Central America

El Salvador facing

renewed terror ;

By Kim Bolan

of eight-by-ten glossies.
6 6 his is how I found my
son,” she says,
pointing to a photo of
something vaguely
resembling a human.
body. “He was half hidden by the dirt
when I found him. The dogs were eating
him. I had to dig him out.”

The face in the picture is completely
disfigured and black, “from the acid they
poured on him,” she says, tears
beginning to form. The intestines are
piled on top of the stomach and he is
missing a leg.

“The only way I could be sure it was
him was because of his pants. He sewed
his own pants. He worked with a tailor
after school.”

She stumbles for a moment as she
recalls the night when the military,
dressed in their civilian clothes, came for
her son. Only 15, he was already asleep
for the night.

“T begged them not to take him. He
wasn’t a guerrilla. I tried to follow them,”
says the tiny widow, who now spends her
days with others on the committee of the
mothers of the disappeared.

A few days later her last glimpse of her
son was the one captured in the
photograph she shows people daily to
remind of the atrocities committed
against men, women and children in the
eight-year old war here.

While death squads slowed their
activity after the election of U.S.-backed
President Jose Napoleon Duarte in 1983,
since the Central American peace plan
was signed last August the
disappearances, captures and murders
have escalated dramatically.

And with the March 20 victory of the
extreme right-wing party ARENA in the
legislative and mayoral elections, people
like Rivas Alas fear it will get worse.

At the office of the non-governmental
Human Rights Commission, one entire
wall is covered with colour photographs
of the blood-soaked body of leader
Herbert Anaya, gunned down by a death
squad in front of his four children last
October.

An example of the increased terror in
recent months, Anaya’s murder remains
unsolved, the government trying to wash
its hands of blame by pinning it on
members of the Farabundo Marti
Liberation Front.

“The death squads form part of a
government strategy to behead the
popular movement and create a
psychological terror in many of the
workers,” says Oscar Hernandez, one of
the commission’s directors who
succeeded Anaya. .

“The people have gone back into the
streets because they are dying of hunger
and now the government is reverting to
policies of repression and psychological
torture.”

Hernandez says the power brokers in

SAN SALVADOR — Maria Isabel Rivas Alas sits small and
humble, silent as the other women around the table begin to tell
of the disappearances, tortures and murders of their children.
When itis her turn to speak, she gathers a handful of long grey
hair, throws it back across her shoulder and opens a binder full

_ PHOTOS — KIM BOLAN

Photos, clockwise from top left: Oscar Hernandez, human rights commissioner with photos of the disappeared;
Salvadorans demonstrate March 24 to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Bishop Romero; the popular
school at Zamoran with the slogan “We don’t want military operations.”’

El Salvador fear the peace promised by
the plan initiated by Costa Rican
president Oscar Arias and are doing their
best to make sure they keep their grip on
this tiny country.

“Despite the hopes awakened in the
Salvadoran people when the peace plan
document was signed, the policy of the
government is to continue the war and to
contain the popular discontent that exists
due to the serious economic, social and
political crisis in El Salvador.”

With the March peace accord between
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and
the U.S.-funded contras — signed across
the bay in Sapoa — the people of El
Salvador are hoping the world’s
attention will shift to the repression they
live under daily.

Even Stanley Gooch, Canada’s
ambassador in the region, says there has
been too much attention paid to
Nicaragua in enforcing the Arias plan.

“The Nicaraguan government is trying
harder than anyone,” he said in an
interview in his Costa Rican office.

“T don’t think the situation in El
Salvador is particularly encouraging. In
El Salvador, the human rights record has
deteriorated since the peace process
began. Hopefully some of the
momentum from Nicaragua will spill into
Salvador.”

But the indications aren’t good, based
on violent incidents against union leaders,
students and campesinos — the country’s
farmers — in the last two months.

Humberto Centeno, a leader of the
popular mass movement coalition

UNTS, was picked up by the airforce and
beaten for three days in retaliation for a
union protest at the labour minister’s
office.

Demonstrators took to the street en
masse to protest Centeno’s arrest,
burning government vehicles and phone
booths. Centeno was released five days
later, but is still recovering from head
and leg injuries.

Four other trade union leaders have
had warrants issued for their arrest and
are in hiding. Two student leaders were
picked up as they left the campus by men
in civilian clothes. The UNTS obtained a
copy of an actual “disappearance order”
issued by government to the national
police, calling for action against two
trade union leaders “up to and including
their disappearance.”

Zamoran is a cluster of stick and palm
leaf shacks about three hours from San
Salvador on dirt trails — called
roads — thick with dust.

The 35 families here, already starved
by a drought that has taken up to 80 per
cent of their crops, are now plagued by
repression from boy soldiers playing with
M-16s and hand grenades, who burn
their houses and their clothes, and even
take their food.

Villagers sneak past the military with
its American-made uniforms and guns
and walk several miles up the road to
meet us at a popular school — with the
slogan, “no more military attacks”
painted on the side — that has been shut
down by the soldiers.

“If we go out and even kill a lizard to

eat, they say we are giving food to the
guerrillas,” says Regina Barerra, 48. “We
can’t leave our children alone because the
army bribes children to give them
evidence.”

She’s already been forced out of her
birth village and doesn’t want to leave
Zamoran, even though the soldiers are
regularly taking their food, their chickens
and searching their simple houses.

“We had to leave because we were
bombed and they searched all the houses
and killed who they wanted. We fled
with our children, leaving behind what
little food we had. My three daughters
were killed by the army as we tried to
escape. That’s where all my children died.
I only came here with one son. They only
left me with one son.”

Tired of the repression against them,
El Salvador’s campesinos support the
guerrillas, though to do so means even
more repression.

“The soldiers were just here. If they
saw a chicken, they took a chicken. They
ate all our animals. We had bananas.
They ate them. They paid us with death,”
says Rosavera Natividad de Mercedes, as
she feeds her fifth child on her lap.

“Even with the elections we just had,
this is not a democracy in which things
can change. I just see things getting
worse.”

Kim Bolan is a shop steward in The
Vancouver-New Westminster Newspaper
Guild who spent a month in Central
America recently, writing stories and
meeting with unions.

24. Pacific Tribune, April 27, 1988