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No More Vietnams: El Salvador

By VVAW

U.S. involvement in El Salvador has been kept real quiet for the past six months or so. But that's a long ways from meaning that it has stopped or even slowed down.

A careful reader of the newspapers might have picked up a paragraph here and there. Such a reader would have learned that 200 protesters ( including VVAW) demonstrated outside Ft Bragg, NC when the first group of a thousand Salvadorian soldiers began basic training under the watchful eye of the U.S. Army, and that 600 officers arrived at Ft Benning, GA for 16 weeks of training ( all at a cost of $15 million U.S. tax dollars).

Or perhaps that the members of the National Guard who killed 4 U.S. nuns a year or so ago were captured but then released.

Or that a deserter from the Salvadorian military reported U.S. advisors present at one of the torture training classes (though not at the subsequent execution of the subjects of the class) where an El Salvadorian officer told the troops that watching " will make you feel more like a man."

But when the troops of U.S. sponsored and sanctioned President Duarte massacred 200 people in the northern part of El Salvador, or the same troops dragged people out of their homes, raped young girls and shot them (as suspected guerrillas or guerrilla sympathizers), the news began to creep toward the front pages. And when the Reagan Administration certified that "substantial progress has been made in the area of human rights in El Salvador," the event made more news. And when it became clear that the Duarte government was in big trouble and the Reagan Administration provided an extra $55 million in aid and asked Congress to authorize still another $100 million (while still slicing away at needed domestic programs) El Salvador began to hit the front pages.

So let us lay it our as clearly as possible: the Reagan Administration is moving the U.S. rapidly into a repeat of Vietnam with its growing involvement in El Salvador. Even the propaganda is the same with an Under Secretary of State testifying in congress that with this additional push of bucks from the U.S. the Duarte government will regain the offensive and be able to hold off the "communist hordes." Even the rhetoric of the "domino theory" where Nicaragua falls first to the communists followed by El Salvador (if the U.S. doesn't pay up) and then the rest of Latin American is nothing more than a repeat of the early justification for U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Of course the Reagan Administration, learning all the wrong lessons from Vietnam, is convinced that they can "win" in El Salvador—which is exactly what their predecessors thought about Vietnam. And like their predecessors, Reagan and Co have no understanding of how and why a people who have been forced to live in brutal poverty for years might join together to try to throw off the yoke of their oppressive government.

Without constant and increasing pressure from the American people to say that we don't want another Vietnam War, the U.S. will get sucked further and further into the swamp which is El Salvador. Vietnam vets have a special role based on our experience of trying to defeat an enemy fighting for the freedom and liberation of their own country—a war that most of us know we could never win. U.S. out of El Salvador! No aid to the Durate government! No more U.S. intervention!