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El Salvador's Jose Duarte: Remember Diem?

By CISPES

(The following article was written by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador—CISPES.)

The Reagan administration justifies sending over 1 billion dollars to war-torn El Salvador by claiming that its president, Juse Napoleon Duarte, is a democratic moderate. But what is the reality behind that image?

Duarte's rule began with the assassination of El Salvador's Archbishop by army death squads who then continued their terror campaign until over 50,000 Salvadorans had been killed. Congress almost cut off aid to El Salvador due to these murders, but backed off when Duarte promised to investigate the crimes. Reagan says that because four soldiers were convicted for the notorious 1980 rape and murder of four U.S. church women, Duarte is making "progress" in human rights. But the lawyer who defended the soldiers recently fled El Salvador saying that when he began to look into the involvement of higher officers in the crime he was arrested and severely tortured. Even as the lawyer was being tortured Duarte was assuring the U.S. press that a "full investigation" has been made.

Now that Duarte has U.S. aid safely in his pocket, death-squad-type murder is again on the rise. According to the Christian Legal Aid Office, 501 people were assassinated by the government forces in the first three months of this year, twice the figure for last year.

Under Duarte's government, a new and much deadlier kind of "death squad" has been turned loose; helicopters and bombers which drop about 7.5 tons of bombs a day on the countryside where a rebel movement is growing. It is the most intensive bombing in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

"When the planes spot villages they attack indiscriminately," explains a rural priest. "If someone has their clothes out to dry and hears the planes, they rush to take them down, for wherever the pilot spots drying clothes the bombs are sure to fall. So the people live in the hills and mountains, sometimes sheltered only by trees and bushes."

Our taxes pay for these planes, the bombs they drop, and the fuel that powers them and the training for their pilots. U.S. advisors are directly involved too, choosing targets, dropping bombs, mapping strategy.

Most of the country folk support the guerilla movement. The bombing in intended to drive these people out of the mountains so the guerillas won't have a civilian base to give them food and supplies. The country people support the guerillas because the guerillas have promised to:

• end the government repression and prosecute the responsible officers,
• lift the state of siege and allow freedom of the press,
• implement a large-scale land reform,
• raise wages
• hold elections, and
• seek a negotiated peace to end the war.

These are the same things Duarte has been promising to do for four years. If he really believes in those ideas, why does his government bomb and murder an opposition movement that wants the same thing? Why doesn't he just do these things himself?

Reagan says we should support Duarte because he won the last elections. But were these elections really democratic?

• The opposition was excluded from the ballot. The Army published a "death list" of people it calls "subversives," including every potential candidate who would offer a real alternative to military rule. These people don't dare show their faces in public, much less run a presidential campaign.
• There is no freedom of the press. All the opposition newspapers and radio stations have been bombed out of existence by government forces.
• The CIA bought the election—with $9 million they spent to insure Duarte's victory (about $3 a vote in a country where many only earn a dollar a day).

While Duarte has fulfilled none of his promises to his people, he has succeeded at one thing: convincing the U.S. Congress to pay for his war. Every few months our involvement increases: more money, more planes, more advisers. The last time we got into a war like this was in Vietnam. The wounds from that tragedy have yet to heal. Let's stop this one now, before it's too late.

CISPES National Office
P.O. Box 50139
Washington, D.C. 20004
(202) 887-5019

CISPES (the Committee in Society with the People of El Salvador) was formed in 1980 in response to growing public opposition to the Vietnam-style war developing in Central America. The goals of CISPES are two-fold to educate and mobilize the public against U.S. intervention, and to build support for the FMLN-FDR, the broad popular movement for social justice in El Salvador. We also support the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the revolutionary movement in Guatemala.