Fullerton : El Salvador Educator Tells of Struggle at Home

For the students among the estimated 300,000 El Salvador refugees in the Los Angeles area to return to their war-torn Central American homeland today would be dangerous, an official of the University of El Salvador said Monday.

“I could not recommend that they return to El Salvador because the danger is very real to all of us as members of the university community,” Mauricio Guevara Pacheco, the university’s vice chancellor, told a group of about 350 at Fullerton College.

Guevara Pacheco described the devastation of higher education in El Salvador that followed a military takeover in 1980. He said 33 members of the university community were captured or disappeared in 1983. Of those who disappeared, a former chancellor and another were assassinated, he said. “The campus was totally destroyed,” said Guevara Pacheco. “Even the desks had disappeared from the classrooms.”

El Salvador’s one major university has more than 28,000 students. It has been under reconstruction since last May, when the military relinquished some control of it.

Guevara Pacheco said the rebuilding was effected by the university community, including those in exile, with support from American academicians.

Guevara Pacheco would not say whether he thought Reagan Administration policies toward his country have helped or hindered development of the university.

“The best foreign policy of any country is that which respects the self-determination of any government,” Guevara Pacheco said after the lecture.

He said the basis of El Salvador’s conflicts “are found in our own history.” An “unjust social structure” is at the root of the strife, he said.

Guevara Pacheco addressed students and faculty at the Fullerton community college in place of his university’s chancellor, who had to remain in El Salvador for budget negotiations between the government and the university, a Fullerton College spokesman said.