Facing Death Squad Threat, Salvadoran Asks Asylum in L.A.

Miguel Angel Morales Joya, leader of an employees’ association at the University of El Salvador, was in Los Angeles awaiting his 11-year-old son’s treatment for leukemia when his father called from home to warn him that he should worry about his own life as well.

Morales Joya’s name had just appeared in several San Salvador newspapers, sixth on a list of 11 university students, teachers and workers “condemned to death” by a right-wing death squad, the Secret Anti-Communist Army.

The communique, published July 13, accused the 11 of being followers of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and its diplomatic arm, the Democratic Revolutionary Front, and said it gave them a week’s warning before “our beloved military squads will carry out the orders of execution.”

The Secret Anti-Communist Army, known by its Spanish initials ESA, is an underground organization that has claimed responsibility for bombings, kidnapings and murders. The group opposes agrarian reform, union activity and attempts by the administration of President Jose Napoleon Duarte to hold a dialogue with the leftist rebels.

In its communique, the group warned that once it has eliminated the 11 on its current hit list, it will target other labor and university leaders.

“Thank God I was already here,” Morales Joya said during an interview at the El Rescate refugee center in Los Angeles. “Really, in El Salvador you expect this sort of thing, but I didn’t think it would be so soon.”

Asylum Application

Dalla Bahan, director of El Rescate, said she would file a political asylum application on behalf of Morales Joya, his wife and two children, next week.

“This is a tragic situation all around,” Bahan said.

Morales Joya’s son underwent a bone marrow transplant Wednesday. His 8-year-old sister was the donor.

Human rights workers in El Salvador said that some others among the 11 people on the death squad list have left the country. They declined “for security reasons” to say who or how many of them remained in El Salvador. Although the July 20 deadline given by the ESA has passed, human rights workers said none of those named have been killed.

Morales Joya, 37, said he has received telephone threats several times since becoming director general of the year-old Coordinating Committee of University Workers, but that this is the first time a threat has been issued publicly and in writing. Like the others named, Morales Joya is accused of being a militant member of one of the groups belonging to the rebel front--a charge that he denies.

“When you work with people, then they deduce that you are against the government. It is a sin to work with the university or to demand rights for workers,” Morales Joya said. “The problem is with their conception that he who is not with us is against us.”

Teaches at Law School

He said the committee, representing about 5,000 administrative workers, is recognized by the university but is not considered a legal union by the government. Morales Joya said he represents a “triple sin” to the extreme rightists because he also is a professor of political economy in the law school and head of the school’s legal aid program, which offers free counseling services to people who cannot afford them.

He said he believes the death threat was prompted by a demonstration by about 8,000 students, teachers and employees last month demanding more money from the government for the university. University leaders have said the government has given them money to cover salaries, but not to buy supplies or make repairs on university buildings.

Morales Joya said there isn’t even enough money left in the budget for salaries for the rest of the year.

The university was closed in June, 1980, by a ruling junta because it--particularly the law school--was considered to be a nerve center of leftist political activism. During that period, while the death squads were active, political demonstrations were large, and confrontations with security forces were common in the capital.

Finally, soldiers armed with tanks and machine guns stormed the university to clean out what the government called “a sanctuary of subversion” and killed 50 students.

As the war between leftist guerrillas and a military government moved to the countryside, many opponents of military rule fled the country, and violence gradually was reduced in the city. The university was ordered reopened in May, 1984, by provisional civilian President Alvaro Magana. Duarte, a Christian Democrat, came to power in June, 1984, promising a “democratization” of El Salvador.

With more pervasive democracy, some student and union groups have begun to demonstrate anew and to strike for such demands as higher wages, a budget for the university and the government-promised dialogue with the left.

Some have feared that the renewed political activity would also cause the death squads to renew their violent activities.

The Duarte government has condemned the Secret Anti-Communist Army’s threats, saying that it will not permit extremist groups to take the law into their own hands, “to judge, terrorize or kill citizens for their opposing political views or for crimes with which they link certain individuals.”

University students subsequently charged that the government tacitly condemns the threats because it has not offered the 11 people protection. They claimed that the Secret Army had access to government security files and, in a newspaper advertisement with teachers and university workers, they challenged the government to capture the members of the right-wing group.

The government also has charged in newspaper and television ads that the university unions and other labor unions are infiltrated by leftists.