Deported Californians Had Hoped to Aid Peasants’ Resettlement : Activists Describe Foiled Salvador Effort

Doddie Stone--schoolteacher, peace activist and supporter of the Sanctuary movement--was back in California on Saturday along with most others in a delegation of similarly committed religious activists expelled from El Salvador.

“We don’t believe you can separate the spiritual, the social and the political,” Stone said in a telephone interview from her home in Concord. She was explaining why the delegation had sought to accompany a group of about 450 Salvadoran peasants returning to a war-torn portion of the countryside despite a military prohibition against unauthorized entry to that area.

The 19-member interfaith delegation--organized primarily by Catholic agencies in San Francisco and largely made up of people active in refugee work--was detained Wednesday by the Salvadoran military and expelled to Guatemala the next day. Two additional Americans, two Canadians and two Australians who had joined the group in San Salvador also were deported.

Most Returned Friday

Most members of the delegation flew back to California on Friday evening--two of them to Los Angeles and 12 to San Francisco--while others were returning Saturday, a few of them to homes in other states.

After being welcomed by relieved supporters at airports in Los Angeles and San Francisco, delegation leaders and members charged that the U.S. Embassy, rather than helping them achieve their goals, had cooperated with Salvadoran authorities in arranging their deportation.

Delegation leaders acknowledged, however, that the group’s attempts to support the “repopulation” efforts of peasants wishing to return to the countryside run counter to U.S. and Salvadoran policies aimed at removing civilians from combat areas.

“Sure, that’s in contradiction to our government’s policy,” said Father Richard Howard, 37, a Jesuit priest and delegation leader who lives at the Dolores Mission in Los Angeles and works at helping Central American refugees. “We (the U. S. government) are the ones that supplied the bombs that forced this situation in the first place.”

The Salvadoran View

Howard said he believes that Salvadoran authorities consider the people that the delegation escorted back to the countryside to be part of “the sea” in which guerrilla “fish” survive and operate.

But delegation members, he said, see them as peasants who wish to escape the poverty and dependence of refugee camp life.

Their destination was a former hacienda that had become a farming cooperative and is located a few miles from Aguacayo, the town 29 miles north of San Salvador where the Americans were separated from the Salvadorans, Howard said. The Salvadoran group included 13 families comprising half the ownership of the cooperative, and they had invited the others to join them, he said.

Delegation members said that although they were held overnight in a police compound in San Salvador, fingerprinted, photographed and required to answer a lengthy questionnaire about their backgrounds and families, they were not physically mistreated.

Emily Goldfarb, 30, co-leader of the delegation, who spoke along with Howard at a Friday night press conference at Los Angeles International Airport, said that “the most important thing is the safety of the people in Aguacayo. . . . We’ve left them in what we don’t feel are safe hands.”

Fears for Salvadorans

She expressed concern that the Salvadorans not only would be denied permission to proceed to the cooperative, but also might face harm at the hands of the military.

Jose Escobar, director of the San Francisco-based U.S. Office on Human Rights in El Salvador, a Catholic-supported organization that played a key role in arranging the group’s trip, said that “the religious principle behind the delegation is the theology of accompaniment.”

“That theology is part of the liberation theology,” Escobar said. “That means, ‘Be with the poor and support the poor.’ That principle has been inspiring the North Americans to go and be with their Christian brothers and sisters down there.”

Escobar--who worked on plans for the trip in close coordination with Catholic Social Services of San Francisco--charged that “the policy of the government of El Salvador and the counterinsurgency program of the United States is to depopulate.”

“That’s not a new policy,” Escobar said. “That’s what they used in Vietnam. The policy that has been planned is to depopulate the countryside. You remove the water from the fish and you kill the fish. The people are the water, and the opposition are the fish.”