El Salvador’s Rights Groups Under Pressure : Guerrilla Infiltration Charged by Defector

Luz Janet Alfaro, a 23-year-old human rights activist, had been in police custody 10 days before she appeared on national television to announce that she was a guerrilla defector.

Alfaro asserted that the Human Rights Commission, a non-government agency where she had worked since 1982, was run by Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas, as were three Mothers Committees for Political Prisoners and the Disappeared and other groups that represent those missing, detained and displaced during six years of civil war in El Salvador.

In that press conference May 30 and subsequent interviews, Alfaro charged that the Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Baptist churches were infiltrated by rebels, who were siphoning off thousands of dollars in international aid to the armed guerrilla groups.

Dozens Identified

She named dozens of human rights and refugee workers, lawyers and religious leaders who, she said, are members of leftist guerrilla groups fighting to overthrow the U.S.-backed government.

The sweeping charges, reproduced by the government in newspaper ads, have sent waves of fear through religious and human rights workers, some of whom charge that the government has embarked on a campaign to brand all humanitarian work as subversive.

Since the war began in 1980, thousands of Salvadorans have been killed or have disappeared for political reasons, including priests, lay religion instructors, union and student leaders and human rights workers. Many of the hundreds of killings each month were carried out by right-wing death squads, and the bodies often were dumped in public places as a warning to others.

Violence Level Lower

Today, the level of the violence is lower than it was in the early 1980s, and increasing numbers of people are arrested rather than killed for alleged subversive activities. But some political killings still occur each month, and in the jails, physical or psychological torture is commonly practiced on political prisoners, according to human rights workers, and a vast majority of the nearly 1,000 political prisoners have not received a hearing or trial.

“So many people were threatened in the past that you don’t need to do a lot in the present to shake them up,” a human rights worker said.

After Alfaro was seized, nine other human rights activists were detained and seven of them were jailed. Alfaro’s sister, Syonara, who was a member of the Human Rights Commission, and Dora Angelica Campos, a secretary for the Bishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero Mothers Committee, say they also were members of Farabundo Marti organizations and publicly allege that human rights groups where they worked were infiltrated by rebels. They, like Alfaro, are not now detained.

Defectors’ Spokeswoman

Alfaro has been the leading spokeswoman among the proclaimed defectors and has given detailed accounts of her work and of the guerrillas’ political organization to Americas Watch, a U.S.-based human rights group, and to reporters.

It is virtually impossible to determine which of Alfaro’s myriad public allegations might be true, because no evidence has been presented. Sources who closely follow the Farabundo Marti Front’s political work say it is likely the guerrillas tried to infiltrate groups such as the Human Rights Commission, but they see no proof linking them to the churches.

In early years of the war, journalists sometimes made contact with guerrillas through the Human Rights Commission.

Alfaro’s declarations have led to speculation that she was a government plant in the commission, a defector-turned-spy, or a disgruntled rebel embittered by infighting. She describes deep divisions within the human rights groups among what she says were members of different factions of the Farabundo Marti Front.

‘Inappropriate Substitute’

Americas Watch has called the government-organized press appearances and the defectors’ public charges against others “an inappropriate substitute for judicial proceedings.” An American Embassy official admitted “concern” for the people Alfaro called guerrillas, most of whom have not been detained. Those so named have denied her charges.

Some human rights workers say Alfaro and her accusations are part of a counterinsurgency campaign to discredit ecumenical and refugee work that does not always dovetail with government policies or military strategy.

Since last year, the army and police have made it a frequent practice to present captured rebels or rebel collaborators to the press as part of their “psychological operations” to discourage cooperation with guerrillas and to win public support.

But the propaganda value has been mixed for the government. While guerrilla defector Miguel Castellanos has enthusiastically urged his comrades to put down their arms, other prisoners, including three suspects in last year’s guerrilla attack on two outdoor cafes that left four U.S. Marines and nine others dead, have appeared to be less than willing showmen when paraded in public.

In Alfaro’s case, the U.S. Embassy initially embraced her declarations, but then it gradually distanced itself from her statements linking the guerrillas to the influential Catholic and Protestant churches.

Even the army chief, Gen. Adolfo Blandon, cast doubt on Alfaro’s statements about churches, thereby damaging her overall credibility. Blandon said he does not believe her claim that Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas of San Salvador knew of the guerrilla infiltration and ignored it.

“It is a terrorist militant who is making that declaration. I take it with caution,” Blandon said.

‘Catch-22” Situation

The Alfaro case illuminates a “Catch-22” situation for the government, which must behave democratically to win the war, but then is faced with legal opposition groups that are potentially fertile ground for infiltration by guerrillas in an increasingly political war.

The arrests and public accusations, meanwhile, have had a chilling effect on all types of human rights and social services work.

A month after Alfaro first appeared on television May 30, an anonymous death threat was telephoned to the Roman Catholic archdiocese. The caller warned five workers in the church’s social secretariat to leave the country within eight days. Two other calls warned doctors to stop treating church-supported refugees.

The five church workers, two of whom had been named by Alfaro, decided to stay in El Salvador, but an Emmanuel Baptist Church deacon fled the country after Alfaro asserted that he was a guerrilla.

Another Baptist church worker was abducted by unidentified armed men in June, beaten, and dumped across the border in Guatemala with the warning not to return, according to church members.

Varying their Routes

Many church and human rights workers say they are varying their routes to and from work and are sleeping away from home. Several said they are regularly watched and followed, and therefore, do not go out alone.

“Many priests have been accused of being Communists here,” said Father Octavio Cruz, one of those whom Alfaro called a guerrilla. Cruz is director of the church social secretariat, which runs food projects, refugee camps and relocation programs.

“For a long time this work with refugees has been seen as bad. People think that refugees are suspicious. They fear they are guerrillas, and people who work with them are suspected of being collaborators,” he said.

The Rev. Medaro Gomez of the Lutheran Church, whom Alfaro also accused of being a guerrilla, has surrounded himself with U.S. church workers as a safety measure. He stopped answering his telephone for a month while church workers told callers that he was out of the country.

“She said I was a member of the Salvadoran Communist Party. In our environment, to say that is to declare a death sentence. It had a big impact on me,” Gomez said.

Gomez, whose church runs a refugee program and health and education projects, said that death threats are not new to him. He received two a week before Alfaro made her charges.

Threat Repeated

“It was a Friday. I got an anonymous call that said ‘Because you are stupid, you are going to die,’ and he hung up. It was strange, but that Sunday a man I didn’t recognize came to church, and as I was shaking hands with the people afterward, he came up and repeated the same thing the caller said,” Gomez said.

Four Human Rights Commission members are among those jailed. Jorge Alberto Rodriguez, one of the commission members still at work, said the group shut down for three weeks after the arrests and that their monthly human rights report is a month behind schedule.

Alfaro said that the group, whose reports have been used by the United Nations, inflated the numbers of disappeared people and of political prisoners by not removing names of those who later turned up or were freed. She said the commission lists dead guerrilla combatants as slain civilians killed. The commission denies those charges.

Alfaro’s accusations have also hurt groups indirectly involved with those she named. Balmore Garcia, director of the Felipe Apostle Kindergarten, an independent food and education center for orphans in the north-central province of Cabanas, said he lost two teachers after Alfaro went public, because his program receives money from Emmanuel Baptist Church.

Archbishop Rivera has publicly defended Catholic churchmen whom Alfaro accused, but since the charges were aired, the Catholic Church has distanced itself from the Human Rights Commission and the Mothers Committees and cut food programs to both.

Three of those in jail are from the Mothers Committees. One of them, Maria Teresa Tula, said in a prison interview that she was beaten during 12 days of police custody, deprived of sleep and offered money and protection to cooperate with authorities. She said she had nothing to offer them.

Denies She Was Coerced

Alfaro bore no apparent signs of physical abuse when she was first presented to the press 10 days after her May 20 arrest. She has said that she was not coerced into defecting but that when she saw the police had photographs proving her involvement with the guerrilla group, she defected and sought police protection.

Like most human rights workers, Alfaro used a protective pseudonym at the commission. She was known to her colleagues as Michele Salinas and, by her own description, was a strong-willed and sometimes contentious rebel, too independent for some of her colleagues.

Alfaro said she joined the Human Rights Commission in 1982, about a year after her mother and an aunt disappeared, apparently victims of a death squad.

Alfaro and her 26-year-old sister say they joined the commission because they needed jobs. They say they were gradually manipulated into working for the National Resistance, one of five groups in the Farabundo Marti Front. By March, 1983, Alfaro said she was working for the guerrillas.

In an interview arranged through the government, Alfaro spoke angrily about being “used” by the guerrillas. She repeated her earlier charges, saying she knew of the others she named in the guerrilla organizations because her “bosses” had told her, or because “everybody knows.”

Alfaro said she left the commission and El Salvador for six months last year to go to Los Angeles, where she says she was re-recruited by her guerrilla group to return to El Salvador in December.

Attorney Accused

Alfaro charged that the guerrillas have members in international church and refugee programs, such as El Rescate in Los Angeles. She said an attorney, Jesus Campos, the Human Rights Commission’s representative in Los Angeles, worked under the auspices of El Rescate and was a member of the guerrilla front.

Roberto Alfaro, who is director of El Rescate but not related to the defecting leftist, said he had no knowledge that Campos ever worked for a guerrilla group. He said Campos had worked for the commission, not El Rescate, and had moved to Northern California for reasons unrelated to Alfaro’s charges.

The three women defectors say that thousands of dollars of funds from the multidenominational Diaconia were funneled to the guerrillas. Diaconia, an umbrella group of the Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal and Catholic churches, coordinates the expenditure of about $2 million annually in international donations for social programs.

Campos said that she falsified reports for thousands of dollars that the Oscar Arnulfo Romero Mothers Committee received from Europe for a beauty parlor to employ widows, a project that never existed.

Directors Linked

Syonara Alfaro said she personally falsified thousands of dollars worth of receipts for money that was given to the guerrillas. Luz Janet Alfaro said each of the directors of Diaconia answered to a guerrilla faction.

The Lutheran Church’s Gomez, a member of Diaconia, denied the charges.

“It is true we helped the Human Rights Commission, but for its work. She charged we knew that what they received went to the guerrillas. That’s false,” Gomez said.

Gomez, Cruz and other church and human rights workers interviewed say they will continue with their social programs despite the climate of uncertainty.

“I imagine authorities must be investigating us now,” said Cruz. “Our work will always be suspicious and subject to vigilance, but we believe it is our mission and we must continue.”