El Salvador’s Rights Groups

Marjorie Miller’s article (Aug. 4), “El Salvador’s Rights Groups Under Pressure,” was very informative and well written and it was good to see El Salvador on the front page again. What I fear is that many readers will choose to read what they want and interpret the news according to their own biases and opinions.

I, myself, have done support work for the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador and have been questioned about my motives. My motives are simply human and influenced largely by what I have learned from the many Salvadoran families I have met as an elementary school teacher. Who knows how I would respond to days of interrogation, accusations, sleep deprivation and other types of psychological torture. I think I would probably begin to believe my accusers.

It may be that Luz Janet Alfaro (Michele Salinas) was a “government plant” or a “defector turned spy,” but then what happened to her during the first 10 days of her detention before appearing in public? And what happened to Dora Angelica Campos? What happens to people in a country where the government is legally allowed to detain any individual suspected of a crime for up to 15 days without outside communication (after eight days there is contact with the International Red Cross) according to Decree 50, and extra judicial confessions are acceptable?

What is certain is that the work of the Human Rights Commission, the Committee of the Mothers of the Disappeared and other human rights groups in El Salvador is to assist the hundreds of displaced persons in El Salvador and assist those searching for missing friends and relatives. This work requires constant monitoring of human rights and analysis and documentation of causes of deaths and displacement and inevitably implies the involvement of official or unofficial government forces, the death squads.

I first learned of the death squads when I was a university student and we were reading report after report by newspapers, Amnesty International, and Americas Watch telling of disappearances and deaths of students and professors, union leaders and teachers. We were all shocked and somewhat paralyzed at this news. Many of us wrote to our public officials requesting that investigations be carried out and those responsible be brought to trial. I, myself, have not received a response, and as far as I know no one has been found guilty for the deaths and disappearances of anybody in El Salvador, not even the U.S. nuns.

Now three years later, as a school teacher, I have learned that it’s not just professors, students, teachers and union leaders who disappear and are killed in El Salvador, but simple people, families, peasants and professionals. I’ve learned that even though the numbers of disappeared and killed in El Salvador are lower since Jose Napoleon Duarte was elected president, terror and indiscriminate bombings and psychological torture continue to terrorize the Salvadoran population.

The statements and traumatization of the Salvadoran children in our school district frame in very concrete terms all that I have read and heard about El Salvador, and the fact that I haven’t received a response from my public officials about U.S. policy in El Salvador and that the United States does not require certification of human rights in El Salvador in order to continue military support for that government tells me that something is terribly wrong.

I urge those of you who have read Miller’s article to continue to read and inform ourselves about human rights in El Salvador. In doing so I am certain that you will come to your own conclusions about what motivates human rights workers, religious and other people to do the work they do in El Salvador. There is such a thing as love and the desire to construct a healthy and sane world--this does not require “guerrilla infiltration.”

MALLORIE BARON

Calabasas