Easter in El Salvador: Time of Hard Transition

This will not be a good Easter in El Salvador.

For ordinary Salvadorans, the victory of the Arena Party in the March 20 election means a victory for the army. The slight and fading restraints that President Jose Napoleon Duarte had imposed will now end. The army and death squads of Roberto D’Aubuisson, whom most Salvadorans believe responsible for the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, will have a free hand.

Passover is celebrated in Judaism as a crossing from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. Easter is celebrated in Christianity as a passing from death to life. Both kinds of transition are only too familiar in El Salvador.

Three months ago a quiet, frail man named Victor came to Casa Grande, a Salvadoran resettlement house in Los Angeles named for the Jesuit priest, Rutilio Grande, whose assassination had so great an impact on Archbishop Romero. Victor was 25 years old when he was abducted from a San Salvador rooming house. He had joined a human-rights organization when he was younger. One of his co-workers in that organization betrayed him to the death squads. His abductors had come to see that he would not repeat his past mistakes. They drove him to a remote place on the outskirts of the city, stripped him, bound him and beat him with their rifle butts.

“I began to lose sense of what was happening,” he told me, “but I was able to see one of them preparing a syringe containing some sort of liquid. At that moment, one of them started to squeeze my neck, to the point of almost strangling me, hitting my head at the same time. I lost consciousness.”

When he awoke, he was at the bottom of a ditch where he had been thrown to die. His arms were stiff and gangrenous. Weeks later, he fled his homeland.

Victor has crossed from death to life. Other Salvadorans are making or have recently made a crossing like that of ancient Israel, a crossing from exile to the Promised Land. Last October, 4,300 Salvadoran civil-war refugees forced into exile for seven years at a camp in Mesa Grande, Honduras, decided to return to their homeland. In a contemporary re-enactment of Exodus, they defied Salvadoran government warnings and moved to resettlement sites in El Salvador.

Why did the government drive them into exile in the first place? Because it wants to fight guerrillas in their home areas? Or because it wants their land? Jesuit Refugee Services reports: “Access in and out of the areas is severely limited, and on a number of occasions, food and construction supplies sent up by the Catholic and Lutheran churches have been denied entry, leaving the people stranded.” Amnesty International in its February address to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights reported: “Returned refugees are apparently viewed as a potential support for the opposition and have been detained or disappeared after repatriation.”

The pattern is familiar. In January, troops forced their way into a Catholic Church refugee camp outside San Salvador. A human wall of refugees and church workers prevented them from abducting the men they had come for. That night the camp was strafed and bombed. A visiting delegation of U.S. church people reported: “We were shocked to see the evidence of the firing . . . against a camp containing only women, children and a small number of wounded whose presence had been agreed upon by church and government authorities, and pastoral workers.”

The fact is that those “government authorities” have never had much authority over the army. Now they will have none. This Easter will not be joyous.