Cristiani’s Plea for Continued Military Aid

Thanks very much for providing some badly needed comic relief by running Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani’s plea for continued U.S. military aid (“Cut Aid and See Democracy Abort,” Commentary, Oct. 1).

The reality of El Salvador is much different from the “young democracy” conjured up by this multimillionaire front man for U.S. interests. The country’s ruling ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance) party is a brutal alliance between the plantation-owner oligarchy and the country’s U.S.-backed military.

Although Cristiani uses the word democracy in connection with El Salvador a number of times, the Salvadoran government’s operative philosophy since the 1920s and before has been to maintain the country’s repressive and extremely profitable status quo at any cost.

The civil war during the last decade is an inevitable outgrowth of conditions where grinding poverty for the overwhelming majority of the population is the norm and where attempts by priests, teachers and workers to bring about peaceful change are greeted with bullets from U.S.-supplied M-16s and rockets from U.S.-supplied helicopter gunships.

The Salvadoran government deserves a cutoff of our taxpayer dollars for the same reasons that the South African regime did.

RANDALL SMITH, Chairman, El Salvador Education Project, San Diego