The Distant Harm of Salvadoran Slaughter : Repression prompts emigration, and that affects L.A.

During the 1980s, the United States bankrolled a series of civilian and military regimes in El Salvador against the left-wing insurgency of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). In the process, Washington often turned a blind eye to government-sponsored violence against Salvadoran civilians. In the last months of 1993 the State Department released more than 12,000 papers documenting U.S. complicity in some of this violence.

The most famous case, dismissed at the time by the U.S. State Department, was the slaughter in the mountain village of El Mozote of at least 500 and quite possibly as many as 800 civilians, including at least 143 infants and children. The Dec. 6 issue of The New Yorker contains the fullest account yet of this atrocity, a book-length article by Mark Danner. Danner begins with the work of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Unit, which set out painstakingly to exhume and analyze the victims, skeleton by shattered skeleton.

What impresses a Los Angeles reader of this account more than the sickening details of the slaughter and the cover-up is something that Danner mentions only in passing. The Salvadoran army’s broad counterinsurgency strategy was that of “denying the fish their water.” Guerrillas, in this metaphor, are fish; the general population is the water. The terrorization and forced relocation of the population dry up the water and expose the fish. Danner notes that in the remote border province of Morazan, where El Mozote is situated, this tactic had much of its intended effect. The peasants who were not slain in the army’s savage “Hammer and Anvil” operation fled into Honduras, where reports confirming the El Mozote massacre, among others, were forwarded by U.S. officials in the area to the State Department (which suppressed the reports). By now, Danner reports, some of the “water” has flowed back, but much of it has not. Where has it gone?

Try Los Angeles, where some of the poorest, least-prepared Latino immigrants to have arrived in recent years are the Salvadoran victims of a decade of U.S. policy in their war-torn homeland. In the long run, they surely will enrich the city; but in the short run, their adjustment has been painful for them and costly for the community that took them in.

This is, regrettably, the sort of thing foreign policy planners rarely think about. We hope that, for the sake of Los Angeles as well as of El Salvador, they will think seriously about it in the few months that remain before El Salvador’s election. U.N. monitors as well as human rights groups have reported an upsurge in activity by anti-communist death squads. Since last August, 20 murders have occurred, including those of three FMLN candidates for the National Assembly. In November, the State Department sent Alexander Watson, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, to San Salvador to warn all political sectors against engaging in violence.

That is a step in the right direction, but the Clinton Administration must not think that a re-escalation of violence in El Salvador will be a tragedy for that country alone. If it triggers a new wave of forced emigration, it could also be a painful and costly development for this city.