> Published on Tuesday, October 17, 2000 in the Boston Globe
>
> US Wrongdoing In El Salvador
>
> by James Carroll
>
> "They killed my mother, my father, and 20 other family members,"
> Lorena Martinez told me through our translator last Saturday. Her
> clear dark eyes never left my face. We were sitting under a tree in
> Cambridge on a golden afternoon, a day whose beauties belied the
> news that was coming from the Middle East. But this woman was
> speaking of a different war - El Salvador in the 1980s and early
> '90s. Her family was among those murdered by "security forces" - the
> nightmare of slaughter that took the lives of thousands.
>
> The Reagan administration, in its misplaced fantasy war against
> communism, was an underwriter of that killing, salting Central
> America with weapons and warplanes, loosening waves of US-trained
> thugs in a paroxysm of violence that came to an end in El Salvador
> only with the Peace Accords of 1992.
>
> Lorena Martinez began 20 years ago as an organizer of cane workers,
> an advocate of land reform, a teacher. Then came the war. She joined
> the FMLN, the guerrilla movement that opposed the murderous
> paramilitary that was tied to Roberto D'Aubuisson's ARENA party.
> Twice she was captured. Her interrogator the second time, she told
> me, was a North American. But in 1992 the violence subsided. The
> gunships and automatic weapons went away, the "disappearing"
> stopped, and people no longer felt afraid. ARENA and the FMLN
> continued their struggle within the structure of democratic
> politics: FMLN has the largest contingent in the national assembly,
> although ARENA governs El Salvador in a coalition with other
> parties.
>
> Lorena Martinez remains a member of the executive committee of FMLN,
> but she has gone back to her work organizing rural communities
> around issues of health, education, and the place of women. But now
> something ominous is happening in El Salvador, she said. America's
> war on communism has been replaced by the war on drugs.
>
> Focused on Colombia, to which President Clinton traveled in August
> to trumpet his plan, the massive new military initiative is spilling
> quickly into the surrounding countries. "This is not Vietnam,"
> Clinton declared in Cartagena, "nor is it Yankee imperialism." But
> what Lorena Martinez sees is a sudden influx of American military
> personnel - a new US air base opened up this summer at the Comalapa
> Airport not far from San Salvador - and, even more alarming, a
> dramatic return by Salvadoran police to military methods, including
> sweeps on US helicopters, which she has seen with her own eyes. (For
> a fuller report see "US Troops to El Salvador" by Gary MacEoin in
> the current National Catholic Reporter.)
>
> The democratic process to which FMLN has been devoted is now at risk
> as an increasingly well-armed ARENA government shows signs of
> resuming old patterns. New chaos threatens the region. An ominously
> named program of "social cleansing" is driving populations out of
> the border areas of Colombia into Panama, human rights abuses are
> rampant, assassinations have returned, and antidrug defoliants are
> already threatening a massive pollution of water and crops.
>
> As part of the war on drugs, the United States, in addition to the
> new base in El Salvador, has established "Forward Operating
> Locations" in Ecuador, and in Curacao. Governments of Guatemala and
> Honduras have once again entered into partnerships with the United
> States for military training and operations. For decades, the curse
> of Central America was the US-funded militarization that turned the
> government forces of half a dozen nations into bands of marauders at
> war with their own people, which was why the agreements that ended
> those wars uniformly emphasized "demilitarization."
>
> That process is now being reversed, as weapons and warrior
> "advisers" once again flood south from North America. "We lived
> through 60 years of militarization," Lorena Martinez said. "It is
> not as if we miss it."
>
> In the United States, the catastrophic effects of the "war" on drugs
> - addiction criminalized, prisons overwhelmed - are bad enough. But
> a foreign war promises to be even more disastrous.
>
> People like Lorena Martinez hear a familiar chord being struck,
> despite President Clinton's assurance. "El Salvador is so
> vulnerable," she said quietly. "We are in a crisis of poverty."
>
> A desperately poor nation needs economic development and investment.
> Instead the rich nation to the north returns with weapons - doing
> nothing for El Salvador's own young people, many of whom have
> themselves fallen into the despair of drugs. "That is when we
> realized that what is going on here with the new American base is
> not about fighting drugs, but about other business."