suppressed by the American press for about 15 months, though it was published in the world press and the Church press, right here in Cambridge, for example. In fact, American press coverage during 1970 was unbelievably bad. In June 1980, the university in San Salvador was attacked and destroyed by the army. Many faculty and students were killed and much of the university facilities were simply destroyed and demolished. In November the political opposition was massacred. Meanwhile the independent media were destroyed. This war had a number of significant successes. The popular organizations were destroyed; therefore we can now permit democratic elections—now that there is no concern anymore that they might mean something. These elections are carried out in “an atmosphere of terror and despair, of macabre rumor and grisly reality.” That was the assessment by the head of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, Lord Chitnis, with regard to the 1984 elections in El Salvador—rather different from the media coverage here, as you may recall. The point is that once the basis for democracy has been destroyed, once state terrorism has been firmly established, then elections are entirely permissible, even worthwhile, for the sake of American public opinion. The contrast between our alleged concern for elections today and our actual concern for elections in the 1970s is, again, informative. Well, that was a success, namely destroying the popular organizations and so on. There was also, however, a failure. The failure was that people began to join the guerrillas. There were only a few hundred guerrillas when all Of this began. They grew to many thousands during this period. Of course, that’s proof that the Russians are coming—anyone who understands the U.S. knows that. And, in fact, that is very similar to Vietnam in the 1950s. If you think through what I’ve just described, what happened in El Salvador under Carter and what happened in Vietnam under Eisenhower Of all of the countries with food reserves that have diplomatic relations with Laos, we are the only nation that didn rt send them food at the time of the worst period of starvation there. We have the largest rice surplus in the world. are very similar. Well, meanwhile, we stepped up our war against Nicaragua, not because Nicaragua is brutal and oppressive. Even if you accept the harshest criticisms that have even a minimal basis in reality, by the standards of the governments that we support, Nicaragua is virtually a paradise. But we attack Nicaragua precisely because it is committed to a model of development that we cannot tolerate. Of course this is presented as defense against the Russians, and as proof that it’s defense against the Russians, we note that they receive weapons with which they can defend themselves against our attack. Foreign Minister d’Escoto pointed out that it’s like “a torturer who pulls out the fingernails of his victim and then gets angry because the victim screams in pain.” Actually, a closer analogy would be a thug who hires a goon squad to beat up some kid in kindergarten who the thug doesn’t like, and then begins whining piteously if the child raises his arms to protect himself. That would be a pretty accurate analogy to what’s hapening there. Reagan’s problem in El Salvador is very similar to Kennedy’s in South Vietnam twenty years ago. There was severe internal repression in both cases, which was very successful in destroying popular organizations, killing a lot of people, and so on. However, the internal repression did elicit resistance which the state that we had installed was unable to control. Kennedy simply attacked South Vietnam with bombardment and defoliation. And Reagan has been trying to do the same in El Salvador for the last couple of years, but he has not been quite able to. He has been blocked by domestic opposition. He has therefore been forced to more indirect measures. These have certainly succeeded in killing many people and causing vast misery, but not yet in crushing the resistance. We are still short of U.S. Air Force bombings. I’ve mentioned some of the similarities. What are the differences? Well, the main difference is that the United BRUCE HALE DESIGN • TYPOGRAPHIC SOLUTIONS FOR IDENTITIES, PACKAGING AND ADVERTISING • 206-282-1191 Clinton St. Quarterly 35
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