Annotations for Topic: Political Context

While the dictatorship talks of elections, our country talks about the reality of death and repression that El Salvador lives.

As I said, we were lied to. They told us that the soldiers brought foreign journalists and that they couldn’t kill defenseless women and children in front of journalists. I speak of Capitan Medina Garay, yes, him. He made them get close when he came here.

Carlos Ibrian Resinos, worked as the Secretary of Finances, and Jose Alirio Martinez Martinez as the General Secretary of the union. We strongly condemn and repudiate the dictatorship’s new attempt against the Salvadoran working class. At the same time, we join in solidarity with our comrades of the sweets and pasta industry union against this regime’s abuses, and we encourage them to continue forward in the struggle for their revindications and for a revolutionary and democratic government.

The enemy is determined to say that our actions are acts of terrorism. Our people know that this is not the case. This is about the continuity of our just fight for national liberation. This is about the popular response to the crime and repression of the genocidal junta. Forward, comrades of San Salvador. The combatants of the Francisco Sanchez Eastern Front greets you. The present is one of fighting. The future is ours.

And there, around five days later was the story in the newspaper about a confrontation in El Rosario Villa where nineteen guerrillas had died and that (the army) had not suffered any casualties.

These are the words of a young Salvadoran who held the weapons the dictatorship gave him and who today bears the weapons of the people. It is a reflection of what is happening in the middle of the Armed Forces.

It’s the awakening awareness of those who belong to the exploited classes and who have remained deceived by the criminal high military command, those who have been recruited by force or out of necessity have remained in the army and at the service of the oppresion. Those peasant soldiers have begun to open their eyes, have begun to question the trenches they have occupied. They have begun to ask themselves, “Why do I fight?” “Who do I serve?” “For whom am I sacrificing my own life?”

In Jucuaran, department of Usulután, soldiers of the third brigade refused to fight against the forces of the Farabundo Marti for National Liberation Front. In Torola, five police of the tax office (Hacienda) abandoned their their posts with their issued weapon and equipment. The same thing is happening in the entire country. Soldiers who have become aware of the misery that they’ve since their roots, (they’ve also become aware) of the repression which they themselves have executed as blind instruments of the oligarchical power and of imperialistic designs.

Soldiers have their own combat post with their own people, and those who have made that decision and have joined our ranks have been well received, by their brethren of class, with the respect and brotherhood that all have come to know.

We showed this recently in the case of soldier Santos Enrique Diaz Alvarenga, the third brigade of San Miguel. And now we have just heard the testimony of Santiago Argueta Sanchez, a former civil guard in Villa del Rosario. In this town when our forces too the enemy’s possession’s, Santiago Argueta Sanches deposed his weapons in response to our combatants’ calls (to join their ranks), and he laid down his weapons and joined our forces.

He immediately expressed his sincere and conscientious desire to join the ranks of the people, and the statements that he has declared to us reiterate what we all already know, that in the National Army there are profound challenges between the military high command and officers, classes, and soldiers that are do not agree with the genocide.

On the other hand, to make these challenges even more acute, within the National Army young officers most likely cannot how Yankee military adviser the day to day take over the lion’s share of the military operations agains the people, thus giving it everyday a more criminal nature.

The case of the soldiers that disobeyed the order to fight against the opposition forces of the Farabundo Marti for National Liberation Front, that is to say, the opposition forces of the people, moves us to encouraging reflections on what is happening in the center of the army, in addition to the fact that they’ve been unable to garner any military victory in all their operatives against our positions in the entire national territory.

While this is all happening, the people are joining the militias, they are joining their (own) army, they are integrating into the cornfields of the people to produce the sustenance for the revolutionary army. They consolidate the zones under their control while the dictatorship lives its worse moment.

Each day, the people is becoming more convinced that victory is within the reach of their united and persevering hands. Hope overwhelms us all, and that is why we close our fists, and we are achieving victory with combat blows. That is, today more than ever we have the conviction that we will prevail, which means that soon we will conquer peace and social justice for our people.

In the last few days, we’ve read with much surprise in the local newspapers the tone of the declarations made by the Interim archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Arturo Rivera y Damas, about the violence that prevails in our country.

We understand that one of the deepest concerns of the church during these historical and conflictive moments is precisely the painful spilling of blood that our country presently suffers.

In the same manner, we remember that when Monsignor Rivera y Damas assumed the position of Interim Archbishop of San Salvador, he stated that he would continue the path outlined by our unforgettable Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

When we speak of an outlined path, we want to refer to something very clearly, Monsignor Romero’s line does not allow ambiguities. He was very clear and precise. He followed a coherent attitude in relation to the role of that the church much play in situations like the one our people are currently passing. He called injustice, repression, and genocide by name.

The day before his assassination, Monsignor Romero, in his last Sunday homily, said, “We want the government to take seriously the fact that reforms will not do any good if they’re soaked in blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people, whose lamentations each day reach the sky more loudly. I plead with you, I beg you, I order you to cease the repression.”

There is no possible confusion. Monsignor Romero directly identified who promote the violence and that is why those promotors of violence assassinated him.

That is why Archbishop Rivera y Damas’s attitude is exceedingly strange when he states that the repression executed by right-wing extremist groups and by army personnel and the security corps has decreased. A few minutes ago, we were listening from the lips of survivors of the El Junquillo massacre all the horror, all the horror of the instrumentalized genocide used by the genocidal junta. In the face of the fresh blood from children of the El Junquillo, we ask, “How is it possible to make such a declaration?”

Only a few days ago, news agencies stated that on Friday the 22nd of this month, 26 bodies were found outside of San Salvador with obvious signs of torture.

We will never know the total number of tortured people or of the forcibly disappeared by the genocidal junta. And regarding the terror that the dictatorship sows in peasant zones, this known throughout the entire world.

No. The regime has definitely not made any kind of concessions in its policy of extermination. On the contrary, we can say with utter certainty and with the support of an entire people that the government repression has multiplied by a thousand.

Additionally, Monsignor Rivera y Damas also stated that, in his opinion, our forces try to impede the people from recooperating trust to start seeking paths of normalization.

We want to believe that these statements were made from naiveté and not from malice. The reality is that the opposite is true and our people know this, and so do the ample democratic and progressive sectors of the entire world.

This misrepresentation is entirely absurd. The FMLN has been at the cutting edge before the concert of voices that demand a political exit to the conflict. In the interest of avoiding further pain and spilling of blood for out people, already afflicted enough, [the FMLN] has accepted and promoted concrete proposals to reach a political exit to the crisis.

Nonetheless, it’s more than evident that those who hinder our people are already looking for paths of normalization, and they’re precisely those that murder and kidnap members of known legal opposition parties while also demogogically talking about elections. As is in the cases of Eleuterio Cárcamo and Margarita Gastiasoro. Both of them were leaders in the Social Democratic Party, National Revolutionary Movement, MNR.

In the case of Dr. Guillermo Manuel Ungo, president of this same party, that incredibly has been accused by the terrorist regime, having mentioned him along with other politically renown personalities in a famous list published by the armed forces and other media.

It is a fact that all the statements formulated by Monseñor Rivera y Damas separate the Church from a neutral position because they are partisan and very dangerous. The only thing that these statements result in is support and they, to a certain extent, justify the criminal actions agains our people that paramilitary groups and members of the security forces and of the army carry out on a daily basis.

We are certai that these types of attitudes do not contribute to achieve a favorable climate for a political exit to the present crisis. At the same time, they distance the church from the possibility of playing an important role in the mediation process.