L.A. 'Death Squads' linked to El Salvador

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Symbol of Death Squads left on doors in El Salvador.

LOS ANGELES-Beginning last May, several Salvadorans active in the solidarity movement here received death threats attributed to the right-wing Death Squads operating in El Salvador.

On July 7, a Salvadoran woman was kidnapped, raped, and beaten. Ten days later, a Guatemalan woman was kidnapped. The Rev. Luis Olivares, pastor of Los Angeles's largest Latino parish, received a note signed "E.M.," the intitials of El Salvador's Escuadron de la Muerte (Squadron of Death).

Ann Salmeron is a member of CASA Nearly 30 others have been harassed or had their property vandalized. [See story in the August 1987 Socialist Action.] I recently spoke to Nell Lancaster, an activist in the Southwest Regional Office of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), one of the organizations whose members have received death threats.

Lancaster said that these attacks are an attempt to intimidate people in this country from associating closely with the Central American support movement. She pointed out that the local events correspond—in terms of the time they occurred and the methods that were used—with a heightened Susan Meiselas wave of repression in El Salvador.

"The months of May, June, and July have seen a terrific upsurge in repression against unions, student groups, and community organizations in El Salvador, she told me. "These groups have been pressing the government with concrete economic demands that cannot be met so long as the war continues."

"To silence them," Lancaster said, "because the government is determined to continue the war, there has been a sharp increase in open repression. Several times in July, government security forces fired on unarmed striking workers who were demonstrating. The offices of the Mothers of the Disappeared were bombed in May."

There has been a sharp upsurge in the number of corpses found in the streets around San Salvador, Lancaster said. In late June, the Hernando Martinez Brigade, one of the most notorious of the Death Squads, issued a list of 14 students and professors at the University of El Salvador that they ordered to leave the country or be killed.

The Los Angeles Police Department has tended to downplay the political aspects of the local attacks. "Is it really a Death Squad type of thing?" a police official commented in the Los Angeles Times. "We're not dismissing anything, but we suspect politics is only a quarter of the pie here."

Harold Ezell, the Western regional commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), went to the point of suggesting that the attacks could have been faked by the Sanctuary Movement to gain public sympathy.

"It is inhumane to assert that a Catholic priest would fabricate a death threat," Lancaster told me. "Or that a woman would somehow arrange for herself to be burned, tortured, and sexually molested to gain publicity."

"And beyond that," she continued, "Ezell charges that these attacks were a publicrelations ploy to persuade Congress to extend voluntary-departure status for Salvadoran and Nicaraguan refugees. This is completely without any basis in fact. He has been challenged by Congressman Joe Moakley [who has co-sponsored legislation on the issue] to come before his committee and present any evidence he has to support his assertion."

Despite the attacks, Lancaster stressed, CISPES members are committed to continuing their work of support and fundraising for the people of El Salvador, protesting human-rights violations, and working to pressure the U.S. government to stop their intervention in El Salvador.

CISPES is demanding a full public investigation which could uncover the ties between the local attacks and Death Squad activity in El Salvador.