American victim describes bombing of Salvadoran union headquarters

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Photo taken moments after explosion at FENASTRAS headquarters.

The Oct. 31 bomb that exploded in the office of FENASTRAS (National Federation of Salvadoran Workers) in San Salvador killed 10 and wounded 31. Mark Anner, an activist from the United States, was seriously injured in the blast. He had been working as a volunteer with FENASTRAS since August 1988 in the Federation's International Relations Department.

Anner is now on a national U.S. tour for FENASTRAS with a representative of COMADRES, the Salvadoran organization of the mothers of the disappeared. The following phone interview with Mark Anner was conducted by Jim Henle on Nov. 20. It has been edited for style and space.

Socialist Action: What is FENASTRAS and what has been its role?

Mark Anner: FENASTRAS was formed in 1972. It is considered the largest labor federation in El Salvador by the government Ministry of Labor. It comprises 17 unions and has 25,000 dues-paying members. In 1980, FENASTRAS led a general strike against government attacks.

After a long period underground, FENASTRAS held its first public congress in 1985. This was a watershed in the revival of the mass movement. FENASTRAS was also key in forming the UNTS (National Union of Salvadoran Workers). The UNTS unites unions and peasant cooperatives with other groups.

Febe Elizabeth Velasquez of FENASTRAS [who was killed in the Oct. 31 bombing] was the representative of the private industrial working class on the UNTS Board of Directors. She was the only woman on the Board.

S.A.: What was the nature of your work with FENASTRAS?

Anner: We helped develop direct links with unions in other countries, from individual unions in the United States to whole confederations in Europe.

We developed several sister-city union campaigns and relations with locals of SEIU, IUE, UE, and others. The Norwegian unions built a day-care center and cafeteria for striking workers and raised funds for the FENASTRAS hall.

In addition to financial support, unions in the United States and elsewhere sent telegrams of protest if Salvadoran unionists were in conflict or captured. We also hoped our work would influence AFL-CIO policy in El Salvador.

Local AFL-CIO unions, because of direct contact, could see the situation more clearly, see the legitimacy of FENASTRAS, which the AFL-CIO leadership denies. We would like to see the AFL-CIO have an emergency review of its policy toward El Salvador because of the widespread violations of tradeunion rights there.

S.A.: Has international solidarity had any impact?

Anner: Yes, definitely. For example, the militant construction workers' union, SOICSCES [a part of FENASTRAS] engaged in a strike against the housing company, COHEFAR. About 500 workers worked 11 to 12-hour days under terrible conditions. On top of this, the company was deducting for healthcare from wages, but just pocketed the money.

The union struck for three months and received solidarity from 18 countries, especially Italy. Different Italian unions that normally don't work together united around support for this strike. They took over the COHEFAR offices in Italy and threatened strikes on their sites there.

S.A.: How was the strike conducted in San Salvador?

Anner: The workers occupied the site. They knew that if they left, scab labor would be hired immediately. When other strikes were lost, the SUTC union would be contracted to scab. SUTC is an AIFLD affiliate. [AIFLD is the AFL-CIO arm for subverting labor in Latin America.] What happens is that the military takes over, then SUTC comes in. They charge dues that are 10 times what they should be. But they can always find workers because unemployment is so high.

S.A.: What happened in this Anner: The military came three times. Each time the workers lit torches and threatened to burn the machinery if attacked. Each time the military backed off. The company cared more for material than for the workers.

The strike was resolved very favorably for the union. There was incredible rank-and-file support, and the international solidarity kept pressure on and helped limit repression.

S.A.: You worked very closely with Febe Velasquez before she was killed in the Oct. 31 bombing. What was she like?

Anner: Febe was one of the most incredible organizers I have ever met. She was a creative, energetic leader and an articulate speaker. She believed El Salvador didn't need union leaders who sit behind a desk. To be a unionist in El Salvador means to take to the streets.

She never had her own desk and never wrote anything down. I felt like her personal secretary sometimes. She never kept paper or pen. She would pass on papers to me, then take care of things. She would act when it was needed.

Mid-morning Sept. 18, the National Guard rounded up 10 unionists. It was a significant step-up of repression. We found out later that three were tortured; one had his feet burned by cigarettes. Febe felt there was no alternative but to organize a protest. We had to take to the streets. By 3 p.m. there was a march. During the march, two, buses were burned in anger against transportation price hikes imposed by [Salvadorn President Alfredo] Cristiani.

The march itself was attacked, 54 were captured. People were beaten and robbed of their personal possessions. Five women were raped, one of them eight times.

Febe, knowing she had been called a terrorist, walked right into the office of the Director of the National Police, demanding the release of the captured. She told him people would keep in the streets until then. Nineteen were released immediately, more later. Thirteen are still in, though.

Febe was strong in her determination and in her feeling that she had been selected as a leader and couldn't let people down. She was 27 years old; at 25, she was the general secretary of PENASTRAS. She was a single mother, with three sons, the youngest 6 months.

S.A.: You were with her when the bomb exploded in the FENASTRAS office.

Anner: At the time of the bombing, we were sitting at a table in the cafeteria. Febe was across from me. Luis Vasquez was to my right. Febe was hit in the head and her skull punctured. Everyone but me at the table died. I was hit on the top of the head, but my skull was not punctured. I was knocked unconscious.

I have 89 stitches in my scalp; my right eardrum was punctured and I have half hearing in that ear. I also had shrapnel lodged in my side which was removed by surgery.

S.A.: What happened to you after the bombing?

Anner: I was in a public hospital and had lost a lot of blood. This hospital had run out of blood supply. They were wonderful people, but they lacked resources. I was conscious at this point and agreed with friends that I should go to a private hospital.

A woman from the U.S. Consulate wanted me to stay where I was. She said it would be difficult to find me at the other hospital, the Policlínica, even though it's not far away. Security is tight at the Policlínica, but there's a reason. It's not beyond the police to burst in and seize people.

When my father came to San Salvador to see me, a woman from the Consulate made the comment to him that friends had moved me to a unionized hospital, and you never SOCIALIST ACI know when they might go on strike. The workers there are organized into PENASTRAS.

S.A.: This wasn't the first time that working with the unions made you suspect.

Anner: In May, my name appeared in an ad in the daily La Prensa. COPRESA, the Military Command, took out this ad which said that I was interfering in the internal affairs of El Salvador.

In September, I was captured by the Treasury Police. The U.S. Embassy found out about it through protest calls from the United States. This is an example of a very positive result of the solidarity network.

My treatment then improved noticeably. I had been blindfolded and put in military shorts; then I got my clothes and was released to the custody of the Embassy. When I didn't go to the Embassy, but went home, I became questionable in their eyes. In any case, the Embassy considers FENASTRAS a terrorist organization.

S.A.: UNTS head Humberto Centeno said this bombing was a declaration of war on the popular movement.

Anner: There have been large numbers of bombings recently, but they took place in the evening. The intent was to scare people off. The bombing on Oct. 31, which took place in the daytime when many people were there, changed all that. ARENA [the ruling party] is showing its true colors.

The immediate result of this situation for the popular movement is that it will stay underground. The government has shown the lengths it will to go to squelch popular organization and support for dialogue. No one is safe.

The FENASTRAS office is now completely abandoned. Everyone is at home. But FENASTRAS has been underground before and still became a major force in the country. That is why it is a major focus of attacks.

S.A.: How have things changed now that the fighting has intensified?

Anner: One thing that is now very clear is that the FMILN is a powerful force. Before, the U.S. ambassador referred to them as a dying force with poor weapons. Then he came on TV saying they are a powerful force ... with Soviet weapons.

S.A.: What do you think people in the United States can do?

Anner: The thing to do right now is to join together around one common campaign. Right now individual campaigns like sister union relations with particular unions can't be carried out because of the repression.

We must demand:

• cease-fires to allow the Red Cross access to the wounded, the establishment of neutral zones, respect for labor, human-rights groups, and opposition political parties, an immediate end to aerial bombardment of civilians, immediate cutoff of all U.S. military aid, including aid in pipeline, so the money stops now.

an emergency resolution to remove El Salvador's favored-nation status, and we must push for a return to serious negotiations.

This is probably the most decisive moment in the 10 years of war. It's really key that our protest is known. We have to express our extreme frustration with Congress. They've made their decision to continue funding the Cristiani government; they won't produce change.

The campaign should be carried out on all fronts: telegrams, letters, civil disobedience, protest demonstrations like the ones in Boston and Washington. There are many tactics. Broad powerful rallies are extremely important. Overall, we need a greater intensity in activities, make them broader and as large as possible with more coordination.

Actions can have an impact all over. When I was lying in the hospital in San Salvador, I heard there were protests against the FENASTRAS bombing in 30 cities in the United States. I smiled, probably for the first time. It was the best news I could have gotten.

For people in El Salvador, our actions send a key message that they are not alone, that people are watching.

ON DECEMBER 1989 9

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.. Stalinism crumbles as millions take to streets in Eastern Europe One face shows the new self-confidence of the masses as they flex their muscles to win socialist democracy. 10 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 1989 (continued from page Stalinism began with an ascending wave of demonstrations in East Germany that forced the resignation of top bureaucrat Erich Honecker on Oct. 18. The "hardline" East German Stalinists have been beating one of the most amazing tactical retreats in history-featured by the dramatic opening of the border and a promise to hold elections. But each concession has only whetted the appetite of the masses for the fundamental right to control all aspects of their economic, social, and political lives.

The upheaval in East Germany took off when Hungary opened its border with Austria on Sept. 10 to allow the departure of East German refugees who had jammed the West German embassy in Budapest. Since then, a series of ever-more massive protests forced the East German regime to steadily give ground as it struggled to keep from being swept, head over heels, out of its positions of power and privilege.

On Uct. 16, over 120,000 protestors demonstrated in Leipzig, East Germany's second largest city. Two days later, Communist Party chief Erich Honecker was forced to resign. But the protests continued and grew still more massive. By Nov. 4 there were over half a million anti-regime demonstrators in East Berlin, alone.

On the same day, Czechoslovakia's hardline Stalinists, showing that they were not immune to the panic engulfing the bureaucratic elites of Eastern Europe, opened their border with West Germany to allow additional thousands of East Germans to leave.

By Nov. 9 the flood of East Germans reaching West Germany from Czechoslovakia in the preceding six days exceeded 50,000, and it is estimated that 250,000 have left for the West in the last three or four months.

The effects of this mass outpouring, which included many skilled young workers, threatened to cripple the already faltering East German economy. To stem the hemorrhage, the Stalinists were compelled to practically remove all restrictions on travel between the two Germanys.

The assurance that people could come and go worked—at least for the time being. It was seen by East Germans as a commitment to carry out fundamental political and economic reforms that would be exceedingly difficult to take back.

It was also an assurance to those who would have left that they still had the option of emigrating if things didn't work out. But most important, the headlong retreat of the Stalinist rulers gives the masses the confiMichael Schwartz/Atlanta Joumal/AP Czech victim of police attack dence to stay and continue the struggle for a democratic socialism.

Special role of German workers East Germany has a unique position in divided Europe. Of all the bureaucratized workers' states of Eastern Europe and Asia, East Germany is at the highest level of economic development. (Czechoslovakia also possesses a highly developed economy, but its historical role in Europe doesn't equal that of Germany.)

It has long been recognized that workers in such countries have the greatest inherent potential for revolutionary organization and action.

German workers from the last quarter of the 19th century until the first third of the 20th century had constituted the largest and bestorganized socialist workers' movement in the world. It is no accident that the founder of scientific socialism, Karl Marx, was a German.

And neither is it accidental that the first Kamel Lamaa-SIPA uprising against the Stalinist dictatorships took place in East Germany in 1953. It was one of the most powerful mass mobilizations in the East yet. It was distinguished by the action of East German workers, sparking and backing up their mass mobilizations in the streets with a massive general strike that shut East German border guard down virtaally all production and transport in East Germany. And as happened in Hungary three years later, it took brutal action by Soviet troops to crush the uprising.

Moreover, East German workers' obvious connection with their counterparts in West Germany means that their influence upon each other is unparalleled. Today, the influence of economically successful West Germany-transmitted through family contacts as well as television—is a factor contributing to the uprising in the Eastern part of Germany.

And conversely, the lessons being learned by workers today in the East are certainly making their impact on their counterparts in the Western part of Germany.

The German working class, in short, has the objective capability of the most advanced forms of class mobilization and therefore is well suited to play a key role in the vanguard of the European working class.

This explains the remarkable shift by the East's Stalinist rulers from "hardline" intransigence to panicky retreat in the face of the increasingly massive mobilizations in the streets of East German cities. The political crisis, which began with tens of thousands of workers and their families fleeing to West Germany, became far more acute when they began to take to the streets, declaring their determination to stay and fight, not flee.

But so far, East European workers have not yet entered the current wave of struggles in their own name, as they had in East Germany in1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Poland at the beginning of this decade, and most recently in the coal-mining regions of the Soviet Union.

Up to now, they have certainly participated in the mass marches and rallies—it must be assumed that when hundreds of thousands demonstrate in one city, a significant component consists of workers—but they have not yet entered the field of battle through their own fighting class institutions, such as have been established in Poland and are just being formed in the Soviet Union.

Response to economic attacks It's important to note why direct intervention by workers-strikes, strike committecs, etc.—has not yet erupted from this recent series of upsurges sweeping through Eastern Europe. In every case where workers intervened in their own name, they did so in response to unbearable economic sacrifices being imposed upon them.

These sacrifices have directly and indirectly been the result of the attempt to solve the problems of shortages and poor quality goods-endemic to bureaucratic planning and privilege-through measures designed to allow market forces to regulate the quantity and quality of commodities produced.

But the panic gripping the bureaucratic regimes derives from the stubborn fact that, for market forces to work, the prices of basic commodities must first be allowed to rise to their real values, according to the laws of commodity exchange. Workers in Poland and the Soviet Union have shown that they will stubbornly resist the resulting reduction in their living standards.

In short, the de-facto "social pact" between workers and the bureaucracies in the workers' states—that is, a guaranteed floor to living standards, full employment and the whole panoply of existing social benefits—must be breached before market mechanisms can have the hoped-for effect of increasing the available quantity and quality of basic commodities.

A dramatic struggle to win the workers to their side was opened with the appeal by Czech students and intellectuals for workers to honor a two-hour general strike called on Nov. 27 in support of their demands for democratization.

The bureaucracy is desperately striving to prevent workers from entering the struggle in their own name by charging that the aim of those demanding democracy is really intended to overthrow "socialism"—by which they mean the guarantee of a secure minimum standard of living which workers see as a truly progressive conquest of the workers' state.

But it is Gorbachev's perestroika (restructuring) policy—not the millions in the streets to demand an end to bureaucratic rule-which is undermining the conquests of the workers' states. Gorbachev's program is being followed by virtually all Stalinist bureaucrats— "reformers" and "hardliners" alike.

And so far, attempts to carry out this anti-working class policy have stirred-up hornets' nests of strikes in Poland and the Soviet Union, forcing the Stalinist rulers into painful retreats and a marking of time, as they agonize to find a way to stop workers from taking matters into their own hands.

Destabilizing world capitalism Clearly, contrary to the wishful thinking of the mouthpieces of world capitalism, the aspirations of the upsurging masses are not at all for a restoration of capitalism.

In East Germany, as we saw in China and

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the Soviet Union, the masses in their great majority have already made clear that their demand for democracy is not a euphemism for giving their factories and other enterprises back to the capitalists. Even if this thought pops into the heads of some of the middle class-minded demonstrators, hardly any have yet dared to voice it.

The protesting millions want democracy so that they can make the socialized economy work! The capitalist media doesn't even try to provide convincing evidence that the masses in the East want capitalism.

The fact is that the news media has been unable to come up with a single poster or banner calling for "free enterprise," or any other unambiguous euphemism for capitalism. They are counting on their intensive past propaganda, falsely equating capitalism with freedom and democracy, to lead observers around the world to believe that the rebellious masses in the bureaucratized workers' states mean capitalism when they demand democracy and the ouster of the "Communist" bureaucratic dictatorship.

Just listen to this unusual confirmation of the pro-socialist sentiment in East Germany revealed in the following extract from a satirical Nov. 15 New York Times editorial. Mockingly headlined "Thoughts of Chairman Krenz," the trepidation of the world's capitalists glares through their gleeful chortling at the plight of East Germany's Stalinists. The piece is written as if it is the new Stalinist chairman of the Socialist Unity Party (the name used by the Communist Party of East Germany), Egon Krenz, speaking:

"The West tells me I need capitalism. Wait till it finds out how radical my opponents are. They want more of a welfare state than the Swedes or the Social Democrats in Bonn. Will the common market give more trade credits to real socialists? My critics here want to make socialism work, not arrange a corporate merger with Bonn.

"They're a bunch of real leftists who want socialism-and democracy too. We're not ready for that....

There are many such reports showing that the capitalist rulers know that workers have a goal going far beyond, and essentially opposed to that of the most radical of the bureaucratic "reformers."

But the Stalinist regimes are not alone in their worries about the instability of their oppressive political system. Western capitalism knows that it is only a matter of time before their own system slips out of control and the example being set today in Eastern Europe is followed tomorrow in the West.

Crises of Stalinism, imperialism Gorbachev surely counted on capitalist fears of economic collapse when he launched his campaign to restructure the Soviet economy. He hoped to make investment in the East appealing to the world's capitalists.

The attractiveness of Gorbachev's invitation to invest in Eastern Europe's economy, he calculates, lies in the opportunity it provides for postponing the economic collapse looming on capitalism's horizon.

Gorbachev hopes to evoke an obvious parallel with the post-World War II Marshall Plan, which poured billions of U.S. dollars into Europe and Japan, reviving their economies, reviving collapsing world trade, radically and steadily improving the living standards of war-devastated European and Japanese workers, and thus rescuing Europe from the very real threat of social revolution which was staring capitalism in the eye at that time.

Gorbachev hopes that imperialism will be driven by its own current mounting problems to accept his invitation to Western capital to invest in the Eastern economies.

There is no question that massive investments in the East and in China could open another prolonged period of capitalist prosperity, such as that opened up by the Marshall Plan-and thus an extended period of social stability for capitalism. But there are symmetrical obstacles to this neat solution on each side of the border between East and West.

In the first place, the Stalinist bureaucracies headed by Gorbachev are not so foolish as to simply open their borders to capitalist investment and let nature take its course. If the restoration of capitalism is allowed to proceed too swiftly, the danger of an uncontrollable workers' insurrection in the East will be intensified, rather than be reduced. Its impact in the West would be incalculable.

This double-sided danger is feared equally by both capitalists and bureaucrats. And this (continued on page 12, in “Hungarian Stalinists leading charge for return of capitalism”)

cracy are clear.