Reed Irvine - Editor
On February 26, the Fox television network devoted an hour of its popular youth-oriented series, "21 Jump Street," to a story about El Salvador. It concerned a young Los Angeles policeman's effort to find his wife, a Salvadoran, who had disappeared in her native land. The program was heavy-handed propaganda for the communist terrorists. It portrayed Salvadoran soldiers as villains who murder civilians at random and the terrorists as kindly heroes leading a rebellion of slaves against their masters
As the L.A. policeman, Doug, and his buddy, Tom, begin their search for Doug's missing wife in El Salvador, scowling soldiers rudely roust them from a bus along with all the Salvadoran passengers. They detain three peasants for no apparent reason and mow them down in cold blood after the other passengers are herded back on board and the bus pulls away. The efforts of the two Americans to get to the missing wife's village are frustrated by brutish soldiers who first shoot out the tires of their rented car and then jerk them out of a decrepit taxi and order them to walk. Finally, a black Vietnam veteran, who tells them that El Salvador is just like Vietnam, introduces them to the kind, noble guerrillas. The black tells them the Salvadorans were born into slavery. "Now the slaves are rising up," he declares.
The guerrillas provide Doug and Tom with a guide, a young girl who is promptly murdered by soldiers. The Americans are arrested, beaten and tortured in an effort to make them tell where the guerrillas are. Doug protests that he is a cop. "You are not a cop," his torturer replies, "you are a communist." Doug replies, "Everyone who disagrees with you is a communist." He is smacked around some more, and his head is submerged in a tub full of water. The guerrillas rescue the battered Americans and escort them to the wife's village, where they learn that she has been murdered by the military. Her sister asks Doug to take her young son to America where he can grow up in safety.
We opened the AIM conference March 3 in San Salvador by showing scenes from this program and inviting comments on it from a panel composed of Gen. Agreda of the Salvadoran army (ret.), Reno, a former guerrilla, Federico Bloch, vice president of TACA Airlines, and Bruce Jones, an American who has lived in Central America and has studied the Salvadoran terrorists. More than a dozen residents of San Salvador and thirty-four Americans who came from all parts of the U.S. in response to AIM's call for people interested in seeing if our media were reporting conditions in El Salvador truthfully attended the conference.
The panelists, as well as everyone else present, were appalled at the dishonesty of the program. A Salvadoran surgeon, aghast at the glorification of the terrorists, asked, "Why does your media tell such lies?" AIM Chairman Reed Irvine said that he bad written to Rupert Murdoch, a conservative whose company, News America, Inc., owns the Fox network. He asked him to keep the network from being used to disseminate such blatant false propaganda. He also suggested Fox compensate for the harm it had done by airing information in the coming weeks that would correct the false negative image conveyed by "21 Jump Street." Murdoch promised to view a tape of the program, but he has not yet informed us of his reaction to it.
Irvine pointed out that CISPES, a grassroots organization founded in 1980 with Communist Party help, was working full time to help the terrorists win in El Salvador, but there was no comparable organization working full time to keep El Salvador free. He said that Salvadorans could not depend on the American reporters to get the truth to the American people. Their suppression of most of the evidence of Jennifer Casolo's guilt had proven that. AIM, with the help of Accuracy in Academia and The Washington Inquirer and its network of supporters, had provided an example in the Casolo case of what could be done to bypass these reporters. He said that was what' El Salvador should be doing. He thought they should be encouraging the development of a grassroots support organization.
Mr. Bloch, who, together with other private businessmen, has been thinking of underwriting a public relations campaign in the United States, thought it would take too long to develop a grassroots support group. The vote on continuing aid to El Salvador was expected around the end of March. CISPES and scores of other groups are organizing a demonstration on March 24-25 in Washington to try to pressure Congress to cut off aid. (Jennifer Casolo will be among those participating in "civil disobedience" in front of the White House, according to the People's Daily World.) David Almasi, of Accuracy in Academia, said he was planning a counter-demonstration in Washington on March 24. Irvine said the Salvadorans should not underestimate the number of Americans who would be willing to help them defeat the communists.
Why Reporters Don't Tell The Truth
The conferees were interested in knowing why the American reporters in El Salvador can't be depended on to tell the truth. Our efforts to get one or more resident American reporters to participate in the conference were not successful. The conferees were told by knowledgeable observers that reporters newly assigned to El Salvador read decade-old clips from an era when the military and the police dealt summarily with terrorists and their supporters, fighting terror with terror. That is no longer true. In the early 1980s there were as many as 500 to 600 political killings each month (on both sides). There are now only 16 or 17 unsolved killings a month, less than half the rate in Washington, D.C. But reporters and their editors find it easier to repeat yesterday's story than to seek out today's truth. The reporters stick together and refrain from criticizing each other's work, lest the herd ostracize them. They are almost all liberal-left in their views, and they depend on the FMLN clandestine radio station located in Nicaragua and other guerrilla sources for much of their information.
A reporter who wrote unfriendly stories about the FMLN would be cut off from guerrilla sources and would become an outcast among colleagues who congregate in the bar of the Camino Real Hotel.
San Salvador is not a city under siege, contrary to the impression created by our media. Armed soldiers and police are reassuringly visible, because the threat of terrorist activity is ever present, just as the threat of criminal violence is present in American cities. The people show no sign of being terrorized, and visitors adapt quickly. The conferees saw the streets teeming with cars and cheerful, friendly pedestrians, shopping, buying snacks from sidewalk vendors, enjoying the parks and the zoos, and filling a stadium to watch the country's favorite soccer team, Alianza, win a 4-2 match. They didn't see the grim country populated by slaves rebelling against their masters that was depicted on the Fox network.
Bruce Jones and a former guerrilla, "Rene," who preferred to keep his identity secret, answered this question. Jones said the FMLN was a creation of Marxist-Leninist middle and upper class young people. The cadres were largely recruited from among the students, as Rene had been. Rene explained that the recruiters appealed to the idealism of the young people, gradually persuading them that they could help improve the lot of the poor by carrying out terrorist actions.
Rene told how he became a dedicated "bus burner" during his university days. He said that when the bus burnings began, the local fare was 20 centavos. As the number of buses diminished, the fare increased five- fold, which didn't help the poor. With the shortage of buses, trucks were brought into service to transport commuters. People were crowded into the backs of trucks like sardines, and many were injured in accidents. Power outages caused by terrorist bombings meant fleeting discomfort for the middle and upper classes, many of whose homes have auxiliary generators. But for a small storeowner in the barrio, it meant spoiled meat and milk--and hunger for customers.
Rene said he eventually realized such sabotage hurt the poor--the people the terrorists claim they want to help. Repelled by the cynicism of the terrorists, he renounced his association with them in 1979 and now is a vehement critic of the FMLN and its tactics. "These people want only power," he said. "They do not care who they harm in getting it."
Jones demonstrated Rene's point with photos showing how the terrorists had focused on damaging the vital arteries of the country by bombing buses and bridges and electric power lines. He said terrorist bombs had destroyed half the country's bridges. Individuals own many of the destroyed buses and minibuses, some of whom drive their own vehicles. The FMLN carries on a war both against the poor who must use public transportation and against those who by dint of hard work and saving have managed to go into business for themselves. The terrorists seem to delight in punishing these small entrepreneurs. In a taped TV interview, a survivor of a bus attack said the terrorists ordered the driver to step forward; then they shot him in the head three times.
The attacks on the country's infrastructure have done serious damage to the economy, again hurting the poor. From 1964 to 1978, the per capita gross domestic product rose 31 percent, but it fell by 25 percent over the next decade when terrorist activity was at its height. The result was that the per capita GDP was lower in 1988 than in 1964. Jones estimated that 80 percent of the U.S. aid to El Salvador over the past decade has done nothing more than compensate for the losses caused by terrorist attacks.
Jones pointed out that Americans, who frequently read about "right-wing death squads" in El Salvador hear very little about the killings carried out by the FMLN. These murders get little attention in our media, and the murderers are never called "death squads."
Prominent victims of FMLN "death squads" in 1989 include Roberto Garcia Alvarado, the attorney general of El Salvador, (4/19); Dr. Rodriguez Perth, President Cristiani's chief of staff, (6/9); Miguel Castellanos, president of the National Realities Studies Center and a former terrorist, (2/16); Dr. Francisco Peccorini, professor at the National University, a former priest and a naturalized American citizen, (3/19); Edgar Chacon, president of the International Relations Institute (IRA), (3/31); and Carlos Ernesto Mendoza, director of the magazine Analisis, who was seriously wounded but survived.
In addition, at the beginning of its November offensive, the FMLN tried to decapitate the government. Its death squads made unsuccessful assassination attempts against top government officials including President Cristiani, the vice president and the president of the national assembly. In 1988, the FMLN sent letters to 274 mayors threatening them with death if they didn't resign. Sixty resigned. Of those who refused, 15 were assassinated in 1988-89.
The conferees were left to wonder why Senators Kennedy and Kerry want to reward these assassins by cutting off aid to El Salvador. The ostensible reason is to protest the killing of six Jesuit priests by Salvadoran troops, but the perpetrators of those murders have been arrested and are awaiting trial. Oscar Vasquez Marenco, head of the National Commission on Human Rights, told the conference that he knew of no case in which those responsible for murders by the FMLN had been brought to justice. The FMLN recently acknowledged that some of its murders were unjustified, such as the shooting of eight campesinos who survived the bombing of a bus last year. But even in these cases, the murderers have not been punished.
Kidnap Or Maim A Child For Peace
Mr. Vasquez said the worst human rights abuse in the country is the kidnapping of hundreds of children by the FMLN to be used as guerrillas. The FMLN used to kidnap 13- and 14-year-old boys, but because of their heavy losses in the November offensive they have stepped up the kidnappings. We were told that since November they have kidnapped between 800 and 900 boys, most of them 10 to 12 years old. The FMLN arms these boys and puts them in the front lines, just as the Ayatollah did in Iran. Our media has ignored this.
Also missing--from both our TV and print media--is another form of "random terror" found in Salvador veritably daily. We refer to land mines, a coward's weapon which the FMLN uses against innocent civilians with the intention of destroying the nation's economy.
As is true in many Central American countries, running water is rare in rural houses in El Salvador. So each morning a child is given a large clay or plastic pot and sent off to the nearest stream or wellhead. The FMLN buries land mines along and near these paths. They do frightful damage to the human body, especially to young children.
The AIM conferees visited a military hospital where some of these victims are treated. We saw children with their legs blown off at the knee, or their feet mangled beyond hope of repair. We saw dozens of young soldiers who had lost limbs to FMLN mines-- boys in their teens with stumps wrapped in blood- stained gauze. As a condition of U.S. aid, the Salvadoran can plant mines only to protect military installations. The FMLN has no such restriction. This particular hospital has treated 1,809 amputation cases since the conflict began in 1980. We asked the director if an American reporter had ever visited the hospital to see these tragic victims. He couldn't recall any such visit.
A dark cloud hanging over Salvador's immediate future is the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter last November. These tragic killings have overshadowed all the deaths and all the destruction caused by the FMLN's callous invasion of densely populated working-class neighborhoods in its November offensive. The offensive was proving to be a disaster for the FMLN until the priests were murdered on Nov. 16. The left, with a big assist from the media, was able to exploit the tragedy to convert a military defeat into what they hope will be a political victory.
As is usual in leftist propaganda campaigns, the focus shifts to accommodate events. The first days after the murders, the left claimed the investigation would be a sham. In January, when nine military men, including a colonel and two lieutenants, were charged with the killings, the left quickly predicted they would never be brought to trial, and they are already claiming that higher- ups are being protected.
The most prominent of the slain Jesuits, Fr. Ignacio Ellacuria, had long been an intellectual godfather of the FMLN, as had Fr. Ignacio Martin-Baro, his associate at the University of Central America (UCA). But Ellacuria had recently publicly stated that the FMLN should stop fighting and give Cristiani a chance to govern. So at first blush his murder bad earmarks of an active measure by the FMLN, designed to (a) rid itself of a former ally whom had become a liability and (b) put the blame on the military.
At the AIM conference an officer of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), which works directly under President Cristiani's office, gave a very thorough briefing on their investigation. He said that at first, the SIU suspected the FMLN. He said an FMLN guerrilla captured in January 1989 had told of a plan to kill priests in conjunction with an offensive. Also it was reported that a note left near the bodies by the killers said the FIVlLN was "bringing justice to people who are beginning to betray us." (The priests at UCA found this note, but they refused to surrender it to the SIU at first.) Moreover, the FMLN has a record of killing its own people when they think it will help their cause. Rene, the former guerrilla who addressed the conference, said that was one reason for his disillusionment.
The SIU gave little credence to the statements of the alleged eyewitness who said she saw soldiers outside the murdered priests' house, because a wall would have blocked her view. The investigators questioned members of all the military units operating near UCA during the offensive. Members of one unit said they were on the campus the night before the killings on routine patrol. But discrepancies in the stories of some of the men aroused the SIU's suspicions. They compared the signatures of the firing pins of the rifles of the men in this unit with cartridges found at the scene of the crime. They found no slugs sufficiently intact for the usual ballistics tests.) These tests proved negative, and the investigation was at a standstill.
Then came a crucial break. Colleagues of the slain priests had refused to cooperate, calling the probe a sham. But in mid-December several of them changed their minds after talking with the SIU for a full day. They told the investigators that they had heard bursts of automatic rifle fire the night of the killing. They also turned over the note they had found at the scene. SIU retested the rifles with the weapons set at automatic fire on the chance that this might produce a signature that differed from a single shot. That proved to be the case, and they were able to match some of the cartridges from the scene of the crime with the soldiers' rifles.
They also analyzed the hand-printed note and concluded that a lieutenant in the unit had written it. The SIU took new statements, and President Cristiani ordered the arrests of Col. Guillermo A. Benavides Moreno, director of El Salvador's military school, two lieutenants who said Benavides had ordered the killings, and five enlisted men. They await trial. The SIU officer refused to answer questions about the motives that might have prompted the colonel to order the killing of the priests, saying that went beyond his responsibility.
The head of the National Police, Lt. Col. Jose Almendariz Rivas, showed the conferees the house occupied by Jennifer Casolo, where a large cache of arms was found buried in the back yard last November. He also provided them with copies of the videotape showing the arms being excavated and with copies of some of her papers that were found buried with the arms.
Casolo told The Wall Street Journal that the house was the nicest she had ever lived in. It has three bedrooms and two baths, and the rent was 1,000 colones a month, twice what a comparable size house in a less affluent neighborhood would cost. But the Casolo house, we noted, had a feature lacking in less costly houses. It is completely surrounded, front and back, by high walls or the walls of neighboring houses. A vehicle could be driven up to the front door, the solid metal gate closed, and the cargo unloaded safe from prying eyes. Access to the back yard was only through the house itself, and it was possible to dig deep holes there without being seen by any neighbor. It was an ideal safe house for the storage of arms.
The physical layout of the garden put the lie to another claim by Casolo. In insisting that someone planted the arms without her knowledge, she said AIM was wrong in saying that a high wall surrounded the entire back yard. She said only a chain-link fence protected part of it and that the neighbor's kids would come into her yard through a hole in the fence. There is a short stretch of chain-link fence about 8-feet high, but it sits on top of a wall that drops about 20 feet to the neighbor's courtyard below. The "hole" is a gap of 3 to 5 inches between the end of the fence and another wall.
We also found a flaw in Casolo's explanation of all the extra keys found in her house. She said she had lost her keys and had to have the locks changed and that the locksmith kept making keys that didn't fit. And so, she said, "None of those keys will fit any door in San Salvador, including the one they were supposed to fit." The flaw: We examined the locks on both the front gate and the front door. They were very old, covered with several coats of paint. We also found four more keys in her house. One was to the front door. The others couldn't be inserted in either lock.
Sam Dickens, a retired Air Force colonel now with the American Security Council, told the conferees that the solution to the terrorist problem in El Salvador had been badly hampered by U.S. actions and policies. Dickens said U.S. policy was not to win a military victory. The State Department wanted what they called the Venezuela solution, overlooking the fact that Venezuela had defeated its terrorists militarily. Tough military commanders in El Salvador who were most effective in combating the terrorists often found themselves replaced as a result of pressure from the U.S. embassy.
Weapons needed to help the troops fight effectively are denied El Salvador. We won't let their pilots use napalm, a weapon that our pilots found invaluable in Vietnam. They are not equipped with the General Electric rapid-fire mini guns, which can be used with such devastating effect against guerrillas that the left is trying to pressure GE to quit making them. When the Salvadoran pilots found their bombs were embedding so deeply in the soft earth that most of their explosive force was vertical and did little damage, the Pentagon provided them with 18-inch fuse extenders that caused bombs to detonate before they burrowed into the ground. When the U.S. embassy found out about this it declared that the extended fuses "were not authorized" and could not be used. The pilots then fashioned their own fuse extenders from pipe and hid them under their beds so the U.S. military advisers would not see them. Dickens said that, like General MacArthur, he believed there was no substitute for victory. He quipped that the U.S. had not won a war since we renamed the War Department and put it under the Department of Defense.
Reality Refutes "Reform" Rhetoric
Liberals have long believed that the best way to "beat communism" in poor countries is by pushing socialism. Liberals field-tested these notions in El Salvador commencing in 1979, when a leftist military junta seized control. The Carter administration, acting through its leftist ambassador, Robert E. White, supported a sweeping program of economic change. In the name of "redistribution of wealth" the government expropriated land, nationalized banks, imposed state planning of the economy and forced exporters to deal through a state bank. The changes were among the most radical ever attempted in a Latin country (save for Cuba and its full-blown communist revolution and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas).
Conservatives complained about "U.S.-imposed social- ism." One of the most vocal was Ricardo "Rick" Valdivieso, now the vice minister of foreign affairs, who addressed the AIM conference twice. He grew up in New York and served with the 82d Airborne before returning to El Salvador to help run the family business. He and another vocal critic of the socialist policies of the junta and Ambassador White, Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, were arrested, and the head of the junta ordered them to be shot. The troops holding them disobeyed the order and helped them escape to Guatemala. Valdivieso and D'Aubuisson, tutored in free market economics by Prof. Manuel Ayau, a Guatemalan disciple of Milton Friedman, founded the ARENA Party in 1981. In El Salvador their message proved popular among the poor as well as the middle and upper classes. In Washington, the Reagan and Bush administrations seemed unaware that the people voted for ARENA because they didn't like socialism. Our government did all it could to frustrate the popular support for ARENA, but the mandate in the 1989 elections was too clear to be denied.
The FMLN, meanwhile, illustrated the central truth that communists are interested in power, not economic betterment of the "masses." Its leadership, armed and trained in (first) Cuba, and then in Sandinista Nicaragua, were not campesinos, but students and union bureaucrats. The attempt of these persons to seize power in Salvador over the past decade is what the conflict is all about. They want power not better lives for the poor. This is a key point the media have missed, either from ignorance or ideological blindness. The FMLN is a minute minority, 12,000 persons at its height (of a population of 5.5 million), now perhaps half that number. The FMLN twice had a chance to win power in presidential elections, in 1984 and in 1989. Instead of electoral democracy, it has chosen the path of terrorism to overthrow an elected government.
The FMLN has achieved one of its goals: wrecking the economy, both at the individual and national level. The FMLN is cruel to peasants it professes to help. If a farmer scrapes together enough money to buy a cow to provide milk for his children--Salvadoran families are largo---the FMLN kills it. The FMLN burns coffee cooperatives and plants mines on plantations so that beans cannot be harvested. Although the U.S. press stresses the amount of aid given Salvador ($1.5 million a day is a stock phrase in the New York Times) in actuality the bulk of this money---$3.9 billion of $4.5 billion the last decade--has gone to repair damage caused by the FMLN.
The Cristiani government was elected in March 1989 on a free-market platform bearing a strong resemblance to Reaganomics. Technocrats running his government are paring a state bureaucracy which soaked up 40.6 percent of national investments in 1988 (versus 18 percent in 1976) and cutting 27 tax brackets to six, with lower effective rates (the high cap went from 70 to 50 percent and is going still lower). Agriculture Minister Antonio Cabrales, who farmed for 30 years before joining the Cristiani cabinet, told the AIM conference that his first priority is the restoration of an agricultural economy decimated by the Duarte government and FMLN terrorists. He accepts as a truth that Salvador was and will remain an agricultural economy, and that the nation must support itself from the land.
Cristiani's technocrats face an awesome challenge. Coffee, cotton and sugar were the three main agricultural exports in the 1970s. The value of these exports has fallen by nearly a third. Coffee production is off nearly 20 percent. Cotton has fared even worse, with production this year only 17 percent of the 1979-81 average. At the same time, food imports have risen by 40 percent.
One cause, Cabrales says, was the confiscation of any farm larger than 800 hectares (owners were supposed to get 30-year, 6-percent bonds in payment, but 40 percent haven't received them). "I find it remarkable that the people continued to produce at all," he said. Cristiani has said no more land will be seized. Parcels already in government hands are being rapidly distributed to peasants, in plots averaging 2.5 hectares. In five years the Duarte government gave title to 25,000 parcels; Cristiani did 15,000 in his first ten months. But there is a difference: peasants now have the right to sell their property, so their ownership is real rather than symbolic. "This gives them something to live for, and to die for," Cabrales said.
The moribund economy shows signs of stirring, even as the FMLN continues terrorism. In June 1989, the month of Cristiani's inauguration, fertilizer sales were highest in a decade--a harbinger of restored confidence.
One-myth conference speakers rousingly debunked was that of "church persecution" by the Cristiani government. Typical was a complaint in the National Catholic Register that "In addition to the Jesuit killings, other Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, Mennonites and those with nondenominational groups have been arrested, interrogated, abused, expelled, and subjected to surveillance and office raids."
Msgr. Freddy Delgado, author of a book on liberation theology, charged that some of the clergy had crossed the line from preaching to FMLN activism. Alan Wisdom, of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, put these charges into perspective in a paper circulated at the conference. He said that the "Salvadoran military took particular aim at one small community--the 'historical Protestants,'" chiefly Episcopalians and Lutherans. These are a "tiny minority" in Salvador, with perhaps 10,000 members. Half a million other Protestants, mostly Pentecostal and other conservative evangelicals, "have experienced few, if any, of the military violations" reported by the Episcopalians and Lutherans.
"The Roman Catholic Church was affected by roughly 30 searches of parishes, schools and religious houses," Wisdom writes. "Yet the vast majority of Catholic facilities--some 300 in the San Salvador archdiocese alone--were untouched."
The targeted churches complain they are singled out because they "work with the poor." Wisdom asks, "But how does one then explain the many ministries among the poor which were not attacked?" The answer is that some churches, under the guise of "liberation theology," sympathize with the FMLN. He cites a 1988 declaration by the Lutheran and Episcopal churches, joined by some Catholics, hailing the FMLN as a "powerful, popular revolutionary movement, prepared to respond to the violence and to overcome the injustice by political-military organizations."
Wisdom cites an episode where church people went beyond expressing sympathy. Last October 30 a bomb exploded outside the armed forces headquarters; a civilian died. "Witnesses testified that the truck used in the attack had been parked the night before on the grounds of an Episcopal church, where church workers had loaded it with explosives. The workers claim that guerrillas forced them to help, but Episcopal archdeacon Victoriano Jimeno also says, 'It is evident that some [FMLN] elements infiltrated [the church] in order to foment violence.'"
Two Texans living in San Salvador who participated in our conference, Sam and Julie Hawkins, epitomize the sort of church workers Salvadorans welcome to their country. Unlike the Jennifer Caselos, they come to help--not to destroy. Sam and Julie take malnourished babies into their home, some weighing less than two pounds, and nurse them to health. Someone told Julie, "That must be thankless work." She grinned. "No, I get my thanks every time a baby smiles at me." The Hawkinses deplore those clergymen who substitute political activism for preaching the gospel and ministering to the needs of their flock. Sam told the conferees there was no religious persecution in El Salvador. He said, "Religious persecution is where you have to bury your bible in the back yard, not AK-47s."
Mrs. Pamela Rundle of Atlanta, another participant in the conference, has been visiting El Salvador regularly for seven years, bringing in needed relief supplies for the hospitals and orphanages as a Christian mission. She also emphasized that there is no religious persecution. She said the soldiers hand out crosses and Bibles. She said of 4,000 churches in the country only 4 or 5 had been closed down, not for religious activities, but because of their support for the terrorists. Mrs. Rundle and the Hawkinses were instrumental in having the conferees visit the military hospital and the Santa Ana Orphanage, high points of the trip. The visible evidence of the human suffering caused by the terrorists and by the dedication of the Hawkinses and Rundies to its alleviation moved everyone. Contributions to help their work, tax deductible, can be sent to The Cross Connection, Inc., 426 Quarters Road, Fayetteville, GA 30214.
Weight considerations limit us to one postcard with this issue. We suggest that you send it to your congressman but that you copy it and send it or your own card or letter to your two senators. The congressmen's address is House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. 20515. The senators' address is U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510. If you wish to write Rupert Murdoch, his address is News America Publishing, Inc., 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036.
AIM REPORT is published twice monthly by Accuracy In Media, Inc., 1341 G Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005, and is free to AIM members. Dues and contributions to AIM are tax deductible. The AIM Report is mailed 3rd class to those whose contribution is at least $15 a year and 1st class to those contributing $30 a year or more. Non-member subscriptions are $35 (1st class mail).
AIM Report NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
AIM'S "QUICKIE" CONFERENCE IN SAN SALVADOR WAS A GREAT SUCCESS. I thought we might get 25 people to go. We had 34, from Connecticut in the east to Washington, Oregon and California in the west, from Minnesota in the north to Texas in the south. They ranged in age from a high schooler to septuagenarians. There was a good mix of writers and lecturers, scholars, political and movement activists and concerned AIM members who wanted to see for themselves if what we had been saying about the contrast between reality and the reporting from El Salvador was true. Some went with trepidation, but I don't think any would hesitate to go again. All were lavish in their praise of the conference and grateful to AIM for having sponsored it.
THE CONFERENCE PRODUCED VISIBLE RESULTS IMMEDIATELY. I WAS ASKED to testify on El Salvador before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee, but the Democrats canceled the hearing the day before it was to be held. It may be rescheduled. Columns on EL Salvador by the following conference participants have been published: Don Feder, two in the Boston Herald and other papers via the Heritage Foundation Feature Syndicate; Arnold Beichman, in The Washington Times; Emilio Labrada, in Diario de Las Americas (Miami); and Joe Goulden and I, in the Washington Inquirer and other papers via the AIM Syndicate. Cliff Kineaid and I have done two Media Monitor radio programs on 250 stations. The Washington Inquirer has published four articles based on the conference, and The Macon (Georgia) Telegraph and News ran a good story based on an interview with conference participant Dr. Miguel Faria. The San Salvador News Gazette gave the conference extensive coverage, and Diario de Hoy, one of San Salvador's two dailies, ran an excellent story about the press conference I gave, even putting my photo on page one. Two TV stations in San Salvador also covered the press conference.
WE HAVE ESTABLISHED A FAX NETWORK AMONG CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS TO enable us to exchange information rapidly. If you wish to participate, send us your FAX number. One of the first things I am sending out is a lengthy AP story by Douglas Mine about religious persecution in El Salvador. It appeared in the L.A. Times on 3/18. Mine is the reporter we wrote about in the February-A AIM Report. His religious persecution story is a prime example of leftist bias. We point out in this report that the Christians in El Salvador who aren't collaborating with the Terrorists constitute the overwhelming majority, and their churches are not raided or closed down. Christians like Pam Rundie and Sam and Julie Hawkins are working with the poor and are genuinely helping them. The liberation theology types confuse helping the poor with the promotion of Marxist revolution, which nearly everyone now recognizes as harmful to the poor. Doug Mine focuses on the latter, who cloak their political activities behind claims that they are "helping resolve the problems of the poor."
MINE DESCRIBES THE MURDER OF THE SIX JESUIT PRIESTS LAST NOVEMBER AS "perhaps the most heinous politically motivated crime" of the "civil war." He doesn't say why this was more heinous than the callous murder of six Salvadoran journalists by the FMLN last November, a crime he didn't even bother to report. Or why it was more heinous than the murder by the FLMN of President Cristiani's chief of staff, Dr. Rodriguez Porth, Attorney General Roberto Garcia Alvardo, philosopher and American citizen Dr. Francisco Peccorini and 15 mayors. Ending the terrorism and giving the Cristiani governments economic policies a chance to work will do more to help the poor than all the liberation theology claptrap in El Salvador, but Douglas Mine dismisses those who believe this as "extremists of the far right."
THE IRONY IS THAT EVEN THE FMLN IS NOW CLAIMING THAT IT HAS ABANDONED Marxism/Leninism and wants nothing more that social democracy and human rights for El Salvador. They are getting help from Lindsey Gruson of The New York Times and the Times op-ed page, which carried an article by former IPS fellow and Castro-promoter William LeoGrande telling us that the FMLN is now applauding "the surge of democracy in Eastern Europe."