p AMONG THE PEASANTS IN EL SALVADOR TODAY, it is said that the vulture should be made the national bird. The creature would be an appropriate symbol, they bitterly contend, because in the past four years of savage civil war, the best and the bravest among them have ended up in a vulture’s gullet.

p The grim humor of the campesinos came back to me as I read Dr. Clements’ remarkable memoir of his year in a rebel enclave twenty-five miles north of the capital, San Salvador. In my nearly four decades of close familiarity with El Salvador and its people, I know of no other visiting American who has ignored the capital in favor of the countryside, where the essential fragedy of this nation is being played out.

p Dr. Clements chose to see for himself how this civil war is being fought, and by whom, and for what reasons. As a doctor he takes no side in the conflict; the ideologies of right and left are as tangential to his narrative as they are useless as a tool for understanding the enormity of what is happening in El Salvador. As he saw and now reports, there is only one reality in El Salvador—its people and the many vultures who have fed upon them.

p The story of injustice in El Salvador is an old one. It doesn’t take a communist to tell a peasant that he or she is x hungry, or a Marxist agitator to stir protest against homegrown misery. Even 1, a newcomer at our Embassy in El Salvador, could write home in April of 1948 that trouble must someday come to a society where 95 percent of the wage earners received less than a dollar a day for their labor. My Ambassador, Albert Nufer, warned the State Department at the same time that so many Salvadorans lived at or below the subsistence level that the country had become a fertile seedbed for communism. Then, as now, the palaces and mansions of the very rich were separated by high walls from the gulleys, or barrancas, of San Salvador where the very poor were huddled by the thousands in cardboard shacks, surrounded by trash and junk and forced to survive with little health care and not much food.

p These poor have been kept in feudal bondage by the Salvadoran oligarchy, or the Fourteen Families, as they are known. One of these land barons once invited me to his coffee plantation to show me the magnanimity with which, he felt, he treated his workers. Together, we watched a team of his laborers line up for their noon meal—one tortilla and a dab of stewed beans each—then he summoned an overseer to bring the two of us exactly what the workers were being fed.

p “Don’t I feed them well?” he asked grandly as we ate and sipped from our scotch glasses. Clearly he believed that he did and, once he was satisfied that his generosity had been demonstrated, we were driven to a nearby restaurant where we could dine in more appropriate surroundings.

p Another finquero, or coffee-grower, once broke with this attitude by joining a reformist Salvadoran junta as minister of agriculture. In due course, the junta was dismantled and he fled to the U.S. While here, he spoke out against the oppression in his homeland and went, with me, to the State Department where our policy planners refused him an audience. In a few months, he risked a return to El Salvador and was there murdered and mutilated by uniformed security forces.

p With few exceptions, historically the U.S. government has aligned itself with the world view and the policies of the Salvadoran rich. As a former Ambassador once told me, “After xi all, they have the power.” When we have been wiser and more humane in our foreign policy, as we were in the early years of President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, we have won the respect and faith of the poor. When we’ve abandoned programs aimed at broadening the country’s economic base and fostering a gradual transfer of wealth and sharing of power, we’ve earned the people’s enmity and distrust.

p Kennedy’s successors abandoned the use of economic aid as a stimulus for social change and chose to emphasize the security provisions of the Alliance. We taught security measures to Salvadoran police chiefs and counterinsurgency methods to Salvadoran military officers at our schools in the Panama Canal Zone. We sent them weapons and airplanes in the vain expectation that social stability would grow out of enforced order.

p They ignored Kennedy’s warning that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This, sadly, is what has happened in El Salvador. Now we must contend with a violent, inevitable revolution in which at least 40,000 Salvadoran civilians have been killed by government security forces and the notorious death squads. President Reagan argues for more military aid to that government and has adamantly resisted all initiatives toward a negotiated settlement of the conflict. Four thousand U.S. soldiers are now stationed and battle-ready across the border in Honduras. We appear to be perilously close to direct U.S. intervention.

p Such a disastrous course is inevitable if we continue to back a government making war on its own people. Dr. Clements treated and interviewed several government prisoners- of-war who obviously belonged to an army with no morale, no leadership, and seemingly no purpose other than to stay alive until the end of their usually forced conscriptions. When these prisoners saw the guerrillas and their peasant supporters for what they were, many chose to stay and fight alongside them.

p There is one tradition that we still honor in this country and, before it is too late, let us begin to exercise a free xii people’s right to choose. I share with Dr. Clements a strong devotion to the principles of Thomas Jefferson, one of which is embodied in the following passage from his writings:

p There is no safe depository of the ultimate power of society, but the people themselves ... If we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their direction by education.

p Dr. Clements is endeavoring to do just that. Far more important than the healing he did in El Salvador is his first-hand witness to the character of its people and the war they are now fighting against their government.

p As I had decades before, he found the campesinos longsuffering, ready to sacrifice, full of love and care for their families and neighbors, and stalwart in the face of the greatest pain and hardship. Many of them have been tortured and mutilated by tormentors who have been trained in the sophisticated tactics of violence—often by our own military advisors.

p I believe no thoughtful U.S. citizen can come away from this powerful document without grave misgivings as to our course in Central America. The American public was not so informed about Vietnam. They did not have the facts until too many of their sons came home in body bags. Today, we have a choice. Let us see what our tax dollars are doing in Central America. Let us decide if we want to pay the price for another intervention. Let us decide if repression is again wrapping itself in the American flag.

p Murat W. Williams
Madison Mills, Virignia
February 1984

p 1946-47 State Dept. El Salvador Desk Officer

p 1947-49 Deputy Chief of Mission, U.S. Embassy El Salvador

1961-64 Ambassador, U.S. Embassy El Salvador