Dear Senator Mitchell,
Thank you for taking the time to meet with me last month concerning El Salvador. Below are some reflections upon that meeting and some additional thoughts and questions concerning the situation there and the evolution of U.S. policy toward a primary, and I think, legitimate purpose of peacemaking.
Let me begin by briefly listing my starting points and central tenets. I have trid to keep them to their simplest outline, but I ask you, please, to consider them carefully, if you would. Analyzing our involvement in Central America from its history, not necessarily from our intentions, I come to the following general conclusions:
• The fundamental cause of social unrest in El Salvador is the accumulation of vast wealth by a few while the great majority of the people live in extreme, life-threatening poverty
• The wealthy have created and controlled the military, economic and political institutions and have used them to insure not just the status quo but their continued accumulation of wealth and their expanded control of resources.
• The United States’ primary interests in the area have been access to natural and labor resources and insuring that no strong or hostile government emerges to threaten that access or the United States itself.
• The United States and the wealthy few have formed a symbiotic relationship which continues the flow of resource to the U.S. and adds to the wealth and military control held by the elite. Our interests have become intertwined.
• The poverty of the people has deepened. Attempts to change the status quo threaten the wealthy few and, thereby, U.S. interests which have aligned with them.
While I do not believe there has been a conspiracy to enslave or impoverish third world peoples, I do think that gradually, often by good intentions, “trickle-down” imaginings, “constructive engagement”, or simple self-deception, we have slid into cooperation with oppressive governments and unjust social systems and are now often their allies. The people of the United States cherish democracy and have a passion for justice. We have struggle hard to integrate those passions into our institutions of government and law. They are alive and in constant evolution. Our foreign policies and involvements have been much more varied in their courses and seem to flow from less certain principles.
In Central America, our cooperation with oppression has painted the contradictions between our internal and external principles in blood. Though we try to look as little as possible, we are nonetheless flooded by the damage. Iran-gate; condemnation by the World Court and often by the international community; the murder and torture of priests and religious workers by U.S. trained and equipped soldiers; the overwhelming debt our neighbors find themselves in to us, even as we harvest more and more of their crops, resources and labor; the plummeting cycle of poverty that leaves hundreds of thousands of people – the largest percentage children – starving on our doorstep as their croplands are turned into cattle ranches to supply beef to our fast-food industry or into flower farms to provide us with bittersweet bouquets; the widespread distribution by U.S. companies of products and chemicals which have been banned for safety reasons in our country; the need to rewrite or hide the murderous abuses of power that are commonplace amongst our “allies”; our turning back tens of thousands of refugees fleeing this utter depravity while trying to rearrange the truth about what they flee – all of these things stem from our own complicity with the oppressor.
When we talked about El Salvador last month, we seemed to talk in two veins – principles and politics. What we both seemed to agree has been a failure of U.S. policy in El Salvador is fundamentally a failure in principles as well. As in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, our government and the media have agreed to honor specious assumptions about U.S. involvement in Central America, though time and time again we are forced to restructure history and claim that we see things which aren’t there or that we cannot see what is there. In the fable, a small child is the only one to speak the obvious. In El Salvador it is the cried of the children who die of malnutrition or see their parents killed or their teachers abducted by soldiers, the cries of children who see MADE IN USA on the canisters of white phosphorus bombs that have destroyed their villages, who see the blood of their pastors smeared on the cries – their cries speak the obvious: ARENA’s cause in not a just cause; the preservation of the oligarchy is not a just cause.
Let those who would receive our support in El Salvador and Central America be those who are willing to put aside their own gain and to work first that all may eat, that all may have some education, that all may receive the minimal healthcare that we in the States would give to our bets, that all may be free from the terror of torture and disappearance.
It is not time simply to reassess whether military aid to the Cristiani government needs stricter conditioning, it is time to end our complicity with the oppressor, to reassess our fundamental involvement. The discussion about what is achievable and which tactic to take continues the myth of the Emperor’s Clothes. We must start with the truth or the tactics are irrelevant.
You asked me what I thought would happen if the U.S. cut military aid to El Salvador. I think that is conditioned by several other questions which Salvadorans and Americans alike must ask. What is our ultimate intent? – to quell the human rights outcry at home and abroad? To preserve the status quo? To open our resources and energies to the Salvadoran people to seek solutions to their needs? To run away or cut our losses?
If U.S. agenda is truly to encourage democracy and justice, we will not seek a military solution. Our million dollars a day will not be spent to preserve the privilege of the few nor to prod “development” which lands Salvadoran resources increasingly on our tables. We must work with groups such as OXFAM, CRIPDES, the church and the unions to seek sustainable self-development. We must foster negotiations between the oligarchy and the popular movement, the military and the FMLN to end hostilities. We should encourage U.N. efforts and offer to send volunteer peace brigades to accompany both the right and the left and to help support a neutral human buffer, if it is necessary, to encourage and safeguard all parties in their pursuit of peace. I think of how many tens of thousands of peace activists in the U.S. have spent years working on Central American issues and think that several thousand could be found to join such non-violent peace brigades and work in concert with both sides on the pressing social and economic issues, besides providing accompaniment.
How much better for our country to offer our lives and resources in the pursuit of justice than our current policy of arming hostile camps to the teeth so that the status quo can be preserved at any cost of human life. I feel that the road to peace has hundreds of options which are constructive and non-violent.
We have consistently sided with governments who are at war with the poor in their own countries. Not only do our policies continue and expand the poverty and violence that tears those countries apart, they also tear at our souls. While non-violent goals my seem naive or impossible given the day-to-day policies we now have in place, I think that they are finally our only way out of the hell that we have helped construct. They will take all our courage and soul force to pursue. They will take dedication of scarce resources and even scarcer leadership. But, in lieu of those goals, the continuing degradation of the Salvadoran people and of our out people is assured.
So where do we stand? The terror haunts us all int eh deepest part of ourselves. Each of us must hear the cry of Oscar Romero the day before he was killed:
My brothers...You are killing your own brothers and sisters...In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people, whose cries rise to heaven each day more despairingly, I beg you, I plead with you, I order to in the name of God: Stop the repressing.
Thanks you for your efforts on these and many issues...There is such a profound need for us to let Truth be present in the world. I know there is a font of peace within us each. May peace be with and within you, Senator.
