Medical supplies ‘blocked’

Press, 12 February 1982, Page 6

Medical supplies ‘blocked’

NZPA San Salvador El Salvador's most active relief agency says it has run out of medicine for 33,000 war refugees and that the Government, is blocking delivery of emergency medical aid from abroad. Juan Francisco Zamora, president of the Salvadorean Green Cross, says the agency has been waiting since October for a Public Health Ministry permit to retrieve three tonnes of antibiotics, tranquilisers, vitamins and surgical equipment from a customs warehouse in San Salvador.

A separate Green Cross request for permission to import 36 two-way radios, one for each of its field officers caring for refugees, has gone unanswered for the same length of time, he said. No Ministry official contacted by the Associated Press could explain the fourmonth delay in the permits, which they’said usually took four weeks to process. A Western diplomat said that the Government’s inaction was “not surprising” in light of what he called the Salvadorean military’s suspicion that the Green Cross and other relief agencies were partial to Leftist rebels in the Central American country's civil war. The Green Cross is the Latin American equivalent of the Red Cross