Salvador guerrillas say Govt massacred 124

Press, 9 March 1982, Page 8

Salvador guerrillas say Govt massacred 124

NZRA San Salvador The United States " Embassy in San Salvador said yesterday that American • officials were investigating charges that Government security forces murdered a total of 124 people in the Salvadorean hamlet of El Campanario and two nearby hamlets.' The charges were made by the guerrillas who control the . territory in Sari Vicente province arid the villagers in the area who are friendly to the insurgents. According to ' them, the victims were killed in El Campanario and in the nearby hamlets of San Benito and' .Pita Puente on or around January 25. On a visit to El Campanario yesterday, facts were hard to ascertain and there was evidence only of tragedy and horror: 14 human skulls, bloodstained clothes, including a little girl’s yellow dress, and several female scalps with thick black hair, one still adorned with an ornamental comb. Because this area is under the control of armed insurgents, reporters who go into it to look for proof of the charges can do so only with the ’ permission of, and escorted by, guerrillas. El Campanario, about 80km south-east of San Salvador, was reached by driving along several miles of dirt ■ and grass-track road through rebel-held areas of El Salvador’s coastal east-

west highway and then by hiking a kilometre or two . over rocky footpaths on scrub-covered, sunburned hills. A guerrilla who identified himself only as Ephraim led two American reporters and . two photographers into . El Campanario yesterday. The group was allowed to visit the site only after convincing the armed rebels who guarded the approach to the hamlet- that the journalists represented publications with wide influence. There was much to see, but there were also many unseen factors and many unanswered questions. Ephraim took the reporters and photographers to a hilltop clearing surrounded by a scattering of abandoned farmsteads and small brick-and-adobe houses with their characteristic tiled roofs. At the entrance to a small compound, marked off with fences and tall cactus plants, there was an open pit, with several bones and a skull at the bottom. Below that, Ephraim said, about 50 or 55 bodies had been buried. There was no way of verifying the account. The largest building in the clearing was a structure described by a small, and apparently freshly painted, sign as a Pentecostal church. Ac- . cording to the guerrilla guide, the Salvadorean military men who invaded the area — members, he said, of the Government’s one-year-old crack Atlacatl battalion - — had pulled people from

the church and lined them up along a barbed-wire fence at the back of the building, where all were beheaded. The attack, Ephraim said, was supposed to have taken place on January 25, a Monday. He indicated that the people had fled into the church for safety. The guerjillas said that about 75 people had died in El Campanario 4- those pulled from the church and others from homes in the hamlet. - He said 35 had been killed at Pita Puente and 14 at San Benito. There was no way to confirm those figures with local civil authorities since the land is in rebel hands. The guerrillas said that a man who escaped the attack had told . the rebels that about 30 soldiers had been responsible. He said they used machetes to kill the local people because the weapons were “silent.” He said that gunfire • would , have sounded a general alarm to the rebels. ThOihas Escobar, a 56-year-old peasant from nearby Las Lombras, and one of the few people seen along the hike into the reported massacre site, said that he thought that about 60 military men had been involved in the attack. When asked what uniforms they wore, he said: “All of them — the national police, the Army, the National Guard, and some in civilian clothes.” He said that there seemed to be no motive for the killings. The guerrilla said that in-

surgent forces who found the bodies at the end of January informed Radio Venceremos, the rebel station, of the discovery. He did not say what use the rebel radio had made of his report. The reported murders were not brought to the attention of the press in the capital until last week-end, when the Legal Aid Society, which has offices in the compound of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, invited reporters to informal press briefings on the subject. According to statistics compiled by the Centre for Documentation and Information at the University of Central America, in San Salvador, also known as the Catholic University, 13,229 civilians were killed last year, compared wit& 9826 in 1980. The Human Rights Commission of El Salvador, a . non-profit organisation that was founded in 1978 at the urging of some of the country’s Christian Democrats, says that 16,276 were killed last year, a 20 per cent increase over 1980. And the legal aid office of the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador has compiled a 1981 figure of 13,353. The American State Department, in a report released last month, said that about 6000 people died as a result of political violence in El Salvador last year. However,' a spokesman conceded that this figure represented “only a tiny portion of the people killed.”