Washington aid for Salvador homeless

Press, 19 August 1983, Page 6

Washington aid for Salvador homeless

NZPA-Reuter San Salvador The United States Government yesterday signed a SUS 2.3 million aid agreement with El Salvador to help thousands of people dislodged from their homes by the country’s civil war.

Salvadorean Government officials estimate that 300,000 people have left their homes, fleeing the violence of nearly four years of war between Leftist guerrillas and the United Statesbacked army. In San Salvador, the capital, the country’s 60-mem-ber Constituent Assembly voted unanimously yesterday to ban all armed groups outside the Army, including Leftist guerrillas and Rightwing death squads. It agreed to add an article to the country’s proposed Constitution prohibiting: “The existence of armed groups of a political, religious or labour union character.”

More than 42,000 people have died in nearly four years of civil war in El Salvador. Human rights groups say that most of them were non-combatants killed by Right-wing death squads composed mainly of active and retired soldiers.

Assembly spokesmen said that the article would be the first such Constitutional ban in the country’s history, al-

though armed groups are outlawed in El Salvador’s penal code. The Assembly is debating each article of the draft Constitution, which it hopes to approve next month. Earlier yesterday Salvadorean guerrillas said that the Government had captured and assassinated 1572 people during the 90 days it was offering the insurgents amnesty.

The Government denied the allegation. Radio Venceremos, the Left-wing rebels’ radio station, said that the Government had used the amnesty offer to deceive the people and cloak “many crimes.”

The amnesty law, which expired on Tuesday offered pardons to guerrillas who laid down their arms and to rebel supporters among the country’s 700-odd political prisoners.

The radio said that the Government had assassinated people in the first 60 days that the amnesty was in effect.

Government spokesmen said that the guerrillas were trying to discredit the amnesty because it had cut into their ranks.

The Government says that 580 guerrillas accepted the amnesty — 375 of them,

or 6 per cent of the estimated 6000 armed insurgents, actual fighters, and the rest, non-combatants.

The rebels have long asserted that the amnesty law was a cosmetic move by the Government to improve the tarnished image of its human rights record.

Radio Venceremos has also predicted that the Army will deal more harshly with the rebels and their supporters it captured after the amnesty expired. In Guatemala City Guatemala’s new military leader yesterday reaffirmed his intention of leading the country toward Constitutional rule while continuing the struggle against “imported foreign interests.” In a Speech to a student rally in the national stadium, Brigadier-General Oscar Mejia Victores appeared to echo President Ronald Reagan’s view that a “Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan axis” was seeking to impose its will on Central America, when he said: “We must never permit foreign and alien flags to fly on our territory, imported by those... who serve interests which are not ours, (seeking) to tie us, like slaves, to peoples and cultures which are very different from ours.”