(The following article appeared in the June 10 issue of Combate Socialista, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International in Colombia. The translation and footnotes are by Intercontinental Press/Inprecor.]
Hours after fourteen members of the Revolutionary People's Bloc (BPR) were gunned down on May 23 by Salvadoran police near the Venezuelan embassy, Salvadoran Minister of Education Carlos A. Herrera was executed by guerrillas of the People's Liberation Forces-Farabundo Martí.'
A dispatch by the EFE news agency stated that the guerrilla group had explained by telephone that its action was a "response to the events of last night," a reference to the new massacre.
On the afternoon of May 23, the government suspended all constitutional guaran. tees throughout the country for a period of thirty days, including the right to assemble, the right to enter and leave the coun try, freedom of expression, and the right not to have one's home searched or mail opened.
On the morning of May 22, the capital, San Salvador, was without public transport. The day before, students clashing with police had burned six buses. They were demanding freedom for various political prisoners and showing their support for the continuing occupation of the Metropolitan Cathedral by the BPR.
The BPR is a coalition of trade unions, peasant organizations, and student and community groups that has been struggling since Gen. Carlos Humberto Romero seized power through fraudulent elections in 1977. The BPR's program centers around demands for higher wages, full employment, and municipal and agrarian reform. Its methods of struggle have been to hold protests and occupations to publicize its demands.
With considerable popular support, the BPR occupied the French and Venezuelan embassies, the Metropolitan Cathedral, more than eight churches, and five schools. These actions began May 4. The archbishop of San Salvador refused to call on the government to eject those occupying the cathedral.
The occupations were launched to demand the release of BPR General Secre-
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Washington Post tary Facundo Guardado and four other BPR leaders who were arrested at the end of April.
The government reacted by declaring that it would never negotiate with "subversive groups." However, it had to partly swallow its words. On May 10 it was forced to free Facundo Guardado, who immediately addressed a crowd of 2,000 persons at the University of San Salvador to condemn the torture he had been subjected to in prison.
Two days before, the police had carried out a cold-blooded massacre in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral. A crowd that had gathered to hear speeches by those occupying the cathedral was suddenly machinegunned. Nineteen persons were killed on the spot, and many more were wounded. The protesters fought back, and two police were wounded.
After the occupations of the cathedral and the embassies, groups of 200 to 300 persons demonstrated in the streets in solidarity with the occupations. They were brutally dispersed by the police. Shortly before the massacre at the cathedral, supporters of the BPR seized a radio station and broadcast demands for the freedom of the five imprisoned leaders.
On May 10, members of the Salvadoran Revolutionary Student Movement (a BPR affiliate) clashed with the police, who killed four high-school students.
So vigorous have been these struggles and the solidarity they have aroused that the bloodthirsty Carlos Humberto Romero had to call on May 18 for a "dialogue with the legal opposition" and promise to "enact electoral reforms" to overcome the crisis.
But this crisis can hardly be settled by "electoral reforms."
El Salvador has had a long history of repression and popular insurgency since the 1930s. El Salvador's economy revolves around agriculture, but 38 percent of the land in this country of 4.2 million is owned by fourteen Salvadoran families. Unemployment has risen to 60 percent in the countryside, and the average wage is US$1.41 a day.
Modernization of the plantations has left an enormous number of peasants without work or land, reducing a large part of the population to poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.
Military dictatorships have ruled the country since 1932. In that year a peasant uprising was crushed with the army's massacre of between 15,000 and 20,000 persons. Armed and financed by Washington, the regular army is aided in its repression by a rightist paramilitary organiza. tion called ORDEN.? The atmosphere in the country is one of continual violencepolice raids, arrests, kidnappings, torture, executions of peasants, and so on.
Against the background of this crisis, the workers have gone into struggle.
A wave of strikes and occupations began last year when the BPR and the Christian Federation of Salvadoran Peasants seized the Venezuelan, Costa Rican, Panamanian, Mexican, and Swiss embassies to protest the brutal repression against the peasants of Cuscatlán Province."
At the beginning of this year, several strikes broke out. Workers at the Pesca fishing company, the PRONASA packing plant, and the Tropical and La Constancia bottling factories struck in early March. More than 1,200 electrical workers belonging to the STECEL union went on strike March 13. On March 19 they cut off electrical power in the entire country for twenty-three hours, with the support of the union at CAESS, the company responsible for electricity distribution.
2. The Democratic Nationalist Organization, founded and led by General Romero.
Barricades went up in San Salvador, Mejicanos, and Soyapango during the strikes. On March 11, groups of BPR members for the first time occupied the cathedral in San Salvador, which they left the following week after demonstrations in the center of the city.
The workers at the La Constancia and Tropical plants eventually won their struggle, but they had to pay a severe price. One day during the strike, the army surrounded the factories while a helicopter machine-gunned workers, family members, and leftist militants who had congregated there. Six persons lost their lives in the assault.
The mass response to this attack was not long in coming. Other strikes erupted within hours of the machine-gunnings. By May 20, more than fifteen companies were paralyzed by workers who had walked out in solidarity with their comrades at La Constancia. The bosses were finally forced to concede, and the workers at the bottling plants and the STECEL workers were victorious.
That was the background of mass struggle that preceded the events at the cathe. dral and the occupied embassies.
Nor has the May 8 massacre at the cathedral terrorized the inhabitants of San Salvador. More than 20,000 persons went into the streets on May 10 during the funeral for the victims of the massacre, condemning the murderers and calling for the downfall of the government. On the day of the massacre itself, teachers, bottling and construction workers, and other unionists struck in solidarity with the occupiers of the cathedral.
Terrorist actions by some groups isolated from the real mass struggle have thrown up additional obstacles to the advance of the masses.
The example of what happened in early April to the workers at the Adoc shoe factory in Soyapango should be noted. The workers had occupied two buildings in response to threats and firings by the employer during their struggle to establish a union. The occupation indicated that the strength and confidence of the workers was rising.
But one day a guerrilla unit of the People's Liberation
Forces-Farabundo
Martí executed the head of personnel for the factory because of his antiunion activities. The army used this as a pretext for occupying the plant and driving out the workers with bursts of machine-gun fire. Many were wounded and the rest were arrested.
Instead of such terrorist actions, the road toward victory is the one that has been chosen by the workers and students of San Salvador, Mejicanos, and other parts of the country-ongoing, massive mobilizations against the regime and its allies.
Notes
1. Farabundo Marti was the leader of the massive peasant uprising in El Salvador in 1932.
3. According to the BPR, fifty persons were killed and hundreds wounded in late March 1978 when troops and paramilitary forces swept through Cuscatlán to put down peasant actions demanding land and protesting against high rents. See Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor, May 8, 1978, p. 546.