HORROR OF REAGAN'S WAR IN SALVADOR 'Dirty weapons' and double standards

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ONE OF the key reasons work for them and provide its nffensive in Fl Salvarnr. offronto ta -d-l1 why Ronald Reagan has taken a decidedly low profile in expressing US support over the Falklands/Malvinas crisis is because he - like most of the 'Moral Majority' from the West Coast and the Sunbelt states - is desperately aware of its critical repercussions on Washington's offensive in Central America, and most particularly in El Salvador.

Until early April the White House clearly believed that Galtieri's junta would do their dirty by Martin Thomas IN THE latest stages of the Tory government's war for the greater glory of the British ruling class, there has been a black-out on all war reports - except the discovery of napalm stocks at Goose Green.

'Hero Paras Braved Napalm Bombs' • screamed the sun. Indeed it 1s hardly to be expected that an army trained over the years in the bloody repression of the Argentinian working class should be delicate about its methods against British troops, or polite to the islanders.

But the outrage rings hollow from the Sun. When did they ever have much to say against the Argentine army's crushing of the Left and the unions? And the napalm was not in fact used at Goose Green, while the British did use cluster bombs. These bombs explode 50 feet above the ground and shower 147 small bombs, each of which then throws out about 2,000 lethal fragments.

From all accounts, they killed the majority of the Argentine 240 dead at Goose Green.

Moreover, the Sunday Times reported:

2247'..." a surrogate shock-force to bolster the disoriented and decrepit Salvadorean military in its extended, highly bloody, and progressively critical war against the national liberation forces of the FMLN.

Now there is no chance of this in any, but the long term. Almost without exception, Washington has found its Latin American client states ranged against its pro-British So the US urgently needs to look for new options for "Britain, like Argentina, has signed a UN convention which would restrict the use of incendiary weapons but, like Argentina, it has so far failed to ratify it...

"(And) it was British troops, not Argentinian, who first concluded that - in extremis - burning men alive was a possibility Marines When the marines on South Georgia expected an Argentine landing from the sea, after April 2, they improvised napalm-type fire bombs. "We could have turned the beach into an inferno" , their commander said.

Fortunately for the Argentines, they.y came by air instead.

Napalm was invented by Britain's allies in this war, the US. They used it to firebomb Tokyo in March 1945, killing 80,000 people (15,000 more than in the Hiroshima bombing).

Britain, too, used fire bombs against civilians in World War 2, slaughtering some 100,000 people in a raid on the German city of. Dresden.

And in Vietnam the US used napalm against civilians on a huge scale and to AUL ULL VLANATU a struggle that in recent weeks has all but disappeared trom the press but continues unabated and in an ever more brutal and acute form.

Reagan's commitment to a militant counterrevolution in El Salvador is total, and in practice qualified, only by a gradual recognition in the US congress of the growing isolationist sentiment of the Northern American working class suffering the brunt of the recession. This has led to a number of terrible effect. Not just napalm, but defoliants, scatter bombs and all the weapons to maim and mutilate that millions of dollars could buy.

Papers like the Sun had little to say about it then.

They also have little to say about the horrors of another war that Britain is waging today - in Ireland.

The British Army does not use napalm in Ireland. TV, even with all its self-censorship, makes that impossible. But it does use plastic bullets against civilians.

Last year, between April and August, the British Army and the RUC killed three children and four .. is: 4' efforts to stall the White House's momentum towards a direct and substantial military intervention, repeating the disaster of Vietnam.

Scared

However, none of the pettifogging and piecemeal manoeuvres attempted by scared congressmen have had any effect in alleviating the misery and terror of the five million besieged people of El Salvador. Under the new president, Magana, it is as it was under Duarte. adults (none of them 'terrorists') with plastic bullets:

Since 1972 a total of fourteen people have been killed by rubber or plastic bullets. And many more have been maimed. Last year, for example, Dermot Gallagher (aged 11) had his skull fractured; Sarah Begley lost an eye; Sean Tumelty suffered brain damage; Patrick Callaghan and Brendan Kelly each lost an eye.

An army trained and drilled in such operations can only serve an arrogant minority ruling class. In our war, the class war, the enemy is " that British army and the capitalist class it represents.

The puppets_provide a certain nuance in political style, but the armed forces are the real rulers and ultimate destroyers of this desperately poor state.

In 1979 direct US economic and military assistance to the Salvadorean junta was $8.6 million; in Carter's last year it rose to $78 million, a massive jump reflecting the growth of the FMLN and the decision to commit US resources in massive quantities to ensure a defeat of the national liberation movement.

In this Carter was followed by Reagan but with considerably more emphasis. In 1981 aid rose to $172 million - the highest received by any Latin American state, with a full $35 million in military aid In 1982 it has alredy reached $388 million ($116 million for the military) and existing plans for fiscal year 1983 allow for $226 million. The military component is over 25%.

El Salvador is now only in the most nominal form a sovereign nation state; it has become a US military outpost, the survival of which is daily dependent on massive infusions of dollars and weapons.

The only beneficiaries of this are the military, fattened by modern material and bloated with corruption on a massive scale, and the newly resurgent landed oligarchy, the victor of the sham elections in March and openly derisive of Washington's carefully sponsored 'agrarian reform' . The impact on the Salvadorean masses can best be quantified in their dead.

Since October 1979, when Washington expressed its pleasure at the form and activity of the new military regime, well over 30,000 people have died and nearly half a million have been forced into exile or refugee status. Since Reagan assumed office over 17,000 have died; of these roughly one in every hundred may be assumed to be a combatant in the civil war.

Vetoed

Recently Congress vetoed $100 million extra military aid on grounds of the new regime's block on land reform. But over 70% of military aid is granted by Reagan without reference to Congress. .

Last year congress passed measures that required Reagan to cerfity every six months that the Salvadorean junta was 'making significant efforts to improve' the human rights situation before aid would be ratified. Some misguided liberals thought this would bring the president up short.

Not a bit of it; this January the smiling septuagarian duly made such a ratification and embellished it with every manner of unctuous praise for his 'colleagues' in San Salvador. Three days before, some o, civilians, the overwhelming majority of them women and children, had been shot and dismembered with machetes by the US-trained Atlacatl battalion in the village of Mozote, in eastern El Salvador.

But Reagan has felt constrained to fall in with a Pentagon plan to maintain a relatively low contingent of US soldiery in the country, and instead to bring Salvadorean troops to the US. For six months some 1,600 troops have been trained in counterinsurgency war in North Carolina and Georgia.

Recently they returned. The event was scarcely noticed by the world's press, and that will please the mandarins of the Pentagon, who know very well romania

by Santiago Fortin

what the result training will be.

Reagan's keenness to take a stand in El Salvador stems from an absolute belief in the crudest form of the domino theory. He understands Nicaragua to be a 'Marxist state' intent on exporting socialist revolution to the rest of the region.

In fact, the FMLN has received very minimal assistance from the Sandinistas, and even less from the Soviet Union and Cuba, which have generously limited themselves to making expressions of solidarity.

Nonetheless, Reagan's view that the bloody struggle in El Salvador holds the key to the future of the Central American isthmus and will substantially affect the political balance of forces in the hemisphere as a whole is not at root misconceived. This is why Reagan shows every sign of continuing to pursue the policy of total military victory.

Under no circumstances can this policy be allowed to succeed, and under no circumstances should readers believe that the defeat of imperialism is the sole responsibility of the FMLN; it will only be achieved with the very highest level of international solidarity with the national liberation struggle against the murderous war drive of the empire. 2235a: d

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday 10 June 198: Page i=