Particular.
Yes.
In Salvador.
OK.
This is a--
I'm going to answer your question in the voice
of a campesino man.
This campesino man is about 50 years old.
He has seven children.
And he had to leave El Salvador because he makes cheese.
And the army was accusing him of--
because the cheese needs no refrigeration,
the army was going to kill him to prevent him
from selling his cheese to anybody who might be fighting
with the guerrillas.
So he had to leave because he made the wrong kind of cheese,
but he explained the election to me in the [INAUDIBLE] words.
And I begin with this little piece.
"We remember the long lines of the last election.
The sun hissing midday heat over the crowds.
And in some villages, the people ducking into polling
places under gunfire.
It was an election.
And people voted in record numbers Yes,
the campesino says, in my village, we voted.
Many people had already left because of fear
and couldn't vote.
A poor man doesn't vote because he has no address.
His shack, what address can it have.
Last time, they said we would be voting for peace.
This is the election you're referring to.
In some places when you vote, they make a mark on your thumb
with ink that doesn't wash off to keep you from voting twice.
They also take the number of your ID card for the ballot.
The National Guard comes to the village and says,
we will know how you vote.
What difference does it make?
If I don't vote, people say I am a subversive.
If our whole village doesn't vote,
that is the end for our village.
Everybody votes."
He says it better than I could.
That's for that election.
Now, they're saying they're going to have another one.
But now, they're sort of getting edgy,
and nobody really wants to have one in the government now.
So they've postponed it.
I don't expect it to happen anytime soon.
Yes?
They are involved everywhere.
Yes, but you can't work openly with Amnesty International
in Salvador because of so many executions of Human Rights
Commission people, people who work for human rights.
So they obtain information from trusted sources
and they verify each piece of information
but with three trusted sources in country.
When I was there, I was supplying the information
to Amnesty.
But the government certainly didn't know that at the time.
They do reports.
They are keeping their organization very much
appraised of what's going on.
And their information is very accurate.
Yes?
Relatively speaking, no.
No, I can't say--
I am not going to tell you that the present administration
and State Department like me because they don't.
But they don't bother me too much.
And I can't predict the future in terms
of Salvadoran, right wing Salvadorans,
in this country and their retaliatory moves.
But I don't really worry about it too much.
And the minor things that I do notice
are nothing compared to what people go through there.
So it's negligible, actually.
Yes.
And traveling in throughout this country in the last year,
I've been amazed at how many are interested.
Because when I first came back from Salvador, no one,
even no one was interested at all.
The other thing is that in terms of the depression,
Monsignor Romero helped--
taught me a lot about that.
If you simply, with an informed conscience,
do whatever needs to be done and make whatever decision needs
to be made, moment to moment, with no goal,
with no idea that you are going to accomplish something
or that I can't have in mind that I
am going to change Mr. Reagan's mind or something like that,
if I think that, I'm going to set myself up
to be discouraged.
And then, I might feel that it wasn't
worth it to do this work.
If I simply do it for its own sake in a moment
because it's correct, right, whatever, then it's fine.
You avoid despair.
And you also avoid hope.
And both of them are probably not necessary to the job.
And I don't know.
I think that one individual can do a lot here, especially here.
I do believe that.
They sleep-- Yes.
That's what I focus on, anyway.
Well.
Yes.
No.
[CHUCKLES] I don't have either.
I'm not a pessimist or an optimist.
I'm not.
I don't have it anymore.
I don't know.
Yes.
I studied Spanish in college for one year.
I studied it in graduate school, and then I learned the rest
very fast on my feet in country and some in Spain
before I went to Salvador.
And then, I was first in Salvador five years ago,
six years ago.
And many of my friends are in exile now.
And they don't let me speak English with them so on.
After a while you can--
yes.
Yes.
There-- yes, there are Charlie Clements,
three tours of duty in Vietnam as a fighter pilot,
two years in the jungle in Salvador
in the mountains of Guazapa treating refugees
and anybody else who was wounded.
Two years in a combat zone, Charlie Clements, MD,
is a wonderful man.
I mean, I could name--
there's not too many Americans that I
know-- there's four Americans fighting with the guerrillas.
Two who fought with the guerrillas, died doing that.
So there was six altogether that I know of.
That part of the work, they have Americans.
You run into Americans in strange places.
One man who's set up a beautiful clinic way out in the middle
of nowhere in Mexico having nothing, no materials
or anything.
And he managed to treat people.
And his clinic was two days by mule to get to it,
so you run into people here and there.
Yeah?
It was very dangerous during January, February,
and March 1980.
I'm very lucky.
I never shot anyone, but I had a gun once in a while.
And one time only because an old man, 70 years
old with leukemia, was with me.
And he was almost dead.
He was a professor and scholar of political science,
and he was on the death list.
I'm glad.
That's what it's from.
Yes.
Well, I had a little tape recorder
that I used sometimes as it turns out dangerously,
foolishly.
And I'd use my memory, and I also wrote on my arms
and on my legs, in different parts of my body,
and then I go home and copy it before I
took a shower, and things like that, and in my mind,
and sometimes papers.
It varied, but I used my own skin a lot.
And I had to use a pen that wouldn't wash off
very easily, so it wouldn't come off.
And then sometimes, it was very hard to get all the sentences
off my skin.
Yes.
I was put on Major [INAUDIBLE] death list,
and they made four attempts.
Two of them because I was with other people on the list,
and two on my own.
And I was very lucky and met with Monsignor Romero
the week before he died for three
hours in the kitchen of the nuns at Divine Providence Hospital.
And he persuaded me.
He said, you have so much.
Now, you have to go back to the United States
and write and talk whatever you can do, whatever you like.
And I said, no, I just need a little bit more time,
a few more days.
You get into a mentality, and you can't even
see the situation clearly that you're in.
You just propelled forward like that.
And he said, no, you're going home, and went back and forth
and back and forth like that.
And I said, why don't you go out?
You're on the list.
He said, look, my place is with my people now,
and your place is with yours.
And you have to get out of here now.
So he arranged for me to be taken out of the country.
And he was killed eight days later.
Yes.
It's difficult. Yeah.
OK, first of all, there are not three or four or five groups.
There is the government which is the military and whatever
civilians they're allowing to sit with them at any given
time, and that hasn't changed all of this century.
OK.
And then, there is what's called the civilian right,
and they have--
most of the wealthy people live in Miami, Houston,
and New Orleans now.
They don't live in El Salvador.
And there are certain civilians who
are in the country, who are very right wing
and have strong ties with the military.
And they work together with the military.
But they have the same.
They're locked together.
And then, there is the population.
There are those who don't know what they should support.
There are those who support the guerrillas.
There are those who want the war to end,
and they want the government out,
but they're not sure what they want to take its place.
The population at large in the majority
opposes the government.
That does not mean they are united on what
they want to have replaced it.
Do you see what I'm saying?
In terms of the solution, it really
doesn't matter what I tell you because
the present administration is seeking a military victory
in El Salvador.
So we will cope with that for a moment.
And I will tell you that a cold assessment of the military
situation in El Salvador indicates that the Salvadoran
government cannot win a military victory without extensive help
from the United States much more than we've given them.
I will tell you one of the reasons I'm saying that.
Do you remember when all the Salvadoran soldiers
were brought here to Fort Bragg and Fort Benning for training?
85% of the first group of 1,000 are no longer in the military.
57% of every soldier trained here
is no longer in the military.
He is dead, or he is wounded, or he has deserted,
or he is not re-enlisted.
348 of the soldiers trained at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg
are now fighting with the guerrillas.
Why is this?
The soldier gets out of the military.
He goes back to his village.
Half of his village is dead because Social Security forces
move through there.
He has no job.
He has no money.
He has no hope.
He has no future.
It's the same as when he went in.
And he is risking his life, and for whom?
So he gets a little discouraged, and he goes over
to the other side.
So we're training guerrillas too.
Now--
[APPLAUSE]
The situation is that you use your imaginations a little bit
about what it will take to achieve a military victory
in that situation.
That's what you have to do.
Now, I will tell you something else.
30% of the American-aid money is stolen by the high command
of the Salvadoran army.
They are like a mafia.
They have been stealing 30% of the aid for years.
That's why the president of Salvador
can retire with $10 million in a New York bank on a $200 a month
salary as a Colonel.
To be president or one of the ministers of Salvador
is one of the most lucrative business opportunities
in the hemisphere.
Salvadoran Officer Corps doesn't own any coffee.
They don't own any land in El Salvador.
They own their job as the American's stability force
in that particular part of the world.
So how much money are we going to have to give them?
Well, I was sitting in the Congress in April 2, 1981.
The first $5.5 million was approved
to be sent military aid to Salvador.
Since that time we have sent $1 billion to El Salvador.
How much is it going to cost?
Are the same conditions of poverty and repression becoming
true in Honduras?
Have they been true in Guatemala for some time?
What is going on in Nicaragua?
You must put this all together and use your own logic
and your own imagination.
Despite the little information that you're given,
and you are given very little, you can--
you know what's going on.
Yeah.
First of all, I don't think that all
of the Sandinista leadership is as intelligent and enlightened
as it might be important to be in this period.
And there are Salvadorans who are a very high caliber
as are some of the Sandinistas.
But the situation is not--
the conditions are not very favorable for the development
of stable economic structures in any particular order
or political democracy in Salvador at this time.
So it would be difficult to say.
One of the results of this war has
been that almost all of the political minds
were forced to either become guerrillas or leave the country
or they were assassinated.
Many were assassinated.
So the country is a bit depleted at the moment.
I can't make predictions.
I don't have a crystal ball.
There are five guerrilla groups, three major ones
and two minor ones.
They are fighting amongst each other right
now over the issue of negotiations
and how hardline they want to be and all of that.
There are groups that are much better than others
in those five.
They differ amongst themselves, very, very strongly
on the issue of Soviet--
friendliness to the Soviet Union, Soviet alignment.
They differ on a number of things.
So they are not in themselves united
in certain ideological respects.
There's one group that's very capable in terms
of political thinking.
Another group is very capable militarily, and so on and so
on.
They all have their separate strengths.
Yes.
I think it is a wonderful, evocative account of what
it would feel like to be an American woman who spends
two weeks in El Salvador.
Did I see something bad?
You can quote me.
It's all right.
Yes, Michael.
Cuba is supplying aid via Nicaragua approximately--
I'm going to guess for you.
OK.
I make an educated guess.
But it is my estimation.
It's approximately 1/16th of what
we are giving the Salvadoran government to fight back
against them.
They also have quite a network within El Salvador
where they build homemade claymores and things.
They have cottage industry weapons.
They make things like--
they use silica and various things
and wrap masking tape around it, and I
mean, very effective, but homemade kinds of things.
And also, they had a $27 million war chest
when they started out.
And they got that by certain of the small groups
kidnapping businessmen and wealthy Salvadorans
and holding them for ransoms.
Of the many kidnappings, they murdered one victim.
They did do that.
They accumulated $27 million.
And they bought arms on the international arms market.
Many of the arms they bought in the United States
in Texas and California.
If you have the money, you can buy any weapon produced
in any country in any quantity.
And just because you find a weapon in El Salvador
and it's maybe a Kalashnikov, that
does not tell you who sold it to whom
or even where it was produced.
The international arms market is an open bazaar
in both senses of the word.
[LAUGHTER]
The only thing you can't buy is an SS-20 or a MX
or a D5 or that kind of thing.
I don't think they're selling tridents either,
but you can buy anything.
You can buy submachine guns, that kind of thing, anything,
grenade launchers.
I'll tell you a little story.
In 1976, the chief of staff of the Salvadoran armed forces
was arrested in Mount Kisco, New York,
for attempting to sell 10,000 machine guns to men
he thought were members of the American mafia
and who were in effect were Mount Kisco
local police in plainclothes in rented
Cadillacs from the local Cadillac dealer.
They videotaped Rodriguez boasting
that he, as chief of staff of the armed forces,
could sell them the following year $2.5 million worth
of military hardware, including sten guns, rocket
launchers, and tanks.
Guess where he was going to get that equipment?
The 10,000 machine guns weren't even
out of their crates in the United States.
So because of the videotapes to the embarrassment
of our own intelligence agencies,
he was tried and convicted by the community
of Mount Kisco, New York, and sentenced
to two consecutive five year prison
terms in upstate New York.
He served two years of the 10 years, and he was deported.
And he now lives in a very nice house
in a colonia outside San Salvador,
and he drives a Mercedes Benz.
His commanding officer was the minister of Defense
who would have had to have not only known about the deal
and approved it but actually would have gotten a cut of it.
He became El Salvador's next president.
Romero.
He was overthrown in the '79 coup.
Now, all of this has been going on for a long time.
I could tell you other stories, but I thought
that was sort of the funniest.
If you would like a little education,
call the Mount Kisco local police
and ask for the Lieutenant [INAUDIBLE]
and ask him to tell you about this story.
Then, call the State Department, Salvador desk, Pete Romero,
and say to him, what can you tell me
about-- what do you have on this?
What can you tell me about-- what's the State Department's
view of that case?
And they will tell you that they don't
have files going back that far.
Then, you can call the Salvadoran embassy,
ask them if Rodriguez was ever prosecuted for his attempt
to do this.
And that will give you everything you need to know.
Yes.
The Kissinger report will most likely
give a academic credibility to the Reagan fiasco.
That's what I think.
In Congress, the main thing that I worked on
over the last year and a half was the Boland Amendment
to cut off funding to covert operations against Nicaragua.
We have to do is wait until budgets come up.
So I also worked on the three human rights certifications
and on fiscal requests for military aid to Salvador.
And right now, I'm not doing anything with the Congress
because it's not possible to at the moment.
Yes.
This morning president announced that American troops
would stay in Grenada.
This morning American Naval exercises
were conducted off the coast of Cuba.
I'm trying to keep as clear an assessment of what
is going on as I can.
I don't know how far he is going to go.
I think with the Boland Amendment covert aid
was cut off.
And instead, they're going to send twice as much overt
aid to the Honduran government.
And the Honduran government will give it to the Contras openly.
So that was the effect of that.
What's going to happen is very serious.
And Nicaragua is very vulnerable at the moment militarily.
I don't know the purposes of the Naval exercises
that began this morning off Cuba.
It's anyone's guess at this moment what's going to happen.
I can't tell you.
I'm watching like you are.
Yes.
For the poorest of the poor, enormously.
The people who are unhappy are people
who had a lot more to lose than they had to gain.
But the Sandinista government also made mistakes.
They're also a very young government.
Yes.
It's the Big Pine operation you're talking about.
It's still going on.
And what they're doing is they're building airports.
They're building ports.
They're building radar stations.
They're putting in an infrastructure
to show the Hondurans how to do it.
But then, they're going to leave them all there.
So Big Pine is a way of turning Honduras into Cambodia.
There.
For quite some time, yes.
And they're thinking about renewing it
when Big Pine is over.
So what you have is 4,000 soldiers
make building airstrips et cetera, et cetera in Honduras
for an indefinite period of time.
We're going to be in Grenada for an indefinite period of time.
We're going to be in Lebanon for an indefinite period of time.
And pretty soon, we're going to have to go to the Philippines
and South Korea.
Yes, probably.
I would imagine so.
I don't know how many people are flocking to join the Marines,
but I've heard that they do have recruits
after the deaths in Lebanon.
Yes?
Shall I be kind or--
I learned that I can't expect them to be logical.
And they do not understand the realities within the countries
that they are dealing with.
They are posturing.
They are committed to symbolic gestures
and to a containment of what they
perceive as Soviet aggression.
Nothing that they're doing it really matches the reality.
I don't think Mr. Reagan knows very much about Central America
or about Lebanon.
I can't help you to try to make sense of this.
I tried for a long time.
He smiles very well, and he combs his hair nicely.
That's what he does.
Yes.
It works, doesn't it?
The Grenada invasion was in violation
of the Organization of American States treaties, the UN
treaties, the War Powers Resolution, and the 1981 treaty
which established the organization of Eastern
Caribbean states, therefore, in violation of every treaty
we are part of or signatory to.
Now, we could say that we are showing the world
that we will defend our allies.
Or we could say that we're showing the world that our word
is good for nothing.
Yes.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I'm going to go now.
Thank you.
You've been very attentive.
Thank you.