Dear Editor:
Mr. Waddleton (Hudson Reporter, Letters, 3/1/09) suggests the documented facts I presented in my letter on the Salvadoran “civil war” are distorted or false. Instead he substitutes his undocumented versions. Rather than nourishing illusions, he should read the Truth Commission Report to the United Nations dated March 25, 1993. And he might avail himself of the many writings of Robert White, career diplomat and ambassador to El Salvador in the early eighties. Mr. White witnessed the disinterment of the four raped and murdered churchwomen on December 4, 1980, only days after two of them were his guests at the embassy.
I was never in El Mosote, the site of the Mayan massacre, but I spent two and a half years during the mid-sixties, working with Ecuadorian trade unions for the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), an AFL-CIO affiliate. Two other AIFLD staff members, Mike Hammer and Mark Pearlman, worked in El Salvador in the early eighties. They were murdered by two Salvadoran National Guardsmen while having lunch at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador with a Salvadoran involved in agrarian land reform. The U.S. Army’s School of the Americas has been definitively linked to the assassinations.
I hope Mr. Waddleton extends his blessing to the Mayans of El Salvador and Guatemala, the Colombian campesinos hounded off their land by the left wing FARC guerrillas and the right wing paramilitaries, the Brazilian rainforest farmers, driven off their farms by loggers and other plunderers of the land, all of whom, like us, are Americans.
James T. Dette