OPINION Ending Complicity In Salvador's Destruction CUSTOM WINDOW - TREATMENT Aluminum 1" Horizontal Blinds • Wood 1" & 2" Horizontal Blinds • Vertical Blinds • Pleated Shades • Woven Woods • New. 1/2" Aluminum and Wood Micro-Blinds The Great Cover - Up 5665 W. MAPLE ROAD WEST BLOOMFIELD, MICHIGAN 48033 Showroom By Appointment Only Free Installation • No Shipping Charges 1 851 -1125 WHEN IT'S YOUR DECISION YOU'LL CHOOSE MERCEDES BENZ WHEN IT'S YOUR MONEY YOU'LL CHOOSE EUROPEAN AUTO IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR THE MERCEDES WE EITHER HAVE IT OR CAN FIND IT. LEASING & FINANCING SERVICE & COLLISION EUROPEAN AUTO SERVICE, LTD. 21425 Woodward, Ferndale 399 3130/31 - 36 Friday, January 16, 1987 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS A Michigan witness views the horrors, and the U.S. role in perpetuating the problems RUDY SIMONS Special to The Jewish News T ake a pencil. Draw a circle with a radius of 51.3 miles. Within that small space lies the entire na- tional territory of El Salvador. Into that one tiny country United States taxpayers have poured over $2 billion during the present administration in Washington. More is scheduled for delivery in 1987. That is the equivalent of about $500 for every man, woman and child still alive there, now that over one million Salvado- rans have fled the terror and tens of thousands have been killed by that country's mili- tary forces and its clandestine agents of terror. Had those billions been spent to improve the lot of the citizens of El Salvador we would have reason to be proud of our own government policy. Sadly, the overwhelming pre- ponderance of that "aid" has been directed against the huge majority of the population in the form of bombs and bom- bers, guns and bullets, helicop- ters and intelligence data, and military training, much of it within our own borders. Al- most none of our largesse has found its way to the be- leaguered people who have managed to survive. These are among the many things I and 174 other North American men and women learned during our brief stay in San Salvador as delegates to a late-November 1986 confer- ence called: "In Search of Peace: U.S.-El Salvador." We met with about 300 Salvado- rans on the campus of the Uni- versity of Central America (Catholic) in the capital city. My companion during the journey was Dr. Charles Rooney, a Detroit psychologist. We had gone to the conference under the combined auspices of the Michigan Interfaith Com- mittee on Central American Human Rights (MICAH), New Jewish Agenda/Detroit Chap- ter, the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights (MCHR), Gray Panthers-Metro North, and the Justice and Peace Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit. We heard many reports of bombing, kidnapping, assassi- nation, disappearance and Rudy Simons is a Bloomfield Hills businessman who chairs the steering committee of the Michigan Interfaith. Committee on Central American Human Rights. In 1984, he visited Nicaragua twice – as part of a Witness for Peace delegation and to deliver medical supplies to Ocotal after a contra attack. overall repression from the lips of men and women who were themselves the victims of such government-sponsored ac- tivity since at least 1979. We were also personal witnesses to the ongoing depredations of the earthquake that shattered San Salvador on Oct. 10, 1986. We saw tens (perhaps hun- dreds) of thousands of earth- quake victims still living in lean-to shacks in the streets of the capital. We heard, time and time again, testimony from those who are suffering the consequences, that the bomb- ings in the countryside con- tinue to rain death on civilian populations day and night. We learned that kidnappings, political imprisonments, tor- ture and assassinations re- main the order of the day. We were told repeatedly that the lot of the people of the country has not improved under the government of the U.S.- sponsored president, Napoleon Duarte. "Things are not better under the president you (the U.S.) have chosen for us. They are worse." We heard uniformly, "The government is not giving us the earthquake relief supplies that were sent to us from around the world." Dr. Rooney and I were fortu- nate to arrange a 90-minute private meeting with the polit- ical officer of the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador following the peace conference. During our exclusive interview, in the face of all that we had already seen and heard, that gentleman told us that the Duarte government has done an excellent job of dis- tributing all of the earthquake relief. It simply, he said, did not make an effort to take cre- dit for the job it had done. The embassy officer declared, "The earthquake emergency is over." When we told him that we had heard from many internal refugees that the bombing in the countryside continues day and night, he told us that everybody with whom we had spoken had been "coached" by representatives of the enemy to tell us such falsehoods — even though the refugee camp in which these people live is funded and administered by the Salvadoran Catholic Church. When we told him the stories of death and destruction we heard from various leaders Of human rights associations, labor unions, mothers' groups and earthquake relief organ- izations, he told us that they, too, were merely enemy agents and were not to be believed. Yet, both Dr. Rooney and I re- main convinced of the sincerity of the scores of people with whom we spoke directly. (Dr. Rooney speaks Spanish; I do Continued on Page 38 N