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OPINION
-Wednesday, September 13, 1989-

Page 4

The Michigan Daily


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Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan
420 Maynard St.
Vol. C. NO. 6 Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Unsigned editorials represent a majority of the Daily's Editorial Board. All other
cartoons, signed articles, and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion
of the Daily.
Slouching toward fascism

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I FELT I SHOULD call the police,
but this was the police," said Maria
Jiminez, a fifth floor resident of 1018
east 163rd Street in the Bronx. "I
wanted to help, but I didn't want to go
outside. I was so scared."
And so, last Saturday, Jiminez
watched - powerless to help or
protect Henry Hughes, the unarmed
Black man below who, twenty-five
rpinutes after the police began beating
apd kicking him in the head, was dead.
The preceding week, the police shot
and killed a Black man, Samuel
Williams, in Vineland, New Jersey.
Interviewed about the protests that fol-
liwed, Vineland's mayor at first re-
fused to consider the possibility that the
killing had been racially motivated, bul
then admitted that "there are bigots in
all areas of life and the Vineland Police
Department is probably not excluded."
On the day of the Vineland murder, six
skinheads in Portland attacked a 15-
year-old Latina. An Ethiopian man
was murdered in Portland by a skin-
head gang earlier this year.
Earlier last week, police arrested 200
and cited 400 more young Black col-
lege students in Virginia Beach. The
Virginia National Guard added their
assistance. Here the police were so out
of control that even the FBI and the
U.S. Justice Department decided that
an investigation into police conduct
was warranted.
Isolated incidents? No more than
Bensonhurst's murder of Yusef
Hawkins was last month in a city that
has given us Eleanor Bumpers,
Michael Griffith, and Henry Hughes,
and a mayor who condemned those
Ototestors who were courageous
ehough to speak out against Hawkins'
killing and New York's racist police
force.
Isolated incidents? No more than the
oxamples of police brutality against
people of color right here in Ann
Arbor, such as the Black youth as-
aulted by white students last year on
South State Street during the basketball
iots which the police decided to watch
father than control.

Aided and abetted by police brutality,
overt racism is once again on the rise.
Nor should we be surprised. Since the
late seventies, the more "respectable"
Right has encouraged this growth
through its vicious rollback of affirma-
tive action programs and its recession-
led restructuring of the economy,
which replaced high-paying jobs where
people of color were best repre-
sented- such as auto and steel- with
either low paying service jobs or no
jobs at all.
The consequence of an increasingly
immiserated underclass and an increas-
ingly oppressed working class are 37
million people below the poverty line,
3 million homeless, and a conviction,
popularized throughout the last decade,
that people are poor because they want
to be.
The other side of this coin is the in-
creasing respectability given to pro-
posals for boot camps and workfare,
larger prisons and bigger police forces,
more national guard patrols and height-
ened surveillance of the cities'
"criminal" activities. In a classic U.S.
example of blaming the victim, the ci-
ties' Black inhabitants become respon-
sible for both their own poverty and the
racism which attends majoritarian per-
ceptions of it.
Hence Yusef Hawkins, by daring to
venture into a "white" neighborhood,
becomes responsible for his own mur-
der. There were "too many Blacks" in
Virginia Beach, frightening merchants
and heightening tensions. The police,
of course, are just doing their job.
Which, of course, they are. It
doesn't take that unforgettable scene in
Spike Lee's movie where the cruising
white cops are met with stares of in-
credible hatred to know that communi-
ties of color from Brooklyn to Watts
see the police for the occupying army
that they are. And unless that army is
soon itself policed by the citizens it
claims to protect, the United States will
continue slouching toward a particu-
larly racist form of fascism the likes of
which this country has not seen since
the days of Jim Crow.

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Three police officers restrain a student on September 3 in Virginia Beach, Va.

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U.S. at war in El Salvador

Guns won't stop drugs

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE for drugs?
President Bush asks. The users, he
days. And with this ploy, blaming the
victims, he clears the way to mobilize
the police and the military against them.
Bush and drug czar Bennett have asked
Congress to double federal spending
against drugs. Senator Biden, speaking
for the Democrats, presses for more
money. Together, they will authorize a
$10 billion "war on drugs" later this
Week.
The scheme is misdirected, futile,
and presents a threat potentially greater
than the problem.
Biden and Time magazine speak of a
"narco-terrorism," to be fought, in the
most heavily-funded plank of the
president's plan, with tougher en-
forcement.
In the United States, that will mean
,more beds" - more walls, walls
which do nothing, prisoners testify, to
stop the flow of drugs, and walls
which hold, disproportionately, people
of color in their teens and twenties.
And through the Clean Sweep pro-
gram, the federal projects that house
the very poorest will effectively be
made into prison-camps, watched
around the clock by police.
The government's war on drugs will
leave white middle-class users un-
touched - Senator Biden claims drugs
cannot be detected in the privacy of the
suburbs. The trick is to take away any
semblance of privacy in the cities, and
to keep police guns trained on the peo-
ple who live there. Occupation, whole-

sale imprisonment, and murder, by
U.N. definition, constitute genocide.
For the international problem, Bush
proposes, vaguely, a drug summit and
some helicopters - fewer than just one
Colombian drug lord has in his private
army. Biden takes a tougher line: he
says that we should send the military
into drug-exporting countries
"uninvited," and that when we spot a
plane carrying drugs we should "blow
it out of the air."
State terrorism won't slow drug pro-
duction. Even Colombian President
Barco's sweeping arrests of some
11,000 citizens only dragged in one
high-level bookkeeper, and he has
since bribed his way free (N Y T
9/9/89).
Neither guns nor the governments
wielding them will stop drugs. And
schemes for prevention that take aim at
the victims, like compulsory testing,
remain, by design, a half-step behind.
Less than one-eighth of the money in
Bush's plan is budgeted for drug
treatment and prevention that works,
education. Yet that is where all of it
should be spent. Rather than blame
users, help their efforts to help them-
selves; then let them tell of their experi-
ence freely. Hundreds of groups in af-
flicted communities and prisons have
followed this model, to success only
limited by their lack of funding. Fund
them, and a first positive step towards
ending the devastation of drugs will
have been taken.

By David Austin
In the past nine years the United States
has sent more than $3.5 billion to the tiny
Central American country of El Salvador,
ostensibly to support a fledgling democ-
racy against a "communist" inspired revo-
lution. The fact thaththe revolution has
been fueled more by the desire of common
people to have enough to eat, rudimentary
health care, and an education, has been ig-
nored by U.S. proponents of our involve-
ment in the war. Also ignored has been
the fact that the alleged democracy in El
Salvador bears only a superficial resem-
blance to a real democracy.
The results of U.S. involvement in El
Salvador's civil war have been devastating
for the Salvadoran people. U.S. advisors
have formulated Salvadoran military strat-
egy and trained Salvadoran troops and U.S.
aid has made fighting the war possible.
In the early part of this decade, the gov-
ernment's strategy for combatting the op-
position movement was to use death
squads, often composed of soldiers in
civilian clothing. According to interna-
tional human rights organizations and the
Catholic church in El Salvador, nearly
E/
Salvador
30,000 people were killed by government
death squads from 1980 to 1983.
Having eliminated the urban opposition,
the Salvadoran government's strategy
shifted to the countryside in the mid-eight-
ies. The government's plan was to fight
the guerrillas through an air war, seeking
to separate the guerrillas from their civil-
ian sunnorters. To do this huge areas of

Jose Napoleon Duarte, provided the an-
swer. In the U.S. government's line,
Duarte was propagandized as the moderate
alternative to extremes of both the Left
and the Right.
Notwithstanding the fact that Duarte
was elected in suspect elections in which
the opposition did not participate, or that
he had little popular support, or that the
Salvadoran military and traditional oli-
garchy continued to hold power, Duarte's
ascension to the office of the president was
held out as proof that democracy was
flourishing in El Salvador.
In keeping with the pretense of democ-
racy, elections were held once again last
March. This time the army and oligarchy
used their power over the government ap-

law would presume the guilt of the sus-
pect until he [sic] could prove his [sic] in-@
nocence." Hossie continues, "The reform
has been introduced at a time when the
Salvadoran military has-launched a sweep-
ing assault on unions, popular organiza-
tions and the church... It would simply le-:
galize many of the human rights viola-
tions that are already being commited un-
der ARENA..." Hossie concludes by quot-
ing Tomasa Ruiz, vice-president of the)
Christian Committee for the Displace of
El Salvador, a group that has recently
come under army attack, "'It's a govern-
ment of death squads that kills people."'
This is the democracy that our govern-
ment supports to the tune of more than al
million and a half dollars a day: one that

'The results of U.S. involvement in El Salvador's civil war
have been devastating for the Salvadoran people...U.S. aid has
made fighting the war possible.'

paratus to assure their party victory.
The ruling party in El Salvador is now
the Republican National Alliance, known
by its acronym ARENA. ARENA is
openly fascist in its orientation, looking
to Adolph Hitler as one of its forefathers.
The party's president for life (so much for
democracy) is Roberto D'Aubuisson, long
acknowledged as the center of the death
squad network in El Salvador and the per-
son who ordered the murder of Catholic
Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.
In a grotesque distortion of what
government by law means, the ARENA
government has moved to cloak govern-
ment repression in a legal framework.
According to Lind Hossie, writing for the
Toronto Globe and Mail, a legal reform
proposed by the ARENA party, and sure
to be approved since ARENA controls the
legislature, would "define most forms of
popular protest as terrorism... It would
prohibit protest marches, peaceful sit-ins,
strikes and international campaigns in fa-
vor of human rights." Additionally, "the

seeks not to promote popular participa-
tion, but to subvert this participation ef-
fort through massive killings; that takes
the idea of government by law to mean
not the protection of individual rights, but
the legitimization of government viola-
tions by defining them as legal.
The fragile democracy of the Reagan
years has come to fruition in the first year
of the Bush administration. Clearly it is*
not a democracy at all. Rather, it is a
country where a small elite is trying to
preserve its privileged position. Through
massive infusions of aid, our government
has and continues to play a large role in:
events in El Salvador, including death
squad murders, routine torture of detainees,
and the bombardment of civilians.
Just as clearly, it is our duty to force
our government to change its policies sc
that they promote a negotiated settlement
to end El Salvador's civil war.
David Austin is an Associate Opinion
page editor and a member of the Latin
American Solidarity Committee (LASC)

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