From: nicanet@nyxfer.UUCP
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Subject: El Salvador Update 12/13
Date: 14 Dec 92 22:37:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:wyBsVB1w165w@nyxfer.uucp:-1025621223:000:3745
Nf-From: nyxfer.uucp!nicanet    Dec 14 14:37:00 1992


Subject: El Salvador Update 12/13
From: nyxfer!nicanet (NicaNet NY)


Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit

from...
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       339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 (212) 674-9499

            Weekly News Update #150, December 13, 1992

EL SALVADOR: ATLACATL BATTALION IS DEAD, OR IS IT?

While El Salvador's elite Atlacatl Battalion was being honored
for the last time by Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani,
demonstrators outside its headquarters carried placards reminding
people that the battalion was responsible for the most grisly
crimes against civilians during the civil war years. Testimony
from witnesses confirmed that the Atlacatl Battalion--now being
disbanded as part of the Salvadoran peace process--was
responsible for at least 794 deaths, including the massacre of
peasants, mostly children, in El Mozote in 1981, as well as the
murder of six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her
daughter at the Central American University in December of 1989.
Cristiani claimed, when asked about the massacres, that they were
"the acts of individual people, not of the battalion as an
institution." He accused supporters of the FMLN (Farabundo Marti
National Liberation Front) of "provocation" by lining up along
the Pan American Highway outside the battalion's headquarters.
[NYT 12/09/92]
 
The battalion was trained at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1981. A
foreign military expert described the Atlacatl as "part of the
strategy of the US not to lose El Salvador to the Soviet Union."
The number of men demobilized from the battalion is estimated to
be between 700 and 800. Officers are being transferred to other
assignments, and soldiers are being given a choice of returning
to civilian life or going to regular army units. [NYT 12/09/92]
When the battalion was formed it was housed in El Salvador's only
teachers college. According to Julio Cesar Portillo, director of
the Salvadoran National Educators Association, the occupation of
the college cost El Salvador the ability to train at least 27,000
teachers, and allowed illiteracy to increase to 70%. Jose Maria
Tojeira, the Jesuit Provincial for Central America, described the
battalion as "a symbol of the brutality of the war which must
disappear quickly." [ED-LP 12/09/92 from AFP] 
 
 
SALVADORAN DEFENSE MINISTER WARNS WAR NOT OVER YET

Rene Ponce, El Salvador's defense minister, expressed doubts that
the FMLN will have destroyed its weapons by the Dec. 15 deadline
agreed to in the peace accord. Ponce, whose name appears on the
list of 100 military men who are to be purged from the Salvadoran
armed forces as part of the peace agreement, claimed that the
FMLN has merely changed its strategy and still intends to "take
power through whatever means." On the other hand, FMLN leader
Sigfrido Reyes accused the army of concealing 10,000 weapons
confiscated from the guerrillas during the war. Ponce is pressing
charges for libel against the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission
(CDHES) and the National Union of Salvadoran Workers (UNTS) for
slandering the armed forces. [IPS 12/03/92]

                               -30-

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