Attacks recall civil war in El Salvador
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, August 8, 2006
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador – The young men ran across the street, their faces covered with bandanas. One fired an automatic weapon, imitating the guerrilla warfare of an earlier generation.
The actions of the men, photographed at a demonstration here last month that left two police officers dead, have reverberated deeply in Salvadoran society, leading many to wonder whether the bad old days of civil war might return.
“We have to admit that a new revolutionary fringe is forming,” said Beatrice Alamanni de Carrillo, El Salvador’s ombudswoman for human rights. “It’s an open secret.”
A 1992 peace treaty between El Salvador’s right-wing government and the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front brought this country’s civil war to an end after more than a decade of guerrilla warfare and government-sanctioned killings and massacres. The FMLN became a legitimate party and entered politics.
But frustration with the country’s lingering poverty, and the continuing political domination of the right-wing National Republican Alliance, known as ARENA, has fed a growing discontent within the ranks of the FMLN, analysts say.
“This is a very patient country where the people have not yet seen any solution to their social and economic problems,” said Leonel Gomez, a political analyst here who has worked as an investigator on several U.S. congressional inquiries. “If there are no solutions, people start to yell. If you don’t answer them, they yell more. If even then you don’t listen to them, they will start to shoot at you.”
The attack on police officers occurred during a student demonstration outside the National University, the scene of many violent and tragic protests during the civil war. The incident began as a peaceful protest of increases in bus fares and utility rates.
According to news and police reports here, a group of radical FMLN activists known as the Limon Brigade from the San Salvador suburb of Mejicanos was responsible for the attack. Many have parents who fought and died in the civil war, sources close to the group say.
