MARCH 2, 1983

   

OTHER FEA TURE )

Guillermo Ungo Spea

By Bill Tielman and Tom Hawthorne
Bill Tieleman is a graduate student

 

isms and activities which run contrary to the oblect-
tves of that process.”’
Throughout our interview, which took place in July in

in political science at the University - Vancouver, where Ungo was adressing the federal
P Unive ly NDP convention, it was clear the the FDR leader is not

of B.C. Tom hawthorn is a Vancouver a dogmatis ideologue, but someone who has turned to
journalist. Both are form er CUP burea armed insurrection as a final resort after attempting to

communist countries in the Salvadorean civil war,’’ as
the Post described it. The White Paper, released in
February, claimed that, ‘‘over the past year, the
insurgency in El Salvador has been progressively
transformed into a textbook case of indirect armed
agression by Communist powers through Cuba.”’

the Journal’s story U.S. State Department po

 

 

chiefs and both have worked as

Vancouver Sun reporters.

He is both a reluctant and an unlikely looking
revolutionary.

Sitting in the student council chambers at the
university of B.C., wearing a tan safari suit, loafers
and rectangular metal frame glasses, with a gold ring,

gold pen, and gold cigarette lighter highly visible,

Guillermo Manuel Ungo, leader of El Salvador’s De-
mocratic Front (FDR) bears little resemblance to the
stereotypical Che Guevara revolutionary commonly
thought to populate Central America.
Given Ungo’s background, however, this is no

coincidence. His father, the late Guillermo Ungo, is
well known in El Salvador as a tounder ot the Christ-

 

change the government through non-violent means.

In El Salvador students have a long history of
nvolvement in attempts to introduce social reforms
ind end the military dictatorships that, backed by the
:offee and cotton plantation owners, have ruled the
country for 50 years. In El Salvador’s last major
iprising, the 1932 revolt that saw 30,000 campasinos
(farm workers) massacred by the army, students at
the University of San Salvador were responsible for
oublishing an anti-government newspaper. The edit-
ors of the paper and other student leaders were
xecuted. On July 30, 1975, a student protest march
‘rom the university to the centre of town ended when
the National Gaurd opened fire, killing at least 37
students. Two days later more than 50,000 Salvador-
sans walked in a procession honoring the dead stud-
2nts.

 

 

em

   

ff SALvADQR

planner John Glassman, the man primarily respons-
ible for the White Paper, acknowleged that there were
“‘mistakes’’ and ‘‘guessing”’ by intelligence analysts,
that parts of it are possibly ‘‘misleading’’ and ‘‘emb-
ellished’’ and that arms shipments agreements sup-
posedly drawn directly from allegedly captured guer-
rila documents were in fact extrapolated. The Post,
which did its own analysis of the documents, (which
were handwritten in Spanish) concluded that many of
the translations into English were faulty.

After examining the documents purporting to back
up the administration’s claims, along with other cap-
tured papers held by the State Department, the Post
concluded that ‘‘read together with the documents
released originally, these others draw a picture that
differs in significant ways from the one in the White
Paper. These documents portray a guerrila move-

 

 

 

ian Democratic party movement in the 1960s. Ungo
himself is one of the best known politicians in the
country. A proffesor of law at the University of San
Salvador, he was one of three civilians appointed to a
five-person government junta after a coup in 1979
by reformist army officers ended the dictatorship of
General Carlos Humberto Romero. Ungo was also the
vice-presidential running mate of Jose Napolean Dua-
rte in the ill-fated 1972 presidential elections that
resulted in a military coup aimed at keeping Duarte
and Ungo out of office. (Currently Duarte, a Chris-
tian Demacrat, is president of the ruling junta.)

' Ungo, married with three children, is also leader of
the social democratic National Revolutionary Move-
ment (MNR), a vice-president in the Socialist Intern-

tional, to which Canada’s NDP belongs, and a former-

director of the Jesuit Central American University’s
reserch institute. ;
In January of 1980, after serving on the government
junta for three months, Ungo became a revolutionary
‘leader by necessity, not by choice. In his letter of
resignation from the junta Ungo said that because of
the independant power of El Salvador’s army and
wealthy oligarchy the junta ‘‘has only minumal, and.

essentially formal, power. It lacks the capacity to lead’

the process of democratization and social change. Nor
can it stop the development of the various mechan-

ti

We asked Ungo about the role of students in the
current attemps to overthrow the military government
He pointed out that it was not just students but all
young people who are leading the guerilla fighting in
the countryside and other opposition actions.

“You have more than 60 per cent of the population
under 25 years old,’’ he explained. ‘‘And these
people suffer misery, hunger, lack of jobs, more than
other people, and these people have more ideals, so
every youngster is a suspect.”’ ;

“Suspected of being a subversive, of belonging to
the mass organizations (that support the oppositon),
of having sympathies toward them, of helping them.
You see, not only in the guerrila forces, but in the
Mass organizations, the trade unions, a lot of students
high school students, university students, and young
people.”’

“‘Most of the people killed, with their heads cut off,
every day, are youngsters, because they’re suspect.
And to be a suspect,’’ he concluded wearily, ‘‘is to be
killed, to be dead. ’

In June The Wall Street Journal and The Washington
Post published lenghy stories detailing how the Rea-
gan administration’s lenghty White Paper on El Salv-
ador contains ‘‘factual errors, misleading statements
and unresolved ambiguities that raise questions about
the administration’s interpretation of participation by

ment that is chronically short of arms and scrounging
for more of them.”’

During a press confrence prior to our interview Ungo
described the U.S. White Paper as ‘‘not so white.”’
We asked him about the White Paper and what effect
its release and subsequent statements by members of
the Reagan administration have had on media cover-
age of the civil war.

‘There is a total manipulation of the news regarding
El Salvador’, he replied. ‘‘For example, the White
Paper is good evidence of that. We think that mo
governments understand that it was just an excuse
justify American intervention. Its not the first White
Paper the Americans have produced.”’

‘Every time they want to intervene in a country, they
produce a White Paper. They did that in the Domini-
can Republic (American troops invaded in 1965), they
did that in Guatemala (the Central Intelligence Age-
ney financed and aided a successful ‘coup by right-
wing exiles in 1954).

‘After the lie is demonstrated, nobody (in the press)
comments on that. So that’s when you see the
manipulation. They (the U.S.) wanted to see our tiny
small country become the first confrontation beetw-
een East and West. So, nobody believed that (the
White Paper).

There have been some articles written about the