Salvador: Testament of Terror Joe Fish and Cristina Sganga, Zed Books, 1988, £6.95. Reviewed by MARIA ASTORGA FROM THE TITLE of this book, you might expect it to be written for human rights minded liberals who support the people' of El Salvador but shy away from the word "revolution'. Testament of Terror is certainly not like that. Informatively written, interspersed with quotes and individual stories, it succeeds - like few other books - in bringing to the reader the reality of a revolutionary war under a military dictatorship, even one disguised by a civilian president. Written before the most recent elections it deals with the then Christian Democrat government and the hopes it raised in 1984 both for the people of El Salvador and for the US SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
the next government which believed it had found the right democratic façade. Now all has collapsed, the masks have slipped and the extreme right-wing has retaken control it had never totally lost.
This book provides a worthwhile analysis of the level of repression under Duarte: on the one hand a more selective repression of popular movement leaders, and on the other hand the indiscriminate bombings of a number of areas with no other purpose than to spread terror.
The country is now on the brink of irreparable destruction: 'Out of a total population in El Salvador of around 5.5 million, almost 70,000 non-combatant civilians have so far been assassinated; 7,000 more have 'disappeared': one million are estimated to have fled the country, and some 700,000 are internal refuges, displaced from their homes by the violence; in addition, there are at present more than 1,000 political prisoners. This means that one-third of the entire population has suffered directly as a result
of the policies of this and previous governments in the conduct of the war.
"A state of siege has been in force for six years (longer than the Constitution itself. Arbitrary arrest and confessions extracted by "extra-judicial inquisition" (in practice, torture) are legalised in the penal code.
•Sixty per cent of the population live in conditions of poverty or extreme poverty; sixty per cent too are un- or under-employed; twenty per cent of the schools lie abandoned. Servicing the external debt accounts for more than half the country's foreign exchange earnings, inflation has compounded since the war began in 1979, and while wage levels are stagnant, the cost of living as tripled in the same period.
Testament of Terror is a very readable background to the present events. 'In the old days, the armed forces ran the country for the benefit of the oligarchy; now the Christian Democratic Party runs the country for the benefit of the Reagan administration... Duarte's own role in this strategy is twofold: he opens the door politically for the military to obtain the aid it needs from the United States, and he plays the main managerial role in the counter-insurgency project."
This is why the US is embarrassed by Duarte's political collapse. It is harder for them to justify support to a crude
military dictatorship which criticises the 'low intensity warfare strategy implemented by the States for not effective enough to rid the country of its revolutionary movement.
The so-called 1966 promotion', made up of officers who graduated in that year and who are particularly ferocious right-wingers, has managed to take control of most of the commanding posts of the army and promise total war' against the population, expecting some 100,000 dead in six months.
Though the US could easily prevent this by simply imposing an economic embargo (as they did for Nicaragua in May 1985), they do not act for lack of a decent alternative acceptable to Congress.
The main weakness of the book lies in its lack of analysis of the revolutionary and popular organisations. It is regrettable as there are very few recent books on El Salvador. Nevertheless Testament of Terror covers in less than 150 pages all the key elements to understanding on E Salvador. It is undoubtedly a harrowing documentary, but well worth reading.
This is a turning point for a country which might well be the place of the next revolution, because 'the workers and the poor and humble must take the initiative because we don't want to go on living with this war which is draining our blood.'
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Whale Nation Heathercote Williams, Jonathon Cape, £8.95, pbk. Reviewed by COLIN SMITH 'From space, the planet is blue. From space, the planet is the territory Not of humans, but of the whale.' WITH THIS antidote to the hubris of Homo sapiens Heathcote Williams sets the tone for this unusual book. It is part celebratory poem, part a stunning photographic album, and part scientific and historical anthology about the natural history of cetaceans - whales, dolphins, and porpoises - and the catastrophic degradations they have suffered at the hands and harpoons of the international whaling industry.
Although Aristotle wrote sympathetically of dolphins over two thousand years ago and
The