Death Squads: A Transcontinental Reach?

URL: http://books.google.com/books/about/Break_Ins_Death_Threats_and_the_FBI.html?id=ymANimNtKAIC
TITLE: Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The covert war against the Central America movement
AUTHOR: Ross Gelbspan
PUBLISHER: South End Press
YEAR: 1991
PAGES: 32-34
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Death Squads: A Transcontinental Reach?
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Perhaps the most horrifying tale of assault and intimidation followed the string of break-ins at offices and cars of West Coast political activists in the spring of 1987. In June of that year, Yanira Corea, a 24-year-old Salvadoran woman who worked as a volunteer at the Los Angeles CISPES office was driving to the Los Angeles airport with her three and a half year old son when a car driven by two Hispanic men forced her off the road. While one of the men kept pounding and kicking her car, the other tried to pull her out of the door. Although she managed to escape, the man did get a book of hers containing a photo of her son Ernesto. The boy was so traumatized by the event that he did not speak for three days after the incident. Two weeks later, she received a letter with her son's photo. The letter, containing petals of dried flowers, bore the notation: "Flowers in the desert die," a traditional warning of Salvadoran death squads. The following Tuesday, as she approached her car outside the Los Angeles CISPES office, a man came up behind Yanira and put a knife against her back. The man and two others (she later identified them as two Salvadorans and one Nicaraguan by their accents) drover her around the city in a van for six hours. The cut the initials EM (for the Spanish words for death squad) in the palms of her hands. One man punctured her neck with a knife blade. Another raped her with a stick. All the while, they kept interrogating her about CISPES, about her brother who is a union activist in El Salvador, and about individuals involved in CISPES. Her wounds were confirmed by both an investigating officer of the Los Angeles Police Department and a doctor in a Los Angeles hospital who examined Corea.

On July 10, three days after Yanira Corea's abduction, Marta Alicia Rivera, a member of the Salvadoran teacher's union, received a threatening letter which had been left at her apartment. The note read: "For Marta Alicia and her terrorist companions, for being a traitor to the country, you will die together with your companions. You saved yourself in El Salvador. Here you will not." The note included the names of 17 other CISPES members. It concluded with the line: "Flowers in the desert die."

Five days later, Fr. Luis Olivares of Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in Los Angeles, received a similar letter. Olivares has been marked for death by an Escuadron de la Muerte.

Two days after that, Ana Maria Lopez, a Guatemalan refugee who worked with the Guatemalan Cultural Center, was abducted outside the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles. Two men with guns and plastic masks and Salvadoran accents forced her into a Toyota. During the drive, they told her they knew she supported Salvadoran organizatons and warned her to stop. They interrogated her about her work with Guatemalan and Salvadoran groups and questioned her intensely about several Americans she had worked with. She was released after two hours.

Yanira Corea's nightmare did not end after her abduction, rape and torture. Shortly after the incident, Yanira, with her mother, a brother and her son, moved into a new home with an unlisted phone. Within two days, she began receiving more threatening calls--most of which involved the safety of her son.

In October, when Corea had recovered enough to go public with her experience, she agreed to a short speaking tour in New York, Philadelphia and Washington. While Arrangements were being made her father, who lives in El Salvador, received a letter from within the country telling him to make his daughter cancel her appearances. Yanira refused to back out. Just prior to her first appearance, on November 5, she went to the office Madre in a building on West 27th street in New York to meet some members of the press. (Madre itself has been burgled the previous month, when thieves took computer disks from the organization which provides nutritional and literacy aid to women and children in Central America. Shortly thereafter, Magic Fingers, a commercial computerized mailing list firm which Madre used, was also broken into. The only thing stolen was one hard-disk computer containing Madre's mailing and subscription lists.) That Wednesday in November, Corea say with a reporter and photographer from the Boston Globe for a two hour interview. At the end of the conversation, the photographer left the office and went down the hall to use the bathroom. When she returned, she spotted a torn piece of paper stuck under the office door. The paper was the top half of a flier advertising a speaking appearance by Corea the following Friday evening. Next to her photograph was written in a crude hand: "Sabes donde y como esta tu hijo?" which translates to: "Do you know where and how your son is?" Next to the scrawled, handwritten line was a drawing of a decapitated torso. Next to it lay a crudely drawn child's head.