EL SALVADOR: Dangling Arms

Little El Salvador was the first Central American country to use passive resistance to depose a dictator. Last May General Maximiliano Hernández Martinez was ousted by a sit-down strike (brazos caidos, literally: arms dangling). When a military clique/headed by Colonel Osmin Aguirre y Salinas, clamped a new dictatorship on the country last week, Salvadorans began to dangle their arms again in a dangerous way.

Two weeks ago Colonel Aguirre and his officers muscled out Provisional President Andres Ignacio Menendez, under whom the 1,704,497 Salvadorans had enjoyed five months of wildly free speech and press. They had reinstated the country’s Constitution of 1886, which acknowledges the right to insurrection. Colonel Aguirre suspended the Constitution, proceeded to “maintain order.” Hundreds were jailed. With a friendly word toward neighboring Dictator Tiburcio Carias of Honduras, Colonel Aguirre raided the headquarters of the Honduran revolutionaries in San Salvador’s Nuevo Mundo Hotel. The arresting officers were so rough with the Honduran leaders they caught that the other exiles hastily fled back to Honduras. Grateful Honduras recognized Salvador’s new Government.

Then the Salvadoran Supreme Court declared Colonel Aguirre’s Government unconstitutional. With this open incite ment to revolution, Chief Justice Miguel Tomas Molina fled to the Guatemalan Embassy. Into Guatemala, which last week ousted Dictator Federico Ponce in a lively revolution of its own, fled Doctor Jorge Sol Castellanos, President of the Credit Banks of El Salvador. All the country’s banks closed their doors.

Hundreds of farmers stayed away from market — and El Salvador is a big tropical farm : a farmers’ strike paralyzes the country. Opinion grew that Colonel Aguirre would soon lose his fight against the passive people. But Colonel Osmin Aguirre y Salinas rattled his Lend-Lease armor, declared that Salvadorans who joined the passive resistance movement would be shot.

Said one Salvadoran : “What this country needs is to cart every last bit of armament to Acajutla and dump it into the sea.”