ON BEHALF of the Irish H Salvador Support Committee, I ssish to thank over 300 people who attended our 3rd Vigil ouLside the US Embassy in Dublin on October 19. A missionary, recently returned from El Salvador. gave personal witness of the widespread and systematic torture and genocide being inflicted on a peasant population by official Salvadorean Security Forces. How a US Government. with a stated concern for human rights continue to prop up one of the most repressive regimes in existence with massive military and economic aid is incomprehensible.
"We plan to provide USS61 million of urgently needed aid aimed at feeding the hungry. improving health. education and housing conditions" (extract from letter front US State Dept August 17, 1980 to Irish El Salvador Support Committee). Such aid has not helped the 21,000 poor victims of Government oppression this year. The $al million never improved the health of four medical students, six doctors and many nurses who were assassinated for treating the victims of the Salvadorean repression.
The 561 million did not aid the education of 108 teachers and 485 students who have received violent deaths this year. Such aid never reached the compiler of these grim statistics. Maria Magdalena Henrigm, information officer of the Corn
mission of Human Rights of El Salvador whose bullet-ridden body was found at the side of a deserted Salvadorean road on October 4. 1980.
El Salvador will become another Vietnam for the US if they do not allow the Salvadorean people to work out its own destiny. Ireland now with a voice at the Security Council, has a moral duty to demand justice for El Salvador. Let us not stand by while another holocaust is being perpetrated ...
Brutidun Butler, Chairman Pennock Hill, Swords, Co Dublin.