All United States military aid to El Salvador should be stopped immediately.

At a recent conference sponsored by Maine Common Cause, I listened to a priest and a nun speak of their years of work in the countryside of El Salvador. A year ago, I heard another priest relate his experiences there. I also heard Brian Stewart of Peace in Central America speak about his recent trip to El Salvador, during which he spent much time with peasants in their villages.

I am convinced all of these speakers are good and truthful people, and they all told the same story of an outrageous torrent of murders, beatings, rapes, tortures, and terrorism by an army supplied with our weapons and partly financed by our taxes. What is wrong with the United States that we support criminals like these? Have we lost any vestige of decent respect for the opinions of mankind?…

Communism is not the real problem in El Salvador. The real problem is that hundreds of years of Spanish colonialism produced a society in which most of the wealth belonged to a small minority. This minority has systematically tyrannized the large number of impoverished, landless, hungry peasants. The Salvadoran army has been the tool of the wealthy minority, and the United States has supplied much of the money and weaponry for the army. In spite of this, what I have heard from people who visited El Salvador is that the peasants there hold no grudge against ordinary Americans. The reason (they say) is that those peasants think we have no more control over our government than they do over theirs. If you feel as humiliated as I do by that reasoning, now is the time to write to Sens. George Mitchell and William Cohen (U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510), and Rep. Olympia Snowe (U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. 20515). Ask them to help stop the endless killings and torment of innocent people by voting to terminate all miltary aid to El Salvador. Karl K. Norton Bangor