The Faculty on Human Rights wrote to Snyder inviting him to Central America. When he arrived in El Salvador he found the state of human rights deplorable. The bulk of the problem was not, as Washington repeatedly claimed, leftist guerrillas gunning down innocent civilians.
Rather, he says, the culprits were death squads and paramilitary organizations that operated with the tacit, if not overt, support of the U.S. trained army. Salvadoran was a minimum of human rights violations to be expected in a civil war.
"Human rights violations were largely attributable to death squads," says Snyder, echoing the opinion of members of the Salvadoran church and human rights organizations. "These squads operated with the consent and even participation of the military. Their violations far out-weigh the real but minimal number of incidents of civil violence perpetrated by the insurgents."
At the moment, Snyder is waiting to see if Nicaragua will hold national elections in November as scheduled. He hopes to attend as an independent observer along with a group of Boston lawyers.
Barry Lester
Dr. Barry M. Lester, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical school, travelled to Nicaragua and El Salvador in the June group as the token physician at the request of Womack.
Lester, 3" a specialist on the effect of nutrition on childhood development, spent two years in the early "0s working in Guatemala at the Institute of Nutrition for Central America and Panama.
Once in Central America. Lester says, he frequently left the group and showed up unannounced at local health care facilities. In Nicaragua, he observed an impressive commitment to health care on the part of the Sandinistas and tremendous improvement against polio, typhoid and a host of childhood diseases.
"What makes Nicaragua unique in the region is that in there human beings are treated as a valuable resource. The priorities of the Nicaraguan government are related to issues of health and education," says Lester.
This contrasts with El Salvador, Lester says, where all health supplies go to the military, while civilians receive poor care.
He claims that the armed forces automatically divert all foreign donations of medical supplies in professionals suspected of treating or sympathizing with the rebels have been killed.