El Salvador: students demand justice on 30th anniversary of massacre

[Judi Lynn]

El Salvador: students demand justice on 30th anniversary of massacre
Submitted by WW4 Report on Mon, 08/09/2010 - 17:49. On July 30, hundreds students from the University of El Salvador took to the streets, accompanied by professors, staff and other sectors of the social movement. The march, filled with street theater, papier-mâché tanks and a 9-foot gorilla, was a commemoration of the the military regime's massacre of student protesters that occurred on July 30, 1975.

Thirty years ago, university students took to the streets to protest military incursions on the Santa Ana campus and the repressive policies of the military dictatorship in power at the time. The peaceful march was attacked by Salvadoran army soldiers with gunfire and tanks. While there are no official numbers of how many students were killed and wounded in the massacre, it is estimated at least 30 students died and over a hundred more were wounded.

This year, student organizations including the Roque Dalton University Front (FURD), the Revolutionary Student Brigades (BRES) organized the march and all-night vigil that followed. Marchers and organizers demanded trials to bring justice to the victims of the 1975 massacre and a repeal of the country's Amnesty Law—passed just after the end of El Salvador's civil war in 1993 and considered by many Salvadorans to be the biggest obstacle to respect for human rights in the country.

Survivors of the massacre participated in the commemoration, speaking at the vigil along with campus leaders, musical groups, theater groups and a religious service. Students kept the vigil lively until dawn, singing revolutionary songs and crying out in unison, "The massacred will be avenged!" (CISPES, Aug. 9)

http://www.ww4report.com/node/8929

[flamingdem]

1. There is a documentary of a massacre of students on the steps of a university

in El Salvador. It was very powerful. I can't find it on google but it toured campuses in 1978-1980 ish. It may be this incident I'm not sure.

This film was also powerful:

http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC26folder/ElSalPeopleWillWin.html

It came later after the students and others became guerilla fighters. The writer of this is London based Michael Chanan.

==

El Salvador: The People Will Win
Resistance

by Michael Chanan

from Jump Cut, no. 26, December 1981, pp. 21-23
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1981, 2005

A group of shots intercut with the credits at the end of EL SALVADOR, EL PUEBLO VENCERÁ (EL SALVADOR, THE PEOPLE WILL WIN, El Salvador, 1981) shows a figure emerging into a clearing carrying a 16mm Arriflex camera. He carefully places it in a basket of clothing which a peasant woman has waiting and which, after covering the camera, she lifts onto her head and carries off. In terms of simple denotation, these pictures indicate the conditions under which various parts of the film were shot: the scenes in the interior of the country where the normal conveniences of filmmaking, like cars and trucks, were unavailable. At the same time, they symbolize the necessary cooperation in making the film between the filmmakers and the nameless peasants of the country's liberated zones in the hills of El Salvador, where peasant struggle has a rich and long history. These are the people who provide the support system for the FMLN and from among whom the combatants of the FMLN are overwhelmingly recruited. These pictures of a woman and a camera among the closing credits therefore become, amid the names of collaborators and testimonials to fallen comrades, a further imprint of authorship. They say: "Also made with the help of many people who must remain anonymous."

It can be said that films are always made with people who remain anonymous, because filmmaking always involves a certain kind of anonymity on the part of the majority of filmmakers. The long list of names which form the credits of a film mean nothing to the vast majority, probably 99%, of the people who watch the film. But in this film the credits draw attention to themselves. And when the anonymous cameraman appears on the screen together with an anonymous peasant woman, with another anonymous cameraman behind the camera which is showing us this image, the sense of anonymity acquires a new dimension. Many of the names in the credits are pseudonyms, the nombres de guerra of the liberation fighter, and they're clearly indicated as such. Because of this, the anonymity of those we don't see but whose presence we feel in the usual indications of authorship which a film manifests, this anonymity is redoubled and merges with that of all those whom we do see but who remain nameless. What comes to be symbolized in the closing credit sequence is that all together are the collective authors of the film (together with the dead as well), just as they will all become the collective authors of the victory they're fighting for. The film is part of this struggle, an instrument.

It is produced by the Instituto de Cine Salvadoreño Revolucionario (Revolutionary Salvadorean Film Institute), an organization of the FDR.

Not that this film institute is simply a servicing unit, a public relations body, for not only has it undertaken a program of film production to promote solidarity outside the country, it has also embarked on the use of film and audiovisual media with El Salvador itself, in parts of the liberated zones, for the purposes of political education. The Revolutionary Salvadorean Film Institute belongs squarely to the history of involvement of film as a powerful protagonist of anti-imperialist struggle throughout America, demanding and forging political and cultural self-expression for the entire continent. It joins a roll call that begins in 1956 with the film school set up at the University of Santa Fe by Fernando Birri and continues with the Cuban Film Institute, ICAIC, set up in 1959; with Ukamau in Bolivia; and with Chile Films under Allende between 1970 and 1973; and which now includes INCINE, the film institute set up in Nicaragua by the Frente Sandinista and incorporating the filmmakers who had filmed the insurrection. The Salvadoreans have gone a step further and are not just using film within the struggle but have set up their film institute even before victory. They have been able to do this because the New Latin American Cinema movement, to which this film belongs as much as it belongs to the Salvadorean people, is wedded to the principles of internationalism. THE PEOPLE WILL WIN was made through international cooperation between militant filmmakers in several Latin American countries. It is directed — perhaps this is especially apt — by a Puerto Rican, Diego de la Texera.

The film is an invitation to its audience to identify with its collective authorship and symbolically to join in the struggle of the people of El Salvador. Symbolically, because this is the level on which art does its work, including political art, and this is a film made with great artistry. Symbolically, however, not in a passive sense but by inviting the acts of solidarity in which we express identification with anti-imperialist struggle, symbolic acts which may produce highly practical results as they did in the case of the war in Vietnam. A film contributes to building such a movement because it gathers an audience, it enters the process of mobilization.

Liberal detractors of political films often declare that they only preach to the converted. But even the converted need to be informed. There are also many people apt to express their solidarity because their human instinct tells them to, who are nevertheless horribly confused by the pile of disinformation poured out by the mass media. They know they're confused, like the old lady in a recent cartoon by Jules Feiffer, sitting in front of her television screen. MORE.....