Tears & cheers for Salvadoran revolutionary

While half a million people mourned former rebel leader Schafik Handal in the streets of San Salvador on Jan. 30, Salvadorans in the U.S. and Canada celebrated the life of this leader of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). In Los Angeles, San Fran cisco, Chicago, Long Island and Toronto, Canada, supporters of El Salvador’s liberation struggle organized films, people’s masses and meetings to commemorate Handal’s life.

Hundreds of thousands attend funeral for guerrilla fighter in El Salvador.

At an FMLN office in a basement called “the bunker” here in Hempstead, L.I., Salvadorans from Long Island and New Jersey gathered to honor their comrade, who died of a heart attack at the age of 75.

U.S.-sponsored repressive military governments ruled El Salvador from 1931 through the 1990s. The election of a communist government in 1931 prompted the U.S. to install strongman Gen. Maxi mili ano Hernandez Martinez to establish martial law. Hernandez Martinez is infamous for saying: “It is a greater crime to kill an ant than a man.”

With U.S. warships stationed offshore in 1932, Martinez’ armed forces and U.S. advisers conducted “La Matanza,” the Massacre. They killed over 40,000 people, mostly Indigenous peasants who supported the people’s government. Fari bundo Marti, a leading revolutionary, was killed in this bloodbath.

U.S. imperialists conspired for years with El Salvador’s 14 ruling class families who owned over 80 percent of the arable land. They protected the regime from labor unions, land reform or any programs that could help the people.

There were years of fraudulent elections, poverty and repression. In the 1970s, revolutionary struggles in South east Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East inspired Salvadorans to take up the gun. Workers, peasants, intellectuals and liberation theologians picked up the banner of Fara bundo Marti and formed the FMLN. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, they waged an armed struggle for justice and economic democracy, for land, for dignity, for humanity.

Handal was the leader of the Salva doran Communist Party and its representative on the directorate of the FMLN. The guerrillas of the FMLN waged a mighty war against the Salvadoran military and its U.S. advisers. The Salvadoran army, trained at the notorious School of the Americas, was brutal and relentless—getting arms from both the U.S. and Israel.

Years of massacres by the army and death squads took their toll: the murder of peasants, priests—including Archbishop Oscar Romero—workers and intellectuals. Some 75,000 were killed in a war promoted by three U.S. presidents: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. When the Soviet Union fell, liberation struggles all over the world suffered. So too in El Salvador.

The FMLN decided to lay down its arms, and Schafik Handal signed a peace accord with the U.S.-backed regime in 1992. It became a legal party in El Salvador, but when Handal ran for president in 2003, intimidation by former death squads and the U.S. government produced a victory for the right-wing ARENA party.

To escape civil war, landlessness, unemployment and the death squads, Salvadorans have been coming to the U.S. since the 1970s. FMLN members organize widely among day laborers. Its members provide legal, social and political leadership among support networks in solidarity with Central America throughout the U.S. and Canada, wherever Salvadorans live.

On Long Island, the Salvadoran diaspora remains true to its revolutionary origins. On Jan. 29, in Hempstead, pastor Jaime Barrios led a “misa popular,” a people’s mass, in celebration of the life of Handal. Barrios and the FMLN activists who spoke emphasized the continuation of his work, of their struggle for equality, unity and liberation.

Barrios repeated the words of Cuban Pre sident Fidel Castro: “Schafik was a great leader of workers, a great revolutionary leader and an extraordinary human being ... a man who lived with dignity, faithful to his principles, and who never gave in.”

It was those principles that moved the people sitting in the “bunker.” Each person who stood up to give testimony vowed to uphold Schafik’s principles. Mario Ave lar said that Schafik served as an inspiration to continue the struggle for the revolution in El Salvador, a struggle that will pro duce a better society. He said that the huge crowds in the streets of El Salvador showed that the people realize that Schafik was a man who believed in justice and dignity.

Barrios referred to the revolutionary movements underway in Cuba, Bolivarian Venezuela and Bolivia. While poverty in El Salvador is growing, a new Latin America is emerging, fighting imperialism and its privatization schemes. Change is coming. This struggle for change was the focus of the life of Schafik Handal and the objective of FMLN members everywhere.

FMLN member Carlos Canales read his tribute to Schafik in the Hempstead bunker:

“While there is a single worker living with injustice or pain, Schafik is not dead.

“While hunger and death still travel in the Third World, killing a thousand people an hour, Schafik is not dead.

“It is a lie that Schafik is dead, it is a lie.

“Let us celebrate his life. Hasta la victoria siempre!”