SUMMARY: US gov't trying to deport to El Salvador former Salvadoran
Army ``Death-Squad'' member and whistle-blower Cesar Vielman Joya
Martinez, who has linked US, CIA, high ES officials, incl. Pres.
Cristiani to death squad operations, and who has info on murder of
Jesuits. Amnesty International has said: that "..there is a strong
risk that if returned to El Salvador he would be subjected to torture
or killed extra-judicially."
------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpted from Ashes & Diamonds, By Alexander Cockburn and Richard
McKerrow, In These Times, Aug. 1-14, 1990
------------------------------------------------------------------

    U.S. to El Salvador: See no death squads, hear no death squads
    ==============================================================

"...Around midday on July 10, ten heavily armed men from the US
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) broke down the door of a
Long Beach, Calif., home and hauled off a Salvadoran named Cesar
Vielman Joya Martinez (see ITT, July 18). The administration, which
wants to deport Martinez, claims he ignored a summons to appear in a
Virginia court on the charge of illegally entering the U.S. after
being deported back in 1983

But this was no ordinary immigration bust. Martinez has been plaguing
the Bush administration ever since last October when he came to the
U.S. to testify about the role played by U.S. officials in death-squad
killings carried out by the U.S.-trained First Infantry Brigade's
intelligence unit in El Salvador.

Martinez explained that two U.S. military advisers controlled the
intelligence department and paid for the unit's operating
expenses...and that..although the U.S. advisers "didn't want to hear
of the actual killings..obviously they had to know what was going on"
[See followup article ITT article for more info]

For the grimmest of reasons Martinez knew what he was talking about.
As a member of the special unit, which he says performed at least 74
executions between April and July 1989, Martinez says he personally
murdered eight people. He and his colleagues either strangled the
victims, slit their throats or injected them with poison. Bullets were
not used since they might be traced back to the military. Martinez
says he also shared a desk with the two Americans, known as "William"
and "Major."

In the wake of Martinez's revelations, first aired by CBS on October
26, the Washington Post confirmed that a U.S. adviser specializing in
intelligence and another U.S. adviser work in liasion with the First
Brigade. And that the C.I.A.. pays expenses [see next article re which
types of "expenses"] for intelligence operations in the brigades.

...one staff member from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with
whom Martinez spoke, said, "we found no reason to doubt this
information." In March, Martinez's story received further
corroboration when a Salvadoran woman identifying herself by her unit
codename as "Blanca," also fled to the U.S. She claimed she worked
under Martinez in the intelligence unit...

The administration's counter-attack has been two-pronged. A State
Department panel has been charged with investigating Martinez's
credentials in an attempt to discredit him. Meanwhile the INS is
trying to deport him to El Salvador where, as a defector from a death
squad his life will most certainly be nasty, brutish and above all,
short.

On May 22, Amnesty International issued a statement strongly opposing
"the threatened deportation of Cesar Joya Martinez," adding that "as a
result of the allegations he has made about the structure and
activities of the First Infantry Brigade of El Salvador's army, there
is a strong risk that if returned to El Salvador he would be subjected
to torture or killed extra-judicially."
	...

The need to silence Martinez is pressing. He has identified a
"committee" of high-ranking Salvadoran officers, naming Deputy
Minister of Defense Colonel Orlando Zepedda, intelligence chief Major
Diaz Hernandez and the head of the First Brigade Col. Elena Fuentes
among them, who selected the victims. He has charged that members of
Estado Mayor (El Salvador's military high command) and President
Cristiani himself had knowledge of the death squad operations.
Martinez told Carmen Lira of the Mexico City daily _La Jornada_:
"President Alfredo Cristiani knows it, he knows about the existence of
that intelligence apparatus, as did Napoleon Duarte before him. I saw
him with my own eyes and kept an ear on his talks with my superior
officers to whom he gave instructions when he visited Department Two
of the First Infantry Brigade, which is nothing but a place where
crimes are being planned. It is not by accident that the actions have
been intensified since Cristiani came to power [see, for example, my
file "Letter From El Salvador" --written by a woman, last Sept, living
in ES]

According to Martinez, Cristiani secretly visited the First Brigades's
intelligence unit a few days after his inauguration and met with
Hernandez and other death squad controllers...

...Martinez also has information concerning the killing of the
Jesuits...His First Brigade unit was attached to the U.S.-trained
Atlacatl batallion, which carried out the slaughter, and last year
Martinez participated in surveillance of the priests. A member from
Martinez's unit, Oscar Mariano Amaya Grimaldi, has confessed to the
slayings and is one of nine military men currently charged...U.S.
advisers are also implicated, since the Defense Department has
admitted that the killers were being trained by the 7th Special Forces
Group (Airborne) of the U.S. Army, commanded by Captain David Akin, 48
hours before the murders.

...The Task Force, headed by Rep. Joe Moakley (D-MA) .. also wants to
question Martinez further, but congressional action has been delayed
while the State Department interrogates him...Those proposed by the
State Department to be on the panel to probe the validity of
Martinez's statements include Richard Chidester..and Lt. Colonel
Manual Antinio Reves of the Salvadoran Special Investigative Unit,
both of whom were responsible for intimidating the only eyewitness to
the Jesuit killings, Lucia Bererra de Cerna.

Martinez consented to the State Department inquisition, demanding only
that the hearing be open to independent observers such as members of
the ACLU, experts on Salvadoran death squads, congressional staff, and
a film maker..who has acted as his translator..but when the staff of
the task force..accepted Joya Martinez's conditions, officials in the
State Department, the U.S. Embassy and the Pentagon began withdrawing
their approval...

Then the INS moved to deny his application for political asylum...
Chidester appeared brandishing a bundle of documents forwarded by the
Salvadoran government [which wants to charge Martinez with murder] and
pushed for his extradition. An aide for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA)
called the conflict of interest between Chidester's part in the asylum
hearing and the State Department panel "outrageous." The hearing ended
on June 8 with a final decision left until after attorneys from both
sides have submitted briefs.

Within a few days though the government indicted Martinez on a new
charge of illegally entering the U.S., something the government has
known since last November. When Martinez didn't respond to a summons
for a court appearance on June 18, slipped under his door only three
days before the court date, a judge issued a bench warrant for his
arrest and hence came the armed agents crashing through the door of
the house in Long Beach last week.

Martinez has been transported to Virginia, where the Department of
Justice has filed its papers against him. The eastern district of
Virginia is known as the "Rocket Docket" because of its reputation as
the most expeditious processor of cases.

The stakes are very high. For Martinez there is the matter of his
life, which will be forfeit if he is deported. For the U.S.
government there is the threat Martinez poses to any claim, time-worn
and absurd though they are, that the Salvadoran government has ever
had the intention of cleaning up it's act. He knows how the whole
machinery of repression has worked. He knows the political and
military high-ups who ordered the murders. He known the U.S. players
in this foul game.

For Americans citizens the stakes are high too. Here, this week, an
inconvenient witness is being hurried to assured doom by a U.S.
government intent on propping up a structure of murder and repression
that should have been left to perish a decade and some 70,000 lives
ago."
			Distributed by Alexander Cockburn
------------------------------------------------------------------