CENTRAL America has slipped off the international stage. Yet 16 years after the assassination of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, "death squads" synonymous with that country's bitter conflict are emerging again.
An average of 18 murders a day during the 1980-1992 hostilities has crept up to 23 a day now... during what is called "peace time".
It was against the backdrop of the 1992 UN brokered peace accords that four Irish aid workers were caught up in a struggle that resulted in their flight from a mountain refugee community, Segundo Montes. This incident has now placed a question mark over the current Irish aid programme in Central America. The leading Salvadoran human rights lawyer, Ms Maria Juita Hernandez, who is in Ireland this week for Central American week, has called for an investigation into the Irish Government's aid programme in her country now.
"They were scapegoats," says an aid agency director who visited the area after the dramatic events of 1993. The UN observer mission has confirmed that it was called in during the height of the dispute involving Irish workers. There were threats of violence, the mission said, but it attributes the problems to the leader of the community who "ran the village like a fiefdom".
Such was the extent of the split that the Irish are even accused of supporting a rival against the community's own FMLN opposition party candidate in the 1994 municipal elections. The workers' union did run another candidate, but all four Irish were out of the area by this time, according to one of them, Mr Brian Flynn, an ESB fitter based in Ferbane, Co Offaly. Mr Flynn welcomes the chance to have a bitter controversy, with many unsubstantiated claims, aired publicly.
The formation of this workers' union with Irish encouragement at a time of great change, economic uncertainty, and post war insecurity is regarded as premature by Mr Phil Borkholder, a US church based relief worker who witnessed the events. There was a need in the community structure for defence of workers' rights, but the socio political atmosphere was too highly volatile for a union, he says.
Sister Antonia Gonzales of the Poor Clare order says that three of the four Irish directly involved in the 1993 controversy were responding to appeals from grassroot members of the community. The community "lost confidence" in the fourth, she says, which was one of several non governmental organisations (NGOs) with projects in the community subsequently withdrew funding. The Salvadoran mountain community believes that Irish influence, through the Agency for Personal Service Overseas (APSO) in San Salvador, is responsible for further funding losses which have "paralysed" development in a post war climate. For example, Swedish support for a women's community initiative, which had been approved in writing, was diverted to another project.
"We were unjustly accused of robbing money, and we only heard this a long time after when we were trying to find out what had happened," says Ms Mabel Reyes of the Segundo Montes women's group and the management committee. "How could we do such a thing? We had plans for a shop and cafe, a place to make tortillas, a chicken range.
For Mr Dario Alajandro Chicas, president of the Segundo Montes community and FMLN supporter, Ireland has backed the wrong horse in Central America.
A VHF radio crackles in the background. Music is carried on the soft breeze, as some of the local pupils perform in the community's music school. Rosa Elia Argueta, Dorina Garcia and Mabel Reyes, members of the community's management committee, concur.
As, with, so many refuge communities in El Salvador during the peace negotiations. There was a climate of insecurity, paranoia and genuine fear. Since the 1994 elections, which returned the right wing business backed party. Arena, to power, the UN has been critical of progress towards democracy and continued human rights abuses.
A UNDP report has called on the international community to exert more pressure through "peace conditionality" in aid programmes. That Ireland should be perceived as supporting that government now is a source of understandable disenchantment among the Irish religious still working in the region - some of whom received threats to their lives during the conflict.
That frustration is also levelled at a former folk hero in El Salvador, Mr Joaquin Villalobos, who was one of the best known FMLN leaders during the war, and who intervened on behalf of the Irish during the Segundo Montes "crisis". He has broken with the FMLN, is now supporting the Arena party in government, and has received much criticism among Central American experts internationally for "selling out".
A recent survey quoted by the Economic Intelligence Unit, shows that only 32.6 per cent of voters support the government party, Arena, while 26.5 per cent favour the FMLN and 12.4 per cent the centrist Christian Democrats.
Mr Adrian Fitzgerald, APSO's Central American director and former volunteer in Segundo Montes, was closely associated with Mr Villalobos and with his FMLN faction, the ERP, which had close links with that community before the split. That association is perceived to continue now. Independent sources in San Salvador confirm that almost half of 25 listed APSO placements in El Salvador are with ERP associated projects, and this is described as a "curious pattern". Others are with highly regarded local initiatives, and human rights projects.
Speaking to The Irish Times in El Salvador, Mr Fitzgerald said that the APSO focus was on cooperativism, and local capacity building, and it had no agreement with the Salvadoran government. Registration with State run organisations like the Salvadoran Institute for Co operative Development, INSAFACOOP, placed co ops on a legal footing and within a strategic plan. Both major co op confederations supported this body, he said, and the leader of one of these confederations had put this in writing in a letter to the Tanaiste in 1994.
APSO has expressed frustration that "unfounded allegations" have not been submitted to it as a forma complaint. A report submitted, to the Department of Foreign Affairs on this, by the Irish El Salvador Solidarity Committee last December was withdrawn in January, before being referred for investigation by APSO, it says. The solidarity Committee says the report was with the department for over a month, and it lost confidence that there would be any serious response.
APSO says that personnel are assigned to projects on a request basis, and, there is no "political test". It stresses that it has a careful selection and training procedure, to ensure that no "agendas" are brought to bear on particular situations, and stresses that El Salvador, is a highly volatile political situation.
Yet in the absence of an investigation, doubts about aspects of the APSO presence seems set to continue. Mr Eduardo Linares, one of the most active FMLN deputies in the parliament and a former comandante, praises the Irish religious presence, and projects funded by Trocaire, but says that there is a problem in Irish aid being channelled through the Salvadoran government.
"This type of aid is . . . often used for political ends", Mr Linares says.
Father Tim McConville, a Scottish diocesan priest living among the Salvadorans in the suburb of Soyapango, says that he applauds the Irish Government's aid programme in general. However, there is a more serious issue he says, "involving young people working with APSO, or with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO)" - two of the largest such technical assistance organisations in Europe.
What I'd worry about with the situation in Segundo Montes - and I have not met the Irish involved, but do know the community is the tendency to say `we are the experts, we know, we are technicians we control'," Father McConville says. "No one is asking if this community has benefited from Irish intervention. If the Irish people are sincere about sending people out, they do have an obligation to check the results."
Prof Beth Cagan of Cleveland State University, who observed the events of 1993, has kept in close touch with Segundo Montes.
One may feel one knows what is best for victims but one cannot put words in people's mouths. The lack of an official [Irish Government] response shows that when you don't know who to trust, you trust the person whose language and culture you speak, who is the colour of your skin. Even the UN has been guilty of this."
