Abstract
The campus was shut down with the loss of 22 lives. The death squads are murdering students or teachers at the rate of one a week; yet 17,000 students are still being taught
Miguel Angel Parada, the rector of El Salvador's national university, visited London at the end of 1983 as part of an international tour to increase awareness of the plight of his university and of education at all levels in El Salvador. The university campus was occupied by the army on 26 June 1980, when 22 people were killed. They are still there, even after a government decree stipulating that it should be returned to the university authorities. Despite the occupation, Dr Parada and his colleagues offer courses to 17,000 students in rented premises throughout the city of El Salvador. Dr Parada's own position is particularly hazardous. His predecessor, Félix Ulloa Martínez, was murdered. He himself was arrested in 1981 when troops burst into a university administrative meeting and detained 20 members of the council. The kidnapping and murder of students and university teachers has continued unabated through 1983 (see box), the latest victim being Dr Enelson Escobar, a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, whose tortured body was found on 8 December 1983. His name, like that of Dr Parada, was on a list published by the Ejercito Secreto Anticomunista (ESA, the ‘Secret Anti-Communist Army’) of people with ‘subversive connections’. In spite of the dangers, likely to increase still further as the March 1984 elections approach, Dr Parada remains outspoken in his defence of the university as the promoter of education in its widest sense, and the ‘defender of rational, critical thought in a country turned over to barbarism’.