In December 1980, I spent several hours talking with Mike Hammer, a field representative in El Salvador of the American Institute for Free Labor Development. AIFLD, an overseas development affiliate of the AFL-CIO, was trying to bring some sense into the polarized politics of El Salvador, a country coming apart at the seams. A few weeks after we met, that violent polarization cost Mike Hammer his life.
When Hammer and two of his AIFLD colleagues were murdered in El Salvador in January 1981, I wrote a memorial essay in the Seattle Weekly, praising these martyrs for decency and democracy. Such were the politics of the time that this tribute to three good men got me into the hottest of hot water with the Seattle-area Left, represented by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. (Thirty years later, when the Mitrokhin Archive, a huge cache of KGB documents, was published, it was revealed that CISPES was a front created by the KGB, the Soviet secret intelligence service, to advance communist interests in Latin America.) The memory of those debates is not what I cherish, however, in thinking back on this episode. What I remember is that my memorial essay was reprinted in AIFLD’s newsletter and became the occasion for meeting William Charles Doherty Jr., who died this past Aug. 28.
Read Full Article »