Hushing up witnesses:

...These incidents are harsh reminders of the distrust and even hostility members of the Salvadoran military bear toward the churches and their humanitarian work...

...One for eigner remarked after being released that Salvadoran friends of hers had been held in the same barracks just months before...

...On April 30, two foreign Lutheran church workers leaving Panchimilama were forced off their bus by a military commander who threatened repeatedly to kill them, saying a friend of his wanted to see foreign blood...

...Vice-Consul Mark Schall listened in on the lecture...

...Then all four were lectured by a Salvadoran military officer about "bad North Americans" who go home and tell "lies" to their senators and representatives about El Salvador...

...On February 22, troops of the Belloso Battalion detained three development workers with the Mennonite Central Committee who were visiting friends in Piedra Labrada, on the slopes of the Guazapa volcano...

...the officer asked, gesturing as if to cut off their ears and pull out their fingernails...

...Once at the barracks, Nancy Guthrie was questioned separately by Major Bill Chadwick, a U.S...

...The experiences of Lutheran workers at the church-supported resettlement at Panchimilama have been particularly alarming...

...U.S...

...military adviser Chadwick and U.S...

...Their testimony has had a considerable impact on the debate over U.S...

...In the early 1980s they were murdered in large numbers...

...The soldiers claimed the three-Gary Guthrie and Kori and Larry Leaman-Miller-did not have permission from the military to be in the area, although the Mennonites had been working there since 1981 and had never before been told they needed special permission...

...The letter to Reverend Medardo Gomez Soto, bishop of the Lutheran church, and Monsignor Arturo Rivera Damas, archbishop of the Roman Catholic church, said such visits endanger the foreign workers and interfere with military operations...

...Did you know what pain was before you came to El Salvador...

...Much of this has to do with the role these workers play as witnesses...

...Now the Salvadoran military is giving notice that it wants this practice stopped...

...policy toward El Salvador...

...The 1980 assassinations of Archbishop Oscar Romero and four North American churchwomen were only the most notorious cases...

...After being tortured and left for days without food and clothing, they were released without charges...

...Several towns destroyed by the military have been repopulated in the last two years, and in October 1987, more than 4,300 refugees returned from Honduras to live in the contested zones they had been forced to flee in the early 1980s...

...Many have involved soldiers of the First Infantry Brigade, a tough outfit which Catholic church leaders have blamed for attacking the archdiocese's center for the displaced at San Jose Calle Real and for murdering three peasants from San Jose Guayabal, Cuscatlan early this year...

...These incidents range from the mundane-such as bureaucratic obstacles preventing visa renewals or safe-conduct passes for travel in contested zones-to the more ominous, including death threats and, in one case, a beating...

...military adviser...

...Having gone to a great deal of trouble to "drain the sea" of a population it did not trust, the military does not welcome the peasants' return...

...Four have been detained and threatened in recent months, several of them on more than one occasion...

...The soldiers searched and questioned them for hours about their work and religion and then turned them over to the National Guard, where they spent the night under an armed guard...

...Since the letter was delivered, dozens of foreign religious workers, health personnel, and reporters have been detained, threatened, or harassed by the members of the military or death squads...

...Many of the foreign religious workers who have been detained or harassed have been assisting in this repopulation effort...

...A less brutal, but nonetheless frightening, campaign is under way again in 1988, apparently aimed at discouraging religious and humanitarian missions in El Salvador...

...But if some foreign workers are feeling vulnerable now, they are still considerably less threatened than their Salvadoran colleagues...

...Over the years, scores of foreigners-many of them religious workers-visited or lived in El Salvador's zones of conflict, bearing witness to the manner in which the military conducts its operations there...

...But without "the protection of foreigners' passports," they were treated less gently than their foreign friends...

...A fourth church worker, Nancy Guthrie, accompanied the three in the hope of protecting them...

...ANNE MANUEL...

...The next morning the workers were forced into a pickup truck with civilian license plates by five men in civilian clothing with Ml6s...

...After about half an hour of threatening statements, the commander finally agreed to examine the church workers' safe-conduct passes from the Armed Forces Chief of Staff, and let them board another bus...

...On January 8, 1988, Colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda, chief of the investigative unit of the Armed Forces high command, wrote to the highest officials of the Catholic and Lutheran churches in El Salvador, asking that they "impede" the visits of foreign religious workers to the nation's conflictive zones...

...Aside from a general desire to keep foreign eyes off its operations, a second suspected reason behind the new campaign is military displeasure with the movement of peasants back to rural areas which had been emptied out by years of counterinsurgency efforts...

...Besides, he added, foreign religious workers may "associate with terrorist delinquents of the FMLN which use the civilian populations as a cover and as a source of logistical supply or recruitment...

...A few blocks from the barracks of the First Infantry Brigade, the four were blindfolded...