By Gretchen Keiser

When the U.S. government resumed giving military aid to El Salvador last month, the explanation publicly was that such aid would support a moderate government trying to hold its own against assaults from the political left and right.

And U.S. officials said that an investigation was continuing in El Salvador into the killings of four American missionary women last December.

In an interview last week, the Central American representative for the American Friends Service Committee, Phil Berryman, said neither of those premises is true. Berryman, who was in Atlanta for a few days for meetings on conditions in Central America, based his statements on reports he gathered and observations he made while living in Guatemala and traveling through El Salvador for the AFSC last fall.

“I categorically reject the assumption that we’re supporting a moderate government fighting attacks from the right and the left,” he said.

Berryman, who was in El Salvador in November, just before the killings of the American women, said that he was given a church document listing acts of violence against the Catholic Church in El Salvador from January to October 1980. The list included 180 items; among them were 28 killings, 13 bombs, and 41 machine gun attacks, he said.

He said that church publications attributed 132 of the acts to official government troops and 22 more to paramilitary groups.

He toured the Chancery in San Salvador, which had visible bomb damage, and saw damage to the church's radio transmitter and buildings at the Catholic university.

“The killings of the nuns was not a freak excess,” he said “…As horrible as it was, what was new was that it was nuns and they were Americans. There is a long list of killings.”

Concerning the promised investigation into the December slayings, he cited his own sources, and the recent statement by former Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White, who said publicly that no investigation was being conducted.

Some 10,000 people have died in violence in El Salvador in the last year.

Berryman said that last fall the violence had become centered on “disappearances” of those who were becoming leaders in their communities.

The government is “powerless to go after the (leftist) guerillas, so they go after anybody who looks like they may be leaders,” he said. “They’re the leaders so if you get them, you can decapitate whatever is going on.”

He said the government “obviously has a right to defend itself against guerrillas,” but asked, “what is the right of a government to kill unarmed people?”

The U.S. government and Americans, must ask “what kind of government we’re supporting,” he said.