El Salvadoran people need support of workers everywhere.
THE freedom fighters in El Salvador have made important gains in their battle against the brutal US-backed junta which rules the country.
On January 10 the mass organisations, the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) and the popular army known as the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN), launched a general offensive.
Since then, the FMLN has taken effective control of one-quarter of the country and holds many key roads and rail bridges, including the main highway into El Salvador *.m Guatemala and Honduras.
The news of the rebeis successes was confirmed by Washington Post correspondent Christopher Dickey in a January 17 dispatch:
"With the war erupting in city slums and villages, around military garrisons and in the sugar cane fields, the guerrillas have prover they can mount co-ordinated actions virtually anywhere in this overcrowded Central American country and operate almost freely in the rural areas."
STRIKE SUCCESSFUL A three-day general strike called for January 13 by the FDR showed the overwhelming support for the popular forces.
In the industrial areas of the cap. ital San Salvador, it was 70 percent effective. More than 40 of El Salvador's largest factories were paralysed. Bank workers also joined the strike, as did many others from government departments Pror to the strike starting much of the capital's transportation had already shut down because the bus owners' association announced its support for the FDR In the three largest cities outside Sar Salvador - •Santa Ana. San Miguel and La Union - industrial Coffee Institute and Carlos Federico Paredes, the government's vice-minister of planning - declared their support for the revolutionary forces.
REPRESSION In the face of this popular upsurge the junta has stepped up its violence and repression.
The clandestine radio of the FMLN, Radio Liberacion, reported on January 16 that more than 30 trade union leaders had been arrested in the preceding days.
The Salvadoran Air Force was reported to be indiscriminately bombing the civilian populations of the towns held by the FMLN, and it has already begun to use incendiary bombs, similar in effect to the napalm used in Vietnam.
On January 16, the Legal Aid office of the San Salvador Catholi Archdiocese said that government forces had raided churchoperated refugee centres in San Salvador, capturing peasants who had fled militarised zones in the countryside.
Accurate information on the situation in El Salvador has been