Cambridge Gets El Salvadoran Sister

A City Council vote last night laid the groundwork for Cambridge to adopt a sister city in El Salvador to counteract the damage that they say the American military has done in the Central American country.

Organizers of the project said that by becoming the sister to a Salvadoran village, Cambridge will help the inhabitants there return to their homes, which have been terrorized during the years of unrest and fighting.

Taking only two minutes to approve the resolution, the Council gave a local committee the formal go-ahead to try to establish ties with the village of San Jose Las Flores.

The council's speedy approval of the relationship caught organizers by surprise, they said, and added that they will meet next week to consider their plan of action.

David Grosser, the project coordinator, said he is confident that if people in Cambridge become involved with the reestablishment of San Jose Las Flores, the Salvadoran government, which receives aid from the United States, will pay more attention to the safety of the town.

Villagers currently receive no government support in their effort to return, said Grosser, a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts.

"We can generate publicity about what's going on in Las Flores that will restrain the Salvadoran government. People will be safe from military attack," Grosser said. "The people of the village said they felt safer knowing that the people of Cambridge were watching."

Grosser said that the military aid which the United States has sent to the Salvadoran government has had a detrimental impact on villagers, who he says are displaced and harmed by "death squads closely tied to the military and national police."

"I don't think that the Reagan Administration or the Salvadoran government wants people to know what's going on there," he said.

The political implications of the Council's decision were not formally debated before the vote was taken on the resolution.

In a series of dramatic moves, City Councillor Alfred Vellucci turned the potentially controversial action into a quick, unanimous affair, suspending rules which would have required a hearing before a council vote.

At the same time Vellucci was speeding up the process, he introduced a new resolution which gave official sanction to the sister city project. The original resolution had only requested that the Council consider such action in the future.

"We just did it--bango--it is now official," Vellucci said after the vote.

"It was vintage Vellucci," said Councillor Alice Wolf. "I didn't expect it necessarily, but I'm not surprised."

Wolf, who was one of the sponsors of the resolution, speculated that the council side-stepped the debate because they did not want to discuss the deeper ramifications of the vote. "People didn't want to get mired into the political controversy," Wolf said.

But last night Grosser wasn't complaining about the speedy decision.

"We would have liked to make the case in front of the city--we thought this would be a nice forum, but we're certainly pleased by the outcome," said Grosser.

Project organizers spent months in preparation for the hearing, raising $2000, sending a delegation to the village and working to amass public and political support for the resolution.