MCPS-approved group includes radicals who killed US servicemen

Casa de Maryland, the MCPS-approved group sponsoring the April 10 demonstrations in Washington, was set up in the 1980s to provide sanctuary for immigrants from Central America - particularly members of a Cuban-backed guerrilla group whose death squads murdered four off-duty US Marines, at least two American businessmen, an American Jesuit priest and others.

Members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) of El Salvador have been heavily involved with Casa de Maryland since the beginning. The FMLN was an extremist guerrilla group that used death squads, political assassinations, car bombings, and sabotage of public schools and infrastructure in its bloody civil war to turn El Salvador into a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary regime.

Among the Americans killed by FMLN gunmen was Army LTC David Pickett (pictured) and CW4 Daniel Scott. The FMLN executed them in 1991 after they survived a helicopter crash. Casa de Maryland was advocating for the FMLN here in Montgomery County at the time.

After a peace agreement, the FMLN demilitarized and became a legal political party, which it remains as today. However, the FMLN has not shed its extremist ideology and remains a radical transnational revolutionary organization.

In El Salvador on April 6, the FMLN sponsored demonstrations in support of the April 10 demonstrations across the United States. The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) is the main US front organization for the FMLN.