To Some, It’s Municipal Suicide : Salvador Villages Resist Army’s Call for Militias

The Salvadoran armed forces are intensifying pressure on towns and villages to form civilian militias to fight leftist guerrillas, and many Salvadorans who are being prodded into the program see it as municipal suicide.

For the first time in three years, towns in combat-heavy northern sections of the country are being told to form such militias. In other areas where fighting is frequent, municipalities that refuse to take part are cut off from government aid programs--assistance that is largely funded by the United States.

The army, with the concurrence of its U.S. advisers, considers the militia units necessary to deprive the insurgents of a source of supplies in rural towns and to free combat-trained regular military units to pursue the rebels.

The move to expand the number of militia units is the government’s latest attempt to take the five-year-old civil war out of its current stalemate.

“We must obtain the support of the people in our effort,” said Col. Sigifredo Ochoa, the aggressive military commander in Chalatenango province. “Formation of self-defense units is a way to get them involved.”

While the militia groups, up to 100 strong in some towns, are supposed to supplement regular army patrols, they have in the past proved easy targets for guerrillas. Ill-equipped and often untrained, the civilian militiamen are often the main victims of rebel attacks on towns and farms.

“We refuse,” said Antonio Aguilar, mayor of Santa Clara, a town in San Vicente province on the edge of guerrilla-controlled territory. “We are not against the army. But people here would rather abandon their homes than join the civil defense.”

“In the first attack (by rebels) here, 20 civil defense members died,” Mayor Ilario Orantes of San Esteban Catarina said. “We’ve had nine attacks altogether, and we don’t want any more.”

Santa Clara and San Esteban Catarina last year turned down demands that they set up militia forces. As a result, the Commission for Area Reconstruction, an armed forces-managed agency that controls aid projects in combat zones, withheld assistance from the towns.

Civil-defense tactics have produced poor results in El Salvador. In the 1960s, the rightist dictatorship that then ruled the country formed an organization called Orden, a network of anti-guerrilla rural militias. The militias eventually became notorious for murderous abuses and were abolished in 1979 after liberal army officers led a coup .

In some areas, however, elements of Orden were replaced by civil defense units under the command of local military officers and paid for by town funds. These, too, became sources of human rights abuses. They were also remarkably ineffective against guerrilla onslaughts. Post after post fell, never to be reorganized.

Military officials insist that the new civil defense program is different.

“The people will be made conscious of the need to defend themselves,” Ochoa said, and he, mindful of the bad reputation of past civil defense groups, has changed their names in Chalatenango province to “self-defense units.” Unlike civil defense units elsewhere, these will be unpaid, a “contribution” of the citizenry to the anti-guerrilla cause, Ochoa said.

To encourage acceptance of his plan, Ochoa is traveling through much of Chalatenango province dispensing food assistance and making speeches. In La Palma, he handed out beans, sugar and corn to peasants who avidly lined up for the handouts.

A woman soldier lectured against the “subversives,” the army’s term for guerrillas battling the government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte. Still, La Palma’s mayor, Guadalupe Sola, was unimpressed. “The people here will reject civil defense,” he predicted.

A bystander agreed. “If we have to choose bullets to have corn, we will do without the corn,” he said.

In trying to persuade Chalatenango’s residents to join his self-defense groups, Ochoa must buck well-entrenched fears of both military abuses and guerrilla retaliation.

“The residents are very upset,” said Father Rusino Bugitti, La Palma’s parish priest. “They fear they are being made a target.”

There are grounds for those fears.

Last fall, three civil defense outposts in La Libertad province were overrun by rebels. Although a major army post was only six miles away, reinforcements failed to arrive for more than a day. Fifty-four militiamen died.

Chalatenango is an area of major activity for the Popular Forces of Liberation, a big and well-organized guerrilla faction. The Popular Forces was responsible for the attacks on civil defense posts in La Libertad, as well as for other major operations in 1984.

La Palma and other villages have reached an understanding with the guerrillas: Their hamlets are free of government guns; in return, the Popular Forces leaves them alone. Army and civil defense units were driven out of La Palma three years ago.

“We will just end up hiding under our beds again” if civil defense units are restored, one La Palma citizen said.

Ochoa admits that resistance to his plan is strong. Of 33 municipalities he has visited proposing to establish new self-defense units, only three have agreed. No coercion is being employed, he said.

If experiences in San Vicente province are any indication, though, coercion could come.

There, the civil defense program was supposed to be part of a much-publicized plan to clear guerrillas out of the province and revive the rural economy.

The plan’s three steps were, first, to launch military sweeps to eliminate rebel troops; second, to organize local civil defense forces and begin civic action programs that included education and health services, and finally, to encourage refugees to return home.

The plan has failed in its first goal of clearing the province of insurgents. Guerrillas still molest traffic, attack power stations, ambush patrols and generally thwart a return to normalcy. Former residents stay away.

“If we go to the fields as neutrals, the guerrillas leave us alone. If they know we are members of civil defense, they will pick us off one by one,” Mayor Aguilar of Santa Clara said.

Other towns have agreed to undertake civil defense chores, but under duress.

“It’s obligatory,” said a young civilian militiaman in nearby Apastepeque. “If we don’t join, we go to jail.”

Apastepeque’s militiamen serve without pay, giving up a day out of every four to patrol surrounding fields and roads.

“We don’t cross the highway, however,” added an elderly man. “It’s too dangerous. The guerrillas are over there.”