Escalation in El Salvador

Recent reports from El Salvador indicate that government forces have begun to escalate the level of fighting in the civil war, with encouragement from the Reagan Administration. Peace will come to that country only with a balanced approach that holds guerrilla forces at bay long enough to bargain them back into the constitutional system. But the new tilt toward a military solution threatens that balance.

U.S. officials confirmed last week that the Salvadoran army has received, and begun using in battle, an ancient DC-3 cargo plane that the military calls a C-47, specially outfitted in the United States as a gunship. At the same time, Times correspondent Dan Williams reports that the Salvadoran army is pressing forward over the objection of many villages with a new civil- defense campaign designed by U.S. counterinsurgency experts. Both moves are designed to put pressure on leftist guerrillas. Both could backfire.

The gunship is modeled after a weapon, dubbed “Puff the Magic Dragon,” used by U.S. forces in the Vietnam War, It is a slow-moving propeller plane carrying night-vision equipment and heavy machine guns capable of firing 1,500 rounds per minute with great accuracy. U.S. military advisers say that it will be used against guerrillas when their small units mass for large coordinated attacks. Salvadoran military officials have already asked for more of the planes.

But how will they really be used? There are already unconfirmed reports that the Salvadoran government has violated its agreement with the United States by converting a second DC-3 into a gunship. In the past El Salvador has misused some U.S. helicopters, employing them as gunships rather as a way to get troops into action faster. Many civilians live in areas where guerrillas operate with impunity; the civilians are thus potential innocent victims if the gunship is accidentally or deliberately misused. The gunships are almost certain to provoke a small-scale arms race, with guerrillas scrambling to retaliate with anti-aircraft weapons.

The Salvadoran army’s civil-defense strategy also looked good on paper when it was launched more than a year ago, but results in the field have been dismal. The effort begins with regular army units chasing guerrillas out of a province, followed by a coordinated government effort to win the support of the local population with food, medical aid and other social services. A militia that is made up of local men is then trained and armed to defend the area once the army moves on. That is the theory.

But Salvadoran army commanders told The Times’ Williams that of 33 municipalities asked to form such militia units in recent weeks only three had complied. Many Salvadoran peasants are reluctant to cooperate with the army not because they support the guerrillas but because they fear for their lives once the soldiers leave. Last year attacking guerrillas wiped out poorly equipped and ill-trained militia units in three major battles. Besides, civil-defense programs have a bad reputation in El Salvador. As recently as the 1960s brutal and corrupt right-wing governments in El Salvador used civil-defense units to help control the Salvadoran countryside through fear and intimidation. The peasants remember that, even if U.S. military advisers do not.

Even if these new tactics work as planned, they are not necessarily in the best interests of El Salvador. The country’s political reconciliation will take place not on the battlefield but at the bargaining table. The civil war is at a stalemate, not because the guerrillas match the government in firepower--they clearly do not--but because neither side can generate the political support that it must have in order to overcome the other. The guerrillas have enough popular support to operate in large sections of the countryside, so military defeat alone cannot finish the job for the government. The opposition groups that the guerrillas represent must be brought back into the Salvadoran political process to work for change peacefully.

Most Salvadorans seem to realize this--witness their hopeful and enthusiastic support for the peace talks that were begun late last year by President Jose Napoleon Duarte. The next round in those negotiations is to take place later this month. The only resistance to the talks has come from the Salvadoran right wing and from the country’s military caste, which has been frustrated rather than chastised by its failure to put down the rebellion. A tilt toward military efforts that may or may not work simply feeds the illusion of that country’s generals that they can “win” the civil war. The Reagan Administration must maintain the balance by devoting at least as much attention to Duarte’s efforts to talk the country out of its plight.