Relocation Sought by U.S., Honduras : Salvadoran Refugees Face Ouster From Border Camp

The 8,000 or so Salvadorans crowded into a border refugee camp here have become the focal point of an increasingly complicated international dispute.

The governments of Honduras and the United States want the refugees relocated, either deeper within Honduras or back in war-torn El Salvador. The refugees want to stay right here.

The first effort to move them out was made in 1983, when the Hondurans announced that they would be relocated to Olancho province in the eastern part of the country. The refugees refused to go.

Then, late last year, the Hondurans asked the Salvadoran government to take the refugees back. Immediately, signs went up around the camp announcing, “We, the Refugees, Reject Repatriation.”

Aleida Lobos, one of the refugee leaders, told a reporter: “We will never accept relocation or repatriation. At no moment do we want to leave.”

But an American official said, “There’ll be a situation soon where they’ll be given a choice: going home or moving.”

The United States, which contributes considerable aid to the Honduran government and therefore has considerable influence, contends that this is not just a refugee center. U.S. officials insist that leftist Salvadoran guerrillas are using it as a base in their campaign to bring down the government of Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees takes a legalistic stance. Its position is that refugees cannot be forced to go back to El Salvador. Relocation within Honduras, however, might be acceptable, in the U.N. view. The United Nations favors distancing refugees from war zones.

The Colomoncagua camp is in a remote area on the border with El Salvador. Getting here from Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, takes 10 hours, mostly by tortuous, rocky, mountain road.

The camp is an orderly place, consisting of rows of shacks that include living quarters, workshops, schools and clinics.

Besides the 8,000 here, there are 12,000 other Salvadorans who have fled the fighting in their homeland for refugee camps in Honduras. Most of them, about 10,000, are in the biggest of the camps at Mesa Grande, northwest of here.

According to some of the refugees here at Colomoncagua, the goal of the Honduran government--and that of its U.S. backers--is to militarize the border region at their expense.

They argue that relocation to another camp would mean the dismantling of four years’ work. And they say that returning to El Salvador is out of the question because of the danger.

“Is there really peace in El Salvador?” a refugee named Jovan asked. “We can hear--and see--the bombardment from here. It doesn’t seem peaceful to me.”

No one disagreed with him. Leaders who serve as liaison between the U.N. agency and the refugees talked with visiting reporters on behalf of the residents. But then, out of earshot of the leaders, individual refugees expressed much the same views.

The refugees are suspicious. They are opposed to efforts by the Honduran government to eliminate foreign relief agencies at the camps and replace them with Honduran groups. The changeover is the subject of U.N.-Honduran negotiations.

The refugees say that expulsion of the foreigners would leave them defenseless against arbitrary arrest, interrogation and possible physical abuse.

“The international agencies are our protection,” a refugee leader named Orbelina said.

Occasional disappearances and beatings feed the refugees’ fears.

The Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, a New York-based group, says that about 25 Salvadorans were killed or wounded in the camps between January and June of last year.

Four refugees were shot and killed last year in the nearby satellite camp of San Antonio after members of local civil defense teams entered on patrol. The exact circumstances of the incident are not clear, but the deaths nourished fears among refugees.

In another case, deserters from the Salvadoran guerrillas who had taken refuge in the camp reportedly led Honduran troops to the home of a Honduran gunrunner. The key participants in the incident disappeared.

In Tegucigalpa, U.S. officials insist that the refugees want to stay at Colomoncagua so that they can help the Salvadoran guerrillas.

“It’s just too convenient for the guerrillas,” a U.S. official said.

Colomoncagua lies just across the border from El Salvador’s Morazan province, where one of the largest concentrations of Salavadoran guerrillas is to be found. U.S. spokesmen assert that wounded and hungry rebels rest and recuperate in the camp.

The credibility of such assertions is difficult to determine. Relief workers at the camp say it would be hard to hide any significant number of new arrivals. Also, entering the camp could be risky because it is patrolled by Honduran troops.

“I’m not saying that guerrillas have never entered the camp,” John Cantier, an official of Catholic Relief Services, said. “But the infiltration charges are clearly overblown.”

U.S. officials say that rebels have infiltrated the camps and installed representatives who intimidate any refugees who might want to go back to El Salvador.

“There are a lot of indications that it’s suicide to come forward and say you want to leave Colomoncagua,” one U.S. official said.

In any case, it would not take much to persuade most refugees to stay. Many of them left El Salvador at a time when death-squad activity and military oppression were intense.

Still, there are refugees at a nearby camp who are less opposed to relocation. Theirs is a small camp called Buenos Aires, adjacent to the town of Colomoncagua. Most of them are recent arrivals.

Buenos Aires was set up to house refugees sympathetic with El Salvador’s government. But even some of these refugees are wary of invitations to return home.

“We are different from the people who live in the big camp,” said Juan Antonio Vasquez, who arrived in Buenos Aires in October. “They have particular opinions we don’t share.”

Vasquez, however, is not yet ready to return to his village in Morazan. “The bombing is too much,” he said. “We are afraid of getting caught in crossfire.”

Despite the danger, some refugees have returned--1,500 of them last year.

There appears to be no ready solution to the impasse. Nor is it clear that El Salvador is in a position to accommodate the return of any great number of refugees. That country is already burdened with 500,000 displaced people, and the Duarte government has forwarded no specific repatriation program to the Hondurans.

But U.S. officials express the firm belief that within the next 18 months, the border camps will be cleared.