Salvadoran War Will Widen, Rebel Warns : Guerrilla Chief Villalobos, Once Reported Dead, Denies His Forces Are Losing, Defies Reagan

Joaquin Villalobos, an elusive guerrilla leader with a boyish grin, has sent a defiant message to anyone inside El Salvador or outside the country who thinks his rebel movement is dead, not to mention that he might be.

“We’re going to win this war,” said the man considered to be the top front-line commander of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. “Within a year, we expect to have taken the war to the totality of the national territory.”

In a rare interview with foreign journalists, Villalobos voiced a challenge to the Reagan Administration, which backs the Salvadoran goverment of President Jose Napoleon Duarte with millions of dollars in military and economic aid:

“The Reagan Administration can send all the rifles it wants. But it can’t replace the casualties among officers, among the troops (of the Salvadoran armed forces). It can’t solve the problem of morale. The prolongation of the war favors us.”

Reputation as Ruthless

The Farabundo Marti front is an umbrella organization of five armed rebel organizations that has been fighting for nearly five years to topple El Salvador’s government. Villalobos has a reputation for ruthlessness and battlefield savvy, and has built his People’s Revolutionary Army, one of five Farabundo Marti groups, into what is considered the most formidable rebel force.

Recent turns in the war have led to suggestions that the guerrillas are losing. And not long ago, Salvadoran military officials reported that Villalobos himself--rarely seen publicly--was killed in battle.

Villalobos, clean-shaven and looking fit, laughed off such reports. His smile disappeared when he narrated a list of actions that he expects to take in hopes of wearing down Duarte’s government and U.S. resolve to continue supporting it:

“Each time they (the Salvadoran armed forces) mount an operation, we will bloody each of their patrols.

“We propose a policy of attacking basic commerce, electrical energy, the roads, with frequent paralyzation of transport, railroad lines, telephone communication, export crops like sugar, cotton and coffee--aimed at breaking the war economy and the regime.”

That kind destruction is familiar to most Salvadorans; such rebel tactics have long been employed and have been intensified in recent months.

Yet, Villalobos’ renewed declaration of war was startling in its intensity.

“We are not disposed to lay down our arms--ever,” he said.

“There is no possibility of developing (the economy) if it is not on the basis of a national (political) solution, an end to the process of North American intervention and if it is without our participation.”

Villalobos made the remarks at a news conference Friday in Perquin, his long-time stronghold in the pine-dotted mountains of northeastern El Salvador. Joining him were four other ranking members of the Farabundo Marti front: Shafick Jorge Handal, head of the Armed Forces of Liberation and the Salvadoran Communist Party; Facundo Guardado, a member of the political commission of the Popular Liberation Forces, the second largest armed faction after Villalobos’ People’s Revolutionary Army; Leo Cabral of the Armed Forces of National Resistance, and Miguel Mendoza of the Central American Workers Revolutionary Party, the latter two both smaller factions.

The site itself was a symbol of defiance.

Two weeks ago, the Salvadoran army swept through the region with thousands of troops, beneath air cover from bomb-dropping A-37 jets. Yet the mostly abandoned town was secure enough for Villalobos to invite six reporters and a delegation of U.S. citizens lobbying for peace for a day of steak lunches, video tape presentations and long speeches.

Villalobos and the other leaders defended controversial rebel tactics as necessary to counter the aid poured into El Salvador by the United States:

--The guerrillas described the killings last month of four U.S. Marines and nine civilians at two San Salvador sidewalk cafes as a “military action.” They persisted in saying that the Marines, assigned as guards at the U.S. Embassy, were really military advisers.

“The advisers live well and go home (after work) and take a good bath. This cannot be,” said Handal, the bearded Communist leader.

--In response to criticisms of the killings by their leading civilian allies, the rebels emphasized that the critics, all members of the Revolutionary Democratic Front, the Farabundo Marti front’s political arm, have limited influence on combat decisions.

--The rebels evaded questions on whether they received arms from Nicaragua. Handal ridiculed evidence offered by the Pentagon of arms shipments, including photos of donkeys carrying boxes. In any case, he added, if they receive weapons from abroad, these supplies amounted to no more than “one one-thousandth” of the amount of aid the government receives from the United States.

--Charging that the Duarte government used past negotiations with the rebels only as a propaganda ploy to win more aid from the United States, the insurgents said that peace will come only when such assistance ends.

--The rebels maintained that their tactic this year of frightening the mayors of many towns by kidnaping them was justified because the Salvadoran army lacks resources to protect the town halls. “Under what logic do they pretend that, where they no longer have military power, they can continue having political power?” Villalobos asked.

For the first time, however, the military leaders admitted that forced recruitment of youth into rebel ranks last year “was an error” because participation in battle must be “voluntary.”

Villalobos, who has just turned 34, led his guerrilla band into the mountains of Morazan after the failure of urban warfare. His rebel troops have long dominated large chunks of eastern El Salvador and frustrated a series of army efforts to retake the region.

In 1981, he ordered a “final offensive” aimed at setting off a general uprising against the government. It failed, and the conflict eventually turned into today’s war of attrition.

Villalobos said that by 1982, the guerrillas had the army on the run, having expelled government forces from about 60 towns in the east and 20 in the north-central region. Between 1982 and 1984, the insurgents were on the verge of entering the cities, he asserted.

U.S. aid to the army stopped that, he said, and new mobile tactics of the army made assaults on military installations meaningless.

Last June, the guerrillas also changed tactics, disbanding large troop columns and regrouping into small, hit-run units. Ambushes and sabotage increased, all aimed at showing that U.S. help cannot bring the war to an end.

“Our strategy had to aim to conquer the . . . capacity of the Reagan Administration to continue supplying the Salvadoran army,” Villalobos said. “If we conquer that factor, we win the war.”