Candy and Leaflets : Salvador Aims Psychological Fire at Rebels

The captain’s jeep barreled into town behind a pickup truck full of soldiers with eyes alert and fingers poised on the triggers of their M-16s.

The husky captain shouted an order and the soldiers hustled to unload the other weapons: a bright red generator, a microphone and an aluminum pot of glue.

They set up their equipment outside the village store. Aproned women carrying plastic bags of rice, tomatoes and green peppers passed by but did not stop.

Children, however, came running from all directions. The captain had been to visit twice before, and each time he brought them something.

“Greetings from the 4th Brigade,” he said over the noise of the generator. The microphone screeched as soldiers began to play a tape cassette of music and messages.

‘Denounce Traitors’

“If you know traitors of your country, denounce them. . . ,” boomed a deep voice. “Our fathers taught us the fear of God and respect for life. The Communists don’t know God, don’t respect life.”

The soldiers handed out leaflets urging anti-government guerrillas to defect from the rebel armies and pasted them on walls throughout the town. A growing crowd of children waited eagerly for the tape to end.

When it finally did, the captain said, “Now we will hand out some delicious candies.”

He lined them up along the dirt road--boys on the left, girls on the right. In each small hand the soldiers put a packet of pink cookies and a roll of caramels.

The captain’s visit to this rural hamlet in El Salvador’s northern province of Chalatenango was part of a major propaganda campaign by the government similar to psychological programs used in Vietnam. Its goals are to try to persuade guerrillas to abandon their fight and to deprive the guerrilla armies of support from the peasant population.

The program, known in military circles here as psyops (psychological operations), is also aimed at government troops and emphasizes the importance of respecting human rights. Military officials insist that the psychological campaign is as important to winning the war as their battlefield strategy.

“As Mao Tse-tung said, a guerrilla lives among the people like a fish lives in water. The guerrillas cannot live without the people,” said the colonel in charge of the program, who asked not to be identified.

U.S. and Salvadoran officials say the program has been initiated and conducted by Salvadorans, although it has been funded with at least $1.5 million in U.S. aid this fiscal year and will receive more than $1 million next year.

Some Salvadoran officials running the program received their training in psychological operations in Taiwan, according to a military observer who also asked not to be identified. Other tips have been picked up from the guerrillas themselves, he said.

The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas, who depend on the peasants for food, information and recruits, have long used leaflets and their own radio stations to disseminate their point of view.

The army’s campaign, which began in earnest last January, includes radio and television ads as well as the leafleting and distribution of goodies.

The army distributes about 250,000 leaflets each month, many of which are dumped from airplanes over guerrilla-occupied areas. Also, two of the government’s O-2 spotter planes are equipped with giant loudspeakers from which the taped messages are blared from an altitude of 5,000 feet.

Each month, soldiers make dozens of trips--such as the one to Adelita--to small towns and cities, sometimes in conjunction with government deliveries of food, clothing and medicines.

The multicolored leaflets feature nostalgic scenes from home with the message “You have the right to be happy” and tell guerrillas how to turn in their arms. The army also hands out safe-conduct passes that offer money to any guerrilla who turns in his weapon.

A recent leaflet includes a drawing of masked gunmen shooting up the San Salvador cafe where 13 people were killed by a guerrilla faction June 19. On the other side of the page, captured guerrilla commander Nidia Diaz is shown receiving medical attention from “her own enemies.” The caption reads: “Who respects human rights?”

When the guerrillas distributed a leaflet that said the army violates human rights, the army responded with one that said it is the rebel leaders who “expose you to death, mistreat and humiliate you.”

The colonel said in San Salvador that the army tries to expose people to these ideas as frequently as possible, thinking that many peasants are “fickle” and often believe the last person who talks to them.

Featured prominently in the army’s radio and print campaign is rebel defector Miguel Castellanos, the pseudonym of Napoleon Romero, a former commander of the Farabundo Marti Front’s Popular Liberation Forces, who turned himself in last April. He addresses the rebels as companero (comrade) and urges them to abandon violence and “incorporate into the democratic process.”

Castellanos is said to have persuaded the army to alter its language in the campaign. It used to call the guerrillas terrorists, but now the leaflets use more respectful terms such as brother or combatant.

Under the program, defectors and captured guerrillas are interviewed by a psychologist or a social worker who are based at each of the country’s six brigades under a chief of psychological operations.

All the guerrillas are asked how and why they came under army control, and the defectors are asked whether others in their units would desert, how the army could best get its message to them and whether they would tape a message for the army urging others to follow suit. The answers are fed into a computer in an effort to determine the guerrillas’ weaknesses.

It is difficult to measure the success of a psychological operation. The captain in Chalatenango said that an increasing number of people are knocking on the door of the garrison to offer information against guerrillas.

The colonel said 550 guerrillas have defected so far this year, 70 of them with weapons. His figures could not be independently verified.

He added that most deserters report that they left the rebel forces because they believe the guerrillas are losing the war, which may suggest that the military situation is more important than propaganda in determining whether a rebel defects.

A military observer said he thinks the defection rate will begin to decrease soon because many of those who could be swayed already have left the rebel forces, while the more hard-core members remain.

A guerrilla commander interviewed in Chalatenango shrugged off the leaflets and propaganda, saying they are misguided.

“They (the government) made a big error,” said the commander who goes by the name of Douglas Santa Maria. “The people here don’t understand cartoons. They don’t know what this means,” he said, pointing to a cartoon image of a person imagining a picnic by the side of a stream.

“Their success is temporary. It lasts only as long as they stay in the village,” he said.

Nonetheless, the army believes its efforts are effective. It is not only continuing the psychological operations, but expanding them, planning to start up its own radio station soon.

The colonel in charge said he believes the program is ethical and humane because it is “a war without blood and corpses.”

One mother, watching the captain hand out candy in Adelita, smiled down at her child in line. She said she likes the army’s program because, “look how the children like the candy.” But she said nothing about the propaganda messages.

Christmas Dolls

Another mother nearby said that last Christmas the soldiers had come around with dolls, but they did not have enough for everyone and her daughter was one of the girls who did not get one. She also made no mention of the propaganda.

The captain said it did not matter that most of those who turned out to hear his messages were small children. They would take the leaflets home to their families, he said and, besides, he wanted them to have a good experience with the army.

“This also is a psychological activity for the children so that they learn to be a friend of the armed forces,” he said.

The psychological operations program, he said, “is like drops of water on a rock. A few drops cannot perforate a rock, but many drops falling continuously eventually can break the rock.”