Salvador Troops, Rebels Welcomed : Yule Fair Back as Town Learns to Live With War

The last time a Christmas fair had been trucked into this mountain town was “before the war,” which was before 8-year-old Blanca Nieve Lara was big enough to go on the whirling rides, and even before many of the children here were born.

With guerrillas and government troops waging a civil war in the hills around El Carrizal, the owner of the hand-powered Ferris wheel and “Flying Chairs” carrousel of swings had refused to bring his fair to the northern edge of El Salvador.

But many things have changed in the war and in the rugged countryside, and this year, residents persuaded the fair owner to return with his rides. On Christmas Eve, music, firecrackers and colored lights filled the town square where Blanca Nieve and dozens of other children screamed with excitement on their first flying chairs ride.

“I rode it twice,” the long-haired second-grader said with a giggle.

The return of the Christmas fair to El Carrizal is not so much a tale of peace--although there was peace here on Christmas--but of how a town has learned to live with a war that does not promise to end soon.

El Carrizal, with about 110 families in the province of Chalatenango, lies in “a conflicted zone,” according to a map that none of its residents have seen but that most take for granted. To the east, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas control much of the rocky terrain, and to the south, government troops line the roads in force.

El Carrizal is part of a landscape in dispute where the two sides battle for power. Both guerrillas and government soldiers pass through the town to eat or rest or to look for each other, appearing at least as often as the twice-a-week mail delivery.

Residents say that the two sides usually both show up in the same week, sometimes on the same day, but not often at the same time.

‘Afraid of an Attack’

“We aren’t afraid of the troops and we aren’t afraid of the guerrillas,” said a man who identified himself only as Ismael. “But we are afraid of an attack. If the troops are here, we don’t come out at night because the guerrillas could attack. And if the guerrillas are here, the troops could attack.”

The tension is here even when the battles aren’t.

Although war broke out in El Salvador in 1980, it did not hit El Carrizal with force until June of the following year, when the guerrillas ambushed soldiers stationed here and took over the town.

The residents fled to Honduras for a month and returned to find that the guerrillas had robbed the town blind--worse, even, than the soldiers who used to steal their chickens, residents said. Many families, fearing further violence, left for the capital city of San Salvador or for the United States.

Over the years, guerrilla leaders have come to El Carrizal to explain that their combatants are more organized now and do not steal as they did in 1981. They occasionally hold meetings in town to try to win the sympathies of the residents, as do the government troops who come with “civic action” campaigns to distribute propaganda and presents to the children.

Poor and Isolated

The town of farmers is poor and isolated near the Honduran border. It is connected to the provincial capital by winding dirt roads that pass through fields of sugar cane, and hillsides of bamboo, banana plants, and, at Christmas time, poinsettia.

Since no one in El Carrizal owns a car, the only way out of town is by two rickety public buses that leave at 3 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. daily, occasionally running into cross-fire en route.

To buy food for their town stores, the shopkeepers must secure a permit from military officials, who they say limit the quantity because they fear it will be sold to guerrillas.

“They limit what we can bring in, and then the soldiers complain there is nothing to eat when they come to town,” said a woman who runs a restaurant at her home.

The residents have survived the presence of both guerrillas and government troops with relatively little violence by appearing to support neither. They have learned not to discuss politics.

“They both respect our dignity more now,” Raul Arguerra, 47, said noncommittally.

Gunfire at Night

The residents have learned to stay out of the hills around town that echo with gunfire in the night, to sell food to both guerrillas and soldiers when they come through, and to take care around nervous men with weapons. They do not carry arms themselves, often not even the commonplace machete.

The residents have grown used to doing without services or doing for themselves. There are no officials in town--the town hall is burned, the mayor and judge have fled in fear of the guerrillas--and the only medical services are provided by a Spanish doctor who visits every two weeks. Two priests moved to El Carrizal last March for the first time since the war began.

The residents alternately accept the guerrillas and soldiers as the authority when they are in town and have learned to negotiate with both, which is how the Christmas fair returned to El Carrizal this year.

A committee of eight youth leaders decided this fall that it was time to bring back the fair. While raising money for two pinatas (candy-filled jars) for each of the town’s children, they had the father of one of the committee members speak with the guerrillas.

No Objections Found

“The owner of the fair was afraid to come because he thought the guerrillas would rob him. I asked the guerrillas if we could bring the fair and they said of course, that they wouldn’t interfere,” Arguerra said. He said that the military also did not object to the fair.

Arguerra was sent to the capital to arrange for the fair, which arrived in trucks a couple of days before Christmas Eve.

“Even the guerrillas have come to ride the flying chairs,” Maria Morales, 25, said staring at the bright lights of the rides.

Men and women who work in factories of the capital or the western coffee plantations, returned to El Carrizal for the fair and other Christmas festivities--a midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, a Christmas Day dance in the old health clinic, and the crowning of the Queen of the Patron Festival of El Carrizal.

On Christmas Eve they found a town free of soldiers and guerrillas, but on Christmas morning there were traces of both.

White leaflets were scattered like snowflakes along the banks of the dirt road to town. On some of them, the armed forces urged guerrillas to go home saying, “Without you, there is no Christmas for your family.”

On others, damp with morning dew, the guerrillas sent “our greetings to the people for Christmas and New Years. . . . We will win.”