Salvador Rebels Expand War, Destroy Coffee-Making Plants

Leftist guerrillas launched their first major attack in the economically important western province of Sonsonate early Thursday, destroying four coffee-processing plants, burning a bank and battling a civil defense patrol and army troops for several hours.

Sonsonate and neighboring Ahuachapan, on the Guatemalan border, were the only two of El Salvador’s 14 provinces that had not previously been scenes of conflict during this country’s six-year-old civil war.

After the new year began, guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front vowed to take the war into those western provinces which, together with the province of Santa Ana, produce about 80% of the country’s coffee crop, El Salvador’s biggest source of export income.

Principal Tactic

Economic sabotage is a key tactic of the Farabundo Marti front, an alliance of five rebel groups battling the U.S.-backed government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte. Sonsonate province is part of the country’s economic backbone, with El Salvador’s most important port, Acajutla, as well as coffee farms, processing plants and sugar refineries.

The province also was the site in 1932 of an episode known ever since as the matanza --the massacre. A peasant uprising that year against landowners in Sonsonate was put down by government troops with the loss of as many as 30,000 Indian lives. A leader of the uprising was Farabundo Marti, who was captured and executed and whose name was adopted by the modern-day guerrilla alliance.

Col. Jose Dionisio Hernandez, commander of Military Detachment No. 6 in Sonsonate, said the attack on Juayua, 40 miles northwest of San Salvador, was carried out by two columns totaling about 100 guerrillas just before midnight Wednesday and lasted until about 4 a.m. Thursday. He said 10 members of the civil defense patrol were on guard at the time but that no soldiers were present.

The guerrillas destroyed the bank with a bomb and fired rocket-propelled grenades at civil defense headquarters. Simultaneously, they burned the Buena Vista coffee-processing plant and set off bombs in three other coffee plants. All four were full of coffee beans, as the harvest is in progress.

High Damage Estimate

Hernandez said he does not have a dollar figure for the damage, but added, “It is in the millions.” He said that four civil defense men and soldiers were wounded and that it is not known if there were rebel casualties.

The guerrillas dropped leaflets throughout the town, warning farmers to “Stop the civil defense. Paramilitary of the west, abandon arms. If you put down the arms, you will not be attacked.”

Hernandez said an AC-47 plane and a helicopter arrived to back up the civil defense patrol about 1 1/2 hours after the attack began and that 50 soldiers arrived on foot about 2 a.m. from a garrison 13 miles away, in the city of Sonsonate, the province capital. Juayua residents, however, said that the soldiers did not arrive until nearly 4 a.m.

Hernandez said he did not send more troops “because we don’t have any more.”

“Sonsonate is a strategic province,” he added. “We have an important port, a refinery for all of the country’s petroleum, 16 coffee processing plants, two sugar mills, a gasohol plant, a satellite antenna, bridges, highways and railroads. I need 5,000 men to protect all of that.”

He said the soldiers had to travel to Juayua on foot to avoid guerrilla ambushes. He insisted that the rebels came from other provinces to launch the attack, but local residents said that for several months, there have been rumors about a guerrilla camp located in Sonsonate.

Houses Still Smolder

Early Thursday, wet smoke and ashes swirled about Juayua as the bank and a block of houses smoldered next to the central square, and firefighters continued to hose the Buena Vista coffee processing plant on the outskirts of town.

Hundreds of the town’s approximately 15,000 residents gathered in the square to listen to the colonel speak over a microphone set up for a Saturday festival honoring the local patron saint.

“I am greatly sorry that you have been the first victims of the war in this zone, but unfortunately the war is in the whole country,” Hernandez said.

He urged the people to collaborate with the army by turning over information on guerrillas whom they know. He told the citizens, who had not experienced the war in their town before, to look at other provinces where people have had to flee their towns because of combat.

“This is no joke,” Hernandez added. “If you don’t have the courage to say, ‘the guerrillas are over there,’ we are not going to win the war and you are going to see more fires. Next time it could be your house that is burned.”

Some women in the crowd mumbled “that’s right” in response to the colonel, but a few people muttered that the military had ignored information given to them about guerrilla camps.

‘When They Help Us’

“We’ll help them when they help us,” said a disgruntled coffee farmer, who thought he would move from Juayua to the capital because of the attack. “What are we going to do if we can’t work here?” he asked.

Military officials maintain that the guerrillas do not have much popular support in Sonsonate, a more prosperous province than some of those in the eastern and north-central areas where the leftists are strong.

A foreign political observer said the attack was not surprising as the guerrillas had announced their intentions to move west. “It is not alarming until we see a pattern. There is no question but that they can reach any area of the country for an attack, but I don’t think they could stay in that area,” he said.

While in Juayua, the rebels painted the walls with slogans including, “We are a sea of guerrillas and an organized people.” At the burned Buena Vista coffee plant, they wrote, “Soldiers, don’t fight for the rich.” It was signed by a battalion of the People’s Revolutionary Army, the most militant of the five guerrilla groups of the Farabundo Marti front.