Peace Talks to Resume Sept. 19 in El Salvador : Government, Rebels Select War-Battered Town for Long-Delayed Third Round of Negotiations

The government of El Salvador and Marxist-led Salvadoran rebels agreed to reopen long-stalled peace talks Sept. 19 in the remote eastern Salvadoran town of Sesori, government officials and guerrilla representatives announced here Saturday.

The agreement was reached during three days of private talks in Mexico City. Another round of private discussions sometime in early September will precede the Sesori talks. A site for this second preliminary round was not set, but its purpose is to take up the question of an agenda and security arrangements for the Sesori meeting.

“It was not easy, but we arrived at the agreement we wanted,” said Salvadoran Foreign Minister Rodolfo Castillo Claramount, who headed the government delegation at the talks here.

“For us this was a difficult round that produced minimal accords,” said Salvador Samayoa, representing the guerrillas.

2 Meetings in 1984

The meeting in Sesori would be the third between the U.S.-backed government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte and rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. Two previous sessions, both held in El Salvador in late 1984, made no progress toward ending the six-year-old civil war that has claimed an estimated 60,000 lives.

The selection of Sesori as the next site followed extended wrangling among the guerrilla and government representatives who met here. The rebels wanted the third round held in San Salvador, the country’s capital, while government representatives pressed for the large eastern Salvadoran city of San Miguel.

Sesori, located in northern San Miguel province, is a war-battered town where homes, electrical facilities and telephone lines have been destroyed during the war. Since 1980, its population has dropped from 15,000 to 6,000.

“Sesori is one of the most battle-punished places in the country,” said Col. Carlos R. Lopez Nuila, El Salvador’s chief of public security and the military’s representative at the Mexico City talks.

The site and date could change. In their final communique, both sides left open the possibility of altering plans for the negotiations. The communique was signed by Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, the Roman Catholic primate of El Salvador, who has mediated the peace negotiations since they began.

While the government representatives expressed satisfaction that a date and location for talks were set, the rebels apparently wanted more to come out of the meeting.

Farabundo Marti front officials said they had hoped to discuss an agenda for the talks but that no agenda discussions took place. They blamed U.S. and Salvadoran military establishment pressure on the government for what they called the limited scope of the Mexico City meeting.

“Maybe it would have been better if Edwin Corr had come,” said the rebels’ Samayoa. Corr is the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador.

The Sesori talks are being billed as the third round of peace negotiations, but both sides are basically starting from scratch.

Goal is Rebel Surrender

At a Saturday press conference, Salvadoran government officials said their goal for the talks is to get the rebels to surrender and join the electoral political process in El Salvador.

“We are looking for a way to incorporate the rebels-in-arms into the democratic process,” said government Planning Minister Fidel Chavez Mena. “This implies that they lay down their arms.”

For their part, the rebels rejected the idea of surrender. “If we wanted to surrender, we wouldn’t need three days of meetings to do it,” said Jorge Villacorta, a spokesman for the Revolutionary Democratic Front, the political arm of the Farabundo Marti front guerrillas.

Instead, the rebels insisted that they want an eventual share of the government and the combining of the rebel and government armies.

Thus, the positions of both sides remain unchanged from those they held after the first two rounds of peace talks concluded in November, 1984.

Despite their wide differences, both sides say that new meetings might produce agreements to somehow reduce the levels of bloodshed and destruction.

Hope for ‘Humanization’

The term they employ for this is “humanization,” although for both sides the word appears also to signify a means of reducing the other’s battlefield effectiveness.

For instance, the Salvadoran government would like an end to sabotage of civilian facilities such as electric power lines. Moreover, the government hopes that “humanization” will become a roundabout way of getting the rebels to stop fighting.

“We might be able to reach small agreements and little by little get them to put down their arms and end the conflict,” Chavez Mena said.

For their part, the rebels are pressing for an end to the government’s aerial bombardment tactics and the forced evacuation from war zones of civilian guerrilla backers.

The first round of government-rebel peace talks took place in October, 1984, at La Palma, a town in the mountains north of San Salvador. The second took place the next month in the village of Ayagualo, just outside of San Salvador.

The Duarte government now is battling not only the rebels but severe economic problems and dissatisfaction among the Christian Democratic administration’s peasant and labor supporters. On June 1, Duarte called for a resumption of the peace talks, apparently pressed by demands of farm and labor groups for action to end the fighting.

The rebels, facing an increasingly large and well-equipped government army, have lost ground in the fighting since the first two rounds of talks. Farabundo Marti battlefield tactics have been reduced mainly to sabotage and widespread mine-laying, accompanied only occasionally by pitched battles with troops.