Salvadoran Factions Try to Capture Hearts, Minds of War’s Displaced

For refugees returning to this desolate farming cooperative, the road home passes through three army blockades, a ghost town of roofless houses, and a political maze that requires peasants to maneuver with the savvy of diplomats.

Walking this road on a recent morning, Ruben Guardado explained how he hoped to survive in a war zone evacuated six months earlier.

“We don’t want the armed forces and we don’t want the guerrillas,” he said. “We don’t want one side or the other to bother us.”

Guardado, 58, is one of thousands of peasants who are fed up with makeshift lives in refugee camps and are moving back to their abandoned villages, even though the six-year-old civil war is far from over.

Some, like Guardado, have moved back in organized groups that appear to challenge the authority of the army. The army originally opposed the return to El Barillo but lately has tried to steer it to its political advantage. Others have returned under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, and still others on their own, moving back family by family. Some may be returning under the leadership of the guerrillas.

Shift to Political Arena

The return to their original homes of some of El Salvador’s 450,000 internal refugees, or displaced peasants, comes at a time when the war between the government and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front has shifted in emphasis from the battlefield to the political arena. There, the fight is for the support of the country’s largely rural population.

The peasants who are repopulating the countryside seem to understand the pitfalls of this political war and watch out for them as carefully as they do for land mines and helicopter gunships. Yet they seem to feel that returning to the land is worth the risks.

“There is nothing like the countryside,” Guardado said. “I don’t want to be a refugee any more.”

Gen. Adolofo Blandon, head of the joint chiefs of staff, last month unveiled “United to Reconstruct,” a plan to repopulate and rebuild strategic areas of El Salvador.

A sweeping counterinsurgency program, the army’s second in three years, it is the key to winning the war, Blandon and other military leaders believe.

“Considering that 90% of this war is of a political, economic, social and ideological character, and only 10% is military,” Blandon said, “it is believed that now is the opportune moment to structure changes in the general strategy of our country.”

United to Reconstruct, like its predecessor, the National Plan, is aimed at routing leftist guerrillas from target areas, installing armed civilian defense groups, and restoring public works and services destroyed or disrupted in the war.

Essential to the plan is the repopulation of some of the 160 abandoned towns and villages in the country, the first of which will be Aguacayo, just west of El Barillo and 30 miles north of the capital in the province of Cuscatlan.

To Use U.S. Aid Funds

Blandon said the government will help Aguacayo residents rebuild their bombed-out houses and start their own businesses, using some of the $18 million in U.S. Agency for International Development funds that officials say are available for the program.

The general has criticized the civilian government for allowing bureaucratic problems and fighting among political parties to stall the plan, which has been a year in the making. In private, military sources say that some in the armed forces feel they are winning the war on the battlefield but that the government is losing it on the social and economic front.

The guerrillas have made economic sabotage a central part of their strategy to bring down the U.S.-backed government and are not likely to spare new bridges, electrical systems and other projects that are part of United to Reconstruct.

“They will try to destroy projects, I am sure,” said Col. Mauricio Vargas, commander of the 3rd Military Detachment in the northeastern province of Morazan. “But they will isolate themselves from the people, and the struggle is for the people.”

Only for Residents

While military and government officials say they want the farmers back in their fields, producing, they also want to make sure that the farmers do not give support and supplies to the guerrillas. Accordingly, the army will restrict the repopulation of Aguacayo to those people who can prove they were born there or were longtime residents.

“Of special importance in this campaign,” Blandon said, are psychological operations--civilian-military actions to distribute goods and the training of armed civil defense forces.

The army has a psychological operations department, with programs like those used in the Philippines in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s. Guerrillas are urged to abandon their fight, and an effort is made to deprive them of popular support. Campaigns to convince the people of the army’s good will are often combined with deliveries of food, clothing, medicine and public services; such efforts are known as civilian-military actions.

Strict Control Sought

“You have to know who these people are,” a source close to the army said. “You have to have control like in Nicaragua, block by block.”

The military has tried for years to organize civil defense units but has found that many people either did not want to side with the army or feared that if they did they would become targets of guerrilla attacks.

Civil defense was an integral part of the 1983 National Plan, which had only modest success in the central province of San Vicente.

While some military observers are skeptical of the new plan, saying it is just a revision of the unsuccessful National Plan, others say that it is more sophisticated. As a Western observer put it, “The military is getting more attuned to the things the guerrillas think are important--political organizing, popular support, restoration of services.”

Most of the families who returned to El Barillo last month had been removed from the area early in the year during Operation Phoenix, an army operation that went on for several months. It was aimed at clearing guerrillas out of the central region of Guazapa Volcano, removing civilians hiding in caves in the surrounding lowlands, and reopening an east-west road through the province of Cuscatlan that the guerrillas had closed.

The army was caught off guard by the return to El Barillo last month of about 65 families, including about 200 children. This upstaged the army’s plan to repopulate nearby Aguacayo. Officials deported 24 foreign religious activists, including 19 Americans, who accompanied the settlers back into the war zone.

The July repopulation project was organized by a previously unknown group called the National Repopulation Coordinator. Soon afterward, one of the directors of the group, Ciriaco Joaquin Rodriguez, was shot in the arm while being detained in San Salvador. He is being held as a suspected guerrilla.

Another member of the coordinator group, Inocente de Jesus Orellana, disappeared July 27 and is, according to the Roman Catholic Church’s human rights office, in police custody. It is not known if Orellana is a member of the El Barillo cooperative.

Troops Kept Close

The army allowed the refugees to stay in El Barillo, where they are living in lean-to houses of wood and aluminum siding. But troops have been kept close by since they arrived.

“We are not going to allow another case like this,” Blandon said.

The government considers the farmers and their families to be masas, civilian supporters of the guerrillas. A military officer showed a reporter a recently captured guerrilla document that analyzes Operation Phoenix and calls for the return of civilian supporters to the area.

Residents of El Barillo say they have spent years dodging government bombs and armed helicopters and have lost many of their people, at least one in Operation Phoenix.

With soldiers nearby, the civilians are careful to point out that they listen to commercial radio stations, not the clandestine rebel broadcasts. A leader of the cooperative was asked if he had ever taken part in the guerrillas’ popular government. He thought for a moment, then answered, “I don’t know”--the farmer’s equivalent of “no comment.”

Tired of War

The leaders of the cooperative say they are tired of war and want to be neutral. They say they will not build the underground caves for protection from aerial attack that identify them, in the soldiers’ view, as guerrilla supporters.

“Gen. Blandon has promised us he will not bomb us,” one of them, Dimas Casco Herrera, said.

“If he does,” said Valentin Landaverde, “he will do it while our arms are raised and our hats are in our hands.”

This is the first time in six years that the government has had access to many of these people. Since they returned to El Barillo, officials have visited them, offering construction materials and applications for national identity cards, which allow them to move legally throughout the country.

But some members of the cooperative admit that there is little the government can do to win their trust or draw them to the government’s side.

“We can take care of ourselves,” a man named Lucio said.

“It is difficult,” said another man, who has lost relatives in the war. “We cannot show them the hate we have for them.”

Residents of Tenancingo, who fled three years ago after being bombed, scarcely flinch today as explosions reverberate through their town from a military operation several miles away.

About 100 families have moved back to Tenancingo, to revive the town that was abandoned until January.

With the help of the Catholic Church and a private Salvadoran foundation, the residents of Tenancingo, about 25 miles northeast of the capital, have cleared debris and overgrowth, restored houses, set up an independent water and electric system, and have begun to revive the local hat-making industry.

The residents say they are happy to be back in the town where most of them were born. They say they hold no resentment over their many relatives lost in two government bombing incidents in 1983 after rebels attacked army positions in Tenancingo.

Both Sides Agreed

The sponsors of the project reached an agreement with the armed forces and the guerrillas to protect the returning refugees: Both sides are allowed to pass through the town but neither side will set up a permanent position there.

The private foundation, the Salvadoran Foundation for Development and Minimum Housing, has printed T-shirts that say “Tenancingo, Seed of Peace.”

But the agreement that makes Tenancingo possible is also the reason why the town may not be a model for future repopulation efforts.

“The armed forces cannot repeat Tenancingo, or eventually you will have the whole country without authorities,” said a source in the ruling Christian Democratic Party. “It is on the margin of the government and, next thing you know, they will say they have their own laws.”

Thousands of other peasants have streamed back to their lands without aid or guarantees from any institution. More than 17,000 people live in the northern half of Morazan province, a guerrilla-dominated area where only about 5,000 people lived less than a year ago.

The population of Arcatao, in the northern province of Chalatenango, has tripled to about 300 in recent months, military observers say.

The observers say that while some of the refugees have been brought back by the guerrillas, many have gone home on their own.

Much of this independent movement represents a problem for the troops, as it forces them to restrict the aerial operations that have helped them gain the upper hand on the battlefield. They prefer to see the people in hamlets rather than dispersed throughout the countryside.

Meanwhile, there are still thousands of refugees in camps, staying with relatives, or living in roadside shanties throughout the country. At the church-run Domus Maria camp in San Salvador, refugees have heard about El Barillo and Tenancingo, but they see no solutions yet for themselves.

“We want to return to our homes, but we don’t know how to do it,” one of them, Juan Abrego, said.

Marta Vigil, 26, and her husband, Gilberto Rodriguez, 32, said they are afraid to return on their own to the area in northern Morazan where Rodriguez lost a hand and a foot in a 1983 bombing.

“We are hoping someone will go back with us and answer for us,” Rodriguez told a reporter. “Do you have any idea how we could go back?”