Social Justice Preached to Peasants : Salvador Rebels Step Up Action on Political Front

Resembling a rural pastor in the pulpit, the veteran guerrilla paced the base of a shady tree in the town square, jabbing his forefinger at the men and women gathered on a Sunday afternoon.

Army units patrolled less than two miles away as the rebel preached about the need for social change: Injustice, he said, was the reason he and about 200 other rebels had pounded a nearby army garrison days earlier, killing at least 69 soldiers and an American military adviser and wounding 60 other Salvadoran troops.

“This is a country where a very few people have a lot, and where many people don’t have anything,” said the guerrilla called Juan Alberto. “There is no work for the working class. . . . The millions of dollars in aid this government receives isn’t to create jobs, but to continue the war, to buy planes, bullets and to continue the suffering of the people.”

The rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front held the political meeting less than four miles from the destroyed 4th Infantry Brigade headquarters at El Paraiso, demonstrating the relative ease with which they move throughout the northern province of Chalatenango.

Besides flexing their military muscle in recent months, the guerrillas have stepped up political work to win support from war-weary peasants. Residents said such meetings are held in towns and villages throughout Chalatenango, one of the most strife-torn provinces in the country.

During a two-day tour of Chalatenango, reporters found fresh guerrilla graffiti sprayed across government buildings in La Reina to the west, and colorful rebel murals on walls to the northeast in El Carrizal, where the rebels have organized farm cooperatives. Residents in La Laguna said that guerrillas had held one of their largest political meetings ever there this year.

The intensity of El Salvador’s seven-year-old civil war varies from province to province and only occasionally has a simultaneous nationwide impact, such as during transportation stoppages that the rebels seek to enforce from time to time. The rebels have vowed to shut down the country’s highways again Wednesday, warning motorists they risk being shot if they travel on the roads.

But Chalatenango gives a view of the patchwork war, the hardship, fear and, sometimes, brutality it inflicts on the peasants who live there.

In the wake of the rebel attack on the El Paraiso garrison, counterinsurgency troops scoured the parched countryside and, according to local newspapers, detained eight suspected guerrillas in the village of San Jose Las Flores, near the Honduran border.

Throughout the weekend, the two sides were rarely far apart: While the guerrillas lectured in Santa Rita, soldiers watched over San Rafael, two miles to the west, and patrolled the highway about three miles to the south. While guerrillas headed south from La Laguna, soldiers headed north from Comalapa, about two miles away. Guerrillas said the two sides clashed near La Laguna, and they claimed to have inflicted 10 army casualties, most of them victims of land mines.

Reported Slaying

Farmers in El Ocotal said several hundred soldiers had passed through the previous day, fanning out into the steep mountains near the Honduran border. They also said that a 25-year-old peasant named Alvaro Guevara had been slain by the guerrillas three months earlier because the rebels said he was an army informant.

Residents of La Laguna said three civilians died in February during an aerial bombardment by the army of the nearby village of Los Prados, but they could not provide names of the dead.

Human rights officials said two civilians were shot by the army in Los Prados in February when they returned from a refugee camp in Honduras with an armed guerrilla guide.

Residents said the army often limits the amount of food they can take into their villages because they fear it will be sold to the guerrillas.

“It depends who’s on duty at the checkpoint,” a resident of La Laguna said.

Thanks Expressed

Santa Rita, about 45 miles north of San Salvador, the capital, is a relatively calm town in the war-torn province. Only two of the town’s native sons are in the army, and none are in the guerrilla forces, residents said. Neither side has come to forcibly recruit, they said, thanking God for their good fortune.

Both soldiers and guerrillas pass through, often to buy food, but neither stays permanently.

On Sunday, about 50 residents listened noncommittally to rebel “preacher” Juan Alberto’s political speech, which was a mixture of explanation, persuasion and threats.

“We don’t have water here. They cut the electricity off at 4 p.m. Let’s demand water. Let’s demand electricity. Or don’t we have the right to demand?” Juan Alberto asked rhetorically.

“There is no medicine in the clinic. Let’s demand medicine. Or don’t we have the right to demand?”

‘End the War’

An army helicopter flew overhead, and in trees surrounding the town, the high-pitched buzzing of cicadas rang like the voice of tension. Juan Alberto’s voice, meanwhile, was deep and determined.

“You know what you have to demand? An end to the war. Because who is suffering from the war? The people.”

As he spoke, about a dozen guerrillas with M-16 automatic rifles stood guard, including three young women and a 13-year-old boy called Humberto. Humberto said he had grown up in a family of guerrilla supporters from Chalatenango and had taken up arms three months ago to join his two older brothers on the battlefield.

Most of the listeners were young men and boys, many of them out of work or working sporadically. Women watched from the sidelines, some with interest and others sneering at the female guerrillas wearing trousers like men.

Arms Warning

Juan Alberto urged the group to push the government to negotiate with the guerrillas. He asserted that the government would come with “false plans” to help them in exchange for their forming armed civil defense units.

“Never agree to arm yourselves,” he said. “For the FMLN (Farabundo Marti Front), all who bear arms are a target. If we have entered the headquarters of the 4th Brigade, how wouldn’t we enter your trenches?”

Juan Alberto thanked the men and women for their attention.

Before leaving, the guerrillas bought bread, candy and canned food. A truck driver passing through gave 12 frozen chickens to the guerrillas, whom he meets frequently on his weekly deliveries along the dirt roads of Chalatenango.

The young men of Santa Rita stayed on in the central square, eating bean-filled tortillas and playing checkers with bottle caps on cardboard. They said the guerrillas’ visit had made them nervous, because the soldiers were so near and the two sides could clash.

‘Respect for Both’

They barely discussed what had been said.

“It doesn’t make any sense for us to voice an opinion because we are subject to the two military forces and have respect for both of them,” Jorge Antonio Zelaya, 25, said. “But as they say, some days we work and some days we don’t.”

Zelaya, the father of three, is an unemployed construction worker who says it now costs too much to take the bus to the capital just to look for a job.

Pedro Ramirez, 16, had watched the rebel meeting with stony eyes. The guerrilla Juan Antonio had attacked the El Paraiso garrison; Ramirez’s brother was a soldier there.

Ramirez said his brother survived the machine gun and mortar attack--he’d walked to the base the following day to make sure. Ramirez spoke seriously, like a boy with too much responsibility. He was angry about the guerrillas’ attack, he said, but added, “They’re right in some of the things they say.”