Depth of Passion Differentiates Guerrillas

As with most things in life, there is presumably a right way and a wrong way to wage a guerrilla war. Fifteen years after defeat in Vietnam, the United States is still trying to get the knack of it.

That is one conclusion to be drawn from the stunning setback that El Salvador’s army suffered here last week when leftist guerrillas attacked a major military base, killing 69 soldiers and a U.S. military adviser.

The death of Army Staff Sgt. Gregory Fronius, the first U.S. soldier to die in combat in a seven-year-old conflict that has left 62,000 Salvadorans dead, ensured that the attack on El Paraiso would rekindle U.S. interest in this nation’s civil war.

That is also why the army’s defeat at El Paraiso was not just military, but political. Major guerrilla attacks like that which left El Paraiso a smoldering ruin are supposed to be a thing of the past. For the last year Salvadoran army officials have been predicting the imminent demise of the rebel armed force. But, as one Salvadoran political analyst told me, the El Paraiso operation “was not an attack by an army that is disbanding or suffering from low morale.”

Indeed, even U.S. military advisers here privately expressed a grudging admiration for El Paraiso’s attackers. In order to get into the base, suicide squads of sappers had to get through a mine field and barbed-wire enclosures. They also had to avoid detection by sentries and roving patrols. For all the risks, the attackers left only eight dead comrades behind.

Having come to El Paraiso after a visit to Nicaragua, I found the contrast compelling: Why are the U.S.-supported Nicaraguan rebels not as effective in fighting the Sandinistas as the Salvadoran guerrillas are in battling an army that has received more than $1 billion in U.S. military aid since 1980?

There are numerous reasons, but the one that stands out is the higher degree of gut-level dedication that keeps the guerrillas in the field, living under miserable conditions and fighting against heavy odds.

I got a glimpse of that determination a couple of days after the El Paraiso attack when I ran across a unit of Salvadoran guerrillas fewer than 20 miles from the base. They were withdrawing back into the mountains of Chalatenango province with army patrols in hot pursuit. The nine people in the unit included a teen-age girl and a 12-year-old boy.

Their nervous young commander, who gave his name as Rogelio, said that he had been a member of the Popular Liberation Forces (one of five guerrilla groups in El Salvador) since 1979, joining when he was 16. He had been wounded once, and bore an ugly scar on his left arm as evidence. A brother died in combat, he said, but what kept him going was what Salvadoran soldiers had done to his family: “They killed three of my uncles, my mother’s brothers, although they did nothing; they killed them because I am with the guerrillas.”

Rogelio’s speech was laced with political rhetoric about poor peasants fighting social injustice and government repression--as if he had memorized the daily propaganda broadcasts on the rebels’ Radio Venceremos. But if his talk was one-dimensional, I don’t doubt that he believed it.

One can consider Rogelio’s motivation to be deep conviction, or one can say that it is fanaticism. Either way, El Salvador’s rebels have it while most of the contras don’t.

I say most because clearly some of the contras would be fighting with or without support from the United States. One Western military observer in Central America told me that the most dedicated contra fighters are people who had their lands confiscated by the Sandinista government for collective farms and cooperatives.

“The greatest animating force in the contra movement is people’s desire to recover their land,” he said, “whether its the Gucci suit boys in Miami who want to get back the land they owned during the Somoza days or the poor peasants who are the front-line fighters,” who feel betrayed by the Sandinistas’ collectivization of farming.

That is why cooperatives are a favorite target for contra units in Nicaragua, he said. “But it’s a stupid tactic, not designed to win the hearts and minds of people. It gets you women and children killed.”

So it seems that the most successful guerrillas are not the almost-mythical “freedom fighters,” as President Reagan likes to call the contras, but fanatics so committed to ideology or vengeance that they are willing to fight for years on end.

Can the United States instill that kind of motivation in the people fighting for “our” side in the world’s brush-fire wars? Perhaps. But that’s something else that we tried and didn’t quite get the knack of in Vietnam.