Amid Worsening Economy, Salvador Rebels Press War

In the San Mateo district of San Salvador, where most of the houses have two-car garages, nearly 50 impoverished families have put up shanties on a vacant lot to replace homes they lost last year in an earthquake.

Across town, students from the National University have been holding classes outside the offices of President Jose Napoleon Duarte to demand an increase in the university budget and to protest a recent death-squad threat against 14 campus leaders.

More than a dozen leftist labor unions have been marching almost daily to demand higher wages and an end to the civil war that has gone on for 7 1/2 years. Several of the unions have called their members out on strike and have been scrawling anti-government graffiti throughout the city.

“When the politicians need votes,” one of the San Mateo squatters, Jose Adrian Flores, told a reporter, “they are out there with promises in their hands. But we never get anything.”

Government Under Pressure

As El Salvador slips further into economic decline, President Duarte’s government is coming under more sustained pressure than it has before in his three most recent years as president. And the squatters, the students and the labor unions have mounted the stiffest challenge yet to his administration, presenting him with the problem of how to deal with increasingly militant protests without resorting to repression that could further strengthen the opposition.

The protests are taking place as guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) are stepping up their campaign of urban warfare in San Salvador. The guerrillas have ambushed National Police patrols, burned buses and interrupted transportation to the extent that last month, for the first time, the capital was paralyzed.

The Washington-backed government has accused the guerrillas of fomenting the protests as part of a plan, announced last year, to bring the war back to the capital.

“This is political war in the streets,” Duarte told reporters the other day. “They are trying to destabilize the government.”

Police Taunted

Police and military officials have warned that there are limits to their tolerance for demonstrations. Demonstrators have painted slogans on military vehicles and taunted the police, but so far there has been no response to the baiting.

Strikers and student protesters admit to having leftist sympathies, but they deny that they are rebel front groups, as the military charges. They say their demands are legitimate, and that the protests are the result of the government’s failure to help those most in need.

“Just because the workers and the people in the mountains call for the same thing, an end to the war, doesn’t mean we receive orders from the FMLN,” said Oscar Marroquin, a leader of the Salvadoran Social Security Institute Union, which has been on strike for more than a month.

“That is completely false,” Marroquin said. “The government gives us the same treatment as the guerrillas. They say they will not negotiate with the guerrillas unless they put down their arms and that they will not negotiate with us unless we end the strike.”

Right Wing on Rise

Meanwhile, Duarte also faces a newly reinvigorated extreme right wing, which has mounted a campaign to take over the National Assembly in next year’s elections. The right has the help of a charismatic colonel, Sigifredo Ochoa Perez, who retired from the army to join the party of retired Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson.

Duarte’s Christian Democratic Party, which controls the Assembly, is divided. Three of its leading figures are competing to be the presidential candidate in 1989. The infighting is hobbling the government, which had already been accused of dragging its feet on pressing matters.

Diplomatic sources say the division has prevented the government from moving ahead on a series of economic and social programs Duarte announced June 1 in his state of the union speech.

Military people talk, privately, of their irritation with what they see as government corruption and the lack of progress on the economic front. An anonymous military group published a letter last month charging that after seven years of war and millions of dollars in foreign aid, “the nation’s problems are multiplying rather than diminishing.”

No Coup Expected

Diplomats, political analysts and military officials have expressed concern about the deteriorating political situation, but they say they do not expect it to lead to a rightist coup or any sort of insurrection. The military commanders still support the government, and public dissatisfaction with Duarte does not seem to translate into support for the guerrillas.

“The government has begun to lose some control in the capital,” said Antonio Canas, a political analyst at the University of Central America. “I wouldn’t say people see the FMLN as a solution, but they want peace and they want negotiations in which the FMLN participates.”

One of the major accomplishments of the Duarte government has been a significant reduction of the kind of human rights abuses that were frequent in the early 1980s, when military and paramilitary groups known as death squads were very active. But the recent union protests and guerrilla activity have been answered with a series of anonymous attacks against leftist and church groups. Among the incidents:

-- On May 28, a bomb destroyed the offices of one of the committees made up of mothers of people who have disappeared. Two persons were wounded.

-- On May 31, a leader of the National Union of Salvadoran Workers was shot in the back at a demonstration outside the men’s penitentiary. The victim, Julio Cesar Portillo, has since recovered and returned to union work.

-- Twice in June, unidentified gunmen fired on the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church here, targeting a power transformer and the church printing offices. No one was hurt.

-- On June 15, a communique signed by “Commandante Aquiles Baires” of the Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez death squad listed the names of 14 National University students who would be killed if they did not leave the country within 48 hours.

Threat of Commando Actions

A day later, a communique was issued on the letterhead of the Secret Anti-Communist Army. It, too, was signed by Baires, and it said his group had not threatened the students but promised that its commandos would soon carry out other actions.

At least one of the students named on the list left the country. None of the others has been killed, but several are said to have received threats by telephone.

Student and labor union activists blame officials or paramilitary groups for the attacks; army and police officials blame leftist infighting. Political analysts say that although the violence is alarming, they do not expect it to rise to the level of the early 1980s, when thousands of union organizers, church workers and suspected guerrilla sympathizers were slain.

In addition to the incidents in the capital, there have been human rights abuses in the countryside, and some sources think the army may have been involved.

Three Had Throats Cut

Three peasants from the northern province of Chalatenango were attacked last month. Their throats were slashed and they were left for dead. All three survived and said later that they had been attacked by uniformed soldiers who accused them of being guerrillas.

“It was about 3 p.m. on a Saturday and they detained me on my way home from work,” one of the three, Jose Antonio Ortega, 22, told an interviewer in a San Salvador hospital. “They asked me questions about arms and my comrades. I said I was at work and I didn’t know anything about that. At about 8 p.m. they said, ‘OK, you don’t want to talk,’ and they cut me. They left me for dead.”

U.S. Embassy officials said they are concerned about the incident, and Duarte has promised an investigation. Human rights officials say they believe the three men were attacked because they work with farm cooperatives and a church health program.

Last month, Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas accused soldiers of killing five peasants and dumping their bodies into a well in the village of Los Palitos in the eastern province of San Miguel. People who live in the village say the army’s Arce Battalion was responsible.

Army Blames Guerrillas

Military officials deny that army men killed the five peasants. A local newspaper quoted officers of the battalion as saying that guerrillas had killed them.

Also in San Miguel, the body of the leader of an agricultural association was found on May 2. A day earlier, in the western province of Santa Ana, three workers who belonged to a union of coffee processors disappeared. Army officers say they know nothing about these incidents.

“This is very serious,” a Western diplomat said. “People are taking justice into their own hands.”

Military officers complain that the government has not renewed a state of emergency that allowed the police to hold suspected guerrillas for up to two weeks without bringing any charges against them and to turn them over to military tribunals for trial. Now they must be charged within 72 hours and tried by a civil court.

Diplomats and military observers say they fear that the army may be killing suspects instead of arresting them.

Fighting Escalates

Fighting has picked up between the guerrillas and the army. Since the first of the year, the guerrillas have undertaken a number of attacks on government troops, including a large-scale assault March 31 on the main garrison at Chalatenango. About 200 soldiers were killed or wounded there.

The army has retaliated, putting 15,000 men into the field, largely in the provinces of Chalatenango and Morazan. Military spokesmen say that about 200 guerrillas have been killed in recent weeks, a figure that some observers think is high in light of the fact that the guerrillas customarily move in small groups.

“The guerrillas have learned to attack with fewer people each time, but they know that’s not the road to winning the war,” a European diplomat remarked. “The war will be won here in the capital, with the masses.”

In the capital, the military has increased the number of roadside checkpoints. Vehicles are searched for weapons and guerrilla propaganda.

Guerrilla Infiltrators

Military officers and diplomats say they believe the chaos that followed the earthquake last Oct. 10 enabled the guerrillas to infiltrate people into the city. Moreover, they say, the quake helped the guerrilla cause by contributing to the economic deterioration.

“The earthquake aggravated problems that were already here,” a Western diplomat said. “Unemployment was high and businesses were lost. There was a housing shortage even before the earthquake; half a million people had been displaced by the war. . . . Personal income is two-thirds of what it was in 1979. The country as a whole has suffered enormously from the war.”

Union leaders say their salaries have been eroded to less than a third of what they were and that 50% of the population is unemployed or underemployed, working only a couple months a year. They say the wage increase of $20 a month that Duarte promised public workers in January has not materialized. Social Security health workers are now asking for an increase of $30 a month.

In addition to the earthquake, El Salvador suffered a drought last year that resulted in months of electricity rationing. A war tax that Duarte tried to put through early this year to strengthen the government’s financial position was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

No Improvement Seen

The economic picture is not expected to improve this year. Forecasters see economic growth of no more than 1% as the price of coffee, El Salvador’s principal export, falls; inflation of more than 30% is projected.

Duarte succeeded last month in persuading U.S. officials to stop pressing him to adopt unpopular economic measures, such as a currency devaluation. The last devaluation, in 1986, caused prices to soar, particularly on such imports as medicines, fertilizers and pesticides.

So far, the government has taken a hard line with striking public workers, and it has ignored the students outside the president’s office. Officials have told the squatters they will have to move out of their shanties in San Mateo. But the government still has the matter of the growing protests to deal with.

Resolving these difficulties will not be easy. Attitudes are changing. Flores, the squatter, who is out of work and has two children still living at home, said:

“I worked day and night for President Duarte in his campaign. I was born with a fish in my heart (a reference to the symbol of the Christian Democratic Party), but I’m not a fish anymore. I don’t want anything to do with any politicians.”