Bodies in Well Heighten Fear, Anger : Salvador’s Civilian Toll Reflects War’s Injustice

Ricarda Sofia Rivera had no doubt that the men digging at the bottom of an abandoned well eventually would find her son’s body.

Two months earlier, Jose Serafin Rivera and four other peasants had been taken away from San Gerardo by guerrillas who demanded they help with such chores as carrying food supplies.

The guerrillas told the five young men “they had to go do a chore and that if they didn’t, they would be killed,” Rivera said. “He left home and I never saw him again.”

Rivera’s search led her and the other families to the all-but-deserted hamlet of Los Palitos, where they were told by nervous farmers that their sons and husbands had been captured by soldiers of a special counterinsurgency battalion. The villagers heard shooting, they said.

After a day of digging with a shovel and bucket on Tuesday, government officials did pull five decomposed bodies out of the well. The women identified their loved ones by shoes, handkerchiefs and, in one case, a national identity card, then wrapped the bones in black plastic bags they had brought as caskets.

The desolate well here provides a window into the seven-year war that has taken more than 60,000 lives, at least half of them civilians. Los Palitos is an hour’s walk from San Gerardo and 2 1/2 hours by jeep to the nearest paved road in an area where the war has been vicious and unrelenting.

President Jose Napoleon Duarte’s civilian government has had little impact on the zone near the Honduran border, in eastern San Miguel province. The area is alternately combed by the Arce Battalion, which human rights workers say has one of the worst records in the Salvadoran army, and by the most strictly militaristic unit of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the guerrilla organization fighting to oust the U.S.-backed government.

In a small-scale war that relies heavily on intelligence gathering, the Salvadoran army has run frequent “psychological operations” in areas such as this to try to win the cooperation of peasants. The army pays some informants and plants others as spies.

The guerrillas, meanwhile, have executed at least eight civilians accused of being informants in the zone, forcibly recruited new combatants and told people who refuse to cooperate with them to move out of the area.

Retribution Sought

The Los Palitos case is unusual in El Salvador because Rivera and other relatives of the five men have openly accused the army of responsibility for the killings and are seeking retribution by filing a complaint in court. The judge from Ciudad Barrios acted quickly to exhume the bodies, and the case has been widely covered by the Salvadoran media.

But like most human rights cases in the country, this one is mired in controversy and may never be resolved. The army says the five victims were killed in combat and were left dead in the open countryside. The families and human rights workers say there are witnesses to the killings but that they refuse to testify because they have been threatened by the Arce Battalion.

Without witnesses willing to testify, the attorney general’s office says, there is no case.

“We had a witness who today refused to talk,” said an official from the attorney general’s office. “I know people saw it, but they won’t talk.”

Dangers Abound

In such a war, there is a danger not only in bullets, but in seeing what is not meant to be seen, and in talking. To avoid such dangers, those who remain in Los Palitos say they stick close to home. They never go outside after dark, and when bullets start to fly, they run inside their one-room adobe houses, close the wooden doors and lie on the dirt floor.

Most of the young men have left this region for the United States. Many of their families have moved to the safety of El Salvador’s cities. Only the poorest remain in Los Palitos.

“Life is expensive in a town,” said Maria Santiago Castro, 37. “Where would we plant our corn if we went to a town?”

Castro’s husband, Ruben Hernandez, allegedly is one of the witnesses to the shooting, but he denies that is so.

‘I Give to Both Sides’

“I was in the field and I heard some shots. That is all I know,” Hernandez said emphatically.

The father of seven said he feeds both the government soldiers and the guerrillas when they pass by his house. He has corn for tortillas and two cows to make cheese.

“I give to both sides out of my own good will. I have learned to have good will,” Hernandez said.

The five victims were men in their 20s and 30s who had done tasks for the guerrillas in the past, their relatives said. The families denied that the men carried weapons when accompanying the guerrillas.

They said the men were taken away on Tuesday, May 19, to carry out the chores in the area of Nuevo Eden de San Juan. Fifteen men had been recruited the previous week, and all had returned home.

Radio Reported the Deaths

Several days after the five men left, their families heard on the radio that “five subversives were killed in combat” in Los Palitos, and they began to investigate. A Salvadoran newspaper article on May 23 also quoted the armed forces as saying the five died in combat against soldiers from the Arce Battalion.

But on Wednesday afternoon, May 20, a peasant who lives in the area saw at least two civilians in custody of soldiers, who were interrogating them in Los Palitos.

“The soldiers said, ‘Isn’t it true that you are guerrillas?’ ” the witness said.

“And they both answered, ‘No, they took us away to do a chore.’ ”

‘They Were Petrified’

The witness said a soldier took the shoes and socks off one of the detained men--an ominous sign in a country where the dead often are found barefoot.

“They were petrified,” said the witness.

On Thursday, May 21, several peasants reported hearing gunfire about 8 a.m.

Within days, the families began to arrive at Los Palitos, and soon the well was surrounded with wooden crosses bearing the names of the five victims: Serafin Rivera, 24; Jose Candelario Rodriguez, 22; Angel Cristino Ramos Argueta, 29; Santiago Correas Rivera, 27, and Andres Mejia, 32.

Another newspaper article on June 20 contradicted the previous story by quoting unnamed officials of the Arce Battalion as blaming the guerrillas for the killings.

Dora del Carmen Mejia, wife of Andres Mejia, said an army lieutenant gathered residents of San Gerardo for a political meeting about two weeks after the men disappeared.

Army Apology, Denial

“He said he was sorry about the case. He said he hadn’t been in the zone when it happened and didn’t know who did it. He said it would be investigated, but that the army wasn’t to blame for what happened. He said if they hadn’t left home, nothing would have happened to them,” Mejia said.

About six months earlier, Mejia said, the guerrillas held a similar meeting in San Gerardo to explain why they had killed three men from the town who allegedly collaborated with the Arce Battalion.

Human rights officials said the guerrillas killed five other civilians accused of aiding the army in San Luis de la Reina about the same time and several others throughout the region. The executions came during a period when the guerrillas had been forcibly recruiting new fighters and were suffering from a high desertion rate.

In 1982, San Gerardo was occupied by the guerrillas, and in 1983 it was a recruitment center for them. The army has had more of a presence in the area in recent years and, residents said, the Arce Battalion has been there almost constantly in the last two months during a nationwide military operation called Col. Jose Domingo Monterrosa, after a colonel killed by the guerrillas.

Found Wearing Backpacks

Col. Roberto Mauricio Staben, commander of the Arce Battalion, said the five victims were shot during combat and that they were found wearing backpacks full of clothes, plastic ponchos, ammunition and rifle clips. He acknowledged no weapons were found on them, but added that guerrillas normally manage to recover arms from the dead before they retreat.

Staben said his troops usually leave the dead on the ground for relatives to identify and bury, since many of the rebels are from the area where they are fighting. He said it was “absurd” to think his men would bury the men in a well and then report the casualties.

Staben blamed the guerrillas for dumping the bodies in the well for propaganda, “to ruin the reputation of the armed forces.” He said he has a tape-recording of an interview with Hernandez, the alleged witness, in which he claims, according to Staben, that a woman from the Roman Catholic Church’s Legal Affairs Office told him to blame the battalion for the burials.

Human rights workers accused Staben’s 1,200-man battalion of being one of the worst human rights offenders in the military. They say disappearances and brutality are common in areas where the Arce Battalion operates.

A Handful of Complaints

An official from the attorney general’s office said the Ciudad Barrios office has received “four or five” complaints in the last nine months involving soldiers supposedly responsible for civilian deaths.

Ricarda Rivera said that while she fears the guerrillas, she is “more afraid” of the army.

Staben, however, said that when guerrilla collaborators are discovered, they are brought to the battalion for a lecture and film to persuade them “to change.” The army tells them that soldiers are much more humane than the guerrillas have led them to believe, then release them with a sinister warning: “The enemy is going to think you are our collaborators now.”

As part of his psychological operations, Staben has printed children’s T-shirts with a picture of a small girl whose left leg was blown off by a mine. Staben distributes the T-shirts in guerrilla zones.

“The guerrillas come and rip the shirts off their backs, the only sport shirts these kids have ever had. And that’s exactly what I want to happen,” Staben said.

The tactic does not seem to be bringing the war any closer to an end. In Los Palitos, as 60-year-old Castro Correas Garcia watched officials dig his nephew out of the well, he lamented, “This war will still be going on the day I die.”