Salvadoran Rebels Suggest Five-Day Cease-Fire to Aid Peace Talks With Duarte

Leftist guerrillas on Friday proposed a five-day cease-fire to facilitate peace talks next month with the government of El Salvador.

A statement broadcast by Radio Venceremos, the clandestine rebel station, expressed the guerrillas’ strongest support yet for the regional peace plan signed Aug. 7 in Guatemala by the five Central American presidents.

“We recognize that the agreement by the Central American presidents, while it is a generic agreement made exclusively by the governments, establishes a general framework that is favorable for the search for political solutions to the internal conflicts in each Central American country,” the statement said.

Similar Proposal Last Year

It suggested that a cease-fire begin Sept. 12 and continue through Sept. 17 “to create a better environment” for talks on Sept. 15, the date President Jose Napoleon Duarte has suggested for the meeting. The statement was issued in the name of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and the guerrillas’ unarmed political wing, the Revolutionary Democratic Front.

President Duarte proposed the talks in a speech Aug. 13, and the guerrillas accepted the next day. Some analysts have expressed doubt that the talks will actually take place because Duarte made them conditional on the guerrillas’ endorsement of the peace plan and said the rebels must renounce violence as a means of taking power.

Duarte’s Washington-backed government did not respond immediately to the guerrillas’ cease-fire proposal. A similar proposal was rejected last year by the Salvadoran armed forces, and a plan for government-guerrilla talks fell through. The two sides, locked in a civil war that has gone on now since early 1980, have had no formal talks since November, 1984.

This time, the guerrillas quickly accepted the government’s proposal in a letter sent through the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, Arturo Rivera y Damas. They suggested as a site for the talks the office of the papal nuncio in San Salvador.

“Since we have not heard an answer from Duarte,” the guerrillas said in their statement Friday, “we repeat our willingness to attend on Sept. 15 to discuss a cease-fire and to work on agreements that will lead to a national reconciliation and to resolution of the conflict through dialogue and negotiation.”

The peace plan signed by the five presidents calls for cease-fires throughout the region by Nov. 7. Aimed primarily at ending the fighting in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the plan also calls for amnesties, elimination of restrictions on the press and other so-called “democratization” measures, as well as an end to foreign aid to rebel forces.

It also calls on neighboring countries to stop letting rebel forces use their territory. Nicaraguan contras have bases in Honduras and the Salvadoran guerrillas have received support from Nicaragua.

The Salvadoran rebels object to the plan’s treating them on an equal basis with the Nicaraguan contras. They argue that, while they are exclusively Salvadoran, the contras were created by the United States and have been sustained by U.S. aid in Honduras.

The plan calls for compliance to be overseen by a 15-member international commission made up of the foreign ministers of the five Central American governments, representatives of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and the foreign ministers of eight Latin American countries that have been working for peace in the region for several years--the so-called Contadora Group and its support group.

A Salvadoran Foreign Ministry official said Friday that his government plans to send diplomatic notes to the eight Latin American foreign ministers asking them to take measures to ensure that the Salvadoran guerrillas do not use their territories.

“In Peru,” said the official, asking not to be identified by name, “the guerrillas have an office better than our embassy, and we won’t even talk about their offices in Mexico. How can they come here and oversee compliance if the guerrillas are using their countries for propaganda and press and everything else?”

The Salvadoran government has already fallen behind the peace plan’s timetable for establishing national committees on reconciliation within each country to monitor the plan’s progress. Each internal committee is to consist of one representative each from the government, church, opposition political parties and a notable private citizen picked by the government.

The Foreign Ministry official blamed the delay on the political parties, which are bickering over the names they will propose.

In Nicaragua, authorities have named a national committee made up of Vice President Sergio Ramirez as the government representative, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo to represent the church, Popular Social Christian Party leader Mauricio Diaz as the opposition representative, and Gustavo Parajon of CEPAD, a Protestant aid group, as the independent.

The Reagan Administration has expressed mistrust about the peace plan, saying that it does not believe the Nicaraguan government will live up to its calls for internal democratic reforms.

Divisions Reported

There have also been reports recently about divisions over the plan within Nicaragua’s leadership. But Interior Minister Tomas Borge, viewed as one of the most hard-line figures in the ruling Sandinista Front, said in a speech Thursday that there are no divisions and that the plan has “the full support of the Sandinista Front.”

In El Salvador, meanwhile, prison officials announced that five prisoners had been wounded in a shooting at La Esperanza prison for men.

Military officials said the prisoners involved--three political prisoners and two common criminals--were wounded in a guerrilla attack on the prison. But a spokesman for the Committee of Political Prisoners of El Salvador said the men were shot by prison guards.

Among the wounded were Jose Vladimir Centeno, whose father, Humberto, is a spokesman for a leftist trade union, and Fermin Rauda, leader of a union presently on strike. The elder Centeno, who is spokesman for the National Unity of Salvadoran Workers, said in a radio interview that his son had been shot in his bed.