He Spurns Government Demands : No Alternative to More War, Salvador Rebel Says

Before he arrived, guerrilla sentries climbed surrounding hilltops and took up positions on the town’s only cobblestone street. Another rebel, armed with an M-16 automatic rifle, searched an abandoned rural health clinic with a flashlight.

In the darkness before a full moonrise, the sound of quick boot steps broke through the night, and bodyguards burst into the clinic ahead of him.

“Hello, I’m Ferman Cienfuegos,” the guerrilla commander said with the grace of a host at a cocktail party.

The slender, bearded guerrilla leader is one of the five commanders of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, fighting a bloody war to oust the U.S.-backed government of El Salvador’s President Jose Napoleon Duarte. Cienfuegos heads the Armed Forces of National Resistance, a small, Marxist-Leninist party that is one of five armed groups in the front.

Since the presidents of the five Central American countries signed a peace plan last August, there has been mounting international pressure on the government and guerrillas to end the civil war that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.

In the wake of the peace plan, Duarte met with the guerrillas to argue that a multitude of political killings and a military-dominated government--the principal issues that sent thousands of guerrillas to the mountains eight years ago--have been resolved by his elected Christian Democratic government.

Duarte said the Farabundo Marti guerrillas, known by their Spanish initials FMLN, must put down their guns, form legal political parties and take part in national elections in what he and U.S. officials call a burgeoning democracy.

But from the steep mountains near the Honduran border, the rebel view is dramatically different. Cienfuegos said the guerrillas’ military pressure, rather than democracy, has brought about changes in El Salvador. Elections, human rights improvements and Duarte’s government are symptoms of a U.S. counterinsurgency program, not democracy, he said.

“It would be political idiocy to disarm,” Cienfuegos said. “Imagine the FMLN without an army. They would annihilate us. There would be a bloodbath.”

At 40, Cienfuegos has been a revolutionary for nearly 18 years--10 of those as a clandestine urban guerrilla and eight in the impoverished countryside that he says he has not left since he made a speaking tour of Europe in 1984.

He takes his nom de guerre from two fallen combatants, has survived rightist death squads, deadly internecine struggles among the left and a war in which, as a commander, he is a principal target. Over the years, his group has carried out kidnapings and executions, as well as countless military operations. Those experiences, perhaps as much as his radical ideology, help explain why this war is not likely to end soon.

‘No, There Is None’

Asked if he seeks any alternative to armed struggle to bring about social change in El Salvador, Cienfuegos answered without hesitation, “No, there is none.”

During a nightlong interview by gas lantern last week, Cienfuegos drank sweet coffee and tirelessly answered questions on behalf of the five-member guerrilla command. He wore solid green fatigues and studious-looking horn-rimmed glasses, and he spoke in an even manner more suited to the art teacher that he once was.

Throughout the night, two bodyguards stood by his side with their rifles at the ready. One of them, who goes by the name Baltazar, said, “We are willing to continue fighting until the end, and after our triumph we will keep on fighting.”

At 24, Baltazar has been a member of a guerrilla organization for 11 years.

The guerrillas’ response to Duarte’s call for their disarmament is a demand that he agree to a provisional government that includes the FMLN and its political allies in the Revolutionary Democratic Front. With a transition government in place, they may then be willing to negotiate a cease-fire and organize new elections. The rebels want a referendum on a new constitution.

“Without our participation, there is no solution to the national situation,” Cienfuegos said.

Protest Over Assassination

The October peace talks in San Salvador produced little more than a cease-fire commission that has met once in Venezuela. The guerrillas suspended the next meeting scheduled for Mexico City to protest the assassination of human rights activist Herbert Anaya Sanabria, and Duarte has since refused to hold further talks.

Cienfuegos said he expects cease-fire talks to resume next month around the time that the five Central American presidents meet to evaluate each country’s progress in complying with the regional peace accord.

Last month, Revolutionary Democratic Front leaders Guillermo Ungo and Ruben Zamora returned briefly from exile to begin organizing a legal movement of the political left. The visit produced speculation of a possible split between the politicians and armed rebels.

But Cienfuegos said the return of Ungo and Zamora was “a mutual decision” by the politicians and the guerrillas and promotes a strategy to build a national consensus for the guerrillas’ negotiated solution at a time when the Duarte government has lost much of its support and his party is beset by bitter infighting.

“The return of the Revolutionary Democratic Front opens the possibility of a real national consensus. . . . The conditions are ripe. It is a moment in which the government does not govern and has no political authority,” Cienfuegos insisted.

Ungo and Zamora have left El Salvador, but they expect to return again early next year.

Opposition to Class Warfare

The Revolutionary Democratic Front, popularly referred to by its Spanish initials FDR, is made up of social democrats and social Christians having a more moderate political line than the armed rebels. Inside the country, Zamora spoke against class warfare, which the rebels advocate, and described the war as a stalemate, a view that the guerrillas do not share.

Cienfuegos said the groups agree on most basic points, the need to build support for a negotiated solution and the need to halt “U.S. intervention.” The United States supports the Duarte government with about $700 million a year in economic and military aid and maintains at least 55 military advisers in the country to help direct the war.

“This is an alliance and we have different analyses. Since 1980, we have had deep discussions over tactics and strategy,” Cienfuegos said.

Cienfuegos said the FMLN would not approve of Ungo and Zamora participating in either the Legislative Assembly elections scheduled next March or in presidential elections due to be held in 1989.

“Anyone who participates in the 1988-89 elections is playing along with the myth that there is democracy in the country, and that supports the counterinsurgency war. Those elections are part of the U.S. plan,” he said.

Undecided on Sabotage

Cienfuegos said the rebel command has not decided whether to try to sabotage the March balloting, as the rebels did in 1984 presidential elections and 1985 assembly elections.

Duarte and U.S. officials argue that the guerrillas are trying to shoot their way into power. They say the guerrillas’ support is eroding because of tactics such as interruption and sabotage of the nation’s transportation and electrical systems, tactics that make life more difficult for many workers.

Some political analysts add that war fatigue has set in and many people have begun to identify the guerrillas as half of the problem.

Duarte says that if the rebels entered elections, their lack of support would become clear. He points to the low turnout for demonstrations by unions and groups considered pro-guerrilla.

Cienfuegos responds that the guerrillas have widespread clandestine support.

“In a war where the objective is the population, our social base must remain hidden. Our power is not born from the rifle. It is born from the participation of the people,” he said.

The guerrillas say their backers come from the families of the tens of thousands of students, peasants, union and church workers slain by rightist military and paramilitary groups in the early 1980s. They say they also draw support from among the thousands of refugees and peasants displaced by the war, from among nearly half of the working-age population that is unemployed and from citizens disillusioned with Duarte’s Christian Democratic government.

Polls Show Lack of Support

Lack of support for Duarte’s party was evidenced by two recent polls conducted by the Jesuit-run Central American University, but what is not known is whether that discontent translates into support for the rebels.

The polls of 1,080 adults nationwide in September and 941 adults in the capital in October-November showed that:

-- 73% felt that the country’s economy is worse or much worse than it was last year.

-- 68% said the country’s “situation in general” is getting worse.

-- 66-75% felt that no political party represents their interests.

Most people blamed the country’s economic problems on the government and “the war,” rather than specifying the guerrillas.

The guerrillas argue that there can be no economic recovery in the country as long as the war continues. Cienfuegos disputes the U.S. and Salvadoran military view that the guerrillas are losing the war and insists that if there are no negotiations, eventually there will be a widespread insurrection.

Despite U.S. aid, training and a near quadrupling of armed forces manpower, the military has not been able to beat the rebels in eight years, Cienfuegos said.

3,000 Casualties a Year

Indeed, half of El Salvador’s annual budget goes to defense, the military suffers about 3,000 casualties a year and the guerrillas’ economic sabotage has cost nearly $2 billion in eight years.

This year, in addition to targeting the national electrical system and coffee, sugar and cotton crops, the rebels hit the cattle industry for the first time. This month, guerrillas attacked a prosperous ranch in the eastern province of San Miguel, killing more than 250 milk and breeding cows.

The campaign, which the guerrillas dubbed “Either We All Eat or No One Eats,” seemed to be a counterproductive tactic in a war that depends on winning the hearts and minds of a largely poor and rural population that could do with more rather than less milk.

But Cienfuegos adamantly defended the sabotage campaign and said that El Salvador’s shrimp exports will be the next target in a broadening of the economic war.

“You have to ask whose food is it. A majority of the people don’t drink milk or eat meat. They have no access,” he said.

Coffee No. 1 Target

The main focus of guerrilla sabotage is coffee, the country’s No. 1 export. The rebels destroyed $2.2-million worth last year and are continuing their attacks during the current harvest.

“The government uses the dollars from exports to pay for the war. Part of the function of sabotage is to stop the flow of dollars and diminish the war potential,” he said.

Although they are professed Marxists, the guerrillas say they are fighting for a mixed economic system that would include private enterprise and private property, but one that would break the control that an oligarchy has maintained over the country’s economy.

They say that despite a limited agrarian reform, nationalization of coffee sales and the country’s banks, the Duarte government has not addressed the economic concerns of the majority of workers and peasants.

When they talk of the government they envision, their language recalls that of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

“We don’t exclude anyone, but the oligarchy has to decide whether or not to participate. If they don’t, they disappear as an economic group. If they do participate, they have to accept the rules of the majority. They are a minority,” Cienfuegos said.

Peasant Villages

In addition to the influence of Marx, the rebel view seems shaped by the peasant villages through which the guerrillas move in some of the poorest regions of El Salvador. Like so many of these villages, Nuevo San Fernando has no teacher, doctor, telephone, transportation or government offices. The peasants lack not only milk and beef but also rice to go with their tortillas and home-grown beans.

“The companeros have more money than we do,” said a peasant woman, using a friendly term for the guerrillas that is the rough equivalent of comrades or companions. “They eat rice.”

The villagers said they sell food to both the guerrillas and the army when they pass through.

The guerrillas appeared well-fed and the morale seemed high among those accompanying Cienfuegos and others encountered on mountain trails in the remote area.

As Cienfuegos spoke inside the abandoned health clinic, half a dozen rebels lay on the ground outside watching the news on a tiny, battery-powered television set that Cienfuegos fondly referred to as “the guerrilla television--made for war.” Other rebels slept, snoring loudly, until it was their turn for sentry duty.

Cienfuegos refused to say how long he thought the war could go on.

“We’ve got time,” he said as he picked up his rifle and pack at 5 a.m. “As long as it takes.”

With a trace of blue light in the sky, the guerrillas took off into the mountains.