Rebels’ Latest Tactics, Sabotage Take Heavy Toll : No End in Sight to El Salvador’s Civil War

The central square shook in the morning as A-37 jets bombed not-so-distant mountains. At midday, spotter planes passed overhead raining leaflets with a Christmas offer to double what the army will pay a guerrilla if he surrenders his gun.

By dusk on New Year’s Eve, column after column of peasant guerrillas filed into the crumbling town square with their M-16 automatic rifles in hand. When the rebels put down their guns, however, it was not to surrender but to dance.

Nearly 800 guerrillas gathered in practiced formation around their highest commander, Joaquin Villalobos, for a morale-boosting military review. Afterward, they celebrated with guerrilla theater, dinner and an all-night dance to the music of a guerrilla band.

7-Month Operation

The rebel gala came on the heels of a seven-month Salvadoran army operation that sent counterinsurgency troops to the mountains of northern Morazan province to rout the guerrillas from their traditional strongholds.

During the May-through-November offensive, the army hoped to prevent guerrilla leaders from meeting, training forces and planning attacks and to separate the rebels from civilian supporters. But the army appears to have fallen short on those goals, too.

During the party, other rebel units to the west carried out the largest attack yet on the season’s coffee harvest. They drove off army troops protecting a coffee processing plant in the central province of San Vicente, destroying $2.2-million worth of coffee beans and equipment.

Also that night, guerrillas launched a series of assaults on the country’s electrical system. They knocked out service to the eastern half of the country and much of the capital.

“While the army came into our rear guard, we moved into theirs,” Villalobos said.

Revolutionary Army Head

Villalobos is one of five top commanders of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, an alliance of five guerrilla organizations and armed political parties. He heads a guerrilla group called the People’s Revolutionary Army and is considered to be the best military strategist among the rebel leaders.

Villalobos rarely appears in public, and on New Year’s Eve he let his second-in-command address the rebels. He declined a formal interview with three American reporters--the first he had met since 1985--but spoke briefly about the eight-year-old civil war, which he confidently asserted the rebels would one day win.

It is an assertion the guerrillas have made each year since they launched their failed “final offensive” on Jan. 10, 1981.

U.S. and Salvadoran officials contend that the leftist rebels no longer can hope for a military victory as they may have in 1983. The U.S.-backed armed forces now number about 55,000 and are buoyed by a powerful air force.

Lengthy War Seen

But after eight years of fighting, tens of thousands of dead and nearly $3 billion in U.S. military and economic aid, many officials concede that the Salvadoran civil war is far from over. Army Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, chief of the 3rd Brigade in San Miguel and the officer responsible for operations in eastern El Salvador, says the armed forces could be fighting the guerrillas for another 10 years.

The rebels’ return to Perquin, about 125 miles northeast of San Salvador, seemed to bear out that prediction. They appeared well fed, adequately armed and in high spirits. Villalobos was joined by other leaders--Comandante Luisa, who heads the clandestine Radio Venceremos; Comandante Jonas, who represented Villalobos at recent peace talks, and Francisco Mena Sandoval, a former army captain who took to the mountains in 1981 after burning a garrison in eastern Santa Ana.

The party also indicated that the army was not successful in disrupting a seemingly comfortable relationship between the guerrillas and civilians--many of whom danced to the rebel band.

Concessions Rejected

Army officers and guerrillas both still believe they can achieve a military victory, and thus, despite the initiative of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez to achieve peace in Central America, neither side here appears willing to make the concessions necessary to end their war.

Salvadoran peace talks in October, under a plan signed by all five Central American presidents, produced no results, primarily because each side’s vision of a “negotiated settlement” contemplates the other’s defeat.

Both sides clearly are preparing for more war and are trying to involve civilians more actively in it. Rebel leaders say they have spent the last year expanding their militia, whose members live openly in the towns and cities but participate in clandestine activities. The rebels say they have trained militia to participate in military actions.

The army estimates that there are 5,500 to 6,000 guerrillas in the Farabundo Marti Front, but one military observer noted a cache of weapons found recently less than 10 miles from the army’s 3rd Brigade and said, “We can’t count guerrillas any more because with the militia we don’t know who is armed and who is a civilian.”

Reserve Units Formed

Ponce said that he formed 27 army reserve units last month in the provincial capital of San Miguel. The 5,000 reservists, many of them former soldiers, will be used to protect bridges and other targets of guerrilla sabotage to free up active-duty soldiers for offensive operations.

The army and guerrillas agree that 90% of the war is being fought to win the active political support of civilians. In that vein, both Villalobos and Ponce are keeping an eye on deteriorating social and economic conditions and on forthcoming elections, which are expected to further polarize national politics.

Ponce blames the civilian government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte for failing to address many of the social needs of El Salvador’s poor, a majority of the population.

“We have had military successes, but we have been unable to convert those military successes, which are temporary, into political successes, which are more permanent,” Ponce said.

The guerrillas also seem to have been unable to mobilize growing discontent over high costs and poor living conditions. In the capital, groups sympathetic to the rebels used confrontational tactics to protest human rights abuses and to press demands for higher salaries, hospitals and housing, but they did not visibly broaden support for their causes.

Impact of Quake

“The impact of the (1986) earthquake on prospects for organizing a popular insurrection is enormous and still has not been developed to its fullest,” Villalobos said.

Besides the earthquake that destroyed much of the capital, Villalobos said that an unemployment rate of more than 50% and a three-year drought that has dried up basic food crops for many peasants help his cause. “Anyone with his eyes closed can see . . . this war is won,” Villalobos boasted.

Like many army officers, Ponce contends that the Central American peace plan has been a setback for the military. He said a brief, unilateral cease-fire declared by President Duarte “took the initiative” from the military, while peace talks, an amnesty and the return of rebel civilian leaders were political gains for the guerrillas.

Ponce said that the guerrillas have been flexing their military muscles in the wake of the peace plan. He said November was the worst month for sabotage in five years.

“Sabotage is up 75% throughout the east,” Ponce said.

Last year, in addition to their usual attacks on export crops, bridges, the telephone and electrical systems, guerrillas hit a large cattle ranch in San Miguel, thereby spreading sabotage to a new sector of the economy.

Long-Term Damage

U.S. officials conservatively estimate that damage to the Salvadoran economy as a result of the war, including sabotage, totaled $1.5 billion from 1979 through 1986. Some officials say the losses neared $2 billion by the end of 1987.

The increase in sabotage can be seen in damage to the electrical system. The U.S. Embassy estimates that during all of 1986 the guerrillas caused $17 million in damage to the electrical system, while in just two weeks in November, 1987, the guerrillas blacked out half the country and caused $14 million in damage.

Army casualties also rose in 1987. According to Salvadoran military figures, the army suffered 470 dead and 2,815 wounded through late December. U.S. figures show 597 dead and 3,183 wounded--a 24% increase over the previous year.

The guerrillas do not make their casualty figures public. U.S. and Salvadoran officials say the rebels are able to replace their casualties to maintain the size of their forces.

The guerrillas’ most spectacular attack in 1987 was a March 31 assault on El Paraiso, the main army garrison in the northern province of Chalatenango, which left at least 200 soldiers dead or wounded and much of the facility in ashes.

Garrison Attacks

The Chalatenango assault was costly for the army but did not alter the balance of the war. It followed a series of mid-size attacks on military positions in the previous four months. In May, the rebels launched another bold, but less successful, assault on the army’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco Gotera, the capital of Morazan province.

The army responded in May with sweeping national offensives--called Operations Col. Domingo Monterrosa and Concordia--putting thousands of troops not only in Morazan but in other guerrilla strongholds in Usulutan and Chalatenango provinces and at Guazapa Volcano in central El Salvador.

During the operations, the army made effective use of its helicopters to ferry troops into the guerrilla areas for surprise assaults. On the ground, troops operated in small patrols as their U.S. trainers have been pushing them to do.

The operations apparently stymied the guerrillas’ military initiatives, but the rebels then switched their emphasis to sabotage. When the army moved into their strongholds, the guerrillas dispersed in small units throughout the country, broadening the areas of fighting and sabotage. The rebels carried out seven national transportation stoppages.

Use of Mines

The guerrillas increased their use of command-detonated mines, targeting military convoys. The tactic contributed to the military’s high casualties. At the same time, the rebels reduced their use of land mines, which have killed or wounded scores and possibly hundreds of civilians. U.S. officials say there was a significant drop in both military and civilian casualties from the land mines that the rebels themselves manufacture.

The guerrillas say they spent the last year developing and improving “popular artillery”--homemade G-3 rifle grenades, 40-millimeter and 81-millimeter mortars and other explosives. They say they will aim new grenades they have made at the sky in an attempt to neutralize the use of helicopters that have been vital to the Salvadoran army’s progress, as they have for the Sandinista Army in neighboring Nicaragua.

The Salvadoran armed forces have 63 helicopters that provide firepower, troop mobility and quick medical evacuation. Their use in the last three years has forced the guerrillas to operate in small groups, limiting the number of large-scale attacks they could carry out. The rebel operations were generally limited to the nighttime, when helicopters are ineffective.

Guerrilla leaders said this year that they plan to use improved artillery and the militia to launch larger, longer military attacks that continue into the daytime. If they are able to do so, it would present a new military challenge for the armed forces at a time when they also will be called on to protect national elections.

Rebels Oppose Elections

The guerrillas oppose the March mayoral and Legislative Assembly elections and next year’s presidential elections. In previous years, they have burned voter registration cards and sabotaged election sites.

Some of the other U.S.-supplied technology appears to have been less effective than the helicopters. Military observers say that the army has learned to track guerrillas through their radio communications but that the guerrillas have learned to use radio communications to throw the army off their track by planting a transmission in one area while moving a column through another.

Twice before the New Year’s Eve party, Salvadoran A-37 jets bombed the mountains surrounding Perquin, apparently trying to prevent a rebel concentration. The night after the party, a C-130 reconnaissance aircraft made half a dozen passes over town.

A guerrilla leader who goes by the name Gustavo made light of the army’s superior equipment. “This war is won with men, not weapons,” he said.

Col. Ponce agreed. He said the army plans to step up its civic action campaigns to win support by distributing food and clothes and embarking on public projects. But, with a look of concern, he added that the next few months of election campaigning and continued drought pose more problems for the army.

“Society is going to be more divided,” he said, “and there is going to be more hunger.”