Dilemma for the Military : Salvador Civilians Learn to Survive in a Rebel Area

Dolores Vigil, a gray-haired country midwife, delights in telling about the time she stood up to a powerful army colonel.

According to Dona Lola, as she is called, Col. Mauricio Vargas would not let townsfolk cross the river to Perquin with food donated by the Roman Catholic Church because he suspected that they would give it to guerrillas. She insisted that the food was for civilians.

“ ‘Colonel,’ I said, ‘don’t you know the Bible commands us to feed the hungry?’ ” Dona Lola recalled. “He got mad and insulted me, so I said, ‘Colonel, you can say anything you want and I can’t do a thing about it, because you’re a colonel.’ He signed the permit for the food.”

At 45, Dona Lola is spunky and self-confident. Like many of the peasants in Perquin, she has been emboldened by eight years of civil war and near-constant contact with leftist guerrillas. Dona Lola sees herself as a civilian standing up for her rights. But to the military, she is part of the sea of support that has enabled the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas to persevere against an army that has quadrupled in size with massive American aid.

The People’s Revolutionary Army, one of five groups in the Farabundo Marti Front, dominates the mountainous northern half of Morazan province from the Torola River to the Honduran border. Although the Salvadoran military frequently launches operations in the area, the crumbling, half-deserted town of Perquin is known as the guerrilla capital.

With army authorization to cross the Torola and guerrilla permission to stay in town, three reporters spent five days in Perquin around the New Year’s holiday for a rare look at life in one of the country’s most battered war zones.

About 25,000 peasants remain in the guerrilla territory, about 3,000 of them in Perquin and surrounding villages. They have done so despite years of bombings, ground combat and army psychological campaigns.

Perquin is surrounded by spectacular countryside, where sunrises erupt behind cone-shaped peaks and ridges of forested mountains provide safe haven for guerrillas. The town is only 20 miles by paved road from the provincial capital of San Francisco Gotera, but it remains a separate reality.

Residents are connected to the rest of El Salvador by three television sets and three trucks for transportation. Guerrilla pamphlets and army propaganda abound, while newspapers arrive dated and dog-eared when someone remembers to bring them to town. Guerrilla broadcasts on the clandestine Radio Venceremos are commonly heard in the early morning and evenings.

Residents have no telephone service, electricity or potable water. Guerrillas chased the mayor out of town in 1982 and blew up the town hall; around the same time, the army bombed other central buildings, whose broken walls are scarred from a continuing graffiti war.

Refugee Inhabitants

Most of the original residents of Perquin fled years ago to safer ground in Honduras, other Salvadoran cities or the United States. The new residents are refugees from the war-whipped countryside, many of them too poor to leave the province. A majority cannot read or write, but they have other skills more suited to war: They can identify the make of an airplane by the sound of its engine and know where an A-37 air force jet will drop its bombs by the angle at which it flies.

Like the rebels, many of the civilians in northern Morazan are survivors of army massacres and search-and-destroy missions that leveled their villages during the early years of the war. Some turned to the guerrillas after the El Mozote massacre in December, 1981, when army troops killed hundreds of men, women and children and burned their bodies in nine villages, including El Mozote.

There has been a gradual “humanization” of the conflict since those years. The military no longer bombs villages or massacres civilians; guerrillas avoid combat in towns. But still the peasants live with a bitter war of spies, house searches, expulsions, occasional executions and arrests.

Col. Vargas, who commanded the army garrison in San Francisco Gotera for two years, does not recall a confrontation with Dona Lola over food, although he bristles at the mention of her name.

Leader in Many Ways

In addition to her work as a midwife, Dona Lola is a health practitioner and leader of a women’s church group organized by radical Roman Catholic priests.

“She never came down from Perquin, because if she had I would have ordered her capture,” Vargas said. “She’s responsible for a lot of the political ideas those people have.”

The civilians pose a dilemma for the military. The army knows that the guerrillas could not have survived so long without civilian help, and so it views the peasants with deep suspicion. But to break the unspoken alliance, the army must court the peasants they distrust. It needs its civilian supporters in Perquin while preventing others from aiding the guerrillas--goals that frequently seem at odds.

“They sometimes do one thing with their hands and another with their feet,” one farmer said. For example, he said, the army distributed food to villagers in Jocoaitique last November in a “civic action” to win support. But the soldiers then detained two women in the village and hauled them away in the truck that brought the food. The women were storekeepers accused of supplying guerrillas.

Food, Supplies at Issue

Food and supplies are a key issue in Perquin. The army maintains an outpost at the river where soldiers examine all goods headed north and limit quantities according to family size.

Vargas defends the practice, saying that once he found an abandoned guerrilla camp in northern Morazan with 16 jugs of cooking oil that had been donated to civilians by the Red Cross. At another rebel camp, soldiers discovered bags of sulfate fertilizer that had been used by guerrillas to make land mines.

Residents counter that the army restricts them unfairly, particularly in such items as shoes, batteries and soap.

“They only let us bring three balls of soap a month because they say we will give it to the guerrillas to make bombs,” said Armilda Amaya, 30. “We tell them that up here we use soap to wash.”

Army Forced to Turn Back

The army launched a seven-month operation in northern Morazan last year to rout guerrillas from their mountain bases and separate them from civilians. The army tried to bring food to Perquin in a civic action during the operation, but rebels shot at the truck, forcing it to turn back.

Shortly after, residents said, the new commander in San Francisco Gotera retaliated by refusing to allow passage of another shipment of food from the Catholic Church.

At the beginning of the operation, soldiers from the special counterinsurgency Arce Battalion captured nine townspeople whom they accused of being guerrilla nurses. Jose Santos Argueta, 38, a member of the Council for Communal Betterment, was one of the nine taken from his home late one night during Easter week.

“They said we had to tell them who had taken the guerrillas’ medical course,” Argueta said. “The (guerrillas) had offered us a first-aid course, but no one took it because they were afraid the army would think we were guerrilla nurses.”

Five of those detained were released the following day and the other four were taken to the garrison in San Miguel for several days before being handed over to the Red Cross.

Three Civilians Killed

Residents said that three civilians were killed during the operation and a fourth lost his leg to a mine. Two of the victims--a man and a boy--died in cross-fire between the villages of El Carrizal and Sabanetas, and a third was found dead by the side of the dirt road from Perquin to San Fernando.

Noe Trejos, 21, of San Fernando was shot to death in November, residents said. They said the farmer had left Perquin at dusk against the advice of townspeople who say it is dangerous to go out after dark when the army is in the area. Trejos never made it home and residents blamed the army for his death.

“We don’t believe that he died in cross-fire,” coffee farmer Oscar Chica said.

The army clearly has its informants in Perquin. Some civilians said they stayed away from a rebel New Year’s Eve party in town because they feared that the army would learn who had been dancing with the guerrillas. Guerrilla commanders hurried out of town long before the dance ended.

“The army probably already has heard we are here,” guerrilla commander Joaquin Villalobos said before leaving the gathering of 800 guerrillas.

Rebels Expelled 2 Women

Residents said the guerrillas expelled two young women from Perquin in August for having spent too much time with soldiers while the army was in town. They said the women, both in their 20s, were told they would be allowed to return if they improved their behavior.

In January, 1987, the guerrillas killed a truck driver accused of being an army spy. Residents said the guerrillas held a meeting of townspeople to explain why Jorge Hernandez would be executed.

“We spoke up for him, but there was nothing we could do,” said Virgilio Gomez, 33. “They said he admitted it.”

Human rights groups have condemned the Farabundo Marti Front for conducting summary executions of spies in violation of the Geneva Conventions. In its report entitled “The Civilian Toll,” Americas Watch said last year that the rebels executed 45 people in 1986. The Catholic Church human rights office reported 29 such executions in 1987.

The U.S.-based Americas Watch reported that at least three multiple executions carried out by the rebels in 1986 took place in territory controlled by the People’s Revolutionary Army.

‘We Would Lose Support’

Asked about the Hernandez execution, a rebel leader called Gustavo said that a civilian spy is killed if the information he provided led directly to the death of combatants or other civilians. He did not say how the guerrillas proved someone is a spy but insisted that the killing “is not done on mere suspicion. We cannot afford to be wrong, or we would lose support.”

Vargas insists that support is maintained through terror and political brainwashing, but on the surface at least, the civilians and guerrilla combatants appeared comfortable with each other.

The guerrillas stay on the outskirts of town or in abandoned houses near the central square. Like the civilians, most of the guerrillas encountered during five days were peasants from Morazan province. Many said they joined the guerrillas after family members were killed by the army.

One of those who lost family in the El Mozote massacre is a jovial, round-bellied guerrilla called Benito, who said he was a catechist when he joined a leftist peasant league in 1975, five years before the war started. He said he was motivated by the extreme poverty of the peasants to fight for a revolution, and that his children now also are armed.

Serves as Liaison

Benito is a political leader of the People’s Revolutionary Army who serves as a liaison between the combatants and civilians. When the civilian government has an issue to take up with the guerrillas, they go to Benito.

The governing body of Perquin and surrounding villages is the 18-member Council for Communal Betterment, elected in July, 1986, to replace the mayors evicted by the guerrillas.

Council members maintain that they are independent from the rebels and most have fought for the right to be recognized as civilians by the army.

“It used to be a crime just to live here,” said farmer Chica, who is a member of the council.

Vargas calls the council politically “ambiguous. . . . I can’t say they are impartial. I also cannot say they are controlled by the FMLN.”

That ambiguity may be intentional. Captured rebel documents from 1986 outline “two-faced popular power,” a strategy proposing that organizations maintain their legality with the government, while the guerrillas influence them politically.

Confronted Town Council

During his tenure in Morazan through mid-1987, Vargas confronted the town council over a tax that it imposed on loggers.

“The army realized we were charging the tax and said we weren’t doing it for communal projects, but for the FMLN,” recalled Chica. “We had to talk with Col. Vargas to legalize the tax. He told us to open a bank account and we did, to prove we were not doing any illegal work.”

Chica, 28, said the council uses the money for communal water and reforestation projects and for celebrations, such as on the town’s patron saint day. He said the council pays four teachers, to supplement the eight teachers paid for by the Ministry of Education, the sole service provided by the government in Perquin.

Vargas said he does not know if the council gives money to the guerrillas. He nonetheless views the council’s tax collection and bank account as gains for the government, because previously the guerrillas collected money from the loggers themselves.

‘Respect for Legal Authority’

“The council opened the bank account because I said to and that shows respect for a legal authority. They are moving away from a de facto authority and moving closer to a legal authority,” Vargas said.

Vargas failed, however, to get the council to hand over control of the money to the expelled mayor of Perquin, who lives in San Francisco Gotera. According to the council, the mayor refused.

The council members are volunteers who, like most men in Perquin, make a meager living as lumbermen and coffee farmers. They raise small crops of corn, beans and bananas for their families.

Their wives begin work at dawn, fetching water from a communal spring and firewood for the stove. The women care for their poor houses, which are sparsely furnished with hemp hammocks and wood benches. Their sons help in the fields, while their daughters care for younger siblings.

Worry About War’s Effects

Parents say they worry about the effects of the long war on their children. The other day, Chica said, he was disturbed to see his 8-year-old son light a firecracker under a pile of plastic soldiers.

During the rebel New Year’s Eve celebration, little boys huddled together staring with wide-eyed fascination at guerrillas in military formation.

“As a father, I would not like that for my children,” Virgilio Gomez said of the combatants. “But who knows what they will decide to do when they grow up.”

The residents say they see few prospects for an end to the war that has become a way of life. There also is little chance that the civilians will abandon rebel territory that is their home in northern Morazan.

“The war has united us in pain and in happiness,” said Chica.

Added Dona Lola, “We have adapted to the war, and the war has adapted to us.”