Yet Fear Still Stalks Villages : A Salvador City Finds War Is More Remote

The lights work here almost every day, and the people get water when they turn on the taps. The local movie house shows films most nights, and young boys and girls stroll hand in hand through quiet streets. It seems to be a normal and unremarkable way of life.

And in many other areas of the country, life is similar. People drive from San Salvador, the capital, to San Miguel, the nation’s third-largest city, over a paved highway that has four lanes much of the way. In San Vicente, the central market is clogged with shoppers on any afternoon.

But that very normality is quite remarkable. It represents major changes in the flow of affairs in a part of El Salvador that has seen some of the worst disruptions of life resulting from 8 1/2 years of civil war.

Hulks Littered Highway

During the first half of the conflict, for instance, the San Salvador-San Miguel highway, part of the Pan American Highway system, was largely dirt, strewn with mines and littered with burned-out bus and truck hulks from rebel attacks.

And Gotera, as the residents call this small city in the northwest province of Morazan, was for years virtually engulfed by violence. On one side, some of the leftist rebels’ toughest forces made any semblance of ordinary life a mockery by destroying utility facilities, mining roads and staging nightly raids on the city. On the other side were the army and government-sponsored death squads, which cowed residents of the city and nearby areas with murders, kidnapings and threats against anyone even vaguely thought to oppose the government.

In those days, only fear walked Gotera’s streets in the dark.

But if the situation in Gotera today shows how much El Salvador’s conflict has changed since 1982, the situation elsewhere merely reaffirms the French saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Linger Over Coffee

While people here can now linger over coffee in the market-square cafes or even catch a daily flight to San Salvador, in the countryside life also goes on in its normal way--only normality is measured differently.

There, elected mayors are hauled from their homes and slain by guerrillas seeking to give an object lesson to those who might support the government--or they disappear forever after being seized by army troops for “questioning” about their alleged support for the rebels.

And if Gotera is not the site of pitched battles, villages a few miles away are the scenes of bloody clashes between rebels and soldiers. In such areas, the only change since 1982 has been in the body count.

A 45-minute drive from Gotera over six miles of incredibly bad roads lies the farming village of Lolotiquillo, where the sullen expressions on the residents’ faces match the forlorn quality of the abandoned church and the tumbledown city hall.

In Lolotiquillo, the electric lights are useless and residents can barely remember when they last had running water--conditions that are the results of guerrilla attacks. But the village has a bus line to Gotera, a lifeline for those with jobs in the provincial capital and for farmers and artisans who sell their goods in the larger city.

The bus route as well as a distribution system for government aid were organized by Dolores Molinas, a member of the Christian Democratic Party, who was elected mayor by a wide margin last March.

Last month in the hours after midnight, according to his wife, Maldah Molinas, a group of men surrounded their tiny farmhouse about 3 miles from the village and took her husband away. Molinas has not been seen since, but Radio Venceremos, a clandestine radio station operated by guerrillas of the the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, reported that he had been killed for collaborating with the government.

“He never killed anyone. He was not evil,” his wife said during an interview in the twilight shadows of her dirt-floored, two-room house. “He just lived off his work. . . . The only thing he did was organize distribution of food--that was the only thing he did.”

An Object Lesson

What happened to Molinas, however was intended to be an object lesson. A few days before he was kidnaped, an army patrol stopped in Lolotiquillo, gathered the townspeople in the square and told them that the guerrillas had been defeated and that the people were safe from further attacks.

The mayor’s kidnaping and disappearance served as a signal to the people that the army’s words were empty.

The rebels’ threats often work. Of the 27 mayors in Morazan, one--Molinas--is missing, and only seven have the courage to live in their towns. The rest stay at Gotera under the protection of Lt. Col. Roman Berrera, commander of the local army forces.

One of those is Magdale Nolobo, a 54-year-old carpenter who was elected mayor of San Isidro as the candidate of the Nationalist Republican Alliance, a rightist political party commonly called Arena. The Arena party has been accused in the past of sponsoring death squads and seeking to fight guerrilla terror with its own terror.

San Isidro is a scattered hamlet of about 2,000 people that perches on the side of a mountain overlooking some of the most beautiful valleys in the country. Just 18 miles northwest of Gotera, it is almost unreachable except by foot or, with difficulty, in a vehicle with four-wheel drive. Its isolation makes it almost impossible to defend against the mobile bands of guerrillas who effectively control the area.

On Sept. 3, guerrillas entered San Isidro about 4 p.m. and took over, Nolobo said in an interview conducted in the Gotera municipal building, across the street from the local army base.

“They searched the town until they reached my house about 8 o’clock,” he said. “I wasn’t there, but they told my wife they were looking especially for me because all Arena officials” are to be killed.

Placida Martinez, Nolobo’s common-law wife, said that her husband fled after the guerrillas had come at night and left leaflets threatening him and any others who work for the government.

“He was the one who brought water down from the (nearby) falls to the town,” she said. “My husband wanted to resign, but the government wouldn’t let him. He left, and I told him not to come back unless he resigned.”

When asked about this, Nolobo sighed and answered: “I can’t go back. They would kill me.”