Salvadoran Rebels Hand Peasants a Tough Ultimatum: Join Us or Else

Year after year, Pedro Garcia Marquez tended his crops, cared for a few cattle and clung to his land. He did not think about whether existence was hard or not--it just was, and he accepted life as it came.

But then last month, El Salvador’s civil war intruded on Garcia Marquez’s seemingly endless pattern of peasant existence. He and more than 100 other residents of his tiny village were told that their crops, cattle, land and even their lives no longer were theirs. They had to leave or die.

Garcia Marquez and the other residents of Nahuaterique, in Morazan province just below the Honduran border in one of the remotest areas of El Salvador, found that neither neutrality nor even benign coexistence with one side or the other of the nearly eight-year-old conflict protected them from the hard realities of a nation they hardly knew existed.

Accused of Collaborating

The leftist guerrillas who have controlled the region for most of the war said that Garcia Marquez, 32, and 109 other people, including 16 children, some still nursing, had collaborated with the army and must be punished.

At 6 p.m. on Oct. 1, they were called together by leaders of the rebel Farabundo Marti Liberation Front. “Comandante Hernan (the local leader of the FMLN, as the guerrilla group is commonly known) told us that we had better not be there at 6 a.m.,” meaning they had 12 hours to get out of town, Garcia Marquez said in an interview.

To show they were serious, the rebels put a bullet into the head of 18-year-old Isabel Hernandez Mejia for supposedly giving information to government troops based in San Francisco Gotera, about 24 miles south of Nahuaterique.

The interview with Garcia Marquez, who acted as an informal spokesman, and 12 other evicted peasants was conducted near the army barracks here and was overheard at times by military personnel. The accounts were confirmed by independent sources who travel frequently in the region.

Largest Rebel Expulsion

The expulsion was the largest by the guerrillas in several years and resumes a practice that, along with renewed FMLN forced recruitment of fighters, was once acknowledged by the rebels as the greatest mistake they had made during the war.

The move by the FMLN indicates that guerrilla leaders are adopting tactics that are forcing civilians to drop neutrality and actively support their war effort, or lose their land, even their lives.

The tactic also serves as an object lesson to peasants that, as tired as they may be of the war and as enticing as government promises of beneficial programs appear, the guerrillas remain a force that determines their lives.

Ironically, the FMLN actions appear to be adopting a variation of a policy that Army Chief of Staff Rene Emilio Ponce introduced when he was commander of the region that includes Morazan.

Col. Ponce’s approach was to re-establish a military presence in areas once controlled by the guerrillas, provide civic services and tell the inhabitants that now that the government and army were present, there was no excuse for accepting, let alone supporting, the guerrillas.

In other words, make a choice: Side with the army or be considered an FMLN sympathizer or worse, an active supporter.

That is not an attractive prospect. According to church workers and human rights observers, over the last nine months, the army has arrested 242 civilians suspected of aiding guerrillas in Morazan and neighboring San Miguel.

29 Slayings Alleged

These same sources attribute 24 civilian murders to army and government security forces, while another eight were said to have died as a result of indiscriminate military attacks on civilians. Right-wing civilian death squads are blamed for one death.

Now, evidently under the pressure of the Ponce program, the guerrillas are giving the peasants in Morazan the same choice and using some of the same terror tactics.

The FMLN is accused of killing 16 civilians, including six elected mayors. The guerrillas are also believed to be responsible for most of the 13 deaths caused by mines in fields and roads.

The expulsion of the 110 from Nahuaterique provides a textbook example of both sides’ attitudes.

According to Paulina Garcia, a peasant woman who looks 20 years older than the 42 she claims: “The army came through on Sept. 30. It was the first time they had been in Nahuaterique in a year. A lieutenant gave us a political lecture,” saying the village was now under government control.

The ominous nature of the army visit was evident from the fact that the patrol belonged to the Arce Battalion, a hard-edged outfit led by Col. Roberto Staben, a man renowned for his unforgiving attitude toward alleged guerrilla sympathizers.

It was the night after Staben’s men came through that Comandante Hernan rounded up the villagers and threatened the 26 families that made up the 110 exiles.

“They read a list of names of people they said had collaborated,” Garcia Marquez said, “then they read names of people who had not cooperated with them.

“We were told we could only take with us what we could carry. Our crops were almost ready for harvest, we had a few cattle, we had homes. We lost everything.”

So, burdened with a few household possessions, several nursing babies and whatever else they could hoist onto their backs, the group trudged for seven hours over the broken track that passes as a road until they reached a crossing near Perquin, a town constantly fought over by the rebels and the army. At that point, they were given rides by lumber trucks to San Francisco Gotera.

All of the people interviewed denied collaborating.

It appeared unlikely that the villagers could have carried out any serious collaboration or informing. Their homes are in an area controlled by the People’s Revolutionary Army, the most militant and toughest of the five groups that make up the FMLN. The nearest permanent army post is in San Francisco Gotera, several hours away through country usually in rebel hands. And until the Sept. 30 patrol showed up, the village had not seen a soldier in a year, if then.

In fact, according to Garcia Marquez, “We had no government programs, no government people except for one teacher. The guerrillas came through all the time, they lived with us. They didn’t bother us. They bought food from us. We never had any problems.”

Rebels Frustrated

But if Garcia Marquez and the others did not collaborate, it appears from their account and the impressions of sources who move about the northern Morazan region frequently that the guerrillas were frustrated by the peasants’ reluctance to “incorporate”--to shift from neutrality to active support and involvement with the rebels.

In the week or so before the expulsion, FMLN leaders called the villagers together for four days to hear political lectures, the exiles said. “They gave us a special task (as part of the incorporation),” Garcia Marquez said. “They had never done that before.” Garcia Marquez did not say what they were supposed to do, but he clearly did not want to do it.

This reluctance to do more than go along with the FMLN presence also was not new. Although some young men had joined the rebel force years before, the last time the FMLN forcibly recruited fighters, several of Nahuaterique’s men left the area for a year.

It was at that point that Joaquin Villalobos, the leading FMLN figure in Morazan, said the impressment of fighters was the most serious error the rebels had made.

Why they would resume those practices again is unknown, but the Nahuaterique experience indicates that the peasants want nothing to do with it.

“They asked us to incorporate,” Garcia Marquez said, “and when we wouldn’t, they made us get out.”

He also showed signs of plain war weariness and disillusionment. “We just want to work. Since the guerrillas have been there for seven years they kept saying they were going to win. But they haven’t, and we’re tired.”