Nation Suffers Battle Fatigue : Salvador Rebels Now Say Only Path Is Peace

Salvadoran guerrilla commander Joaquin Villalobos, who has built Latin America’s strongest rebel army and steered it through nearly a decade of civil war, said Saturday that he now believes the way to make revolutionary change is through peace.

Villalobos said that the rebels of the Farabundo National Liberation Front realize they cannot achieve their revolutionary goals alone and, instead, must ally themselves with centrist political sectors.

The guerrillas’ top military strategist and one who long held that a popular insurrection in El Salvador was inevitable, Villalobos acknowledged the battle fatigue that exists in that country now.

“After 10 years of war, the only thing that can unite the nation and make use of all its energy to transform society is peace,” Villalobos said.

Can’t Do It Alone

“Can the FMLN (guerrillas) do it alone? No, we can’t. It’s impossible. Did we used to think we could do it alone? Yes, but everything advances,” he said.

Villalobos and commander Schafik Jorge Handal spoke in a wide-ranging interview Saturday, a day after the guerrillas’ first peace talks with the 3 1/2-month-old government of President Alfredo Cristiani.

The rebels presented the right-wing government with an offer to lay down their arms and organize a political party in exchange for sweeping reforms of El Salvador’s military, system of justice and constitution. They want a new attorney general, Supreme Court and legislative assembly.

Villalobos, 38, heads the Popular Liberation Forces, largest of five armed groups in the Farabundo Marti front. He left his stronghold in El Salvador’s Morazan province almost a year ago to begin the rebels’ current initiative for negotiations. He said that months of consultations with leaders and politicians of other countries contributed to the front’s peace plan.

The two commanders said that a series of factors, such as the international move to end armed struggles and the arrival of the more-pragmatic Bush Administration after eight years of President Ronald Reagan also influenced their decision to push for negotiations.

The commanders said their key demand for ending the war is a dramatic reduction in the size and power of the Salvadoran armed forces to ensure civilian rule.

“We are asking for the demilitarization of the country as a way of seeking revolutionary change to achieve the absolute predominance of civilian society. If this had been suggested six years ago, it would never have occurred to us to accept it. There were too many interventionist policies in the world,” Villalobos said.

The guerrillas’ proposal already has been attacked by conservative army officers and leaders of Cristiani’s Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena party) who believe that the rebels cannot be trusted.

Villalobos and Handal emphasized that they are not calling for prosecution of the military for war crimes or for the killings of thousands of students, peasants, church workers and union leaders in the early 1980s by so-called “death squads” trying to wipe out the growing rebel movement.

Won’t Relent on One Case

But the rebels insist that the one case that must be prosecuted is the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero of San Salvador.

“Society has to have a clear example that this (death squads) has been dismantled,” Villalobos said.

Retired Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson, a founder and power behind the Arena party, is widely believed to have ordered Romero’s assassination and was openly accused of it by former President Jose Napoleon Duarte.

U.S. officials have expressed the belief that D’Aubuisson is untouchable. Asked if the rebels mean that D’Aubuisson must be tried, Villalobos answered, “How can you have democracy when the head of the death squads is there?”

At the same time, however, the rebel leaders defended a series of killings by the rebels this year, including that of Atty. Gen. Roberto Garcia Alvarado, who Villalobos said was slain because he had blocked prosecution of the Romero case.

“Because of his defense of death squads, he was a legitimate target,” Villalobos said.

Handal, on the other hand, said the rebels “erred” when they killed Francisco Peccorini, a Salvadoran-American dual citizen and ideologue of the extreme right.

“It sent the wrong message that we execute people for what they think and not for what they do, when we are willing to respect all of those who do not think as we do,” Handal said.

The commanders maintained that the rebels had nothing to do with the killing of Jose Antonio Rodriguez Porth, Cristiani’s minister of the presidency who was shot to death in front of his home last June. They believe his death and that of another rightist ideologue, Edgar Chacon, were the result of an internecine battle among far-rightists.

Asked what guarantees the guerrilla peace plan offers the government against future rebel attacks, Handal said, “The guarantee we’re offering is that we are going to disarm.”

But first, Villalobos said, the rebels must go about the job of uniting with other political groups to push for their plan. The rebels believe that sectors of the military and even of Cristiani’s Arena party will work with them to settle the war. And with the Arena party in power, they believe that a majority of Salvadorans want change.

“If in 1980 we had been able to elaborate a policy that could have united the nation, I suspect we would be having this conversation somewhere else,” Villalobos said in the lobby of a Mexico City hotel.

“But we made serious errors. We didn’t know how to approach sectors of the army and capitalists. The payment for that grave error has been 10 years of war,” he said. “Now what we are saying is that we are not going to miss this second opportunity.”