San Salvador Slums Reeling Under Attacks

As fighting intensified around guerrilla strongholds in the Salvadoran capital Wednesday, a thunderous explosion shook the roomful of slum dwellers holed up in a Catholic mission called St. Mary of the Poor in Santa Marta.

A rocket-propelled grenade, apparently aimed at a rebel bunker 50 yards away, crashed into the gray, concrete-block shelter, wounding two children and two adults among 150 people already driven from their shacks, witnesses said. The rest evacuated the shelter during a lull in the fighting, waving white flags above their heads, to seek refuge in a nearby parish.

Such harrowing scenes have been played out hour after hour over the past five days in Santa Marta and other poor districts during the worst urban combat of El Salvador’s decade-old civil war. A tour of the capital Wednesday showed just how close the war is hitting home, even amid government assertions of a rebel retreat.

“I’m afraid this is not going to end soon,” said Nelly Campos, a volunteer worker at St. Mary of the Poor. “The (rebels) have lots of collaborators and lots and lots of strength. They are not going to leave here alive.”

Residents of the neighborhood said several bombs fell near their homes from A-37 fighter jets late Tuesday and early Wednesday in an apparent escalation of government air strikes on rebel positions.

Hospitals and morgues reported that 204 people have been killed in the capital, 81 of them civilians, since rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) launched an offensive Saturday. Another 926 civilians have been wounded.

Catholic relief workers said 2,730 people have crowded into eight shelters around the city and thousands more, including uncounted numbers of wounded, are trapped in their neighborhoods by the fighting.

The International Red Cross and the Roman Catholic hierarchy urged both armies Wednesday to call a six-hour cease-fire to allow for evacuation of the wounded. The government rejected the appeal to stop its counteroffensive but promised not to impede relief work.

However, government forces raided one shelter in a Catholic basilica and seized food that a Jesuit-run relief agency was taking to another agency.

Gunfire could be heard from anywhere in this city of 1.5 million people Wednesday. The few private cars and people on the streets carried white flags. Soldiers with grease-painted faces guarded gas stations, and most businesses were shut. Garbage piled up. Wrecks of cars hit by guns and grenades littered the roadsides, and scattered light poles lay bent on the ground.

Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, the army chief of staff, said the rebels have begun retreating from the capital. U.S. Ambassador William Walker said “significant numbers” of the estimated 1,500 guerrillas in town are moving out.

At a briefing in the U.S. Embassy, Walker displayed a map showing rectangular areas of northern and eastern San Salvador where rebels have held sway on each of the past three days. The rectangles on the map grow progressively smaller, from about one-third of the city’s area Monday to one-tenth of it Wednesday.

The broadcast on the guerrilla’s clandestine radio Wednesday did not acknowledge a retreat; nor did it repeat earlier boasts of glorious advances. The broadcast said simply that guerrillas held their ground against government counterattacks.

No letup in the fighting was evident in Santa Marta, in southeastern San Salvador, one of 14 neighborhoods where U.S. officials said the guerrillas were still dug in.

Residents who took refuge at the Catholic mission there told how the fighting has swept in and out of their neighborhood, keeping them in a shifting line of fire.

They said about 50 guerrillas entered Santa Marta late Saturday and asked people to help dig trenches and build barricades to keep the army out.

Santa Marta has always been a zone where the guerrillas move with relative ease. Unemployment is high there and people say they have not benefited from the $3 billion in U.S. economic aid poured into El Salvador over the past decade.

“The guerrillas came (Saturday) and said ‘We’re on your side,’ ” recalled Lucila Cruz Martinez, 48, an itinerant food merchant. “The government has never done anything for the poor. It doesn’t care that we don’t eat. So we collaborated. The guerrillas said this would protect us.”

By Monday, however, the Treasury Police, a branch of the Salvadoran military, had fought its way into Santa Marta and ordered people by megaphone to get out of their homes within 30 minutes.

Two children were slightly wounded by shrapnel when a grenade hit their house just as the half-hour deadline expired, people in the shelter said.

“We gathered the family, wrapped up the baby and ran,” said Cruz Martinez, who took her husband, nine children and six grandchildren to the shelter with about 150 other people. “There was no time to gather any food.”

As she spoke, Cruz Martinez sat barefoot on a concrete floor with her 2-month-old grandson, who floundered on his back staring at the bare ceiling as machine-gun fire rattled from a guerrilla bunker just up the hill. Other children sat stoically against the walls.

The church has provided food in the shelter. But the Treasury Police prevented volunteers from leaving the shelter after the 6 p.m. curfew Monday.

“We told the commander there were children going hungry out there,” said Campos, the volunteer worker. “He told us: ‘Why do they have to eat if they’re going to die anyway?’ ”

Several members of the food brigade said the argument over their mission ended when policemen opened fire at their feet.

The next morning, the police occupied the shelter as a fortress as they opened fire at the guerrillas and drove them away from their own bunker, residents said.

An officer and four policemen were killed in the fighting, according to Father Daniel Sanchez, the neighborhood’s Spanish-born Roman Catholic priest.

Sanchez said the police asked him to help get the bodies out of the battle zone, and the rebels agreed at his behest to call a truce by both sides. But the police refused to halt their own fire and left their dead behind, he said.

Before the policemen retreated Tuesday afternoon, however, they fell into a mistaken-identity fire fight with an army unit in the neighborhood, several residents said. At least 10 civilians died in the cross-fire, Sanchez said.

Bombs began falling on the neighborhood as government forces pulled out, residents said.

“There was a fierce aerial show,” said Father James Barnett, a Catholic priest in nearby Ciudad Credisa. “Fighter planes, jet aircraft and the C-47s with machine guns.”

A Salvadoran resident said the worst bombing came Tuesday at dusk and left “many dead” in Santa Marta. Sanchez said bombardments came 15 minutes after every hour between midnight and 5 a.m. Wednesday.

Some of the thousands of civilians who continued to flee embattled neighborhoods on foot Wednesday blamed the guerrillas for their plight.

“Why didn’t they take Escalon (a rich neighborhood)?” asked Miguel Rivas, 42, a plumber in Zacamil. “Why did they come to a poor area where we already suffer?”