RETURN TO Morazan : Despite the Still-Raging Civil War, a Brave Band of Salvadoran Refugees Goes Home

THE CONVOY of more than five-score trucks rumbles through the barbed-wire gates of the Colomoncagua refugee camp in Honduras. It is February, 1990, and this is about the 10th group to depart in the past month. Those remaining behind line the roadway for the joyful, albeit tense, leave-taking, waving and wishing good fortune to loved ones and neighbors; their time to follow will come soon. All face danger and uncertainty. At a time when some troubled countries have moved toward peace, theirs is still a war zone where civilians often lose their lives. But all had decided to take this critical step together.

The great majority of the vehicles’ occupants are women and children. Their sense of expectation, and of strain, mount with every bumpy kilometer along the unpaved road, much of which has been cut specifically for the trip. It is the first time in almost a decade that most of them have been outside the camp’s fenced-in compound; many of the children have never set foot on soil that was not part of the refugee camp. The convoy moves slowly south toward the border, leaving Honduras and exile behind in the choking dust of the Central American dry season. At long last, this group of about 600 refugees is going home--to El Salvador.

They peer from the open-topped trucks as the procession chugs across the mountainous unmarked border and through parched hills now ablaze from recent rocket attacks by gunships. They pass within sight of the bombed-out town of San Fernando and push through the graffiti-glazed, bullet-pocked ruins of Perquin, a once-elegant coffee-growing center. A lone guerrilla sentry, an AK-47 automatic rifle slung from his shoulder, sits in the shade of a pastel storefront and observes with mild interest the column winding through the narrow, cobblestoned streets of this rebel stronghold.

Farther south, past formerly thriving coffee plantations now gone to weeds, the trucks drive by the turnoff to the village of Arambala, once home to more than 1,000 people, now an eerie ghost town, frozen in time. The church of San Bartolo is a caved-in hulk of whitewashed debris, strangled by vegetation; only its bell tower stands. The other structure intact is an unadorned entryway to the municipal cemetery, where the last marked grave is dated 1979--the year in which the war began and the luxury of traditional burials vanished.

Finally, after seven hours of travel, having covered only 30 kilometers, the dust-laden trucks lumber toward their final destination: a new and bustling settlement in a depopulated place called Meanguera, in the northeastern province of Morazan.

Though most of the villages in this part of El Salvador are gone, the people at last have come home.

THOSE IN THE CORTEGE view the region as the promised land, a place where they can start over, this time as a united community, educated and skilled, not as petrified peasants fleeing warfare. “Where do we want to go?” they had chanted jointly on countless occasions before their homecoming. “Meanguera, Morazan!” had been the reply. The resettled zones were selected, refugee leaders say, because the areas are close to the refugees’ places of origin and provide ample arable land. Repeated delays and obstacles--most associated with the continued warfare--had failed to dash their hopes. And, now, with reality finally overtaking the dream, there is a palpable aura of exhilaration as they alight from the trucks beneath the searing winter sun. At the makeshift settlement in Meanguera, busy with construction, the 5,000 who have arrived in previous weeks greet the newcomers. The community band sings ballads of hope as tearful embraces are exchanged. With this group, more than half of the 8,400 returning are home.

“Now that I am back, I feel a sense of tranquility,” says Clemencia Hernandez, at 77 the matriarch of four generations of returning refugees, as she rocks the youngest, 9-month-old Elvin Alexis, in a homespun hammock stretched between two laurel trees. Elvin and two siblings were born in Honduras. The family is originally from a nearby hamlet, perhaps four kilometers away from the resettled zone. “After all this time away, the fear has left me,” she says, her wrinkled hands caressing the youngster’s sleeping body. “I have faith that God will be here again with us.”

More than a decade of civil war has left El Salvador a sad and haunting place. Few families have escaped the conflict unscathed. Most of the estimated 75,000 dead were civilians, as are the returning refugees. The war has wrecked the economy, sparking an exodus of biblical proportions from the densely populated nation--perhaps 5.5 million live in an area slightly larger than Massachusetts. Some 1.5 million are believed to have fled since the combat began, resettling elsewhere in Central America, or escaping to such destinations as Mexico, the United States, Canada and Europe. (Los Angeles has the largest concentration of Salvadoran expatriates, who arrive daily.) Within El Salvador, about half a million are desplazado--displaced by warfare.

Against this dismal backdrop, the convoy that enters Morazan province from Honduras offers some small promise. The refugees and their supporters see their return as a chance for things finally to be different in El Salvador. The exiles returning to Morazan province are the largest--and most singular--group among some 20,000 war refugees who have come back in the past few years. Most are from the northern provinces, including Morazan, which the military deemed sympathetic to the growing guerrilla insurgency. Before 1984, when internal and international pressures led to a few reforms, the army conducted a “scorched-earth” counterinsurgency campaign--bombing, strafing and razing villages in zones where the rebels were active, according to residents, human rights activists and church officials. (Government officials claim that much of the damage was caused by “subversives” or during battles between rebels and soldiers.)

Even now, Salvadoran military and government officials routinely charge the ex-refugees with having guerrilla connections. There have been military attacks in other areas where returning refugees have settled. The people in northern Morazan, while clearly not admirers of the government, express neutrality.

“What we want,” says Carolina Diaz, “is to work for peace in our country.”

A lively, spirited woman of 30, Diaz relates the type of story told with almost-numbing frequency here. On Feb. 22, 1980, while she was away from home, she says, a plainclothes gunman burst into her living room and murdered her mother and sister. The then-embryonic war had already claimed the lives of her two older brothers, who were involved in anti-government protests, she says. She, her father and her son, Alexis, then 4, fled to Honduras; later, she helped guide others over the border.

“I think we all feel a great joy to have come back; back not as refugees but as an independent people who are united and seek to work,” Diaz explains as she sits in the shade of one of the newly constructed dwellings. “Being here as a community makes me remember the great festivals that we had in my village. The boys played football on the weekends and everyone watched and the vendors would sell fruit drinks and ices. Maybe someday it will be like that for the kids here.”

Repatriates now reside in a score of communities where the war continues to rage. Northern Morazan, like other areas of conflict, is still a guerrilla stronghold. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN, as it is known by its Spanish acronym) patrols openly and claims it bases its clandestine broadcasts of Radio Venceremos in the province, which is named after a 19th-Century champion of a united Central America.

Negotiations have resumed between the government and the rebel front; a series of talks have been held in Mexico, Venezuela and other countries in recent months. There are some hopes for a cease-fire before the end the year, but currently the fighting continues, the civilian death toll mounts, and residents live with the constant threat of another major rebel offensive, like the one that cost several thousand lives last November. There is no government but the military north of the Rio Torola, which bisects the province. The bridge spanning the river, a lifeline to the area, lies in a twisted heap, the victim of guerrilla sabotage, a symbol of the area’s apartness, and its ruin.

Despite the realities of war, the refugees exude confidence. United, they are a different people from the helpless campesinos who fled their country in terror. In Honduras, the exiles achieved an extraordinary degree of self-sufficiency and organization. They created communal farms and a wide array of factories and workshops, producing everything from clothing and shoes to furniture and kitchenware. Cadres of international volunteers taught them a variety of skills. The literacy rate zoomed from 15% in 1980 to 85% in a decade, and soon the camp was full of health workers, midwives, teachers, tailors and shoemakers.

Their ability to overcome such great odds has left many hopeful that their mission will succeed, even within the grim tableau that is El Salvador. “If anyone can do it, I think these people can,” says Father Dennis Leder, a Jesuit from New Jersey who was the community’s parish priest for the past four years in Honduras. Leder spoke after celebrating an open-air Sunday-morning Mass in the settlement. “For most of us, the idea of sacrifice is something very banal,” he says. “But here, sacrifice cost these people nine years of their lives; it cost the lives of their loved ones. There’ll be ways of surmounting the difficulties, and I believe they will find them.”

Their accomplishments have not gone unnoticed by those in power: Both sides in the war have attempted to score propaganda points from the resettlement.

“We believe that the conditions that provoked the flight of these fellow countrymen have disappeared,” Vice President Francisco Merino Lopez stated during an interview at the ornate presidential palace in San Salvador. “The El Salvador that these people knew of 9 or 10 years ago is no longer the same El Salvador. There has been a process of democratization. . . . The armed forces are more and more professional.”

But the war is never far away. Children in the resettled area quickly learn to recognize the percussion of bombs dropped by Salvadoran military A-37 Dragonfly jets, overflights by fast-moving reconnaissance aircraft, the whoosh of Gatling guns and rockets, the crackle of automatic-weapons fire from ground-based troops. Rumors frequently sweep through the community warning of impending offensives by the army or the guerrillas. In February, rebels encamped nearby requested through intermediaries that residents respect a curfew, apparently necessitated by evening movements of insurgent troops.

Even with the air of optimism, many villages look like the aftermath of a holocaust. In Perquin, townsfolk inhabit the skeletons of adobe homes. The gaping remains of the once-graceful city hall are scrawled over with the often-bloodcurdling graffiti of two armies, particularly the proclamations bearing the names of crack Salvadoran military units that have occupied the town. “Great Mother Death” screeches one message scribbled on a wall that appears to be spattered with blood. Nearby, someone has drawn a skull-and-crossbones, an arrow piercing the skull. “No sacrifice is too great for our motherland,” states a slogan penned next to the logo of the military’s elite Atlacatl Batallion. Military posters offer bounties to FMLN fighters who turn in their weapons--almost $300 for AK-47s, $200 for rocket launchers, $140 for U.S.-made M-16 rifles, the most common armament. “Your rights will be respected,” the poster advises. The guerrillas, meantime, urge soldiers to escape “humiliation” and “exploitation” and join the rebels. “We will fight together against the rich,” the FMLN proclaims.

IT WASN’T UNTIL early last year that the refugees’ leaders seriously considered repatriation. The exiles were tired of living under the supervision of often-antagonistic Honduran soldiers vigilant against FMLN infiltration. After the election of the rightist Alfredo Cristiani to the presidency of El Salvador in 1989, the refugees decided that it was pointless to expect the political climate to improve. In June, 1989, a decision was made to return. All went back voluntarily.

“If we’re going to die, we’d rather die in our own land, with honor,” says Jose Hernandez, 62. “(In the camp) we were like birds in a cage. Even a cage of gold is still a cage,” says Hernandez, who cares for the herd of goats that were his charges in Honduras.

His task is one of countless responsibilities in the returned exiles’ communal society. Committees, representing such broad needs as farming, building and shoe-making, orchestrate the different projects; residents choose or are assigned their tasks based on skill and interest. The group has ambitious plans to set up farming collectives and a network of free schools, clinics and day-care centers. They want to create high-volume factories where goods--such as shoes, clothing and hammocks--will be manufactured for their own use and for trade. This from a people who didn’t use money during most of the last decade. Advocating free-market principles, they say they will sell to the military and guerrillas alike.

“We have a lot to do,” says Andres Antonio Amaya, 47, who spoke as he sought his belongings from a mountain of crates, furniture and other items trucked over from Honduras. “The experience of the camp has transformed me,” he says, adding that he hopes to develop the sewing and tailoring skills he learned in Honduras. “There is a great satisfaction in work.”

Whether the refugees will be able--even permitted--to succeed remains a central question. They face enormous obstacles, key among them the feeding and maintenance of a community in an area completely lacking infrastructure. The region has no good roads, no running water, no electric power and no telephone service. The United Nations and various international relief organizations have pledged to help, but they cannot do it all. The U.N. did pick up the $1-million tab for the large-scale repatriation, a relatively inexpensive price for transportation, land and road clearing and start-up funds of $50 for each adult, $25 for each child. Until crops can be harvested, the resettled villagers rely on donated food.

Publicly, the Salvadoran government has vowed to cooperate and has even offered to reconstruct the bridge spanning the Rio Torola, a critical supply link. But the war has left little surplus for new projects in this nation of blown-up bridges, downed power lines and fallow fields. And, privately, officials of the Salvadoran government and military--along with U.S. authorities--express considerable wariness about the refugees, viewing their return as part of a master plan by the rebels to increase logistic support.

“We know they (the returning exiles) are influenced by the subversives,” Lt. Col. Omar Arturo Vaqueramo Quintanilla says on a February afternoon as he reviews new recruits in the plaza of San Francisco Gotera. Located 25 kilometers south of Meanguera, it is the provincial capital of Morazan and the base of all military operations. The military wanted the refugees to resettle in more secure zones south of Rio Torola, but the exiles insisted on going back to their places of origin.

The colonel stands ramrod straight observing maneuvers taking place in front of the storybook century-and-a-half-old church, incongruously situated next to the squat, camouflage-green headquarters. The military structure is topped with a massive satellite dish and emblazoned with the motto: “No mission is impossible.” The plaza area is itself a military zone; edgy troops stand behind piled-up sandbags. “These people are masses,” Vaqueramo says of the returned refugees. “The masses are easily swayed. We, too, can influence them.”

The following day, in a battered home in the rebel stronghold of Jocoaitique, a heavily damaged town perhaps 35 kilometers north of San Francisco, three FMLN representatives meet with a reporter and deny any control over the returnees. “There’s no question that the government will resort to increasing repression of these people, charging that they are linked to the ‘terrorists,’ meaning us,” says Rosendo, a 40-year-old guerrilla leader, over a cup of warm chocolate and a plate of cookies.

In fact, other resettlements have faced serious problems, including delays in receiving documentation, shipments of food, building materials and other supplies that soldiers confiscated, claiming the goods were destined for the rebels. Then there is the fighting. On Feb. 11, Salvadoran gunships launched a rocket attack against suspected guerrilla positions in a resettled community in the province of Chalatenango. Five civilians, four of them children, were killed.

“The military always makes false allegations that dislocated people have collaborated with the guerrillas,” says Reina Isabel Hernandez, a 29-year-old San Salvador resident and former refugee. She heads the Committee of Refugees and Displaced Persons of El Salvador. “The motive (of the military) is always to justify acts of violence against these people.”

She spoke following a Mass in San Salvador honoring the five dead civilians. The service was held in a chapel named for assassinated former Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, on the grounds of the Jesuit-run University of Central America Jose Simeon Canas. The chapel is perhaps 100 feet from the site where, in November, armed men murdered six Jesuit scholars, a housekeeper and her daughter. Among the priests killed was Segundo Montes, the prolific chronicler of the Salvadoran exodus, who championed the cause of the refugees in Honduras. In March, the settlement in Meanguera was named in his honor.

AT SEGUNDO MONTES, work begins before dawn. Women grind U.S.-donated corn and fashion tortillas in huge kitchen areas, men saw wood, children carry bamboo to be used in building. Everywhere, people attempt to reconstruct their lives.

“I have always worked with maguey, just as my father did before me,” explains Santos Perez Hernandez, 58, as he scouts the banks of the Rio Torola in search of sites for cultivating the plant, whose fleshy leaves yield sisal, a fiber used to make rope and hammocks. (The plant is better known for tequila, which is distilled from it.) Although Perez worked in a shoe factory in the camp, he is eager to return to farming and teach the skills to his sons, age 14 and 11. “In camp, the young ones didn’t have a chance to learn to farm; we only had a little land,” Perez says, showing a visitor the knife used for cutting maguey.

The repopulated zone of northern Morazan has been divided into four separate communities consisting of about 2,100 persons each. The settlements are spread over a 10-kilometer stretch straddling the area’s main north-south road. Until permanent homes can be built--wood and other materials are shipped from the camp in Honduras--residents have been living in temporary structures fashioned from whatever is available. Initially, organizers decided that building dwellings and a water-supply system was priority. But a three-month delay--caused by the rebel offensive last November--set back plans to plant crops, mostly corn and beans, by spring. “It has been more complicated than we thought,” acknowledges Aquilino Hernandez, a 50-year-old father of seven who is one of the resettlement planners. “Yes, we need help now, but we feel that in five years we’ll be a self-sufficient community. Here, we are obliged to start all over again.”

The first months back in El Salvador also have been a time to renew acquaintances and visit old haunts. Sometimes the reminders are less than joyful.

On their first Sunday back in El Salvador, Jose Isaias Ventura, 47, and his wife, Maxima Lainez, 35, return to Jocoaitique to view the remains of the mud-brick home from which they and their five children had fled in late 1980. “Of course, it’s a great sadness for me to see this place in such condition,” Ventura says as he steps through the former living quarters; the roof is gone, the beams charred and the floor overgrown with weeds. Residents later tell him that soldiers had destroyed all the houses in the area. Coffee plants and avocado trees, once his father’s pride, now grow untended. All that remains intact is a stone used to grind corn. “One remembers where one used to work, to play with the children. . . .”

Ventura recognizes that he is lucky--he survived. A younger brother was shot dead in October, 1980, as he worked in a nearby field of maguey, Ventura says; a gunship sprayed the area with bullets. His cousin, Cleofus Martinez, had the misfortune to live almost alongside the main road, allowing him little time to escape an army patrol. “They took him away one day,” Ventura says of his cousin. “We never found him again.”

The search for the missing drew Roberto Argueta, who has spent much of the last decade in Guatemala, to the new settlement. Argueta held out a slim hope that his wife, Dolores, the couple’s daughter and his mother might be among those returning from Honduras. A truck driver, Argueta said he had last seen his family 10 years ago, when he left his village to haul a load of bananas. When he returned, he says, he found the village destroyed and all the inhabitants gone. “Really, I have very little hope that they may still be alive,” Argueta says, his tear-filled eyes betraying his despair. “I don’t know what kind of animals would kill helpless people. I just can’t comprehend it.’

These horrific stories of the war are recounted over and over by the returning refugees and their relatives in northern Morazan. Probably the most infamous incident in the region occurred in December, 1981, when Salvadoran troops attached to the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion (later implicated in the 1989 murder of the Jesuits in San Salvador) killed at least 733 civilians in and around the hamlet of El Mozote, according to Americas Watch, the human rights monitoring group. A few weeks later, journalists made their way on foot into isolated El Mozote and found the carnage. Inside the church sacristy, wrote Alma Guillermoprieto in the Washington Post on Jan. 7, 1982, “the stench was overpowering, and countless bits of bones--skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column--poked out of the rubble.”

One of the few known survivors of the massacre, Rufina Amaya, returned to El Salvador in January from the refugee camp. Amaya, an imposing, strong-willed woman of 48, lost her four children, aged 8 months to 9 years, in the massacre. She managed to slip away while she was among a group of women being herded into a storefront to be shot. After crawling out of the village, she says, she lived in caves and in the brush for a year before making her way to Honduras and safety.

Amaya, who has become a kind of oral historian of the massacre, says she has no fear about being back in her homeland. “I feel that the blood of my children will be a strength for us all,” says Amaya, who has a 4-year-old daughter, Marta, born in Honduras. “We want peace and liberty in El Salvador. We know the difficulties continue. But my children were killed, and it would be cowardice on my part if I lacked the strength to confront those problems.”