Blood-Soaked Mountainside Calls On Salvadoran Guerrillas to Return

A strange and powerful force draws the scattered people back to this mountainside. Some say it is their own blood within its soil that beckons.

Gloria, a peasant wife and mother, has returned. This is where her parents buried her umbilical cord.

Dimas, a guerrilla commander, has returned. This is where a field doctor buried the bullet-torn piece of intestine that he removed from Dimas using a razor blade for a scalpel.

The northern slope of Guazapa, a 4,500-foot extinct volcano 15 miles north of San Salvador, is the bloodiest parcel of a small nation staggering from 11 years of bloody civil war. The blood Dimas and thousands of other rebels shed on this mountain seems to have consecrated their vow to hold it.

In the 1980s, Guazapa’s earth was scorched, its sons and daughters slain, its denizens turned into hole-dwelling foragers fleeing bombs and bullets.

The refugees are back now to sow and harvest corn and beans. The guerrilla force, which resisted the government’s most concerted offensives, has established itself as a virtual parallel state--providing security, education and health services to those never driven out and those who have returned.

The tenacity with which the guerrillas defended their soil and its proximity to the capital have given the mountain a popular name. In translation: “The arrow stuck in the enemy’s heart.”

The Salvadoran armed forces, backed by the United States, launched the two biggest offensives of the war in March, 1983, and January, 1986. Both were designed to annihilate or rout Guazapa’s insurgents. Up to 10,000 troops, along with the war’s most sustained aerial and artillery bombardments, were thrown against about 1,500 rebels.

Both offensives failed. Today, the mountain and its environs remain guerrilla territory, although government forces still make periodic incursions, usually brief, and drop an occasional bomb.

The only permanent government position near the guerrilla camps sits on the mountain’s highest point, El Roblar peak. A base there defends military radio antennas rebuilt after the guerrillas destroyed them in 1987. Supplies come in by helicopter.

Gloria lives in a village in the shadow of Guazapa repopulated in the past three years by erstwhile refugees. She is the mother of five and the wife and sister of rebel combatants.

“In 1982 and ’83 we lived in almost constant guinda, “ she said. The word guinda describes a common experience of refugees: army-pursued treks of entire local populations, as many as 2,000 people in harried columns. “I had one child in my belly, one tied on my back and another clutching my hand as we ran from one place to another.”

Some of the refugees made their way to U.N. camps in Honduras. Others migrated to the capital, where they lived in squalid shantytowns.

The current administration of President Alfredo Cristiani and the army consider the Guazapa’s local civilian population little more than the rebels’ logistic base and do not like the idea of people going back.

But back they come. With backing from the Roman Catholic Church and international relief-solidarity groups, the refugees overcame government resistance. Several thousand have returned to rebuild their lives in ruined hamlets pocked with bomb craters and hide-out caves.

Joaquin Ramos is one. The aging peasant led a visitor through his cornfield to an old cemetery where a 500-pound bomb had been dropped the previous day.

The bomb had landed 400 yards from a home, gouged a crater 15 feet deep and 30 feet across, scorched the edge of Ramos’ cornfield and destroyed trees in a 50-yard radius. “Not one guerrilla did they kill with this. Not one,” giggled Ramos, amused at what seemed to him the folly of such tactics.

“Those bombs cost a fortune,” said Maura, a member of the governing council of one of the Guazapa villages. “The price of one could build us a school or a clinic.”

Maura, a widow whose husband was killed by a death squad in 1981, knows firsthand about government harassment. Last December, she and several companions were arrested while transporting food and medicine provided by the San Salvador Archdiocese. She and the others were held and questioned for three days. The supplies were confiscated.

“They say all our supplies go to the guerrillas,” Maura said. “Don’t they understand that civilians need food and clothing and medicine too?”

It seemed that every one of the 60 combatants at this guerrilla camp had a story to tell of a relative either murdered by the armed forces or killed in bombardment or combat.

“When the armed forces have killed part of your family, you don’t soon forget it,” Maura said.

Moises, a 21-year-old guerrilla, described the event that moved him to join the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the rebel army, when he was 12:

“My father was active in campesino (peasant) organization. He took part in demonstrations. Somebody fingered him and one day uniformed men with rifles came to the cornfield where we were working and beat him with their guns. Then they put a rope around his neck and hanged him from a branch.”

A second generation of fighters makes up part of this camp. Sisters Susana, 19, and Amanda, 16, fight on Guazapa while their mother serves on another front.

Though blood debts serve to strengthen resolve, most of the rebels say that they joined the guerrilla army not to claim vengeance but to fight oppression and poverty.

A silver crucifix glints below the curly auburn beard of Elias, a former Salesian seminarian. He says his militancy grew logically from his Christianity. “Mine is the faith of the early Christians, the Christianity of the oppressed, not that of the Vatican,” he said.

In camp, the rebels sleep in pairs on dried grass beneath tarps. For the last six months it has poured almost every night--the rainy season, now ending.

“They say he who does not have foot fungus is not a real guerrilla,” Agusto said. Agusto is the doctor who cut the bullet from Dimas’ gut with a razor blade, saving the comandante’s life.

The guerrilla diet is mainly tortillas and beans. Onions and spices added to the bean paste make it tasty and nutritious.

When the army is not around, the rebels pass the hours in drills and exercise and also chess, cards and dominoes. Radio operators practice codes.

A few paperback novels circulate according to a long sign-up list. Salmon Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” and Miguel Angel Asturias’s “Men of Corn” are currently making the rounds. Many on the book list learned to read in the guerrilla camp.

One American who knew the rebels in the early years was Charles Clements, a former U.S. Air Force pilot. Following a tour of duty in Vietnam, Clements became a physician and pacifist. He spent 1982 at Guazapa treating rebels and civilians and wrote a book about his experiences, “Witness to War.”

“Without the support of the people,” he wrote, “this and any other revolution is condemned to failure. With the support they had, and which I could see firsthand, the rebels would eventually win.”

It has been six years since Clements wrote that. The guerrillas have not won, and their commanders say that outright military victory is not possible.

They describe their struggle only as a means to push the government toward reforming an authoritarian society in which a select few prosper while the majority barely subsist.

With that goal in mind, and with bloodstained Guazapa as the main staging ground and strategic rear guard, the rebels in November, 1989, launched their biggest offensive of the war.

Peace talks between the two armies have bogged down. Another guerrilla offensive, in which Guazapa will once again be crucial, is expected.