NEWS ANALYSIS : Ending the Salvadoran Civil War Won’t Automatically Bring Peace : Central America: Accords aim to defang army and bring rebels into mainstream--but tension will remain.

The cease-fire agreement negotiated between Salvadoran guerrillas and the government over the last 20 months and completed on New Year’s Eve calls for sweeping political reforms that, if carried out, will most certainly bring an end to 12 years of savage civil war.

But ending the war will not automatically bring peace to El Salvador.

The accords between President Alfredo Cristiani and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front aim to break the power of El Salvador’s right-wing armed forces, which directly or indirectly have ruled the country for the last 60 years, and to ensure civilian rule through fair, popular elections.

The agreements, reached in general outline in September and made final last week, commit the government to respect human rights and the leftist guerrillas to abandon armed struggle as a means of achieving power. The accords pave the way for the rebels’ return to civilian life, after which their battle against the country’s economic elite will be fought through legal unions and political parties.

Details of Tuesday’s cease-fire agreement will not be made public until it is signed Jan. 16. In general terms, however, the accords to end the war require a reduction in the 55,000-member military and a redefinition of its role from that of a counterinsurgency army--fighting the enemy within--to a traditional army assigned to defend the nation’s borders.

A new civilian police force would be created--one that the rebels would be allowed to join--theoretically as a counterbalance to the military. The civilian force would replace three security forces that are now part of the military and have a history of brutal repression.

Land in rebel-held territory would be distributed to the guerrillas, their families and supporters now farming it.

Neither the government nor the rebels was able to win a war that took an estimated 75,000 lives, and both were forced to make concessions at the negotiating table. In the end, both sides are claiming a stunted victory: The guerrillas believe that their armed struggle brought about far-reaching political change in the country, while rightist business and political leaders assert that the government achieved its goal--to force the rebels to disarm.

The transition from armed insurgency to political activism will not be easy for the rebels, many of whom are teen-agers who have known only war. To them, guns are the source of their power and their protection.

The extreme right will probably find it even harder to accept the rebels’ return to public life. This was evident in the daily newspaper Diario de Hoy, whose editorial Thursday sounded an alarm against “the very grave threat of incorporating terrorists into political life and as landowners and leaders of their own settlements with hidden arms and enormous international support. It is not possible to pasture sheep and fox together.”

A bomb exploded in a jeep belonging to the British news agency Reuters just after the cease-fire agreement was announced in New York on Tuesday night, and it was believed to be evidence of rightist displeasure and a warning of what may lie ahead.

“There is going to be a reaction,” a leading Salvadoran lawyer said. “You can’t discount further killings in a country where the army decides to kill Jesuit priests in their own home.”

The lawyer, a onetime adviser to former President Jose Napoleon Duarte who asked not to be identified by name, said the murder of six Jesuit priests by army men at the height of a rebel offensive in November, 1989, cost the armed forces international credibility and ultimately forced them to accept the changes that will result in their reduced role.

“The army lost the war,” he said. “They were an all-powerful army in a militarized society, and now they will be a normal army.”

The majority of soldiers and police have yet to realize the magnitude of the accords, which will leave most of them out of work.

The skepticism of so many Salvadorans is rooted in the fact that they have been hearing about negotiated peace since 1984 when then-President Duarte first met with the guerrillas. Duarte, a Christian Democrat, sat down with the rebels two more times during his term without reaching any agreements.

Political observers attribute Cristiani’s success to a number of internal and international factors, not the least of which is the end of the Cold War. During the 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union fought their battles through proxies, in locales such as El Salvador.

With the collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the East-West conflict ceased to exist, and neither side was willing to continue financing the Salvadoran war. The rebels also abandoned Marxism-Leninism as their guiding ideology. Today, they tell Salvadoran businessmen they have no economic model in mind, although they plan to continue battling for the rights of workers.

While Duarte came under attack from the extreme right for negotiating with the rebels, Cristiani had the support of most sectors of his own rightist party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena party). The dominant right-wing media did not attack him as they had attacked Duarte.

The reason, according to one leading businessman, is that Cristiani consulted with his party, the business elite and the army throughout the negotiations.

“The sectors opposed to the agreement are very, very small,” said the businessman, who asked to remain anonymous. “Among businessmen, I have not encountered any organized opposition. Nobody’s happy. It’s bittersweet. But nobody is calling meetings to denounce the agreement.”

Business, he said, is bracing for a period of intense civil unrest--demonstrations, strikes, the occupation of buildings--as the rebels enter public life and press demands for economic reforms.

“A very complicated and conflict-ridden period is ahead that will test this democracy. The left is going to question the development of our economic model very openly and vociferously and with threats of going back to the mountains,” he said. “With their ‘nonviolent’ demonstrations, they would like to provoke the army to kill two or three martyrs at this point.”

During the last period of civil unrest in the early 1980s, right-wing death squads with ties to the army and security forces killed thousands of students and union, church and leftist political leaders and drove thousands more underground into the rebel army.

Now, as they emerge from the mountains, the rebels say, they fear a repeat of the experience of Colombian guerrillas who were slain as they returned to civilian life after agreeing to a cease-fire.

But they were quick to test the waters. A day after the cease-fire agreement was announced, a couple of thousand leftists gathered around the Metropolitan Cathedral, draping its facade with enormous guerrilla banners. A group of self-proclaimed rebels from Chalatenango province showed up unarmed to announce that they would join a new Farabundo Marti Front political party.

There were no attacks by security forces on the demonstration as there would have been a decade ago. The government allowed the rebel banners to remain while, on the radio, both sides rushed to claim credit for a peace that is still incomplete.