Portraits from El Salvador

...The villains of this scenario, for Brian Coughlin, are the "Marxists," a descriptive term that fits the guerrillas in the mountains...

...ferried him to a hospital and later to the refugee center, St...

...Two generations earlier the Coughlins had fled famine-struck Ireland...

...Archbishop Romero was saying mass for his mother's anniversary when a sniper killed him...

...No doubt it's true...

...They say they are going to expropriate phase-two fanners this year, people who made it the hard way and have less general cultivation than the so-called oligarchy...

...and disburses some of its economic aid...

...The Carter State Department decided to steal their thunder by invoking agrarian reform, and Duarte and Morales Ehrlich are pushing it...

...A boy of three grabs the priest's trousers...

...Yet he presides over a government that in fact condones them...

...He is a civil engineer, educated in America - at Notre Dame - and speaks good English...

...His paper is dead...

...Joseph of the Mountain seminary in San Salvador...

...The Germans pay a couple of cents a pound over the market price for it...

...She was eight months pregnant...

...They control the civilian sector...

...Before, we had as many as twenty private mills to choose from and bargain with for a better price...

...There are 225 refugees, all but 25 under the age of twelve...

...He had organized a campesino cooperative and they wiped out his family because of it...

...I heard that story three times...

...Some saw their parents killed...

...But he will try to explain the killing of three American nuns and a lay missionary, Jean Donovan, last December 2. Salvadorans are courteous, he says, but there is a cruel streak in these people and they are mostly illiterate and besides "the nuns were not dressed as nuns - they were wearing jeans...

...In this respect at least, El Salvador is like South Vietnam...

...Coffee is the lifeblood of this country...

...He is the nearest thing to a national figure El Salvador possesses...

...Meanwhile, he awaits democracy in Mexico City.le, he awaits democracy in Mexico City...

...He is an honest man, as far as I could gather - like his colleague, Morales Ehrlich - in a very corrupt government...

...This peasant woman who cannot understand why six members of her family were slaughtered is now in exile...

...Everything is done by hand...

...When I learned the truth about the deaths of the four Americans, I sought an opportunity to draw an official reaction...

...There are other similarities...

...But world prices today are the worst in years...

...They have been compensated with government bonds (ninety percent) and cash (ten percent) but have not, Mr...

...There is a more horrifying story than that and it happened in Morazan, not Chaletanango...

...Aged twenty-seven, she was a laughing woman, "full of life, the soul of every party," with a fund of stories and songs...

...G3s," he replied, and said nothing more...

...Cantas sends food parcels...

...What weapons are'the Hacienda police armed with...

...Today the coffee farmers are dealing with bureaucrats who have taken over the mills and export houses under agrarian reform, and now they can tell you they won't buy from you or they will only buy fifty percent of your crop...

...Jean Donovan gave up a good job in Cleveland to give three years to the missions for a petty stipend...

...The junta decreed the transfer of title deeds to the sharecroppers...

...Last January the Los Angeles Times asked Pinto for an article and he was sending it via telex when the military came looking for him...

...It is called the "land to the tiller'' and is referred to derisively as the "land to the killer" program, for obvious reasons...

...He paused for a moment but did not look up...

...Murdered Archbishop Romero was a political not a pastoral bishop, Mr...

...They were killed by G3s and the terrorists are armed with G3s...

...They will fight...

...The higher on the hill the better the crop...

...The family had no politics," a Morazan priest told me...

...Two fingers of his left hand are missing...

...second, the economy probably would collapse, since these people produce most of El Salvador's coffee and cotton and are efficient farmers...

...As the devil would have it, a root disease called roya (rust) attacked the coffee crop while the Communists and terrorists attacked the mills and farms...

...At the St...

...She saved a twelve-year-old boy, who was near death from machete wounds...

...embassy make contrary claims, and journalists are taken on tours regularly to show how agrarian reform is progressing...

...The drafters of agrarian reform - one is Roy L. Prosterman, a University of Washington law professor, who performed a like function in South Vietnam - have devised a program that gives a couple of acres to sharecroppers...

...The military went to his home and threatened to kidnap his three-year-old son...

...Jean Donovan worked for the refugee center...

...The situation is fluid...

...Why was your family killed...

...You can't tell right away with coffee because it is a perennial crop.'' The government estimates that the fall in coffee production is about ten percent...

...So far nothing has been done...

...advisers...

...The armed forces remain autonomous and under the control of the vice-president and military member of the junta, Col...

...We know nothing about him, or who his parents were, or where they are, or if they are alive...

...A boy of eleven with a baseball cap stood beside his mother when she died...

...Jaime Abdul Gutierrez Avendano, and the minister for defense and public security, Col...

...She was about to leave the country...

...His former colleagues, now in exile, say he has an obsession for power - but it's the worst they can say about him...

...They took over his newspaper, blew up the machinery, and thereby suppressed a critic of the regime...

...Duarte was asked about the case and gave the usual answer about its being under investigation...

...They come from the mountains where the fighting is...

...It is always the military: one rarely hears of killings by the guerrillas, except the story of the hacienda owner who was in his pool when the terrorists struck...

...Pinto knows that security forces, not right-wing terrorists, murdered Archbishop Romero, who was marked for death after denouncing Colonel Garcia and his "immoral command...

...Joseph of the Mountain refugee center I met a twelve-year old boy who may have been the one Jean Donovan saved...

...A great red mark covers the boy's neck where he was struck by a machete before he got away...

...Last June, her brother, his wife, and daughter were killed by the military...

...The Communists for years sought to win the campesinos with 'agrarian reform' on their banner...

...He was with his sister, twenty-three, who had a baby at the breast...

...General Haig had made his statement that the four Americans may have been caught in crossfire...

...Jorge Pinto also believes he is marked for death...

...A group of people in London who knew Jean Donovan also send money...

...The editert Jorge Pinto, editor and publisher of the respected San Salvador daily, El Independiente, is in exile in Mexico City with his wife and child, lucky to be alive...

...the Spanish Jesuits who run the Catholic University, which was built for the children of the affluent with the money of the coffee farmers...

...Coughlin said cotton production is down forty percent from a year ago - the government, in revised figures, admits a drop of thirty-five percent - and coffee will fall over a three-year period...

...he asked...

...We don't know how he got here," Father Kenny, a fifty-six-year old former Cleveland pastor, says...

...A priest took me to a house in San Salvador where a woman was hiding with her baby of four months, a boy, two, and a daughter, nine, recuperating from machete wounds...

...Coughlin considers that Duarte and Morales Ehrlich are working inside the government to carry out the same program that the "terrorists" are seeking on the outside...

...If anything they were pro-military...

...At best they have "minor ideological differences" with the Marxists...

...People are very frightened to have their names used or to be quoted...

...They killed the father, raped the woman, struck her with machetes, and left her for dead, then raped and killed the daughter...

...I asked the woman through a Basque Jesuit...

...When the bodies were found, President Carter cut off aid to the junta...

...Incafe is the government coffee agency...

...Most of the children are parentless...

...The implication was that the security forces have other weapons...

...The case is still under investigation," President Duarte says when asked...

...The blue water turned red...

...He escaped to the Mexican embassy...

...Missionaries and martyrs: Out at Zaragoza, where Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy worked in a children's refugee center before they were murdered, you won't hear talk like that...

...A tall, gray-haired, distinguished-looking man of about sixty-five, wearing summer suit, tie, pocket handkerchief, Mr...

...There's a surplus of coffee in the world...

...The bodies were taken to another place and buried in shallow graves...

...They have severe psychological problems - but only at night, never in the daytime...

...A successor junta could decree some other form of transfer...

...His father was murdered by the military regime of Gen...

...Her father, husband, and two brothers had been killed by the military...

...Why not by the terrorists...

...But they were good Christians...

...The reasons are two-fold: first, these farmers would indeed fight to retain their farms and are responsible, it is thought, for the assassinations last January of the Sal vadoran director of the program and his two U.S...

...Father Jim Kenny lifts him into the, air and he cries with joy...

...A priest went to the barracks next day to inquire about them and knew from the looks of the police that they had been murdered...

...He has impassive Indian features...

...A few days later Duarte came to the Camino Real Hotel to open a press center...

...The captain told him nothing like that would happen again...

...Their estates are now cooperatives, but since only about two percent of campesinos are functionally literate, these estates are run by government SEAN CRONIN is the Washington correspondent of the Irish Times of Dublin and the author of a number of books on Ireland, most recently Irish Nationalism: A History of Its Roots and Ideology...

...Coughlin puts it - were expropriated...

...It's a Cleveland mission and people in Cleveland send money to keep the refugee center going...

...Hundreds of thousands are employed in coffee farming, perhaps a million, Eighty percent of our foreign earnings are from coffee...

...and men like Mr...

...The people they expropriated were good farmers," Mr...

...These owners are tough...

...Many people see Garcia as the strongman of the junta, not Duarte...

...The reform will benefit, it is said, 125,000 families and create a small-farmer class that will be the backbone of a democratic El Salvador...

...The woman struggled out of her grave, reached her home, took her two children with her and was helped by the church...

...He does not control the security forces that carry them out...

...The government and the U.S...

...He is not entirely powerless for he has the support of the U.S...

...Local people heard the four shots...

...He has an Indian face and dark hair shooting straight up like a porcupine...

...Jose Napoleon Duarte, president of the civilian-military junta, and Jose Antonio Morales Ehrlich, member of the junta, are Christian Democrats...

...His helicopter was parked nearby, but they cut him to pieces with machetes before he could get out of the pool...

...He adds: "It's very questionable who killed them...

...Coughlin - who in this respect at least holds the same view as the left-wing opposition - say it is unreal, a hoax, and carries a "made in U.S.A...

...People without a proprietary interest in the crop won't give it the proper care...

...the political opposition now in exile...

...The president: Jose Napoleon Duarte, fifty-five, would not approve of such atrocities...

...They're talking about more than five thousand families...

...Coughlin maintains...

...The jeep was driven off and burned...

...label...

...Some had tried to flee with their families to Honduras when the military killed their parents...

...The father protested the deaths to an army captain...

...Coffee is like wine," says Mr...

...I sat beside him at an informal press conference and in front of him at a formal one...

...They found excellent fingerprints on the partly burned jeep and gave them to the junta to check out...

...I wouldn't want to be an agronomist taking over phase-two farms...

...She was smuggled to San Salvador, given medical care and recovered...

...Jose Guillermo Garcia...

...He will not defend assassinations...

...Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez in 1943...

...Coughlin says, received one cent yet...

...El Salvador has the highest production per acre in coffee - and in cotton," he says...

...But the quality that nature provides can be easily ruined if the fermenting process is not carefully controlled...

...the terrorists of the left who set off bombs in the cities...

...Morales Ehrlich, who is responsible for agrarian reform, has one son fighting in the hills with the guerrillas, another a political prisoner...

...administrators and, according to Coughlin, are going downhill rapidly...

...His wife pleaded with them and they left...

...They play behind the Spanish colonial church in the hot sun...

...Martinez killed thirty thousand peasants during a campesino rebellion in 1932...

...They won't soon forget her...

...Brazil and Colombia are not interested in forming a coffee cartel to keep their coffee off the market until prices go up and thus help El Salvador, as the agrarian reform theorists imagine...

...That night the military came and took the father, the woman, her other daughter, aged fourteen, to a wooded place...

...Why does the press accept the premise that they were killed by the security forces...

...A helicopter tracked her, which may be why she, the two Maryknoll sisters, Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, and Sister Dorothy of the Cleveland mission were murdered last December 2, as they drove from San Salvador airport, along a lonely road, as night fell...

...Because my father was a good man," she replied...

...I asked the president, leaning over his chair by his left ear...

...He went there thirty-three years ago from Massachusetts and married a Salyadoran...

...She would drive north in the jeep to Chaletanango where the Maryknoll Sisters have a mission...

...Coughlin points to the fincas (coffee farms) on the flanks of the hills around San Salvador, and in a gently modulated voice explains the political economy of his adopted country, which is based on coffee, cotton, and sugar...

...Father Ken Myers began the center with his own money...

...Then, perhaps to bolster Haig, he came up with something new...

...Coughlin argues...

...To win democracy, we must defeat and break up the military," Jorge Pinto said...

...In Zaragoza no one has any doubt about the identity of their killers: Hacienda (or Treasury) police, patrolling the highway, armed with German-made G3 carbines, who took them to a barracks in Zacatoluca, "sexually humiliated" them (rape has not been established), then executed them by shooting them in the head...

...The economy is collapsing, in the meantime...

...El Salvador exports the champagne of coffee...

...I'm predicting now that the world-recognized quality of El Salvador's coffee will be lost in a short time...

...Coffee farmers carry heavy interest on crop loans and are at the mercy of Incafe...

...Under phase one of the agrarian reform program the 263 largest estates - "the so-called oligarchy," as Mr...

...The junta seems to have abandoned, for the time being anyway, any plan to expropriate the "phase-two fanners...

...He sent an FBI team to investigate...

...Journalists gathered around, pushed microphones toward him, and asked questions...

...It was a political move...