EL SALVADOR: No Easy Victory
We feel a strong obligation to learn as much as possible from our participation in this strange and difficult war. Though we have never fought one quite like it, this conflict may be typical...
...During the months of February and March, the FMLN evaluated the central failures ofJanuary: The military forces of the FMLN had attempted an overly ambitious full-scale offensive...
...El Dia (Mexico City), April 9, 1981...
...policy is building rapidly...
...and it meant the slaughter of Salvadorean refugees as they tried to cross into neighboring Honduras or Guatemala...
...A recent vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee imposed restrictions on U.S...
...trained strike force of 2,000 men-into the guerrillas' zones of control...
...It would mean an end to the military bravado of the junta-the "We can win by August" mentality that clashes with battlefield conditions...
...During the first junta, Garcia authorized the use of Army units to attack legal street demonstrations and to break up labor conflicts in the capital...
...He added, "Many of the guerrillas are themselves peasants from the province and therefore not considered outsiders...
...The mountains and dense jungles commonly associated with guerrilla warfare are scarce...
...According to virtually all observers, the millions of dollars of U.S...
...Punto Final, May 1981, p. 7. 30...
...Until 1980, guerrilla units had existed alongside the massive "popular organizations" engaged in legal and public protests, at the cost of many lives...
...The press printed gleeful headlines: "Leftist Offensive in El Salvador Stalled...
...volvement-taken hesitantly by Carter, stridently by Reagan-has led to another and yet another,with no "quick victory" in sight...
...Their findings included, "demoralization inside the Army...
...Production has declined by more than 15% in the last two years, according to U.S...
...It found that by using the more familiar methods of guerrilla warfare, it was able to inflict more casualties on the regime, recover more weapons and suffer fewer losses...
...Robert White, "In Defense of the Junta," Caribbean Review, Vol...
...It meant that the supply of weapons and ammunition could not be replenished on a scheduled basis...
...press, relying largely on official sources for information on the offensive's progress in the countryside, covered the war from San Salvador, where the structural weaknesses of the revolutionary movement were most apparent...
...Roy Prosterman, a consultant to the U.S...
...For further analysis of the strike, see Mario Aguinada, "El momento actual en El Salvador," in Pensamiento Revolucionario (El Salvador), No...
...But the notion of "business as usual" in San Salvador, of a failure due to lack of support for the FMLN, was belied by the terror that consumed the capital in the following weeks and months...
...A Change in Tactics From the vantage point of San Salvador, most journalists concluded that the war was over by late January...
...2 1 Or witness the deaths of 20,000 noncombatants since January 1980...
...1 5 Consolidation also means a new set of social relations in the liberated territories...
...newly trained medics teach classes in hygiene and first aid...
...have a clean-cut, technocratic image, the product of years of U.S...
...Choppers...
...3 These small guerrilla organizations had tried to be catalysts for revolution, to spark a reaction from the masses without ever being part of them...
...The risks were still great, but incomparable to facing a united Salvadorean oligarchy and its armed might...
...it meant no way to deal with casualties in a war in which the wounded are never left behind by their comrades...
...His rise to prominence and permanence went hand-inhand with the demotion and later ouster and arrest of Colonel Adolfo Majano, the last remnant of reformism on the junta...
...At the time of the January offensive, the FMLN was avowedly still an "army in formation' '-with fresh recruits, unprepared for conventional battle...
...The simple truth is that...
...We don't refer to these as liberated zones," says FMLN Commander Ferman Cienfuegos, "but rather as zones ofcontrol...
...As a result, thousands of refugees have been caught in the pincer tactics of two armies...
...Pentagon planners were encouraged by the results...
...government has leased ten Huey choppers to Honduras, also at no cost, to improve surveillance of the common border area...
...The North Americans know that the Army can't enter our zones with infantry," says an FMLN Commander, "so they're trying to get in by air...
...His troops had set fire to five villages, killing everyone they could...
...2 7 There were no "general offensives" by the FMLN that week, not even one major battle...
...All radio stations were taken over by the junta...
...In order to evaluate the danger of deeper U.S...
...Phase I of the reform, which turned the largest haciendas over to peasant cooperatives, affected only 15 % of the country's arable land and a still smaller percentage of the rural workforce...
...A new, more flexible strategy was needed to meet this threat of "subversive insurgency," as it was called, without spreading U.S...
...and public assemblies elect representatives to local governments...
...press reports...
...He was recently named by an Army Captain, Mena Sandoval, as the key contact between the paramilitary death squads and the regular Army...
...They call it the phase of "active resistance" and liken it to the tactics of the French Resistance in World War II...
...1 4 Consolidation also means planting the seeds of a new society...
...But that's only a fraction of what it would take today...
...to ransacked buildings at the Jesuit-run university and to refugee centers terrorized by midnight attacks...
...2 8 U.S...
...The answer is that the junta expects none of the above...
...Yet even in the capital itself, guerrilla camps, housing 100 guerrillas or more, were hidden in the dense barrios of the poor...
...Their job is to aid each of El Salvador's five regional commands in planning specific operations...
...1 (January-February 1981...
...portunities to do other things...
...People outside the main battle areas remained unaware that significant fighting was taking place, while the government had unlimited opportunities to present its version of the offensive to the Salvadorean people and to the world...
...External Limitations: International support for the FMLN/FDR had grown tremendously in 1980, including the unwavering support of European governments and parties belonging to the Socialist International, as well as Canada, Mexico, Ecuador and others...
...X, No...
...Rumors abound of a creeping coup that would dispense with the fig-leafpresident but maintain the military structure intact...
...The Rio Sumpul massacre of three to six hundred refugees in May 1980, was the first horror story of its kind to gain international attention...
...On April 21, they were preparing to cross the border when Honduran soldiers appeared and ordered them back into the arms of Salvadorean troops...
...9. Interview with FMLN Commander Alejandro Montenegro, published in Intercontinental Press, March 16, 1981, p. 238...
...Yet this support did not approach the active and more proximate aid received by the FSLN in Nicaragua from Panama, Costa Rica and Venezuela...
...6 In addition to a guerrilla army of 4,000, the FMLN had organized local militias, estimated at more than 5,000 members, to protect local populations and participate in guerrilla actions...
...Can the junta really expect opposition leaders to campaign, when six leaders of the FDR were kidnapped in broad daylight in November 1980 and later slaughtered by security forces...
...Today, six months after the "failed offensive," a very different evaluation can be made, based on interviews with journalists in the field duringJanuary and in the months that followed, with participants in the struggle, with the FMLN itself and gleaned from European and U.S...
...It is the armed branch of a popular movement of massive proportions, that was forced to abandon other forms of struggle as each door to peaceful change was closed...
...The political-economic side was the Alliance for Progress, funded by the United States and administered at best unevenly by governments throughout the continent...
...El Salvador's independent press has been extinguished...
...International opinion is sharply critical of U.S...
...A woman standing nearby nods her agreement...
...Today, however, several things are clear...
...They didn't know how to conserve ammunition, and weapons were scarce...
...Of these, 681 were peasants killed in bombings during assaults by government planes and helicopter gunships...
...But they'll be back again," he said...
...government, designed the reform programs in El Salvador and Vietnam, with the same ends in mind...
...This territory covers nearly 300 square miles from the Panamerican Highway to the Pacific Highway...
...ants and guerrillas is purely academic...
...This does not prevent us from concluding, however, that given the extreme limitations within which a revolutionary war in El Salvador must be fought, the FMLN's advances between January and March of 1981 were formidable, and perhaps "irreversible...
...4 The notion of free elections in a society with no freedoms is preposterous...
...all are fair military targets...
...and they worry that "too much" military aid will strengthen the most right-wing sectors of the military, at the expense of agrarian and other reforms...
...David Blundy, "Victims of the Massacre That the World Ignored," The London Times, February 22, 1981...
...press chose to portray what happened as total defeat for the FMLN-only to choke on its words in a few months' time when the guerrillas refused to disappear...
...2 (March-April 1980), and "El Salvador: A Revolution Brews," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...to independent newspapers bombed out of existence...
...Thus the process of building a people's army-of incorporating large sectors of the Guerrillas in training...
...military aid to the governingjunta...
...John Foster, Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Congressional Testimony, 19671 Vietnam was like no other war the United States had ever fought...
...A series of articles by Edward Schumacher in the New York Times consistently stresses the bright spots of the agrarian reform...
...The FMLN is not an assortment of isolated guerrilla bands trying to inject armed struggle prematurely into a population still resigned to its own suffering...
...2 9 The main task of the choppers is to airlift the Atlacatl Brigade-the U.S...
...aid to El Salvador, as the only form of leverage that might force the junta toward mediation...
...3 2 Counterinsurgency in El Salvador, as in Vietnam, is necessarily a policy of mass extermination...
...the no-cost procedure was used "in order to bypass time-consuming military procurement procedures that are required for sales or grants...
...This most blatant reversal of Phases II and III appears in the New York Times, April 15 and 30, 1981...
...And can it really expect people to lay down their arms and trust in the willingness of the military to accept the people's verdict...
...Ex-Ambassador Robert White said of the offensive, "They gave a war and nobody came...
...They are all sick with communism...
...I inherited it...
...troops were drawn in to assume the tasks assigned in theory to host country personnel...
...1. 36...
...advisers also include 15 counterinsurgency specialists from the U.S...
...Stewart Klepper, "The United States in El Salvador," Covert Action Information Bulletin, No...
...The FMLN had called on the city's workforce to join a general strike, timed to coincide with military actions...
...Here they don't grab you to arrest you, they grab you to kill you...
...XV, No...
...On January 15,Jimmy Carter initiated an emergency airlift of helicopters, artillery pieces, infantry weapons and ammunition to help an army in trouble...
...And the junta did have a regional rear guard, a vast one...
...His plan included a small contingent of U.S...
...William Safire, "The Savings of El Salvador," New York Times, February 26, 1981...
...Hence, the distinction between peasThe death squads leave a message on an access road to the airport...
...Ambassador to El Salvador, Deane Hinton, is also a counterinsurgency "pro," having served as Director of the U.S...
...defense budget is calculated in the billions...
...In El Salvador, the FMLN had had less than a year to complete that process...
...advisers...
...They also succeeded in forcing the Salvadorean Army to retreat from large areas of the countryside and concentrate in the cities...
...Diario Las Americas, May 27, 1981...
...Congressional subcommittee in May: "It would be a grievous error," he said, "to believe that the forces of the extreme right...
...Fiallos proceeded to list the names of Garcia and company...
...Similar successes were scored in Bolivia and Venezuela...
...3 0 It would not be the last...
...Each step toward greater U.S...
...In Chalatenango, according to one guerrilla, "We are trying to teach the women that they do not have to accept only the traditional roles for women, that they should try to examine their potentialities...
...0 First, the war in El Salvador is anything but "clean:" Witness the raped and murdered nuns, the decapitated children, the bodies of men with genitals stuffed in their mouths...
...second, the effects to date of U.S...
...advisory team in El Salvador now includes two "counterinsurgency operational planning and assistance teams" of five men each...
...Collective farms sow "revolutionary crops" to feed the fighters...
...Second, the structures of the labor movement had been severely weakened in the months pre- ceding the offensive by a series of arrests...
...The guerrilla army was intact, regrouping and reformulating its strategy...
...In practice, this meant that the Salvadorean 8MaylJune 1981 A working class barrio in San Salvador guerrillas had no logistical rearguard and no safe haven for retreat...
...they used their hovels as hiding places for arms and mediC '5 Cd E NACLAReport A peasant family in Chalatenango...
...By 1980, all restraint on repression had been lifted and public protest became a suicidal act...
...8 (April 26, 1981...
...This is one of a four-part series of life behind the FMLN lines...
...In a single week in March, 798 people were killed in El Salvador, according to the Legal Aid Office of San Salvador's Archbishop...
...and finally, the nature of that junta itself in light of two years of resignations, purges and musical chairs...
...El Salvador is the most densely populated country in the hemisphere...
...As for the capital city, "We still don't have control...
...Moreover, the enemy now went beyond the corrupt and undisciplined ranks of the Salvadorean Armed Forces...
...But how much longer will the military hang on to Duarte...
...Most refugees, numbering over a quarter of a million, are the alleged beneficiaries of the phase that was intended to "buy" support for the junta...
...Wall Street Journal, May 7, 1981...
...They had tried to accomplish too much, too soon...
...The FMLN's errors of judgment and timing in calling for the strike despite the odds against it cost the movement dearly in terms of international perceptions...
...policy toward El Salvador is a grossly distorted image of the scope and depth of the Salvadorean opposition...
...2 0 Counterinsurgency began with the president who ironically may be remembered more as a champion of human rights...
...policy in Central America is growing rapidly-aided by the absence of the economic boom that pacified the public for a time in the 1960s...
...3 9 Duarte hangs on, however, obsessed with the semblance of power...
...This is not to say that areas under FMLN control are off-limits to the Salvadorean Army, or that the population is free from persecution...
...All are part of the same government...
...4 0 Civilian casualties are rising accordingly...
...Central America Watch," The Nation, April 18, 1981, p. 455...
...The failed strike would be interpreted as proof that the city's workers had turned their backs on the opposition...
...That's whatJames Cheek, serving as Carter's interim ambassador, proposed to the second Salvadoreanjunta inJanuary 1980...
...He is now Vice-President and Commanderin-Chief of the Armed Forces, a position that would normally accrue to the president...
...With far greater gusto, the local militaries stalked the revolutionary bands that took their inspiration from the Cuban revolution...
...Central America Watch," The Nation, May 16, 1981...
...Today it's clear that Garcia is the junta and calls the shots...
...Moreover, the war was not against Salvadorean troops alone...
...Diario Las Americas, May 30, 1981...
...The London Times, April 26, 1981...
...we control the most populous barrios...
...In late May 1981, Gutierrez traveled to Chile to bestow El Salvador's highest medal of honor on a man he admires: Augusto Pinochet...
...In Vietnam, it was called "the battle for hearts and minds:" land reform, inserted within the contours of the military campaign, and anti-corruption drives...
...NI 13NACLA Report 02 O r (D -J 0 Ana Guadalupe Martinez, member of the PoliticalDiplomatic Commission of the FDR/FMLN...
...And the Political-Diplomatic Commission of the FDR/FMLN has declared its willingness to enter into discussions with the junta and the United States, through third-party intermediaries...
...In March and April, a group of foreign journalists spent five weeks with the FMLN in Morazan Province...
...One journalist, who visited eight guerrilla camps and three towns controlled by the FMLN, wrote that, "Contrary to Salvadorean government and U.S...
...military build-up, the junta has issued a cynical call for elections in 1982...
...In March, letters to the White House were running ten to one against the sending of military aid and advisers to El Salvador...
...Counterinsurgency began, as it did in Viet14MaylJune 1981 nam, with a notion of "clean" warfare and rapid results...
...A New Phase Based on the lessons learned since January and the advances made by March, the FMLN has defined a new phase of the revolutionary struggle...
...Graveyard Elections Confident of continued U.S...
...No, things have not turned out as planned in El Salvador...
...1013 (May 15, 1981...
...Broad support for the FDR or any of its constituent organizations is denied by citing the absence of massive street demonstrations characteristic of the 1970s...
...In August 1980, the entire leadership of the electrical workers' union (STECEL), a key compon- ent of any strike action, was arrested...
...5. Manchester Guardian Weekly, February 1, 1981...
...New York Times, May 3, 1981...
...operate independent of the security forces...
...To be entirely thorough, the U.S...
...Military Assistance to Central America," Resource Update, No...
...policy, with the Socialist International offering its services for a political settlement...
...Even on these "model farms," hundreds of peasants continue to be assassinated by government forces...
...NO EASY VICTORY 1. U.S...
...They had an insufficient number of middle-level officers to command smaller units and were in reality five distinct revolutionary groups testing the recent unification of their command structures under the FMLN...
...19, No...
...Why would the same military rulers, and the same rich landowners and industrialists, accept defeat in 1982 when they have always relied on fraud and violence to erase the electoral verdicts against them...
...advisers and Green Berets went along for the hunt...
...1 3 As a result of these scorched-earth tactics, many peasant families have sought protection from government troops by moving closer to the guerrilla camps...
...Leo Gabriel, "El Salvador: Report from the Liberated Zones," Liberation News Service, No...
...State Department reports of lack of popular enthusiasm for the guerrilla cause...., the insurgents in Chalatenango [near Honduras] have considerable support among the local inhabitants and move through the province virtually at will day or night...
...3 (July 1967) and Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, Regis Debray and the Latin American Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968...
...And as they die by the thousands, the fine distinctions between Duarte and the military, between the "moderates" and the Right, between the death squads and the security forces, lose all meaning...
...The Atlacatl Brigade is ready for action...
...It has now been postponed indefinitely for "technical" reasons...
...In January, only days before the offensive, the Army assaulted a safe-house in the capital, arresting several key people and capturing plans for miliE tary actions in San Salvador...
...People weren't trained to know where the bullets were coming from," said a rebel commander in March...
...We always wait until the enemy has advanced a long way into our territory and then we launch our ambushes when they least expect it," said a fighter on the Francisco Sanchez Southeastern Front of the FMLN...
...Colonel Jose Guillermo Garcia has been Minister of Defense since the first junta, the only cabinet member to enjoy such longevity...
...VI, No...
...In the cities, especially San Salvador, the FMLN's infrastructure was far more fragile, given the tremendous difficulty of organizing under the very nose of the enemy...
...A New York Times editorial, March 6, 1981, warned that, "by dramtically subordinating all politics to the military campaign, the Reagan Administration strengthened the right-wing forces it now fears...(the United States) has to use its aid not only to protect Mr...
...The double-edged sword of pacification has been dulled on both sides, and the proxy is in trouble...
...Even within his own party, Duarte's pact with the devil is causing some consternation...
...their camps "spring back to life...
...pressure on the junta to curb the "excesses" of undisciplined troops and to investigate assassinations...
...And there can be no democratic solution without the full participation of those who now fight in the FMLN...
...Punto Final, May 1981, pp...
...and they sent their sons and daughters to fight...
...Thus American liberals patiently await the outcome of what they perceive as a struggle for hegemony between the Center and the Right...
...William Safire, conservative columnist for the New York Times33 Mass slaughter isn't palatable to most Americans-even in the hallowed name of national security...
...We know now that counterinsurgency in Vietnam didn't accomplish what the manuals said it would...
...Accordingly, the FMLN changed tactics...
...In Vietnam, none applied...
...4(July-August 1980...
...Only the presence of foreign observers forestalled another massacre...
...backing, the junta is now embarking on a projected fourmonth campaign to crush the guerrillas...
...Yet in addition to the factors cited above, it is important to add that in Nicaragua, the general strike linked to the final offensive of June 1979 was supported by factory owners and workers alike...
...and growing incorporation of the people into the guerrillas and an increase in their military capabilities...
...acts of terrorism credited to these squads such as political assassinations, kidnappings and indiscriminate murder are planned by highranking military officers and carried out by members of the security forces...
...An American priest who works with the refugees, Father Earl Gallagher, told Blundy: "That was my tax money paying for American bombs to drop from American helicopters on to my head...
...And to the extent that Duarte really disagrees with the military tactics of indiscriminate terror, his permanence on the junta is all the more reprehensible...
...In contrast to men like Major Roberto d'Abuisson, the foaming founder of the death squads, they represent the "respectable" Right...
...Agency for International Development (AID) in Guatemala during the most intense years of anti-guerrilla warfare (1967-69...
...journalist, reporting in April from the Southeastern Front, describes literacy classes during lulls in the fighting, using dirt and sticks for lack of paper and pen...
...Army School of Special Forces...
...So far, the actions and attitudes of the Reagan Administration offer little hope that mediation will be chosen over military campaigns and massacres...
...Alex Drehsler, "The Rebels of El Salvador," The Boston Globe, March 8, 1981...
...But the destruction wrought on the people of El Salvador--a country the size of Massachusetts-is enormous...
...Hence, the only explanation for the FMLN's ability to survive is the active and unconditional support of the people...
...It hopes only to buy time for the military extermination of the opposition...
...On persecution of the Church in this period, see Simon Smith, "San Salvador: A Chronicle of Intimidation," America, March 28, 1981...
...How did they get sick...
...4 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies), April 1981...
...London Times, April 26, 1981 The U.S...
...Another journalist in Chalatenango reported that, "It is possible to see more than a dozen pillars of smoke every day from fields being burned by government troops and ORDEN members...
...and their intricate system of tunnels and foxholes bears an ominous resemblance to those of the "Viet Cong...
...difficulties for the military in taking positions and dislodging the guerrillas...
...Pacification by Proxy Eyewitness reports of Salvadorean atrocities say that towns and villages in the Morazan area have been strafed, bombed and napalmed...
...5 (June 1981), p. 28...
...3 1 Blundy cites two examples...
...Second, the war is not yielding rapid results...
...He readily points out to journalists that, "it is the decision of the Armed Forces to accept or reject people on the junta.'' 3 6 * ColonelJaime Abdul Gutierrez is the only remaining member of the original five-man junta...
...Many press reports portray these tactics as wanton acts of terrorism, and claim that they have alienated middle and working class sectors once sympathetic to the opposition...
...Where government troops have literally "occupied" an area, such as the capital city, the FMLN strategy is to make that occupation as costly as possible for the enemy...
...By March, the FMLN had established eight military fronts and de facto control over a broad strip of land, roughly demarcated by the Honduran border on the north NACLA Report En Z a n 0, w I and El Salvador's four major volcanos on the south...
...12 (April 1981...
...By all accounts, they suffered few casualties...
...A painful and costly lesson had been learned...
...economic aid package of $126.5 million as "a drop in the bucket...
...But the junta's Vice-President, Colonel Abdul Gutierrez, recently dismissed the U.S...
...El Salvador's prestigious bar association recently refused to take part in the drafting of electoral legislation, claiming that fair elections would be impossible "under the current political conditions.' "42 There can be no democratic solution to the crisis in El Salvador without the full participation of the popular organizations that speak for the vast majority of the Salvadorean poor, the peasantry and the working class...
...Polls show only 2 % in favor of sending troops to help the junta...
...David Blundy, of the London Times, reported that a 10-day trip through the border area in April 1981 pro16MaylJune 1981 vided "overwhelming evidence of atrocities and of increasing brutality and repression by the Honduran Army as well as the Salvadoreans...
...Domestic pressure in the United States is building for an end to all U.S...
...in15NACLAReport Refugees line up to be registered at camps taken over by the military...
...7 Despite torture and murders by Army goon squads, the peasantry didnot denounce the presence of FMLN camps during the January offensive...
...Through the maze of personalities that have comprised the four successive juntas, since 1718 October 1980, several figures stand out-all of them clad in army green...
...The head of ORD.EN in a provincial capital provides the rationale for such brutality: "They are all communists, even the children...
...One has already been downed by the FMLN...
...First, the FMLN's general lack of communication channels was most serious in the capital, where the call for a strike went not so much unheeded as unheard by the city's population...
...Ibid...
...It marked the assumption of new "responsibilities" in a world redefined by the aftermath of World War II, by the decline of colonialism and the aggrandized role of the United States as a hegemonic power...
...3 8 It is this core of military hardliners that wields Left to right: Colonel Abdul Gutierrez, Napoleon Duarte real power in El Salvador today, backed by the more "enlightened" sectors of the oligarchy who understand the importance of moderate language and the utility of "reforms...
...Moreover, important specific goals set by the FMLN were not met: a general strike in San Salvador did not materialize, nor did a military assault on the capital...
...It needs a formula for "peace" and has found one in the formation of a council to set up elections for a National Assembly in 1982, which would then be empowered to write a new Constitution and prepare-at some future date-for presidential elections...
...Intent on creating "an irreversible situation" for Ronald Reagah, the FMLN had raised hopes of total victory which contributed to the confusion in evaluating the real results of the January operation...
...The new phase also means economic sabotage-burning factories and warehouses that store the export crops needed to earn foreign exchange...
...The military side was designed to locate insurgent cells and then destroy them with superior firepower and technology, an efficient, almost surgical operation much like removing the cancer from an otherwise healthy body...
...6. Interview with FMLN Commander Ferman Cienfuegos, published in Punto Final (Mexico), No...
...On reprisals against the independent press, seeJorge Pinto, " From Exile, A Salvadorean Editor Still Pits Pen Against Sword," Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1981...
...Central America Watch," The Nation, May 30, 1981...
...Miami Herald, February 2, 1981...
...But the Army is largely restricted to the townsMaylJune 1981 and cities, and to conducting regular two-tofive-day forays into the countryside, burning crops and villages, killing livestock, murdering an enemy it readily identifies as "the people...
...Guerrilla ambushes, combined with a hit-and-run " war of movement," have led to high casualties and low morale among Army troops...
...It would be written up in the manuals as "counterinsurgency warfare," and would be conducted primarily by the "host country," supported where necessary by U.S...
...The junta did its dirty work during curfew hours, and each morning the city awoke to dozens of decapitated bodies, strewn on the pavement or dumped in playgrounds...
...For a moving and inciteful account of the Catholic Church's role in El Salvador, see Placido Erdozain, Archbishop Romero (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books), 1981...
...Another parallel to the past: Dr...
...Most owners are waiting out the war comfortably in Miami or Guatemala...
...The junta refused to acknowledge the latent forces of insurrection, but it moved nonetheless to swiftly exterminate them...
...These may sound like paltry sums, given that the U.S...
...military aid to El Salvador that would require the President to certify that the junta is making "significant progress" in implementing economic and political changes and human rights...
...They become combatants, medics or leaders...
...To the extent that Duarte wields any power at all, it is rationed in carefully calculated amounts by his military colleagues to appease public opinion abroad...
...Alex Drehsler, "Guerrillas Say Why They Fight," The Boston Globe, March 10, 1981...
...Washington Post, April 5 and 9, 1981...
...advisers, "non-lethal" military assistance, and an agrarian reform program to neutralize the masses...
...2 2 Even the bodycounts are questionable, as reporters search in vain for the corpses of allegedly slain guerrillas...
...In the past year alone, 40 Christian Democratic mayors and local councilors have been killed by what the party believes are right-wing assassins allied to the military...
...In areas not under FMLN control, particularly in San Salvador, the FMLN focuses on rebuilding its infrastructure and counteracting the incessant terror inflicted by security forces on unarmed civilians...
...7NACLAReport El Salvador today is the first test of counterinsurgency in that new era...
...Salvadorean history provides the precedent: 30,000 peasants slaughtered in 1932 following a popular rebellion...
...By December, the civilian members of that junta (now leaders of the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Front) demanded that Garcia be replaced, arguing that he had come to exercise powers independent of the junta...
...But domestic opposition to U.S...
...Counterinsurgency now means protracted war, as it did in Vietnam...
...XIV, No...
...In righteous contrast to the French experience in Indochina, the United States would act not as an occupying power but as an ally, lending a helping hand...
...It's hard to farm when the fields are burning and family members are being killed...
...and 3) that the "host" ruling class can agree on the requisite level of reforms and not become weakened by its own internal contradictions...
...Another Army Captain, Ricardo Fiallos, recently escaped right-wing death threats in El Salvador and testified before a U.S...
...A foreign invasion had become a distinct possibility...
...All the ones we didn't kill will be back...
...But these successes were more a testimony to the errors of the "foco" theory of struggle than to the effectiveness of counterinsurgency...
...Yot in January 1981, the FMLN initiated a general offensive that fell far short of its own expectations and raised questions as to the resiliency of a movement and a people subjected to indiscriminate and savage terror...
...This difference is critical to understanding the implications of counterinsurgency for people in El Salvador and the United States...
...3 4 This liberal position, most clearly articulated by ex-Ambassador Robert White, rests its case on the person and power of Napoleon Duarte, the Christian Democrat who joined the third junta in March 1980 and was named president of the fourth junta in January 1981...
...The Vietnam analogy works at home as well...
...The military prong of the strategy means wearing down the Army, rather than taking fixed positions to confront them directly...
...grooming...
...The Army understands very clearly that the guerrillas could not survive without popular support...
...for hours through terrain where all peasants supported the FMLN, where hospitals and munitions factories and food distribution centers had been set up and where the Salvadorean Army was nowhere to be seen...
...They reject the conspiracy theories put forth by Reagan and Haig, and acknowledge the domestic roots of the Salvadorean opposition...
...He then moved on to play a pivotal role, again as Director of AID, in the economic destabilization campaign against Allende's government in Chile (1969-71).'9 Ronald Reagan has a seasoned team on the ground...
...For a comprehensive evaluation of the agrarian reform, see Laurence Simon and James Stephens, El Salvador Land Reform, 1980-81 (Boston: OXFAM-America), 1981...
...advisers are currently busy training pilots and mechanics to keep the choppers aloft...
...Duarte, in White's view, is a pragmatic politician, unlike the idealists who resigned from the first junta because "they expected to change things overnight.'"" 3 Duarte is patient, willing to bide his time and slowly strengthen his alliance with "moderate" military men, while fighting off the danger of a "right-wing" coup...
...But this is precisely what the oligarchy, and its military allies, have always fought to prevent because it would, by definition, put an end to their privilege...
...It is difficult, if not impossible, to walk for half an hour without running into at least a small cluster of homes...
...Taken together, they comprise one-eighth of the national territory...
...2 3 * Third, the agrarian reform program, launched with much fanfare in Maich 1980, has taken a back seat to the military campaign...
...2 " Phase II of the reform would have affected medium-sized farms-the bulk of the coffee lands and the backbone of the oligarchy's power...
...3. For a discussion of foco theory, see Regis Debray, "Revolution in the Revolution," Monthly Review, Vol...
...Interestingly, the New York Times now obligingly refers to this as Phase III).26 And the real Phase III, which gives sharecroppers title to the small plots they farm, has had little impact on El Salvador's poor...
...See accounts, for example, in Miami Herald, April 12, 1981...
...The Reagan Administration immediately jumped to describe the present junta as "a transition to democracy...
...Reagan has 56 advisers on the ground and only vague promises stand between that number and a larger U.S...
...2 In Vietnam, its first application, counterinsurgency involved a two-pronged campaign of military and political warfare...
...Also, James Stephens, "Agrarian Reform: Hope Turns to Terror," NACLA Report on theAmericas, Vol...
...4. See, "El Salvador: Why Revolution...
...The General Strike The U.S...
...And most critically, the FMLN's failure to mount diversionary actions on San Salvador itself meant that heeding the call to strike was tantamount to suicide for the city's unarmed workers...
...people involved in refugee work and human rights investigations, including judges appointed by the junta, have been.assassinated...
...The doctrine relies for its success on three important conditions: 1) that the guerrilla forces are isolated from a significant mass base and therefore surgically removable...
...The junta knew then the countdown: 4,000 troops were laying in wait for the first signs of action...
...He has sent $25 million in military aid in 1981, and projects at least $26 million for 1982...
...House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Hearings on Military Posture, 90th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1967), p. 1425...
...they demand greater U.S...
...2. For an important analysis of counterinsurgency, then and now, see Michael Klare, "The New Counterinsurgency," The Nation, March 14, 1981...
...XIV, No...
...government...
...Press reports increasingly evoke the language of Vietnam: The guerrillas seem to "melt away" as the Army approaches...
...1 8 The new U.S...
...She was taught to be a combat engineer by the guerrillas and is now in charge of fortifications for ten guerrilla camps...
...Instead they sacrificed to provide the guerrillas with tortillas and beans...
...As Guillermo Ungo, president of the FDR, put it: "Elections will have to be held in graveyards...
...Sandoval himself defected to the ranks of the FDR/FMLN during the January offensive...
...The reasons are obvious...
...Mediation, which the FDR/FMLN carefully distinguishes from negotiation, would mean an acknowledgement of the social forces represented by the revolutionary movement...
...Despite these limitations, the FMLN was able to mount major military actions in twothirds of the country in January and stage assaults on the barracks of most towns and villages...
...u) o 910 population into a regular military fighting structure-was begun...
...involvement in El Salvador, including direct military intervention, we must examine three factors that will determine the evolution of U.S...
...And Congressional opposition to current U.S...
...Leftists Routed...
...A journalist traveling through the northwestern areas talked to a barracks officer who had just completed a mission...
...Che Guevara's death marked the beginning of a new era for Latin America...
...Duarte, as nominal president, enhances this image-but he has not brought even a modicum of popular domestic support...
...The last FMLN broadcast, made on a radio commandeered a few days before the offensive, said, "Prepare for the general strike," but general confusion prevailed as to timing...
...Financial Times, March 9, 1981...
...These were just the weekly victims of the Army's search-and-destroy missions, rendered more efficient by the arrival of ten Huey helicopters mounted with machine guns...
...The Liberal Illusion Make sure the generals know that they need a civilian government headed by somebody like Jose Napoleon Duarte, a centrist politician with a catchy middle name...
...And many have stated privately that should the military achieve its victory, they may well end up in exile or in their graves...
...Church involvement in the opposition is dismissed as dangerous naivete...
...And it would mean a halt to U.S...
...But even as it was failing in Vietnam, the doctrine was being vindicated by small victories in Latin America during the 1960s and early 70s...
...NACLA's first two issues on El Salvador present it frnm rebuttal to this wishful portrait of a rlarrow movementt 4 They also document the transition from street demonstrations to civil disobedience to clandestine forms of armed resistanez -a the direct consequence of unrestrained repression...
...Political efforts were aimed at correcting the more flagrant forms of social injustice in order to generate support for the government in power...
...economic aid to the junta is money down the drain...
...But several more experienced reporters who ventured beyond the safe haven of the capital, learned that it was possible to walk 1112 Celebration in a zone controlled by the FMLN...
...But El Salvador was to fall far short of the parallels, and below the expectations generated by the FMLN itself...
...After all, the man who had become a symbol of guerrilla struggle in Latin America, the man who countered the green beret with a black one emblazoned with a small red star, was dead...
...The choppers have been leased to the junta at no cost by the U.S...
...All support the conscious military campaign described in these pages, and designed in Washington...
...Garcia, Gutierrez et al...
...The transition from leading commando units to full-size columns, from guerrilla tactics to full-scale battles, was much more difficult than we had imagined...
...By the time of this writing, the FMLN has established firm control over a significant and ever-widening share of the national territory...
...According to the Salvadorean Green Cross, they are on the verge of becoming blind from chemicals dumped on them by Air Force planes...
...Memories of Nicaragua's insurrection, of triumphant Sandinista columns entering Managua and bathing in Somoza's bathtub, were easily evoked...
...Yet the junta can ill afford to appear intransigent...
...The mountains are the people," says the FMLN...
...The junta, however, has rejected categorically the notion of mediation-calling it, almost comically were the tragedy not so vast, an unacceptable form of intervention in the country's internal affairs...
...Salvadorean peasants, teachers, workers and priests do not have the luxury of waiting...
...But he was right in stating, "I didn't start the El Salvador thing...
...He's their ticket to all those shiny new gunships that can carry the battle to the terrorists...
...2 4 Moreover, its earlier accomplishments and potential allure have been paled by the terror that consumes the countryside...
...The Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), a broad coalition that incorporates labor unions in the cities and countryside, universities, professional associations, church groups and more, is written off as a cosmetic cover for the Marxist Left...
...Tactics used against the civilians and against the guerrillas opposed to El Salvador's junta appear often to be based on United States military handbooks...
...Duarte's office but also to promote his social program and his effort to reach out to the democratic leaders in the opposition...
...Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1981...
...3 7 * As Commander of the Salvadorean National Guard, largest of the security forces, Colonel Eugenio Vides Casanova is a man to remember when "judgment day" rolls around...
...Ibid...
...They were indoctrinated by the priest," he responds...
...The January Offensive Reports of an imminent offensive had been in the press for weeks, raising expectations (or apprehensions) to extraordinary levels...
...NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...By the early 1970s, operations in the Guatemalan highlands had decimated the guerrilla bands there...
...And the Reagan Administration breathed a loud sigh of relief, even as it rushed more arms and advisers to help fight those "lonely" rebels...
...Other observers say that popular support has not been eroded, that people understand the exigencies of war...
...bombing power stations and roads...
...They were protected by local lookouts, and supplied with food by the barrio dwellResistance cells grow in the dense barrios of the poor.MaylJune 1981 ers-even as the Army patrolled the streets in armored cars and helicopters flew constantly overhead...
...A small army of 500 refugees, mainly women, children and babies, had been hiding from the Salvadorean Army for as long as five months...
...A. U.S...
...without the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), that joins the popular organizations to middle-class professionals, political parties, the universities and more...
...cines...
...and Journal oj Commerce, March 31, 1981...
...First, the state and strategy of the revolutionary forces in El Salvador...
...Garcia stayed and the civilians resigned...
...What remains, according to the White Paper and the mainstream press, is a small extremist cdre, beholden to Moscow and bereft of popular support...
...A taxi driver cited the effect: "Last Sunday I was listening to the Government radio telling me that the guerrillas had been defeated while I drove through Suchitoto, which was in the hands of the guerrillas...
...What must be understood," said FMLN commander Alejandro Montenegro, in a post-mortem of the strike, "is that in our country it is no longer possible to raise the idea of a strike without also discussing military protection for the strike...
...Internal Limitations: One of the most serious problems faced by the FMLN was the lack of an adequate communications network: no safe place where the command structure could meet and no radio station that could be heard by the population or used for internal FMLN communications...
...El Dia, April 24, 1981, as cited in Intercontinental Press, June 1, 1981, p. 579...
...On March 16, the Salvadorean Air Force dropped bombs on 8, 000 refugees stranded at the Rio Lempa, another crossing point, while the Army fired mortar shells and machine guns, and the Honduran Army blocked their escape route...
...Still, an important sector of liberal opinion in the United States clings doggedly to the notion of a centrist, reformist regime in El Salvador, battling the extremists at both ends of the political spectrum...
...government figures, and the foreign exchange shortage is expected to exceed $143 million...
...According to FMLN and independent reports, in zones where the balance of forces went against the Salvadorean Army, Honduras and Guatemala provided air and ground support...
...But the labor movement's ability to respond to the call was limited by several factors...
...In practice, it means the military and political consolidation of the zones under FMLN control, and extending that control to zones presently in dispute...
...The era of "cheap victories" is over...
...presence...
...Though we have never fought one quite like it, this conflict may be typical of future struggles in which we might, sad to say, become involved...
...forces too thinly over entire continents in turmoil...
...Cynthia Arnson, "Background Information on El Salvador and U.S...
...The results of this last accomplishment would not be immediately apparent in January, and the U.S...
...You can't fool the people a second time around...
...critics of the junta must flee the country to voice their opinions...
...funds, intended to counter the effects of capital flight and sabotage, flow largely to the private sector as an inducement to stay in business...
...Their job is to train a special "quick reaction force" of 2000 men...
...Who then, wields real power in El Salvador today...
...5 Troops Forged in Battle The FSLN in Nicaragua had taken two years to incorporate people into its ranks and prepare for a general insurrection...
...We have some peasant women who join us as cooks, but they soon realize that they have opThe FMLN's zones of control shaded in gray...
...Or witness the 1,200 children under ten years of age who are refugees in San Rafael la Bermuda...
...1 6 This process of revolutionary integration is expected to expand as the rainy season begins in June and these zones become less penetrable to the Army...
...With each mutilated body that turns up at dawn, bearing the clear markings of the death squads, San Salvador's workers have few tears to shed for the property of those who oppress them...
...Ibid...
...Washington Post, April 21, 1981...
...ORDEN is a paramilitary organization officially banned but nevertheless tolerated by the government...
...Taking the Longer View A necessary component of U.S...
...The popular organizations had been forced deep underground, and many members had left the city to join the guerrilla ranks...
...Wars of national- liberation, anywhere on the globe, would be seen as a threat to that hegemony in a zero-sum game that could only favor "the other side...
...policy...
...According to the Miami Herald, such arrangements are not routine...
...Journalists have been banned from areas where military operations are underway...
...Duarte, like the agrarian reform, is a sideshow to divert attention from the massacres...
...And in the midst of this19 and Colonel Jose Garcia...
...193 (May 1981), p. 7. 7. Ibid., p. 7. 8. Journal of Commerce, January 15, 1981...
...Even so, 26 factories were struck on the first day, and 20,000 public employees walked out on January 15.8 More workers joined, but ultimately the strike petered out for lack of adequate protection...
...35...
...Karen DeYoung, "White Hand of Terror," MotherJones, Vol...
...Both sides of the counterinsurgency operation were lost, and half a million U.S...
...2) that the populace has a sufficiently low level of political consciousness and will respond to cooptation...
Vol. 15 • May 1981 • No. 3
