EL SALVADOR'S FORGOTTEN WAR

...Although they have not been decisively beaten," the September CIA report states, "the guerrillas, in our view, no longer have the capacity to launch and sustain major offensives...

...Last year, training shifted to a new center in La Union, El Salvador...

...The conflict has already claimed some 60,000 lives—more than 1 per cent of the Salvadoran population...

...Torture in El Salvador," Americas Watch reported last year, "consists increasingly of physical abuse that does not leave physical marks, such as the capucha (hood to suffocate) and immersion in filthy water...

...Today the spotlight is on Nicaragua and El Salvador is all but forgotten, despite a resurgence of political violence and new evidence of U.S...

...Instead, the Duarte government has chosen to dismiss the opposition as a subversive communist front...

...In fact, these documents—prepared by the Office of African and Latin American Analysis in coordination with the CIA's Directorate of Operations—dismiss Duarte's previous call for peace, issued last year, as a meaningless "public-relations gesture...

...The interrogators were able to learn the pseudonyms of about thirty members of that guerrilla unit, their titles and functions, and the pseudonyms of the three clandestine operatives who had recruited the prisoners...

...But according to U.S...

...One goal of Reagan Administration policy is to avoid the kind of wholesale slaughter that used to lead to questions in Congress and public protests...

...These practices, like the capucha and immersion, leave no physical marks...

...Government was directed less at restoring human rights than at developing more sophisticated forms of interrogation...

...Ultra-conservative parties, backed by the country's intransigent private sector, control El Salvador's supreme court...

...policy...

...The Salvadoran government maintains that the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) is prolonging the conflict...

...A new rightist organization, the Movement for National Action, has entered the fray, calling for Duarte's resignation and berating the military for failing to crush the insurgents...

...The steps proposed by the FMLN would, therefore, go a lpng way toward reducing civilian casualties...

...The murdered Hernandez Martinez was last seen being led off by government soldiers on April 16...

...authorities believe the government has taken the upper hand...

...partment official, "was to play by their rules"—"their" meaning such human-rights organizations as Amnesty International and Americas Watch, which had long criticized U.S...

...Even as the use of "negative-incentive" techniques has increased, blatant physical abuse continues...

...The Salvadoran military say they can win the war, and U.S...

...Military intelligence documents sent from El Salvador to Washington give an indication of how interrogations are conducted in the field...

...He added that methods inappropriate for use by the police in the United States can be justified in El Salvador because "this is a war and a different situation...

...The ultraconservatives enjoy backing within the armed forces, especially among U.S.-trained oficiales de la guerra (war officers), including Colonel Sigfrido Ochoa, former commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade in Chalatenango, and Colonel Mauricio Staben of the Arce Battalion...

...El Salvador's FORGOTTEN WAR BY FRANK SMYTH The U.S...

...Army Special Forces advisers formerly stationed in the region, small courses for selected Salvadoran soldiers regularly included training in "negative-incentive" methods...

...Their offer included pledges to stop using land mines and to suspend their campaign of economic sabotage in exchange for an end to aerial bombing by the government and a halt of summary executions by both sides...

...Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Brigadier General Fred Woerner to conduct a survey of the Salvadoran armed forces...

...Congress, mindful of El Salvador's blatant disregard for human rights, had blocked or reduced Administration requests for an escalation of military aid...

...advisers, Salvadoran officers complain that they don't have time for lengthy interrogations on patrol...

...Such assessments have often been made in the course of the eight-year-old conflict, and they have always turned out to be unfounded...

...A few years ago, all eyes were on El Salvador, its infamous Death Squads, and the U.S...

...The prisoner, it seems clear, was persuaded that his captors would inflict greater harm if he didn't talk than his comrades would if he did...

...In the past, such rhetoric has preceded the unleashing of new Death Squad offensives...

...In 1985, 250 Salvadoran military personnel were sent to the Pentagon's Regional Training Center in Tegucigalpa, Honduras...

...Duarte, who has neither the will nor the power to oversee an end to the war, did offer two symbolic concessions in his June 1 speech: He said that he would allow seventy-eight wounded rebels to leave the country for medical treatment and that he might grant amnesty to 400 political prisoners...

...For four months earlier this year, they boycotted the legislative assembly, which is dominated by Duarte's Christian Democrats...

...Three days before Duarte's speech at Sensuntepeque, the FMLN had proposed to enter into direct negotiations with the government on July 15...

...Additional units, particularly elite battalions, were trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and smaller units received special instruction at the U.S...

...complicity in assaults on human rights...

...In 1981, when unarmed civilians were being murdered at the rate of thirty-five a day, the U.S...

...The first group of 470 Salvadoran officer cadets received training in a three-month course at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1982...

...The FMLN has expanded its operations to all fourteen provinces of El Salvador, increasing the likelihood that the struggle may continue for many years...

...In fact, one of El Salvador's notorious right-wing Death Squads resurfaced on June 16...

...Another 600 arrived in 1983, followed by even more in 1984...

...Few armed guerrillas have ever been taken prisoner, and it is generally assumed that they are executed when captured in the field...

...CIA analysts fear the FMLN is trying to provoke violence between civilians and security forces, and have expressed concern that in the future the military may exercise less restraint: "Increasing violence will fuel the insurgency by alienating Duarte's primary constituencies in the lower middle classes and the urban poor, or by provoking a coup and military crackdown...

...Indeed, five unarmed alleged "FMLN collaborators" were murdered by the army's Arce Battalion on May 22, their bodies thrown into a well...

...He unveiled fifty-four new proposals to rebuild El Salvador and promised to open a dialogue with leftist guerrillas, provided they first laid down their arms...

...Salvadoran government officials "see little to be gained in a dialogue with the rebels while the Salvadoran military has the initiative in the war," says a CIA report dated September 2, 1986...

...Government bombing missions are targeted on areas of high rebel activity, but most casualties are inflicted on civilians rather than FMLN fighters...

...Under mounting pressure from church and human-rights groups, the Administration began in 1983 to express concern over the operations of the Salvadoran Death Squads...

...But the Salvadoran government, backed by the United States, is interested only in a military solution...

...Government's role in sustaining a brutally repressive regime...

...The idea," says a former State DeFrank Smyth, a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C., has reported from El Salvador...

...Southern Command in Panama...

...But classified CIA documents reveal that it is Duarte's U.S.-backed government that has no interest in ending the civil war...

...However, State Department sources confirm there was considerable friction within the Administration over its indifference to human-rights considerations...

...Three days before that, the offices of the Co-Madres (Committee of Mothers and Relatives of Political Prisoners Disappeared) were demolished by a bomb...

...Duarte ignored these developments when he traveled in a heavily armored eighty-car convoy to deliver his state-of-the-union address in the small northern town of Sensuntepeque...

...The Reagan Administration has tried to make El Salvador a showcase for containment of communism in the Hemisphere, and has undertaken highly publicized steps to "professionalize" the Salvadoran military...

...A Pentagon intelligence officer who spoke on condition that his name not be published said such techniques "are exactly the kind of thing that the Special Forces are teaching in El Salvador...

...At the same time, however, he rejected out of hand a bold new FMLN peace initiative...

...But once he saw that this was false, he opened up a little more...

...However, the new training effort undertaken by the U.S...

...The democratic revolution has just begun," President Jose Napoleon Duarte told the Salvadoran people in his third annual state-of-the-union address on June 1. But one day earlier, labor leader Julio Por-tillo was shot at an anti-government demonstration near San Salvador...

...According to former U.S...

...In mid-1985, three combatants of the FAL—a guerrilla group led by the Salvadoran Communist Party-were captured coming off the Guazapa Volcano near the capital...

...Early this spring, at a time when the insurgents were believed to be in decline, the FMLN mounted a surprise attack on an army garrison at El Paraiso, killing sixty-nine government soldiers and one U.S...

...For these officers, there is no distinction between the insurgents and the domestic political opposition...

...The extreme Right continues to play an active role in Salvadoran politics...

...A Defense Department spokesman, Marine Captain Jay C. Farrar, said it is "highly doubtful" that these courses offered instruction in abusive interrogation techniques...

...The documents explain, in euphemistic terms, the interrogation of one combatant: "In the beginning he didn't say much, due to his companeros who had told him that the FAL would beat or kill him [if he talked...

...He had been on his way to arrange for a loan to his peasant cooperative...

...In the past few months, the military has grown increasingly independent in El Salvador, and another round of political violence may be in the offing...

...That may explain why opposition political figures have come under violent political attack in recent months, and why Duarte's effectiveness has been markedly reduced...

...The most prevalent forms of abuse of detainees at present are sleep deprivation, food deprivation, and threats against family members...

...Guerrilla-planted mines cause up to 70 per cent of government casualties and are, along with the economic-sabotage campaign, the insurgents' most effective weapons...

...The Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez Brigade accused fourteen teachers and students at the National University of having guerrilla links, and gave them forty-eight hours to leave the country...

...But if the Duarte government's current policy of selective repression were to fail to keep the domestic opposition under control, the military might resort to more obvious methods...

...Army Special Forces adviser...

...State Department sources say abuse of this kind now occurs in about 20 per cent of all prisoner interrogations...

...And earlier in May, the tortured, headless body of peasant leader Antonio Hernandez Martinez was found in San Miguel...

...His report, which called for the expansion, equipping, training, and modernization of the Salvadoran military, set the tone for Reagan Administration policy toward El Salvador...

...Julio Portillo, who heads a high-school teachers' union, was leading a peaceful anti-government protest outside Mariona prison when he was struck by one of the shots directed at the protesters from the direction of the Salvadoran army's First Infantry Brigade...

...Hernandez, Portillo, and the Co-Madres were active participants in a labor-led opposition coalition that has been challenging the Salvadoran government to pursue genuine reforms and negotiate an end to years of insurgent warfare...