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Release the Jesuit Tapes

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Original article can be found here.

by Thomas Long & Frank Smyth

The FBI Has Videotaped Testimony That Accuses the Salvadoran Army of Killing Six Jesuits—and Proves the U.S. Knew in Advance

SAN SALVADOR—American officials in both San Salvador and Washington claim that they have cooperated “intensely” with the investigation into the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter last November. Yet even though State Department officials finally yielded to pressure from Congress to turn over the sworn testimony of a U.S. military adviser—who said he knew of the murder plan in advance—they have continued to withhold key evidence. For 10 months the FBI has kept a videotape of the adviser’s testimony, which suggests there was a conspiracy to murder the Jesuits that included several top Salvadoran army officers, in their Washington headquarters.

Two weeks ago U.S. Embassy officials delivered to a Salvadoran judge three cursory sworn affidavits given by U.S. Army Major Eric Warren Buckland to the FBI in January. But they did not turn over the videotape or a transcript of a detailed discussion between Buckland and FBI examiner Paul Cully.

The recorded discussion is vital. Cully based his own conclusion that Buckland had prior knowledge of a plan to kill the Jesuit priests on the videotaped interview. It also contains information that Buckland recanted—with only a sketchy explanation—one week later.

“There is no way to analyze his statements and his supposed retraction without having the videotape—or at least a transcript—to know exactly what he said and what he was trying to recant,” said Antonio Cañas, a senior political analyst at the Jesuit-run University of Central America.

American officials have yet to explain why this evidence has not already been volunteered to investigating Salvadoran authorities. In fact, U.S. officials in San Salvador have received strict instructions from Washington not to comment on Buckland’s testimony at all.

Nevertheless, the videotape was entered into evidence at FBI headquarters in Washington. Logged, according to official FBI documents, under case title “Shooting of Six Jesuit Priests,” subject “Murder,” it has been “maintained” at the Polygraph Unit, section GRB, Suite 2, under the file number #00116093 PQ1X0.

“Why is the Embassy being so fucking tight-lipped?” asked a non-American Western official, who has been independently monitoring the investigation. “Somewhere somebody is lying through their back teeth within the U.S. hierarchy.”

According to Jesuit academic Michael Czerny, “The United States government from very early on has been acting in a very irregular if not criminal manner.”

Major Buckland has offered two clearly conflicting stories. First he said he had prior knowledge that senior officers were planning to murder the priests. Then he said that he only learned of the Jesuit murders after the fact.

But his recantation is less than weak. “It’s absolutely nonsensical,” said one Western diplomat. In both versions, Buckland says that some time before the Jesuits were killed he accompanied a senior Salvadoran army officer, Colonel Carlos Avilés, to the country’s military academy to “solve a problem” with the school’s director, Colonel Guillermo Benavides. Benavides was later charged with ordering the Jesuit murders.

Buckland says he shared a close working and personal relationship with Colonel Avilés, his Salvadoran counterpart in developing psychological operations for the war. He also says that Avilés was his chief source of information on the murders. According to both Buckland’s original and revised testimonies, on the day of their visit to the academy, Avilés was acting as a special envoy of then army chief of staff Colonel René Emilio Ponce.

In a sworn handwritten statement given to the FBI on January 11, Buckland says Avilés told him that Benavides, the military school’s director, and other unnamed officers were planning to kill Ignacio Ellacuría, the rector of the University of Central America and the most prominent of the murdered priests. The adviser says he waited while Avilés went to talk with Benavides:

“Aviles appeared very uncomfortable about talking to Benevides. Upon returning to the vehicle Aviles called me back to the vehicle and told me that he had to work something out; ‘Colonel Benavides is from the old school, he liked to handle things in his own way, in the old style.”…

“Benevides told Aviles that Ella Coria [sic] was a problem. Aviles told me they wanted to handle it the old way by killing some of the priests. I asked what happened when you (Aviles) talked to him. Aviles told me that Benavides was old school and was still the ‘rammer.’ ”

In his January 18 retraction one week later, Buckland describes the same visit in even greater detail. He recalls, for instance, Avilés telling him “about the fine quality of the bread baked at the military school.” At the same time, however, Buckland curiously claims not to remember anything about his conversation with Avilés concerning Benavides—which was, according to the adviser’s own testimonies, the purpose of the trip:

“After we both got into the vehicle, I asked him words to the effect of what was going on and I do not remember his reply or specifically what “we talked about.” According to this revised version, the major still claims Avilés told him about Benavides’s involvement in the murders—but on another occasion, six weeks after the crime took place.

In explaining the switch, Buckland implies that his initial version was given under duress, and that he became confused during the FBI examination. But it does seem odd that Buckland could have invented the information that Benavides wanted to murder Father Ellacuria—and even write it down himself—and then recall nothing a week later. What’s more, Buckland’s first account is rich, in its particulars, with little hint of confusion under stern FBI examination. It seems unlikely, for example, that Buckland could have remembered all the details like the little-known nickname, “the rammer,” when Benavides is more commonly referred to by fellow officers as “Virgin Boots.”

U.S. officials back up Buckland’s claim that he lost control of his faculties in his initial testimony—even though the veteran Green Beret and army Special Forces Psychological Operations major was under routine questioning as a friendly witness.

Even more convincing, a lie detector test directly contradicts Buckland’s retraction. In answer to the question, “Did you have prior knowledge that the Jesuits would be killed?” Buckland said no, and the polygraph indicated “deception,” according to official FBI documents.

Based on this and the subsequent videotaped interview, FBI examiner Cully concludes: “Buckland admitted that he obtained prior knowledge that the [priests at the university] were going to be killed, specifically Ellacoria [sic], through conversations with Colonel Avilés. According to Major Buckland, Colonel Avilés told him of the intent of certain officers of the El Salvadoran Army to conduct a military operation against the University of Central America. Major Buckland became aware of this information several weeks before the Jesuits were murdered.”

But Colonel Avilés, Buckland’s main source, denies telling the adviser anything. Avilés denies even his former friendship with Buckland—a relationship of which both Salvadoran and Americans were well aware. Indeed, Avilés claims that he was not even in El Salvador when the alleged trip took place.

Buckland, in his initial statement, says the pair made the visit “approximately 10 days before the killings (circa November 6, 1989).” But in his later version, the adviser says the trip was made in late October, recalling that Avilés left for vacation at the beginning of November.

Colonel Ponce, on whose orders Avilés was allegedly sent to the military school, also denies knowing of the murders in advance. He bases his denial on a selectively narrow reading of Buckland’s testimony (Ponce has since been promoted to the military’s top post as minister of defense).

Last month Ponce sent a letter to Massachusetts congressman Joe Moakley, who chairs a special task force on the investigation. Ponce points out that Avilés passport indicates he was not in El Salvador in early November. “That should be sufficient to demonstrate with facts the falsehood of Major Buckland’s declaration,” he says in the letter.

Only Buckland’s revised testimony, which U.S. officials now claim is the truth, establishes the date of the visit in late October.

The newest revelations do not mark the first time Avilés and Buckland have given widely disparate versions of their activities together. Buckland first came forward in early January, telling his superiors that Aviles informed him in December that the military school director had ordered the killings. Avilés categorically denies revealing any information.

Both men were given lie detector tests at that time. Congressman Moakley and other officials concluded that it was the Salvadoran colonel who was lying.

Avilés would have had good reason. To be branded a snitch within the most exclusive and powerful men’s club in El Salvador—the senior officers’ corps—is akin to blowing the whistle on the Mafia. At the very least, “his career is over,” said one Western official. Not surprisingly, Avilés has since said he’s planning to retire.

“It is a very grave sin among them [to snitch],” said a chief prosecutor from the office of the Salvadoran attorney general. “But they can’t get rid of him now, because it would be too obvious.” Portions of the affidavits which Buckland does not retract reveal that both men feared for their lives because of what they knew of the murders.

The many inconsistencies between Buckland’s original and revised testimonies clearly indicate that key pieces of the puzzle are still missing. For one thing, much of the information he recants in his revised affidavit never actually appeared in his previous sworn statements.

What’s more, the FBI examiner’s report draws heavily on evidence that has never been made available to Salvadoran judicial authorities. The most complete record of what Buckland may have known and when he knew it is likely to be found in the videotaped FBI interview.

The Bush administration has never been notably openhanded about information concerning the Jesuits’ murder. The January affidavits were released only after Congressman Moakley publicly complained in mid-October. The Salvadoran judge on the case has now asked for the videotaped interview; U.S. officials refuse to comment on the matter, saying they have not yet received a formal diplomatic request.

Such behavior leads Jesuit leaders and other observers to question the administration’s true intentions. “The U.S. Embassy did not provide the evidence, and they have not yet explained why,” said Father Jose Maria Tojeira, the Jesuit Provincial for Central America. “They are either inept, or acting in bad faith.”

Sources say that Buckland’s January testimony was “discovered” by U.S. officials in San Salvador in late September. Yet they refuse to say who in the federal government might be responsible for their mysterious discovery or even which agency channeled the evidence from the FBI headquarters in Washington to the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador. They also fail to explain why it took nearly a month to pass the evidence to Salvadoran authorities— at the same time that they deny that Moakley’s prodding played any role.

Non-American officials and other observers say that the U.S. government’s blatant discrepancies warrant an inquiry. “There are too many agencies involved,” said one Western diplomat. “They [should] be called to testify under oath.”

Officials of the Jesuit university agree.

“There has always been passive complicity [by U.S. officials] in human rights abuses in the past; now the complicity has become active,” said the university’s Cañas. “It is not only a question of how far does this complicity reach, but where did it begin?”

The Truth Will Out

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San Salvador — The official purpose given for Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson’s visit here two weeks ago was to express support for negotiations between El Salvador’s U.S.-backed government and the leftist guerrillas. But the real reason the ranking state department policymaker for Latin America traveled to El Salvador was to give a scathing lecture to the High Command of the Salvadoran Army over their suspected involvement in the murders of six Jesuit Priests last November.

Aronson gave the High Command a dressing down that differed markedly from his public comments on the U.S. ambassador’s lawn. Sources present at the meeting said Aronson lambasted the assembled officers about the Jesuit investigation, and demanded that those responsible be brought to trial.

U.S. officials here admit to being terrified at what they might find if they press the government to get to the bottom of the case. They have begun to realize that not only a few lower-ranking officers, but several members of the senior High Command may be complicit in planning the murders. U.S. officials also fear the embassy’s favorite son, armed forces chief of staff Colonel Rene Emilio Ponce, may be involved.

So far, no definitive evidence to link specific senior officers to the actual ordering of the crime has come to light — presumably because individual officers have closed ranks to protect one another. But a mounting body of evidence points increasingly to the complicity of the High Command.

Military intelligence sources as well as Catholic Church officials say that prior to the Jesuit murders, the military conceived of “Plan Djakarta” a term coined after the brutal 1965 anti-communist campaign in Indonesia that led to the wholesale slaughter of leftists and ethnic Chinese in that country. Sources say the military’s Plan Djakarta, which was developed in the midst of the major offensive by leftist guerrillas last November, targeted dozens of prominent religious, labor, and other popular leaders for assassination. The Plan Djakarta strongly suggests that the Jesuits were not killed in isolation, but as part of a broader, preconceived plan.

Under strong pressure from Congress, the [George H. W.] Bush administration has been forced to make the infamous massacre of six Jesuit priests and two women a test case for U.S. policy. But various diplomatic and other sources say the Salvadoran military High Command is actively blocking the investigation. Unless the crime is successfully prosecuted and its “intellectual authors” within the military are tried, U.S. officials admit they will have little remaining justification to defend against serious cuts in U.S. aid.

It’s now become apparent that the dilemma has frozen U.S. policy in its tracks. At the very least, even if Ponce was not involved in the killings, given his sway over the rest of the rest of the High Command, diplomats suspect the chief of staff is collaborating in a cover-up. The High Command’s failure to demand accountability in the case demonstrates that U.S. attempts to “professionalize” the Salvadoran Armed Forces have been in vain. Though it has been financed and supported by U.S. tax dollars over the past 10 years, the Salvadoran military is now thumbing its nose at its backers, and the senior officers that currently dominate the High Command have become Washington’s Frankenstein — or Noriega — in yet another Central American nation.

The High Command remained politely silent during Aronson’s address, and at the end gave him an ovation. But sources present said they doubted that his words were well heeded. One observer said, “It was like telling sharks not to eat sardines.”

Wearing a standard dark-blue suit, white shirt, and red tie, the assistant secretary looked a little out of place before the camouflage-clad Salvadoran High Command, according to one observer present. “He was like a Dutch uncle,” he said. “But I don’t know if they got the [message].”

Aronson’s visit came in the wake of heavy pressure from U.S. officials here. Diplomats say the embassy’s military attaché, Colonel Wayne Wheeler, has lobbied the High Command almost daily to cooperate with the investigation. Frustrated with the lack of progress in the case, U.S. ambassador William Walker — conscious that his own diplomatic future may be hanging on the outcome — recently gave what officials described as the “toughest speech of his 30-year career.” But the High Command didn’t budge. Aronson was called in to up the ante.

Five soldiers and three junior officers have been charged with carrying out the murders, and Colonel Guillermo Benavides has been charged with ordering them. But diplomats and other observers here are almost unanimous that Benavidcs, who has been referred to as “Virgin Boots” could not have ordered a crime of such magnitude on his own. “I know Benavides,” said a senior U.S. official directly involved in the case. “I don’t believe he did it,” he said flatly.

For a time, U.S. officials entertained the thought that the lower-ranking officers charged in the assassination of some of El Salvador’s most prestigious Catholic clergy and respected academic critics on their own. But both the severity of the crime and the number of troops involved make that highly unlikely. Besides, the High Command’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation puts that scenario further in doubt. “Why would a lieutenant decide to do that?” said a non-American Western diplomat. “It had to come from higher up.”

Speculation revolves around two now well-known meetings. The first took place in the High Command headquarters the evening of November 15, just hours before the Jesuit murders. The second occurred in the military’s National Directorate of Intelligence (which shares facilities with the CIA) several hours after the deaths. Earlier this year, military sources told reporters that officers at the first meeting decided to use air power to put down the mounting guerrilla offensive, and to try to assassinate suspected rebel leaders in the capital. Sources also said that at the second meeting, officers clapped in approval upon hearing of the Jesuits’ deaths.

One Salvadoran Army officer present at that second meeting, Colonel Pineda Guerra, took issue with his fellow officers for applauding, according to diplomatic and military sources. Pineda argued that the Jesuit murders were a mistake, and predicted that the case would be a terrible scar on the military as an institution. Other officers, especially Colonel Guzman Aguilar, argued that the Jesuits deserved what they got. “[Pineda] made a real impression on people present,” said a U.S. official — implying that either American officials or sources were also represented.

But it still remains unclear who ordered the killings — and who knew about them, and when. On the morning the Jesuits were killed, Army soldiers raided the headquarters of the Lutheran Church and were also seen at the homes of several other antigovernment politicians and activists. All but the Jesuits had already gone into hiding. That the actions all occurred at about the same time led to speculation among Church officials and others that the military had drawn up a list, identified to the Church as “Plan Djakarta.” Several members of the High Command confirmed the existence of the Plan Djakarta, according to an individual with long-standing access to the military and official intelligence information. The purpose of the list was “to decapitate” the antigovernment movement, he said. “There were lots of religious and other people on it.” When asked how many, he said, “at least a hundred.”

El Salvador’s Catholic archbishop, Rivera y Damas, told an audience in Europe that he believes his name and that of Auxiliary Bishop Rosa Chavez were included: “Bishop Rosa Chavez and I could have died too on that night (the Jesuits were killed). Our names were on the list of Plan Djakarta, whose aim was the physical elimination of all of those of us who denounce human rights violations and the system of injustice here in El Salvador.”

“What we do know, we have from sources which the Archbishop sees as worthy of belief,” Rosa Chavez later told an American reporter. “The plan you mention did exist.” Two days after the Jesuits were killed, El Salvador Attorney General Eduardo Colorado sent a letter to Pope John Paul II, warning him that the bishops were in danger. The Salvadoran AG encouraged the Pope to temporarily withdraw the bishops for their own protection.

The Jesuits’ deaths make it inconceivable that they would not have been on the list. The testimony of one the lieutenants charged with killing them is also telling. According to the testimony recorded by El Salvador’s Fourth Penal Court, Benavides told three of his subordinates, “This is a situation where it’s them or us; we’re going to begin with the ringleaders. And within our sector, we have the university and Ellacuria [the most prominent of the murdered priests) is there.”

Nevertheless, judicial authorities have not even begun to seriously investigate the High Command. Actually, fewer than a dozen officers have provided even peripheral testimony in the case. Ponce, for example, took responsibility for ordering a search of the Jesuits’ residence less than three days before they were killed. But he has only provided a judge with prepared statements, limited largely to the search itself. Only one senior officer besides Benavides has been called before the judge. Other key senior officers whom diplomats strongly suspect, such as Vice-Minister of Defense Juan Orlando Zepeda, have yet to be even seriously questioned. El Salvador’s Fourth Penal judge, Ricardo Zamora [no relation to leftist politician Ruben Zamora] is genuinely pursuing leads. But his efforts are, predictably, limited mostly to the execution of the crime, not to who gave the order.

The investigation itself has taken a number of strange turns. “Every time they get one thing straight, they come to something else,” said a non-American diplomat. “They keep incriminating more people.” The burning of more than 7O log books from the Military Academy — which might have indicated who directed the unit that killed the Priests — is one example. Military officers said that all the books from 1989 were burned as standard routine, though the books for 1987 and 1988 are, oddly, still on file.

In another bizarre twist, Judge Zamora ordered the arrest of Lieutenant Colonel Camilo Hernandez for having allegedly ordered the books to be burned. But three weeks passed before Hernandez was actually arrested, and consigned to a judge. The High Command says it was a misunderstanding; a non-American Western diplomat independently monitoring the case describes the military’s attitude toward the investigation as a “joke.”

Other diplomats say the Bush administration has wanted to get — or has needed to get in order to pacify Congress– at least one officer above Benavides to take responsibility for ordering the assassinations. But the problem is whether one senior officer can be singled out from the rest. “They were looking for one other name besides (Benavides),” said a non-American diplomat. “They (thought) someone higher up was involved, but what if they were all involved?”

Salvadoran Abyss

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Escalon, San Salvador — “They should either kill them all or negotiate,” the well-to-do Salvadoran businessman said in nearly flawless English. Leftist guerrillas had taken over this usually quiet suburban neighborhood, and some had even passed the night in his home. “This thing has to end,” he added. “We need a solution.”

The November military offensive by the F.M.L.N. has forced a watershed in El Salvador’s history and overturned all conventional assumptions about U.S. policy here. In Escalon and other wealthy areas of the capital, the rebel drive has generated a new sense of pragmatism among right-wing people who had never entertained the concept of negotiations between the government and the F.M.L.N. Within the Salvadoran military, however, the offensive has strengthened the hand of the most ruthless and uncompromising army and air force officers. Unless there is swift action in Washington, total war may break out, leaving the United States with the choice of embracing the bloodshed or cutting off aid — thereby risking a military victory by leftist rebels. Events are moving at lightning speed, and the window of opportunity closes a little further each day.

A negotiated solution is Washington’s best hope for avoiding a policy disaster. But policymakers should abandon self-serving illusions, remove their ideological blinders and recognize the consequences of the November offensive.

First, it demonstrated that despite ten years of U.S. intervention and more than $4 billion in aid, the Salvadoran government and armed forces still cannot defeat the F.M.L.N. Militarily, the offensive was the rebels’ most spectacular demonstration of strength of the war. Politically it fell short of becoming a general insurrection or a seizure of power. But tens of thousands of Salvadorans collaborated, with a sophistication that demonstrates the rebels’ deep and highly organized base of clandestine support.

Second, the offensive prompted the government to shed its mask of democracy and civility with amazing speed. Its behavior surpassed even the worst expectations of its critics. The level of human rights abuses has been unprecedented since the early 1980s. The indiscriminate strafing, rocketing and bombing of heavily populated neighborhoods was appalling to behold.

Third, an overwhelming sense of terror has seized the country. The killing of the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter seems irrational to the naive denizens of Washington, but in El Salvador it made perfect Machiavellian sense. The Jesuits were vociferous critics of the government and the most persuasive advocates of a negotiated settlement. Their murders sent a message: Anyone who even thinks of supporting the F.M.L.N. or a negotiated solution is at risk. And no one, from highly visible critic to anonymous peasant collaborator, is immune.

Fourth, the country’s political center has collapsed. With the exception of a few leaders, the left-led popular movement has been driven underground. Formerly U.S.-supported Christian Democrats find themselves either threatened or irrelevant. Church-based community activists have been targeted for repression. The only two political options that remain are the Salvadoran Army and the F.M.L.N.

Fifth, President Alfredo Cristiani is technically the commander in chief of the military, but he is an inexperienced politician who is in over his head. A bloc of ultraconservative military officers, including Gen. Juan Rafael Bustillo of the air force and Vice Minister of Defense Juan Orlando Zepeda, has effectively assumed command. Zepeda is the officer that army defector Cesar Joya Martinez named as ordering military death squad assassinations as recently as last June. Bustillo has ordered his planes to buzz and drown out several presidential press conferences in open mockery of civilian authority. Bustillo himself may soon be headed for retirement, but he and his ilk have built alliances with junior and senior commanders throughout the military, reducing Cristiani’s role to little more than figurehead.

Sixth, Cristiani’s middle- and upper-class supporters have been left dumbstruck by the offensive. They once believed the predictions of Cristiani and the U.S. Embassy that prosperity was just around the corner. After F.M.L.N. guerrillas appeared literally on their doorstep, they are now leaving El Salvador en masse for Guatemala or Miami. Their exodus is likely to precipitate a long-term economic divestment. U.S. aid, which offset this trend in the early 1980s, can no longer be absorbed. And El Salvador is already more dependent on U.S. aid than any nation since South Vietnam.

Finally, although this aid and intervention represent the greatest U.S.-backed counterinsurgency effort since the Vietnam War, the ability of the United States to influence or control events here has been reduced to almost nothing. In previous years, policymakers argued that current levels of U.S. military and economic assistance were necessary to support “moderates” in the Salvadoran military and to avoid a bloodbath. But the bloodbath has begun and the “moderates,” it seems, are either impotent or nonexistent.

Faced with the choice of negotiations or all-out war, the Salvadoran military has begun to opt for war. Its most powerful officers believe the United States will tolerate any level of abuse in the name of anticommunism, whatever that now means. Only a substantial cut in U.S. aid when Congress reconvenes in January will make them see things differently.

Caught With Their Pants Down: Why U.S. Policy – and Intelligence – Failed in Salvador

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Original story can be found here.

“I DON’T THINK THEY HAVE the capability,” said a U.S. Embassy official as he sipped coffee one Saturday morning in the tropical setting of his patio. I asked him if he thought rumors of an upcoming rebel offensive were true. “We’ve heard some things,” he said. “But ESAF’s [El Salvador Armed Forces] taken measures to prevent it.”

Seven and a half hours later, heavy gunfire had made his pleasant, suburban street impassable. He was forced to barricade his family inside his home for hours as the battle raged.

Ever since Vietnam, U.S. policymakers have underestimated Third World guerilla movements. Although the Salvadoran military twice detected concrete evidence of planned rebel attacks the week before they occurred, both the army and their U.S. advisors preferred to believe their own propaganda. For years, U.S. officials had said the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) was losing this war. They never expected the FMLN to launch the most spectacular military offensive in the history of the 10-year civil war.

IN HINDSIGHT, it’s hard to see how anyone could have missed it. The grassroots guerilla activity amounted to a national conspiracy; tens of thousands of people participated in preparations for the offensive. Truckloads of rice, beans, bullets, and medicine were stockpiled in poor barrios.

The night before the offensive, U.S. Embassy personnel indulged in their annual Marine Corps ball. Most U.S. officials rarely get out of Escalon and the other affluent suburbs on the western side of the capital. Most of the staff press corps live out there as well. On the night the offensive began, the resident correspondents for Newsweek, Associated Press, and The New York Times were out of the country.

“They were caught with their pants down,” said one Western diplomat. Considering the level of U.S. commitment here–after 10 years and nearly $4 billion in aid–the failure to even remotely estimate the rebel strength amounts to the worst intelligence blunder since the fall of the Shah.

And then there’s President Alfredo Cristiani’s startled, unglued eyes after the reverberating crump of several bombs exploding outside his headquarters disrupting his press conference last week. They normally unflappable squash champion had just finished telling the cameras that the Salvadoran army had regained control of the capital.

The rebel offensive has forever changed the face of Salvadoran politics. On one hand, the FMLN has demonstrated that it can stand up to the greatest U.S.-backed counterinsurgency effort since Vietnam. On the other, the rebel drive has generated a rightist backlash of killing and repression not seen since the slaughter of the Archbishop Oscar Romero, four American nuns, and thousands of others in the early 1980s.

Thousands more are now likely to be killed. A military-impose, dusk-to-dawn curfew will provide cover for dragging targeted victims out of their homes. Trade unions, student, and other popular organizations have already become inactive or gone underground. But it’s the above-ground church activists, especially those who work with the poor, who have the most to fear.

Once more, the same old policy debate in Washington has also begun to round up the usual suspects. Critics are pointing to the slaying of six Jesuit priests by uniformed men (nearly every non-U.S. Western diplomat in town will tell you that the Salvadoran military was, at the very least, complicit in the crime) to argue against military and economic assistant. The State Department, on the other hand, is rattling its sabers after a plane loaded with sophisticated, Russian-made surface-to-air missiles was discovered apparently en route to the rebels from Managua.

The cold choice between human rights and “national security” was what both Reagan and Bush administration officials had long tried to avoid. But rather than admit that U.S. policy has run aground, American officials continue to engage in spin-control diplomacy, blaming the press and not the policy. During a press conference, Ambassador Walker tried to argue that the fighting in El Salvador is not a war. When I pointed out that was just what U.S. officials had said in Vietnam, U.S. Information Officer Barry Jacobs stepped forward, pointed his index finger and them at me as if it were a pistol, and jerked it upward in imaginary recoil.

“WE’RE ALL SCARED,” said a young heavyset Salvadoran woman, “because we’ve never seen anything like this before.” She was standing with about a dozen local residents at a recently built rebel barricade. Most said they had never seen a real guerilla before.

Like many other poor barrios around the country, popular organization in Santa Marta is a strong but mostly clandestine. Both rebel operatives and government oreja–informants–live close together here; on one street; unbeknownst to the oreja, the guerillas even live next door.

The FMLN tried to judge potential support when choosing areas to occupy. Once the offensive began, thousands of rebels too fixed positions in the east, south, and north of the capital city. When the muchachos appeared, some civilians joined the struggle. But depending on whom you talked to and when, the rebels’ presence brought a mixture of hope, resentment, and fear.

“What we’re afraid of is the plans will come and massacre everyone,” said a mother standing at a barricade of bricks and overturned cars in the street.

“A fear we have,” explained an older woman in an apron. “It’s natural. But for me, more than anything, I have hope that there will be change.”

The 28-year-old urban commando in charge of the barricade, Izabel, represents a second generation of committed guerillas. She sat cross-legged on the floor, and asked a group of journalists for identification.
Izabel looked slightly surreal in the shell-pocked barrio wearing a bright turquoise bandanna and a dark blue polo shirt, cradling her AK-47. Her red nail polish was fading, like the bruises between her cheekbones and eyes.

She explained she had been captured by the Treasury Police the week before. “But I didn’t give information– not a thing,” she said, smiling. “So they beat me.”

Izabel directed the rebel occupation from a second-story window while other rebels prepared homemade contact bombs on the floor below. Barricades were being erected on nearly every street. The guerillas had about 10 square blocks under their control. Other guerilla unites were positioned a few miles away.

In these northern sectors, the rebels moved among apartment buildings and shantytowns. Taking cover in a cement stairway during a firefight, I encountered someone I recognized from the national university. His day pack was filled with ammunition. Like hundreds of students, trade unionists, and other activists, he had abandoned his legal life for the FMLN.

In this new urban context, the revels intentionally mixed experienced fighters with new recruits. Roberto, a commander and a veteran fighter from the countryside, climbed up the stairs. Moises, a 16-year-old recruit, held a position in the corner balcony on the upper floor. The sound of the gunfire was deafening; we both took cover as bullets ricocheted off the walls. Cringing slightly with each blast, Moises told me this was his first time in combat.

The FMLN’s success in switching from rural to urban warfare surprised even themselves. They demonstrated more military capability in seven days than Nicaraguan contras had demonstrated in that many years. Their immediate objective was to take hold parts of the city in a vivid demonstration of strength: they held most urban areas for about a week.

But some guerilla commanders I talked to said their ultimate goal was to take power. “Here we are and we will defend [our position] until freedom has arrived,” predicted Izabel. She and the 40 rebels under her command successfully repelled three government advances that week.

Later that day, a photographer saw Izabel’s body among the pile of 13 dead guerillas. She still wore her bright turquoise bandanna. Her pants were ripped, leaving the business card I had given her exposed in her leg. Several years ago, a similar mistake resulted in the assassinations of four Dutch journalists. By the time I arrived to retrieve it, soldiers had doused the corpse with gasoline. Izabel and her companions were left burning in the street.

THE HELICOPTER CIRCLED slowly overhead. I was in the northern sector of Zacamil, interviewing a woman in a shantytown among several thousand mud-and-split bamboo shacks. On the third approach, the pilot fired a single rocket in my direction, exploding about a hundred yards away.

There was gunfire on two sides, but none coming from the ridge where the rocket had landed. I approached a man whose face and arm were covered in blood. “They’ve just killed my family,” he said. The rocket had hit his home; his wife and two daughters were inside.

The severe reaction of the Salvadoran military to the rebel offensive surprised even its most ardent critics. The strafing, rocketing, and later bombing of heavily populated civilian areas was more than indiscriminate. Unlike in wealthy suburbs to the west, the Salvadoran military demonstrated a total disregard for the safety and well-being of its indigent residents.

“Señor periodista, señor periodista [Mr. journalist], please tell them to stop firing on our home,” said one many fleeing with about 50 others. “This isn’t the countryside. We live here.” Scores of families, carrying bundles of belongings and white flags, fled en masse from San Salvador’s poorer neighborhoods. At least a thousand people are known to have been killed since the fighting began; countless others have been wounded.

“Look at the beds,” said one elderly woman pointing to a pile of ashes. Following government airstrikes, row upon row of makeshift shacks were either demolished or burned. In Soyapango, entire blocks were destroyed. Reporters saw massive craters from what appear to have been 500-pound bombs.

“We don’t have anything left,” said a mother surveying the rubble that was once her home. “They just fired and fired.”

Military attitudes notwithstanding, the political cost to the government for the air war on the city will be tremendous. “Why don’t they negotiate” with the rebels, screamed one woman after her family in Zacamil was rocketed and killed.

They’re destroying the country,” said another woman fleeing from bombing raids in Soyapango.

“Who?” I asked.

“The same people who did that,” she said, referring to the brutal slaying of six Jesuit priests and academics.

FATHERS IGNACIO ELLACURIA, Ignacio Martin-Baro, and Segundo Montes were the country’s leading intellectuals, as well as El Salvador’s most articulate and compelling critics of both the Salvadoran government and U.S. policy. Their killings were only the beginning.

Religious activities across the country have been targeted. More than 41 church volunteers, including 20 foreigners, have been captured. U.S.-born Catholic priest Jim Barnet and Lutheran minister Bill Dexheimer received death threats and left the country.

U.S. volunteer Jennifer Casolo also received a death threat by telephone. At 10:30 Saturday night, soldiers entered her home. They claimed to have found one of the largest guerilla arms caches since the offensive began buried in her backyard.

Casolo organized visiting religious and congressional delegations. Anyone who knows her would say the accusation is preposterous. But privately U.S. officials say they expect her to be tried, convicted and send to a Salvadoran jail.

Casolo, like the Jesuits, is being made an example. Independent criticism is no longer acceptable. And meddling by foreigners in Salvadoran affairs will no longer be tolerated.

AFTER THE AIRSTRIKES here first started, Ambassador Walker said he had “no knowledge” of government bombing. But other U.S. officials had already admitted the government was bombing urban areas of the city. Once religious volunteer who lives in a targeted area was told the situation was out of the embassy’s control.

But that hardly meant that Americans were not involved in the terror bombing of San Salvador’s people. On November 15 at approximately 10:15 in the morning, a conversation between a U.S. military advisor in a “Blackhawk” observation helicopter and “retelo,” the U.S. military command center in San Salvador, was intercepted by radio. The observer told retelo the Salvadoran air force needed to “hit” an area several blocks “north of the church.”

U.S. advisors in El Salvador are prohibited from participating in or directing government raids. Shortly after this transmission, a senior U.S. military official monitoring the conversation broke in ordering all such communications to be done “on push 5”–-a scrambling system installed last February after U.S. military advisors became aware that journalists were monitoring their communications.

After years of self-deception, American policy had finally been unveiled. “That’s why they’re here” said a diplomat from a U.S.-allied country, “to keep the place in order–-to keep the place from turning commie.”

“Why would they kill Jesuits?” asked the diplomat, referring to the army. “It’s another Romero,” he said. “It’s starting again.”

Negotiations or Total War

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Morazan, El Salvador — Compa, read the posted handwritten note, “Why did the insurrection not occur?”… Many people at all levels of El Salvador’s leftist guerrilla movement genuinely believed that they would be raising their flag over San Salvador by March of this year. But at a base in the rebel stronghold of Morazan province, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.) has to question its own views. This process of self-criticism and re-evaluation has been described by sympathetic Salvadoran political analysts as the rebels’ Vatican II.

In short, both the leadership and the rank and file of the F.M.L.N. are weighing whether they can negotiate a compromise settlement with the government and still remain true to their revolutionary vision. Although this debate is more than five years old, never before in the history of the Salvadoran guerrilla movement has the concept of negotiations taken root so deeply. The reasons are both internal and external to El Salvador’s nine-year-long civil war.

First, rebel leaders cannot but take into account the geopolitical realities of Central America. Like it or hot, the Reagan Administration successfully demonstrated that the United States retains veto power in its backyard, and the Bush Administration is unlikely to depart radically from the old framework. Nicaragua, where most of the F.M.L.N. leadership has been living for the past year, has just marked the tenth anniversary of its revolution facing the worst economic crisis in its history. Regardless of the origins of that crisis, Salvadoran rebel leaders know that a second successful revolution in the region cannot afford to engage the wrath of the United States.

Second, the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev has voiced its opposition to a military victory by the Salvadoran rebels. Although its influence over the F.M.L.N. as an insurgency is marginal, it has nonetheless made it clear that a post-revolutionary El Salvador should expect much less than Nicaragua in the way of support. Again, the point is that a revolutionary El Salvador would face even narrower options than Nicaragua in trying to establish its independence from the United States.

Third, the F.M.L.N. has always perceived itself as being within a broad vein of Latin American nationalism. But on their nine-country tour of Latin America last fall, the two top Salvadoran rebel leaders, Leonel Gonzalez and Joaquin Villalobos, received unexpected criticism from sympathetic countries such as Mexico, whose views they take seriously. The message from the continent was clear: Pursue negotiations rather than a victory on the battlefield.

Fourth, the F.M.L.N.’s attempt to achieve a military win by way of popular insurrection did not succeed. Certainly, insurrection has not been abandoned. Part of the strategy behind it is to make the country ungovernable, forcing the government either to negotiate or collapse. But the rebels’ dream of seizing power through revolt this year didn’t happen; in fact, they didn’t even come close.

And fifth, in light of the failure of this insurrectional strategy, rebel leaders are aware that a military victory over an army that is so heavily bankrolled and equipped by the United States is not a viable option.

As in any such process of rethinking, it will take time for a consensus to form in light of these changes. Debate over whether the F.M.L.N. could genuinely support negotiations and a compromise settlement as its ultimate goal remains vibrant. But rather than pitting rebel factions against one another, the split — as far as one exists — is largely between the F.M.L.N.’s leadership and its rank-and-file supporters.

One frequently painted image of the F.M.L.N. is that of a band of zealous ideologues manipulating innocent civilians. But the irony is that, over time, the F.M.L.N.’s peasant base has grown more radical than its leadership. At least 90 percent of the F.M.L.N.’s combatants and civilian supporters are drawn from the ranks of El Salvador’s radicalized peasantry. Their participation in a revolutionary movement has been an experiment in empowerment; most have gruesome tales to tell of army repression. Unlike their leaders, who are better attuned to geopolitical realities, these radicalized peasants resist equating revolution with elections and negotiations with “the enemy.”

In January, for instance, the F.M.L.N. made the unprecedented offer to participate indirectly in elections (through the left-of-center Democratic Convergence) and to their outcome, on condition that the vote be delayed for six months. For the, F.M.L.N. leadership, the most difficult exercise was, not to persuade its adversaries of its sincerity but to convince its supporters that taking part in elections did not mean selling out the revolution.

The concept of negotiations and power sharing also raises a number of ideological questions for groups that have grown up within the Marxist tradition. But it is worth noting that the dominant element in the F.M.L.N. today is one of the least ideologically driven of the five rebel groups. The People’s Revolutionary Army (E.R.P.), led by Comandante Villalobos, is regularly misidentified as the “most dogmatic Marxist-Leninist” rebel organization. But the group was armed in the early 1970s out of the New Left tradition and not, like other member organizations of the F.M.L.N., as a splinter group from the Salvadoran Communist Party.

The E.R.P. can be called radical, even ruthless, in its tactics. The eight mayors assassinated by the F.M.L.N., for example, were all killed in areas under E.R.P. control. Nevertheless, the E.R.P. is politically pragmatic, and the group least constrained by the kind of Marxist orthodoxy that was dominant within the F.M.L.N. as recently as five or six years ago.

Writing in the Spring issue of Foreign Policy, Villalobos told his U.S. readers that the F.M.L.N. is committed to a third way of revolutionary democracy. “The Salvadoran revolution is conditioned by the geopolitical realities of Latin America and the United States,” he wrote. “The F.M.L.N. pursues an El Salvador that is open, flexible, pluralistic, and democratic.” Critics may be skeptical, but this position is entirely consistent with the E.R.P.’s own history and the internal evolution of the F.M.L.N. as a whole. Even so, the situation remains fluid, with no single group calling the shots for the F.M.L.N. Smaller rebel units acting independently are widely believed to have been involved in the recent wave of assassinations of high-ranking Salvadoran government officials, actions not authorized by the F.M.L.N. General Command.

How the cards ultimately fall will depend in large part on the response of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government and army. While there has been considerable pressure on the F.M.L.N. both at home and abroad to re-evaluate its position, there has been no corresponding pressure on its opponents. Rather, El Salvador’s newly inaugurated government, led by the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), has shifted the country’s political balance markedly to the right.

Arena, like nearly everyone else in El Salvador, believes that the U.S.-advocated ‘low-intensity’ approach to the Salvadoran conflict has failed. Arena is right; a change in tactics is bound to occur. The question is whether the government will attempt to end the conflict via negotiations or the all-out military strategy that some army commanders favor.

How one chooses to measure the insurgency is important, and will weigh heavily on the course that the government ultimately decides to pursue. By conventional military standards, the F.M.L.N. may appear to have been weakened. In 1983, for instance, the rebels controlled more than one-third of El Salvador’s territory. Operating in large columns of several hundred fighters, the F.M.L.N. was able to overrun key economic and military targets and control, many major towns and highways. But a turning point came with the introduction of increased U.S.-supplied air power by the Salvadoran government that year, bolstered by the bipartisan consensus on U.S. policy in El Salvador that crystallized after the election of President Jose Napoleon Duarte 1984, The combination of increased air power tilted the balance in the war. Saturation bombing of guerrilla strongholds such as the Guazapa volcano, nearly twenty miles from San Salvador, wrought havoc on the rebels’ network of civilian supporters. Helicopter strafing of guerrilla columns inflicted high casualties on rebel fighters.

But the F.M.L.N. adapted accordingly, and by unconventional standards — as a rural-based guerrilla insurgency — it is stronger and more deeply rooted in 1989 than ever before. To avoid presenting an easy target to the government, a normal rebel unit is now made up of only three to eight fighters. Since 1985, these smaller and more mobile guerrilla patrols have concentrated on bleeding the Salvadoran economy and wearing down the army through classic guerrilla tactics such as land mines and ambushes. The F.M.L.N.’s most important change, however, has come in the political arena, especially in the attempt to reorganize and expand its civilian support base. On the slopes of the San Vicente volcano, for instance, the rebels have built organized support among coffee pickers. Growers there, who include El Salvador’s newly inaugurated President, Alfredo Cristiani, used to pay their workers about 65 cents (U.S.) for picking twenty-five pounds of beans. They now pay more than $1 — the wage demanded by the F.M.L.N. and imposed under threat of reprisals for noncompliance.

For the past three years, the rebels have focused on organizing pickers in areas that produce crops for export, such as San Vicente, Usulutan, the San Salvador volcano and the western province of Santa Ana, while the army protects the growers. On the volcano of El Tigre in Usulutan, for example, peasants who voted for the Christian Democrat Duarte in 1984 now work diligently making homemade contact bombs for the F.M.L.N.

The F.M.L.N.’s new, stronger and more highly developed civilian infrastructure presents a problem for those who wish to eradicate the rebels militarily. Although the F. M. L. N. may still be far short of taking power, the government is even farther away from its goal of defeating the guerrillas now than it was when hostilities began.

The U.S. approach to the problem has been to continue advocating counterinsurgency techniques similar to those employed in Vietnam — small-unit patrols to root out the rebel fighters, coupled with “hearts and minds” civic action and psychological operations to wean away the rebels’ civilian base. But the Salvadoran Army looks all too much like the A.R.V.N. forces in Vietnam. “It’s like chasing a mosquito with a hammer,” complained one U.S. military adviser. The Salvadoran armed forces have become too dependent on their U.S.-supplied firepower, which they use to defend themselves more than to attack. Motivation is also a problem. Press-ganged into military service, most Salvadoran Army soldiers would rather try to obtain a visa to the United States than fight. And civic action projects? As long as the rebels defend coffee pickers and the army defends coffee growers, no amount of free government handouts will be able to conceal the class-based nature of El Salvador’s civil war.

Yet the Arena government, together with hard-line elements in the army, have another plan: an escalation of the counterinsurgency effort to approach something that leading Arena deputy Sigifredo Ochoa, formerly a top field commander, calls ‘total war.’ Like many critics of U.S. policy in Vietnam, Ochoa accuses the United States of having “no political will to end the war.” He is correct. The Salvadoran insurgency is simply too strong and too well entrenched to be defeated without the violation of human rights on a massive scale. That is a price Arena may be willing to pay, but that U.S. policymakers may not.

For all intents and purposes, the U.S. military option is dead in El Salvador. And the F.M.L.N. is not about to go away. The country will become more ungovernable the longer the war drags on. Two ways remain to resolve it: negotiations or total war. Although both the United States and the Salvadoran government missed an unprecedented opportunity by refusing the F.M.L.N.’s January peace proposal, the window is still open. But with an Arena government in power it may be closing fast. The United States must choose which path it wishes to pursue. If it does not, the Arena government and the Salvadoran Army will make the choice themselves.

Mysterious Influx of Soviet & Chinese Arms for Salvador Rebels

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Title: A Mysterious Influx of Soviet and Chinese Arms for Salvador Rebels
Source: The Sacramento Bee
Date: June 4, 1989

Morazan, El Salvador — Seventeen-year-old Odilia playfully pushed her tongue through her teeth as she recalled how she shot seven Salvadoran army soldiers in an ambush a few days before.

Odilia’s under five feet tall, and her high-powered, Soviet-made Dragunov rifle is almost as big as she is. No matter. The bashful Salvadoran teenager is a highly trained sharpshooter for the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

Over the past several months, eastern-bloc and Chinese-made weapons have been distributed to FMLN guerrilla forces nationwide. The rebels say they bought the majority of the new arms, most of which are AK-47 assault rifles, from the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua, who are now in decline. Officials at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador say the arms and ammunition have been supplied by the leftist governments of Nicaragua and Cuba, a charge those countries deny.

Regardless of the weapons’ origins, they have bolstered rebel morale in the nine-year civil war. I have just spent two weeks travelling with FMLN guerrillas in northern Morazán province. In dozens of interviews, rebel combatants were confident they could defeat the government led by President Alfredo Cristiani of the ultra-conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party. Cristiani began his five-year term on Thursday.

Cristiani’s victory in elections last March was widely seen as a backlash against Christian Democrat President Jose Napoleon Duarte. During their campaign, ARENA party leaders blamed the Christian Democrats for failing to defeat the rebels. But most Western diplomats and military analysts agree that the FMLN guerrillas represent the most difficult challenge the Cristiani government will face.

It appears that Cristiani will take a tough line with the rebels. Prior to his inauguration, he announced the appointment of General Rafael Larios and two other hard-line army officers as minister and vice-ministers of defense. U.S. officials had lobbied for the more moderate choice of Chief of Staff Rene Emilio Ponce for the posts.

U.S. officials still defend Cristiani. But most non-American Western diplomats expect human rights abuses to increase as the government escalates the war effort against the FMLN.

“We are ready to talk to them,” said rebel sharpshooter Odilia. “But if they don’t want to talk, we’ll hit them hard.”

On Monday, the FMLN offered to implement a cease-fire and begin negotiations with the new government. But as part of the plan, the rebels demanded that the government prosecute those implicated in the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, including cashiered army major and leading ARENA deputy Roberto D’Aubuisson.

ARENA leaders rejected the rebel offer. “They are asking for something that is not negotiable, nor subject to discussion,” said Ricardo Alvarenga, president of the ARENA-controlled Legislative Assembly.

Rebel leaders promised to “back up” their offer of negotiations with military force. “Both roads are integrated into our strategy,” said Gustavo, a nom de guerre for a senior FMLN official in Morazán. “If the [peace] proposal is not accepted, the people will defend the situation in another way.

There is still the possibility of insurrection,” he added, “and an increase in the war.”

The introduction of Soviet and Chinese arms has already produced a tactical change in the conflict. Both AK-47 and Dragunov rifles use a heavier bullet and have a greater range than American-made M-16 rifles traditionally used by both the Salvadoran army and the FMLN. On Election Day, March 19, for instance, rebel forces used their new weapons in attacks nationwide. According to Salvadoran military sources, following a day of combat many of the helicopters in the government’s fleet returned damaged from rebel rounds.

During a guerrilla ambush last week against about 40 army soldiers between the villages of San Isidro and San Simon in northern Morazán, I watched as an army helicopter arrived to provide air support. But to avoid being hit by rebel fire, the pilot flew extremely high, neutralizing his own ability to fire effectively at the attacking rebel force.

According to Lucio, a veteran rebel fighter in charge of arms distribution in Morazán, 30 percent of the FMLN’s regular forces and five to 10 percent of its special assault forces are equipped with AK-47 rifles. With an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 full-time FMLN fighters, which means upwards of 1,000 AK-47 rifles have entered the country from foreign sources over the past year.

The regular force in rebel rearguard areas such as northern Morazán, Lucio said, benefit more from the AKs’ greater range. The Salvadoran army does not use AKs.

On Wednesday, Salvadoran authorities showed reporters more than 300 Soviet- and Chinese-made weapons captured from FMLN forces. It is the largest arms cache recovered by the government in the war. Weapons were of diverse origin, including AK-47s with Soviet, Chinese, and Yugoslavian markings. But authorities offered no evidence as to how the arms entered the country.

According to FMLN official Gustavo, most of the weapons were bought from the Nicaraguan Contras. But he conceded that some of the weapons were obtained from “other channels.” Asked to elaborate on those channels, the guerrilla leader refused, saying they were secrets of war.

U.S. officials, on the other hand, deny that rebels bought the AKs from the Contras. In a seven-page document which journalists were allowed to read but not copy, embassy officials claimed that Cuba and Nicaragua are the “bulk suppliers” of the new arms.

According to the embassy document, which is labeled “For Official Use Only,” Salvadoran authorities have captured documents indicating arms and ammunition shipments. The embassy document also states that weapons shipments by boat along El Salvador’s Pacific coast have been detected. But when asked to produce further evidence, a U.S. official said he could not because the information was classified.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Wayne Smith of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies doubted the embassy’s claim. “My yardstick, based on past experience, is to accept nothing that the embassy says, nothing the U.S. government says on this subject without seeing the hard evidence and the data to back it.” An ex-career diplomat and the former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba, Smith added, “They’ve said this so many times that their credibility is gone.”

Despite the presence of the AK-47s, FMLN rebels maintained that they capture or make most of their weapons inside the country. At a secret FMLN bomb factory, about 20 rebels worked at making explosives from land mines to homemade anti-personnel rockets.

Sand Diggers and the Strongman

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Vista Hermosa, El Salvador — A powerful torrent during the high rains, Rio Las Canas is a trickle of muddy water from October to May. It begins ten kilometers from the city center, carving its way north past volcanic slopes, eventually feeding into the large, man-made reservoir that separates government-held terrain from contested zones. But there is no fighting between government and guerrilla forces where the river begins-only the taking of sand from its shores.

Homes made of dried mud and bamboo shafts dot Las Canas’s western bank. Inside the riverbed, barefoot workers with rolled-up pants load sand into waiting trucks. Farther downstream the riverbed is demarcated by a barbed-wire fence. Beyond the fence bulldozers load sand into trucks watched by heavily armed men.

Used primarily to make concrete, sand in El Salvador sold on site for $25 a truckload. In an export-oriented economy dominated by more valuable cash crops, even the country’s prolific Marxists have failed to designate such a cheap commodity as a vehicle of class struggle. But, for the riverbank community of Vista Hermosa, sand, not coffee, is king.

Vista Hermosa is located far from the large agricultural plantations in the western region of the country that offer seasonal labor. With a combined under- and unemployment rate in El Salvador of well over 50 percent, few if any of the community’s residents have access to better paying jobs in the capital city of San Salvador. Like most of El Salvador’s marginal population, they also receive no external assistance. A hodgepodge of peasants from various parts of the country, the people living along the river fall neither into official categories of earthquake victims nor war refugees that would make them eligible for U.S. targeted aid.

Most of the river dwellers front Vista Hermosa live in constant fear of failing beyond the edge of survival. Prices of food staples have more than quadrupled in the past three years. A typical “food basket” for a family consists primarily of corn tortillas with salt, and perhaps an occasional plate of higher priced rice and beans.

But unlike the less fortunate who pick their meals from refuse piles in San Salvador’s central market, the 350-odd people from Vista Hermosa and two other nearby communities have had regular work. Breadwinners earn their living standing knee-deep in mud, shoveling sand into twenty-foot trucks for $3 a load. Depending upon demand, a strong young man might make up to $15 on a good summer day. But lesser-abled bodies usually earn about $3, provided that rain doesn’t wash the sand downstream.

Even with cheap labor abundant, entrepreneur Jose Rene Mendoza finds it more advantageous to employ modern machinery to excavate the river. He could further maximize profits if he could monopolize the sale of sand and charge a higher price for every load. But first he would have to eliminate the competition; aII digging by independents would have to stop. Mendoza plans to make himself master of Rio Las Canas.

Before the rainy season came, Mendoza expropriated an extension of the riverbed and brought in bulldozers to replace the work of men. Mendoza says he owns the area encircled by the barbed-wire fence, and adds that the rest of the riverbed is the property of other landowners like himself. Pointing to the workers loading sand by spade he says, “Those people have no property titles, they are trespassers on private land.”

The people from Vista Hermosa claim that the river is in the public domain. They avoid the part watched over by Mendoza’s armed guards. Dependent on their daily earnings, workers (about a third of whom are women and preadolescent children) walk the trail every morning to the water’s edge. The private truckers, who don’t seem to mind whose land they are on, buy from both the independents and Mendoza. The latter’s conflict is not with those who take from the river, but only those who dig.

An association of agricultural workers is trying to organize the sand diggers and their community. A number of workers from Vista Hermosa, including Jose Arnoldo Cerritos and Arturo Navarro Garcia, decided to join. But the peasant association belongs to a larger trade union coalition, which Salvadoran and U.S. government officials say is a front group for the country’s leftist guerrillas.

The issue appears to be about property rights and the question of public versus private domain. In El Salvador, such matters are rarely if ever settled before a formal court. Rather, from the perspective of the authorities, the dispute here is between a respected landowner and businessman and three base-wage sand diggers who are members of a known subversive organization.

Leaving aside strictly legal questions, I will let the reader decide whether this case is a political or civil dispute. I will also leave it to the reader to decide if the way in which it was (partially) resolved should be characterized as a political or a common crime. But let me forewarn, your decision is moot. Either way, the story that follows is endemic in a society and social structure that seven years and $3.3 billion in U.S. aid failed to change.

Nineteen-year-old Maria Luisa Leiva was in her mud-walled home with her husband, uncle, and two children the evening of April 14, 1988. Three armed men in olive green uniforms came to the door and told her to put out the light. They asked for her husband by name and said, “Tell Arnoldo Cerritos to come out.” The men bound his wrists and then took both Arnoldo and the uncle away. Maria Luisa was told that she would be taken too if she tried to follow. One of the uniformed men remained five minutes to make sure she stayed behind.

Arturo Navarro and his eighteen-year-old helper were intercepted by armed men near the same house about fifteen minutes later. They were ordered to lie face down and were asked their names. One of the uniformed men left for a few minutes and then returned. He said, “Are you Arturo Navarro? Then you’re coming with us.” The men led Arturo away in the direction of the river. The younger captive was searched and set free.

The next day both Maria Luisa and Arturo’s wife went to the air force base at Ilopango to inquire about their husbands and the uncle. The communities along the river are patrolled regularly by the air force, who were present in Vista Hermosa under daylight on April 14. The air force patrols are elite U.S.-trained paratroopers, distinguished from the other military services by their maroonish red berets. The uniformed men who came the night before were hatless, although one was carrying a “red beret” in the same hand as his black-barreled gun.

An air force sergeant spoke to the wives, and then made a phone call asking for the three disappeared men by name. He told the women to wait a moment, as he thought that the men were, in custody on the base. Three young men appeared, heavily armed and in civilian clothes. They spoke to the sergeant, and then told the women that the people they were looking for were not there.

The base at llopango is just a few kilometers from the scene of the abduction. But the men’s bodies were found two days later in a ravine near the airport some thirty kilometers away. When asked about the murders two weeks later, Mendoza said, “We didn’t kill them.” No doubt a truthful retort. The murders had been denounced as the work of the armed forces based at Ilopango by Auxiliary Archbishop Rosa Chavez in his Sunday homily a few days before.

The killings are not particularly surprising for El Salvador. Nor, despite at least two adult eyewitnesses to the abduction, that they will go uninvestigated, unpunished, and officially unsolved. But what is unusual is that the attempt to intimidate the community didn’t work. At the time of this writing, twenty to thirty sand diggers can still be seen within eyesight of the fenced-off property claimed by Mendoza on any given day; more than a hundred others can be found further on — either up- or down-stream. Unable to support themselves and their families any other way, the motley assembly of workers (who include one or two pregnant women) will continue to dig as long as they need to or can.

That survival could be the flip side of subversion is something that both the paratroopers and Jose Rene Mendoza fail to grasp. Jose Santana, for instance, begs a journalist to help him, as he has heard rumors that he will be next. His voice shrill and cracking, the terrified man stutters as he explains that he is not so much worried about himself but for his family and how they would support themselves if he should disappear. Jose Santana is the cousin of one of the victims and knew the other two. But despite the danger, a month after the murders he is still digging as before.

The nine-year-old son of Arturo says he doesn’t understand why his father was killed. But now that he is the breadwinner, Oscar carries his father’s shovel to the river every morning to dig. But the boy earns only about a dollar working a half day, as his mother, who also digs, wants him to stay in school.

Oscar is too young to be a member of the peasant association to which his father belonged. But there is no doubt that in the eyes of Jose Rene Mendoza, the son following his father to the river is an outlaw. In a country where property and power remain the rule of law, a beleaguered landlord can phone the armed forces’ twenty-four-hour hotline to report a subversive act. There is no number to call, however, if armed men in olive green uniforms take a relative away in the night.