Killing That Will Not Stop

By Sara Medina

EL SALVADOR

The leftist offensive is not final, after all

In the tiny, crowded killing ground that is El Salvador, 10,000 people died by violence last year. That total seems certain to be surpassed in 1981. Last week leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.) began their long-promised "final offensive" against the forces of the military-civilian junta: more than 800 people were killed.

The seemingly inexorable, escalating tide of violence was sucking other countries into the vortex. Even before the start of the leftist offensive, the Carter Administration had become alarmed by evidence that the guerrillas were obtaining large quantities of sophisticated weapons from a number of sources, including Middle Eastern and East European countries as well as nearby Cuba and Nicaragua. Nicaragua appeared to be serving as the transit point for these arms. In order to "help El Salvador interdict the supply of military equipment coming in from the outside," as U.S. Ambassador Robert White put it, Washington resumed the modest $5 million military aid program that had been suspended since the murders of three American nuns and a lay worker by right-wing death squads a month ago.

Nicaragua, whose leftist Sandinistas have made no secret of their support for the F.M.L.N. guerrillas, was helping in other ominous ways. El Cuco, a beachside resort in the eastern part of El Salvador, witnessed an invasion by 100 guerrillas in five 30-ft. wooden boats; they almost certainly came from Nicaragua. Government forces claimed to have captured one boat and bottled up the invaders in the beach area, killing 52 of them.

The "final offensive" began early last week in working-class districts of San Salvador, the capital. As guerrilla bands in the city staged hit-and-run attacks on police and military targets, they issued, over a captured classical music radio station, a tape-recorded appeal for a general strike and a popular insurrection against the junta.

But there appeared to be few classical music lovers in San Salvador's barrios. The guerrilla attacks were beaten off by withering rifle fire and grenade attacks by the army. The government declared martial law and a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Less than 24 hours after the start of the offensive, Junta President Jose Napoleon Duarte called a press conference to deride the leftist efforts as "an absolute failure." Stores and businesses opened as usual the next day, and workers generally stayed on their jobs.

Elsewhere, the guerrillas had some temporary successes. They fomented an insurrection in the garrison of Santa Ana, the country's second largest city; an army captain and 80 soldiers defected to the guerrillas. Heavy fighting continued for days, as leftist troops penetrated several provincial cities before being thrown back. They seized San Francisco Gotera, the capital of eastern Morazan department, and it took government troops three days to break the cordon around the city and recapture it.

Several journalists, venturing into the countryside to search out the facts for themselves, were engulfed in the violence. Among the casualties were Photographers Susan Meiselas, 32, on assignment for TIME; John Hoagland, 33, working for Newsweek; and Ian Mates, 26, a South African cameraman for a London-based television organization. Their small Japanese car was the target of a remote-controlled Claymore-type antipersonnel mine on a road about 15 miles north of San Salvador. Mates suffered severe head wounds from steel splinters and died the next day in a local hospital. Meiselas and Hoagland were evacuated to the U.S. Later in the week another photographer on assignment for Newsweek, Olivier Rebbot, 31, was shot in the chest by a sniper while covering the fighting at San Francisco Gotera. Another photographer on assignment for TIME, Harry Mattison, protected Rebbot till an ambulance arrived.

While the tide of battle continued to go against the guerrillas, exiled leaders of the F.M.L.N. assembled a new seven-member "diplomatic-political commission" in Mexico City. The leader of this umbrella group is Guillermo Manuel Ungo, 49, a Social Democrat who was President Duarte's running mate in the 1972 elections, as well as a member of the original junta that replaced the military in October 1979. Apparently embarrassed by the guerrillas' failure to produce a mass uprising, the commission insisted that the current offensive was not, after all, the "final" one. But what goaded the guerrillas into action at this time was their well-founded fear that Ronald Reagan, as President, will give the military all the American aid and advisers necessary to wipe out the leftists. Such a swing to the right, it is believed, could even sweep Duarte from power.

The civil war in El Salvador is a conflict with no victors, only victims; indeed, there are those who would argue neither side deserves to win. Despite its commitment to a sweeping land reform program, the junta headed by Duarte has been tarnished by its inability to control the security forces, which have condoned and perhaps participated in the torture and execution of suspected leftists by right-wing death squads. The F.M.L.N., meanwhile, has managed to alienate much of its potential support among workers and peasants by answering violence with violence, brutality with brutality. Leftist death squads may be fewer in number than those on the right, but they are no less efficient in the business of killing. On a railway embankment outside the capital last week, the body of a dead youth was propped up, with a cigarette in his mouth, bearing a sign that read TRAITOR; it was signed by the F.M.L.N.

By now Salvadorans are as cynical about the leftists' rallying cries as they are sick of the violence. "We know that the right has done most of the killing," says a young mechanic in a San Salvador barrio, "but the left is also responsible. It has become natural for us to distrust all people with guns."

--By Sara Medina. Reported by Bernard Diederich/San Salvador

With reporting by Bernard Diederich/San Salvador

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