Pray You Are Right, Don Jose'

By Sara Medina

Duarte exudes confidence, but the guerrillas hang on

El Salvador's civilian-military regime expressed confidence last week that it had succeeded in repelling the vaunted "final offensive" of the country's revolutionary left. Jose Napoleon Duarte, the shrewd Christian Democratic politician who heads the junta, attributed the left's setback to its failure to win popular support. Duarte offered amnesty to any guerrillas willing to lay down their arms, pledged to move forward on the junta's promises of social reforms and free elections, and toured the provinces like a glad-handing political campaigner.

Embracing a group of children in the recaptured provincial capital of San Francisco Gotera, Duarte declared: "These are the future of our country and none of us wants to see them become guerrillas." The local Indians broke into applause when he assured them that they would no longer have to fear guerrilla attacks against the town. An old Indian woman raised her hands in prayer and cried out: "Pray to God you are right, Don Jose!"

The leftists, however, although they had received a heavy beating from government forces, were hardly ready to concede defeat. Said a commander of a 300-man guerrilla contingent of the Forces of Popular Liberation: "The offensive has. many stages. It may take three or four more months." The guerrillas, in fact, were still in control of scattered patches of countryside and some villages in the northern provinces of Chalatenango and Morazan. Sporadic fighting continued.

Having tasted blood and victory, the army's counterinsurgency forces were in no mood for mercy. In one mopping-up operation around Santa Ana, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting, government troops claimed to have killed a column of 97 leftists, including 21 women, two doctors, an engineer, and several employees from a local power company. As usual they took no prisoners.

President Duarte boasted that the guerrilla offensive had been contained "without the use of a single American bullet." Nevertheless, in response to the guerrilla offensive, the U.S. discarded earlier misgivings and rushed to El Salvador's assistance with $10 million in military aid. By way of justification, U.S. diplomats argued that the increasing flow of sophisticated weaponry to the leftists from foreign sources indicated that the antigovernment forces had, in the words of U.S. Ambassador Robert White, "upped the ante." The envoy pointed the finger mostly at Nicaragua, not only as a transit point for arms, but also as the possible base from which a bizarre seaborne "invasion" had supposedly been launched during the offensive against the eastern coast of El Salvador.

The U.S. had earlier suspended all military aid to El Salvador pending the outcome of an investigation by a Salvadoran commission into the murders of four American missionaries last month. Despite the lack of evidence that any investigation was even going forward, Washington moved swiftly to resume $5 million in nonlethal materiel--jeeps, trucks and transport helicopters, with U.S. technicians to maintain them.

It also rushed an additional $5 million in emergency--"lethal," meaning combat--equipment, including M-16 rifles and M-79 grenade launchers, as well as four more helicopters and a dozen more U.S. technicians. In fact, the Salvadoran military could probably outfit two battalions with the caches captured from the guerrillas during their offensive. Most of the weapons were of Western manufacture: Belgian automatic rifles, Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns and U.S. M16s. There were also large numbers of Soviet grenades and Chinese-made rocket launchers. The weapons, bought in many places and stockpiled in Nicaragua, according to intelligence reports, had been smuggled by small plane to clandestine landing strips in remote areas of El Salvador. Nicaragua has repeatedly denied such trafficking, but the Sandinistas have proclaimed their moral support of El Salvador's leftist offensive.

In Washington, the renewed U.S. aid, and especially the dispatch of U.S. personnel for training and the maintenance of sophisticated equipment, raised edgy questions about the wisdom of direct U.S. involvement in the Salvadoran conflict. The junta is already sensitive to accusations that it is being propped up by the U.S., and to comparisons with the U.S.-backed regime in South Viet Nam.

Increased U.S. military aid could also offer a pretext for the guerrillas' backers in Nicaragua and elsewhere to step up their own covert, and possibly even overt support. Thus, even as the guerrilla offensive appeared to have been halted for the foreseeable future, officials in the new Reagan Administration were worried that El Salvador might soon confront them with one of their first serious foreign policy dilemmas. --By Sara Medina.

Reported by Bernard Diederich/San Salvador

With reporting by Bernard Diederich

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