Tactical Retreat

The rebels still hold ground

The bearded, middle-aged man, a visitor to San Salvador, was on his way back to his lodgings when he realized it was 7 p.m., the hour of the strict, dusk-to-dawn curfew. Caught out of doors, he was liable to be shot on sight as a guerrilla. Frantically he began knocking at the houses on Calle Poniente, pleading for shelter. No doors were opened. Instead, a frightened resident telephoned the police to report a suspicious character making a commotion. As the bearded stranger approached the door of No. 2031, he died in a fusillade of police bullets.

The victim was Primo Gerardo Caceres, 45, the former mayor of a provincial town. He was one of at least 46 people who have been killed by police after hours since the curfew was imposed in mid-January in an attempt to control El Salvador's guerrilla war. Most of the victims, according to the Human Rights Commission in San Salvador, were not dangerous insurgents but innocent civilians: some mentally retarded, aimless drunks, a milkman in Santa Ana who started his morning rounds too early. Nevertheless, military and security forces are enthusiastic about being able to deny the hours of darkness to the guerrillas, and thus to uncover arms caches by observing suspicious nighttime activity. "It is fantastic," said a police major. "We should have instituted it a long time ago."

In the countryside, the "final offensive" launched by the guerrillas' Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front has been halted by repeated military onslaughts. One F.M.L.N. leader, Communist Party Secretary-General Jorge Shafik Handel, admitted last week to a "temporary tactical retreat." The offensive has not been defeated, however.

In Chalatenango department, only 45 miles north of the capital, an estimated 1,000 guerrillas have been holding off a government force of equal size for more than a week in one of the biggest battles of the campaign. Dug into mountain caves and concrete bunkers, the guerrillas have clung to their positions despite infantry assaults, artillery barrages and air strikes.

Government forces claim that they killed 1,500 guerrillas in the first two weeks of the offensive, while losing only 150 of their own troops. Other observers put the number of guerrillas killed closer to 500. Even if the higher figure were correct, that would still leave an estimated 3,500 guerrilla fighters and 5,000 armed supporters entrenched in strongholds around the country. Some members of the ruling civilian-military junta concede that the leftists are far from vanquished and may actually be regrouping for a new assault.

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