Bombs and Broadsides

By George Russell

As the guerrilla war drags on, a propaganda battle erupts

The attack was carefully timed and perfectly executed. Members of the Marxist-dominated Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front last week slipped under cover of darkness among the open hangars at El Salvador's heavily guarded Ilopango military airport. They placed explosive charges around some of the country's fleet of venerable fighter aircraft and 14 U.S.-built UH-1H "Huey" helicopters and then escaped undetected. At 1:30 a.m., the bombs went off and parts of the airport became an inferno.

The exultant guerrillas quickly issued a communique claiming that they had destroyed 28 aircraft. A tight-lipped General Jose Guillermo Garcia, Defense Minister in the country's civilian-military government, gave figures that were much lower: "about eleven" aircraft and four of the helicopters that are so useful in fighting El Salvador's long-smoldering guerrilla war were destroyed. There was no doubt, however, that the insurgents had dealt the government a major setback. Said a U.S. military officer about the airport raid: "Disastrous."

The Ilopango bomb blasts had echoes in Washington, where the Reagan Administration is the principal backer of El Salvador's President Jose Napoleon Duarte. Following the raid, the State Department declared that "we must be prepared to increase our economic and our military assistance to El Salvador as necessary. We are presently reassessing needs on an urgent basis." Among other things, that relief package was now bound to include more helicopters.

But before any such help arrived, it looked as if the Reagan Administration was going to have to fight a war of its own, this one of the propaganda variety. As the guerrillas certainly knew, their attack came on the eve of a certification procedure by President Reagan that is needed to unlock $26 million in military aid and $40 million in economic assistance for El Salvador in 1982. Concerned over the Central American country's appalling human rights record, one of the worst in the Western Hemisphere, Congress last December decided to attach special conditions to the assistance money. It demanded that Reagan certify that the Duarte government was making a "concerted, significant effort" to improve the human rights climate and that the Salvadorans were achieving "continued progress" in implementing political and economic reforms. Congress also wanted assurances that the Salvadoran government was making "good faith efforts" to investigate and prosecute the murders there of four American churchwomen and two American aid officials a year ago.

Reagan duly signed the certification last Thursday. It is a two-page document with a six-page appendix claiming that "despite formidable obstacles," the Duarte government has made a "concerted, significant and good-faith effort to deal with the complex political, social and human rights problems it is confronting." The document made it clear that those problems were by no means solved. (As many as 1,000 people still disappear or are murdered each month in El Salvador by death squads of both the left and the right.) But the U.S. claimed that "progress is being made."

The Reagan certificate noted the October 1980 imposition of a new military code of conduct in El Salvador, the removal from command of military officers sympathetic to the "violent right" and the scheduled elections for a new constituent assembly on March 28. Reagan lauded the Salvadoran efforts at land reform, which so far has taken, with compensation, all farms of 1,235 acres or more and redistributed them to tenant farmers. On the issue of the murder of American citizens, Salvadoran Defense Minister Garcia last week made statements indicating that the end was nearing of a secretive, yearlong investigation into the deaths of the three U.S. nuns and their lay companion. He intimated that six Salvadoran national guardsmen, suspected of the crime, might soon stand trial. Says U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Deane Hinton: "We are going to get the people before justice."

The Administration's report that El Salvador was improving its human rights performance arrived amid a barrage of criticism claiming just the opposite. Earlier in the week, the American Civil Liberties Union, in conjunction with the New York-based Americas Watch Committee, released a 287-page human rights report on El Salvador. The report, heavily documented with eyewitness accounts, held the Duarte government responsible for "the great majority" of some 200 politically motivated murders a week, the use of torture by security forces, and other forms of systematic repression. It urged the denial of certification.

Perhaps most devastating of all for the Reagan Administration were reports by U.S. correspondents who had been led by guerrilla forces to a village in the remote Salvadoran department of Morazan, near the Honduran border. There and in surrounding hamlets, the journalists found decomposing bodies and other evidence of major massacres of civilians that allegedly took place in December. As many as 900 people may have been killed in the incidents, and according to surviving eyewitnesses, the massacres were carried out in cold blood by members of the Salvadoran army.

The human rights furor over El Salvador will continue this week, as Congress holds hearings on Reagan's certification document. But nothing is likely to shake the U.S. Administration's determination to support the Duarte regime. Nor are the guerrillas, emboldened by their latest success, expected to remain idle. As the March 28 election draws nearer, it seems certain that both the violence and the outcry it produces can only grow greater in El Salvador.

--By George Russell.

Reported by Johanna McGeary/Washington and James Willwerth/San Salvador

With reporting by Johanna McGeary/Washington, James Willwerth/San Salvador

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