Stung by a Wasp's Nest

By George Russell

El Salvador guerrillas hold off an airborne assault as the fighting gets hot

The fighting between El Salvador's 15,000-man army and some 4,000 to 6,000 Marxist-led guerrillas is growing bloodier. Neither side can score a decisive victory, but the guerrillas are increasingly able to launch strikes in the countryside and defend themselves skillfully under attack.

In one of the war's harshest engagements to date, 1,500 government soldiers swarmed around the rugged, inactive volcano of Guazapa last week, about 15 miles from the country's capital of San Salvador. They pounded the area with heavy artillery, while support aircraft rained down phosphorous bombs and 100-lb. and 500-lb. high-explosive charges. Their quarry was a guerrilla contingent that had turned Guazapa into a formidable stronghold. The attack aircraft were hit by heavy ground fire from machine guns, while Salvadoran army helicopters ferrying in troops took such concentrated fire that they tried to remain on the ground no longer than 30 seconds. At week's end, the fighting raged on. The army claimed to have suffered 16 dead and 31 wounded in the action, but the casualty toll may have been substantially higher. Said TIME Photographer Harry Mattison, who witnessed the fighting: "Dead bodies were being stacked like logs. The army decided to hit a wasp's nest and was heavily stung."

U.S. political and military analysts are increasingly pessimistic about the corrosive psychological effects of the drawn-out fighting on the armed forces that buttress the civilian-military government of Christian Democrat President Jose Napoleon Duarte. Said a senior U.S. military analyst: "We are trying our damnedest to keep this enthusiasm up. That's why we sent those helicopters in so quickly." Warned a high-ranking U.S. specialist on Central America: "The momentum has gone, and we are within inches of losing control over the situation entirely."

In this mood of mounting concern, President Ronald Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative speech was the best news the Salvadoran government had received in weeks. Reagan's promises of long-term economic help for the entire Central American region, plus the warning that the U.S. will do "whatever is prudent and necessary to ensure the peace and security of the Caribbean area," noticeably buoyed President Duarte. The Salvadoran leader appeared on television to announce that he had sent his personal felicitaciones to the White House.

Pointedly, Duarte had nothing to say at that time about another, earlier presidential address in nearby Nicaragua. There, Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo delivered a variation on his government's view that the U.S. should abandon its current policy in El Salvador in favor of recommending negotiations between all interested parties, a position favored by the U.S. hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church (see box). At week's end, Duarte finally dismissed Lopez Portillo's suggestion as "utopian."

Duarte was behaving like a man under siege. As the March 28 deadline approaches for critical constituent assembly elections in El Salvador, Duarte should have been barnstorming the countryside for the Christian Democrats, the main civilian element in the government. But Duarte is campaigning chiefly by radio and television, giving the impression that he is afraid to move about in the hinterlands. Meanwhile, ultrarightist candidates in the eight-party election, who are led by onetime Salvadoran National Guard Major Roberto d'Aubuisson, campaign freely, though perilously, in person. At week's end, D'Aubuisson was wounded when his campaign van was ambushed by unknown attackers. Still, the rightists show alarming signs of winning substantial popular support. Their victory would be a blow to U.S. aims in El Salvador and would increase the slaughter that has killed about 20,000 Salvadorans. Says one D'Aubuisson supporter: "We still have many scores to settle. All we need now are the orders to pacify the community."

Paradoxically, few signs of the grim nature of events in El Salvador are visible in the streets of the capital.

The Salvadoran middle and upper classes have seemingly adopted a fatalistic disregard for the future. In the elegant San Salvador suburbs of San Benito and San Francisco, more homes than ever are brightly lighted at night as their owners entertain with dinner parties and dancing. Restaurants and discotheques are jammed. The consequences of the war show themselves on the city's dark underside: burglars and stickup artists who once carried knives as weapons have obtained machine guns and grenades. And every day, human rights workers patrol San Salvador's poorer neighborhoods to look for corpses left in the streets by marauding death squads whose members are often reported to belong to the Salvadoran security forces.

With its economy virtually prostrate, El Salvador's main export is its people. Officially, some 600,000 have left for other parts of Central America, Mexico and the U.S. Unofficially, another 400,000 are believed to have fled. Says a cynical professor of social science at San Salvador's Central American University: "The main thing we will learn from the [March 28] elections is who is still here."

The Reagan Administration's initiative was designed to address the economic problems that are helping to cause the exodus from El Salvador and that are endemic throughout the region. One country unlikely to get aid, however, was Nicaragua. In his speech, Reagan was sharply critical of the Marxist-dominated country, which the Administration accuses of sending arms to the Salvadoran guerrillas.

Concern over the increasingly tense relations between the U.S. and both Nicaragua and Cuba led Mexican President Lopez Portillo to make his speech before a mass rally of Sandinista supporters in Managua's Plaza de la Revolucion. Declaring that U.S. hostility toward Nicaragua was "dangerous, undignified and unnecessary," the Mexican President appealed to Reagan to avoid armed intervention in Central America and offered his services as a "bridge" between the U.S. on the one hand and Cuba, Nicaragua and the El Salvador guerrillas on the other.

Lopez Portillo also called for the disarming of bands of anti-Sandinista guerrillas who are launching harrying attacks into Nicaragua from neighboring Honduras. At the same time, he suggested that the Nicaraguans cease the alarming military buildup that they have carried on since their revolutionary victory in 1979.

Lopez Portillo's last suggestion drew a stony silence from members of Nicaragua's Sandinista directorate, who sat next to him on the speaker's platform. Directorate Member Daniel Ortega Saavedra offered Nicaragua's five-point plan for better relations with the U.S. and its Central American neighbors, including regional nonaggression pacts, joint patrols by the Hondurans and Nicaraguans of their border, and a commitment to free elections and political pluralism in Nicaragua. Washington responded politely but noncommittally to the proposals of Lopez Portillo, who later called the economic aspects of Reagan's Caribbean plan "a first serious reaction" to the problems of developing countries.

In the weeks that remain before the March 28 election, the situation in El Salvador may well deteriorate further, since the guerrillas will step up military action to disrupt the voting. Last week a Salvadoran businessman, sympathetic to U.S. efforts, considered the problems that lay ahead. He carried a handgun on his hip and he had a shotgun in his car. "You can't have a stable country where 90% of your people are poor," said he. "You're sitting on a volcano. The Marxists already have the power of hatred. It's up to us to see if we have anything else." --By George Russell. Reported by

Laura Lopez/Managua and William McWhirter/ San Salvador

With reporting by Laura Lopez, William McWhirter

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