Inside Guerrilla Territory

By Ricardo Chavira

During half a decade of civil war, no part of El Salvador has been more fiercely contested than rugged and isolated northern Morazan province. The area is now a stronghold for antigovernment rebels, but they won it at a high cost. Years of fighting have devastated once thriving villages. Electrical lines hang limply from wooden poles, and telephone service is just a memory. Correspondent Ricardo Chavira returned last week from a rare tour of the area with officials of the People's Revolutionary Army (E.R.P.), the most powerful faction within the five-member Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.). Chavira's report:

Crossing to the northern bank of El Salvador's Torola River is like entering a different country. The neatly uniformed government troops who man checkpoints south of the river are replaced less than a mile down the road by rebels in mix-and-match uniforms and civilian clothes. A guerrilla painstakingly writes down travelers' names, addresses, ages and reasons for coming. Having passed inspection, the visitors drive up the rutted, overgrown road to Perquin, where they are shown the bomb-damaged house in which they will stay, stark evidence of the danger that envelops the 15,000 to 20,000 people who live in northern Morazan. But despite the hardships the war has imposed, the portrait that emerges from a visit behind rebel lines is of an area struggling desperately to return to normality.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Perquin, a coffee and lumber center that in 1980 had a population of 5,000. When the E.R.P. stepped up its guerrilla war, Perquin was repeatedly overrun by battling government and rebel troops, and by 1983 it was a bombed-out ghost town. Today, as those who fled have slowly and steadily returned, it is again home to 4,000 people. Most say that regardless of who is in control, they would rather live in a war zone than in refugee-choked cities.

The guerrillas have carefully nurtured the repopulation of northern Morazan by restoring some basic services that collapsed when the government abandoned the area to the rebels. There is still no electricity or telegraph service. Buses have not been seen for five years, and consumer goods are scarce. But the rebels, through civilian "directorates" that now run the towns, have reopened schools, many of which had not conducted classes for four years. While most of the new teachers are recruited and paid by the directorates, four in Perquin are government employees. One of them, Esperanza Varela de Guevara, 47, moved back to Perquin with her husband a year ago. "When we moved away people accused us of being on the side of the guerrillas," she said, "and when we moved back we were accused of being army spies. We are just caught in the middle."

Like people who live under military occupation anywhere, those whom visitors can talk to in northern Morazan express views that range from overt cooperation with the rebels to resigned tolerance. One center of support is the area around La Joya, where more than 900 residents were killed in late 1981 in a major assault by government troops. Villagers now flee at every approach of the military, whose last attack they say came on Christmas morning.

As villagers recount it, the town's 200 or so inhabitants were preparing to observe the holiday quietly when seven planes of the Salvadoran air force swooped in low, dropping several bombs and strafing the area with machine-gun fire. "That was President [Jose Napoleon] Duarte's Christmas present to us," remarked Maria Cruz Amaya, who says she spent most of the day hiding in the brush. As it happened, no one was hurt in the raid. Indeed, Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Adolfo Blandon later denied to TIME that there had been any recent air attack on La Joya. Such charges, he said, were a "trick" by the rebels to "ruin the prestige of the armed forces."

Despite the air raids, peasants today are safer from the ravages of large-scale fighting than they have been for years. The army's effective aerial counterinsurgency program has forced the rebels, in Morazan and elsewhere, to regroup into small units of ten to 15 fighters. The guerrillas have made few territorial gains in the past three years; they control perhaps 10% of tiny El Salvador's territory and 70,000 of its 5.4 million people. But they are still capable of major destruction, as they proved last week when the E.R.P. launched a midnight strike on Juayua, a government-controlled town in western Sonsonate province. While no one was killed, an entire block was left in ruins when fire from a bank hit by antitank rockets spread to surrounding buildings.

Insurgent leaders say that with the breakdown of peace talks a year ago, they are even more intent on waging a prolonged conflict designed to destabilize the Duarte government and sap military morale. Their tactics, as detailed by a top E.R.P. official in Morazan, will be as blunt and brutal as ever: urban warfare, including kidnapings like that last fall of Duarte's daughter Ines; economic sabotage, like blowing up power stations; and the outright murder of U.S. advisers and officials. "In the long run, killing Yanquis is a form of undermining Reagan's policies," declared the rebel official.

Meanwhile, as the civil war lurches into its sixth year, the poor peasants who are its principal victims want nothing more than to be left alone. Said Perquin Resident Adan Vigil when asked whether there were any reasons for the struggle to continue: "There must be, but I don't understand them."