El Salvador Another Fragile, Isolated Truce

By Jill Smolowe

Life is slowly returning to the town of Tenancingo. The grade school has reopened its doors, as have the youth club and the carpentry workshop. Once again women call to one another from window ledges as they sit weaving palm straw into strips for hats and bags. Two weeks ago, bus service resumed to the capital city of San Salvador, 16 miles away, and last week running water started to flow again. Next month, if all goes according to plan, electricity will be restored. If Tenancingo's progress is modest, its ambition is not. The townspeople aim to make their hamlet a sort of demilitarized zone in the six- year-old Salvadoran civil war.

The 70 families that have trickled back into Tenancingo over the past three months fled their homes in 1983 following an air force bombardment aimed at routing leftist guerrillas. Like many of the other 500,000 Salvadorans who have been displaced by the war, the returnees had subsisted in urban slums or overcrowded refugee camps. By returning home, the people of Tenancingo have become the first refugees to resettle in a war zone without government supervision. Under a plan developed by Roman Catholic Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas, Tenancingo has become inerme, a place without weapons, where government troops and leftist rebels are permitted to enter but are not supposed to incite hostilities. While both the military and the guerrillas have pledged to honor Rivera's plan, there is no binding agreement. "The plan is going ahead with 'an understanding,' which means it is inevitable that incidents will happen," says a Western diplomat.

Indeed, only weeks after the first residents returned home in late January, the fragile peace was shattered. Army troops tangled with a guerrilla unit on the outskirts of town, leaving three rebels dead. The troops then advanced into Tenancingo firing M-16 rifles and grenade launchers. The soldiers searched homes, detained and interrogated inhabitants, and killed at least one unarmed civilian. A postmortem by directors of the Tenancingo project and human rights officials blamed both sides for the breakdown: the guerrillas for breaching the agreement by maintaining a near constant presence in the town, the army for treating the civilians unjustly and, at times, violently.

President Jose Napoleon Duarte labeled the episode "lamentable," and has called on both sides to respect the agreement. General Adolfo Blandon, the chief of staff, has reaffirmed military support for the project. Tenancingo has long been a rebel-controlled zone and is thus a prime candidate for the army's newest counterinsurgency campaign, "United to Reconstruct," which calls for repopulating evacuated war zones with civilians who will be organized into "patriotic self-defense militias." Some people connected with the Tenancingo project predict it is only a matter of time before their town is made a part of the army's campaign.

After the February fighting, several families left Tenancingo. Within days, however, all had returned and a few new families had even joined the effort. "We are fine," says Demetrio Archila, 45. "The planes come by, they look at us, but they let us keep working. Now they don't bomb in the town, only outside it." That may be a small achievement, but it presents a ray of hope for many Salvadorans. "We don't need bombs or projectiles," says one townsman."We just want to be left alone. We hate this damned war."

With reporting by Jon Lee Anderson/Tenancingo