El Salvador Bloody Setback

By John Borrell/San Salvador

"There was total confusion," a survivor said later. "It was dark and the wounded were screaming, and we didn't know what was happening." At about 2 a.m., the first mortar fire crashed into the Salvadoran army's garrison at El Paraiso, just 36 miles from the capital of San Salvador. In a daring and well- planned attack last week, leftist guerrillas of the Popular Liberation Forces killed at least 69 government soldiers, as well as a U.S. military adviser, Staff Sergeant Gregory Fronius, 27, of Greensburg, Pa. He was the first American to die in combat during El Salvador's seven-year-old civil war, though five U.S. soldiers have been murdered by Salvadoran insurgents since 1983.

Once again the rebels had shattered the claims of the Salvadoran army and its 55-man U.S. training team that the guerrillas were being successfully contained. When he visited the garrison a few hours after the raid, General Adolfo Blandon, the Salvadoran army commander, was confronted with scenes of carnage and destruction. Wisps of smoke still curled from charred buildings as soldiers gathered bodies and parts of bodies into plastic bags. Discarded uniforms and blood-stained bandages were strewn about a building that had been a barracks.

In the meantime, the guerrillas boasted of the attack over the clandestine Radio Venceremos, describing it as the beginning of a new campaign for the "conquest of peace, bread, work and liberty." More Americans will be killed, they declared, if the Reagan Administration's "interventionist policy" continues. The guerrillas claimed to have killed or wounded 600 Salvadorans, including the brigade's commander, Colonel Gilberto Rubio. In truth, the number of dead and wounded was probably no more than 130, and Rubio had escaped with a slight injury to his hand.

Nonetheless, the Paraiso attack, in which the guerrillas lost only ten of their men, was both a setback to President Jose Napoleon Duarte's Christian Democratic government and a reminder to the U.S. that shoring up democracies in Central America is neither cheap nor painless. Drawing further attention to the price of the U.S. involvement in the Salvadoran war, the CIA announced last week that one of its employees had been killed in a helicopter crash in the eastern part of the country. Though the CIA did not identify him, the dead man was believed to be Richard Krobock, 31, of Quincy, Mass.

In the past seven years, the U.S. has provided El Salvador with $500 million in military aid and $1.5 billion more in economic assistance. Since 1980 the size of the Salvadoran army has grown fourfold, to 52,000, while that of the guerrillas has dropped from 10,000 to an estimated 5,000 to 6,000. The army's overall mobility and effectiveness have increased markedly, and it is no longer ridiculed as a "9-to-5" outfit whose officers go home on weekends and holidays.

Yet the Salvadoran military is still beset by serious problems. Perhaps the most critical of these is the gulf that remains between the enlisted men, the majority of whom are conscripts from poor rural families, and the officers, who are drawn mostly from the urban middle class. The recruits sometimes distrust the officers for their relatively privileged background, while the officers often suspect their men of being sympathetic to the aims of the guerrillas. After last week's attack, some officers hinted that the guerrillas may have been helped by troops inside the barracks.

Whatever the truth of that charge, it was obvious that the guerrillas knew what they were doing. After the mortar barrage had created confusion in the garrison, the force of about 200 guerrillas apparently cut its way through the defensive wire perimeter and planted explosive charges in the garrison's administration building, officers' quarters and intelligence center. The entire attack lasted about two hours, and by dawn the guerrillas had melted away into the countryside.

The raid was a personal blow for President Duarte, the country's first democratically elected leader in 50 years. Even before the earthquake last October that killed 1,500 and left 100,000 homeless, Duarte had been under sustained attack by both left and right for his economic policies. The quake caused damage estimated at between $1 billion and $2 billion, exacerbating already serious economic problems.

Fiscal reforms, including a hefty devaluation of the currency and a cut in government spending, have raised prices of imports and increased unemployment. Fully 50% of El Salvador's 5 million people are now either unemployed or underemployed. The right opposes such Duarte measures as a special tax to pay for the war. As always, there are rumors of right-wing agitation for a coup. Says a Western diplomat in San Salvador: "Duarte increasingly looks like the meat in the sandwich."

In fact, the President's political support has been declining ever since the breakdown of peace talks with the guerrillas in 1984. At that time Duarte had just defeated the left in an election and was making impressive progress in curbing the excesses of the right-wing death squads, which had been killing as many as 1,000 opponents a month. "If he could have pulled off a peace agreement, Duarte would still be a hero," says another Western diplomat on the scene. "Only peace can make any difference to this tattered economy."

Despite the guerrillas' success at El Paraiso, the country does not appear to be on the verge of military or political collapse. "We don't think this represents an action of strategic significance," says a State Department official of the latest assault. "It shows that a well-prepared guerrilla force is still able to carry out effective attacks. But it does not change the overall military situation." What the raid did demonstrate, however, was that the guerrillas still have the ability to mount such operations and that, for all the U.S. money and training El Salvador has received, there is no end in sight to the war.