Salvador Rebels Step Up Pressure : Suspected Military Reprisals Against Civilians Also Rise

A recent upsurge of guerrilla attacks throughout El Salvador has raised the possibility that an oft-threatened fall rebel offensive is under way, causing concern that the armed forces will react with increasing harshness, including the killing of suspected civilian collaborators, diplomatic and human rights sources say.

During the last month, elements of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front have staged several major attacks on army posts and have ambushed patrols, mined roads and killed local government officials.

At the same time, statistics compiled by church and human rights groups show a marked increase in killings, arrests and disappearances of civilians suspected of sympathizing with the guerrilla front. The U.S. Embassy agrees that the statistics are accurate.

10 Rounded Up, Slain

The most serious incident blamed on government forces occurred Sept. 21, when soldiers were reported by witnesses to have rounded up 10 residents of the village of San Francisco in San Vicente province, about 30 miles east of here, and killed them with grenades and automatic-rifle fire.

A spectacular guerrilla operation also occurred late last month when guerrillas attacked a major army base at El Paraiso, about 30 miles northeast of San Salvador, breaching the fort’s walls, killing nine soldiers and wounding 12 others. The army reported killing five of the guerrillas, four of whom had penetrated the base and placed explosives before being shot.

Earlier last month, guerrillas attacked a National Guard barracks and killed at least 13 troops before being driven off with a loss of four fighters. And throughout recent days, government units have been ambushed on roads and in areas that had been considered secure for years. Four army musicians were killed near Santa Ana, the nation’s second-largest city and once the most peaceful area of El Salvador.

In addition, the intensity of fighting in Morazan and Chalatenango provinces and other areas of almost constant guerrilla warfare rose throughout September. One battle claimed the lives of 15 soldiers defending an important military communications center near Corinto in Morazan.

Government and diplomatic sources say they are not certain that the growing violence signals the start of an offensive that the Farabundo Marti front vowed would begin this fall, but one European diplomat said in an interview, “Things are a bloody shambles.”

Gen. Adolfo Blandon, the army’s chief of staff, has told diplomats and journalists that any offensive will take one of three forms: a single, large coordinated attack; a series of spectacular assaults on key bases and major cities; or an increase in hit-and-run attacks, ambushes, mining of roads and violence aimed at government and political officials.

“The third option may be what we’re seeing,” said a Latin American diplomat with ties to the guerrillas. “It gives them the flexibility to slow things down if they want, but it frightens the army and provokes (the military) into counterproductive acts.”

Blandon has acknowledged that the current guerrilla tactics are the hardest kind to defend against.

“The (guerrilla front) clearly is organizing its masses (civilian supporters) and tightening the pressure,” the European diplomat said. “The army has to react, and it will be bloody,” he predicted.

Sympathetic to Guerrillas

He cited the killings at San Francisco as an example. The area is a stronghold of guerrilla sympathy and straddles a major rebel supply route.

According to witnesses and human rights observers, upwards of 100 government troops were patrolling a nearby region when 12 to 15 soldiers under the command of a major entered the village, carrying a list of suspected guerrilla sympathizers.

Witnesses said the soldiers rounded up 40 villagers in a school, then took 10 of them outside to a field and killed them.

Tutela Legal, the human rights office of the Roman Catholic Church here, said that all 10 were shot in the head and then mutilated by grenades. Reporters who visited the site before the bodies were buried said all victims showed injuries caused by explosives.

Although the armed forces and death squads have often been accused of killing civilians during the last few years, nothing lately had occurred to match the rate of slayings during the early part of this decade, when the deaths of as many as 600 civilians a month were blamed on various government elements and shadowy right-wing groups.

Now, the San Francisco killings have aroused concern at the U.S. Embassy that some army officers are returning to ways of the early 1980s.

Ranking embassy officials visited the San Francisco scene and have been in almost daily contact with Blandon, urging a thorough investigation and the punishment of soldiers found to be responsible.

Yet, past pressure on the military has accomplished little, and the army’s reaction to the San Francisco killings was not promising, diplomats say.

The army’s Public Affairs Department initially said that the 10 deaths resulted from fighting between soldiers and guerrillas. Later, the department said that a patrol was taking the victims away to be questioned when they were slain in a guerrilla ambush.

Still later, army investigators reportedly said that investigation of the killings was “not going well”--leading diplomats to conclude that the officer and soldiers involved were not talking and evidently counting on past reluctance of the military to punish its own people.

However, Gen. Carlos Vides Casanova, the minister of defense, called the top military commander in San Vicente province on the carpet and told him that he and his men must cooperate in the investigation, which is still under way.