"What Will We Have Left?"

The killings continue in bloody El Salvador

The brutal civil war in El Salvador was between battles last week. In the only major skirmish, Salvadoran soldiers clashed with armed teen-agers sympathetic to the rebel cause in the village of San Lorenzo. The toll, according to an army major: 40 guerrillas and one soldier dead. From their hideouts in remote areas near the border with Honduras, leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front emerged briefly to blockade roads and blow up a number of bridges and power lines. Meanwhile, death squads of both right and left still roamed the land, murdering anyone they suspected of collaborating with the other side. TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich, who has visited El Salvador ten times in the past twelve months, returned to that terrorized country last week and sent this report:

For a people caught in the crossfire between guerrillas and government soldiers, Salvadorans display a remarkable ability to keep up business as usual. Trucks carrying sugar cane and coffee beans still crowd the highways, shops remain open, the buses run. Most people now seem to feel that the guerrillas will eventually be defeated. Many are much more frightened by the right-wing death squads, which apparently intend to kill anyone tainted by the left.

Since their "final offensive" last January was blunted by the Salvadoran military and by lack of popular support, the guerrillas have made no headway in their struggle to overthrow the civilian-military junta that first took power in October 1979. Indeed, the guerrillas' attempts to wreck the nation's economy by cutting town water supplies and blowing up bridges have cost them the support of many people. The town of Usulutan (pop. 41,000) is without water, and San Miguel (pop. 113,000) has neither electricity nor water.

The poorly trained government troops outnumber the guerrillas by 16,000 to 4,000. But the soldiers are spread thinly across a country the size of Massachusetts, and their mobility is hampered by antiquated equipment, their tactics by a lack of know-how. Still, one military expert contends that "only with an immense infusion of arms and men from the outside" do the guerrillas have a chance at winning the war. Owing in part to the failure of the January offensive, and to the Reagan Administration's determination to help the junta, the leftists' support abroad is ebbing. Even the sympathetic Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua has urged the guerrillas to work out "a negotiated settlement" with the junta.

It may already be too late. Junta President Jose Napoleon Duarte has firmly stated that there are no negotiating points with the guerrillas, and that the people should decide what kind of government they want in "free and honest elections," now scheduled for 1982-83. Duarte insists that his government's program of social reforms, especially land reform, will continue to erode support of the guerrillas.

At least for the moment, the war itself has been overshadowed by random attacks on civilians by right-wing and leftist death squads. The rightist squads are often aided by members of the government security forces. Many of them are said to be receiving funds from exiled Salvadorans in Miami and elsewhere who vehemently oppose the junta's land reforms, which have led to the expropriation of some large ranches, and hope to see Duarte's government fall.

Each day brings a fresh batch of horror stories about the death squads. El Salvador's Human Rights Commission, a private organization, estimates that two-thirds of the killings were done by the right, though Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, a government critic, contends that slayings by the guerrillas are on the rise. One night last week, there was a knock at the door of a small house in the city of Santa Ana. Alida Fidelina Miranda de Escobar, 35, a kindergarten teacher, answered the door and was confronted by five masked gunmen. As her three young girls begged, "Don't shoot Mama!" Miranda was killed in a hail of bullets. Next night, 50 armed men searched the home of Salvador Rivera Hernandez, 39, in a working-class suburb of San Salvador. They marched Rivera and his wife into the street and shot them dead. Later in the week, a pickup truck carrying ten armed men pulled up to a cemetery in San Salvador. Interrupting a funeral service, they pointed to five cemetery workers and ordered them into the truck. That night the bodies of four of the workers, clad only in underpants, were dumped at the cemetery's gate; on the chest of one of them were burned the initials of a right-wing death squad. The whereabouts of the fifth victim remains unknown.

There were 10,000 violent deaths in El Salvador last year, and this year the total already tops 3,000. Tens of thousands of peasants have been forced to flee the countryside and settle in makeshift refugee camps in the larger cities and across the border in Honduras. As Father Manuel Torruella said in his homily at San Salvador Cathedral last Sunday, "It is sad to see our country destroyed. What will be left to a country as poor as ours after this? No matter who wins, what will we have left?"

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