The Rising Tides of War

By George Russell

In three countries, a wave of soldiering and questioning

The struggle over the troubled future of Central America grew fiercer last week. In El Salvador, Marxist guerrillas scored a psychological triumph with a surprise raid on the country's economic heartland; for the first time a U.S. military adviser was wounded. In Honduras, a major display of U.S. military logistics was intended to send an intimidating message to neighboring Nicaragua's Sandinista government. At the same time, the covert border war against the Sandinistas heated up, even though the Marxist leadership seemed more entrenched than ever. Reports from the scenes of battle:

EL SALVADOR. By the standards of El Salvador's tortuous three-year civil war, the first signs of the impending debacle were small ones. As some 70 members of the country's National Police guarded the once bustling agricultural center of Berlin (pop. about 30,000), guerrillas launched a cautious nighttime raid. For an hour small-arms fire popped back and forth between the opposing forces. Then the guerrillas slipped away into the surrounding cotton and coffee fields of Usulutan, one of El Salvador's richest and most strategic departments.

But as dawn broke the next day, the guerrillas returned with a vengeance. Some 500 members of the People's Revolutionary Army, a branch of the Marxist-led Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), descended on Berlin. Raking the town with automatic-weapons fire and rocket-propelled grenades, they devastated the puny garrison, killing or wounding four policemen and capturing or driving away the rest. The guerrillas sacked and burned Berlin's pharmacies and dry-goods stores, robbed the only local bank of $160,000, and rocketed the town's postal and telex offices. Local residents were herded into the central municipal plaza and harangued with propaganda and recruitment speeches.

The reaction of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran armed forces was slow and clumsy. The day after the guerrillas began their occupation, U.S.-supplied A-37B Dragonfly jets appeared over Berlin and began to strafe and rocket the town. At least two bombs were dropped a few blocks from the central plaza. Floods of refugees started to stream from their homes carrying sacks of food, clothing and hammocks, as Red Cross ambulances, their sirens screaming, crept through the streets.

More than two full days after the guerrillas had captured Berlin, 1,000 Salvadoran army troops arrived to lift the siege. When relief columns neared the town, the guerrillas, true to form, melted into the nearby hills. As they retreated, they burned Berlin's coffee warehouses, the town's chief source of income.

In Washington, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas O. Enders admitted that the F.M.L.N. occupation was a "significant psychological action." Not only had the guerrillas briefly occupied a major town, but they seemed to have underscored a growing incompetence on the part of the Salvadoran army. U.S. military advisers in El Salvador have repeatedly warned the country's Defense Minister, Jose Guillermo Garcia, to concentrate on defending economically vital Usulutan, where they believe the Salvadoran conflict ultimately will be won or lost. Instead, Garcia had sent the cream of his 22,000-member army into the northeastern department of Morazan, a mountainous guerrilla stronghold that is both economically and militarily unimportant.

The U.S. also paid a price for the Berlin episode. Special Forces Staff Sergeant Jay Thomas Stanley, a communications specialist, was wounded in the left leg by guerrilla ground fire while flying in a helicopter near the border of Usulutan, about seven miles from Berlin. At first, U.S. officials maintained that Stanley was on a "training mission." Later, however, the U.S. embassy in the capital of San Salvador announced that Stanley's immediate superior had been relieved of duty for ordering the sergeant to act in violation of congressional strictures that forbid advisers to enter Salvadoran combat zones. Two other U.S. military men were also sent home. The entire incident was almost certainly bound to generate further controversy about the U.S. role in El Salvador, and about whether the more than $160 million in requested military and economic aid to the country this year is a wise investment.

HONDURAS. The poverty-stricken Miskito Indians who eke out an existence in the northeastern Honduras department of Gracias a Dios had never seen anything like it. As U.S. Air Force C-141 transports and giant C5-A Galaxies roared overhead, Honduran special-forces parachutes bloomed in the skies above that remote and inhospitable corner of the country, twelve miles from the Nicaraguan border. In the nearby Caribbean coastal town of Puerto Lempira, two 8,800-ton U.S. Navy landing craft nosed ashore to deposit 580 members of the Honduran fourth infantry battalion. A mile away, U.S. Army officers huddled at a sophisticated and top-secret satellite communications center that had suddenly materialized in the swampy jungle, along with a mobile radar station. The display of U.S. military muscle flexing known as Operation Big Pine was launched with a fanfare of technological sound and fury.

In Washington, Pentagon officials said that Big Pine was merely a continuation of U.S.-Honduran military exercises that have taken place annually since 1965. True enough, but the scale of this year's effort was vastly grander than that of war games of the past. Last year only 30 U.S. military men turned up for the Honduran exercises. This year 1,600 Americans provided logistic and communications support in pitting 4,000 Honduran troops against an imaginary invading "Red army" from a neighboring, equally imaginary country called Corinth.

The real aim of Big Pine, of course, was to send an intimidating message to Marxist-led Nicaragua. "There has been a big change in Central America since the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979," said U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte. "Since then, the Nicaraguan government has quadrupled the number of its uniformed soldiers and brought in between 1,700 and 2,000 Cuban security advisers. Honduras and Costa Rica are worried. So is El Salvador, which has suffered from Nicaragua's role as the springboard for the Salvadoran insurgency." Said another U.S. diplomat, who traveled from the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa to observe the war games: "Big Pine is a political maneuver rather than one of major military significance."

It was also a highly provocative maneuver. The area chosen for the exercise is part of a surreptitious battleground used by Nicaraguan exiles in a growing counter-revolutionary war against their homeland. U.S. Air Force pilots learned about the covert war the hard way during Big Pine: two days after the exercise began, a U.S. C-130 transport aircraft was sent back to the U.S. with bullet holes in its tail assembly.

As an exercise in the U.S. ability to transport and supply the Hondurans, Operation Big Pine went off without a hitch. But as a test of Honduran military ability, the exercise appeared to be a failure. The ill-trained Hondurans were unable to cope with the 1,300 tons of equipment rained on them by the U.S. Nor did they show any great mastery of the battlefield discipline necessary to repel a hypothetical Corinthian advance. The 528 Honduran paratroopers dropped into the war-game zone, for example, spent two full hours attempting to regroup into companies. When one trooper was slightly injured during a faulty jump, other members of his battalion stood idly by rather than carrying him off for medical aid. In public, U.S. military officers had only good things to say about the doleful Honduran performance. But a ranking U.S. officer admitted: "They have a very long way to go before they can be rated as capable of defending their own country."

NICARAGUA. Smoke and the stench of death hung over the isolated Nicaraguan village of Bismuna last week. Bullet holes pocked the wooden sides of the tiny thatched huts that cluster on stilts along the bank of a small river, 20 miles from the Honduran border. A concrete schoolhouse stood blackened and gutted by mortar fire. Brown-shirted members of Bismuna's Sandinista militia defense force gathered up unexploded mortar rounds and other debris of battle. Jorge Vargas Lopez, 38, a combat veteran who fought in Nicaragua's Marxist-led Sandinista revolution of 1979, pointed to boot tracks near the river. Said he: "Those are Honduran military boots they were wearing."

Vargas was referring to some 150 anti-Sandinista invaders who had swept down on the hamlet garrison five days earlier to launch a twelve-hour firefight. Before the attack was repelled, the Sandinistas claimed, the counterrevolutionaries killed five Nicaraguan defenders and wounded five others, at a cost of 58 of their own dead. According to the Nicaraguans, the incident was the latest in a series of 500 such attacks in the past year; as many as 440 civilians and military men have been killed. The Bismuna battle, they protested, was part of a continuing effort by the Reagan Administration to overthrow the Sandinista government. Says Rosario Murillo, director of the Sandinista Association of Nicaraguan Cultural Workers: "Nicaragua is in a state of war."

That state reached a new height last week as the Nicaraguans watched Operation Big Pine taking place across the border. Claiming that Big Pine was the prelude to a major U.S.-backed invasion of Nicaragua, the Sandinista government called a full-scale alert in five frontier provinces. Green-uniformed guardsmen scanned border outposts for signs of more incursions of the kind that occurred at Bismuna.

Nicaraguan officials candidly admitted that they were embarked on a form of propaganda campaign against the Big Pine maneuvers. Said a Sandinista diplomat in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua: "When there's a well-known rapist in the neighborhood, you scream in order not to suffer."

Screaming is useful for the Sandinistas in another way. At a time when important sectors of Nicaraguan society have become alienated by the leftward drift of the regime, the constant evocation of a threat from the U.S. and the counterrevolutionaries, known as contras, has become an important domestic political weapon. Moreover, the strategy seems to work. For all their highly vocal insecurities, Nicaragua's rulers are more securely entrenched at home than ever.

Citing the contra threat, the government is still using an emergency law enacted in March 1982 that gives the government almost unlimited powers of censorship, arrest without warrants, and the authority to set up special counterrevolutionary tribunals. According to Western intelligence sources, internal security operations in Nicaragua are controlled by Cuban and Soviet-bloc experts.

One of the small signs that the Sandinistas are growing more self-confident is the disappearance of roving goon squads from Managua streets. The gangs were used to rough up antagonists to the regime and break up opposition political rallies. Now the Sandinistas claim that freedom of assembly is being respected. They also say they are drafting a law that will guarantee a role for opposition political parties, in theory at least. Such progress, however, is likely to be limited as long as the Sandinistas can claim that extraordinary domestic measures are needed to confront foreign threats. Through their protests and actions last week, the Sandinistas seemed to give notice that they still consider government by emergency to be the order of the day.

--By George Russell. Reported by Bernard Diederich/Managua, David Halevy/Tegucigalpa and Timothy Loughran/San Salvador

With reporting by Bernard Diederich, David Halevy, Timothy Loughran This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.