Aiming To Gain Ground

By John Kohan

Talk of peace, as the fighting goes on and on.

As the crowd gathered in the columned halls of the presidential palace in Bogota, Colombia, to await the outcome of the second face-to-face meeting between representatives of El Salvador's warring factions, rumors spread that the talks were on the verge of collapse. So when delegates from the Salvadoran Peace Commission and from the five-faction guerrilla movement that opposes the government emerged from the negotiating chamber nearly 3 1/2 hours later, the sense of relief was almost palpable. "The door is open for future meetings," said a smiling Colombian President Belisario Betancur as he posed with the seven Salvadorans. "The dialogue for peace in El Salvador has been directly initiated." But when asked to give a thumbs-up, thumbs-down verdict on the session, Peace Commission President Francisco Quinonez evasively thrust his thumb sideways. Later, he described the meeting as "a total disappointment."

The Bogota talks produced little progress in ending El Salvador's four-year-old civil war. Representing the provisional government of President Alvaro Magana, the Peace Commission insisted that the insurgents take part in the national elections that are scheduled for early next year. The guerrillas, however, were still holding out for a settlement in which they would be given a share of power before having to participate in any elections. They also demanded that future meetings be held in El Salvador, a move that would give them added legitimacy. The leftist coalition predicted that talks would continue despite the present impasse, but Peace Commission members seemed to be pessimistic about the future of negotiations.

There were other reminders last week of how intractable the problems are in a region whose troubles seemed to be momentarily forgotten as the Korean Air Lines disaster and the war in Lebanon captured world attention. In both El Salvador and Nicaragua, guerrillas engaged government troops in some of the most intense fighting in months. In El Salvador, the U.S. supports the government, while in Marxist-led Nicaragua the U.S. has, through the CIA, helped finance the insurgents. To no one's surprise, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, 37, coordinator of Nicaragua's ruling junta, lashed out at the U.S. during his address to the U.N. General Assembly in New York City last week, charging that the Reagan Administration had "declared war on the people of Nicaragua." He claimed that U.S.-backed contras (counterrevolutionaries) had killed 717 Nicaraguans and caused economic damage totaling $108.5 million since 1981. The U.S., said Ortega, was pursuing "the policy of the big stick, the policy of gunboats, the policy of terror." The Sandinista leader warned later that Nicaragua was prepared to go "everywhere" (including, implicitly, the Soviet Union) to procure the combat aircraft it needs to check the contras. The state of conflict in each country:

El Salvador. While both sides went through the motions of peacemaking in Bogota, they still hoped to gain a decisive edge on the battlefield. Crawling through cornfields, tobacco patches and shoulder-high brush, squads of guerrillas staged a surprise early-morning raid against several army outposts near the hilltop town of Tenancingo, 17 miles northeast of San Salvador. After two hours of fighting, frightened townspeople, many of whom were hiding under their beds, heard approaching army helicopters. They were soon followed by spotter planes and three U.S.-supplied A-37B Dragonfly jets.

The guerrillas countered with a barrage of automatic machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades and fled for the center of the town, seeking cover and supplies in the courtyards and homes of the villagers. As clay-tile roofs splintered and shattered in a sudden rain of machine-gun fire, the fighter planes unloaded their cargo of 250-lb. bombs, sending bottles and statuettes of saints flying from shelves and demolishing many adobe homes. Fleeing civilians were gunned down in the indiscriminate fire from the jets and helicopters circling overhead. Said a stunned villager: "What can we do? The bullets come from one side. They come from the other side. Where can you go? You cannot avoid it."

When the smoke cleared, as many as 40 residents of Tenancingo and 20 government troops had been killed. The guerrillas escaped with at least 20 casualties. Salvadoran military officials claimed that government pilots had not intended to strike the town center and had been misdirected by insurgents using captured radios. The commander who led the counterattack apologized to the people of Tenancingo, explaining that the brutal bombing raid had been an "exception." Nevertheless, the incident was bound to set back government efforts to pacify and repopulate wartorn areas of the country. It was also sure to draw the wrath of U.S. congressional critics.

Further complicating the situation, the Constituent Assembly, charged with drafting a new constitution before next year's elections, has been painfully slow. The reason: bitter debate over three proposed articles that would jeopardize the bold land-redistribution program that has forced large landowners to turn acreage over to small farmers during the past three years. Moderate Salvadorans want the land-reform provisions to be spelled out in the constitution in clear, irrefutable language. Former President Jose Napoleon Duarte, leader of the Christian Democratic Party, warned that any effort to dilute land reform would "be responsible for a violent social revolution. It is a historical mistake."

Some 15,000 peasants and Christian Democratic loyalists paraded through downtown San Salvador last week to express opposition to the proposed articles, further snarling normally congested morning traffic. The crowd massed in Parque Libertad roared in approval when an impassioned speaker asked: "Do we want the land for those who work it?" It was the largest political demonstration since 1980, when leftists took to the streets to protest against the death squads and the policies of the civilian-military junta then in power. President Magana had given the land-reform advocates special permission to hold a march, despite a ban on public demonstrations, and U.S. officials quietly hoped that the Constituent Assembly would be equally accommodating in finding a compromise that would preserve land reform. Said an American diplomat: "It is indispensable to the survival of the country."

Nicaragua. In the most serious outbreak of fighting since May, U.S.-backed contras launched a three-pronged offensive against the town of Ocotal, about 15 miles from the Honduran border. Before Sandinista forces pushed them back into the hills, the contras managed to dynamite the main bridge that links the northern province of Nueva Segovia to the country's main cities. The contras also occupied and destroyed a border checkpoint at El Espino, a cluster of customs buildings on the frontier with Honduras.

Besides the ruined bridge, the most visible reminder that the contras had come and gone were hundreds of soggy leaflets, strewn along the dirt roads of Barrio Sandino, a poor sprawling district on the outskirts of Ocotal. The neatly typed tracts warned that the contras were initiating a new phase in their struggle, and affirmed that "with God and patriotism we will overthrow Communism."

The Sandinistas angrily claimed that Honduran army troops in green fatigues had joined the bluish-uniformed contras in their northern offensive. They also accused neighboring Costa Rica of aiding contras who launched an attack against Penas Blancas, an outpost on Nicaragua's southern frontier. While Costa Rican national guardsmen stayed discreetly away from the border, Sandinista troops pushed back the contra raiding party, but not before the guerrillas had destroyed the customs office and killed three Nicaraguan soldiers.

The short-lived offensive may have been staged to persuade the U.S. Congress to renew CIA funding for the contras for the fiscal year that began last Saturday. Under the complicated rules that keep the U.S. government afloat until a new budget has been approved, it is not likely that Congress will be able to invoke the Boland-Zablocki Amendment that threatened to cut off aid for the not-so-secret "covert" war. Two weeks ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee authorized the Administration to continue funding the contras. But it is by no means certain that the White House will get the aid it requested, which by some estimates is as high as $30 million.

Congress also turned its attention to El Salvador last week. In a quick, unanimous vote, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a one-year extension of the requirement that U.S. aid to El Salvador be linked to evidence that the Salvadoran government is making progress in improving human rights. As the national bipartisan com-- mission on Central America headed by former Secretary of |State Henry Kissinger pre| pared to set off on a six-nation fact-finding tour of the region next week, there was little doubt that the Administration could still use all the advice on Central America that it can get. --By John Kohan. Reported by Timothy Loughran/San Salvador and Alessandra Stanley/Managua

With reporting by Timothy Loughran, Alessandra Stanley This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.