"Like a Sears, Roebuck Catalogue"

By George Russell

How the Salvadoran rebels order outside help for their revolution

In the debate over U.S. policy in Central America, one of the Reagan Administration's biggest problems has been to make a successful case that there is any kind of superpower meddling in the stricken region--any meddling, that is, aside from its own. Congressmen have leaped quickly upon the Administration's barely concealed support for the guerrilla warfare of disaffected rebels against the Marxist-led Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Legislators have been unwilling to accept Reagan's oft-repeated assertion that the four-year-old insurgency in El Salvador is covertly sponsored by the Soviet Union and its revolution-oriented client states.

From sources in Washington and Central America, TIME has pieced together many aspects of the nature of the Marxist-Leninist interference in El Salvador that worries Washington. The picture that emerges is of a sophisticated strategy that takes advantage of the region's terrain and circumstances, and, above all, of the weaknesses of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran forces. The guerrillas, says a Washington-based intelligence analyst, "are really good. They're flexible. There are no Ho Chi Minh trails this time."

According to a Sandinista military defector interviewed by TIME, the building of a Nicaraguan arms link to El Salvador began almost as soon as the victorious revolutionaries took power in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua in July 1979. Says the defector: "It took nine months to plan the operation. The arms that eventually went to El Salvador were first taken from our forces who fought against [Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle]. After the triumph, they were instructed to turn in their weapons, which were put in warehouses and held for shipment to El Salvador. Then it was discussed who would take them there. It was decided that the organization to run this was [Sandinista] military intelligence. As former guerrillas, we knew that different routes could be used to make it difficult to prove that this was happening. We studied the environmental and human factors to determine the possibility of the mission's success."

According to the defector, arms were secreted in trailer trucks with dummy fuel tanks, then driven from Nicaragua through Honduras to El Salvador. Some of those runs were detected. In 1981 the Reagan Administration displayed photographs of such a truck containing a cache of U.S.-made M-16 rifles in its false bottom. The serial numbers on some of the rifles showed that the weapons had been left behind by U.S. forces in Viet Nam.

Soon after the early Nicaraguan smuggling operations into El Salvador, Washington began trying to document Marxist-Leninist interference in that country. In February 1981 the Reagan Administration sent a white paper to its West European and Latin American allies, concluding that the Salvadoran civil war had been "transformed into a textbook case of indirect aggression by Communist powers."

The U.S. wanted to show that the Salvadoran guerrillas were receiving materiel and direction from revolutionary Nicaragua, which in turn was supplied by the Soviet Union, Cuba, Libya and various East bloc countries. Among other things, the white paper contained copies of documents allegedly written by a Salvadoran Communist leader, Shafik Handal, mentioning commitments to the Central American insurgency from Viet Nam, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union and East European nations.

The white paper also spelled out the crucial role of Fidel Castro in forging a coalition among El Salvador's formerly disparate Marxist-Leninist guerrilla groups. As early as 1979, the U.S. documentation showed, Castro helped to coordinate the activities of three of the five major Salvadoran guerrilla organizations. According to the white paper, the three groups saluted Castro for his help at the time and acknowledged Cuban assistance in the signing of an agreement among the rebels that "establishes very solid bases upon which we begin building coordination and unity of our organizations." Throughout that formative period, Salvadoran guerrilla leaders conferred frequently in Havana. Their efforts led to the formation of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), the current Salvadoran guerrilla umbrella organization.

Since those days, the Nicaraguan arms smugglers have turned to more sophisticated methods. An insight into their tactics came last March, when Honduran police intercepted a group of green-uniformed Salvadoran irregulars backpacking near the town of Nacaome, 50 miles from the Nicaragua-Honduras border. After a gunfight, the Salvadorans fled, leaving behind notebooks that mapped out, in unusual detail, an important arms infiltration route. It hugged the Honduran Pacific coast between Nicaragua and El Salvador, then angled into the remote areas of El Salvador where the Marxist rebels hold almost undisputed sway. U.S. analysts estimate that 15 to 20 such land routes exist across Honduras. Some involve cable-and-pulley systems to carry arms shipments across otherwise impassable mountain gorges and rivers. The arms routes are interchangeable and almost impossible to patrol on a constant basis.

Other military shipments come in by air and sea. Sandinista smugglers have been known to move supplies directly across the 20-mile-wide Gulf of Fonseca. When the going is safe, the Nicaraguans make nighttime forays from the Pacific gulf port of Potosi aboard small fishing boats, equipped with false bottoms, or 50-foot frame canoes. That practice has now been curtailed because of the patrols of U.S. electronic surveillance ships in the area and the greater vigilance of the Salvadoran and Honduran navies.

Lately, Nicaraguan vessels have set sail from the Pacific landing of Estero Padre Ramos, then headed as far as 50 miles straight out to sea. There, says one U.S. analyst, "you're getting into an area where nobody can watch all that open water." The Nicaraguan boats are known to rendezvous with Salvadoran ships that speed farther north toward isolated beaches near the Salvadoran Bay of Jiquilisco. That area is a swampy maze of waterways, canals and tributaries. Concealment is easy, pursuit almost impossible. The military shipments are then quickly transferred to small canoes that take the loads upstream to clandestine warehousing points along the local bayous.

At night, the Jiquilisco region is also known as a favorite destination of arms-laden helicopters and light fixed-wing aircraft. If warned off from the steamy coast, the smugglers head for other makeshift airfields farther inland. Says one U.S. analyst: "These people have it down so that an aircraft can land, unload and be off again within five minutes." An important alternative air route for the smugglers is from the former British colony of Belize into Guatemala. After that, the rebels and their supplies filter south into Salvadoran rebel strongholds.

Once in El Salvador, the pipeline becomes even more labyrinthine. Materiel from the Jiquilisco area is moved by boat, oxcart or mule tram toward guerrilla camps in the center and northwest of the country. Supplies that come overland across Honduras also move northwest, toward El Salvador's vital agricultural provinces of Usulutan and San Vicente. Every guerrilla route has at least one alternative path. In areas where the rebels are strong, the alternative routes often interconnect; at night, smugglers can slip right under the noses of Salvadoran soldiers.

The flexible and surreptitious nature of the guerrilla supply system is a major reason why the Reagan Administration has been unable to add much in the way of flesh-and-blood examples to its rarefied intelligence data concerning outside interference in El Salvador. U.S. electronic listening equipment aboard naval vessels or AWACS aircraft can sometimes detect arms shipments, but rarely in time to photograph or intercept the smugglers. Says a U.S. intelligence source: "They set up meetings in code. You dig in and figure out the codes, but it takes too long. The infiltration has already occurred." Specialists also blame their lack of physical proof on the reluctance of Salvadoran armed forces to patrol at night, when most of the smuggling takes place.

The battery of U.S. listening gear now in and around El Salvador may not be directly hindering the insurgents, but it has helped to confirm Nicaragua's role in the Salvadoran conflict. U.S. intelligence sources insist that there is a constant chatter of coded radio traffic between the Salvadoran rebels and Managua. When Salvadoran guerrilla units stop fighting, says a U.S. expert, "you can hear them order supplies [from Nicaragua]. A unit says: 'I need candles, boots, batteries, diarrhea medicine, bullets and mortar rounds.' It's like a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. If they don't get what they ask for, they bitch. The fact that they bitch shows that they've got a pipeline that they think they can depend on."

Along with foreign supplies, the guerrillas can also depend on foreign training. Cuban advisers frequently sit in on Salvadoran guerrilla strategy sessions. Rebel cadres have all taken extensive training courses in Cuba. U.S. intelligence sources have obtained a 14-page manual used by the guerrillas that describes a seven-month "platoon leader course," with topics ranging from "review of infantry movements" to radio communications to "the history of Cuba." If seven months' training is given to guerrilla platoon leaders, U.S. analysts note, the training given to higher-ups in the guerrilla hierarchy is probably far more intensive.

U.S. counterinsurgency experts and the Salvadoran guerrillas agree on one thing: the rebels are not utterly dependent, for the moment at least, upon outside help for weapons. Guerrilla radio calls to Nicaragua are almost always for ammunition, medical help and food, rather than for rifles and machine guns. That seems to bear out a rebel claim that they have captured, or bought, sufficient arms from the demoralized Salvadoran army.

U.S. radio eavesdropping supports the Reagan Administration's contention that Nicaragua calls most of the shots for the Salvadoran rebels. TIME has learned from a Central American source that virtually all of the commanders of the all-important Unified Revolutionary Directorate (D.R.U.), the topmost level of Salvadoran guerrilla leadership, have been living in Managua for the past two years.

A feisty challenge to Nicaragua's complicity was offered last week by Representative Bill Young of Florida. On a congressional fact-finding tour in Managua, he asked his hosts about a local command center that relayed orders to Salvadoran rebels. The Nicaraguans denied the existence of the place. When Young offered to provide an exact address, the subject was abruptly changed.

Ties between the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran guerrilla movement do not provide by themselves proof of East bloc involvement in Central America. But the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. U.S. analysts have charted an "impressive" number of Soviet freighters docking at Nicaraguan ports. Cuban cargo flights land regularly at Managua's Augusto Cesar Sandino Airport. So do large numbers of Libyan Il-76 transport planes. In addition, a veritable flotilla of Cuban surface ships pays regular calls. Referring to Nicaragua's enigmatic stockpile of Communist goods, a U.S. analyst commented: "You see piles and piles of crates, but you can't be sure what is in them."

A strong indication of what might be in the crates came three weeks ago, after the Brazilian government seized four Libyan transport aircraft carrying tons of illicit arms to Nicaragua. The Brazilians were tipped off by U.S. intelligence about the load. Among the contents were reported to be rocket parts, rifles, and at least one Czechoslovak light ground attack trainer aircraft.

Yet another expose of clandestine Nicaraguan arms shipments seemed to be in the offing early last week, when Costa Rican officials boarded a Panamanian ship that was bound for Managua. The ship contained some 50 tons of dynamite and detonators. The Costa Ricans took no further action, lamely explaining that the explosives were destined for a private company in Nicaragua.

In one sense, the complicated chain of Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan interference in the Salvadoran civil war only fulfills a longstanding dictum of guerrilla warfare: at some point, rebel forces need outside assistance in order to win. That precept has been endorsed by such revolutionary strategists as Mao Tse-tung, who wrote that "international support is necessary for the revolutionary struggle in any country," and North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap.

Such outside support, it is true, need not be Communist. In the case of Castro's 1959 revolution, aid came from pro-democratic Cuban exile groups in the U.S., Puerto Rico and several Latin American countries. In the case of Nicaragua, assistance came from Venezuela, Costa Rica and a variety of West European social democratic groups that still support the increasingly totalitarian Sandinistas.

At the same time, the presence of outside assistance does not necessarily mean that a guerrilla uprising will win. In the Philippines' Hukbalahap movement of the late 1940s and early '50s and again in the Malayan rebellion of the same period, insurgents were defeated even though they claimed to have external help. In both cases, a key factor proved to be whether local residents could be won over by something other than Communist ideals. Even though he is once again meddling in El Salvador, no one should know that lesson better than Cuba's Castro. It was he who lent outside support to revolutionary adventures in Venezuela and Bolivia during the 1960s, only to see those efforts squelched ignominiously when the residents of those countries rejected the message of Communist salvation.

--By George Russell.

Reported by James Willwerth/Mexico City

With reporting by James Willwerth/Mexico City This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.