Central America No Place to Hide

By J.F.O. McAllister

The pattern would be tedious if it were not so deadly. Every time the government of El Salvador announces that, yes, the rebel offensive is finally over and the capital of San Salvador is safe again, the guerrillas pop up in yet another neighborhood.

Last week the troops of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.) embarrassed President Alfredo Cristiani by seizing control of the wealthy Escalon district and then melting away again. As rebels burned several luxurious homes and sniped at slowly advancing government troops from windows, hundreds of foreigners and wealthy Salvadorans fled the country. The F.M.L.N. even carried the battle to the skies: for the first time in the ten- year-old conflict, the insurgents fired a surface-to-air missile at an air force jet. The sharply escalating violence not only raised fresh questions about Nicaragua's role in arming the Salvadoran guerrillas, but proved an unwelcome irritant for the U.S. and the Soviet Union on the eve of their Malta summit.

By targeting the lush and peaceful enclave of Escalon, which spreads elegantly along the western fringes of the capital, the insurgents brought the war home to the wealthy. Using luxury cars as barricades against the army's armored personnel carriers and light tanks, the rebels seized about 40 houses. For the most part, they carefully obeyed F.M.L.N. orders not to harm civilians. American officials warned F.M.L.N. representatives in Mexico City and San Salvador against endangering the lives of U.S. diplomats. None were hurt, but some envoys had close calls. On Thursday a chartered jet evacuated 234 civilian workers and dependents of U.S. officials. "The Bush Administration keeps saying that we are acting out of desperation, that the offensive will end soon," says an F.M.L.N. officer. "But the actions of the last few days will be a permanent feature as long as there is war in El Salvador."

The Escalon offensive rattled Cristiani, who only three days earlier had held a press conference to display a cache of weapons, including 24 surface- to-air missiles, found in the wreckage of a twin-engine Cessna that had crashed some 70 miles east of San Salvador. The plane almost certainly took off from Nicaragua, bolstering Cristiani's conviction that Ortega's Sandinista government was supplying arms to the F.M.L.N. despite a personal promise to Cristiani last August not to do so. Cristiani suspended diplomatic relations with Nicaragua and refused to attend a summit of Central American Presidents scheduled for this weekend unless it was moved from Managua.

The rebels were not known to have the heat-seeking SA-7s until they fired one at a Salvadoran jet last week. The shoulder-held SA-7 is a Soviet-designed cousin of the more advanced U.S. Stinger rocket that significantly boosted the power of the mujahedin in the Afghan war. "These missiles could really make a difference," says a key U.S. Senate staffer. The insurgents offered to sheathe the weapon if the air force stopped bombing and strafing ground targets, but Cristiani is unlikely to accept the deal.

Although SA-7s can be obtained in arms bazaars around the world, there was little doubt that the weapons were shipped from Nicaragua. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez firmly backed Cristiani in blaming Ortega, who did not even bother to deny the charge. Instead, Ortega noted the many flights that originated from San Salvador's Ilopango airport to ferry weapons to the contras fighting his government. "So what's the scandal?" he asked.

The Sandinistas have admitted supplying the F.M.L.N. with other types of weapons in the past. But U.S. intelligence agencies have not been able to come up with hard information about the nature of these shipments or how they have changed over time. Some Washington officials believe Managua's military aid to the F.M.L.N. was fairly modest from the early 1980s until mid-1988, when plans were first laid for the current offensive and arms shipments were cranked up. If Ortega is indeed the purveyor of SA-7s to the F.M.L.N., why did he choose to send them now? One plausible hypothesis assumes that a demand for the rockets was created by the current rebel offensive. Another is that both Ortega and Castro are rushing to help the F.M.L.N. before Gorbachev pressures them to cut off the rebels as part of his larger rapprochement with Washington. Foreign diplomats, confirming a report in the French daily Le Monde, said that a Soviet emissary told Sandinista and Cuban officials in Managua last week to stop arming the F.M.L.N. Salvadoran diplomats closed their Managua embassy on Wednesday and left the country in protest over the SA-7 shipments. But they stressed that relations were being suspended, not terminated. Ortega pointedly did not suspend his government's ties with San Salvador. The flap between the two countries will probably blow over.

The much graver danger to the region is that El Salvador will slip completely into chaos as the government discovers that it cannot control even the streets around its offices in San Salvador. "The military is showing itself to be incompetent," says a U.S. official. "Unless there's some radical and magical improvement, the guerrillas are going to keep coming in at will. It's really nightmarish."

A grisly fantasy of a different sort may soon be conjured up out of the frustration of ultra-rightists in the Salvadoran army and government who are considering a campaign of terror to suppress the insurgents. Between 1980 and 1985, confirmed killings by death squads linked to the military or National Guard liquidated 0.3% of El Salvador's population, and many far-right members of the President's ARENA party would like to resume that strategy. The rightists have reportedly stockpiled enough weapons and ammunition to pursue a terror campaign for several months after a cutoff of U.S. aid.

Already the government is betraying distressingly fascist leanings. Strict, vaguely worded laws curbing dissent were rammed through the legislature last week. Death squads are on the rise; evidence collected by human-rights groups strongly implicates the army in the killing of six Jesuit priests three weeks ago. Predictably, the criminal investigation of the Jesuits' slaying -- in contrast to the official probe of the SA-7s' origin -- has got nowhere.

George Bush journeyed to San Salvador as Vice President in 1983 to tell its leaders that the U.S. was prepared to drop aid to the country if they did not act against the death squads. He could make the same speech today. The country's center, enfeebled by vast poverty and the effects of a decade of war, is crumbling under the prodding of the offensive. The future for El Salvador looks to be a free-for-all between a buoyant and rearmed F.M.L.N. and generals willing to make the country a boneyard.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira/Washington and John Moody/San Salvador