10 MAY 1986, Page 16

BACH AND WAR IN EL SALVADOR

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on the

ability of civilised Salvadorans to remain oblivious to a cruel civil war

San Salvador 'WE ARE about to listen to Bach's third Brandenberg Concerto, performed by the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, con- ducted by Neville Marriner,' announces a gentle voice in impeccable Castilian. From early morning to late at night Radio Clasica broadcasts softly through El Salva- dor. At eight o'clock it sometimes goes a bit fuzzy as the army tries to jam the rebel transmitter, Radio Venceremos (We will triumph'), but that is one of the few inconveniences suffered by the bourgeoisie after six years of civil war.

By and large life goes on at a jolly pace in the capital. The streets seem to be full of plump women driving new model BMWs. Lively teenagers in pressed school uni- forms queue at the video rental, hoping at last to get a copy of Under Fire or Missing — the risque films about revolution and repression in Latin America that have been such a hit in El Salvador. And up in the rich suburbs weekend parties are often wild and promiscuous. You can hear them several blocks away as tipsy young `garks' — the scions of the oligarchy — toss huge fireworks in the air and spray the skies with machine-gun fire.

Where does all the money come from? One might have thought war was bad for business. After all there is no investment to speak of and landowners are mostly letting their farms run down. But investment is not the issue in El Salvador, it is consump- tion that tells the story. Salvadorans are spending as much as ever and the United States is footing the bill.

Remember the Marshall Plan? Over three years 22 countries received a total of $10.2 billion. That makes about $155 mil- lion a year each to rebuild advanced economies that had disintegrated in world war two. El Salvador, which is little bigger than Wales and has a rural economy barely touched by the fighting, got $432 million in US economic aid last year — albeit in devalued dollars. Then it got another great tranche of the military aid which has enriched a whole generation of colonels, who by their spending alone must have sent a ripple of wealth through the eco- nomy. And finally there is a million dollars a day being repatriated by the 500,0°° Salvadorans who have fled and are now washing dishes in Los Angeles or extract - mg teeth as bargain dentists in Houston. i Together that is a lot of money, more n fact than total exports in an average Year' And it allows much of El Salvador to carrY on as if there were no war. Indeed, one old conservative told me he didn't believe there really was a war going on at all. He thought that the 'bandits' in the mountains could be finished off easily enough but that nobody wanted to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, and that the silly gringos (Americans) with their obsession about communism would just keep on paying for it all. That is an illusion, however. The leftist guerrillas of the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) would have seized power long ago if the US had n°t stepped in and they are still a force to be reckoned with. They have also beconle more radical. At first they courted the middle classes in the hope of repeating the 'strategic alliance' that brought down the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, but Ow they seem to have accepted that such. people are unfit for the struggle. Instead the FMLN has announced that it is a Marxist-Leninist party and the militarY vanguard of a communist revolution. As evidence of the new hard line it has increasingly gone in for kidnapping, extol.' tion and summary executions — known a.s 'judgments' in rebel jargon. Even so, it hard for many Salvadorans to take the threat seriously because the war is now 5° rarely felt in the cities. There was a time when journalists in San Salvador would do the daily `vulturde round' to count the corpses of suspect leftists and to see, by the pattern of torture and mutilation, whether it was the Nan011, al Guard or the Treasury Police that hau been busy the night before. Not anY,. longer. Numbers are down and the boch.e" are dropped discreetly at night into tnie middle of Lake Ilopango and only rare121 wash up onto the shore to remind bathel' that the repression is still going on. ,1 The improvement is not just because tt Salvador now has an elected goveriunen or because Vice-President George Bush told the security forces, and their affiliate death squads, that the killing would have to stop, it is also because the war no longer requires that sort of approach. The death Squads did exactly what they were sup- posed to do: they decapitated the trade unions and mass organisations that seemed in danger of setting off an urban insurrec- tion at the beginning of the decade. The survivors had either to flee the country or Join the guerrillas. El Salvador was left With a clearly defined civil war which the army, backed by the United States, was sure it would win.

Many Salvadorans have little sense of the scale and brutality of the conflict. The 9,000 or so guerrillas operate in a series of mini-republics where they have schools, Clinics and even some radical priests. These zones are mostly poor and isolated and can be bombed without seriously hurting the economy or stirring the national conscien- ce. The practice, well known to Vietnam aficionados and brought to El Salvador by US military advisers,is to drive civilians out of the zones and leave the guerrillas cut off from their support structure. Without the 'sea' (people), wrote Chairman Mao, the 'fish' (guerrillas) cannot survive. So the sea must be drained. The peasants say they can always tell When there is going to be an attack. First comes a 'push and pull' reconnaissance flight, then an A-37 Dragonfly in a flat dive. And they say the bombs are so big — Often 500 pounds — that they can tell Where they are going to land and have about 30 seconds to find cover. If it is a fragmentation bomb that explodes in the air and blasts sharpnel in all directions, they can only trust to God. Then comes the `guinda', the flight from f°11crw-up sweeps by regular infantry. The Peasants grab what they can and run off to secret caves and burrows where they may Spend days on end, too frightened to venture out for food and water. Mean- the troops go through their villages, burning crops, killing livestock, tearing clown houses, ripping up water pipes, and even planting hideous booby traps in the ruins they leave behind. It is a cruel way to wage war, but then hallmarks and terror have long been the _ft‘allmarks of El Salvador. The brutality 'ten surprises visitors because the country IS not depraved in other respects. It is neither rooted in crime like Colombia, nor 1,11. corruption and hypocrisy like Mexico. Lt ins ead El Salvador is by and large an "4_°fiest, courteous and cheerful society. 1 ,1"nce there may be some truth in what Tatty Salvadorans say about the violence: iinat it is not indigenous and that it has been tmriPosed from outside. The army learnt its schcks at American counter-insurgency ools in Panama and the United States. _we learnt from you', a death squad ember once told an American reporter, we learnt from you the methods, like blowtorches in the armpits, shots in the balls.' And political prisoners often insist they were tortured by foreigners, some Argentian, others maybe American.

In England we tend to throw up our hands at the ghastly stories that filter out from Central America, seeing it all as an outbreak of jungle barbarism. But for them it is a watershed in their history. It is a ferocious and at times heroic struggle to decide the future of semi-feudal societies rapidly entering the modern world; a bloody ordeal that some of the finest nations have already been through. 'In the United States there was once a terrible civil war,' one of El Salvador's more liberal field commanders told me earnestly. 'Millions died. But then it en- ded, peace came, and a great nation came forth; a great democracy was forged. One day there will be peace for us and we will be a model for the world.' Then he added with a playful smile: 'You think we are savages, don't you? Well, what about you "English" in Ireland? You kill each other over religion and that doesn't even exist. At least we are fighting for something real. In a way you are more savage then us.'