TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/83/83capts.8

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                                                                                February 14, 1983

CENTRAL AMERICA

The Rising Tides of War


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 then
ever. Reports from the scenes of the 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. A 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-,ember 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 ware 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 wargame 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 counter-
revolutionaries known as the 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
order of the day.


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