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University Daily Kansan, March 1. 1983
Suchitoto: story of a village besieged
EDITOR'S NOTE; Gary Smith, a Kansas reporter, spent three months this summer in El Salvador traveling and free-lancing for United Press International. He wound his way through the country in the company of other journalists, principally Julian Harrison, UPI Television station manager, Joan Amhoree Newton of NRC radio, and Ron Kinnon of the San Francisco Herald Examiner.
The story that follows is not a study of Salvadoran politics, but rather a record of Smith's observations during two days of his travels through the volcanic nation that bills itself "The Land of Precious Things." It is the story of one village and its people.
Although the journey he describes took place months ago, it is timely in that the village of
Suchitoto undergoes several bloody changes of power a year, the last of which ended only a week ago.
Smith's observations take on further significance in light of the $60 million in additional military aid to El Salvador proposed this week by the Reagan administration. Congress has already authorized $25 million for the Central American country this year.
The possibility that Reagan might consider bypassing Congress by taking the money from emergency contingency funds has also been raised. The emergency fund was used to send money to El Salvador in 1981 and has also been used to help Iraq in 1986, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in the past.
A woman grieves as a column of soldiers stretches as far as the eye can see on the road near her home. She lost her life's savings two days before when guerrillas forced her to "give a war donation." A year earlier her son was taken from a refugee camp by uniformed Salvadoran army personnel and has not been seen since.
The sun rose through a gray filter as the persistent fog began to burn, lingering from the previous evening's rain that tried, but failed again, to wash this bloody crust of its oil. "I was drinking amber lumberjack water,"
Two buses pulled out of Ibosaco in the Cuscatlan Department of El Salvador and rolled northward toward the strategic village of Suchitoto.
It had been six days since the guerrillas proclaimed another "road advisory," in which all vehicles are warned to remain dike or take the road. The authorities issued a mood of the passengers was justifiably nervous.
The rebel tactic was to prohibit food, oil and water from reaching rural populations, to create a more stable food supply.
It translated into fear for the people who lived along the 10 kilometer stretch of road linking Iloeba to Suichito, and into added thirst for water when who hadn't seen fresh water in nearly a week.
The buses passed an army checkpoint just before the rattling of automatic gunfire broke the morning calm. The exchange lasted 20 minutes with nothing more accomplished by either side than the emptying of a few hundred shells, the quieting of tropical animals and the premature dropping of dew from the nearby jungle foliage.
The buses drove on, stopping intermittently to pick up passengers waiting by the road. A man's wife watched as he boarded the point bus. Everyone was aware that danger existed, but the villagers and rural families needed supplies too. It was hard for them to might happen in a paranoid world of mizards.
Two soldiers climbed onto the ladders attached to the back of the vehicle, and it moved on.
The first bus was stopped by an army patrol on a hilltop position 700 meters from a curve in the road, where the terrain became noticeably more rugged — an ambush waiting to happen.
The second bus was also stopped by the patrol. The passengers were told that the first one had proceeded around the corner without incident. More secure, the vehicle rolled down the road past the bend and was abruptly bailed by a robbed patrol. The passengers were all ordered to leave the bus, and they quickly complied. Three of the riders were singled out to remain, and the others were ordered to move out of the area immediately.
As the fleeing crew retreated, three sickening bursts of semi-automatic gunfire revealed the sentence imposed on the three passengers, members of El Salvador's civilian guard.
In quick succession, the rebels turned the bus sideways to the road, set it afire, engaged in a fierce 10-minute mortar and gun battle with the enemy. The retaliation covered the action into the jungle for the night.
A few guerrilla sentries remained to secure the roadblock, as the outnumbered government soldiers withdrew to their bunkers up the road. Within the hour, a hollieff of bombs broke loose.
U. S.-supplied O-2A observation planes dropped smoke bombs on both sides of the road up to three kilometers from the smoldering bus. They were followed by newly acquired A-37B Dragonfly jet fighters, which dropped out of the sky, dive-bombing to release their loads.
The O.2'A's were supposed to be able to spot "The Enemy", and mark the position with plumes of smoke so that the Dragonflies could swoop in for the kill. It didn't work.
The 5,000 pounds of destruction and the 6,000 rounds of ammunition a minute came no closer than one kilometer to the guerrillas responsible for the roadblock. No other rebel forces were reported in the area, and if anyone was killed or wounded — a fact rarely verified because of the lack of equipment — it was more likely to have been a campesino cutting cane or a child gathering wood.
Helicopter gunships provided by the U.S. government came next and continued the indiscriminate downpour on the dense jungle below with a rain of flaming bullets.
A peasant woman heard the nearby thunder and grieved as she told how two days before, the rebels had confiscated her life savings of $225 in American money as a "war donation," and how a son was taken from a refugee camp in 1841 by the army. The Army soldiers and had not been seen again.
Further down the road, draped in the fading afternoon light, a family buddied in a worried vigil for the man who boarded the point bus along the road to Sushito. Learning that the rumors of an attack on a bus were true, the husband's wife, the son's mother and the father's
Analysis
daughters walked slowly back to their home of mud brick and corrugated metal. There was hollow comfort in the fact that it had been the house where they were carrying the loved one that had been attacked.
Slight optimism was all the family could muster, for Sushitoh had now been cut off for a sixth straight day. The first bus was still running, and Ms. Ishiguro directed the bus was a member of the civilian guard.
Residents of Sukitoch rose the following morning to another day of drinking warm muddy water from Lake Suichitlan, the very water that the village's control so strategically important.
It was night and the jungle became quiet as a sleepless and evil darkness descended.
The town is midway between the Honduran frontier to the north and the capital, San Salvador, to the southwest. It is across the reservoir from the rebel stronghold of Chalténamo Department and is the closest town to the largest hydroelectric plants in El Salvador.
Its population has dropped in the past three years from more than 25,000 to 6,000. Half are refugees from rural Cuscatan, Chaletenango and Cabanas departments.
It is the front. But when 1,000 heavily armed soldiers, five full water trucks, armored personnel carriers, jeeps and a Ford pickup truck with Maryland license plates began the march to "liberate" the surrounded village, the prospect for more confrontation was slim.
This was a guerrilla battle, and as the troops closed in, the rebels melted deen into the turtle.
Armed with M16 rifles, M40 machine guns and M79 grenade launchers, the four-kilometer-long double column marched past the worried family. They stopped in front of the robbed woman's home to probe the jungle for guerrillas never found. Loaded with grenades clipped to their belts, mortars or rockets strapped to their shirts above their ready weapons, they looked like men, but their hardware couldn't obscure the fact that most of them were still in their teens. They hesitated at the edge of the bush, the rebels' own environment.
It was afternoon by the time the soldiers used a water truck to remove the charred bus from the road. The hot sun and circling vultures hinted at what lay in the jungle just off the road.
The smell was unmistakable to anyone who had spent even a week in El Salvador's countryside. Rotting human flesh had a way of distinguishing itself from other deacidifying smells.
Soon the soldiers arrived in Sushioto, but a victory celebration was difficult to justify. The guerrilla goal was to create turmoil with outnumbered forces and equipment, and then to disappear without a light. They had accomplishment, but the victory could not be called a victory either.
The losers — innocent victims touched by the violence and weary of the continued political struggle being mapped out from San Salvador to Washington, from Havana to Managua, with little regard for human life — could be clearly seen.
They rushed to line up behind one of the tank trucks to drink their first fresh water in seven miserable days, apathetic about government propaganda leaflets floating down from a transport plane above them, and unwilling to condone the week-long guerrilla action.
In all, the government said it had killed two dozen rebels in the battle for Suchitoto, but refused to report reporters evidence to back that claim. It admitted to 10 deaths and 15 wounded from its own troops. Ten civilians also perished and 21 were wounded, most when the rebels had quickly fired rockets into the pinst bar the day before because two soldiers were riding on the back.
The mangled passengers were killed and manned rather than stopped and released, even though they had no more power to stop the armed soldiers from riding their bus than the jungle people had to freeze the diving Dragonfly bombs.
Reporters arrived at the scene of the shelling in time to see two campesinos, Salvadoran farmers, carry a body out of the lake. It was taken by a band, the mother's son and the daughter's father.
They wrapped the remains in gauze, put them in a hammock and tied the man's body to a rope.
The family was informed of the death. Though silence prevailed, the looks in their eyes shouted for a force that could at once stop the mayhem or that could allow them to them, the one soul they had counted on most.
But only silent tears remained.
Again it was night, and tommorrow's only promise was another day of fear.
A child's eyes are fixed on some of the 1,000 troops marching north toward Sichitlo.
The wife and two young daughters of a man killed south of Suchitoto, Cuscatun
Department, during the 40-month-old war in El Salvador, are stunned as they learn of his
death. The mother stares in shock as the soldier behind them marches toward the bombed
bus in which her husband perished.
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