Journalist fails to vanish
Patrick Marnham
Tegucigalpa to San Salvador The bus company's sign was intended to be reassuring. `Transportes El Salvador — Safety, Comfort, Responsibility.' Lower down, as an afterthought, the owner had added, 'We offer an economical service'. The last was certainly true since the ticket for the eight-hour journey cost £2, the same price as the ten-minute taxi ride to the bus station. This is the only bus company still operating along the Pan American Highway between Honduras. and El Salvador. No Hondurans try to run buses along this route which crosses Morazan Province, a place which Time magazine might describe as `battle-torn', or even 'strife-ripped'. The previous week the government in San Salvador announced that 'insurgents' had blown up 19 buses in one day. No one had been injured.
Our bus left promptly at 9 a.m. The driver seemed anxious to live up to his na- tional reputation for aggression, and treated the sleepier Honduran drivers with reckless contempt. It was the day that the Argentinian surrender was announced and El Salvador lost 10-1 to Hungary in the World Cup, not a day for singing 'London Pride'. At 1.15 after surprisingly mild bribery we cleared Salvadorean customs, and the second part of the journey began. The worst thing likely to happen, from the driver's point of view, was that the bus would be stopped, emptied and blown up. A more likely mishap was that the guerrillas would impose a 'Peoples' tax', which meant that the People on the bus would be robbed of everything that had a commercial value. In Nicaragua I had acquired a prcr- paganda postcard issued by the Salvadorean guerrillas, the FMLN, and decided to place this in my wallet in order to soften their Marxist hearts. This was an ex- tremely stupid idea.
At 1.30 we passed a group of heavily- armed men in civilian clothes. There were about ten of them in the shade of a tall tree. They carried machine guns and one had a heavier weapon slung across his back. The Passenger beside me nodded gloomily in response to my inquiry. The guerrillas did not stop the bus but continued to gaze down the road, apparently waiting for some other vehicle. Just beyond them the road crossed a river in which a party of women and children was washing. Contrary to the general custom they still had their clothes on, as though ready to leave in a hurry. One girl stood with the sun behind her, soaked to the skin, lazily rinsing out her hair and looking up at the bridge. Twenty miles to the north the guerrillas had driven 4,000 troops south towards the highway and were reported to be threatening the town of San Francisco Gotera. Shortly after crossing the river our bus broke down.
In some ways Central American society remains very conservative. If women run a risk by washing in a river they expect to be guarded, and if a bus breaks down it is the male passengers who push it. In this case seven men attempted to push the bus backwards and up a short slope, while 15 women remained in their seats looking down with interest and prepared to offer critical advice. It clearly never occurred to them to stand, attractively grouped perhaps, by the side of the road, but then by that time it was raining. Eventually we achieved success and rejoined the ladies. I felt hot, wet and irritable. The Salva- doreans felt wet, hot and immensely strong. Although the driver had not been pushing, he too was lifted by the masculine triumph. He drove even faster. The faster he went the less worried he looked. After any famous piece of overtaking he glanced back at his passengers as though expecting applause. He only began to look really worried when we reached the first of the army road blocks.
There was nothing genial about the soldiers manning it. They were engaged in the biggest military battle since the general election, and were stationed in an area where the guerrillas seemed able to operate with impunity. They were searching every vehicle that passed by, for arms or other evidence of subversive sympathies. Oddly. enough, social traditions were respected even here. The women had to leave the bus but they were not searched. The men had to line up facing the side of the bus with hands pressed against the windows, and were then searched thoroughly. Once the soldiers were satisfied that nobody was armed they started going through the mens' wallets. It was then that I remembered the propagan- da postcard. I was saved by my foreign passport and my fellow passengers. Anx- ious for the national reputation, and em- barrassed by what they supposed to be my first impressions, the other travellers in- sisted that the soldiers give my pockets the benefit of the doubt. Later we were stopped by an even less friendly group of soldiers who emptied my wallet completely, but by then I had transferred the incriminating souvenir to the pages of a notebook. As we drew near to San Salvador, and the traffic grew thicker, the burnt-out wrecks by the side of the road also increased. There were giant petrol tankers, many buses and several bulldozers and other road-making machines. The government are trying to upgrade the Pan American Highway. The FMLN are trying to make normal commer- cial life impossible. Both sides seem to be achieving some success. We eventually reached our destination 15 minutes early. The driver climbed onto the the roof and started to hand down the luggage. Next morning he was due to take the bus back to Tegucigalpa. He spent six days of every week driving along that road.
The battle between the army and the FMLN is currently being fought in two nor- thern provinces, Morazan and Chala- tenango. Just as outside observers were sur- prised by the amount of support the right- wing received in the recent elections, so they are now surprised by the military success which the FMLN has enjoyed in the past three weeks. The battle which was being fought that day in Morazan was subse- quently resolved in the army's favour, the FMLN being driven out of the two towns which it had held for 20 days. The guerrillas retreated into the countryside along the Honduran border which they have held for very much longer, having demonstrated
that 1,000 men could with- stand jet bombing, heavy artillery and two regiments of well-armed troops. On the day that they were driven back the FMLN an- nounced that in future the circulation of all traffic throughout. the territory of El Salvador was prohibited. Another punitive raid was carried out on the buses, lorries and private cars passing along the Pan American Highway. Twenty-five vehicles were destroyed in the next two days.
This sort of operation, while it demonstrates the FMLN's power to defy the government, does not make it very popular. The passengers on the bus were apprehensive of both army and guerrillas, but they clearly considered the former preferable to the latter. The guerrillas can count on considerable local support in the areas which they dominate but that amounts to little more than the instinct for self-preservation. If the peasants will not help the guerrillas, they are penalised. If they help the army, they are shot. The army behaves in the same way, but since it still dominates most of the country it is still accepted by the great majority of people as the lawful authority.
The recent elections, in which the Chris- tian Democrats received more votes than any other party, but not enough to present a coalition of more right-wing parties from forming the government, has naturally been proposed by the government as the fairest test of popular opinion. This view has recently been challenged by 'researchers' at the Jesuit University in San Salvador. Their case is that it would have been impossible for the stated total of 1.5 million votes to have been cast, and that therefore the votes cast for the right-wing parties have been fraudulently inflated. Their arguments are based on technical grounds and particularly on the fact that every vote took 2'/ minutes to cast. Strangely enough, exactly the same claim was made by the FMLN on the day after the election results were announced, when it was still too early to advance the technical arguments favoured by the Jesuits. The latter have now provided some evidence for the FMLN's suspicions, but few people are convinced by it. The length of voting time was carefully measured by many of the observers at the elections and was averaged out at I'/ minutes. It seems that, within the usual standards of accuracy of Central American elections, the result announced was correct. The people of El Salvador generally support an extreme right-wing response to the violent subver- sion of the FMLN.
Certainly the elections have been a con- siderable setback for the guerrillas. One group was recently reported to have shot its own leaders on the grounds that they had made an incorrect analysis of the political options facing the movement. But, though such incidents may encourage the govern- ment, the real struggle is a military one. The guerrillas can always fall back on the thick forest that straddles the El Salvador- Honduras border. Though both El Salva- dor and Honduras are opposed to 'Marxist- subversion' they are not very good at cooperating with each other. _The guerrillas should be able to hold out undefeated in this area for the foreseeable future.
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