El Salvador: Pray You Are Right, Don Jose'

Duarte exudes confidence, but the guerrillas hang on

El Salvador's civilian-military regime expressed confidence last week that it had succeeded in repelling the vaunted "final offensive" of the country's revolutionary left. José Napoleon Duarte, the shrewd Christian Democratic politician who heads the junta, attributed the left's setback to its failure to win popular support. Duarte offered amnesty to any guerrillas willing to lay down their arms, pledged to move forward on the junta's promises of social reforms and free elections, and toured the provinces like a glad-handing political campaigner.

Embracing a group of children in the recaptured provincial capital of San Francisco Gotera, Duarte declared: "These are the future of our country and none of us wants to see them become guerrillas." The local Indians broke into applause when he assured them that they would no longer have to fear guerrilla attacks against the town. An old Indian woman raised her hands in prayer and cried out: "Pray to God you are right, Don José!"

The leftists, however, although they had received a heavy beating from government forces, were hardly ready to concede defeat. Said a commander of a 300-man guerrilla contingent of the Forces of Popular Liberation: "The offensive has. many stages. It may take three or four more months." The guerrillas, in fact, were still in control of scattered patches of countryside and some villages in the northern provinces of Chalatenango and Morazan. Sporadic fighting continued.

Having tasted blood and victory, the army's counterinsurgency forces were in no mood for mercy. In one mopping-up operation around Santa Ana, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting, government troops claimed to have killed a column of 97 leftists, including 21 women, two doctors, an engineer, and several employees from a local power company. As usual they took no prisoners.

President Duarte boasted that the guerrilla offensive had been contained "without the use of a single American bullet." Nevertheless, in response to the guerrilla offensive, the U.S. discarded earlier misgivings and rushed to El Salvador's assistance with $10 million in military aid. By way of justification, U.S. diplomats argued that the increasing flow of sophisticated weaponry to the leftists from foreign sources indicated that the antigovernment forces had, in the words of U.S. Ambassador Robert White, "upped the ante." The envoy pointed the finger mostly at Nicaragua, not only as a transit point for arms, but also as the possible base from which a bizarre seaborne "invasion" had supposedly been launched during the offensive against the eastern coast of El Salvador.

The U.S. had earlier suspended all military aid to El Salvador pending the outcome of an investigation by a Salvadoran commission into the murders of four American missionaries last month. Despite the lack of evidence that any investigation was even going forward, Washington moved swiftly to resume $5 million in nonlethal matériel—jeeps, trucks and transport helicopters, with U.S. technicians to maintain them.