ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996 TAG: 9603220014
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR
SOURCE: JOSEPH B. FRAZIER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DEATH SQUADS ARE OUT, street gangs are in. Democracy has a toehold, poverty is deeply imbedded. Since a 1992 peace accord ended 12 years of civil war, much has changed in El Salvador. Former combatants are now merely political adversaries. But many problems persist.
Gerson Martinez, a former guerrilla chief, and Rene Figueroa, a comfortable member of the Salvadoran establishment, might have shot each other a few years ago.
And they would have been praised by their friends for doing it.
Today, they lead their respective parties in congress. While sharp differences and social problems remain, the rancor that split this Central American nation is softening as the country rebuilds from war.
With the Cold War over, the United States, which pumped more than $4 billion into the country in the 1980s, no longer smothers it with attention but still spends millions to unscramble the egg that was El Salvador.
After a 1992 peace accord ended 12 years of war that claimed 75,000 lives, former combatants are finding they can at least tolerate each other.
The main problems of this Massachusetts-size country aren't lingering hatreds but youth gangs, soaring crime and stubborn poverty.
Figueroa, head of the conservative ARENA faction in congress, said he has a good working relationship in the legislature with the former rebels, a relationship that began in 1994.
``We will not be enemies again, only political adversaries,'' he said.
Martinez feels likewise.
``I believe we are working toward a congress that can function without too much emotional baggage,'' said Martinez, congressional leader of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.
The FMLN, as it is known, fought a series of U.S-backed Salvadoran governments and now is a legal party.
The human-rights outrages that smudged the country's image in the 1980s and helped fuel the war are virtually gone. Now there is at least a veneer of economic recovery, especially in the capital.
The name ``El Salvador'' defined terror in the 1980s, when rightist death squads ran unchecked, slaughtering suspected leftists at will. At one point political murders averaged about 1,000 a month.
``We can say that the aspect of violence and human-rights abuses in a systematic form has changed,'' said Victoria Marina de Aviles, the government human-rights prosecutor, a post created by the peace accords.
``It continues but it is no longer politically inspired, and violations are no longer protected by impunity.
``We fight as always the elitist position that to work for human rights is to work for delinquency and for the sectors of the left.''
The United Nations reported in January that twice as many complaints were filed with her office in 1995 as in 1994 and said that was ``testimony to Salvadorans' increased confidence in this institution.''
Most complaints involve police brutality or legal procedures. De Aviles says loss of social and economic rights now are a greater concern in a poor nation.
The poor are as poor - poorer say some - as they were before the war.
Sixty percent of the nation lives in poverty. The capital remains crowded with thousands of people who fled here to avoid the war in the countryside, and they continue to live wherever and however they can.
``Maras,'' or gangs of poor youth, many inspired by their Los Angeles counterparts, and nurtured by a shattered society rule the streets in some areas. Their estimated 10,000 members are blamed by the government for everything from petty crime to murder and trafficking in guns and drugs.
There were 7,877 murders in the country of 5 million last year, 21 a day. Violent attacks put 15,000 people in the hospital last year, double the number from 1994.
``The government doesn't want to face the fact that they are the ones making the country go to hell,'' countered one gang member who didn't give his name. ``They think that it is all imported. It's not. Kids have always been rebellious.''
Maybe.
But the gangs are a postwar phenomenon unseen when the country was, for practical purposes, under the heel of the military in the 1980s.
The largest gang, the Mara Salvatrucha, with an estimated 4,000 members, was founded around 1970 in Los Angeles.
Emigration soared during the war, providing a flood of potential new members, many of whom were arrested and deported back to El Salvador.
``Many Salvadorans went to the United States to flee violence and have had kids who come back. The kids feel unprotected, without the warmth of family, and they find it in the gangs,'' said the FMLN's Martinez.
``They have lost faith in society,'' he added. ``For them El Salvador is a country of no hope and no jobs.''
Nonetheless, he said, they are the best-organized groups in the country. ``No political party here has their capacity.''
Coincidentally or not, the rap song ``Gangster's Paradise'' tops the charts here.
On the streets, gang members are identifiable by their slouch, their slang and by the tattoos that forge their ties and isolate them from the rest of society.
One gang member, Demonio, or Demon, winced in pain as he recovered in a San Salvador hospital from a beating by another gang member in a fight over a girlfriend. His stomach was tattooed with the Mara Salvatrucha name.
``I messed up with all these tags,'' said Demonio, using the slang for tattoos. ``Nobody gives you a job.''
Life can be hard and short-lived on the streets.
Last year Salvatrucha leader Jose Mauricio Solano Menjivar, 23, known as ``El Ozzy,'' was jailed with members of a rival gang. In 40 minutes he was dead.
Public Security Minister Hugo Barrera has ordered formation of a specially trained 300-member police unit to handle juvenile crimes.
Through it all, attempts to mend the causes of the war plod on.
The peace accords signed in January 1992 were to have been fulfilled last Oct. 31. The United Nations mandate to oversee the peace agreement runs out April 30 but may be extended.
FMLN leader Salvador Sanchez recently urged the United Nations mission to remain, saying ``there have been no advances'' toward meeting the goals of the U.N.-brokered accords.
Not true. While some aspects of the accords are high-centered on technicalities, there has been real progress in other areas.
About 89 percent of the eligible applicants for land have received it under a land-redistribution program.
Plots of land, mostly about five acres, were promised to combatants on both sides who wanted them and also to squatters who had moved onto abandoned land and farmed it during the war.
Of 35,015 people scheduled to get land, 31,218 had received it by late February. Registration of titles, however, lags far behind.
The government now is having trouble finding land to buy for the program and is advertising on the radio urging landholders to sell.
The United States, which was putting $400 million a year into El Salvador in 1985, donated $72 million in 1995, most of it to buy land to be distributed to the former guerrillas it paid billions trying to defeat.
Other American aid goes to small rural infrastructure projects.
``A lot of good things were budgeted to start from 1992 to 1997,'' said Kenneth Ellis, the deputy director of the U.S. Agency for International Development program in El Salvador, which administers American assistance.
``A lot needs to be continued among the rural poor. The conflictive zones of the 1980s hold a high percentage of the poor in the country.''
He said American aid is focusing on community development and other work at the municipal level where there is less partisan difference ``and more interest in solving the problems of the communities.''
The oppressive security forces such as the National Guard and the Treasury Police have been replaced by a civilian national police force made up of former combatants of both sides.
However, the United Nations reported in October that the police are falling short of the mark even though their number substantially surpasses the target in the peace accords.
``It has continued to appear insufficient to counter the growing tides of crime affecting the country,'' the report said.
The army and various police agencies, which totaled about 60,000 officers during the war, now number about 32,000.
Today the civilian police spend a lot of time unscrambling choking traffic jams when the signals black out, which they do almost daily. In 1980, even the meter maids packed submachine guns.
``There is political will on behalf of the government to comply with all the provisions, especially land redistribution,'' said Rogelio Vigil, who heads the United Nations Mission in El Salvador.
``The work is not done but in general the mission is being accomplished.''
He said squabbles over laws guaranteeing due process of law, the presumption of innocence, banning extrajudicial confessions as evidence, the right to legal defense and other provisions are holding up legislative and judicial reform.
Work continues on areas such as the penal code, the military justice system and laws to control organized crime.
Work continues on the street, too, for those lucky enough to have it.
A recent newspaper poll showed 45 percent of the adults looking for work not finding any. Most had been looking for more than a year.
Last year 15,000 government employees were fired as a cost-cutting measure, setting off a series of demonstrations that killed one man and injured others.
ARENA faction leader Figueroa, however, contends ``things are better.''
``They're not what we would like but there has been something,'' he said. ``Affiliations in the social security program are on the rise and that tells us that more jobs are being developed.
``We are trying to lessen the gap between rich and poor, and it exists, we can't deny that.''
``The problem is not economic growth, the economy is growing,'' Martinez noted. ``But the growth is not being redistributed.''
Many of the poorest live in cardboard shacks around the capital in gulches lined with the homes of the wealthy.
A poor family earns less than 1,500 colons, about $170 a month. Most of the shiny new fast-food franchises and boutiques that popped up with the return of the refugees are out of reach of most Salvadorans.
Some claim the new businesses opened with money the refugees made. Others contend most returned as poor as when they fled. There are whispers of money laundering.
``You really need 2,500 colons [$287] a month just to get by,'' said Jose Dimas Medino, a shoe repairman in a dingy shop in the capital's working-class district of Zacamil.
``People like us are lucky to see 300 colons a week, even if we work nights. Costs are high and nobody really has enough. We have peace, but we are `los caidos','' Spanish for the fallen ones.
LENGTH: Long : 197 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. A National Civil Police agent detains a gangby CNBmember in Apopa, an impoverished suburb of San Salvador. Police have
their hands full combating escalating crime, which some say should
be dealt with harshly while respecting human rights. 2. Farabundo
Marti National Liberation party leader Gerson Martinez believes "we
are working toward a congress that can function without too much
emotional baggage. color.