Former Salvadoran Foes Share Doubts on War

Chica Argueta, who maintains the pencil-thin mustache he wore as a young rebel, once trudged through a shallow stream to get there, so that he wouldn't leave footprints that would give away the location of the guerrillas' Radio Venceremos -- Radio We Will Be Victorious. Now he'll take anyone there for a few dollars.

In a honeyed voice that once crooned revolutionary anthems, Chica Argueta, now 46, said his guided visits are part of an effort to build a tourist industry on the relics of El Salvador's civil war -- one of the first such endeavors in Central America. But something else is at work. He is trying to secure his guerrilla movement's place in history.

Even though some factions of the coalition of guerrilla armies that fought in El Salvador's civil war were Marxist, he said, ideology had nothing to do with his decision to take up arms and leave the farm where his father earned only a few colones for backbreaking work. Nor did ideology play a role in motivating his friends in the People's Revolutionary Army -- one of five guerrilla factions during the war -- that he served with in the northern Morazan region, he said. He remembers fighting "for a piece of land, for the chance that my children might someday get to go to the university."

The Reagan administration, fearing a communist uprising, built up El Salvador's military with weapons, training and hundreds of advisers to serve as a surrogate force against what it described as encroaching Soviet and Cuban influence in Central America. To this day, Chica Argueta seethes when he recalls the sight of U.S. planes, knowing that they were there to fight a communist threat that he believes was overblown.

The war's degeneration into senseless malice was seared into Chica Argueta's mind in a tiny mountain town called El Mozote. In December 1981, a U.S.-trained battalion of government troops tortured and executed about 500 villagers there; the names of dozens of victims -- many under the age of 2 -- are now etched on the wall of the rebuilt church.

Chica Argueta and his fellow guerrillas arrived in El Mozote several days after the massacre and, fearing a return of the soldiers, hurriedly buried the dead beneath a thin layer of adobe bricks. Salgada arrived months later, after rains had unearthed the corpses, and piled skulls into sacks as souvenirs. He had "lost his love of humanity," he recalled, but a kernel of doubt was forming. He was conflicted, as he is today.

Salgada kept the skulls for years. They were reminders of how deeply he had sunk into depravity, yet somehow they also represented his awakening, he said. Witnessing the aftermath of what his colleagues did in El Mozote and reflecting on those skulls changed his mind about how the war was being fought. He might still have the skulls, he said, if not for the new family and the new life he has forged.

"Could you imagine the nightmares my children would have if I kept them in the house?" he said.

Salgada's mentor, the vaunted Col. Domingo Monterrosa, ordered the attack in El Mozote, which Salgada said he now considers "a genocide." Yet Salgada displays a huge painting of himself and Monterrosa -- who was killed during the war -- in the foyer of San Miguel City Hall. Perhaps it will make people ask questions about the war, Salgada said, though he's sure "people hate me" for displaying it.

If Monterrosa had lived, Salgada said, he should have been prosecuted for "war crimes like a Hitler." But he tempered his historical indictment, saying that "those were different times."

The scars of what he and his compatriots did, of the horrors of their brand of war, linger. Just two years ago, on a bridge in San Miguel, Salgada encountered a former government soldier who appeared to believe the war was still underway. He saluted Salgada and told him he had secured the bridge so that rebels couldn't cross, even though the war had been over for more than a decade.

"These are old wounds," Salgada said. "These anniversaries just open them wider."