Word: morazã
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During half a decade of civil war, no part of El Salvador has been more fiercely contested than rugged and isolated northern Moraz??n province. The area is now a stronghold for antigovernment rebels, but they won it at a high cost. Years of fighting have devastated once thriving villages. Electrical lines hang limply from wooden poles, and telephone service is just a memory. Correspondent Ricardo Chavira returned last week from a rare tour of the area with officials of the People's Revolutionary Army (E.R.P.), the most powerful faction within the five-member Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N...
...guerrillas have carefully nurtured the repopulation of northern Moraz??n by restoring some basic services that collapsed when the government abandoned the area to the rebels. There is still no electricity or telegraph service. Buses have not been seen for five years, and consumer goods are scarce. But the rebels, through civilian "directorates" that now run the towns, have reopened schools, many of which had not conducted classes for four years. While most of the new teachers are recruited and paid by the directorates, four in Perquín are government employees. One of them, Esperanza Varela de Guevara, 47, moved...
Like people who live under military occupation anywhere, those whom visitors can talk to in northern Moraz??n express views that range from overt cooperation with the rebels to resigned tolerance. One center of support is the area around La Joya, where more than 900 residents were killed in late 1981 in a major assault by government troops. Villagers now flee at every approach of the military, whose last attack they say came on Christmas morning...
Despite the air raids, peasants today are safer from the ravages of large-scale fighting than they have been for years. The army's effective aerial counterinsurgency program has forced the rebels, in Moraz??n and elsewhere, to regroup into small units of ten to 15 fighters. The guerrillas have made few territorial gains in the past three years; they control perhaps 10% of tiny El Salvador's territory and 70,000 of its 5.4 million people. But they are still capable of major destruction, as they proved last week when the E.R.P. launched a midnight strike on Juayúa...
Insurgent leaders say that with the breakdown of peace talks a year ago, they are even more intent on waging a prolonged conflict designed to destabilize the Duarte government and sap military morale. Their tactics, as detailed by a top E.R.P. official in Moraz??n, will be as blunt and brutal as ever: urban warfare, including kidnapings like that last fall of Duarte's daughter Inés; economic sabotage, like blowing up power stations; and the outright murder of U.S. advisers and officials. "In the long run, killing Yanquis is a form of undermining Reagan's policies," declared the rebel...