The general offensive in January demonstrated the huge qualitative and quantitative growth of the revolutionary forces. The balance of forces has changed in favour of the people. Today it is accepted that there is a situation of military stalemate in El Salvador, there being such a massive difference in the arms that the enemy possesses and those that we have. This stalemate illustrates clearly that the popular forces are growing without interruption, while the enemy is collapsing, going down in a deep economic, political and military deterioration.
We are fighting in 13 of the 14 departments of El Salvador. We are intensifying the war, extending our territorial control and our logistic and communications corridors. We are consolidating the popular power and the arming of the masses. There was a substantial growth in every aspect from January to July.
As well as this, it is significant that the present North American model of direct intervention in El Salvador is not working. Since June the special Quick Response Unit, trained by the North Americans, has been in combat. This unit has operated in three areas so far and failed completely in all of them. And this was the force on which the imperialists were relying so as not to have to use their own forces! This fact marks a new political and military turning point. The USA already knows that its model of counter-insurgency is exhausted. It knows that it must change the nature of its intervention because the Salvadorean army cannot efficiently absorb, in the short term, more military aid. More military aid is being negotiated urgently but there is a problem about who is going to use it — the government troops grow increasingly demoralised every day because they aren't winning the war.
On the other hand, our comrades in Guatemala are intensifying their revolutionary organisation. This complicates the regional picture for imperialism. The two sides are clearly drawn: on the one hand, the possibility that the revolutionary movement takes power; on the other, a direct North American intervention. There has to be a resolution, and the moment of resolution is coming.
That is why I believe that the balance of forces on a national level, and the balance of forces on a Central American and international level, is favourable to the revolutionary movement. But this fact has its counterside and that is the increasing possibility of imperialist intervention.
We know that this will have enormous political and diplomatic costs for them. In particular, it will have enormous military costs for the USA. They can get into El Salvador but to get out will be more difficult. Any analysis of the military situation shows that intervention in Central America — just to consider only Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua — would mean something like half a million troops. In El Salvador alone they would have to send something like 30,000 air-transported troops. Because of the type of operation it is obvious that in the first week of combat at least a quarter of them will die. This will mean that they will have to replace and increase the number of troops. This will be an enormous political problem for the USA. Now, to intervene in El Salvador is to regionalise the conflict.
We have very beautiful mountains on the border with Honduras, we are not going to be removed from there within 30 years. There is all the Guatemalan jungle; the Nicaraguan territory is extensive and the Nicaraguans are ready, organised into militias. If the North Americans intervene and try to do what they did in Vietnam, they will have the same fate as they found in Vietnam.
To talk about the balance of forces we have to understand two things: that this process is dynamic; and that it is a revolutionary popular war and not a conventional war. Since 1970, when the first political and military revolutionary organisation was created in El Salvador, the process has been one of constant evolution in favour of the people in every way. The fact that we started with a .22 rifle and now have an army shows this process.
The popular war is a dynamic process and the people especially the peasants, play a very important role in providing arms. The production of home-made armaments is very significant. We have mined whole areas with mines made in our own workshops, within the country. On the other hand, all the weapons that the North Americans provide to the army follows an economic law called 'the law of diminishing returns'. They will ask for more and more arms, which will be useful to them to the extent that more equipment arrives, but there will come a point at which they won't be able to use it properly.
Let us look at what the absorption capacity of the war means. At a given time, these arms that are given to the army start being progressively acquired by the people, recovered during combat. We have recovered artillery pieces, mortars, grenade launchers, and the quantities taken away are very high.
I think that the solidarity tasks are those of material support, of the stopping, by all possible means, of imperialist intervention and of support to the refugee civilian population. These tasks that must be taken up in a combative way. It is a priority task to stop the intervention. But we also need material solidarity — aid in food, medicaments, money where possible and according to each people and each revolutionary organisation.
SALVADOR SAMAYOA is a representative of the FPL (another of the revolutionary organisations in the FMLN) on the Diplomatic-Political Commission of the FMLN-FDR. The article is reprinted from the January 1982 issue of Combate (Sweden).