REBELS TARGET COFFEE CROPS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504020011-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 11
• Publication Date: January 2, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST DA-r
eclassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504020011-2
i
ARTU 1.E APPEARED
ON __--
WASHINGTON POST
2 January 1985
Rebels Target Coffee Crops
By Robert J. McCartney
Washington Post Foreign Service
Bean
CHALCHUAPA, El Salvador- !
Tens of thousands of poor peasants
now are plodding through fields of
large green bushes in Central
America, carefully plucking the
small, fragile berries that contain'
the region's most valuable product:
coffee beans.
Coffee is known'as Central Amer-'. ica's "gold" because of the fortunes
it has created and because of the
beans' yellow color before roasting?,
The region's tropical climate., vol-,
canic soil and mountainous terrain
are ideal for growing coffee, which
flourishes in the changing temper-
atures of the slopes.
But these same mountains also
are home for guerrillas battling cen-
tral governments in two countries,
and the rebel forces have made the
coffee harvest one of their top tar-
gets. Both El Salvador's Marxist
insurgents and Nicaragua's anti-
Marxist ones repeatedly have
raided coffee farms, burned machin-
ery, and sought to frighten farm
owners into abandoning their land.
Attacks in coffee-growing re-
gions of the two countries are ex-
pected to cause millions of dollars of
damage and to be the focus of fight-
ing through the end of the harvest
in early March. Under the protec-
tion of well-armed regular troops,
however, the. bulk of the crop is
likely to be gathered in both coun-
tries. The governments also should
benefit from favorable weather that
has increased this year's potential
harvest by more than 25 percent
over the previous season.
The political distance separating
El lvador's Farabundo Marti Na-
tional Liberation Front and the Ni-
caraguan Democratic Force is re-
flected in their contrasting relation-
ships with the United States: Wash-,
ins non is pouring tens of millions of
dollars into efforts to defeat the
Salvadoran insurgency, while it
funded the Nicaraguan guerrill
Vital to Nicaragua, El Salvador
until May via the CIA. The Reagan
administration plans to ask Con-
gress this spring to resume funding
for the Nicaraguan .rebels.
But similar circumstances of eco-
nomics and geography have led
both insurgent forces to seek to
weaken their countries' respective
governments by striking at the na-
tions' main cash crop. Also, the reb-
els' mountain strongholds are much
closer to the coffee fields than, to
the sugar and cotton plantations in
the coastal lowlands where govern-
ment troops travel more easily.
The coffee harvest began in late
November, almost midway through
the dry season that Central Amer-
icans call summer. The dollars
earned from selling coffee to the
United States and Western Europe,
the two principal markets, are used
to import the manufactured prod-
ucts.
"This country has two months to
guarantee its foreign exchange for
the entire year," said Miguel Bar-
rios, a senior Nicaraguan govern-
ment agriculture official.
While firm figures are not avail-
able, projections indicate that Nic-
aragua could earn $200 million
from coffee exports this season,
while El Salvador could bring in
$250 million.
The biggest difference between
the two guerrilla forces' campaigns
against the coffee harvest appears
to be in their policies toward pick-
ers: the Salvadoran guerrillas seek
to push up wages by threatening to
attack farms where workers alleg-
edly are underpaid, while Nicara-
gua's insurgents try to frighten
pickers away from the fields and
thus reduce the harvest.
For the third year in a row, the
Salvadoran guerrillas' clandestine
Radio Venceremos has threatened
to raid farms where defined "min-
imum" wages and working condi-
tions are not met. It said that pick-
ers must receive $1.33 for each can
or tray of beans; an average picker
can fill six or seven cans in a day.
Since most farms pay only about
$1 for a can or tray, the guerrillas
have an excuse to attack virtually
any farm that they wish: They are
not strong enough militarily to en-
force their demands on a large
scale, however, and the "wage ta-
ble" appears to be primarily a prop-
aganda tool.
Pickers in Nicaragua are paid
about 75 cents per tray. The-rate
was doubled to that level last year
in an effort to attract more work-
ers.
The Nicaraguan guerrillas, seek-
ing to aggravate the shortage of
pickers, ambushes trucks carrying
government employes , or progov-
ernment activists to the fields after'
easily overwhelming the handful of
militia guarding the vehicles. ,
. Neither guerrilla group publicly
favors killing civilians in their cam-.
paigns against the coffee harvest,
but in both countries defenseless
persons have been victims. Salva-
doran guerrillas killed four young
men on Nov. 23, when the youths
stumbled across a group of rebels
on their way to raid a large coffee
processing mill in this town 36
miles northwest of San Salvador.
Nine days earlier, the Nicaraguan
insurgents had killed two infants,
aged 5 months and 13 months, in an
attack on a state-owned coffee farm
in the village of La Sorpresa in
northern Jinotega province.
The Nicaraguan insurgents, in
particular, appear to have a policy
of killing government officials or
sympathizers regardless of whether
they are armed. This is interpreted
in Nicaragua as being in line with
recommendations of a CIA-written
manual that called for guerrillas to
neutralize" government mili
tants-and that thereby triggered
an extended debate in Washington.
On Dec. 13, rebels killed three
Nicaraguan government agriculture
officials, one education official and
five militiamen in an ambush .of a
truck sent to check the coffee har-
vest in northern Jinotega province.
The truck had driven several miles
into an area where the guerrillas
were known to be strong, and some
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504020011-2
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504020011-2
,bservers questioned why the of-
.icials had traveled there without a
sizable Army escort.
"There aren't enough troops to
send with every truck," said Ramon
Blandon, the local head of propagan-
da for the Sandinista government.
Officials apparently would rather
risk becoming "martyrs for the rev-
olution" than acknowledge that the
insurgents dominate any area of the
country.
In the Salvadoran rebels' raid in
this western town, guerrillas used
homemade explosives and caused
about $500,000 worth of damage to
equipment at the large, prosperous
Tazumal coffee mill. But the dam-
age was repaired in two weeks and
the mill resumed normal opera-
tions, employes said. Moreover, the
guerrillas - spurred widespread re- i
sentment among residents by kill-
ing the four youths, apparently to
prevent them from sounding an
alarm.
"We cannot forget this. We can-
not erase this from our memory,"
said Esperanza Gonzalez, 55, moth-
er of three of the youths killed by
the guerrillas. Her sons, aged 18 to
25, were returning from the movies
when they were killed by the reb-
els, she said. Radio Venceremos,
which boasted that the raid had shut
down the Tazumal mill completely,
claimed that the four persons killed
were Salvadoran Army troops.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504020011-2