COLOMONCAGUA, Honduras — After nine years, Jose Hernandez and other Salvadoran refugees say they have had enough.

Enough of fences, military guards and the stifling confines of a camp situated alongside this hamlet near the El Salvadoran border. Enough of what they view as fruitless expectation of improvements in the land of their birth, split by bloody civil war for a decade. Enough of allegations that they are actively collaborating with the insurgents there.

"Here, there is constant suffering," said the lanky Hernandez, 62, who cares for a communal herd of goats penned atop a craggy plateau amid the refugee camp here. "We have food, but we're like birds in a cage. Even a cage of gold is still a cage. . . . If we're going to die, we'd rather die in our own land, with honor."

At a time when warfare and terror have gripped their native land, the more than 7,000 Salvadoran refugees crammed here have made their decision: They want to go home. Thousands of their fellow citizens may be seeking to flee the conflict, as more than 1 million--perhaps a fifth of the entire population--have already done in the last 10 years of violence. But those encamped here seek to go back.

The renewed warfare of recent weeks, however, has interrupted their planned return after what has been almost a decade in exile.

The refugees here were scheduled to be repatriated in November, a prospect that prompted them to disassemble their extensive infrastructure--including wood-frame homes, warehouses, schools, kitchens and several dozen workshops producing everything from clothing to shoes to cooking ware to hammocks.

They had planned to take it all back with them to rural El Salvador, where they have Utopian plans to create a "new society" complete with communal factories and fields, along with hexagonal-shaped model villages boasting free clinics, day-care centers and schools.

But it was not to be. A delicate agreement worked out between the governments of El Salvador and Honduras and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees--which runs this and other refugee camps--fell apart after the guerrilla offensive broke out in El Salvador more than a month ago.

Authorities in San Salvador, expressing suspicions about links between the camps and the guerrillas, suspended a long-planned repatriation, leaving the refugees in a predicament they describe as critical.