Salvadoran Standoff

When President Jose Napoleon Duarte left El Salvador last week to enter Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, he left behind a nation still racked by deep political and economic problems.

Duarte had been the best hope for the Reagan Administration’s goal of holding off a serious leftist insurgency in El Salvador while it nurtured a legitimate civilian government to replace the repressive military regimes that had controlled the country for 50 years. For a time after Duarte was elected in 1984, it seemed that the strategy might work. The guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, although not defeated, had at least been fought to a stalemate by the Salvadoran security forces. The nation’s economy had seemed to stablize. But both achievements required massive infusions of U.S. aid--more than $1 million per day. And Congress was willing to give that kind of help to El Salvador mainly because of its respect for Duarte, a Christian Democrat who had been educated in the United States.

After surgery on Tuesday, during which doctors discovered cancerous tissue in both his stomach and liver, Duarte was given six months to live. Now Congress must begin to pay closer attention to troubling trends in El Salvador that call the White House’s strategy there into question.

Duarte’s Christian Democratic party is in disarray. It was defeated by the right-wing ARENA party in legislative elections earlier this year, and has split into two factions backing rival candidates for the presidential election next year. Duarte had failed to stop the fighting; with him gone, analysts think it likely that an ARENA candidate could be El Salvador’s next president. The right-wing party has tried to moderate its image, but it remains the party of the nation’s wealthy elite--the people who, along with the old military class, helped touch off the civil war by repressing efforts to bring about peaceful social change.

Militarily, the war remains a standoff after almost nine years. The military continues to pursue the guerrillas, sometimes inflicting heavy losses and sometimes suffering heavy casualties in return. The most frightening indication of the far right’s frustration with the battlefield stalemate is an increase in the number of killings that are blamed on death squads. The Roman Catholic Church’s human-rights office reports three times as many death-squad killings in the first four months of this year as in the same period last year. Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas warned in a recent sermon that El Salvador is returning “to the law of the jungle.”

El Salvador’s economy remains viable only because of U.S. aid. The guerrillas continue to sabotage highways and the electric system. Recently the government has been forced to cut electric power in the capital for up to five hours a day as a conservation measure, causing losses for many private businesses. Inflation remains a problem for wage earners and consumers.

For all his personal charm and political skills, Duarte was having an increasingly hard time governing. No one expects Vice President Rodolfo Castillo Claramount, an unimpressive former Christian Democratic party bureaucrat, to have any more luck in resolving matters before the next presidential election.

The Reagan Administration’s Central American policy is falling apart from Honduras to Panama. But the Reagan White House seems to be no more inclined than it has ever been to pursue the most reasonable course for resolving the Salvadoran crisis: peace talks between the government and the guerrillas’ civilian arm, the Democratic Revolutionary Front, leading toward a cease-fire and then a power-sharing arrangement that would persuade the left that it can fight for change more effectively through peaceful means than it can in the mountains. Until that point of political consensus is reached in El Salvador, the prognosis for that poor, bloodied country will be no more hopeful than it was for Duarte on Tuesday.