Nightmare in El Salvador

Like a recurring nightmare, the violence in El Salvador never seems to end. Recent year-end statistics confirmed what many analysts had suspected: After declining for a few years, the pace of the killing in El Salvador’s civil war is again accelerating.

Since the conflict began in 1979, battlefield casualties have not been the only deaths in El Salvador; thousands of civilians have also been slain. This month officials in the legal education office of El Salvador’s Roman Catholic Church, one of the few reliable sources of information in a highly polarized society, reported that the killing of civilians by both government forces and leftist rebels increased in 1988. Forty deaths were blamed on the guerrillas--an increase of 43% over 1987. There were 45 deaths from land mines, which are used primarily by rebel forces--an increase of 72%. Eighty-three killings were attributed to government security forces--an increase of 28% over last year. And 51 persons were killed by death squads, the shadowy killers directed by the Salvadoran right--an upsurge of 135%.

In the Reagan Administration’s simplistic analysis, the war in El Salvador was blamed on outside intervention by surrogates of the Soviet Union in Cuba or Nicaragua. But El Salvador’s bloodshed has been impelled by a terrible dynamic all its own. And while there are links between the Salvadoran guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and their ideological kin in Havana and Managua, the FMLN forces have proved that they are capable of waging their own war quite effectively without help from Fidel Castro or the Sandinistas.

The same claim cannot be made by the Salvadoran security forces. Despite the almost $3 billion in U.S. aid that the Salvadoran government has received since 1980, military analysts still question the battlefield effectiveness of the Salvadoran army. Now political analysts are starting to question the viability of the democratic political system that the United States has been trying to help establish in El Salvador.

For the last five years El Salvador’s tenuous democracy has been blessed with a highly visible and energetic leader in President Jose Napoleon Duarte. But once it was revealed that he is suffering from an incurable cancer, the careful coalition built around Duarte began to crumble. While he is fighting cancer with the dogged courage that has marked his entire political life, it is only a matter of time before Duarte is gone.

When that happens, there is no other politician in El Salvador to whom the United States can look for the kind of leadership that Duarte provided. There is a possibility that deep divisions in Duarte’s centrist Christian Democratic party could result in the next president being a member of the ARENA party--the political base for El Salvador’s most regressive, and potentially repressive, rightists. President-elect George Bush, whom President Reagan sent to El Salvador in 1983 specifically to warn the Salvadoran right that it must control the death squads or risk losing U.S. support, must realize how difficult it will be to persuade Congress to keep pouring aid into a country controlled by men suspected of involvement with renewed death-squad activity.

Clearly the incoming American Administration must reassess its policy toward El Salvador, giving up Reagan’s wish-dream that the insurgency can somehow be defeated. A more realistic, if difficult, option would be to revive the stalled peace talks between the government and the rebels’ political representatives, with the aim of trying to reach first a cease-fire and then a power-sharing arrangement. Power-sharing is a concept that is an anathema to extremists of both the left and the right in El Salvador. But, given the exhaustion that most Salvadorans feel with a civil war that has claimed 70,000 lives since 1979, it may be the way out of the stalemate. Power-sharing would reflect the harsh reality of El Salvador’s polarized politics, but it would carry that nation’s deep divisions off the battlefield and into the conference room.

If there is any hope in El Salvador, perhaps it is that the level of violence there has not returned to that of 1980, when the death squads alone claimed hundreds of victims. Still, the increase in political violence must serve as a warning to the incoming Bush Administration--a warning that the civil war in El Salvador could continue long after other crises in Central America are resolved.