Salvador’s Grim Prospects

The inauguration of El Salvador’s President Alfredo Cristiani was a landmark in the history of that country. For the first time, a democratically elected civilian peacefully handed power to another democratically elected civilian, no small accomplishment in a nation controlled for 140 years by a small landed oligarchy and a corrupt military.

That said, however, there is little else positive, or even very hopeful, about El Salvador these days. For Cristiani’s ascension to the presidency marks the final step in a campaign by the most radical elements of the Salvadoran right wing, a notorious faction with a sordid history of violence, to take control of a Salvadoran government that is already under siege from a fierce and persistent Marxist insurgency. Cristiani’s Nationalist Republican Alliance, best known by its Spanish-language acronym Arena, controlled El Salvador’s courts and its legislature before his inauguration. Now Arena’s grasp of power is total.

That bodes trouble for the United States. For the past 10 years U.S. policy-makers and diplomats have promoted moderate Salvadoran politicians such as former President Jose Napoleon Duarte as alternatives to the extremists of right and left. For a while that strategy worked. Duarte helped persuade Congress to make El Salvador the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the Western Hemisphere. But with Duarte out of office and likely to die of cancer soon, there seem to be no moderate alternatives in El Salvador. That puts the Administration in the unenviable position of sending about $1.5 million a day to a government run by men described by some U.S. officials as neo-Nazis.

Cristiani, a businessman who was not among the original leaders of Arena when the party was founded several years ago, insists that he represents a new breed of more moderate Arena leaders. But the old hands lurk in the background, including Roberto D’Aubuisson, the alleged godfather of El Salvador’s death squads, and Hector Antonio Regalado, whom Duarte accused of assassinating Archbishop Oscar Romero several years ago. If recent history is any guide, Cristiani cannot control the Arena thugs. He was forced to appoint associates of D’Aubuisson to important security positions in the government. And when he resisted pressure to appoint a hard-line officer as his defense minister, Cristiani faced a near-revolt in the Salvadoran military.

It is hard to say which faction in El Salvador will pose the greater headache for the United States in the coming years--its “enemies” the rebels or its “friends” in the government. Guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front control a third of the country and have an unnerving capacity to kill and wound security forces and sabotage the national economy. The government now represents reactionary civilians who refer to land reform as “U.S.-imposed socialism” and hard-line military officers who want to replace the low-intensity warfare urged on them by U.S. advisers with all-out war on the guerrillas.

With more than 60,000 people dead and 1 million refugees--this in a nation of only 5 million people--El Salvador has had more than enough of war. But the only alternative to either high-intensity or low-intensity conflict is a revival of peace talks begun by Duarte that stalled when the severity of his illness became known. In almost 10 years of fighting, neither side has come close to defeating the other. Under the circumstances, it is amazing that hard-liners on both sides think victory is possible. But if Arena and the Salvadoran military want to pursue a scorched-earth policy to rout the FMLN, Washington should make it clear that U.S. taxpayers won’t pay the bill.

Rather, this county must use its leverage to downplay the war talk and push for a renewal of the dialogue with the FMLN. Peace talks will not be easy between two sides that have been at war so long,but there are short-term goals that could be a starting point--specifically, plans to “humanize” the war by reducing the level of fighting in areas where innocent people are affected, and beyond that the details of a possible cease-fire. Ultimately, any peace talks must include a power-sharing arrangement between the various political factions, a step hard-liners on both sides have resisted, but one that would take the resolution of the divisions within Salvadoran society off the battlefield and put it on the conference table.