NEWS ANALYSIS : Salvador Rebel Peace Plan Crafted to Win U.S. Favor

Although El Salvador’s leftist guerrillas sat down to talk peace with the right-wing government of President Alfredo Cristiani this week, their words really were aimed at their other long-time adversary--Washington.

The rebel peace proposal, which calls for sweeping political reforms in exchange for laying down their arms, was crafted for consumption by the Bush Administration: It was short on rhetoric and emphasized issues that already are a part of U.S. policy, such as judicial reform.

Dressed like senators and appealing directly to the U.S. Congress, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front commanders were the picture of conciliation.

“(We) aspire to a Christmas and New Year with peace in our country,” commander Schafik Jorge Handal said Thursday. “We hope that 1990 is the year the war definitively ends and that our country enters a new, qualitatively better era of its history.”

For nearly a year, the rebels have been pursuing a two-track policy of stepping up military attacks to prove their strength at home while pushing internationally for a negotiated settlement in the 9 1/2-year war.

After President Bush’s election last November, guerrilla commander Joaquin Villalobos emerged from six years in the mountains of El Salvador to say that he believed the new Administration would be “more pragmatic” than the eight-year Reagan Administration and more willing to negotiate.

In the following months, the rebels increased economic sabotage and attacks on military installations and began a campaign of assassinations in San Salvador. At the same time, they offered to stop the war and participate in presidential elections if the March 19 vote were postponed.

The guerrillas dropped their demands for power-sharing and integration of the rebel and government armies--both points the U.S. government had opposed. But the Bush Administration was new and slow to respond, and then-President Jose Napoleon Duarte rejected the offer. Cristiani went on to win by a landslide and took office June 1, promising to seek a solution to the war.

While the American-educated Cristiani is well-received in Washington, the rebels believe that his Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena party, is problematic for the U.S. government.

In the past, U.S. officials have accused Arena’s most powerful leader, retired Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson, of masterminding “death squad” killings and plotting to assassinate a U.S. ambassador. Duarte, Washington’s old ally, repeatedly accused D’Aubuisson of having ordered the 1980 assassination of the archbishop of San Salvador, Msgr. Oscar A. Romero.

Many of the hard-line Arena members, meanwhile, view U.S. involvement as a thorn in their side. They believe the U.S. strategy of low-intensity conflict has failed and that by attaching human rights to economic aid, the U.S. has in fact hampered their war.

The guerrillas apparently see the unhappy alliance between Arena and the United States as providing them with a chance to pursue negotiations with a U.S. blessing.

“It’s not that we think there is a crisis in Washington,” said rebel spokesman Salvador Samayoa. “It’s that we think our proposal offers Washington a low-cost solution.”

On a global scale, the rebels are looking at the resolution of conflicts in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan and believe the trend could also lead to a reduction of U.S. involvement in El Salvador.

“Internationally, there is less space for war not only for us but for the government, too,” rebel commander Handal said. “You can see this in editorials in U.S. newspapers that ask how long the (U.S. government) is going to finance this war.”

The rebels have often expressed their belief that without American interference, they would have won the war a long time ago, either militarily or politically. The rebels’ peace proposals apparently are based in their conviction that if allowed to participate in fair and honest elections, they would win.

There is no empirical evidence that they are right. Rather, there is evidence to the contrary: The rebels’ civilian allies who returned from exile to run in the March presidential election won a scant 4% of the vote.

Exhausted From War

The rebels acknowledge that the country is exhausted from a war that has taken tens of thousands of lives. And while they clearly have not abandoned their vision of a socialist-style revolutionary state, their proposals indicate they believe the battles for that goal are increasingly political.

“In the past, the (rebels) have made proposals that were obviously meant to be rejected and they were,” said Sigfrido Munes Cruz, El Salvador’s ambassador to Mexico. “This one is different. There is a new, more realistic attitude.”

The rebel proposal calls for negotiating a cease-fire by Nov. 15 and a permanent demobilization of the rebel army by next February. In exchange, they are demanding a new attorney general, Supreme Court and National Assembly.

The plan would leave the Cristiani government intact, but it calls for reforms to the constitution and electoral laws and for advancing the 1991 municipal and legislative elections.

The key to the disarmament is the demand for a restructuring of the armed forces, including a dramatic reduction in the size of the 56,000-member military. They want the security forces consolidated into one police force under civilian control and security guarantees for the return of rebel combatants to civilian life.

At the three-day meeting, the government agreed to set up a permanent, monthly dialogue with the guerrillas to begin Oct. 15 in San Jose, Costa Rica.

The government team, led by Justice Minister Oscar Santamaria, refused to comment on the rebel proposal, saying officials want to evaluate it thoroughly first. Cristiani also has yet to respond.

But perhaps the most important pronouncement will come from Washington, which has spent more than $3 billion over the last decade to prevent a guerrilla victory.

The Bush Administration has not officially responded to the proposal, although the initial reaction has been as negative as that of the Salvadoran military. “It strikes me as not very impressive,” said a senior State Department official. “They’re supposed to be negotiating without preconditions, but when you boil it down, they want the entire government and constitution to be scrapped.”