There’s Hope for Peace Talks . . .

Maybe this time they’ll give peace a chance in El Salvador.

Like exhausted boxers, the warring sides in that nation’s decade-long civil war are warily shuffling toward each other again, exploring the possibility of peace talks. Both sides recall that when this happened last fall, the talks collapsed and were followed by some of the fiercest fighting in years. Things haven’t gotten much better in El Salvador since then, but conditions elsewhere in Central America have changed dramatically. That’s reason to hope that now the talks can get somewhere.

This week the rightist government of President Alfredo Cristiani made its first substantive counterproposal to several peace offers made by the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. Government spokesmen said they would no longer insist that the FMLN halt all military actions before peace talks resume. A few days earlier, the FMLN made its own conciliatory gesture, offering to limit its attacks to military targets. Both are significant breakthroughs in a war that has claimed 70,000 victims, most of them civilians.

Both government and rebel spokesmen have also confirmed that they are in regular contact with United Nations diplomats who are trying to arrange negotiations to be mediated by U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar.

Clearly, outside events have prodded the two opponents, who can’t defeat each other on the battlefield, to think about negotiations again. The recent election loss of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government deprived the FMLN of its principal ally. But the end of the Sandinista threat also deprives the Salvadoran right, almost irrationally anti-Communist, of a bogeyman. That bogeyman was the reason the United States has given billions of dollars in aid to the Salvadoran government. Now, with foreign interests put aside, perhaps the left and right in El Salvador can finally sit across from each other and see who they really are: two faces of one small but deeply divided nation.