Salvador’s Salvation: Has It Finally Arrived? : Washington must do all it can to make accord enduring

The tentative peace agreement to end the civil war in El Salvador, signed this week at the United Nations, is just that--very, very tentative.

A lot of hard negotiating still lies ahead before almost 12 years of ferocious warfare will be officially over. Still, the follow-up negotiations are well worth pursuing, and the United States must be in the forefront of the effort--because peace in El Salvador is just as important to this country as it is to the long-suffering Salvadoran people.

THE AGREEMENT: Signed in New York by El Salvador’s rightist President Alfredo Cristiani and the five leftist guerrilla groups fighting to overthrow his government, it took almost 18 months to achieve. The pivotal issue was what would become of 5,000 to 7,000 rebel soldiers who have fought the 55,000-man Salvadoran army to a stalemate. Cristiani wanted the rebels to lay down their arms in exchange for a promise of safety. Rebel leaders wanted their fighters incorporated into what is already Central America’s biggest army. Their compromise would reduce the size of the army, have the rebels join a new national police force and allow rebel families to keep land occupied during the war. The devil, as the cliche goes, will be in the details.

Washington remains a key actor in the Salvadoran drama because it’s the paymaster that helped a nearly bankrupt government keep an army in the field. Three successive U.S. administrations have poured about $1 billion in military aid into El Salvador since 1979. To date, Washington has precious little to show for that money beyond having propped up a series of weak civilian governments. The battlefield situation is deadlocked, and our military allies continue to embarrass us periodically by engaging in some truly egregious human rights violations, the murder of priests and nuns being only the most widely publicized.

THE BENEFITS: The best thing the United States will get from a Salvadoran peace accord is a chance to finally get out of a horrid marriage of convenience with a military notorious for brutality and corruption even after a decade of efforts by U.S. military trainers to reform it. Of course, the Salvadoran armed forces had been the brutal henchmen of a corrupt oligarchy for half a century before U.S. trainers arrived. So it would have been nothing short of miraculous for a handful of U.S. Army Green Berets--no matter how resourceful or courageous--to have made more than a minimal difference in the way the Salvadoran army operates.

Peace would also give more than half a million Salvadoran citizens who fled to the United States as illegal immigrants a chance to return home. Their ranks include some of El Salvador’s most ambitious and energetic people, but now their labor is needed far more in El Salvador than in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Finally, peace in El Salvador would bring further stability to Central America. After more than a decade of bloody turmoil in which they became the last backwater battleground of a waning Cold War, the six Central American republics can finally get on with the far more important task of building their region’s economic potential. As far back as the early 1800s, when independence from Spain was won, Central American dreamers have envisioned a common market in which El Salvador and its neighbors could work together to create economic prosperity for all their peoples. The potential remains, but it can be pursued only when the region is at peace.

A peaceful, prosperous Central America should fit quite nicely into the “new world order” that President Bush keeps talking about. He can help the Central Americans get there by pushing for the tentative Salvadoran peace accord to be made permanent.