Turning Up the Heat

By KURT ANDERSEN

For U.S. policy in Central America, the day of reckoning nears

"There are a lot of balls in the air at the same time," said a State Department official last week, talking about the quickening pace of U.S. diplomacy in Central America, and indeed there were. Vice President George Bush visited El Salvador and demanded in unequivocal terms an end to the political murders being carried out by right-wing extremists. Henry Kissinger, along with eight members of the bipartisan presidential commission he heads, was in Mexico and Venezuela gathering fact and opinion for the report that is scheduled to go to the President in early January. U.S. Special Envoy Richard Stone met with the President-elect of Venezuela and the President of Colombia.

Despite the high-level meetings, the State Department down-played the notion that some bold stroke was imminent. "The gut issues," said one official, "are not appreciably changed." But that cool appraisal understates the current, critical juncture for U.S. policy toward Central America, in particular El Salvador. Two days after Bush's ultimatum, Salvadoran extremists won worrisome victories: a rightist coalition in the legislature managed to weaken the three-year-old land-reform program, and leftist guerrillas in the field ravaged a U.S.-trained army battalion (25 dead, 45 wounded) in a ten-hour firefight. In Nicaragua, meanwhile, the left-wing Sandinista government has made much of its recent moderate gestures, as the U.S. endeavors to fashion a diplomatic response.

Among the contentious questions dividing U.S. policymakers is how best to stop El Salvador's escuadrones de la muerte--death squads. The victims are supposedly "subversives," but they include union leaders, liberal professors and centrist politicians. Bush was in El Salvador for just seven hours, but his warnings about "these right-wing fanatics" were stark and powerful. "Your cause is being undermined by the murderous violence of reactionary minorities," he said to an assembly of the country's politicians and military men, "[which] poisons the well of friendship between our countries. [Do not] make the mistake of thinking that there is any division in my country on this question."

Bush later gave the government an extraordinary private message from President Reagan. The letter demanded a reduction in arrests by secret police and named the Salvadoran officials believed to be organizers of the death squads, whom the U.S. wants sent out of the country--or else. Washington evidently stopped just short of threatening a cutoff of its $65 million in military aid, which would probably doom the Salvadoran government. Explained one U.S. diplomat: "We're saying, 'Clean up your act or we won't be able to save you--and we might not even try.'" The Salvadoran government asked Washington for technical help from U.S. law-enforcement experts to prosecute the assassins.

The new U.S. hard line is welcome, although late. "The Administration realized we had been had," says a U.S. diplomat in El Salvador, "that we were not supporting genuine anti-Communists but feudalists or worse." Last month Reagan exercised a pocket veto of the two-year-old human rights certification law, which had obliged him to certify twice a year that El Salvador was making headway against the quasi-official terrorism.

According to Jose Napoleon Duarte, the country's moderate former President, who was in Washington last week, the current U.S. condemnations are more effective than the nebulous certification process. An example cited by Duarte: "The Minister of Defense, Mr. Vides Casanova, for the first time in the history of our country, made an open speech against the death squads."

Carlos Vides Casanova ran the brutal National Guard in 1980, when a gang of Guardsmen shot to death four American women, all Roman Catholic missionaries. Three weeks ago, retired U.S. District Court Judge Harold Tyler submitted his 101-page special report on the case to the State Department. According to those who have seen the classified document, Tyler found that the U.S. embassy in San Salvador pressed the murder investigations properly. It now seems likely that the five Guardsmen charged with murdering the churchwomen will finally be tried. The Salvadoran government has a large incentive to do justice in the case: if no trial is held, Congress has ordered that U.S. military aid shrink 30%, or $20 million this fiscal year.

Another 10% of the aid is contingent on the continued progress of El Salvador's ambitious agrarian-reform program, which both the Carter and Reagan Administrations have promoted as a bulwark against Communism. Congress will have to decide whether the constitutional provision passed last week gutted land reform, as some Salvadoran moderates and U.S. labor leaders suspect, or merely modified it.

Agrarian reform was to have taken place in three stages, each providing for purchase, not expropriation, of farm land. The first phase, under which the country's largest farms were turned into peasant-run cooperatives, is complete. Phase 2 had called for giving medium-size plantations to peasant farmers. Under the new Salvadoran law, however, Phase 2 was substantially diluted: the current owners may keep almost 60% of the land that was to be redistributed, and a loophole could let them sell the remainder to family-held corporations.

An even greater concern is the scheduled end of Phase 3 reforms, a "land-to-the-tiller" program that has been enabling peasants to buy on government credit the tiny parcels of land that they now farm. Partly because of intimidation by landlords, only about half of those eligible have enrolled, and the program is scheduled to expire Dec. 31.

The Kissinger commission traveled to Mexico City and Caracas to confer with leaders of the Contadora process, the regional peace-seeking effort undertaken by Mexico, Venezuela, Panama and Colombia. The group has proposed a draft treaty that would try to stop arms shipments into and between Central American countries, get rid of foreign military advisers and promote democracy. Those goals, Kissinger said in Mexico City, "seem to be consistent with U.S. objectives, or what should be U.S. objectives." Rebellions that arise indigenously, he said, "should not be the concern of the U.S." but should be "worked out by the people concerned in their own way."

While the Administration has generally supported the Contadora goals, it has envisioned them mainly as fetters on the Sandinistas, who have shipped arms to Salvadoran rebels, imported hundreds of Cuban military advisers and drifted toward one-party Marxist rule. At least for the moment, however, the Sandinistas have all but ended the arms traffic, begun to send the Cubans home, eased press censorship and promised to hold elections in 1985. In January, a State Department official said, the U.S. will meet with the Sandinistas to encourage them to come up with an election framework acceptable to the Reagan Administration.

The Sandinistas' show of moderation was diplomatically deft. It was as if the U.S., not expecting them to play along with the Contadora plan, failed to compute the consequences for its allies in the region. Under the Contadora treaty, those countries could be denied U.S. military help. Washington has since 1981 supplied arms to the antigovernment contra guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua. In Honduras, the Big Pine maneuvers amount to a continuing large-scale U.S. military presence. Earlier this month, Honduras and its conservative neighbors started objecting to Contadora proposals, probably precluding any agreement before spring.

Central America's violent politics is primed for an unusually precarious period. The contras talk about a January offensive, and the Sandinistas say that in February they will set an election date. Big Pine II, due to end by March, will be almost immediately replaced by Big Pine III. El Salvador will doubtless hold its presidential elections on schedule, March 25, but Salvadoran citizens do not seem aroused or optimistic about the voting. As far as U.S. policy is concerned, Central America is no place to invest high hopes. Right now, averting a crisis seems good enough.

--By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Timothy Loughran/San Salvador and Barrett Seaman/Washington

With reporting by Timothy Loughran, Barrett Seaman This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.