THE ELECTIONS IN EL SALVADOR MAY BE
over, but the war goes on. In Congress, Jose
Napoleon Duarte’s success at the polls induced a spell
of euphoria, just as the revelations of the CIA mining
of Nicaraguan ports had provoked a brief bout of
anguish. Yet these flareups of congressional passion
seem curiously irrelevant to the war that is playing itself
out in Central America. If they are a barometer to
anything, it is the collective inability of Congress to
ask the right questions-why the war will not stop, or
indeed how and why it is being waged in the first place.
So far, the press has done little better. The pattern
and logic of events in Central America seem to elude
even the more perceptive of correspondents. Thus
Hedrick Smith of The New York Times, who is nothing
if not factually well informed, spoke with alarm on
a recent TV talk show of “all kinds of ways in which
U.S. troops could get drawn willy-nilly into the con-
flict.”
“Accidental war” is the favorite scenario of those
few people in Congress and the press who grasp that
the Reagan Administration stands poised to cross a
threshold in Central America by sending U.S. troops
into combat. It is based on the idea that the Administra-
tion has no coherent policy, and is stumbling out of
control.
This issue of NACLA’s Report on the Americas,
written by New York-based journalist Allan Nairn, of-
fers an entirely different analysis. On his return from
three months of research in Central America, Nairn
told us of an alarming new development. U.S. diplo-
mats and military officials in the region, he reported,
no longer refer to “accidents” that might trigger a con-
flict. Instead, they talk of “pretexts” for war.
This Report pieces together the evolution of U.S.
military policy in Central America since the Sandinista
revolution of 1979. It is the story of sophisticated
political maneuvers in Washington and of a renewed
ability of the U.S. armed forces to intervene anywhere
in the world at short notice. Grenada was the first ex-
ample of that new capacity, even though the stage was
miniature; the Big Pine exercises in Honduras have
put most of the key assault units for a Central American
invasion through their paces.
Washington’s surrogate forces in the region-the
Salvadorean Army and the Nicaraguan contras-seem
to have reached the limits of their usefulness. What
comes next? B-52 carpet bombing of El Salvador
perhaps, or a full-scale invasion of Nicaragua. Actions
on that scale can be prevented only if the moral con-
science of this nation is reawakened. It is tempting to
say that the consequences of intervention would be incalculable-but they are not. The material cost and the death toll, in U.S. soldiers and Central American
peasants, can be assessed with some accuracy, and this
Report does so.
Allan Nairn’s work has caused ripples in
Washington since 1980, when he published a detailed expose of ties between the Reagan Administration and
Guatemala’s far Right. Since then, his writings have
appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post
and The New Republic. His most recent article, pub-
lished in The Progressive, is a study of 20 years of U.S. support for the Salvadorean death squads.
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