Four Down, Four to Go
FOUR YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, THE
FMLN launched an offensive in El Salvador de-
signed to present incoming U.S. President Ronald
Reagan with an “irreversible” situation. That was
January 10. In those early days of 1981, there was a
mood of euphoric optimism on the Left. Revolu-
tionaries in Guatemala and El Salvador thought they
glimpsed an imminent victory on the Nicaraguan
pattern. Their optimism was short-lived. Seven days
after the FMLN offensive, on January 17, Salvado-
rean troops were cracking open the first crates of M-
16s and grenades, the initial consignment of so-
called “lethal” aid from Washington. Jimmy Car-
ter’s lame-duck administration had three days to
run.
The Carter Administration also found time in its
last week in office to suspend aid payments to Nica-
ragua, after the first of repeated charges that the
Sandinista government was channeling arms to the
FMLN. Those charges that Nicaragua was “export-
ing communist subversion” were echoed in
Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where a man identifying
himself only as “the coordinator” announced to the
press that he had 250 troops in the field ready to
fight the Sandinistas. When it ran in January 1981,
the story attracted little attention. The name contra
had not yet been invented.
F OUR YEARS LATER, HOW FAR HAVE WE
come? Millions of words have been written on
the region. One recent book bears the appropriate
title of Endless War. More than 60,000 Central
Americans died during the first Reagan term. The
scrublands of eastern Honduras and the forested
mountains of northern Nicaragua have witnessed the
most extensive and repugnant covert war in recent
history. The contra forces have grown to more than
10,000. In El Salvador, those crates of M-16s have
been followed by half a billion dollars in military
aid. A short- or mid-term revolutionary victory now
seems out of the question. As the first Reagan Ad-
ministration boasted, not an inch of turf was “lost”
on its watch. Better yet, Grenada was snatched from
the jaws of Soviet-Cuban conspiracy. With the sole
exception of continued congressional truculence
over aid to the contras, Washington feels that its re-
gional policy is going well.
The Reagan Administration, like its predecessor,
broadly defines its goals as bolstering centrist politi-
cal forces and democratic institutions. The clearest
statement of its long-term intentions is the report of
the Kissinger Commission, which advocates an in-
flux of $8.8 billion of U.S. assistance to the region
over the next five years. But will the Congress buy
it? And is this a realistic blueprint, or an exercise in
bipartisan chicanery for immediate political ends? It
frequently seems that policy goals extend no farther
than winning a military victory in El Salvador and
overthrowing a Nicaraguan government for which
Washington feels an obsessive hatred.
The policy disputes that have racked Reagan’s
first four years-Hawks vs. Doves, pragmatists vs.
ideologues–continue unresolved. Secretary of State
George Shultz’s declared intent to purge ultra-con-
servative political appointees from the diplomatic
corps is only the latest in a series of conflicting sig-
nals and public disagreements. The old question
again arises: who’s in charge? As for the Democratic
Party, the liberal foreign policy interlude of the early
Carter years, which culminated in the fall of
Somoza, now appears to many as a Paradise Lost.
The party has once again fractured into competing
wings, and has stumbled to its fourth electoral
humiliation in five outings. There are alarmingly
few signs of an alternative Central America policy
growing in the party’s ranks. Where, then, is the al-
ternative to come from?
THESE ARE SOME OF THE QUESTIONS WE
address in this special issue of NACLA’s Re-
port on the Americas. History, of course, refuses to
stand still, and events in Central America have
rushed onward since we invited a group of friends
and colleagues, policy experts and academics, ac-
tivists and notable past contributors to the magazine,
to join us in New York on November 30 and De-
cember 1, 1984 to talk about Central America and
the second Reagan term.
In the case of El Salvador, one focus of our dis-
cussion was the new political dynamic set in motion
by the La Palma peace talks. In the judgment of
many of the participants in our meeting, the process
raised two obstacles: one was the impossibility of
the FMLN-FDR accepting Duarte’s bottom-line de-
mand of surrender, the other the unpredictable reac-
tion of the Right to the dialogue. On both counts we
were rapidly proved right. Even as we met in New
York, the second round of talks in the Salesian semi-
nary of Ayagualo were foundering on Duarte’s re-
fusal to consider peace proposals from the FMLN-
FDR. And while the so-called “humanization of the
war” was uneasily marked by Christmas and New
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1985
Tai Ng N
3Year truces, the humanization of the Salvadorean
Right seemed as distant a prospect as ever. On Janu-
ary 6, Roberto D’Aubuisson condemned the talks as
“a propaganda tool for the rebels.” The same day,
Pedro Rene Yanes, Christian Democratic head of an
official inquiry into corruption, was shot dead by
members of D’Aubuisson’s ARENA.
Yet as the March legislative elections loom
closer, the administration continues to send mixed
signals on how to deal with these tensions. Intelli-
gence reports say that Duarte is now under greater
threat than ever from the Right, but U.S. officials
portray the conflict as healthy evidence of democ-
racy in action, and hint that the United States would
back a right-wing majority in the Assembly.
The speed of events in Nicaragua illustrates even
more forcefully the difficulty of timely analysis. The
complex chess game of the Sandinista transition
continues, with the final repercussions of the
November 4 elections still unclear. Some polarities
have grown more acute. The brief pre-election d6-
tente between the government and La Prensa has
ended abruptly with the decision by editor Pedro
Joaquin Chamorro Barrios to go into voluntary
exile. But there are signs elsewhere that political
dialogue may yet advance. The opposition Social
Christian Party has broken away from its arch-con-
servative allies in the Coordinadora. Both Presi-
dent-elect Daniel Ortega and Bishop Pablo Antonio
Vega, head of the Episcopal Conference, described
their Christmas talks as “very positive.” And the
FSLN has appointed a special commission to devise
ways of granting some degree of self-rule to the
troubled Atlantic Coast region.
More urgently, the critical contra vote hangs in
the balance. Since December 1, we have seen Ar-
turo Cruz complete his descent from loyal critic of
the Sandinistas to advocate of aid for the FDN. In a
Washington, D.C. news conference on January 3,
Cruz declared his “commonality of purpose” with
the contras, and announced it would be “a terrible
political mistake” for Congress to continue to block
aid. On the other hand, a number of other develop-
ments suggest that the administration may still not
get its way on the crucial vote. On grounds of both
morality and pragmatism-the latter likely to carry
greater weight in Congress–the month of De-
cember brought fresh ammunition for opponents of
the aid. Reports of contra atrocities circulated
widely on Capitol Hill, and a report by the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence condemned the
CIA for “inadequate supervision and management”
of its Nicaragua operation.
4
REPORT
ON THE AMERICAS
VER THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF THE
Reagan presidency, two-thirds of the issues of
Report on the Americas have focussed on the crisis
in Central America and the Caribbean. Our themes
have ranged from the minutiae of U.S. military
strategy to the activities of evangelical Christians,
from the diplomacy of the Contadora countries to
the changing attitudes of the U.S. media. These Re-
ports have been complemented by our research on
the state of politics in the United States in the 1980s,
from the landslide triumphs of the New Right and
the neoconservatives, to the debacles of the Demo-
cratic Party.
The rationale behind all this work is a commit-
ment to seek out alternatives in the pages of the
magazine. Where the Reagan Administration has
proclaimed the need to stay the course, we have
asked how the course can be changed. We under-
stand that to mean two things. One is to find the fac-
tual and analytical basis for fresh policy options that
promise to bring about a peaceful and equitable set-
tlement of the regional crisis. The other involves a
critical assessment of our own role as scholars and
journalists, discarding stale formulae and dogma
where they have served us badly and instead finding
innovative methods and fresh language to address
enduring problems.
The four years since Reagan first took office have
been arduous ones for critics on the Left. The New
Right may still chafe that its agenda is incomplete,
that its leaders have been passed over in the search
for high office, but the Reagan revolution has
brought a sweeping shift in the intellectual climate
of the country. The Reagan era is the age of “new
ideas” in the worst sense, as neoconservatives and
neoliberals compete to shift the center of gravity of
political debate to the Right. It is time to arrest that
slide, and to stake out new terrain in which progres-
sive ideas can breathe and have broad resonance.
With that goal in mind, we bring you this unusual
issue of NACLA’s Report on the Americas. We
have set aside the customary format of the
magazine, and instead of a series of detailed analyti-
cal essays, we offer you the proceedings of a sym-
posium. We have chosen the beginning of President
Reagan’s second term of office as a time to draw to-
gether the main threads of our work from 1981-84
and to sketch out the main themes that we will be
thinking and writing about over the next four years.
This Report contains the highlights of the discus-
sions which we held in New York two months ago,
with a range of opinions sharp enough to touch off
polemic, yet close enough, we hope, to provide the
framework for a progressive consensus.
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