El Salvador: The Roots of Conflict

Only a little more than two months into its reign, the Reagan administration is off and running, proposing a change in direction in our domestic policies and in our foreign policies as well. While much of the early attention given the new administration has centered around Reagan’s controversial budget “cuts,” far more important changes—in terms of potential harm wrought—are being made in foreign policy, changes which indicate that Reagan will revive a decaying Cold War rhetoric and restore aggressive intervention into the Third World. The new direction in foreign policy was initiated with Reagan’s harsh words toward the Soviet Union at his first presidential press conference, and is being boldly put into practice by Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who once thought Henry Kissinger was “too soft” on the Vietnamese.

He began with a series of mainly symbolic acts: Robert White, Ambassador to El Salvador and opponent of American military intervention there, was fired; Anatol Dobrynin, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., was deprived of his privilege of entering the State Department through the garage; Haig announced that former President Carter’s alleged “human rights” policies were a dead letter, and that “human rights” concerns would henceforth be limited to U.S. opposition to terrorism; President Chun Doo Hwan, the dictator of South Korea, was invited to make the first major visit of a foreign head of state to the U.S.; NATO was chastised, more harshly than ever before, for dragging its feet in escalating its defense spending; aid to El Salvador’s junta was stepped up. And, if the point were still not made, the administration promptly lifted Carter’s ban on trade assistance for Chile’s military government.

But these were almost minor measures. Secretary Haig lost no time in getting down to more serious business. ‘U.S. Says Salvador is ‘Textbook Case’ of Communist Plot,’ proclaimed a headline in the February 20 New York Times. And what followed was a report on the opening salvo in an administration battle to portray El Salvador as a ‘test issue’ in a revived East-West conflict, a propaganda blitz designed to promote Haig’s quest for huge increases in the ‘defense’ budget, and to gain public and Allied support for a more brashly aggressive foreign policy.

Haig then launched a carefully crafted campaign to convince the American people and our allies that the guerrilla war now raging in El Salvador is not primarily generated by indigenous forces, but is rather a ‘communist plot’ to take over another country in the Western Hemisphere. At his briefing of representatives of NATO, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Spain on February 17, Haig announced that

A well-orchestrated international Communist campaign designed to transform the Salvadoran crisis from an internal conflict to an increasingly internationalized conflict is under way. With Cuban coordination, the Soviet bloc, Vietnam, Ethiopia and radical Arabs are furnishing at least several hundred tons of military equipment to the Salvadoran leftist insurgents.

Haig waved a thick collection of documents — a White Paper entitled ‘Communist Interference in El Salvador’ — which claimed to chart the itinerary of Salvadoran Communist boss Shafik Handal, to show meetings with foreign Communist leaders in which Handal asked for help, and to document arms shipments to El Salvador, both current and proposed.

Haig’s portrayal of the junta was equally clear-cut: it was a ‘coaliiton, headed by a true Christian Democrat,’ Napoleón Duarte, which included ‘moderate military and independent civilians’; it had been caught in a crossfire between terrorists of both the left and the right, but was nonetheless making ‘progress’ in restoring peace and implementing democratic reforms. It was this ‘progress,’ he asserted, that saw the left increasingly without a cause, losing its popular support, a situation which forced it to turn more openly to the Soviet bloc:

The Communist nations intervened in 1980 to provide the insurgents with large amounts of military supplies.... During the first weeks of this Administration we have taken a number of steps to deal with this situation. After, and only after, the external intervention we furnished the Salvadoran Government the additional military supplies it urgently needs to meet the threat of the Cuban-supported guerrillas. There were no lethal military supplies before that—none—until large-scale military attacks had been executed [my emphasis].

It seemed, somehow, as though we had heard it all before. A small, beleaguered nation, saddled for years with an oppressive regime, desperately trying to ‘reform’ and ‘modernize’ itself, harassed by “leftist terrorists” who are being supported by weapons supplied from “outside” the country, and, of course, aided, trained and supported by the Soviet bloc. After, and only after, that outside Communist interference has been established “beyond doubt,” the U. S. intervened to supply arms and a few minor advisers.

Having painted the scenario skillfully (almost as if from memory) Haig announced that an intensive investigation was underway to determine precisely what help, in addition to the $63 million already committed in fiscal year 1981, was necessary to help the Salvadoran junta in the near future. And the troops snapped to attention. Senator Charles Percy intoned, “this is where we draw the line” to stop Communist expansion. He said that the use of U. S. troops was “unlikely”—but did not rule it out. Senator Howard Baker supported sending arms and “as many as 150 advisers” to El Salvador, to help defend it against Cuban attack (as if, through a subtle change, alleged Cuban arms shipments had now become an open “attack”). The chief counsel to the President, Edwin Meese III, went further on ABC’s “Issues and Answers,” threatening possible “direct action” against the Cubans, if their support of the Salvadoran insurgents didn’t come to an abrupt halt. That could take the form of a blockade of Cuba—apparently Reagan’s solution to every world problem—or even the use of American troops against Cuba.

Nor was this foreign-policy swaggering limited to the administration itself. William Safire wrote that “A generation ago and half a world away, South Korea was chosen to be the place where the line was drawn against Communist expansion. President Reagan has chosen El Salvador to be this generation’s and this hemisphere’s South Korea.” What should we do? “First, we must break the Communist winning streak,” Safire said and, “Second, El Salvador is a place where we can win.... Our purpose... is not merely to stop Western Hemispheric penetration but to turn the global tide.” Nor was Safire naive about what this might entail: “What is ‘winning’? Is it supporting a military junta that kills the opposition but by its repressive nature produces more opposition that [sic] becomes necessary to kill? If need be, yes....”

Not to be left behind in the scramble toward intervention was Mr. Establishment himself, Joseph Kraft. “If this country cannot sustain the junta by a limited application of muscle, then it should quit the Great Power business,” he wrote. “If the junta now collapsed, the United States would cut a ridiculous figure all over the world.” And that, presumably, is reason enough to make El Salvador this generation’s Korea... or Vietnam.

Reagan himself was not unaware of the parallels, for in a meeting with reporters he complained that those who were already questioning the wisdom of American intervention were victims of the “Vietnam syndrome,” and he, for one, was not about to be cowed by so much ancient history. Someone was heard to mumble, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but that was probably some obscure McGovernite. And anyway, weren’t the McGovernites defeated in the last election?

“The past is like a funeral gone by”

While the Reaganites are eager to have another chance at Vietnam, this time in a small Central American country, with a population of 4.5 million, and a territory, as legend has it, “the size of Massachusetts,” the fact is that the administration’s and Haig’s caricatures of the situation in El Salvador are almost entirely devoid of truth or logic. The notions that El Salvador’s junta is composed of “moderates,” that they are “reformers” trying to end both right-wing and leftwing terrorism, that their primary opposition is Soviet or Cuban-backed Marxists, that the guerrillas are primarily fighting with arms supplied by the Soviet bloc, and, especially, that the U. S. intervened in El Salvador only after the intervention of that bloc, are such obvious distortions of the facts that only the media’s “memory hole” approach to current political crises allows them to get away with it. Cicero once wrote “Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.” What then are we to call those unaware of events barely gone by? Do policymakers in the Reagan Administration really need to be reminded that what is happening in El Salvador is not part of any “Communist plot,” but part and parcel of a struggle against the legacy of feudalism which is sweeping so much of Latin America? Or that U.S. involvement in Latin America did not begin as Reagan took office, pretending to respond to a Cuban “threat,” but dates back to the nineteenth century? Apparently so. But we need not recall the literally dozens of instances of American military intervention in Latin America over the past century and a half just yet. Let us simply remind the Reagan Administration of a memorandum written by Under Secretary of State Robert Olds, in 1927:

Our ministers accredited to the five little republics, stretching from the Mexican border to Panama... have been advisers whose advice has been accepted virtually as law in the capitals where they respectively reside.... We do control the destinies of Central America and we do so for the simple reason that the national interest absolutely dictates such a course.... Until now Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those we do not recognize and support fall.

The United States was not the first nation to try to dominate the affairs of what is now called Latin America. That distinction belonged to Portugal and Spain, particularly Spain which, a scant three decades after Columbus’s discovery, had succeeded in sending major expeditions to conquer Latin America.

In El Salvador, the Spaniards defeated the Pipil Indian tribe in 1527, seized their land, and reduced them to serfdom. While initial Spanish conquests concentrated on extracting as much gold as possible from the New World—enslaving Indians to work in the mines, where necessary— Spaniards later settled on the land, carved up vast quantities into feudal estates, and forced the Indians to work on the farms to pay tribute.

When El Salvador gained independence from Spain in the 1820s, the internal system changed very little until the introduction of coffee in the 1850s as a major crop in El Salvador. Coffee was labor-intensive, and required more work from the peasants than had earlier crops. Laws were passed by the feudal landlords to expel the Indians from their property. The landowners also created “rural judges” who had the power to force the Indians to work the coffee plantations. Occasional uprisings began (the first in El Salvador on any large scale was recorded in 1889), but they were dealt with harshly by the Hacienda police, a rural police force whose methods were often as brutal as those of the security police and “death squads” which are so oppressive in El Salvador today.

The role of the United States in Latin American affairs was ambitious from the outset. With the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States tried to ban any European intervention into Latin American affairs, but its own intervention vastly increased. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny served as a rationalization for further conquests throughout North America, including those of the Mexican-American war. The North Americans intervened militarily in the affairs of Latin American countries dozens of times throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the U. S. government used both military force and economic “aid” to promote American business interests and obtain the acquiescence of Latin American nations in the “leadership” of the North American giant.

In the early twentieth century, under the (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, U.S. businessmen hoping to open up new markets and establish new investments in Latin America were backed by U. S. Marines, which promptly established protectorates over Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Nicaragua, including much of what is now El Salvador. From the time of the so-called Good Neighbor Policy on, more subtle means of intervention were relied upon, including the encouragement of wide-scale state planning of Latin American economies in the name of “development.” Economic aid functioned as a form of “leverage,” much as did the policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, the InterAmerican Development Bank and the Alliance for Progress. This meant that U.S. economic and military policies were used simultaneously as carrot and stick, to induce Latin American nations to promote agricultural and industrial policies congenial to American business and political interests alike, at the expense of taxpayers in the U.S. and Latin America. To protect business investments, and to ensure steady repayment of loans—whether governmental, quasi-governmental (the IMF and World Bank), or private—stability became the watchword in international affairs. Without a “stability,” officials claimed, neither foreign investment, nor international government-to-government loans, nor economic growth, (within carefully planned channels) would be forthcoming. What was at stake was an internationalization of liberal-Keynesian “planning” and “reform”—a reform which, until the 1960s, usually entailed the protection, above all else, of the feudal land tenure system and the oligarchs of Latin America whose survival and wealth depended upon it. This was portrayed as an extension of “capitalism” to Latin America, but it was a very odd capitalism indeed, as we shall see.

Feudalism and capitalism

None of this went unnoticed by Latin Americans, who revolted against both their own oppressive oligarchic regimes and foreign imperialism. In Mexico there were more than a thousand armed uprisings between 1800 and 1940; in Bolivia, there were more than 130—and these uprisings were not atypical. Neither was the brutality with which such revolts were put down. The self-consciousness of Latin Americans concerning the oppressiveness of their feudal-oligarchic political system was eloquently expressed in the early 1960s by the Mexican intellectual Carlos Fuentes, in his lecture “The Argument of Latin America: Words for the North Americans.“ Fuentes addressed the North American ignorance of the plight of the Latin Americans:

You have had four centuries of uninterrupted development within the capitalistic structure. We have had four centuries of underdevelopment within a feudal structure.

You must understand this key word: structure. You had your own origin in the capitalistic revolution, liberal and Protestant. You were born without an anachronistic link.... On the contrary, we were were founded as an appendix of the falling feudal order of the Middle Ages; we inherited its obsolete structures, absorbed its vices, and converted them in institutions on the outer rim of the revolution in the modern world. If you come from the Reformation, we come from the Counter-Reformation: ... a customs house closed to modern ideas....

You must understand that the Latin American drama stems from the persistence of those feudal structures over four centuries of misery and stagnation, while you were in the midst of the industrial revolution and were exercising a liberal democracy. You must understand that the only solutions for Latin Americans will be to destroy all those structures at once [emphasis added].

What had developed throughout Latin America, in short, despite the more-than-occasional talk of “modernization,” was not free market capitalism, based on just property titles acquired by homesteading or voluntary purchase, but what sociologist Stanislav Andreski calls “a parasitic involution of capitalism,” with limited and politically-controlled markets which are based on feudal land titles. In El Salvador, the ruling feudal-oligarchy used every political means possible to monopolize the land in the hands of the so-called “fourteen families,” including conscript labor, controls on exports, investments, industrialization and the banking system, land theft, and mass executions. By the early twentieth century, the rule of El Salvador’s fourteen families was consolidated, and they had gained control of nearly 90 percent of the land of the country.

By the late 1920s, their most profitable crop, coffee, dominated the nation’s economy, accounting for nearly 95 percent of the nation’s exports. When more land was needed, it was seized. And when the Great Depression hit, the price of coffee fell dramatically, wiping out many of the small landowners. Neighboring countries, such as Nicaragua, were similarly hard-hit. Wages on large plantations fell from 50¢ to 20¢ per day, and the Hacienda police were brutal in dealing with those who complained too loudly about their condition or the political system which had led up to it. In Nicaragua, there was a revolt against the U.S.-installed Somoza, answered by a continuing U.S. intervention which was to keep the Somoza dynasty in power until 1979. In El Salvador, there was a mass uprising, led by Agustin Farabundo Marti, a founder of the Central American Socialist Party.

The uprising in El Salvador was brutally put down by government troops. And then a real massacre began: the systematic executions of some 30,000 peasants and Indians — some 4 percent of the population — by firing squads. Those whose only crime was to have Indian features were summarily lined up and shot. The wholesale slaughter made its point; for the better part of the next 50 years El Salvador’s population remained in the grip of one military regime after another.

When Castro’s revolution against Batista succeeded in Cuba in 1959, Americans suddenly became nervous about the stability of the feudal system which they had supported so eagerly for decades. Out of a desire to forestall a peasant uprising, New Frontiersmen began toying with the idea of pressuring El Salvador into adopting some significant reforms, particularly land reform, but the oligarchy resisted. And so, to obtain “stability-at-any-price,” Kennedy — and later Johnson—began to arm the Salvadoran military as a “precautionary measure,” and to build up the security forces.

Oligarchy and opposition

The limited reforms of the early 1960s in El Salvador produced a ray of hope among opponents of autocratic government. The founding of the Christian Democratic Party (PCD) in 1962, squaring off against the “official” party, the Party of National Conciliation (PCN), in a number of local elections, fueled their hopes that electoral, rather than violent, means could be used to transform the system.

The striking successes of the PCD in the late 1960s caused the military and the oligarchy to worry. In 1967, these groups set up the major security police, ORDEN, a paramilitary group primarily consisting of active army reservists and retired military men under the leadership of General Jose Alberto, to deal with “disruptions” in the rural areas of El Salvador. ORDEN’s 70,000 to 100,000 men, far outnumbering the small Salvadoran army of less than 15,000, began to practice those ways of dissent which were to make it the most corrupt, feared, and brutal of El Salvador’s paramilitary groups.

Sensing a chance for victory against the military and the oligarchy in the 1972 presidential election, the leaders of the Christian Democrats joined in a united front with the Social Democrats (MNR) and the legal arm (UDN) of the tiny and outlawed Communist Party, long considered one of Latin America’s most conservative communist groups (they regularly opposed nonelectoral means of changing the government, and in 1979 were to be among the first to back the first military-civilian government junta). This united front was called the National Opposition Union (UNO), and ran as its slate of candidates prominent Christian Democrat Napoleón Duarte for President and Guillermo Ungo, a leader of the Social Democrats, for Vice President. The wealthy landowners ran General Alberto, head of ORDEN, while the military backed the PCN candidate, Colonel Arturo Molina. When the Duarte-Ungo slate was the clear winner, the army simply ignored the results and declared Colonel Molina the new President. Duarte and Ungo were exiled; Duarte, whom the military and oligarchs considered to be a “dangerous radical,” was to remain in exile for nearly eight years, while Ungo, considered less radical and less dangerous, was allowed to return after four months. Less than nine years later, the two candidates would be bitter enemies, on opposite sides in the developing conflict.

When President Molina indicated half-hearted support for land reform, he was ousted in 1977, again through fraudulent elections. Molina was replaced by the autocratic General Carlos Humberto Romero who, as Minister of Defense, had blocked a proposed land reform project. Much of the population at that point became radicalized, moving to support one or another of the opposition groups which had dismissed electoral politics as a political strategy after the failure of their repeated efforts to have elections conducted fairly and their results observed. The Communist Party, however, opposed these groups; in the eyes of the PCS, they were “ultra-leftist.”

During General Romero’s reign, opposition to the government often proved to be fatal; according to the Los Angeles Times, “Up to 800 people are believed to have died or ‘disappeared’ for political reasons during his two year regime.” (November 26, 1979) Opposition to Romero mounted, among the people, in the Carter Administration, and even in the military. When the United States made it clear in 1977 that it was planning to cut off military aid to El Salvador under Carter’s “human rights” policies, the Salvadoran government renounced U.S. aid — as did several other dictatorships in Latin America — in protest against “U.S. interventionism.” Even so, American aid to the military dictatorship was never really cut off — it was simply disguised. As the Los Angeles Times reported,

the U.S., which quietly pressured Romero to resign, continued to support the regime publicly. While the U.S. Agency for International Development provided $8 million in “basic human need” grants and loans, and the U. S.-supported Inter-American Development Bank gave $30 million more [in 1979], Romero’s congress transferred $21 million out of housing, education and health budgets and into the military [November 26 1979].

By mid-1979, at least three different groups were planning to overthrow Romero as violence escalated. Still smarting from its failure in Nicaragua, where long-time U.S. ally Somoza had been overthrown by the Sandinistas, the U. S. lost no time in hastening to defuse the situation. The U. S. embassy worked with a group of young, “progressive” army colonels to overthrow Romero and set up a civilian-military junta in his stead.

On October 15, 1979, the colonels made their move, ousting Romero and “retiring” scores of senior military officers upon whom they blamed much of the violence and repression. Within 48 hours, the army named a five-man junta consisting of Colonel Adolpho Majano, 41, deputy chief of El Salvador’s military school, who was chosen unanimously by the military; Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutierrez, 43, a conservative military leader; Roman Mayarga

Quiros, 36, an MIT-educated electrical engineer who was formerly rector of the University of Central America, with close ties to the popular Archbishop Oscar Romero (no relation to the deposed General) of San Salvador; Guillermo Manuel Ungo, 47, a university administrator and respected Social Democrat who had been Napoleón Duarte’s vice-presidential candidate in 1972 and then was exiled briefly by the military; and Mario Antonio Andino, an engineer with close contacts to American interests, who held ‘progressive’ political views and represented private enterprise groups in El Salvador.

Within a scant few weeks, the junta would be wrecked on the shoals of Salvadoran military reality. Although the military members were prominent on the junta, they were portrayed as “progressive” military leaders, with the civilians having an equal voice. Reforms were promised, including land reform and an end to repression by the army and paramilitary forces. Leftist and centrist opposition groups decided to give the junta a chance, and Archbishop Romero took to the airwaves to give the junta his blessing, pleading with his countrymen to give the new regime time to prove that “its beautiful promises are not dead letters, but rather a real hope that a new era has begun for our country.”

It was, alas, not to be.

Two months into the new regime, while murders by the right-wing death squads as well as by government security forces were escalating, a massacre took place in the town of El Congo, where the army dispatched a number of civilians who had not been accused of any crime. The civilians on the junta demanded an investigation and were thwarted. On January 3 and 4, Guillermo Ungo, Mario Andino, and Roman Mayarga Quiros abruptly resigned. Mayarga was so shaken that he left the country, vowing never to set foot in it again.

The Christian Democrats had formed no part of the junta, but as the army desperately sought replacements for the three civilians who had left, the PCD was the only party which would agree to give them a chance. On January 7, Hector Dada and Antonio Morales Erlich, both of the PCD, and Dr. Ramon Avalos Navarrete, a physician and close friend of Colonel Gutierrez, were named as replacement junta members. Again, promises were made, and again they were not kept, as the number of deaths in the early months of the junta’s reign were more than twice what they had been under General Romero. An ambitious program of land reform, largely designed by Americans, was announced on March 6; on March 7, the banking system was nationalized; soon thereafter, the export industry followed suit.

In mid-March, Dada resigned to protest the repression, and he was replaced by Napoleón Duarte, who returned from eight years of exile. The violence continued.

As the killings increased — and there were more than 2,000 during the junta’s opening few months—Archbishop Oscar Romero began to run out of patience and began to preach in his sermons the right of rebellion against tyranny when all other avenues to social and political change had been exhausted. In late March, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while offering Sunday mass in San Salvador, gunned down by an assassin reportedly working with the right-wing death squad, the White Warrior’s Union, commanded by Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, head of Salvadoran military intelligence until 1979. Hundreds of thousands of mourners took to the streets in a peaceful demonstration days later, only to be fired upon by the army and security forces. Corpses of unarmed demonstrators littered the streets of San Salvador. Two days after the Archbishop’s brutal assassination, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations held hearings on further aid for El Salvador; $5.7 million was approved on April 1.

The junta found itself isolated from the people. The civilian members of the junta had failed to carry through on their promises. They failed in their efforts to oust Defense Minister Jose Garcia (a supporter of ORDEN and the right-wing death squads), and in their attempts to control the military and paramilitary units. Every investigation into the murders committed by the military was thwarted. Finally, faced with a mounting list of tortured, maimed, and murdered civilians, every political party in the country, except the Christian Democrats, deserted the junta. Its presumed “popular support”—a facade at best—had disappeared. Ungo and the Social Democrats joined the opposition; so did an entire faction of the Christian Democrats who deserted the PCD’s two junta members. The progressive Colonel Majano remained, hoping to fight the repressive elements in the military, but when in May he helped to thwart an attempted coup engineered by D’Aubuisson, the military refused to support him. Majano was stripped of his command, while D’Aubuisson, who had been jailed, was freed immediately. Later, Majano was ousted from the junta altogether, and in February of this year was arrested. Jose Napoleón Duarte was named President of El Salvador, but the right-wing remained in control of the army and security police. In fact, Duarte was a mere figurehead, an adornment shining atop a murderous regime, tolerated by the military only because of their desperate need of a symbol, any symbol, which they could use to claim, in the court of international public opinion, that, somehow, the junta remained “moderate,” “reformist,” and “centrist”— when in fact it was a military dictatorship in everything but name.

On April 11, 1980, the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) was created, comprised of more than 150 organizations, including unionists, teachers, slum dwellers, professionals, technicians, market vendors, religious figures, university rectors, and children. The FDR was legal, it was said in El Salvador, but the penalty for membership was death. The first president of the FDR was Enrique Alvarez, a wealthy landowner who had resigned as Minister of Agriculture in the first junta of 1979 because of the military domination of the government. Alvarez was one of six FDR leaders who met in a Jesuit High School in November 1980. Soldiers surrounded the school, while a group of heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes entered the building and seized the opposition leaders. Later, they were found: tortured, mutilated, and dead.

The FDR choose as its new leader Guillermo Ungo, Napoleón Duarte’s running mate in 1972, and one of the members of the original junta which overthrew General Humberto Romero in October 1979. Duarte and Ungo had become bitter opponents.

Haig’s complaint

That is one reason we should be skeptical of the chicken-little scenario painted by Alexander Haig and company. In the event of a victory by FMLN, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front which serves as the guerrilla arm of the FDR, it is widely believed that the new government of El Salvador would be run by top leaders of the FDR, with Ungo as its most likely President. If Ungo is a “Marxist-Leninist,” why was he not a Marxist-Leninist when the U.S. supported his appointment to the original junta? The fact is, of course, that Ungo is a Social Democrat, a socialist in the tradition of many governments in Western Europe, that he was a Social Democrat in 1972, was one in 1979 when appointed to the junta, and remains one today. As president of the FDR, he is the head of a wide coalition of different groups opposed to the military junta, including dissident Christian Democrats, religious groups, and peasants.

There are Marxists in the opposition, of course, including many fighting in the guerrilla forces. But they are far from dominant in the guerrilla forces, who number among themselves a disproportionate number of very young Salvadorans flatly and simply opposed to the current junta. And while socialism is certainly a disreputable and even evil social system, someone should ask Secretary Haig a question: How does the socialism of Ungo differ from the practice of the current regime, which has for the most part nationalized—not “redistributed”—large segments of land, the banking system, and the export industry, “reforms” which Haig says we will continue to support?

This, however, is a minor question. Even larger questions loom as we examine Haig’s charges, with which we began our analysis. Haig, you will recall, claimed that the ruling junta was a “moderate coalition” headed by a “true Christian Democrat” — Duarte — which was implementing significant “reforms,” while it battled “extremist” elements of both the left and the right. According to Haig, the guerrillas are all “leftists” and “Marxist-Leninists,” with no popular support, who are only able to continue their battle against the junta because they are supplied with arms from the Soviet bloc. Moreover, Haig claimed that the U.S. supplied military aid “after and only after” the “external intervention.”

Clearly one does not have to be a Marxist-Leninist to oppose rampant slaughter; more than 12,000 civilians have been murdered in the last 14 months in El Salvador, 80 percent of these murders, according to a vast array of sources, attributable to the army and government security forces. Even former Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White put this point bluntly: “The chief killer of Salvadorans is the government security forces,” he told a group of mostly Republican Senators. “Do you want to associate yourself with this kind of killing?”

Just as clearly, one does not have to be a Marxist to see through the ploy which holds that the junta is a “moderate coalition.” The “moderate” segments in the junta, including every cabinet member in the original except the Minister of Defense, have long since left or been ousted, and the quicker they came to see that the junta was a front for a murdering military, the quicker they departed.

“After, and only after”?

What, then can we say to answer Haig’s main charge, to wit, that the U.S. had supplied no lethal weapons to El Salvador, and intervened “after, and only after” the evidence of “external intervention” by the Soviet bloc?

Unfortunately, a great deal. There is, to begin with, the little matter of hypocrisy. Let us consider at some length the question of “external interference,” and where it began. Haig’s specific charge, in the State Department Special Report No. 80, is: “By providing arms, training, and direction to a local insurgency and by supporting it with a global propaganda campaign, the Communists have intensified and widened the conflict, greatly increased the sufferings of the Salvadoran people and deceived much of the world about the true nature of the revolution.”

Now, anyone who has bothered to spend even a weekend studying the history of El Salvador, not to mention the rest of Latin America, is perfectly aware of the fact that the U.S. began intervening there in the mid-nineteenth century and has continued ever since. We have mentioned a few of the interventions earlier. Let us look at U.S. military aid, training, and support, as well as that of its allies.

From 1950 until 1979, El Salvador received the following in direct U.S. military aid: $4.9 million in Military Assistance Program grants; $3.5 million in Foreign Military Sales Agreements; $2.5 million in Excess Defense Articles; and $5.8 million in International Military Education and Training Program grants, totalling $16.7 million. Until the mid-1970s, El Salvador’s armed forces were equipped with surplus U.S. equipment. In 1980, $5.7 million in security assistance was provided, in addition to $50 million in “economic aid,” a good portion of which has almost certainly been diverted to the military and security forces, a time-honored custom in the Third World. Five million, two hundred thousand dollars in military aid was provided in fiscal year 1981, and a loan from the International Monetary Fund provided, with U.S. backing, a whopping $180 million.

The issue of direct training of Salvadoran military personnel can also be quickly addressed. From 1950 through 1976 the U.S. trained 1925 Salvadoran officers, mostly at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone. Moreover, in 1957, the U.S. instituted a public safety program, under the auspices of AID (the Agency for International Development), which undertook to “develop the managerial and operational skills and effectiveness of the [Salvadoran] civil police forces.” (Miami Herald, April 14,

1. From 1963 until 1974, the program emphasized the National Guard. One of the “graduates” of U.S. training facilities was . . . Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, torturer extraordinaire.

The “unofficial channels” through which the U.S. is supplying arms should not be neglected, either. Just as the Soviet Union, East Germany, Vietnam, and Cuba are supplying the Salvadoran guerrillas with arms through various “unofficial” means, so too is the U.S. The CIA has long had a practice of providing military assistance to various countries through illegal channels. So, too, have at least a select few of the multinational companies which operate in Third World nations. Sometimes these are observed, sometimes not. On March 18, 1974, for example, the U.S. customs announced that its agents had seized $22.5 million in military helicopter parts that were being illegally shipped from Long Beach, California to El Salvador. (New York Times, March 19, 1974) Similarly, on May 16, 1976, the Chief of Staff of the Salvadoran armed forces was arrested in New York and charged with plotting, with six other men, a sale of arms worth $2.8 million. Moreover, when the U.S. government provides a grant of economic aid and some of it is diverted by the Salvadoran government to military purchases, this is not counted by the State Department as military aid. And none of the direct purchases of American arms from private arms suppliers is counted as “military aid,” either. In the Soviet bloc, of course, there is no private sector, so all military assistance is government-to-government.

Another means the U.S. has used to aid El Salvador is the indirect routing of military equipment. “In order to bankroll the Salvadoran military without provoking still more criticism on human rights grounds,” Penny Lernoux wrote recently in The Nation, “Washington is using the [Christian Democratic] Government in Venezuela as a screen. Former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez charges that the Venezuelan Government is funneling arms and money to the Salvadoran military through Costa Rica, which has emerged as a black market arsenal for the region.” (December 13, 1980).

Finally, since Haig is quick to point out that the Soviet Union itself is not directly sending arms to El Salvador, but is supporting such shipments largely through allies, such as Cuba, we should glance at the military assistance given to El Salvador by America’s allies. Over the past few years, the Salvadoran government has received military assistance and arms from France, Venezuela, Brazil, Germany, and, especially, Israel. The largest supplier has been Israel, which supplied 81 percent of El Salvador’s military imports between 1972 and 1977, including 25 ARAVA aircraft, UZI sub-machine guns, and Galil assault rifles, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Figures for sales since 1977 have been more difficult to compile, but large shipments of arms and aircraft have been seen arriving in Israeli ships at Salvadoran ports.

Again, let us ask Secretary Haig: whose external intervention? What we have documented is a history of intervention by the U.S. and its allies. When did the Communist support for the insurgents begin? According to Haig’s own State Department Special Report, the first weapons shipped from the Communist bloc nations to the Salvadoran guerrillas did not reach them until late September, 1980.

The point is not merely that Alexander Haig and his platoon of Pentagon propagandists are misrepresenting the facts, claiming that the U.S. “intervened” in El Salvador “after and only after” the Communist bloc nations began to ship military hardware. The point is that these are deliberate, systematic distortions of the truth designed to mislead the American people, and to stampede them into an ill-informed support for increased defense spending and American Third World intervention. And, furthermore, El Salvador isn’t even the main focus of these efforts on the part of the Reagan administration to revive the Cold War. It is, as administration officials openly admit, a means of “sending the Russians a message.” Before the U.S. government begins to escalate its intervention in Central America, leading possibly even to the use of American troops, before it blockades Cuba, before it rushes to ship off American “advisers” as potential targets of the guerrillas, and before it dumps a proposed $200 million into the government coffers there, both directly and through the International Monetary Fund, why doesn’t it try Western Union, instead?

The junta in El Salvador is not a “moderate, centrist” regime—it is a military dictatorship with a weak civilian at its helm. The murders in El Salvador are not being committed by “left and right-wing extremists,” but, for the most part, by the government security forces and the army themselves. The reforms being imposed—virtually at American direction—are dubious at best, and malicious at worst. And the guerrillas are not “Marxist-Leninists,” although some among them are, but rebels carrying on a struggle against oligarchy and oppression which has been decades, if not centuries, in the making. If Salvadoran Communist boss Handal has traveled to Communist nations to gain support, other opposition leaders, such as Guillermo Ungo, have appealed to Western governments, Germany, Mexico, France, Scandanavia—and to the United States—for help. Ungo has offered to negotiate with the U.S., saying he will talk with the owners of the circus, but not the clowns, but the State Department has turned him down.

Playing into the hands of Communists and Socialists everywhere, the Reagan administration is apparently going to continue the policies of earlier administrations, offering U.S. aid to feudal, autocratic, and authoritarian regimes, in the name of “free enterprise” and “anti-Communism.”

The Reagan administration’s motives are dubious; its claims are outrageous falsehoods; its planned actions, dangerous and ill-considered. It has exaggerated the “Soviet threat,” whitewashed U.S. involvement in El Salvador, and misrepresented the nature of the opposition to the junta. It claims to be opposed to “terrorism,” but the only terrorism it actually sees is that of “the left,” never the terrorism of governments themselves. If the murders committed by the Salvadoran army and security forces over the past year and a quarter were translated into terms that Americans could understand, it would be the equivalent of the U.S. government murdering the population of New Orleans. If that is not terrorism, one can only wonder what is.

The Reagan administration’s policies in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America ought to be opposed vigorously by all freedom-loving Americans. Libertarians and others concerned with this new adventurism in foreign policy ought to organize teach-ins, and make the course of our entire foreign policy a matter of open public discussion. Already the Reaganites, supposed budget-cutters, are shackling us with the largest increases in “defense” spending since the second World War. And, as if to make up for having lost the Vietnam war, and failed to get involved heavily enough in the Middle East, the American defense establishment and its intellectual supporters are charging full-speed ahead into the quagmire of Latin America. It’s time for someone to send them a message.

Roy A. Childs, Jr. is the editor of The Libertarian Review.