Wrong Way in El Salvador

A special report prepared for Congress confirms what many have suspected about the Reagan Administration’s strategy in El Salvador--it is a short-term fix designed to suppress the rebellion, and it fails to deal with the long-range problems that are at the causes of the strife. The effect of the policy is to make less likely a realistic and lasting solution.

The report was prepared for Congress’ bipartisan 130-member Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus, and includes some of the most careful analyses that congressional staff members have yet done on how the U.S. and Salvadoran governments have spent the $1.7 billion that the United States has poured into El Salvador since 1980.

The report’s main conclusion is that President Reagan’s oft-repeated claim that three-fourths of U.S. aid to El Salvador goes for economic rather than military assistance is simply not true. Congressional analysts found that only 15% of U.S. aid has been spent on long-range reforms such as land redistribution, economic development, professionalizing Salvadoran law-enforcement agencies and improving the country’s judicial system. The bulk of the money has gone for military and military-related activities. Vast funds have been expended for training the rapidly expanding Salvadoran army and for purchasing arms and ammunition for the country’s fighting forces. A large portion of the aid that the Administration counts as economic assistance actually is spent on projects directly related to the war effort, such as food aid and assistance for refugees displaced by the fighting, according to the report.

Bureaucratic sleights-of-hand are used by the Administration to keep more U.S. military personnel in El Salvador than are permitted under the 55-person limit agreed to by Congress and the Administration, according to the report. Further, the report found that the American advisers and trainers come closer to combat than the U.S. government has publicly admitted. Finally, the report accuses the Administration of deceiving Congress on the extent of the air war being carried out by the Salvadoran air force to support the army’s counterinsurgency campaign.

Recent eyewitness reports indicate that the air war is reaching new levels of violence now that the United States has provided more helicopters and specially equipped DC-3 gunships to the Salvadoran forces. It is possible that more innocent civilians are now being killed in these air attacks than by El Salvador’s notorious death squads.

The many alleged “deceptions” cited in the congressional report are troubling. Most troubling of all, however, is the delusion reflected by the overall report: the Reagan Administration’s wishful notion that a military victory in El Salvador is worth pursuing.

In strictly military terms it may be possible to contain the insurgency, now dragging into its fifth year. Counterinsurgency experts disagree on what price would have to be paid in money and casualties and national destabilization, and how long it might take. Optimists argue that the war can be contained in two years, but skeptics warn that at least five years of continued combat would be required.

Advocates of a military solution assume that escalation of the government’s operations could ultimately reduce the five guerrilla factions to ragtag groups of bandits, no longer a threat to national security. By pouring in aid to the government side, the United States appears to be slowly and painfully shifting the military balance--but at a high political price. The political stalemate remains. The prolongation of fighting implicit in that strategy would only leave the Salvadoran people more traumatized, the countryside more ravaged, the nation more divided.

The bitterness of an inevitably unsatisfactory and incomplete “victory” by either side would almost certainly create the conditions for another explosion, just as the seeds of today’s violence were sown when a peasant uprising was crushed by the Salvadoran government in 1932.

The way to break El Salvador’s political stalemate, and to provide long-range stability in that country, is to encourage Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte’s effort to end the fighting through dialogue. The first tentative steps toward peace talks were taken late last year. The process stalled because of resistance by hard-liners in the Salvadoran military and in right-wing political parties. Duarte will be no more successful when he renews the dialogue this year unless Washington shows more enthusiasm for this peace process.

Another cease-fire, not an escalation of the war, is a prerequisite for negotiations. Once the killing has stopped, discussions aimed at creating a more broadly based Salvadoran government can begin. That new government must include the opposition leaders who now see guerrilla warfare as the only means left to them to effect change in El Salvador. The prospect for that sort of settlement is made less likely with each escalation of the war.