How a Policy Was Born

"Adversaries large and small test our will and seek to confound our resolve." So said Ronald Reagan in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last July. At that moment, half a world away, a Communist leader from El Salvador, Shafik Jorge Handal, was visiting Soviet-bloc countries in search of arms for Ms country's leftist guerrillas. In retrospect, the chain of events that made El Salvador the first focus of the new Administration's foreign policy seems inexorable.

This policy began to evolve in December, when Richard Allen and Jeane Kirkpatrick, two Reagan advisers with a keen interest in Latin America, told the President-elect that El Salvador would likely be his first testing ground.

That month Allen met with the leader of the country's ruling military-civilian junta, Jose Napoleon Duarte, at Reagan transition headquarters in Washington. They discussed the possibility of increasing the U.S. aid to El Salvador that had been initiated in the waning days of the Carter Administration.

Secretary of State Alexander Haig took the lead in discussions about El Salvador after the new Administration was inaugurated. This was the place to try to halt Soviet adventurism, he argued. Some White House advisers--including top Aides James Baker and Edwin Meese--were initially reluctant to initiate a highly visible foreign policy thrust while the Administration was trying to focus attention on its economic program. But they succumbed to the argument, put by one top presidential aide: "You can't abdicate the conduct of foreign policy no matter what the domestic priorities are."

The Reagan Administration immediately decided to scrap the Carter policy of linking aid to El Salvador to the elimination of human rights abuses and to progress on land reforms promised by the junta. Instead, another form of linkage was instituted: Reagan and Haig publicly emphasized that since Cuba and other Soviet clients were supporting the rebels, the guerrilla war in El Salvador was not a local affair but part of a larger East-West struggle.

The Salvadoran army managed to crush the guerrillas long-threatened "final offensive," which began in mid-January. Nonetheless, U.S. military experts concluded that the guerrillas still possessed a large cache of weapons and that the poorly trained, shoddily equipped army could not suppress the resistance entirely. A spectrum of options for helping the regime was considered, ranging from a proposal to provide massive American training for thousands of Salvadoran troops at camps in Panama or the U.S., to a plan for sending in as many as 100 advisers, who would train Salvadoran troops within the country and even accompany them on combat missions. Coordinating this review was a task force headed by James Cheek, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and a career Foreign Service officer. Cheek's task force reported to an interagency group that included representatives from State, Defense, the CIA and the National Security Council.

Though 150 Salvadoran soldiers will still undergo three weeks of training this year at an army school in Panama, the task force rejected the proposal to train larger numbers of troops outside the country. The move would take too many soldiers off active duty when they were sorely needed. Sending U.S. advisers into the field was considered very risky; the death of an American soldier in a skirmish with the guerrillas would clearly escalate protests that the US was getting mired in another Viet Nam.

The final decision was made at the highest level, with Haig and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger actively involved. The plan: to station a limited number of American "trainers" in provincial garrisons with the Salvadoran military. They would be prevented from straying far from protected enclaves by what one top official called "the most strict operational guidelines that could be devised." An interagency group formulated the proposal in a decision memorandum; it was approved two weeks ago by the President at a meeting with the NSC.

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