Reform Setback

Rightists anger U.S. Congress

By a vote of 35 to 18 last week, El Salvador's newly elected constituent assembly suspended a key element of the country's land reform, thereby raising grave doubts about the future of the program that was initiated only two years ago with U.S. backing. The vote was a victory for the right-wing coalition led by Major Roberto d'Aubuisson. Declared former President Jose Napoleon Duarte, whose Christian Democrats opposed the measure: "It was strictly a political move to attack the poor people of El Salvador."

What outraged Duarte was the sweeping nature of the resolution. President Alvaro Alfredo Magana's original proposal was to continue the exemption, first enacted last year, of cotton and sugar cane acreage from the so-called land-to-the-tiller reform decree, which enables tenant farmers and sharecroppers to acquire plots of up to 17 acres from their landlords. The suspension, for one growing season (a year for cotton, three to four years for sugar cane), was aimed at ensuring high production of two of the country's leading exports at a time of economic strain. But in a surprise move, D'Aubuisson's coalition broadened the exemption to include grain and cattle land as well.

The assembly's action reinforced many campesinos' fears that the rightists are out to halt the land-reform program altogether. One deputy who voted for the winning motion acknowledged as much afterward when he said that the next step could be to break up the large cooperatives formed under Phase I of the agrarian reforms. Labor organizations joined with the campesinos last week in a call for a general strike to protest the assembly's decisions.

The vote was received with dismay in Washington. Under a measure passed by Congress late last year, aid dollars cannot flow to El Salvador unless the Administration certifies every six months that the economic and political reforms are being carried out. The State Department is still giving D'Aubuisson the benefit of the doubt, but some members of Congress are not. Senator Paul Tsongas, a leading critic of U.S. policy in El Salvador, called the suspension of part of the land reforms a "breaking of faith." Said Democratic Congressman Michael Barnes, chairman of the House Inter-American Affairs Subcommittee: "These actions seem to confirm that the wrong guys won."

D'Aubuisson professes not to be concerned by the U.S. reaction. "I do not answer to the [U.S.] Congress, only to the Salvadoran people," he said last week. Perhaps, but he still needs Congress's support if his country is to receive any of the $128 million in economic aid and $60 million in military assistance requested by the Reagan Administration.

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