Suggest, Persuade, Bargain

By George Russell

A U.S. campaign for change yields a few, but only a few, victories

It was either a bold bid for peace or aclever propaganda ploy. Shadowed by bodyguards in the venerable Mexico City Foreign Correspondents Club, Guillermo Manuel Ungo, 51, president of El Salvador's Democratic Revolutionary Front (F.D.R.), a leftist political alliance that boycotted last March's elections, faced an overflow audience. Alongside was Ana Guadalupe Martinez, a representative of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), the Marxist-led organization that unites the country's five guerrilla factions. Ungo and Martinez announced that their groups had offered to begin unconditional direct negotiations with the Salvadoran government to end the country's three-year civil war and to help reduce tensions throughout volatile Central America. Said Ungo last week: "We can now test the U.S. willingness to talk. The political will of the U.S. is a vital factor in leading to any dialogue."

Once again, Washington's attempts to draw the line against insurgency in tiny El Salvador were being tugged into the spotlight. The F.D.R. and F.M.L.N. leaders said that they had not yet received a formal response from the Salvadoran government, whose efforts to put down the guerrillas have been backed by about $122.4 million in U.S. military aid in the past three years. But in the capital of San Salvador, there was an immediate reaction. Said Right-Wing Leader Roberto d'Aubuisson, who is president of the Constituent Assembly: "We will permit no dialogue or negotiation with the criminal groups of the F.D.R. and F.M.L.N.!"

In Washington, the response to the guerrilla proposal was less negative, but equally skeptical. Said a State Department official: "It is the old, familiar line of cosmetic procedural devices. This is a proposal to exchange proposals, not a real deal." State Department Spokesman John Hughes noted that "if [the guerrillas] wish to participate in the political process as we have always urged, they should say so."

According to another F.M.L.N. spokesman in Mexico City, an additional reason for the peace offer is a rebel fear that the Salvadoran insurgency might broaden into a regional war. But in the view of many U.S. analysts, the rebels are beginning to sound more conciliatory because they know that the Salvadoran government, under U.S. pressure, is inching toward a proposal of its own for political reconciliation. The initial step would be for Provisional President Alvaro Magana to name a peace commission that would be instructed to look for a way to include leftists in the presidential and municipal elections scheduled to take place by the end of March 1984. The main condition: that the guerrillas wishing to re-enter the political process lay down their arms.

Some U.S. experts believe the real aim of the latest F.D.R. and F.M.L.N. offer was to thwart any attempts toward reconciliation. Still, the rebels appear to realize that talks may be inevitable. To enhance their position in any future negotiations, three weeks ago the guerrillas launched a military offensive in El Salvador's northern and eastern regions. They overran five small towns and hamlets, claimed to have killed 189 members of the Salvadoran armed forces and captured, then released, some 90 "prisoners of war."

Magana's commission is based on one of many novel U.S. proposals to the Salvadoran government. While public attention has focused largely on U.S. military and economic support for the embattled regime, the Reagan Administration has re-emphasized a discreet and ambitious program of suggestion, persuasion and bargaining to bolster the U.S.'s long-term goal: the evolution of a stable, pluralistic system of government in the long-suffering country.

Many details of the U.S. campaign to transform the country were outlined last May 21 in a lengthy, confidential State Department cable to U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Deane Hinton. While the message repeated Washington's longstanding commitiment to democratic institutions, human rights and land reform in the country, practical suggestions for implementing them were a welcome change from the Administration's former public preoccupation with Cuban and Soviet influence in the Marxist-led insurgency. The cable listed a number of ways to carry out what one top-ranking U.S. diplomat calls "a social and economic revolution of enormous and unprecedented magnitude."

On human rights, the long-range U.S. objective is the reorganization of the Salvadoran armed forces in order to "eliminate indiscriminate violence against the civilian population." One idea from Washington: to take away intelligence functions from the 10,000-strong forces of the Salvadoran National Guard, Treasury Police and National Police. Those forces are charged by Salvadoran human rights organizations with much of the civilian torture and wanton murder in the country, where some 30,000 people have died since 1979. Another suggestion was to pressure the Salvadoran army into creating a special judge advocate general's office to protect guerrilla prisoners and to prosecute military men accused of human rights abuses. A third idea: to offer U.S. assistance in overhauling El Salvador's moribund legal and judicial system. The need for such reform was brought home with stinging force last month when a Salvadoran judge found insufficient evidence to try an army officer who has been accused of ordering the 1981 murders of two U.S. land-reform experts, Michael Peter Hammer, 42, and Mark David Pearlman, 36; and Salvadoran Labor Leader Jose Rodolfo Viera, 43.

The State Department cable also reaffirmed support for the land-reform program that D'Aubuisson's party has tried hard to slow down, if not halt altogether. It urged the Salvadoran army to stop the brutal practice by landowners of forcibly evicting peasant sharecroppers from land that they could claim as their own under the reform. Said a senior U.S. diplomat in Washington last week: "It is slow and there are zillions of problems. But we feel land reform is doing much better." The improvement is still hard to see. In its May 21 cable, for example, the U.S. called for 12,000 clear titles to land to be granted to individual peasants in 1982. So far, there have been 408.

Perhaps the most critical effort of all, from the U.S. point of view, is Washington's determination to encourage the building of a new Salvadoran national consensus. The Administration's aim is to give the provisional authorities a chance to seize "the initiative from the F.D.R. and F.M.L.N. by offering opportunities for elements of the extreme left to return to the political mainstream." The U.S. hopes that the Salvadoran government will find ways to involve all major nonguerrilla groups, including the Roman Catholic Church, business, labor and rural peasants in that effort.

So far, the Reagan Administration's low-key campaign for change has produced disappointingly few results. U.S. proposals for reorganization of the armed forces have come to naught: the idea has been resisted by the tightly knit brotherhood of the Salvadoran armed forces, which exists almost as a society apart from the rest of the country's citizens. Human rights atrocities continue. According to Ambassador Hinton, at least 68 people were killed in the first two weeks of October. U.S. efforts have been further set back by the disappearance of 21 leftists and labor leaders, several of whom attended the meeting in Mexico City. Last week the Salvadoran government announced that eight of the missing were being held by the National Police on charges of belonging to guerrilla groups or leftist "political support groups." The whereabouts of the remaining 13 was not known.

In a speech last week, Hinton bluntly warned the government that if it could not control rightist "thugs" it could lose U.S. aid. Said he: "You don't have to kill people in the night. You don't have to decapitate people."

In pressing for the national reconciliation that many elements of Salvadoran society are now ready to consider, Washington has encountered yet another daunting obstacle: the fanatical intransigence of Roberto d'Aubuisson's ARENA party. Although D'Aubuisson indicated only a month ago that he accepted the prospect of bringing the rebellious left back into the country's political fold by 1984, some observers suspect that he has lost control of the more extreme members of his party. Says a U.S. official: "Every time D'Aubuisson does something responsible, the crazies around him get upset."

Despite the meager results, the Reagan Administration is convinced that it has adopted the proper course. Says a senior State Department official: "We see it as a long-term proposition. There are dips and bobs and weaves, good days and bad days. But the trend of the process is generally forward and upward, in a slow, erratic way." Just how slow and erratic may be decided in January, when the Administration must again certify to Congress that progress is being made on human rights and social reform in El Salvador.

--By George Russell. Reported by Timothy Loughran and James Willwerth/San Salvador

With reporting by Timothy Loughran, James Willwerth

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