Salvador's Supersalesman

By KURT ANDERSEN

With an assist from Duarte, Reagan reassures Congress and critics

The Reagan Administration wants to give billions of dollars to Central America, it says, to support liberty and political pluralism. Yet democracy in Central America is a patchy business at best. From among the few authentic democrats in the region, the U.S. has staked most of its money and hopes on Jose Napoleon Duarte, who will assume El Salvador's presidency on Friday. Last week he came to Washington for four days to justify that investment, and succeeded: Duarte won the hearts and minds of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, of President Reagan and severe Reagan critics. "No one could talk to him for half an hour without believing in him," said a high State Department official. "He exuded credibility." Just so: a day after Duarte returned home, where his army is firing a million rounds of ammunition a week in an unending war against leftist guerrillas, the House voted overwhelmingly to send El Salvador $62 million in emergency military aid, without conditions.

Reagan had prefaced his press conference last week with a stern speech in favor of more aid for Central America, and then faced a flurry of questions about his policies around the world. Indeed, the various, precarious strands of foreign policy dominated Washington's agenda all week. Pugnacity from Moscow and aerial assaults by Iran and Iraq on shipping in the Persian Gulf naturally prompted concern, even skittishness. "Mr. President," his final press conference inquisitor asked, "how do you account for the fact that so many people . . . think that during the last 3 1/2 years the world has moved closer to war?" Reagan had been prepped by two mock press conferences with his staff. "That is because that's all most of the people have been hearing . . . that I somehow have an itchy ringer and am going to blow up the world," he said.

Have Reagan's foreign policies actually made the world "a little safer," as he suggested last week? The American voters' answer to that question may be crucial in next fall's presidential election. Reagan's political advisers worry about a contagion of war fears. "We think the talk is getting carried away," says one White House aide. Reagan's soothing, rather lighthearted press-conference manner was meant to calm those national jitters.

Of all the unsettled issues, the Administration's policy in Central America is most controversial. Yet Duarte managed to make military aid to El Salvador a cinch. "We couldn't have done it without Duarte," said an Administration official. In eleven hours one day, the President-elect had eight back-to-back meetings with congressional committees and caucuses. "I need your help," he pleaded. "Don't leave me standing alone." Duarte, the first freely elected President in half a century, means to lead a country enduring a hellish civil war, where the ruling class has been particularly resistant to social reform. By trying to reform and perhaps even redeem El Salvador, he told one group, "I'm putting my life on the line." In 1972 he was imprisoned and beaten by the army he will now lead. Democratic Congressman Clarence Long of Maryland, a leading critic of Reagan's Latin American policies, was persuaded. "He's been tested and he's courageous," he said of Duarte. "He's our kind of man."

Duarte explained his plan to have a "national dialogue" with all Salvadoran factions, including the leftist insurgents. But such talks, he vowed, would never cede a share of governing power ("the piece of cake") to the revolutionaries. He said he would continue El Salvador's ambitious but teetering land-reform program (see WORLD). Perhaps most significant in terms of U.S. support, Duarte said he would establish commissions to investigate the thousands of political murders committed by the extreme right. "I have the will," he said. "I have the guts to do it, to stop the death squads." The day Duarte returned to El Salvador, orders were issued for the quasi-exile of Treasury Police Chief Nicolas Carranza, who is thought to be a death squad organizer.

A few hours before the House approved military aid, the most infamous Salvadoran death squad triggermen were convicted of murder. After a nonstop 20-hour trial, a jury of Salvadoran civilians found five former national guardsmen guilty of killing four American women in 1980. Three of the victims were Roman Catholic nuns. The provincial courtroom had a musky, Gabriel Garcia Marquez air. Through swinging saloon doors came and went a family selling sandwiches and coffee to spectators. A group of onlookers stood tiptoe on a junked car just outside--until the rotted car roof gave way. The crowd laughed; when the verdict came at 4 a.m., a man from the U.S. embassy cried happily.

The outcome was just, but the killers' commanders have not been charged. Moreover, the proceeding was a show trial, conducted for the benefit of Americans: no death squad member has yet been convicted of murdering a Salvadoran. Last year Congress made a $19 million chunk of Salvadoran aid contingent on a verdict in the nuns' case. Said New York Democratic Congressman Ted Weiss: "It's a $19 million verdict. The military knew it would lose it unless there was a trial."

Indeed, Weiss and other liberals argued for placing similar conditions on the Salvadoran aid approved last week. The concern in the White House, on the other hand, was whether Duarte's socialist tendencies might lead him to provoke El Salvador's landed oligarchy and their allies in the military. During an Oval Office chat, Duarte reassured Reagan that he was not hostile to private enterprise.

Duarte was evasive when asked about the CIA-financed contra attacks against the Sandinista regime of Nicaragua; he is ambivalent on the issue. The Reagan Administration claims it has funded the contras mainly for El Salvador's sake, to help cut the Salvadoran rebels' supply lines. Most Democrats in Congress, however, believe U.S. sponsorship of the insurgency is wrong, more trouble than it is worth, or both. Just an hour after the House approved the Salvadoran arms money, it voted to pinch off all funding for the contras.

"If we believe in the right of self-determination for El Salvador," asked Majority Leader Jim Wright, "must we not also believe in the right of self-determination for Nicaragua, with which we disagree?" U.S. patronage of the contras, said Democrat Edward Boland of Massachusetts, "has caused our allies to wonder at our sense of proportion." The Republican-controlled Senate has approved $21 million for the contras. But a standard, split-the-difference compromise may be unlikely, since keeping a meager flow to the contras would not satisfy either side.

Reagan still insists that his policies toward El Salvador and Nicaragua are fundamentally linked. Both, he suggested last week, involve struggles against "the expanding export of subversion by the Soviet bloc." He called the contra guerrillas "freedom fighters," and lumped them with Duarte's army. While he refused to rule out direct U.S. military intervention in El Salvador, he raised good arguments against it. "President Duarte made it very plain that they would never request American troops," Reagan said, and added, "Look at all our friends and neighbors in Latin America. . . we'd lose all those friends and neighbors if we did that."

Reagan also tried to allay fears that, as the Iran-Iraq war heats up, he will send U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. How likely is direct American intervention? "I can't foresee that happening," Reagan replied.

Transcending all foreign policy concerns is the sorry state of U.S. -Soviet relations. The Olympic boycott expands. Sakharov suffers. The Soviets seem unwilling to talk about nuclear-arms reductions. Instead, the Soviet Defense Minister announced last week that Moscow has added two warhead-laden submarines to the several already patrolling American coasts. Reagan tried to shrug off the new subs. "If I thought there was some reason to be concerned about them," he joshed, "I wouldn't be sleeping in this house tonight."

The President attributes the Soviets' harsh line to their discomfort over his military buildup. He also believes their belligerent mood will pass after the November election. Reagan is probably right that some of the recent Soviet misbehavior is calculated to unnerve Americans and encourage his defeat. But his aides hope that U.S. voters, and world opinion generally, will blame the Kremlin, not the White House, for the acute tensions. "They are doing Ronald Reagan a favor," says one presidential adviser. "When they take hamhanded, unilateral steps to close down the relationship, they are vindicating the Reagan rhetoric and taking him off the hook."

At least the President can count on appearing statesmanlike when he takes off on a low-risk, high-profile trip to Europe this week. He will probably face demonstrations in Ireland, and at the annual Western economic summit in London, he may be taken to task for high U.S. interest rates. No matter. The tour is mainly ceremonial, and Reagan is unbeatable at ceremony. When he hits the beach at Normandy to mark the 40th anniversary of D-day , he is sure to look every inch the Commander in Chief. And for Presidents, especially in an election year, splashy impressions count. --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Douglas Brew and Johanna McGeary/ Washington

With reporting by Douglas Brew, Johanna McGeary