Four Down, Four to Go FOUR YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, THE FMLN launched an offensive in El Salvador de- signed to present incoming U.S. President Ronald Reagan with an "irreversible" situation. That was January 10. In those early days of 1981, there was a mood of euphoric optimism on the Left. Revolu- tionaries in Guatemala and El Salvador thought they glimpsed an imminent victory on the Nicaraguan pattern. Their optimism was short-lived. Seven days after the FMLN offensive, on January 17, Salvado- rean troops were cracking open the first crates of M- 16s and grenades, the initial consignment of so- called "lethal" aid from Washington. Jimmy Car- ter's lame-duck administration had three days to run. The Carter Administration also found time in its last week in office to suspend aid payments to Nica- ragua, after the first of repeated charges that the Sandinista government was channeling arms to the FMLN. Those charges that Nicaragua was "export- ing communist subversion" were echoed in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where a man identifying himself only as "the coordinator" announced to the press that he had 250 troops in the field ready to fight the Sandinistas. When it ran in January 1981, the story attracted little attention. The name contra had not yet been invented. F OUR YEARS LATER, HOW FAR HAVE WE come? Millions of words have been written on the region. One recent book bears the appropriate title of Endless War. More than 60,000 Central Americans died during the first Reagan term. The scrublands of eastern Honduras and the forested mountains of northern Nicaragua have witnessed the most extensive and repugnant covert war in recent history. The contra forces have grown to more than 10,000. In El Salvador, those crates of M-16s have been followed by half a billion dollars in military aid. A short- or mid-term revolutionary victory now seems out of the question. As the first Reagan Ad- ministration boasted, not an inch of turf was "lost" on its watch. Better yet, Grenada was snatched from the jaws of Soviet-Cuban conspiracy. With the sole exception of continued congressional truculence over aid to the contras, Washington feels that its re- gional policy is going well. The Reagan Administration, like its predecessor, broadly defines its goals as bolstering centrist politi- cal forces and democratic institutions. The clearest statement of its long-term intentions is the report of the Kissinger Commission, which advocates an in- flux of $8.8 billion of U.S. assistance to the region over the next five years. But will the Congress buy it? And is this a realistic blueprint, or an exercise in bipartisan chicanery for immediate political ends? It frequently seems that policy goals extend no farther than winning a military victory in El Salvador and overthrowing a Nicaraguan government for which Washington feels an obsessive hatred. The policy disputes that have racked Reagan's first four years-Hawks vs. Doves, pragmatists vs. ideologues--continue unresolved. Secretary of State George Shultz's declared intent to purge ultra-con- servative political appointees from the diplomatic corps is only the latest in a series of conflicting sig- nals and public disagreements. The old question again arises: who's in charge? As for the Democratic Party, the liberal foreign policy interlude of the early Carter years, which culminated in the fall of Somoza, now appears to many as a Paradise Lost. The party has once again fractured into competing wings, and has stumbled to its fourth electoral humiliation in five outings. There are alarmingly few signs of an alternative Central America policy growing in the party's ranks. Where, then, is the al- ternative to come from? THESE ARE SOME OF THE QUESTIONS WE address in this special issue of NACLA's Re- port on the Americas. History, of course, refuses to stand still, and events in Central America have rushed onward since we invited a group of friends and colleagues, policy experts and academics, ac- tivists and notable past contributors to the magazine, to join us in New York on November 30 and De- cember 1, 1984 to talk about Central America and the second Reagan term. In the case of El Salvador, one focus of our dis- cussion was the new political dynamic set in motion by the La Palma peace talks. In the judgment of many of the participants in our meeting, the process raised two obstacles: one was the impossibility of the FMLN-FDR accepting Duarte's bottom-line de- mand of surrender, the other the unpredictable reac- tion of the Right to the dialogue. On both counts we were rapidly proved right. Even as we met in New York, the second round of talks in the Salesian semi- nary of Ayagualo were foundering on Duarte's re- fusal to consider peace proposals from the FMLN- FDR. And while the so-called "humanization of the war" was uneasily marked by Christmas and New JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1985 Tai Ng N 3Year truces, the humanization of the Salvadorean Right seemed as distant a prospect as ever. On Janu- ary 6, Roberto D'Aubuisson condemned the talks as "a propaganda tool for the rebels." The same day, Pedro Rene Yanes, Christian Democratic head of an official inquiry into corruption, was shot dead by members of D'Aubuisson's ARENA. Yet as the March legislative elections loom closer, the administration continues to send mixed signals on how to deal with these tensions. Intelli- gence reports say that Duarte is now under greater threat than ever from the Right, but U.S. officials portray the conflict as healthy evidence of democ- racy in action, and hint that the United States would back a right-wing majority in the Assembly. The speed of events in Nicaragua illustrates even more forcefully the difficulty of timely analysis. The complex chess game of the Sandinista transition continues, with the final repercussions of the November 4 elections still unclear. Some polarities have grown more acute. The brief pre-election d6- tente between the government and La Prensa has ended abruptly with the decision by editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Barrios to go into voluntary exile. But there are signs elsewhere that political dialogue may yet advance. The opposition Social Christian Party has broken away from its arch-con- servative allies in the Coordinadora. Both Presi- dent-elect Daniel Ortega and Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega, head of the Episcopal Conference, described their Christmas talks as "very positive." And the FSLN has appointed a special commission to devise ways of granting some degree of self-rule to the troubled Atlantic Coast region. More urgently, the critical contra vote hangs in the balance. Since December 1, we have seen Ar- turo Cruz complete his descent from loyal critic of the Sandinistas to advocate of aid for the FDN. In a Washington, D.C. news conference on January 3, Cruz declared his "commonality of purpose" with the contras, and announced it would be "a terrible political mistake" for Congress to continue to block aid. On the other hand, a number of other develop- ments suggest that the administration may still not get its way on the crucial vote. On grounds of both morality and pragmatism-the latter likely to carry greater weight in Congress--the month of De- cember brought fresh ammunition for opponents of the aid. Reports of contra atrocities circulated widely on Capitol Hill, and a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence condemned the CIA for "inadequate supervision and management" of its Nicaragua operation. 4 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS VER THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF THE Reagan presidency, two-thirds of the issues of Report on the Americas have focussed on the crisis in Central America and the Caribbean. Our themes have ranged from the minutiae of U.S. military strategy to the activities of evangelical Christians, from the diplomacy of the Contadora countries to the changing attitudes of the U.S. media. These Re- ports have been complemented by our research on the state of politics in the United States in the 1980s, from the landslide triumphs of the New Right and the neoconservatives, to the debacles of the Demo- cratic Party. The rationale behind all this work is a commit- ment to seek out alternatives in the pages of the magazine. Where the Reagan Administration has proclaimed the need to stay the course, we have asked how the course can be changed. We under- stand that to mean two things. One is to find the fac- tual and analytical basis for fresh policy options that promise to bring about a peaceful and equitable set- tlement of the regional crisis. The other involves a critical assessment of our own role as scholars and journalists, discarding stale formulae and dogma where they have served us badly and instead finding innovative methods and fresh language to address enduring problems. The four years since Reagan first took office have been arduous ones for critics on the Left. The New Right may still chafe that its agenda is incomplete, that its leaders have been passed over in the search for high office, but the Reagan revolution has brought a sweeping shift in the intellectual climate of the country. The Reagan era is the age of "new ideas" in the worst sense, as neoconservatives and neoliberals compete to shift the center of gravity of political debate to the Right. It is time to arrest that slide, and to stake out new terrain in which progres- sive ideas can breathe and have broad resonance. With that goal in mind, we bring you this unusual issue of NACLA's Report on the Americas. We have set aside the customary format of the magazine, and instead of a series of detailed analyti- cal essays, we offer you the proceedings of a sym- posium. We have chosen the beginning of President Reagan's second term of office as a time to draw to- gether the main threads of our work from 1981-84 and to sketch out the main themes that we will be thinking and writing about over the next four years. This Report contains the highlights of the discus- sions which we held in New York two months ago, with a range of opinions sharp enough to touch off polemic, yet close enough, we hope, to provide the framework for a progressive consensus.
