Report

THERE IS NO END IN SIGHT TO THE war that has ravaged El Salvador for the last four years. 45,000 people have died or dis- appeared.

Article

IN BOTH THE POLITICAL AND MILITARY arenas, it appears that the situation in El Salvador has become bogged down; there is no hope of the pres- ent deadlock leading anywhere but to a greater exacer- bation of the war. The United States, hostage to its own policies and backed into a corner by its own rhetoric, has chosen to promote a series of elections designed to buy time.
A STRATEGIC ALLIANCE EXISTS TODAY between the Farabundo Marti National Libera- tion Front (FMLN) and the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), yet there are numerous and profound distinctions between the two. The FMLN has united five organizations which had been separate-even antagonistic-since 1969; the FDR has brought together groups of a different kind.
Claudia Dziobek
"We were 76 traveling companions and only one did not renegotiate; that was us," declared Brazil's Planning Minister Ant6nio Delfim Netto in a January 1983 speech attempting to jus- tify the secret negotiations that had been conducted with IMF officials since mid-1982. In the meantime it has be- come clear that this declaration amounts Claudia Dziobek is an economist spe- cializing in Third World debt.
Need for Bridge Building Martha Cooley's article, "Haiti: the AIDS Stigma" (September/October 1983 Report) calls long-overdue atten- tion to the plight of Haitians who are being victimized by the mixture of irra- tional fear and reinforced prejudice which has accompanied the AIDS epi- demic. The Haitian tourist industry has been practically destroyed and Haitians in this country, up against government attempts to deny them the right of resi- dence, have been made to feel even more unwelcome.
Marc Edelman & Jayne Hutchcroft
Only a few years ago, Costa Rican policemen carried screwdrivers, not guns, in their holsters. Much of their time was spent removing parking vio- lators' license plates.
Report on Human Rights in El Sal- vador by Aryeh Neier and Juan Men- dez. Americas Watch Committee and The American Civil Liberties Union, 91 pp.
ON OCTOBER 15, 1979 A GROUP OF YOUNG officers carried out a bloodless coup against the government of General Oscar Humberto Romero. Wel- comed by the United States, and with widespread sup- port among more senior officers, the coup aimed to head off a crisis that had been brewing since late 1976.
POOR GEORGE ORWELL. WITH THE YEAR just two months old, every camp from neocon- servative to Marxist has been trying to appropriate the pessimistic English socialist as its own.
EL SALVADOR'S CIVIL WAR EMBRACES TWO conflicts: one is the war between those in power and the FMLN-FDR insurgents; the other, a dispute for power between the extreme Right and the U.S.
THE RELATIVE LULL IN MILITARY ACTIVITY after the March 1982 elections, a result of the poli- tical setback suffered by the insurgents, coupled with the rumor of serious rifts within the FMLN, gave rise to speculation about the likelihood of a medium-term mili- tary victory by the armed forces. By September 1982, the Salvadorean military was boasting that the guerril- las' capacity was limited to "occasional spectacular at- tacks" and acts of sabotage.
THE FORCES ARRAYED AGAINST EACH other in the civil war are sharply defined; the op- posing blocs illustrate clearly that this is a class conflict. On one side, forces that revolve around big private enterprise; they largely control the state apparatus through the political parties that represent their inter- ests.
NO ANALYSIS OF THE SALVADOREAN crisis can ignore the ubiquitous presence of the United States in the nation's affairs: that much is clear after four years of civil war. U.