El Salvador: a new Vietnam?

Richard West

San Salvador Before coming to El Salvador, I bought a Communist pamphlet whose very title attempted to make the point: El Salvador: America's New Vietnam. The comparison has been made by the hapless Gerald Ford who was US President at the time the North invaded South Vietnam. He is quoted as saying, by one of the Salvadorean papers, that he hoped the United States, with regard to El Salvador 'will be more intelligent than we were in 1962 when we intervened in Vietnam'.

The critics or outright foes of the United States assume that she has already committed herself as firmly to El Salvador as once she did to Vietnam. For example, Graham Greene, whose novel The Quiet American predicted and also condemned United States intervention in Vietnam, recently equated (in a speech reprinted in the Spectator) the gulags of Russia with `the death squads of El Salvador, Guatemala and Argentina, death squads which now seem to be winning the support of the United States,' There is surely a difference between condoning a death squad in some foreign country and actually running a death squad, the KGB, which has murdered 20 million people?

The United States, like any power, can not be expected to break off relations with every foreign government that employs loathsome police forces.

But Mr Greene's strictures against the United States are not as stark as those in the advertisement for a charity War on Want', which appeared in the same issue of the Spectator (18 April 1981): 'El Salvador emergency. Nearly 20,000 people have been killed since the present government seized power. Peasant and popular orga nisations and the Church have been repressed. Military and economic aid from the US government to El Salvador continues . . . The people of El Salvador want a better and more just society. They are fighting against political oppression, economic and social inequality and foreign intervention etc . . .'Is this War on Want, or War on the United States? Why is the suffering worse because a foreign power is said to be partly responsible?

One must resist the desire to compare America's feeble support for El Salvador with the direct, blatant and brutal interven tion of Russia in Poland, Afghanistan and Ethiopia — let alone its less direct interfer ence in El Salvador, probably quite as big as America's, in terms of weapons and ammunition. This is not a place to bandy abuse; rather to ask why Latin America, and in particular El Salvador, so obsesses the Left of the Western world. And why it is linked with Vietnam?

To answer these questions, we have to throw our minds back to the Sixties, when the United States was getting involved in Vietnam: when Cuba was spreading its faith through Latin America; when radical stu dents were marching and shouting slogans from Paris and Berlin to Los Angeles; to the Berkeley (university) riots; to the welter of sects and slogans like New Left, the March through the Institutions, Black Power, Flower Power and Power to the People.

The New Left of the Sixties discovered its hero and archetype in the person of Che Guevara, a rich, truculent Argentine who had served under Castro before getting killed while trying to start a peasants' revolt in Bolivia. Che Guevara, Fidel and Ho Chi Minh were the revolutionary faces appearing on banners at countless demos.

The Seventies saw less concern with Vietnam and Latin America, The United States withdrew its troops from South Vietnam, leaving it open to an invasion by the army of the North; the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, probably worse even than Hitler's or Stalin's, gave revolution a bad name; the spectacle of the 'boat people' fleeing Indo-China caused some of the New Left to reconsider their loyalties.

In Latin America, revolution petered out. The,middle-classurban guerrilla groups in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina waged a campaign of bombing, shooting and kidnapping which had the (perhaps intended) result of provoking right-wing revolution and savage police repression. The New Left virtually disappeared in the torture chambers and execution sheds of southern America. The revolution was no longer fun. And then came the overthrow of Somoza , the cruel and venal dictator of Nicaragua. The little countries of Central America became sites of potential revolution, all the more so since they were physically close to Cuba.

Last year, Jamaica came close to revolution, with Cuban advisers helping the left-wing regime of Manley, and probably egging on, if not arming the gunmen who caused a wave of terror in Kingston. Then Manley was kicked out in a general election. El Salvador became once again the focus of left-wing interest in the region.

Many writers on El Salvador like to suggest that the latest troubles are only the latter round of an ancient struggle against social injustice and dictatorship — which in a sense is true. For most of its century and a half of independence not to mention three centuries under Spain — their country has suffered some kind of autocratic political rule and economic exploitation. But so has all Central America.

Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, by far the largest Central American state, have all suffered worse tyrannies, over a longer period than El Salvador. When I first came here, in 1966, El Salvador was considered the most peaceful and freest of all these states except Costa Rica, whose population is almost entirely European, and still enjoys a European democracy. The major trouble-spots of that time were Nicaragua, Guatemala and, in South America, Colombia, Venezuela and North-east Brazil. Left-wing excitement was focussed above all on the Caribbean island Dominican Republic, which was actually under occupation by US troops.

The growth of trouble in El Salvador followed the triumph of Nicaragua's Sandanista guerrillas, who now supply their comrades in El Salvador. Yet oddly enough, the movement of revolution has leap-frogged Honduras, which lies in between the two countries, and might have been thought inflammable. It is the classic `banana republic' whose governments rose and fell at the whim of the United Fruit Company. Yet Honduras is peaceful.

The rising of El Salvador was led and inspired by the various left-wing groups, who seem to have found support with the peasants if not in the towns. The left-wing terror is more than matched by the Salvadorean armed forces, the worst of whom are the oddly-named Treasury Police, a combination of SS and the Income Tax. These people scarcely bother to disguise their murders of Communists and alleged supporters. Their victims include a number of priests and Archbishop Romero of San Salvador, gunned down at the altar. When the new Reagan administration announced its intention of halting what it regards as aggressive Soviet policies throughout the world, it implied rather than promised strong US support for the junta in El Salvador.

At this, the American press and TV descended in hundreds to seek out, and find evidence of the cruelty in El Salvador. At one point, one of the TV networks had six film crews staying in the Camino Real Hotel, all chattering to each other over the walkie-talkie sets which are now de rigueur in TV circles. Some of the Press Corps I know from Vietnam days. Others are young and eager, wearing facetious T-shirts saying in Spanish 'Pressman — Don't Shoot!'. As in Vietnam, the reporters divide between those looking for bloody stories and photographs, and those who are hoping to make their name with an exposé of political hanky-panky. There are other types reminiscent of Vietnam, such as the diplomats, often divided amongst themselves and sceptical of the instructions from Washington. There are visiting Congressmen, touching down here to show their constituents that they are earning their salaries. There are US Army and Air Force advisers who, unlike those in Vietnam, do not appear much in public. Even the CIA here is inconspicuous. America's intervention consisted largely of giving or selling arms to the Salvadorian government as indeed she does to almost every country in the hemisphere, and the nonCommunist world, The Carter government welcomed the overthrow of the former dictatorship and its replacement by the present junta, of a reforming nature. Even the Reagan government has decried the brutality and apparent lawlessness of El Salvador's army and its police forces. It seems that the present administration would like the El Salvador government to continue its promised social reforms, and in particular land reform. This last was met with hostility with the Salvadorean ruling class. Two American land reform experts were shot dead — presumably by rightist thugs in the coffee shop of the Sheraton Hotel.

The concern with land reform is a throw-back to Vietnam where dozens of US aid and political agencies were busy throughout the Mekong Delta and other agricultural areas, spreading their wellintended but often contradictory theories on rice improvement, irrigation, cooperative marketing and the rest. The fine theories of land reform often failed to consider ancient, complicated usages in which the peasants themselves as much as the landlords and merchants, were often an obstacle to reform.

And land reform is not always the blessing it sounds. In Bolivia and the highlands of Peru, the redistribution of land proved an economic disaster, not least to the new peasant proprietors. The land reforms of Allende contributed to the bankruptcy of Chile. If land reform does not improve the farming of livestock and subsistence drops, it is almost always disastrous for cash crops, like coffee and bananas, which are the basis of the wealth of Central America.

Nor is land reform always popular with the peasantry. The massacre of the kulaks in Russia did not in any way help the landless peasants. The land reform initiated in North Vietnam in 1954 was a ghastly blunder, later admitted as such by Ho Chi Minh. The Cuban economy has been destroyed by land reform, whatever its merits in terms of social justice. In the Communist, as in the non-Communist world, it seems that land reform tends to encourage rather than slow down the drift from the countryside to the towns.

It may be wrong and politically dangerous for the United States to back unsavoury governments such as that of El Salvador. There are still worse dangers in trying to improve foreign governments; in trying to make them well-behaved, liberal democracies. It was the high-minded liberal President Woodrow Wilson who sent troops into Mexico in order to overthrow their government. It was he who proclaimed, with insufferable arrogance: 'I propose to teach the South American Republics to elect good men'. The same streak of bossiness could be found in another Democrat President, John F. Kennedy, who launched a high-falutin' 'Alliance for Progress' to try to bring the rest of the Continent up to American moral standards. He infuriated both Left and Right in Latin America. His attempt to get rid by force of Fidel Castro ended in ignominy at the Bay of Pigs.

It was President Kennedy as well, who permitted, if he did not inspire, the coup d'etat against President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in November 1962. His regime too was brutal and undemocratic. The liberal newspapers in the United States campaigned against their country's support for a government that, among other things, did not introduce land reform. And so Diem and his brother were overthrown and murdered, shortly before Kennedy's own death. And the South Vietnamese never forgave the United States for having interfered in their business, for having tried to play God. I am among those who blame the overthrow of Diem for the catastrophic war and defeat in Indo-China, Ex-President Ford is right. The United States should not get involved in El Salvador. Nor should it try to interfere with the country to make the political system more acceptable to high-minded opinion. The United States has strategic and economic interests in Central America but these do not bestow any special moral responsibility for what goes on there.

To those who describe El Salvador as 'America's new Vietnam', I recommend visiting Vietnam as I did last year. The war goes on as hard as ever — this time against the neighbouring Communist Chinese and Cambodians. The Americans have gone, only to be replaced by hundreds of Russian advisers. The streets of Saigon are loud with old American rock music. The Yankees are loved and missed. And down in the Mekong Delta, I heard from our guide, the government has not interfered with the agricultural system for fear of upsetting the peasants.