Might and right in San Salvador

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

WEAKNESS AND DECEIT by Raymond Bonner

Hamish Hamilton, f13.95

They were priests and their catechists, teachers and their students, carpenters and

peasants. Among them were arthritic old men and little children who just happened to be around. The lucky ones would be lying in ditches, thumbs tied behind their backs and a neat bullet hole through the back of the skull. Others would be flayed alive and left hanging from trees or have their eyes scooped out with teaspoons before being hacked to pieces and strewn across San Salvador's nearby lava bed, where relatives would hunt through the rotting flesh for some trace of them. Over 13,000 were murdered by the authorities in the 12 months before January 1982 when President Reagan went before Congress and certified that the Salvadorean govern- ment was making a serious effort to respect human rights.

Raymond Bonner was a witness to this slaughter. He was the New York Times correspondent in El Salvador until he was forced out by the American embassy for supposedly sympathising with the guerril- las. His excellent book lays bare what everybody suspected already, that the Reagan administration was not only turn- ing a blind eye to the death squads but was essentially funding and supplying them. Confidential cables, either released under the Freedom of Information Act or leaked to Bonner by exasperated diplomats, re- veal that the American embassy knew exactly who was doing the killing and buried the secret.

Instead, a myth was fostered that the violence came from extremists of the left and right, while the army was caught in the middle, needing ever greater infusions of US military aid to spearhead reform and save the country from anarchy. Many believed that the rightist death squads with their colourful names, the White Warriors Union and the Secret Anti-Communist Army, were just the private hit teams of a few fanatical landowners, but in fact there is no distinction between these assassins and the security forces. All are instruments of the army-run apparatus of terror. Army officers control the National Police, the National Guard, and the most evil of them all — the Treasury Police, which has somewhat exceeded its role of collecting taxes. And beneath these are the 80,000 paramilitary thugs of 'Orden' who make sure that things run smoothly in the coun- tryside and who go on army raids, wearing black hoods, and fingering 'subversive' and `delinquent' families.

The Americans did not approve of this, indeed there were frequent threats to cut off aid if the security forces did not, as George Schultz put it, 'cut that shit out'. But the Salvadorean army, incompetent and cowardly as it may have been at the beginning of the war, fearing to venture into rebel territory unless in sweeps of several battalions and keeping its officers well clear of hostile fire, was still the last defence against Marxist revolution. The high command gambled that the United States would not rock the boat over the foggy question of counter-insurgency methods. It made no concessions, punished no officers, carried on stealing millions of dollars, and got away with it.

Not even when three American nuns and a lay missionary were raped and murdered by the National Guard did the Reagan, administration force the issue. Rumours were put out that the nuns were subversive' and 'had it coming to them', and it was only after four years of howling in the Congress and the American press that the henchmen, though not their officers, were brought to trial. But there was no punish- ment for the killers of two American land reform advisers, gunned down while hav- ing dinner at the San Salvador Sheraton. Lieutenant Lopez Sibrian, who ordered the attack, has since been promoted and is often seen driving around the capital in his red Mustang. Open threats by the Penta- gon and a personal intervention by Presi- dent Reagan failed to bring the Salvado- rean army to heel. As always, it closed , ranks and called the American bluff.

`El Salvador is thumbing its nose at us' roared a furious Senator Leahy, 'it's saying "give us a billion dollars and go to hell" '. Exactly.

But it was not only in protecting human rights, argues Bonner, that the United States failed to use its leverage over the Salvadorean army. It gave no support to the reforms of the progressive young offic- ers after the coup in 1979, thereby tipping the balance back in favour of the uncom- promising old guard, and it did not push the army into negotiations with the rebels. It is typical of American liberals to put so much faith in 'talks', as if the civil war was just a semantic misunderstanding. When President Duarte did finally invite the FMLN last October to a 'peace dialogue' at La Palma, one guerrilla faction did not attend and the others demanded almost unconditional surrender. What, after all, did they have to say to each other?

It is when Bonner goes on from minute investigative journalism to an analysis of the Salvadorean civil war that his book starts to resemble the many radical tracts denouncing US policy in Central America. He does not, to his credit, go on and on about `transnational capital' and 'neo- colonialism', indeed he says that `multina- tional investment has been too minuscule to influence policy' — a rare insight. His error is not Marxist but rather that he is perhaps too ingenuously Christian, for he seems to link the iniquity of the American position to its inevitable failure, as if there were some correspondence between morality and politics.

He believes the guerrillas are winning the war. They are not. Up in their moun- tain retreats the FMLN can hold on for years, harrassing army patrols, blowing up electricity pylons, and burning buses on the pan-American highway, but few now think they can actually defeat the US trained `Hunter' battalions backed up with fleets of helicopter gunships and A-37 Dragonflies that are dropping eight tons of bombs daily on the villages and hamlets of rebel terri- tory. 'El Salvador is a country where we can win' wrote William Safire of the New York Times. 'Logistics, for a change, works against the communists and for us.'

The Soviet Union pushes forward slow- ly, keeping Americans divided among themselves as to whether each step in itself poses a strategic threat. One has to draw the line somewhere; Al Haig drew it in El Salvador. It was the country chosen for a showdown with Marxist expansion and, after the reverses of the Carter era, for a reassertion of American power.

For the Salvadorean people it might have been better if the FMLN had toppled the whole fascist edifice five years ago. The guerrilla high command, though mostly communist and with a habit of butchering each other with pickaxes to settle personal rivalries and ideological schisms, has not made genocide a part of its strategy.

Guerrilla recruits learn not only the 'theory of surplus value' but also the Geneva Convention before they are unleashed on their countrymen. Like their Sandinista comrades in Nicar- agua, the rebel leaders would slowly have pushed aside their civilian allies in the FDR, using them for a front of democratic respectability before discarding them, as the institutions of the state became the property of the party, and as veteran guerrillas became the guardians of an irreversible revolution. The FMLN has never spoken for the majority of El Salva- dor and it would have been disastrous had the rebels won the war, but even so, it would almost certainly have been better for El Salvador than the obscenity which has been practised on that enchanting little country.

But the Reagan administration has not been fighting the war for the Salvadorean people. They have been cannon fodder in a global and an ideological contest, sacri- ficed so that Marxists all over the world should realise the costs of trying to shoot their way into power.

In weighing the ends of realpolitik against the moral depravity of such means one needs to know just how wicked the Reagan administration has really been. Raymond Bonner gives us the details. After reading his book one would have to be a very hard man to think the price was worth paying.