The fat lady sings
Christopher Hitchens Senator Washington Jesse Helms of North Carolina has been called, in an official 1,11110eratic Party circular to raise funds for 1Is defeat, 'the New Right's prince of darkness'. He cut his fangs as an ardent segregationist radio broadcaster in the days of the civil rights movement. He is an ally the extreme Christian fundamentalists, 51 one of the masters of the Senate 111 !Illbuster. He led the opposition to declar- ., g Martin Luther King's birthday a na- 'lanai holiday, alleging that King's move- ment had been a communist front. He sent a team of advisers to bolster Ian Smith's delegation at the Lancaster House talks, causing an irritated Lord Carrington to Petition Washington for their return. Whenever the Reaganite true believers need hear mpion on the floor, you can count on hng the famous Helms drawl. I once rie,,a.rd him inaugurate a long filibuster. by
slowly and saying, 'The opera ain t over till the fat lady sings.'
.s-s fundraiser, propagandist and eslator, Helms has been the jewel in s.eagan's crown, and well worth the occa- i.o.nal embarrassments. But last week he ,_131131Y irritated the Republican leadership blutlY asserting the obvio. El t.aly much-bruited democraticus elec- c°n, he said, had been 'arranged' by the 'We did everything,' growled Helms, `but stuff the ballot boxes.' of There are some sweet ironies here, some them at Helms's expense. The CIA has ° t ",,, fled oP to giving at least a million dollars uarte's party, and at least another F9°,000 to another centrist group which „ to qualify for the second round. The i° Wed purpose of this generosity was the ti,,e!eat of Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, Helms has described with a straight as El Salvador's equivalent of a ePUblican. (Duarte he dismisses as a ma11.gerous socialist'.) The Reagan ad- tn. Inistration, moreover, made it very clear ough its diplomatic and political repre- sentatives that Duarte had to win if the DBow of aid was to continue. Let's all be ank and admit that this partly justifies Aubuisson's Arena Party in claiming, a, s clid last week, that the elections were 'a 7ee' It also adds weight to Guillermo , ngO's statement made on behalf of the leftist guerrillas, that the elections were
merely a device for legitimising United States intervention. If Ungo has, as his critics say, become a captive of the hard Left, then Duarte, his former political part- ner, has certainly become a captive of the Pentagon and the CIA. Many normally vocal dogs have not bark- ed. The liberals, who were often ready to denounce CIA manipulation of elections in Greece, Chile, Italy and Lebanon, have decided to sit this one out. The Right, who usually spring to the Agency's defence and urge that it be allowed to operate in unimpeded clandestinity, have publicly criticised it and even leaked compromising material to the press. Roberto D'Au- buisson, who had been monotonously call- ing Duarte a communist, now ridicules him as a hireling of the gringos.
These ironies are, however, only super- ficial. In his outstanding new book Weakness and Deceit, New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner shows that D'Aubuisson and his squadristi were set up by the CIA in the first place. The values of the Salvadorian Right are, as it happens, deeply anti-American. They are pervaded with anti-Jewish and anti- democratic ideas, they regard America itself as decadent, and they are not above making demagogic appeals to 'anti-Yanquismo'. But their anti-communism eclipsed all this in the eyes of Washington, which has con- sistently deceived itself about the extent to which los escuadrones de la muerta are an organic and not a contingent part of the state apparatus.
The truth is, and Helms has blurted it out, that you can't have the one without the other. The fact that the CIA is now shopping on both sides of the street is only the sharpest illustration of this confusion.
In 1979, having left the army as a result of the coup which brought a brief period of civilian rule, Roberto D'Aubuisson made a series of minatory television broadcasts. I have seen the stills of him on the screen, pointing at photographs and dossiers, and warning those whom he identified that they were considered 'enemies of the fatherland'. Mario Zamora, a leading Christian Democratic member of the government, wks murdered very shortly after featuring in a D'Aubuisson broadcast. Archbishop Oscar Romero was told over the airwaves, 'You still have time to change your ways.' Not, as it turned out, all that much time. The thing to remember here is that all the dossiers, photographs and other exhibits on dissenters were supplied to D'Aubuisson by a well-known US govern- ment agency in Langley, Virginia. The chief of the death squads, General Jose Alberto Medrano, got his money and weapons from the same source. So did Colonel Nicholas Carranza of the bizarrely named Treasury Police, whose men concern themselves with anything but counterfeiting. The CIA will have to invest much more than a million dollars among the Christian Democrats before it makes up for what its previous clients did with their stipends.
Walter Mondale and Gary Hart are travelling the country and warning that if Ronald Reagan gets a second mandate, he will commit ground forces to Central America. This is becoming the received wisdom of the Democratic Party. There is another, more insidious line of reasoning which runs thus: Reagan will commit ground forces to Central America as a means of securing himself a second man- date. The first argument is too bland, and the second probably too conspiratorial. Who needs to go to war, after all, to beat Walter Mondale? Still it is safe to say that the debate, in all quarters, is resolving itself into the question of 'when?' rather than 'whether?'. If the administration wants what it says it wants — the defeat of the rebels in El Salvador and the removal of the revolutionary government in Nicaragua then it cannot encompass both by using on- ly local talent. (My first-born son could tell them that, and he really was born yester- day ).But it cannot dispense with local talent either, which means that it cannot quite discover a way of severing the ties
which bind it to the former Somozistas or to Roberto D'Aubuisson and his merry men. Helms cannot be faulted for pointing out this uncomfortable truth.
Duarte has, of course, been elected Presi- dent of El Salvador before. In 1972, with Guillermo Ungo as his running mate, he challenged the dictator Colonel Arturo Molina. He won, in spite of appalling in- timidation. The government simply annull- ed the results, tortured Duarte briefly, and sent him into exile. Subsequent protests were put down with the help of aircraft sup- plied by General Somoza in Nicaragua. Molina, who was in Taiwan at the time, was brought back to San Salvador in a United States military plane. His despotism lasted another seven years. Duarte appealed to the United States, and was received with utter indifference by the Nixon administration. A few thousand dollars, in the right place and at the right time, could have made all the difference in 1972. Woe and lack-a-day, the CIA was fully engaged elsewhere that year — in Chile to be precise. The moving finger writes ... .
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