Three Perspectives on El Salvador

THREE PERSPECTIVES ON EL SALVADOR Robert A. Pastor Ifthe Vietnam war stimulated a dialogue ofthe deaf, then the debate on U.S. policy toward El Salvador increasingly sounds like a dialogue between the committed and the confused. One is committed either to stopping the Communists or to stopping American involvement. Or one is a bit confused about developments there. Is the government of El Salvador rightist, leftist, or just aimless? Did the crisis originate in Moscow, Havana, Washington, in the feudalistic socioeconomic structure of El Salvador, or in two decades of economic progress? Is this an East-West struggle against communist insurgency , a North-South problem of social injustice, or none of the above? Who is responsible for the violence—the security forces, the communist terrorists, or U.S. military advisers? Will El Salvador become another Vietnam? Should the United States even care about developments in that small country and, if so, what should we do? These questions are at the center of the debate on El Salvador—a debate fought with guns there and with increasingly intense rhetoric in Washington. While trying to heal the poor nation of El Salvador, the American body politic seems to have contracted a case of the dreaded Central American disease of political polarization. Polarization has made the middle dangerous in El Salvador and unpopular in the United States, but a middle position exists, and there is a need to explore more fully this area, between those who advocate providing as much military aid as is necessary to defeat the left and those who believe we should get out completely. There are three perspectives with different sets of answers to the Robert A. Pastor coordinated Latin American and Caribbean affairs on the National Security Council staffin the White House during the Carter administration. He is currently a Guest Scholar at The Brookings Institution. 35 36 SAIS REVIEW questions above. Each perspective stems from a different vision of the origin of the crisis and leads to a different analysis of current developments there; prescriptions for Salvadoran and U.S. policy follow from these analyses.1 Included among those who view the crisis in El Salvador from the rightist perspective are the Salvadoran "oligarchy" and conservatives from Guatemala, Argentina, and the United States. "Oligarchy" is the term used to refer to the 200 or so families (originally, 14 families) who have owned or controlled the central sources of power in El Salvador—the largest farms, the best land, the banks, and the international trade sector. Until October 15, 1979, the oligarchy governed the country through the military. According to the rightist perspective, El Salvador was stable until after the Nicaraguan revolution when Moscow instructed Havana to put El Salvador on its "hit list." Thus, instability was "inflicted upon" El Salvador from the outside. Communist tactics are to destroy the economy, erode Western support for the government by publicizing its human rights violations, and divide and defeat the military. The fall of El Salvador will tip the other dominoes—Guatemala, Honduras, and even Mexico—and will ultimately affect the United States. They view the current government as weak and as pursuing a pusillanimous strategy of appeasement vis-à-vis the Communists. The Communists, they argue, cannot be defeated by socializing the economy; instead, the productive base ofthe country is undermined, thus making it easier for the Communists to bring the nation to its knees. The right believes that the communist cancer has reached an advanced state in El Salvador, and radical surgery—meaning perhaps 200,000 deaths—is necessary to excise the malignancy. While a military strategy is pursued, the private sector should be unleashed to get the economy moving again. The "social reformers" should be booted out (from both Salvadoran and U.S. governments). The agrarian and banking reforms should be reversed, and the export sector should be returned to private business. (For tactical reasons, the more sophisticated suggest "delaying" the reforms until the war is over.) Their prescription for U.S. policy follows from this analysis. El Salvador is providing the Reagan administration with its first test in the East-West struggle. The leader ofthe free world must draw the line 'Each perspective is necessarily distilled...