A Central American Journal
Novak, Robert D.
Robert D. Novak A CENTRAL AMERICAN JOURNAL The Novak of Evans & Novak reports adagio con pessimismo from San Salvador, Managua, Tegucigalpa, and Guatemala City. While Communist guerrillas...
...His arm was in a cast from wounds caused by gunshots fired by unknown assailants (he suspects Christian Democrats, not Communists...
...But beneath this surface are the same economic woes and troubles with Washington seen in San Salvador...
...he hears voices all the time and even sees the ghosts of the title...
...So, they run their businesses by Robert D. Novak ii a nationally syndicated columnist based in Washington, D. C. telephone from Miami, make occasional flying trips to Salvador, and dream of the day when they can return...
...Hinton regards as " s t u p i d " the congressional requirement for periodic certification of the " r e f o r m s " that prohibit denationalization of coffee exports, a requirement the Ambassador thinks is desirable...
...Yet there were signs that the Army, with U.S...
...The heavyset Garcia was genial but no more enchanted by the National Assembly's tinkering with the agrarian reform than he was with its previous stalemate over presidential succession...
...San Salvador, May 17...
...backing, might strike again if the National Assembly exercised its mandate...
...The expatriates were divided whether capitalism could flourish under authoritarian rule...
...Emphasis on human rights is maintained at the middle-level of the State Department by Carter Administration holdovers, but even opponents of this policy in the U.S...
...San Salvador, May 18...
...D'Aubuisson, accused by his enemies of leading right-wing "death squads" in years past, arrived in the flush of victory from the National Assembly vote...
...Since the overthrow of the brutal, corrupt military dictatorship two months earlier, the mood has lightened...
...Nothing...
...Things are as bad as ever, maybe worse...
...The boyish-looking new U.S...
...The protagonist, Mickelsson, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the State University...
...That same night, a leading ARENA member invited me to his home for a party, during which I would interview Major D' Aubuisson...
...The economic rot in Nicaragua transcends the commodity price deflation plaguing all Central America and derives from the dead economic hand of Communism...
...Alvaro Magana...
...Guillermo (Billy) Sol, an Americaneducated (Texas A&M, '52) business executive, typifies the ARENA supporter having his first fling at politics...
...In our meeting at the presidential mansion, Rios Montt subdued the flamboyant Christian evangelism that has been his life the last five years...
...There is no insurgency within its borders...
...The governmentowned Intercontinental Hotel where I stayed is enveloped in...
...John Podhoretz LANDSCAPE FICTION John Gardner's shot at The Great American Novel...
...I n a 1956 piece for Partisan Review, Leslie Fiedler, reviewing four new novels, found himself seized by "a depressing desire to sneak out to a movie...
...But they were growing in number, bringing back more and more recruits from each cross-border raid...
...the country was not ready for rule by ARENA...
...Even hopeless Guatemala seemed to be getting better, with the new military government a marked improvement over its brutal predecessor...
...But D'Aubuisson was delayed by the National Assembly session on the agrarian reform, and I had ample opportunity to talk to key ARENA figures in the government...
...I received a preview from Duarte himself, who seemed happy to be relieved of the burdens of government...
...Democracy is not the answer...
...San Salvador, May 19...
...The astute General Alvarez in Honduras had told me that Guatemala was a markedly more serious problem than El Salvador, and I quickly found him to be correct...
...Magana had been put in power by what the businessmen called a military coup d' " etat against D'Aubuisson's National Assembly...
...To my surprise, only one of the expatriates was contemplating a permanent return in the wake of the March 28 elections and that is only because he could no longer stand Florida rather than because of any perceived improvement back home...
...They have been allotted the economic portfolios in the three-party coalition government and aim to restore freedom for private enterprise so restricted under the Christian Democratic president, J o s e Napoleon Duarte...
...The steady armament of neighboring Nicaragua is deeply disturbing to officials here, none more so than Ambassador Negroponte, a one-time aide to Henry Kissinger in the Paris talks on Vietnam...
...There was little of the aura of danger and tension that immediately seized a visitor to Saigon...
...To him, as to the other Guatemalans, the Falklands War underscored the undependability of Uncle Sam...
...But Hinton embraces the notion of"taking flags from the Communists" so cherished by the State Department--in El Salvador's case, the confiscation and collectivization of private property...
...Influenced in part by Michael Novak's brilliant new book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, I was looking for signs of Central American interest in a democratic capitalist model instead of the usual authoritarian and Marxist ones...
...I did see Garcia at the Army high command that day...
...Guatemala City, with its heavy traffic and highrise skyline, bears no resemblance to decaying Managua and hardly any to the sleepy Guatemalan capital I last visited in 1966...
...But he denied he wanted sophisticated new U.S...
...Mickelsson, it seems, has been driven mad by nothing less than the sorry state of mankind in the late twentieth century...
...Crisply efficient, he waved in my face a copy of a letter to U.S...
...President Magana, a'worldly technocrat who speaks excellent English, saw me alone at the Presidential Palace without aide, interpreterr or recording device present (the only other chief of state to do so with me during the past 20 years was Ronald Reagan...
...The simultaneous nationalization of banking and agriculture by the Duarte regime, linked to the fallen sugar and coffee prices, had produced an economic crisis...
...Embassy hesitate to restore aid...
...military aid...
...Miami, May 16...
...military aid in the war against the Communists should be endangered by politicians defying Washington's orders...
...Still, he has become enough of a politician to understand that, however economically desirable, estates cannot be restored to the big landowners...
...Ambassador, Frederick Chapin, is an old foreign-service hand who helped write the Marshall Plan and is an expert on foreign aid...
...Rios Montt is Guatemala's first ruler in recent memory who has any rapport with the public, but he obviously has not even the slightest concept of government, especially of economics...
...If nothing happens, I leave...
...Garcia was outraged that essential U.S...
...But unlike Duarte, Magana called in the private sector to cooperate...
...ashiugtou, May 28...
...The new U.S...
...They do not want Guatemala to be subjected to the same humiliating surveillance by Congress now required for Ei Salvador...
...They were obsessed by events in the Falklands-even liberals with no affection for the junta in Buenos Aires...
...Teguclgalpa, May 22...
...ambassador, and Gen...
...Then, a woman who had been silent all evening spoke: "We have had our elections in El Salvador, and what has happened...
...He talks to himself continually and has been known to dress up in Victorian garb while smearing his face with Indian war-paint...
...The symbol of Managua for me on this Sunday was the Cathedral, never restored after the earthquake, heavy vegetation growing on the floor, and a huge Sandinista flag defacing its exterior...
...For the first time," he said, "I thought democracy could work in this country...
...The unexpected flow of campesinos going to the polls to vote ARENA moved him...
...Tlaey believe capitalism has never been given a chance in El Salvador under the heavy hand of church and state...
...He worries about his children, ruminates over his past life, fantasizes about and enters into a fitful sexual relation with a gorgeous Jewish sociology professor, and is drawn into a search for a document that might delegitimate the Mormon Church...
...This is, of course, no longer the case, but Fiedler's comment still holds true...
...As a veteran of trying to report Vietnam, I was leery of even such modest outbursts of official optimism, so I spent a quick ten days in Central America to shape my own tentative assessment...
...Jose Garcia, minister of defense and head of the Army...
...General Garcia, I suspect, cares nothing" for land reform...
...Alone among senior U.S...
...But what is expected to happen...
...With this article be begins a regular column on fiction...
...This coincided with the coming of the first democratically elected government in Honduras, which was proceeding on a sensible course...
...strategy to confront this first Communist presence on the American mainland...
...He told me in an offhand manner that the National Assembly will make "a little change" tkis very evening in Duarte's agrarian reform bill, making sure landowners can lease small plots of land for the coming growing season without fear of losing title to the land under Section III of the Land Reform Act...
...Several non-party businessmen put the Salvadoran situation in" perspective over dinner...
...Though flat broke, he buys a beautiful, ramshackle old house which he lovingly re.stores to its former aristocratic grandeur...
...But he is no 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 ideological cold warrior comm-tted to makieg life u~..pleasant for the Sandinistas...
...Only the big enterprises that the Sandinistas must keep operating and cannot run themselves--such as the San Antonio sugar operation and the Coca Cola bottling works--are left untouched...
...Embassy and the Army will prevent the rollback of socialist "reform" imposed with Washington's blessing by the Duarte government...
...failure to join the Rio pact in support of Argentina clouds prospects of a united effort against Marxist-Leninist Nicaragua...
...Gen...
...Alvarez is deeply concerned by the Nicaraguan build-up, for which continued Honduran air superiorky is the answer...
...In particular, the role of the United States in Central America seems confused, contradictory, committed to no overriding strategy...
...My contacts with private citizens reveal this story: Nicaragua is a Communist police state in everything but name...
...He is bemused at the infinkesimal trickle of aid permitted because of the past regime's human rights transgressions...
...They impressed me by their lack of bloated claims and admissions of how badly armed they were...
...The young Army officers who brought him to power have been stunned...
...I would not see Hinton until the next day, but another U.S...
...Gustavo Anzueto, a defeated consereatire presidential candidate in the last :orrupted election, agrees...
...We need production, not taxes...
...The Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, exporter of subversion to El Salvador and Hondurasl now faced its own insurgency creeping across the borders from Honduras...
...diplomat told me that the Embassy was mightily displeased, fearful of the firestorm in Congress...
...Filling his second important ambassadorial role at age 41, Quainton is one of the bright young men of the Foreign Service...
...recent American novels have failed to do...
...meeting with Get...
...But the major plot strand concerns a teenage prostitute Mickelsson takes up with...
...Few weapons and few troops were in evidence...
...I met two of these anti-Sandinista guerrilla leaders later that day in the lobby of the Hotel Maya...
...More important than Duarte's political reflex was how the change in the reform affected the two most powerful men in this country: Dean Hinton, the U.S...
...policy in the Falklands that I would hear everywhere on my trip...
...jet aircraft...
...Ail recognize it is merely a stay of execution...
...We follow him through the most~dis*Random House, $16.95...
...It is no longer a deluxe international hotel, the facilities disintegrating as Nicaragua slowly descends into the Third World...
...This was the man who had responded to Dick Walters's visit by ordering the National Assembly to end its bickering and elect a president (specifically Dr...
...The change in the agrarian reform, he told me, "is a sign of the hatred by the extreme Right...
...The "little change" in the reform bill proved an immediate threat to the desperately needed flow of U.S...
...My eight a.m...
...The house, however, is haunted...
...We thought there never could be anything worse than Somoza," he said...
...In typical MarxistLeninist patterns, the " h a r d s " in the Sandinista revolution supplant the "softs...
...Expropriations of private property, especially productive farm land, are accelerating...
...John Gardner's new novel, Mickelsson's Ghosts,* is a particularly interesting case in point...
...To get $85 million needed from the International Monetary Fund, Honduras was being forced to raise taxes...
...They are less stereotypical Latin American authoritarians than acolytes of Milton Friedman...
...The gM becomes pregnant, and Mickelsson, who has a horror of abortion, is forced into a terrifying step to save the life of what may not even be his unborn child...
...He went to great lengths to make it clear that if his name appeared in print he would surely be arrested and imprisoned for a violation of security...
...It lacks the buoyancy of the Hispanic culture...
...gloom, secret police officers reportedly abounding on the staff...
...Any trip to Central America begins here, where expatriates abound...
...of New York at Binghamton, is (as Gardner informs us in a preface) a"lunatic...
...Yet there is no U.S...
...In Latin America, Uncle Sam is perceiyed as part of the problem--and the perception is correct...
...Roberto D'Aubuisson, viewing him as an upstart unqualified for high office...
...What bothers him is the troublesome workings of representative democracy, much more cumbersome than a junta...
...This is no longer a city of fear where cars stay off the street after dark...
...Positively not," he said...
...Vernon (DicK) Waiters, U.S...
...He is short, slim, intense, and looking perhaps a little older than his 38 years...
...The expatriates were heartsick that the rightwing victory had been followed by what they considered intervention by Lt...
...The deceptive tranquillity was enhanced by the fact that the international press corps no longer infested the Hotel Camino Real but, to the delight of almost everyone, had departed to cover the Falklands War...
...Managua, May 23.There is no there in Managua...
...Fiedler was writing at a time when there was something disreputable, something delightfully scandalous, about preferring movies to novels...
...In private conversation, they express fear that the U.S...
...Over the dinner table, we discussed Chile's system of authoritarian rule mixed with capitalism...
...He sees himself as a transitional president, neither retreating on past land confiscations nor advancing on new ones...
...That defiance of Communist effot~ts at disruption led gloomy Washington officials to reassess their fears that CentralAmerica was lost...
...most recently, the president of the central bank was overridden in attempts for modest incentives for the private sector, and defected on his honeymoon to Panama...
...I spent the evening before my flight to San Salvador enjoying the hospitality of self-exiled Salvadoran men and women of means (they deeply resent being called " o l i g a r c h s " ) , who prefer Miami to the constant threat of kidnapping and demands on their relatives for ransom...
...This bitterness was eclipsed over lunch with several prominent Hondurans...
...Ambassador, Anthony C. Quainton, has not reassured the regime's dissidents about Washington's intentions...
...tilt toward Britain in the Falklands, confirming all Honduran doubts about Washington...
...In Salvador, the guerrillas were licking their wounds while a de jure government took power...
...Efrain Rios Montt, president of the junta, has taken the position that he needs no U.S...
...While Communist guerrillas ambushed inept government troops in E1 Salvador this summer, self-righteous congressmen in Washington complained that collectivization of the land was moving too slowly...
...Like other Salvadoran conservatives, he seemed baffled that the Reagan Administration continued to press hard for the confiscation and collectivization of land...
...diplomats I met in Central America, Negroponte perceives the potential trail of fallen dominoes triggered by Nicaragua...
...There is an opportunity to preach democratic capitalism in Central America, but there is no appreciation of this in the U.S...
...Guatemala City, May 26...
...G ustavo A!varez, chief of the armed forces, was de!ayed by the arrival of four Nicaraguan officers who had crossed the border by helicopter in search of asylum...
...He exudes charisma but may have been less than prudent in criticizing Ambassador Hinton and General Garcia for interfering with the National Assembly...
...It was probably providential...
...That morning he met with leaders of campesino organizations who warned him that the National Assembly's action could reap a bountiful harvest in Communist support...
...But hewas expansive about his nation' s future...
...He, like everyone else in the government, felt the guerrillas incapable of a major new offensive any time soon and was laying plans for a "peace committee" (including D'Aubuisson) to offer amnesty to the rebels and perhaps start negotiations...
...Dressed in polo shirts and blue jeans, they could scarcely have been mistaken for high-ranking former Nicaraguan army officers...
...These were laid out to me by Carlos Flores, the 34-year-old minister of the presidency...
...You cannot trust the gringos," one of the government's leading figures told me...
...He also believes Guatemala must look for military help not from Washington but from Israel, South Africa, and Argentina...
...How respectable [the novel] has become, how predictable...
...This concern dovetailed with the angry reaction to the U.S...
...I t is ridiculous," Flores told me...
...My first contact here is a businessman, whose story was to be repeated over the next two days...
...Gardner, whose many books include October Light (which won the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award), has written a novel in the grand style--a long, sprawling, intensely serious work that finds its author staring down into the famous abyss...
...Tile $200 million aid package that so impressed the Honduran officials is viewed here as a Potemkin village of foreign aid--lots of promised equipment, none of the desperately needed foreign exchange...
...Ambassador John Negroponte which he described as follows: Washington hounds us to get a democratically elected government, and after two years of bargaining, our urgent request for $35 million in aid remains becalmed in the bureaucracy, while Nicaragua's Comandante Daniel Ortega returns from a flying trip to Moscow with $200 million...
...I think your ambassador is too s o f t , " one key leader in the anti-Sandinista underground said...
...The Argentine-trained Alvarez was disconsolate over the U.S...
...I lunched with Ambassador Hinton, a senior foreign service officer who is on a first-name basis with Secretary of State Alexander Haig and unlike Ambassador Robert White of Carter Administration days is on fairly good personal terms with the Right...
...I returned home slightly encouraged by El Salvador but not reassured about the fate of all Central America...
...Falklands War or not, the Argentine presence continues in Honduras, training Hondurans in anti-terrorist action and, clandestinely, training anti-Communist guerrillas...
...There is no confidence that the United States would play a major role...
...The Liberal regime elected earlier this year has dispelled Nationalist THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 15 warnings of softness toward Communism and promises to be the nation's first stable democratic government in a generation...
...The U.S.supplied Army was necessary to wage the war against the Communist insurrection, but they were fighting the new forces seeking to implant in El Salvador its first seedlings of democratic capitalism...
...By a logic I did not entirely understand, they believe the U.S...
...Fie believes that productivity can be achieved only through private incentives, not through the Keynesian planning demanded by both the International Monetary Fund and the State Department...
...But this is precisely what most John Podhoretz, formerly the movie critic of The American Spectator, has wr#ten for Harper's, the New Republic, Policy Review, and the Wall Street Journal...
...The culture shock on arriving here is intense...
...We were wrong...
...Mauagua, May 24...
...D'Aubuisson is committed to economic freedom--and perhaps democracy as well...
...I give it two more years," a businessman in his mid-40s told me...
...Though this is an enormously long novel THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 17...
...In contrast to the gloom among the Miami expatriates, the leaders of the new National Republican Alliance (ARENA) were in a state of high excitement, despite the disappointment over Magana (for which they also blame General Waiters...
...astrous year of his life, as he struggles to find a bit of peace...
...His ex-wife is demanding an alimony settlement that comes to several thousand dollars more a year than he earns...
...But the biggest, most important country in Central America remains in deep trouble...
...Dressed in a blue polo shirt, he held forth in the grimy downtown headquarters of the Christian Democratic Party...
...Tegucigalpa, May 21...
...Though he praised Chile's economic system, he said "well, that's another matter" when asked about the Chilean political system...
...These dissidents are not quite sure, but some foresee a Central American war to determine whether this region shall be capitalist or Communist...
...Whereas White called D'Aubuisson a "psychopathic killer," Hinton considers him a politician with an unlimited future...
...On the surface, Honduras is a world away from El Salvador...
...For Our interview, he peeled off his suit coat, revealing an automatic pistol stuck in his belt...
...Alvarez assured me the talks would come to nothing...
...There had been a Honduran-Nicaraguan meeting on the border two days earlier, in which the Sandinista officers curbed their usual arrogance to plead for border control to curb anti-Sandinista guerrillas crossing the border in bands that once numbered in the tens but now were in the hundreds...
...Still, it soon became clear that nobody of importance goes anywhere without a bodyguard or, better still, a backup car filled with bodyguards...
...But that too would require financing from Washington...
...Too expensive," he said, adding he would prefer buying Kaffirs from Israel...
...But they showed little affinity for the new leader of the Right, ex-army Maj...
...My first appointment of the day was with the new minister of agriculture, Miguel Muyshondt, another 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 Texas Aggie ('56) who is one of ARENA's members of the new government...
...Movies with a presentday setting, even if otherwise deceptive and false, cannot help but show us something of " i h e way we live now," as Anthony Trollope significantly titled one of his novels...
...I was also moved by a broader aim...
...Magana, whose intense popularity with the military is attributed to years of artificially low-interest loans made by his bank to Army officers...
...These politicians are like chib dren with a new toy," he said...
...They thought they were getting a general, and found they had gotten a preacher," commented one political leader...
...Apart from the pervasive economic doldrums, guerrilla activity is uncontrolled, and the government lacks adequate arms and expertise...
...An impending operation against some 800 guerrillas hard by the Mexican border was going to have to use civilian helicopters...
...A foe of the Sornoza dictatorship, he has been reduced to penury and insolvency by the Sandinistas he had welcomed as delive, ers...
...The irony was unavoidable...
...In an im.erview with me, though, he suggested that the failure of Washington to help might mean a Communist victory here...
...ambassador at large, imposing as president a banker and international technocrat, Dr...
...State Department...
...The ravages of the 1972 earthquake remain, and there is no central section to the cky...
...The protracted struggle for Central America thus continued indecisively, muting but not extinguishing the cautious optimism set off by the large turnout in last spring's Salvadoran elections...
Vol. 15 • October 1982 • No. 10
