Taking Note
Four Down, Four to Go FOUR YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, THE FMLN launched an offensive in El Salvador designed to present incoming U.S. President Ronald Reagan with an "irreversible" situation. That...
...officials portray the conflict as healthy evidence of democracy in action, and hint that the United States would back a right-wing majority in the Assembly...
...The four years since Reagan first took office have been arduous ones for critics on the Left...
...ideologues--continue unresolved...
...The scrublands of eastern Honduras and the forested mountains of northern Nicaragua have witnessed the most extensive and repugnant covert war in recent history...
...Since December 1, we have seen Arturo Cruz complete his descent from loyal critic of the Sandinistas to advocate of aid for the FDN...
...F OUR YEARS LATER, HOW FAR HAVE WE come...
...The opposition Social Christian Party has broken away from its arch-conservative allies in the Coordinadora...
...And is this a realistic blueprint, or an exercise in bipartisan chicanery for immediate political ends...
...But will the Congress buy it...
...With the sole exception of continued congressional truculence over aid to the contras, Washington feels that its regional policy is going well...
...The same day, Pedro Rene Yanes, Christian Democratic head of an official inquiry into corruption, was shot dead by members of D'Aubuisson's ARENA...
...Both President-elect Daniel Ortega and Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega, head of the Episcopal Conference, described their Christmas talks as "very positive...
...Jimmy Carter's lame-duck administration had three days to run...
...The rationale behind all this work is a commitment to seek out alternatives in the pages of the magazine...
...We have chosen the beginning of President Reagan's second term of office as a time to draw together the main threads of our work from 1981-84 and to sketch out the main themes that we will be thinking and writing about over the next four years...
...The speed of events in Nicaragua illustrates even more forcefully the difficulty of timely analysis...
...We understand that to mean two things...
...There are alarmingly few signs of an alternative Central America policy growing in the party's ranks...
...4 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS VER THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF THE Reagan presidency, two-thirds of the issues of Report on the Americas have focussed on the crisis in Central America and the Caribbean...
...Where, then, is the alternative to come from...
...Better yet, Grenada was snatched from the jaws of Soviet-Cuban conspiracy...
...In a Washington, D.C...
...When it ran in January 1981, the story attracted little attention...
...On both counts we were rapidly proved right...
...news conference on January 3, Cruz declared his "commonality of purpose" with the contras, and announced it would be "a terrible political mistake" for Congress to continue to block aid...
...The complex chess game of the Sandinista transition continues, with the final repercussions of the November 4 elections still unclear...
...Secretary of State George Shultz's declared intent to purge ultra-conservative political appointees from the diplomatic corps is only the latest in a series of conflicting signals and public disagreements...
...Intelligence reports say that Duarte is now under greater threat than ever from the Right, but U.S...
...More than 60,000 Central Americans died during the first Reagan term...
...Their optimism was short-lived...
...And the FSLN has appointed a special commission to devise ways of granting some degree of self-rule to the troubled Atlantic Coast region...
...Seven days after the FMLN offensive, on January 17, Salvadorean troops were cracking open the first crates of M16s and grenades, the initial consignment of socalled "lethal" aid from Washington...
...As for the Democratic Party, the liberal foreign policy interlude of the early Carter years, which culminated in the fall of Somoza, now appears to many as a Paradise Lost...
...On January 6, Roberto D'Aubuisson condemned the talks as "a propaganda tool for the rebels...
...military strategy to the activities of evangelical Christians, from the diplomacy of the Contadora countries to the changing attitudes of the U.S...
...On the other hand, a number of other developments suggest that the administration may still not get its way on the crucial vote...
...A short- or mid-term revolutionary victory now seems out of the question...
...Even as we met in New York, the second round of talks in the Salesian seminary of Ayagualo were foundering on Duarte's refusal to consider peace proposals from the FMLNFDR...
...media...
...The Reagan Administration, like its predecessor, broadly defines its goals as bolstering centrist political forces and democratic institutions...
...Our themes have ranged from the minutiae of U.S...
...And while the so-called "humanization of the war" was uneasily marked by Christmas and New JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1985 Tai Ng N 3Year truces, the humanization of the Salvadorean Right seemed as distant a prospect as ever...
...THESE ARE SOME OF THE QUESTIONS WE address in this special issue of NACLA's Report on the Americas...
...The brief pre-election d6tente between the government and La Prensa has ended abruptly with the decision by editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Barrios to go into voluntary exile...
...With that goal in mind, we bring you this unusual issue of NACLA's Report on the Americas...
...The Carter Administration also found time in its last week in office to suspend aid payments to Nicaragua, after the first of repeated charges that the Sandinista government was channeling arms to the FMLN...
...In El Salvador, those crates of M-16s have been followed by half a billion dollars in military aid...
...On grounds of both morality and pragmatism-the latter likely to carry greater weight in Congress--the month of December brought fresh ammunition for opponents of the aid...
...The Reagan era is the age of "new ideas" in the worst sense, as neoconservatives and neoliberals compete to shift the center of gravity of political debate to the Right...
...The old question again arises: who's in charge...
...We have set aside the customary format of the magazine, and instead of a series of detailed analytical essays, we offer you the proceedings of a symposium...
...The other involves a critical assessment of our own role as scholars and journalists, discarding stale formulae and dogma where they have served us badly and instead finding innovative methods and fresh language to address enduring problems...
...In the case of El Salvador, one focus of our discussion was the new political dynamic set in motion by the La Palma peace talks...
...The contra forces have grown to more than 10,000...
...It frequently seems that policy goals extend no farther than winning a military victory in El Salvador and overthrowing a Nicaraguan government for which Washington feels an obsessive hatred...
...This Report contains the highlights of the discussions which we held in New York two months ago, with a range of opinions sharp enough to touch off polemic, yet close enough, we hope, to provide the framework for a progressive consensus...
...In the judgment of many of the participants in our meeting, the process raised two obstacles: one was the impossibility of the FMLN-FDR accepting Duarte's bottom-line demand of surrender, the other the unpredictable reaction of the Right to the dialogue...
...History, of course, refuses to stand still, and events in Central America have rushed onward since we invited a group of friends and colleagues, policy experts and academics, activists and notable past contributors to the magazine, to join us in New York on November 30 and December 1, 1984 to talk about Central America and the second Reagan term...
...As the first Reagan Administration boasted, not an inch of turf was "lost" on its watch...
...assistance to the region over the next five years...
...One recent book bears the appropriate title of Endless War...
...In those early days of 1981, there was a mood of euphoric optimism on the Left...
...Millions of words have been written on the region...
...Where the Reagan Administration has proclaimed the need to stay the course, we have asked how the course can be changed...
...The name contra had not yet been invented...
...That was January 10...
...Those charges that Nicaragua was "exporting communist subversion" were echoed in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where a man identifying himself only as "the coordinator" announced to the press that he had 250 troops in the field ready to fight the Sandinistas...
...One is to find the factual and analytical basis for fresh policy options that promise to bring about a peaceful and equitable settlement of the regional crisis...
...Reports of contra atrocities circulated widely on Capitol Hill, and a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence condemned the CIA for "inadequate supervision and management" of its Nicaragua operation...
...Revolutionaries in Guatemala and El Salvador thought they glimpsed an imminent victory on the Nicaraguan pattern...
...More urgently, the critical contra vote hangs in the balance...
...These Reports have been complemented by our research on the state of politics in the United States in the 1980s, from the landslide triumphs of the New Right and the neoconservatives, to the debacles of the Democratic Party...
...Yet as the March legislative elections loom closer, the administration continues to send mixed signals on how to deal with these tensions...
...The policy disputes that have racked Reagan's first four years-Hawks vs...
...The party has once again fractured into competing wings, and has stumbled to its fourth electoral humiliation in five outings...
...The clearest statement of its long-term intentions is the report of the Kissinger Commission, which advocates an influx of $8.8 billion of U.S...
...But there are signs elsewhere that political dialogue may yet advance...
...Some polarities have grown more acute...
...The New Right may still chafe that its agenda is incomplete, that its leaders have been passed over in the search for high office, but the Reagan revolution has brought a sweeping shift in the intellectual climate of the country...
...It is time to arrest that slide, and to stake out new terrain in which progressive ideas can breathe and have broad resonance...
...Doves, pragmatists vs...
Vol. 19 • January 1985 • No. 1
