REAGAN AND REVOLUTION: The game is up in Central America.
Dinges, John
Reagan and Revolution The Test in Central America BY JOHN DINGES "Must we let Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador all become additional 'Cubas,' new outposts for Soviet combat brigades? Will the next...
...Had such a course been adopted in the past, it would have allowed Central America to resolve its formidable social and political problems with far less internal bloodshed or international destabilization...
...What they mean when they offer this assurance, however, is not that the United States will avoid military involvement in the region...
...By January 20, 1981—Inauguration Day—it was already clear that the rebel offensive had ground to a halt...
...Guatemala has presented the Reagan Administration with a special dilemma: Secretary Haig's envoy, General Vernon Walters, went there early last year to demonstrate U.S...
...portrayal of the guerrillas as minority terrorists sponsored and abetted by Havana and Moscow...
...The strategy failed: There were no mass revolts, and the focos were isolated and defeated...
...Many followed the Cuban model of creating focos—small guerrilla bands whose job it was to radicalize the indigenous nonpoliti-cal peasantry...
...Military aid to the Salvadoran junta was increased fivefold over the level Carter had provided, and U.S...
...The U.S...
...What does offer some hope is the early skepticism in Congress toward the Administration's preparations for intervention...
...investments...
...To the southwest, the 500-mile Honduran border with Nicaragua runs along rugged mountains on the populous Pacific Coast side...
...The United States keeps trying to stop it by building stronger and stronger dams...
...military intervention in Central America...
...But Reagan is convinced that this "Vietnam" can be reversed—and by reversing it his Administration would rid itself of the "Vietnam Syndrome" and the political and psychological barrier it has been to the exercise of U.S...
...Together, they have a combined force of close to 250,000 men and women under arms...
...interests, and it is the height of arrogance for the Reagan Administration, with its sorry record of credibility, to question the "sincerity" of these programs...
...In the United States, the Right was furious and unforgiving...
...The United States has an option that would clearly serve this country's long-run interests and the region's: It can accept the emergence of left-wing governments in a spirit of ideological accommodation and economic cooperation...
...They want economic development and income redistribution to ease and ultimately erase some of the world's most egregious inequities...
...Two years ago, Mexico, acting in concert with Venezuela, instituted a Caribbean aid plan providing preferential prices and low-interest credit for oil imports...
...By then, the United States had, in effect, ruled out a political settlement and decided on a purely military strategy to "save" El Salvador...
...The second was the fall of Nicaragua's Somoza regime in 1979 and the failure of the Carter Administration to prevent the Sandinistas from coming to power...
...Reagan's proposed Caribbean Basin Plan would provide preferential trade access to those countries included, and would offer $350 million in U.S...
...The plan is part of a long-range strategy to stimulate private investment and nongovernmental economic activity in countries where the government exercises strong market controls...
...The answer is still unclear, and some of the signals emanating from the Administration are contradictory...
...In Washington, the obvious hope was that the new government of Guatemala could somehow be depicted as a clear departure from that nation's sordidly oppressive past, so that U.S...
...Furthermore, recent leftist-led revolutions around the world—including Nicaragua's—have not brought attempts to expropriate U.S...
...aid was the flow of arms from Nicaragua to guerrilla forces in El Salvador, though U.S...
...But in 1977, to the conservatives' horror, Jimmy Carter began undoing what had been so carefully wrought...
...In El Salvador, the Farabundi Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas number at least 5,000 battle-seasoned troops who have achieved significant gains in the last year, despite substantial U.S...
...After barely a month in office, the Administration issued its famous State Department White Paper on El Salvador which, as it turned out...
...officials conceded that the flow was only a trickle when Reagan entered the White House...
...Past U.S...
...But these efforts failed and Carter, resigned to the Sandinistas' triumph, instructed his diplomats to work out an accommodation...
...The Reagan Administration also seems to be pursuing the multilateral approach in its covert action program against Nicaragua, although only fragmentary accounts are available at this writing...
...But neither Washington's official pronouncements nor its course of conduct holds out much promise that our Government will suddenly be seized by an impulse to pursue peace and equity in Central America...
...intention is not merely to "keep the dominoes from falling" in the Caribbean, but to apply a domino strategy of our own, first knocking down the guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador, then overthrowing the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and finally destroying even Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba...
...Senator Edward Zorinsky, Nebraska Democrat, has called the scheme "little more than a cover" for stepped-up efforts to defeat the Salvadoran rebels...
...Administration officials insist, of course, that they have no intention of venturing into "another Vietnam" in Central America...
...In still another propaganda disaster...
...Mexico's mediation attempt—part of its increasingly activist foreign policy role since new oil discoveries made it a major Third World power—illustrates the changed international climate which certainly affects—and may ultimately help deter—an active U.S...
...It needs friendly, though not necessarily allied, governments...
...What they mean is that the United States, once involved, intends to win...
...Later in the day, in a twist muddling any clear interpretation of the coup's likely consequences, a retired general with genuinely moderate credentials outmaneuvered the young rightists and took over the leadership of the new junta...
...His sources asserted, though, that while a "mechanism for contacts"" with Washington existed, it did not yet entail direct U.S...
...In recent interviews, rebel leaders have credited their dramatic year-long resurgence to their broad base of political support in the countryside and to the peasants' hatred of the brutal and repressive government forces...
...the Sandinistas had gone to great lengths to accommodate U.S...
...Nonetheless, revolution and the threat of revolution in Central America have been the obsessive concern of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy from the beginning, summoning widespread apprehension that the United States may be about to plunge into a quagmire deeper and wider than Vietnam...
...The first was the wave of revolution that rumbled through South America from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s and that was successfully thrown back by U.S.-backed military regimes...
...involvement was generally limited to furnishing supplies and training, and running a scattering of covert CIA operations...
...To defuse demands in this country and abroad for a political solution, elections were announced for March...
...After many decades of heavyhanded repression, they want an end to military despotism...
...Despite the bluster about "the next push of the Moscow-Havana axis," it seems unlikely that Reagan and his men take their own "Soviet menace" propaganda at face value, at least so far as Central America is concerned...
...Beginning in 1964, Latin American revolutionaries attempted armed uprisings in a number of nations on the continent...
...policy...
...The ostensible reason for the cutoff of U.S...
...In San Salvador, a conservative politician told me, "We are nationalists and we don't want intervention, but we aren't left alone...
...When the Sandinista government reacted to U.S...
...Quietly, Washington has established in Honduras its largest military and diplomatic mission between Mexico and Brazil— 147 civilians and ninety-seven military advisers...
...in dollar terms, the Mexican-Venezuelan effort is larger than Reagan's proposed initiative...
...It is an upheaval that must be brought under control by "whatever means," as Reagan has said, are "prudent and necessary...
...demands for an end to Nicaraguan arms shipments to the Salvadoran rebels...
...Since then—and since the Sandinistas inevitably turned to the socialist countries for economic and military assistance—U.S...
...Government's official vocabulary and applied the term not only when discussing Cold War adversaries but also when talking about allies—especially the military regimes of Argentina and Chile, whose anti-leftist vendettas had claimed more than 20,000 victims of executions and "disappearances" from 1973 to 1977...
...In the Right's view, all of these actions— but especially the "human rights" policy— helped grease the skids for Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza, a faithful anti-communist ally...
...The stakes were instantly defined by Secretary of State Haig: This was an instance of Cuban-controlled "outside aggression," and it would serve as a "test case" of the new Aministration's toughness...
...State Department swiftly described the coup leaders as "apparent moderates" who planned to call immediate elections...
...Invoking the 1947 Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, Reagan has tried—without apparent success so far—to enlist the strong military powers of Latin America in a joint expedition to crush the Salvadoran rebels...
...The treaty provides for collective military action by the United States and Latin American nations should any signatory be subjected to "external attack"—a term that easily encompasses internal insurrections, since these are always presumed to be inspired and aided by the "international communist conspiracy...
...It turned out to be a 1978 picture of Red Cross workers burning the bodies of Indians killed by the Somoza regime...
...In March 1981, when the Salvadoran Democratic Revolutionary Front made it known that it was ready to enter into negotiations under mediation of the Catholic Church and European socialist and Christian Democratic parties, the Reagan Administration joined the Salvadoran military in strong-arming President Jose Napoleon Duarte into opposing the talks...
...The coup was mounted by young army officers with political ties to the ultra-rightist National Liberation Movement of defeated presidential candidate Mario Sandoval Alarcon, believed to be the leader of the country's death squads...
...The change was celebrated by the U.S...
...More recently—and after a number of similar gaffes—the State Department strained credibility to the breaking point when it invited Washington reporters to meet Orlando Tardencillas, a young Nicaraguan who had been captured while serving with the FMLN in ElSalvador...
...When a military coup removed General Lucas Garcia on March 23 of this year, in the wake of fraud-tainted elections, it may have provided Washington with at least a cosmetic solution to its Guatemala problem...
...At about the same time, according to The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CBS News, Reagan approved a $19 million covert military action plan aimed at Nicaragua...
...Washington saw the Left's willingness to negotiate as a sign of weakness and imminent collapse...
...But it is not the prospect of a military challenge to the United States in this hemisphere that haunts the President and his policy advisers...
...On the other hand, the "Vietnam Syndrome," as manifested in early and vigorous opposition in this country (and, for that matter, abroad) to any U.S...
...Throughout the continent, the new, fiercely anti-communist military regimes mounted a wave of brutal oppression that made the previous, often flawed constitutional governments look like models of benign pluralism...
...The original charge of assistance to the Salvadoran rebels has been augmented by the accusation that Nicaragua has become "totalitarian...
...military intervention in Central America, has certainly compelled the Administration to restrain itself while it explores alternatives to direct military force...
...Most of all, the United States needs to shed its role as the mainstay of repressive right-wing regimes...
...He was expected to tell the press that he had been trained in Cuba and Ethiopia and then assigned by the Sandinistas to fight in El Salvador...
...Security forces wiped out incipient guerrilla movements in Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina...
...Carter's policy, Reagan added, was one of "vacillation, appeasement, and aimlessness...
...assistance...
...investments and preserve access to strategic resources...
...But the unmitigated brutality exercised by the government of General Romeo Lucas Garcia, condemned by international organizations as the worst human rights violator in the Western hemisphere, has made it impossible, or at least impolitic, to step up U.S...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick, now the Reagan Administration's ambassador to the United Nations, invoked such terms as "moderately repressive" and "authoritarian" (as distinct from communist "totalitarian") to characterize the new pro-American dictatorships...
...But a quick glance at a map of Central America shows why Honduras is of key importance in U.S...
...As Harvard University's Jorge Dominguez observed in a recent report for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, "Neither Cuba nor the Soviet Union now poses a strategic nuclear or conventional military threat to the United States from bases in Cuba...
...pledge to refrain from attacking Nicaragua by direct military force or covert, destabilizing proxies...
...Back in 1979, the Sandinista revolution meant the defeat of an anti-communist ally, brought about (as in Vietnam) by the faintheartedness of the U.S...
...Repeated embarrassments have, in fact, characterized the Reagan Administration's efforts to lay a propaganda groundwork for U.S...
...More pathetic than these inept attempts at deception, however, is the Reagan Administration's stubborn pursuit of a policy that is ultimately bound to fail—and one for which there is and always has been a decent alternative...
...The Washington Post's Patrick Tyler and Bob Woodward wrote on March 10 that the President had authorized the creation of a paramilitary force of 500 Latin Americans to operate out of Honduras...
...It was Monroe Doctrine territory—staked out as our special turf when the republic was still young...
...response to what it perceived as a deteriorating military situation was to more than double its assistance to the government—raising military aid to $81 million and economic aid to $232 million, making El Salvador the third-largest U.S...
...military aid suddenly multiplied almost tenfold to $10 million in the current fiscal year (and an estimated $14 million in fiscal 1983), the country is well on the way toward becoming a formidable military presence in Central America...
...It was there, at the turn of the Twentieth Century, that our fledgling empire took its first modest steps as a world power...
...advisers were dispatched to train Salvadoran troops in the techniques of counterinsurgency...
...Candidate Ronald Reagan, March 17, 1980 When Ronald Reagan was a boy, Central America was this country's undisputed sphere of influence—just about the only one we had...
...They want these things so desperately that they are turning more and more to guerrilla warfare to achieve them...
...The programs sponsored by opposition movements in El Salvador and Guatemala, and already instituted in Nicaragua, contain no element that is incompatible with these U.S...
...Government...
...The second recent initiative was Secretary Haig's tentative acceptance of a mediation offer by Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda...
...He put "human rights" in the U.S...
...The U.S...
...with U.S...
...Politically, Mexico has lined up in support of the Salvadoran opposition Democratic Revolutionary Front, while Venezuela backs the government of Christian Democratic President Duarte...
...If El Salvador and Nicaragua have occupied the center ring of the Reagan Administration's policy toward Central America, Honduras and Guatemala have become the twin sideshows...
...officials of bringing him to Washington "for purposes of propaganda" under threat of "certain death...
...But both countries have called for a negotiated settlement of the conflict—a course rejected outright by the United States...
...plans for the region...
...If the fighting in El Salvador were to end tomorrow, if the country were again subjected to a stable dictatorship holding sway over a passive peasantry, Reagan's principal concern in Central America would still be Nicaragua, and he would still be eager to topple the Sandinista regime even though his main pretext for doing so would have been removed...
...Secretary Haig showed a color photograph alleged to depict a Sandinista massacre of Miskito Indians...
...military aid and advisers could promptly be dispatched to strengthen Guatemalan participation in the Central America war against communism...
...There is a country that is determined to use El Salvador as a springboard to fight Nicaragua and Cuba...
...The overwhelming military superiority of the United States in the [Caribbean] provides the necessary margin of security for itself and for all of its allies in the region...
...It is a strange—some might say tragic—turn of events: Honduras, though desperately poor, does not have the violent history of its neighbors, and the government confronts no significant guerrilla opposition...
...Guy Gugliotta of The Miami Herald reported that the Argentine military were funding, training, and equipping Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries in Honduras...
...Military assistance has been suspended since 1977, though one consequence of the Walters mission was a resumption of "back-door aid," including military trucks, helicopters, and jeeps...
...gua that promises to be just as durable...
...Last November, the military rulers-handed the reins over to elected civilians...
...Their fear is not that the Soviets will somehow infiltrate and ultimately dominate indigenous movements for social change: Their fear is of the change itself, and what it would mean for the preservation of the existing order—and U.S...
...But the military victory expected by the Reagan Administration did not materialize...
...solidarity with the military regime and proclaim that "friends are friends...
...An] attack elsewhere in the region . . . could be repelled successfully by the United States from its forces in mainland United States...
...When Reagan took office in January 1981, one of his first official acts was to cut off the remaining portion of a $75 million aid package that had been painstakingly negotiated by the Carter Administration to keep the Sandinistas from turning to Cuba and other socialist countries for assistance...
...aid recipient in the world, surpassed only by Israel and Egypt...
...These reactions may yet head off what will otherwise surely be a catastrophe...
...Along with France and the Netherlands, Mexico has recognized the Democratic Revolutionary Front as a "representative political force" in El Salvador—a position that severely undermines U.S...
...participation in the Mexican effort, and the State Department disparaged it...
...Two initiatives taken in recent weeks seem to be efforts to develop possible non-military solutions to some of the region's problems...
...efforts to prevent or reverse Latin American revolutions—as in Chile, for example— were prompted, at least in part, by the will to protect huge U.S...
...hostility toward Nicaragua has undergone some dramatic transformations...
...It wasn't just armed insurrection that was squelched, though...
...hostility has been intense and unremitting...
...multinational corporations...
...An exasperated Latin American diplomat put it this way: "The revolt in Central America is like a flooding river that gets higher every vear...
...the swift and massive outcry from religious organizations, and especially from the Roman Catholic Church...
...It is not a matter of preserving a Monroe Doctrine fantasy, nor is it any longer simply a case of protecting the superprofits of United Fruit...
...In Reagan's thinking, Nicaragua has already become "another Vietnam...
...Now, in turn, he rescinded the promise of elections...
...domination—in the region...
...To American conservatives, including Ronald Reagan and policymakers of his Administration, revolution in Central America is not just a geopolitical problem...
...As the Nicaraguan crisis built to the San-dinista victory of 1979, the Carter Administration resorted to frantic manipulations to preserve intact Somoza's National Guard as a curb on the Sandinistas' radicalism...
...He was Efrain Rios Montt, whose election in 1974 as the presidential candidate of the centrist Democratic Party had been overturned by the military...
...Official pronouncements suggest that the ultimate U.S...
...But the U.S...
...But the higher the dam the more destruction the flood will bring when it finally breaks through...
...combat troops to duty in Central America...
...In just a few years, South America's republican, constitutional tradition, however imperfect its workings, was obliterated...
...Last November, Secretary of State Alexander Haig pointedly refused to give Congress "assurances" that the United States would take no covert action to overthrow the Nicaraguan government...
...As Reagan looks south, he sees a revolutionary regime in Cuba, solidly entrenched after two decades, and another in NicaraJohn Dinges, a Washington writer who returned recently from a tour of Central America, is co-author (with Saul Landau) of "Assassination on Embassy Row, " published in 1980 by Pantheon...
...Honduras has long had the largest air force in the region...
...interests, even pledging to honor the $1.6 billion in foreign debts that had been incurred by Somoza...
...on the Atlantic side, the inhospitable tropical lowlands are inhabited by Miskito Indians...
...military attache in Guatemala City...
...it is an emotional wrench and a threat that strikes perilously close to home...
...The United States would be well served by stability in theregion, and by having it available as an outlet for American trade and investment...
...Reagan, in a March 1980 campaign speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, denounced Carter's foreign policy in terms that evoked the 1938 Munich Pact and the "who lost China" debate of the 1950s: "While the Soviets arrogantly warn us to stay out of their way, we occupy ourselves by looking for human rights violations in those countries which have historically been our friends and allies...
...But once they have won their revolutions, they want peace and full economic relations with their natural trading partner, the United States...
...Now the people in Central America are in revolt—open, angry rebellion against death squads and military juntas, against the oligarchies that hold the land in feudal thrall while operating an unbridled kind of capitalism, and against the United States, which has sustained and perpetuated these evils...
...military forces or U.S.-trained infiltrators in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Honduras is a natural invasion route...
...The 1980 Republican Party platform singled out Nicaragua's Sandinista government as a special target...
...If there is to be growing involvement of U.S...
...a limit on the buildup of Nicaragua's own armed forces...
...And even at this late date, adoption of a rational policy by the United States could avert a major tragedy...
...Presidential approval coincided with an outbreak of serious incursions by opposition forces along the remote Coco River border with Honduras, as well as a series of acts of sabotage against Nicaraguan airlines and bridges...
...Rhetorical revolutionary flourishes aside, the people of Central America and their leaders have fundamental interests that need not be incompatible with the legitimate interests of the United States...
...The Washington Post reported that the coup leaders' program, including the promise of elections, was delivered in the early hours after the coup to an aide to the U.S...
...Policy toward El Salvador has Intensified along similar grim lines...
...But these are minor considerations in Central America, which accounts for less than half of 1 per cent of worldwide U.S...
...the enterprise of the press—far greater and much sooner than any displayed in Vietnam—in digging out the truth behind official claims, and the refusal of the American people to stumble into another ruinous military venture...
...military might...
...In Guatemala, Indians and La-dino (mestizo) leftists have joined, for the first time, a united front of guerrilla organizations that commands thousands of fighters...
...rather, the revolutionary regimes have regarded the corporate giants as indispensable to national development, and have encouraged them to stay...
...The FMLN rebels launched their "final offensive" as Reagan was about to take office...
...Right, and the installation of military rule was hailed as the advent of stability in the troubled hemisphere...
...Those friends feel betrayed and abandoned, and in several specific cases they have been...
...The undefeated FMLN forces entrenched themselves in widening "zones of control" in all but the southwestern quadrant of the country...
...interest in Central America also deserves to be recognized in terms of reality...
...conservatives...
...Since about the time of the Nicaraguan revolution—and increasingly in connection with the Salvadoran conflict—Mexico has been asserting foreign policy positions independent of, and sometimes at odds with, those of the United States...
...In 1977, Carter also "gave away" the Panama Canal by treaty, lifted the ban on travel by Americans to Cuba, and resumed official contacts, if not diplomatic relations, with that long-isolated country...
...In the process, strong electoral coalitions—political alliances seeking to establish democratic socialism—were wiped out in Chile and Uruguay...
...Will the next push of the Moscow-Havana axis be northward to Guatemala and thence to Mexico, and south to Costa Rica and Panama...
...Two episodes in the recent history of relations between the United States and Latin America provide the backdrop for the conservative attitudes that shape current U.S...
...Instead, with the cameras rolling, he renounced his previous confession as having been elicited under torture and accused U.S...
...They withstood massive army strikes launched in the last months of 1981, and at the beginning of this year they moved again to take the offensive...
...a nonaggression treaty between Nicaragua and its neighbors, and a U.S...
...The cutoff was a harsh rebuff...
...It promised to be a quick hit and an easy victory...
...After an initial flurry of interest and optimism, however, Haig seemed to stiffen the terms for U.S...
...But with $128 million of the total Caribbean Basin aid earmarked for El Salvador...
...However formidable such forces may be on their home grounds, obviously they represent no military danger to the United States...
...Not only in Nicaragua but throughout Central America, revolution had a new lease on life, and this time guerrillas were operating with a firm base of grass-roots support, avoiding the elitism of the failed foco strategy...
...In Latin America, at least, something was going right for U.S...
...At what point might the Reagan Administration decide it was "prudent and necessary" to assign U.S...
...One consideration is the official reading of that haunting vestige of America's Indochina disaster, the "Vietnam Syndrome...
...military intervention in Central America...
...This is how the Administration's policy is widely perceived in Latin America—even among those on the Right...
...failed to bear out the claims (made in an official summary of the White Paper) that there was Soviet involvement on the rebel side...
...To the south, Honduras borders on those northern Salvadoran provinces where FMLN activity is most intense...
...What was left of it would require only routine military mopping-up operations—and the Reagan Administration could bask in the glory of a great victory...
...Early last year, followers of Somoza were allowed to set up training camps in Florida...
...The Reagan Administration asked only that the Salvadoran military retain Duarte as president and preserve those banking and legal reforms that had already been instituted—measures deemed essential to continuing Congressional support for the Reagan Administration's policy...
...aid to the Salva-doran army...
...The official rationale for U.S...
...It is a fear based more on ideology than on pragmatic considerations...
...The so-called Mexican Plan encompassed U.S...
...They want the freedom to organize into real labor unions and peasants' organizations, and to choose their own governments...
...belligerence by mobilizing a citizens' militia and seeking new military aid (which France provided by entering into a $17 million sales and credit agreement), Washington charged that the Nicaraguan buildup posed a military threat to the rest of the region...
Vol. 46 • May 1982 • No. 5
