The Reagan administration invested $3 billion over eight years trying to stave off a communist insurgency and make this war-ravaged nation of 6 million a regional showcase for democracy.
But with violence from the right and left on the rise again and the political situation up for grabs, President-elect George Bush will inherit a stalemated war and a U.S. policy sorely in need of re-evaluation here when he takes office.
The Bush administration also may face difficulty with Congress in its attempts to hold the line on U.S. aid to El Salvador. President Jose Napoleon Duarte, the linchpin of U.S. policy, is terminally ill with cancer; death squad assassinations are on the rise again; and an ultra-conservative party linked in the past with such killings could win presidential elections in March.
All of this, administration officials say, could lead Democrats in Congress and other critics to conclude that assistance to El Salvador has not achieved its stated purpose and therefore should be reduced.
Administration officials insist that extensive economic and military aid, the highest level of U.S. foreign assistance after Israel and Egypt, has prevented a takeover by the rebels while human rights violations have declined dramatically since the early 1980s.
But despite U.S. assertions that the center has held and that El Salvador`s ”democratic system is light years ahead of what it was,”
political extremism is on the rise again, the economy is in a steep decline and there has been a doubling in the last year of human rights abuses.
Diplomats, politicians and human rights groups predicted in recent interviews here that the already deteriorating situation will only get worse. President Reagan made El Salvador the centerpiece of his policy promoting the trend toward more democratic governments in Latin America, but he could not buy a democracy here, these experts argued. And Bush will have to convince a new Congress if he wants to keep funding the experiment.
”The crucial point is what Americans are ready to pay for,” noted one Western diplomat. ”You can`t fight an all-out war without human rights abuses, and if you have more human rights abuses, less aid will come from Congress.”
U.S. officials here and in Washington, D.C., acknowledge that violence is likely to increase between now and the March presidential elections. But they claim the consensus behind U.S. aid policy will probably continue in a Bush administration unless the violence can be tied to a specific party.
Nonetheless, U.S. efforts to shore up democracy here, which have supported consolidation of the center against violent extremes, have run into trouble across the board, analysts say.
Perhaps the greatest source of uncertainty is the departure from the political stage of Duarte, a member of the center-left Christian Democratic Party and the man largely responsible for helping Reagan forge that bipartisan consensus in Congress behind economic and military aid.
More Top Picks Nest Cam Indoor
Elected in 1984 after winning El Salvador`s first freely contested election in 50 years, Duarte has been fighting incurable cancer of the stomach and liver for six months. Treatments in the United States have shrunk his tumors, and he is determined to survive to turn over power to an elected successor in June.
Right now, the rightist Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party, is likely to get the most votes in the March presidential election, despite past links by some of its leaders to death squad violence. But analysts say they are not likely to win a majority and the Christian Democrats could still win a runoff.
Still, ARENA`s commanding lead in the polls, coupled with recent changes putting aggressive younger officers in firmer control of the powerful military, has fueled fears of further government violence.
Leftist leaders allied with the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) are also participating in the elections, and the rebels are expected to step up their attacks before and after the elections to protest and further destabilize the democratic process.
FMLN guerrillas have moved their nine-year terrorist fight to overthrow the government into the cities with increasingly bold rocket attacks and daylight raids. Car bombs have been used since April against civilian targets and there were three rocket attacks last month, including one against the National Assembly.
In one of their boldest attacks of the war, they staged a daylight raid Nov. 2 on the national guard headquarters in central San Salvador, killing four guardsmen and wounding 35 people.
U.S. officials say a re-evaluation of the U.S.-directed counterinsurgency effort is required, and there is wide disagreement within the administration over the progress of that effort.
”It`s not a stalemate,” said U.S. Ambassador William Walker in an interview last week, when asked about the military situation. ”It`s improving. The Salvadoran army is getting better day by day.”
Walker insisted that the FMLN rebels have been ”whittled down” from 12,000 to 14,000 in 1983 to about 5,000 to 7,000 today. He said their changed tactics, away from larger battles and towards more urban terrorism, show they are weakening while the military has gained back rebel-controlled territory and operates now with more professionalism.
But a State Department official who requested anonymity said, ”The guerrillas hope they can drive a wedge between Congress and the administration and win the war that way. The guerrillas can`t be defeated militarily in the short run.”
Other diplomats argue that the FMLN is an extremely good guerrilla force trained by Cuba and Vietnam and adopting the most advantageous tactics for its reduced numbers.
They point out that the Salvadoran army, with some 55,000 troops, is on the defensive with a third of its forces guarding dams and bridges, a third assigned to administrative duties and only the final third available for combat operations.
”You can`t win a war that way,” said one.
And a recent study at Harvard University by four U.S. Army lieutenant colonels concluded that all the administration`s aid and training by 55 U.S. military advisers in El Salvador ”has produced not success but a seemingly interminable war of attrition.”
While staving off the collapse of the government, U.S. policy in the war
”took shape without well-defined objectives, a comprehensive plan of action” or the commitment to win, according to the study, published by the Institute for Policy Analysis, Inc.
A new generation of younger military officers was recently promoted to most of the senior positions in the armed forces here. They are conducting the war more agressively, with smaller patrols, night attacks and better use of intelligence.
Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, the new chief of staff, told reporters recently,
”I was worried in 1983, as was the United States, that we could be lost. I am not worried today. We have the support of the people and the international community.”
Ponce insists the military understands the importance of winning the hearts and minds of the population, backing the civilian government and curbing the human rights abuses of the past.
Human rights violations on both sides are on the rise again, although nowhere near the thousands of unexplained political killings of the early 1980s, when some 800 people were slain every month.
Tutela Legal, the legal aid office of the Catholic Church that monitors rights violations, blames two-thirds of them on the government.
Office director Maria Julia Hernandez said in an interview that there were 56 killings in 1987 by death squads believed connected to the government and perhaps 120 political killings by army, civil defense or security forces. This year, she said, the death squad killings have doubled, while those by security forces remained about the same. The FMLN has been responsible for about 40 or 50 assassinations each of the last two years, she said.