Attack from the Right

Businessmen launch a campaign to seize power from the junta

As automatic-rifle fire echoed in the cloud-draped mountains along the El Salvador-Honduras border, U.S.-supplied "Huey" transport helicopters banked low over steep, forested gorges, then deposited heavily armed troops at key locations on the forbidding terrain. According to eyewitnesses, the elite Atlacatl Brigade, some 800 to 1,000 strong, landed near the village of Valladolid, Honduras, violating Honduran airspace and territory as local soldiers looked on impassively. The invaders' mission: to engage leftist Salvadoran guerrilla forces entrenched in pockets along the demilitarized border zone established after El Salvador's four-day war in 1969 with Honduras.

The operation was the first real test for Salvadoran forces trained by a 15-member team of U.S. military advisers sent to El Salvador last March. Armed with U.S.-made M-16 assault rifles and supported by mortars and grenade launchers, the troops fanned out in search of refugee camps that harbored leftist sympathizers, then turned their attention to guerrilla sanctuaries at Arcatao and Los Filos, just across the border in El Salvador.

After a two-month lull in the anti-guerrilla war, the operation clearly demonstrated the government's new military power. But in San Salvador, the moderate junta, led by President Jose Napoleon Duarte, was having new and serious problems. Right-wing businessmen, long attacked by Duarte as the greatest threat to the junta, were grasping for a share of power in the beleaguered country. Said the President: "The private sector is in its final offensive."

The rightists were encouraged by the "clarification" of U.S. policy toward El Salvador made by Thomas Enders, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, on July 16. Enders declared U.S. support for free elections and asserted that the Salvadoran conflict called for a solution that "must be democratic . . . Only a genuinely pluralistic approach can enable a profoundly divided society to live with itself without violent convulsions."

Right-wing politicians concluded that the U.S. would welcome a greater voice in the government by business leaders. Last week they began lashing out at the Christian Democrats, who support Duarte. The right-wingers feel that liberal policies, like extensive land reform, are hurting the faltering economy and bungling the war with the leftist rebels.

The businessmen, who have close ties to military officers displeased with the junta's policies, first clashed openly with the Duarte government over a proposed relaxation of a wage-price freeze. Government officials quashed the plan. Since then, businessmen, frustrated by the lack of international confidence in the Salvadoran economy, have pressed Duarte to moderate his reforms by giving the private sector freer reign. The campaign has had some success. Besides loosening tax and credit requirements, the junta has indefinitely postponed its planned second stage of the land-reform program, which would have converted some 1,500 small farms to peasant cooperatives.

With the March 1983 presidential elections now a priority for U.S. policymakers seeking a political settlement in El Salvador, conservative business leaders are already looking for a candidate to run against Duarte. The man most frequently mentioned is Rene Fortin Magana, 49, an attorney and former member of the short-lived "progressive" junta of 1960. That regime was replaced by a series of military governments before the leftist coup in 1979 led to the present junta.

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