Making Martial Noises

By George Russell

With a presidential election next Sunday, the U.S. is taking no chances

Partisan clamor in Congress over the goals and methods of American diplomacy. U.S. warships hovering off a foreign coast. Growing American military activity in a tense region, a presence intended to shore up a beleaguered government in the midst of prolonged and bloody civil war.

All the elements of a familiar scenario were back on center stage of U.S. foreign policy. Not long ago, the setting was Lebanon. This time it was the scarred landscape of El Salvador. As it has so often before, the Reagan Administration was rattling sabers as a means of drawing the line against Communist expansion in Central America. The Administration's aim, paradoxically enough, was to focus attention on a supposedly peaceable watershed: the March 25 presidential election in El Salvador, a long-awaited contest in which the outcome is uncertain and the stakes are considerable. With the balloting only a few days away, the Administration was making martial noises in a number of ways:

> On Capitol Hill, the White House won a small victory in its ongoing battle with Congress over emergency military aid for the Salvadoran government, which is now in its fourth year of war against some 10,000 Marxist-led guerrillas of the Farabundo Salvador, Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.). By a 16-to-13 vote, the Senate Appropriations Committee gave its approval to a $93 million aid package after President Reagan lobbied personally for the bill. At a White House lunch for Republican women officeholders, Reagan argued last week that without the aid money, "El Salvador cannot hold secure elections or defend" itself against the guerrillas.

> In the Caribbean, the U.S. aircraft carrier America and three escort ships left port in the Virgin Islands and cruised toward the Central American coast, where they will take part in readiness exercises this week. The task force is smaller than U.S. carrier fleets that plied the same waters seven months ago on White House orders, but the intention is the same: to warn the Marxist governments of nearby Nicaragua and Cuba that the U.S. will brook no interference in El Salvador, particularly during the elections.

> In the airspace over northeastern El Salvador, U.S. OV-1B MOhawk and RU-21J Beechcraft reconnaissance aircraft based in nearby Palmerola, Honduras, are conducting discreet surveillance missions. The flights, manned by pilots from the U.S. 224th Military Intelligence Battalion, have been under way since last month. Supplementing similar missions by longer-range RC-130 reconnaissance aircraft from Howard Air Force Base in Panama, the flights are intended to help fend off an anticipated increase in guerrilla activity as the March 25 election approaches. For the Reagan Administration, the Honduras-based forays have another advantage: they do not violate the self-imposed U.S. limit of 55 military advisers in El Salvador.

> At Palmerola, 50 miles northwest of the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, a remarkable transformation has taken place. TIME Senior Correspondent Peter Stoler first visited the installation last September. Back then, U.S. military officers stationed at the base gave free rein to visiting journalists and photographers. Now, reports Stoler, "the approach to the U.S. part of the base is guarded by large pieces of concrete sewer conduit, placed on the approach road to form an obstacle course for trucks that might be loaded with dynamite. The new public affairs officer seems dismayed that a reporter will ask him questions about the 224th Military Intelligence Battalion, a 300-man outfit that came here a month ago from Hunter Air" Force Base in Savannah, Ga. The unit's com-ound-within-a-compound is surrounded by a triple layer of barbed concertina wire and decorated with signs that say in both English and Spanish that the area is not to be either entered or photographed, and that the use of 'deadly force' is authorized against anyone who tries to do either."

Attempts by Stoler to arrange interviews with the commanding officer of the 224th or with any of his men were greeted with consternation. So were efforts to inspect the unit's twin-engine OV-1B and RU-21J aircraft. Nonetheless, five planes of each type could be seen parked on the tarmac of the 10,000-foot concrete airstrip. Painted dull gray, with small black letters identifying them as U.S. Army property, the aircraft bristled with electronic equipment. Despite the official wall of secrecy, off-duty members of the 224th, drinking beer in a bar at the nearby city of Comayagua, confirmed their surveillance role in El Salvador. They disclosed that before a flight, some reconnaissance crewmen gather golf ball-size rocks, which they occasionally drop on rebels when they spot them. Said an OV-1B crewman: "It's a way of sending them a message. If we can hit them with rocks, we can hit them with other things any time we want."

The Palmerola base is only part of a new U.S. military establishment in Honduras, permitted under the terms of a revised military agreement between the two countries. According to Pentagon spokesmen, about 1,750 U.S. personnel are in Honduras, many of them holdovers from Big Pine II, the U.S.-Honduran military exercises conducted from August of last year until February. Yet another joint exercise, known as Grenadero I, is scheduled to be mounted in Honduras in June or July; Pentagon officials say that it will be smaller than the Big Pine exercise, which involved 6,000 U.S. troops.

The Pentagon also plans to conduct Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercises in Honduras. Men from units based in the southern U.S. or at the Army's Southern Command in Panama will be flown in. One such exercise will begin on Thursday--just three days before the presidential balloting in El Salvador. Predicts a U.S. embassy source in Tegucigalpa: "You're going to see some muscle flexing around here in the next couple of weeks."

However muscular that display, it can only underline the importance that the Reagan Administration attaches to next Sunday's Salvadoran elections. The White House is gambling that an increasingly skeptical Congress will agree that a successful vote is a substantial step forward by El Salvador on the road from military-backed despotism to civilian democracy. Put more bluntly, the Administration argument is that free, open and honest elections are worth defending: the choosing of a Salvadoran President for a single five-year term would give the White House a greater chance to unblock some $250 million in additional military aid to El Salvador that is stalled in Congress.

Ideally, Washington hopes for a repetition of El Salvador's electoral achievement of March 1982. At that time, according to Salvadoran figures, some 74% of eligible voters ignored guerrilla threats and cast ballots for a 60-member Constituent Assembly. Says State Department Special Adviser Otto J. Reich: "What we're supporting in El Salvador is a process--not an individual, not a party--to reverse the country's cycle of violence. If a person is elected who continues those reforms, then we would continue to support him."

Washington has gone to great lengths to ensure that balloting in the seven-man presidential race will be honest and efficient. The U.S. Agency for International Development has spent $3.4 million, part of which was used to help the Salvadorans install an elaborate Wang computer system that can tabulate results-and keep track of the birth dates, home towns and parental names of all 2.4 million potential voters. The system will allow refugees displaced by the civil war to cast their ballots anywhere in the country, an important provision in El Salvador, where voting is mandatory and where citizens' identity cards will be stamped during the balloting as a sign of participation. To allay concerns over stuffed ballot boxes, the U.S. has provided some 6,600 sealed receptacles made of transparent Lucite.

But the high-tech U.S. approach to the elections faces a substantial obstacle: Salvadoran reality. Whatever else the elections may achieve, they are unlikely to bring even a semblance of political harmony to the deeply divided country. As the end of the hard-fought, two-month presidential campaign drew near (see following story), the front runners in the race were Jose Napoleon Duarte, 58, of the center-left Christian Democrats (P.D.C.) and Roberto d'Aubuisson, 40, leader of the ultrarightist Republican Nationalist Alliance, known as ARENA. Trailing behind, according to the country's unreliable opinion polls, was the only other possible winner, Francisco Jose Guerrero, 58, leader of the right-of-center National Conciliation Party (P.C.N.).

The Christian Democrats' Duarte is firmly identified with the notion of conciliation toward elements of the F.M.L.N. guerrillas and with such progressive measures as land reform and nationalization of the country's leading industries. His campaign platform promises a new "social contract" between the Salvadoran government and people, including support for collective bargaining, impartial courts and a restructuring of Salvador's brutal security forces.

By contrast, ARENA'S D'Aubuisson promises to wage a war of extermination against the guerrillas and their supporters, and draws cheers from well-to-do Salvadorans by vowing to return already nationalized industries to private hands. To his lower-income countrymen he holds out the vague prospect of full employment (40% of the labor force is currently jobless), but offers few concrete proposals for attaining it. In a recent bid to modify his reputation as a leading force behind El Salvador's death squads, D'Aubuisson has taken to adding in speeches that "it is not right to take justice into our hands. We must stop that." By and large, however, he tries to explain away the right-wing killings as the misguided acts of a few patriots.

Despite their studied neutrality, U.S. officials are aware that a D'Aubuisson victory would in all likelihood spell disaster for the Administration's effort to pry more Salvadoran military assistance from Congress. The possibility of a Duarte win, on the other hand, raises the specter of a backlash from the death squads and a more rapid decline for El Salvador's battered economy. Says a State Department official: "Duarte's principal problem is the business community. He's got to earn their trust. He needs them."

Washington officials were facing up to the idea that the election might not be over on voting day. With a handful of splinter candidates in the race, it is probable that neither D'Aubuisson nor Duarte could win the majority of votes needed for immediate election. Under the presidential selection rules, such a stalemate would require a runoff election between the top two finishers next month. There was no predicting where followers of the other, mostly conservative candidates would throw their second-round support.

That prospect could hardly be described as heartening for U.S. officials, but some of them were taking consolation in the Salvadoran military's apparent willingness to accept the election result--even if the winner is Duarte, who charged the government with election fraud when he lost the 1972 contest to Colonel Arturo Armando Molina. An important reason for the military's new attitude, of course, has been heavy pressure from the Reagan Administration, backed by the certainty of a U.S. military aid cutoff if the soldiers try to overturn the election result. "The military leaders have said that they now realize their job is to stay out of politics and fight this war," says a State Department official. Declares the Salvadoran army chief of operations, Colonel Miguel Antonio Mendez: "In my opinion, the word coup has to disappear from our vocabulary."

The guerrillas also claim to be following a policy of electoral noninterference, but for different reasons. In 1982 they suffered a major propaganda defeat when Salvadorans braved the guerrillas' campaign of intimidation and turned out to vote; guerrilla leaders have vowed not to repeat that mistake. Instead, they have apparently launched a spate of assassinations that have claimed the lives of at least four prominent conservative and right-wing leaders during the campaign. Among last week's targets were Hector Julio Flores Larin, a P.C.N. representative in the Constituent Assembly, and Tito Adalberto Rosa, a campaign coordinator for the ultraconservative Salvadoran Authentic Institutional Party. Another victim of the civil war last week was Gamma/Liaison Photographer John Hoagland, 36, on assignment for Newsweek, who was killed during a clash between guerrillas and government forces about 20 miles from the capital of San Salvador.

The F.M.L.N. has continued its longstanding strategy of hit-and-run sabotage, showing increasing disregard for civilian casualties. In one of their more spectacular exploits, the guerrillas machine-gunned a train about 40 miles north of San Salvador; twelve civilian passengers were killed. Late last week the rebels announced a major offensive "to step up the war before, during and after the elections." In that case, the question of who will become El Salvador's first freely elected President in more than 50 years may make a big difference to the kind of help that the Reagan Administration is willing--and able--to provide. --By George Russell. Reported by Ricardo Chavira and David DeVoss/ San Salvador

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira, David DeVoss/ San Salvador