Real Peace (11 page)

Mexico's people are able, hard-working, and proud. But as a nation Mexico is dangerously unstable. It is a prime candidate for communist subversion. Over half a century of one-party government has left it awash in corruption. As a result of short-sighted economic policies and in spite of its position as a major oil-exporting country, its economy is in shambles. The strength of its currency has hit a record low. The Cubans, meanwhile, already have a beachhead in Mexico. The two countries have signed 27 major formal agreements on trade and other forms of cooperation. The Mexican far-left is fanatically pro-Castro.

We have learned over and over again that once they establish a beachhead, the communists always want more. Mexico and the other countries that follow El Salvador on the Kremlin's shopping list are the ones that have the most to fear both from the revolutionaries and from any hesitancy on our part about
stopping them. For the moment the U.S. could endure a communist government in El Salvador. To its neighbors such a development would be an immediate, mortal danger.

Resisting the communists is in the interests of all the nations of Central America. It is also in the interests of the people of El Salvador. There is no question but that El Salvador needed a revolution. Of the more than 80 countries I have visited I can think of none in which the gap between rich and poor was greater than in the El Salvador I visited in 1955. For generations the oligarchs had been squeezing the people dry. Reform on all levels of Salvadorean society was desperately needed.

In recent years, however, peaceful revolution has been under way in El Salvador. The current government, empowered as a result of a free, fair election in which
77
percent of the country's eligible voters participated, is working to bring justice and progress to a nation that has seen little of either. But it must also contend with a murderous insurrection by an 8,000-man guerrilla army, dominated by Marxist-Leninists and armed with Sovietbloc weapons channelled through Nicaragua.

American media coverage is blatantly biased against the Salvadorean government. Virtually every day we hear or read of guerrillas and civilians being killed by government troops. The fact that in the past year alone the guerrillas have killed or wounded 7,000 government soldiers and murdered hundreds of innocent civilians receives only passing notice.

The senseless killing on both sides must stop. We should support efforts by the nations in the area to end the war by negotiation, but with two caveats.

We talk to bring peace. As we learned in Vietnam, the communists use talking as a screen for continued fighting.

Also, under no circumstances should we support the guerrillas' demand that they should hold high posts in a popular front government. A popular front would be a front for the guerrillas' ongoing revolution. Communists usually enter negotiations or coalition governments not to achieve peace but
to achieve the same objective they had sought on the battlefield: total victory.

The choice is clear-cut. Should ballots or bullets determine what kind of government El Salvador will have? If the communists have so much faith in their system, why do they resist letting the people decide the question in a free, internationally supervised election? It is time to let the people of El Salvador decide whether they will have a better chance to get reform and economic progress under a Nicaraguan- or Cuban-style communist government, or under one supported and influenced by the United States.

Nicaragua is a tragic example of the kind of government El Salvador will get if the guerrillas win. When the Sandinistas took over many in Washington said we should just leave them alone. Keep the economic aid flowing, the revolutionaries' apologists assured us, and Nicaragua will flower into a functioning democracy.

Instead it is degenerating into a Castro-style dictatorship. A quarter-million refugees have fled the country. The villages of the Miskito Indians, who refused to be assimilated into the revolution, were burned to the ground. The free press was closed down, religious leaders were harassed, and citizens were taught to spy on each other Stalin-style through neighborhood “defense” committees. Children receive Marxist indoctrination in school. Meanwhile, real wages are down by 50 percent, unemployment is rising, and there are shortages of key foodstuffs.

With their people and their economy on the ropes, the Sandinistas turned away from problems at home to expansion abroad, building up a 138,000-man army, larger than the armed forces of all the other nations of the region put together, and prosecuting their “revolution without borders” in El Salvador and elsewhere—with the assistance of Soviets, Cubans, East Germans, and Libyans. As these foreigners flooded in thousands of Nicaraguans, including former Sandinistas, flooded out, vowing to return and oust those who betrayed their revolution.

In Nicaragua the U.S. policy of hands-off and handouts—including $120 million in aid to the Sandinistas from 1979 to 1981—didn't work. A policy designed to encourage the Sandinistas to allow more democracy only encouraged them in their belief that they could get away with less. A policy designed to leave them alone to mind their country's business only freed them to meddle with impunity in their neighbors' business. That is why the Reagan Administration began its covert support of anti-Sandinista rebels based in Honduras.

The Administration's Central America policies are designed to achieve three goals.

The purpose of our support of anti-Sandinista forces is to help the elected government of El Salvador by cutting off military supplies to the guerrillas: As British M.P. Julian Amery recently observed, “Experience has shown that a guerrilla movement can generally be beaten only if the base from which it operates is destabilized.”

Our policy of economic and military aid to El Salvador is designed to strengthen the anti-communist government forces so that they can stop the communist-dominated revolutionaries, thus derailing Soviet hopes of subverting other governments in a strategically vital region.

A third goal is to quarantine Cuba and Nicaragua by preventing them from infecting their neighbors with their tyranny and their misery. In that connection the United States should not be defensive about our military presence in the area. We should not make threats as to what we
will
do. But even more important, we should not proclaim what we will not do. In attempting to reassure our own people we should not reassure our potential enemies. We should leave no doubt in their minds that we have the capability and the will to do what is necessary to stop the flow of arms from Cuba and Nicaragua into El Salvador.

The question now is whether Congress will support the President's policies or cut the authority and the funds he needs to continue them. In considering that question the critics should
bear in mind that President Reagan did not create the crises in Nicaragua and El Salvador. He inherited them.

The specter of American men dying in Vietnam is being raised to defeat the Administration's military aid and training program. The comparison does not bear analysis. American troops were sent to South Vietnam because communist North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. As the North Vietnamese have since admitted, they instigated, supplied and controlled the guerrillas in South Vietnam from the beginning. That was why President Kennedy sent the first American combat troops to Vietnam in 1962. Crack North Vietnamese regulars, not barefoot peasants, rode Soviet tanks triumphantly into Saigon in April 1975. Had there been no outside forces in South Vietnam, American troops would not have been needed.

There are as yet no outside troops in El Salvador. As long as this is the case no American combat troops will or should be sent there. Our policy in El Salvador and in other countries similarly threatened by revolutionary forces should be to provide arms and economic aid only. They must provide the men. If when adequately trained and armed they lack the will and the ability to defeat the revolutionary forces, we cannot do it for them. Even if we were to win, the victory would be temporary. As soon as we withdrew the revolutionaries would take over.

The doves who oppose military aid contend that the primary problem in El Salvador is poverty. Since poverty causes communist revolution, they assert, then we should deal with the cause by providing economic rather than military aid.

I first heard this argument in 1947, when President Truman asked the Congress to provide military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. Thousands of postcards inundated our congressional offices. The message was simple: “Send food, not arms.” Fortunately, a bipartisan majority resisted the pressure and supported the Truman Doctrine. If we had not done so and the U.S. had sent only food and not arms, Greece and Turkey would probably be communist today.

Both military and economic aid are essential. Either one
without the other will fail to do the job. That is why the U.S. is sending El Salvador three dollars in economic and humanitarian aid for every dollar of military aid, a fact the critics persistently ignore.

The hawks contend that our primary emphasis should be on military aid rather than economic aid. This course would also be folly. Helping a government stop a violent revolution without helping it deal with the economic conditions that helped spawn the revolution would also buy only a short-lived victory. After one revolution was put down, another would take its place.

The critics—both hawks and doves—fail to recognize a fundamental truth about nations in the developing world: they cannot have progress without security, and they cannot have security without progress.

If there is one justifiable criticism of U.S. Latin American policy which applies to all Administrations since World War II, it is that we have consistently provided too much military aid and not enough economic aid for our friends and allies in the area.

But the worst mistake we could make in El Salvador or in any country under siege from Soviet-backed guerrillas would be to provide just enough military aid to keep them fighting, but not enough to win. If the Congress refuses to support President Reagan's policy with the funds he feels are necessary to prevent a communist victory, he will have no choice but to get out and let the communists take over. This would be tragic for the people of El Salvador and for us, but it would be worse to half try and to fail. We cannot afford another Bay of Pigs, where we sent a brave but pathetically undersupported force to be cut to pieces on the beaches of Cuba. And we cannot afford another Vietnam, where Congress was unwilling to follow through with the commitment we had made in the 1973 Paris peace agreements to provide the same amount of support to South Vietnam that the Soviet Union was providing for North Vietnam.

Such setbacks are bad enough for the people we let down. The legacy of our failure in Vietnam was over 100,000 boat people and three million Cambodians slaughtered by the communist Khmer Rouge government. But if it happens again the world may decide that failure is endemic to America, that our idealism and our good intentions, since they spell defeat for us and our friends time and time again, are burdens rather than blessings. Leaders everywhere will conclude, as did President Ayub Khan of Pakistan when he learned of U.S. complicity in the coup that led to the murder of President Diem of South Vietnam, “It is dangerous to be a friend of the United States; it pays to be neutral; and sometimes it helps to be an enemy.”

The “how not to do it” pundits and congressional critics dominate the dialogue on Central America. What they fail to recognize is that while our current policy is not an ideal one, it is the least we can do under the circumstances. In the future, however, the United States should act
before
Soviet puppets such as the Sandinistas take power,
before
communist guerrillas can assail another freely-elected government such as El Salvador's.

To put it charitably, U.S. policy toward Latin America since World War II, while well-intentioned, has been inadequate, inept, and, worst of all, plagued by fitful starts and stops. Because of its proximity, Latin America should be our first foreign policy priority. But as I observed when I returned from Caracas in 1958, the only time Latin America receives frontpage attention in the U.S. media is when “there is a revolution or a riot at a soccer game.”

For decades the U.S. has been smothering Latin America with slogans. Foreign aid programs such as the Alliance for Progress and Good Neighbors raised high hopes in Latin America, and when the hopes were unfulfilled they raised hackles. Despite our good intentions we have broken our promises to the Latin Americans over and over again. Most of the billions of dollars we have sent to their governments have been sucked
up by corrupt officials or wasted on poorly conceived or poorly managed projects.

Meanwhile we have left the impression that we become actively involved in Latin America only when
our
interests are threatened by communist aggression. We must now develop policies which also address
their
interests. Even if there were no communist threat millions of Latin Americans would justifiably demand reforms to lift the burdens of poverty, injustice, and corruption that have been their lot for generations. In addressing these concerns we will serve the interests of the people of Latin America and serve our own interests as well by depriving the communists of the issues they exploit to gain power and impose a new tyranny.

A top Carter Administration official recently said that after the flurry of high-level concern in the U.S. government as Somoza was falling to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979, Latin America was once again put on the back burner—until the crisis in El Salvador erupted.

It would be unfair to single out the Carter Administration for this tragic error. All postwar American Presidents, understandably busy with innumerable current crises far away, have not had the time or the inclination to focus on potential ones close to home. The tendency is understandable, but it must stop. We can no longer afford it. Since so many crises in Latin America and the other parts of the Third World are either instigated or encouraged by the Soviets, a modus operandi based solely on crisis management will give our adversary the advantage of always making the first move.