Word: salvadoran
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...James Baker: "We do not want a Central American country to go Communist on our watch. We are pointing out to Congress that it shares that responsibility." Indeed, one reason that Congress has thus far been willing to give Reagan at least half a loaf in his requests for Salvadoran aid is the realization that the fragile regime might otherwise fall to Communist rebels, an event that could not only endanger U.S. security but also prove a political liability for those responsible. By taking his case to Capitol Hill, Reagan made it clear he would hold members accountable if they...
...America, initially at the urging of CIA Director William Casey and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Both argued for a hard-line anti-Soviet address that would cast the region's problems in a stark East-West context. Kirkpatrick wrote an article last month arguing that denying aid to the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan insurgents "would be to make the U.S. the enforcer of [the late Soviet President Leonid] Brezhnev's doctrine of irreversible Communist revolution." In another article, Casey wrote that the problems in Central America reflected the Soviet Union's strategy of using surrogates like Nicaragua to spread...
...carefully modulated address. Calling the President's policies "a formula for failure," Dodd accused him of ignoring the fundamental factors that led to instability in the region. "If Central America were not racked with poverty, there would be no revolution," Dodd argued. He painted a bleak picture of the Salvadoran government, charging that its land-reform program had long been "abandoned" and that its repressive police tactics still terrorized the populace. "I have been to that country, and I know about the morticians who travel the streets each morning to collect the bodies of those summarily dispatched the night before...
Leaders in El Salvador were heartened by Reagan's speech. U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton invited seven prominent businessmen to his house to watch a tape of the address. Said Conrado López Andreu, president of the Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce and Industry: "Despite the twisted misinformation in the U.S., President Reagan finally told the truth about the region and El Salvador." But some who were not at the dinner expressed the fear that Reagan was still not paying enough attention to the political and social situation. "He said the problem in Central America was political, not military...
Even if Reagan can line up political support in Congress and the country for his program, the U.S. will find it difficult to achieve the stability it seeks in Central America. The Salvadoran army is in trou ble, weakened by a corrupt and generally incompetent officer corps. Until recently the army was no more than an overgrown police force that kept 9-to-5 hours, five days a week, in its halfhearted struggle against the leftist guerrillas, and this attitude is changing only very slowly. The commanders had refused to adopt counterinsurgency tactics, like using small mobile units to pursue...