Word: salvadore
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...unsettled issues, the Administration's policy in Central America is most controversial. Yet Duarte managed to make military aid to El Salvador a cinch. "We couldn't have done it without Duarte," said an Administration official. In eleven hours one day, the President-elect had eight back-to-back meetings with congressional committees and caucuses. "I need your help," he pleaded. "Don't leave me standing alone." Duarte, the first freely elected President in half a century, means to lead a country enduring a hellish civil war, where the ruling class has been particularly resistant to social...
Duarte explained his plan to have a "national dialogue" with all Salvadoran factions, including the leftist insurgents. But such talks, he vowed, would never cede a share of governing power ("the piece of cake") to the revolutionaries. He said he would continue El Salvador's ambitious but teetering land-reform program (see WORLD). Perhaps most significant in terms of U.S. support, Duarte said he would establish commissions to investigate the thousands of political murders committed by the extreme right. "I have the will," he said. "I have the guts to do it, to stop the death squads...
Indeed, Weiss and other liberals argued for placing similar conditions on the Salvadoran aid approved last week. The concern in the White House, on the other hand, was whether Duarte's socialist tendencies might lead him to provoke El Salvador's landed oligarchy and their allies in the military. During an Oval Office chat, Duarte reassured Reagan that he was not hostile to private enterprise...
Duarte was evasive when asked about the CIA-financed contra attacks against the Sandinista regime of Nicaragua; he is ambivalent on the issue. The Reagan Administration claims it has funded the contras mainly for El Salvador's sake, to help cut the Salvadoran rebels' supply lines. Most Democrats in Congress, however, believe U.S. sponsorship of the insurgency is wrong, more trouble than it is worth, or both. Just an hour after the House approved the Salvadoran arms money, it voted to pinch off all funding for the contras...
...believe in the right of self-determination for El Salvador," asked Majority Leader Jim Wright, "must we not also believe in the right of self-determination for Nicaragua, with which we disagree?" U.S. patronage of the contras, said Democrat Edward Boland of Massachusetts, "has caused our allies to wonder at our sense of proportion." The Republican-controlled Senate has approved $21 million for the contras. But a standard, split-the-difference compromise may be unlikely, since keeping a meager flow to the contras would not satisfy either side...