Word: salvadore
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While the guerrillas showed their disdain, American visitors expressed non-partisan delight over the election process. U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Thomas Pickering took 41 official U.S. observers, including Senators Pete Wilson of California and John Chafee of Rhode Island and a group of Congressmen, around to watch the balloting. Said Chafee: "Anybody who looks at this and fails to be impressed is just immune to sensitivity." Agreed Angier Biddle Duke, a Democrat who had served as Ambassador to El Salvador in 1952-53: "The U.S. spent chicken feed here, and in return for that investment we have seen...
President Reagan expressed that theme, though in much stronger and more sweeping terms, during his TV address. Reagan has been frustrated, above all, by the determined resistance of the House to his requests for $62 million in emergency military aid for El Salvador and $21 million in funding for the Administration's not so secret war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government. Those funds have been approved by the Republican-controlled Senate, but House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill, a firm opponent of Reagan's policies in Central America, has blocked a congressional conference that could release...
...next day Reagan used almost exactly those words during a half-hour nationally televised speech. "We have provided just enough aid to avoid outright disaster, but not enough to resolve the crisis, so El Salvador is being left to slowly bleed to death," he declared. Conveying both anger and urgency, the President painted a harsh picture of Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan attempts to "spread Communism by force throughout the hemisphere." Alternately evoking that alarming picture and declaring the Administration's commitment to programs of longterm, peaceful economic and social assistance for Central America, Reagan implicitly justified his Administration...
Between the euphoria of the Salvadoran election outcome and the urgency of Reagan's address, the Administration's pitch to Congress produced a quick success. The Representatives attached only a relatively mild proviso to the aid bill, requiring the President to report periodically on El Salvador's progress in ending human rights abuses, most notably those of the country's predominantly right-wing death squads (see following story). Said a senior State Department official: "That's the best of both worlds...
...Duarte ran for President against Colonel Arturo Armando Molina Barraza, the candidate of El Salvador's ruling military-landowner alliance. Duarte's running mate was a high school chum, Guillermo Ungo.* Conservative businessmen were aghast at the duo's election promises of land reform and support for organized labor, and by the fact that a front organization for the illegal Communist Party was participating in its National Opposition Union. When Duarte appeared to be pulling into the lead, the government blacked out television coverage of the ballot counting and announced the following day that Molina...