Word: salvadore
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...There are a lot of balls in the air at the same time," said a State Department official last week, talking about the quickening pace of U.S. diplomacy in Central America, and indeed there were. Vice President George Bush visited El Salvador and demanded in unequivocal terms an end to the political murders being carried out by right-wing extremists. Henry Kissinger, along with eight members of the bipartisan presidential commission he heads, was in Mexico and Venezuela gathering fact and opinion for the report that is scheduled to go to the President in early January. U.S. Special Envoy Richard...
Despite the high-level meetings, the State Department down-played the notion that some bold stroke was imminent. "The gut issues," said one official, "are not appreciably changed." But that cool appraisal understates the current, critical juncture for U.S. policy toward Central America, in particular El Salvador. Two days after Bush's ultimatum, Salvadoran extremists won worrisome victories: a rightist coalition in the legislature managed to weaken the three-year-old land-reform program, and leftist guerrillas in the field ravaged a U.S.-trained army battalion (25 dead, 45 wounded) in a ten-hour firefight. In Nicaragua, meanwhile...
Among the contentious questions dividing U.S. policymakers is how best to stop El Salvador's escuadrones de la muerte-death squads. The victims are supposedly "subversives," but they include union leaders, liberal professors and centrist politicians. Bush was in El Salvador for just seven hours, but his warnings about "these right-wing fanatics" were stark and powerful. "Your cause is being undermined by the murderous violence of reactionary minorities," he said to an assembly of the country's politicians and military men, "[which] poisons the well of friendship between our countries. [Do not] make the mistake of thinking...
...hard line is welcome, although late. "The Administration realized we had been had," says a U.S. diplomat in El Salvador, "that we were not supporting genuine anti-Communists but feudalists or worse." Last month Reagan exercised a pocket veto of the two-year-old human rights certification law, which had obliged him to certify twice a year that El Salvador was making headway against the quasi-official terrorism...
...death four American women, all Roman Catholic missionaries. Three weeks ago, retired U.S. District Court Judge Harold Tyler submitted his 101-page special report on the case to the State Department. According to those who have seen the classified document, Tyler found that the U.S. embassy in San Salvador pressed the murder investigations properly. It now seems likely that the five Guardsmen charged with murdering the churchwomen will finally be tried. The Salvadoran government has a large incentive to do justice in the case: if no trial is held, Congress has ordered that U.S. military aid shrink...