El Salvador Stricken President, Ailing Country

“I have been a man of crisis, a man of battle, a fighting man. Now God has given me this one test more.” With those words, a tearful Jose Napoleon Duarte bade farewell to friends, boarded a U.S. military transport and lifted off last week from San Salvador’s Ilopango air force base. Seven hours later, the President of El Salvador checked into Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington to face his latest — and most daunting — challenge. Before leaving El Salvador, he had announced, “I have a bleeding ulcer in the stomach of a malignant character.” Medical tests conducted at Walter Reed found that Duarte, 62, is suffering from stomach cancer that appears to have spread to his liver. “I’m going to fight,” Duarte vowed. “God willing, I’ll come out all right.”

Duarte’s farewell at Ilopango had a sad dignity, but could not disguise the fact that he departed a defeated man. In 1984 the stocky Christian Democrat rode to the presidency on a wave of popular enthusiasm for two of his electoral promises: to bring El Salvador’s civil war to an end and to usher in an era of stability. That hope has long since given way to military stalemate, political confusion, social despair and pervasive corruption. When he took office, Duarte was touted by the Reagan Administration as the man who would bring democracy to El Salvador. But Duarte’s populist concern with reform soon buckled under the frustrations of managing an intractable war. “It might not be his fault that there still is no peace,” says fellow Christian Democrat Eduardo Molina Olivares, “but people blame him.”

In fact, Duarte has had a hand in turning White House policy in El Salvador — considered the Administration’s sole success story in Central America — into another potential failure, alongside Panama and Nicaragua. U.S. embassy officials in San Salvador continue to insist that Duarte is making slow progress toward ending the war and establishing a democratic system, but other Western diplomats are more pessimistic. “Things are a shambles,” says a West European envoy. “The Americans are in for a shock.” Even State Department officials concede that the rosy analysis emanating from the U.S. embassy is “dreamwork.”

Duarte’s departure is expected to deepen El Salvador’s sense of political drift. Vice President Rodolfo Castillo Claramount, who is standing in for Duarte, lacks the charisma and the power to stem a slow disintegration. Recent attacks by leftist guerrillas on hydroelectric dams, bridges and power stations have stepped up the eight-year-old civil war, which has claimed some 70,000 lives. The increase in military action guarantees further erosion in an economy that is afflicted with a 26% inflation rate and cannot provide adequate jobs for half the work force. Right-wing death squads have returned, undermining Duarte’s curtailment of political murders and other human-rights abuses.

Even if his health had not failed, the President would have faced rapidly escalating political problems. Under the constitution, he cannot run for consecutive five-year terms. His Christian Democratic Party is likely to be rejected in presidential elections scheduled for next March. Three months ago, in local balloting that amounted to a referendum on Duarte’s performance, the party was trounced by the deeply conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which gained control of the 60-seat Assembly and won 13 of 14 mayoral races. In San Salvador, the capital, Duarte’s son Alejandro was defeated in his bid for the mayor’s office.

Since then, the Christian Democrats have splintered over who should inherit the leadership. Duarte tried to unite the party behind a trusted adviser, Abraham Rodriguez, but found no echo; instead a divided rank and file lined up behind two former Cabinet ministers, Julio Adolfo Rey Prendes and Fidel Chavez Mena. Rey Prendes is favored to receive the presidential nomination, but his candidacy will be tarnished by corruption charges that have dogged the Duarte administration.

ARENA, by contrast, has thrown its support behind Alfredo Cristiani, 42, the U.S.-educated scion of a wealthy coffee-growing family. A poll released last week by the University of Central America indicated that, as of now, Cristiani would defeat any other presidential candidate by at least 10 percentage points. That would amount to a repudiation of the Duarte record on at least two counts: Cristiani has said that he would return to private hands export industries run by the Duarte administration as state enterprises, and that he would roll back a land-reform program that turned El Salvador’s largest estates into farm cooperatives.

Cristiani has also called for the 56,000-strong military to have a freer hand in defeating the guerrillas of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, who currently number about 6,000. Some Salvadorans fear such a strategy would mean ignoring a sizable increase in death-squad activities and other human-rights abuses. ARENA Founder Roberto d’Aubuisson, a former army major who ran against Duarte in the 1984 elections and has since yielded his party’s leadership to Cristiani, has been linked by U.S. intelligence to the killer squads that ran amuck in the early 1980s.

Those shadowy units seem to be expanding their business again. Human-rights groups estimate that death-squad activity — the kidnaping and killing by unidentified gunmen of civilians suspected of leftist sympathies — has trebled since last year. One rights group, Tutela Legal, identified 24 undisputed death-squad killings in all of 1987; this year’s toll stood at 21 by the end of April. (By comparison, Tutela counted 29 executions of civilians by the guerrillas in 1987, vs. 17 so far this year.) Most Salvadorans believe the upsurge in right-wing terrorism is the work of military men frustrated by their inability to put down the guerrillas in the field.

In Washington the rising death toll and the prospect of an ARENA presidency have revived congressional unease over military and economic support for El Salvador, which costs the U.S. more than $1 million daily. Some legislators wonder whether Duarte could have done more to bring the military under civilian control: only two death-squad cases have been successfully prosecuted during his presidency, and both involved American victims. “We should have leaned on Duarte,” says Republican Congressman Robert Dornan, a California conservative who serves on the House subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs. “We should have used a little of the public hot white light to embarrass some of these people.” Even so, Dornan credits Duarte with making some progress toward democracy and blames the guerrillas for thwarting his agenda.

Others in Washington are less generous. They charge that Duarte made little progress on land reform, failed to meet his overall economic goals and refused to stand up to the military. One congressional source says that after the U.S. spent $3 billion over eight years to strengthen and foster democracy in El Salvador, “now it looks like we’re going back to the good old days prior to all the money.” Observes another congressional source: “One of the real frauds the Administration has perpetrated on Congress and the American people is the idea that the election of Duarte somehow turned El Salvador overnight from a military government to a democratic one.”

Whatever the Administration’s views about Duarte and the threat of Communist insurgency in El Salvador, the message has yet to reach most Americans. In a poll released last week by Market Opinion Research, a Republican-oriented firm based in Detroit, 33% of respondents said that they had no idea what kind of government ran El Salvador, 35% thought it was a pro-Soviet regime, a mere 15% that it was democratic. For both the Reagan Administration and the ailing Salvadoran President at Walter Reed, the findings must have come as a profoundly dispiriting assessment of the past four years.