EL SALVADOR: One Step Closer to Anarchy

Leftist extremists provoke the new junta to violence

It was just past noon in the capital city of El Salvador, the little Central American country that had undergone a coup d’état only two weeks earlier. As merchants in San Salvador’s central business district pulled down their steel shutters for the traditional two-hour siesta, a group of 180 young men suddenly jogged down the street, followed cautiously by a small band of foreign journalists. The joggers, all members of a Trotskyite political group called the LP-28, shouted “Unity!” and carried antigovernment banners. Some also held gym bags and cumbersome parcels—at least one of which, it turned out later, contained a rifle ready for firing.

As the runners approached a newspaper office that had been destroyed by bombs the previous night, a dozen policemen braced for trouble. Shots rang out, and soon army reinforcements arrived in armored personnel carriers, firing at the activists and running over bystanders in the process, “People were falling like pins in a bowling alley,” said one horrified shopkeeper. By the tune the shooting ended six hours later, the streets were littered with 32 bodies, and the country had slipped one step closer to anarchy.

In the next five days, 20 more Salvadorans died in clashes among the many extremist political factions that have made civil strife a way of life in El Salvador (pop. 4.8 million). On one side are the leftist terrorist groups that seek to provoke a Nicaragua-style insurrection. On the other are the hit teams obedient to the country’s ultraconservative elite. Standing helpless in the middle, unable to control either the notoriously brutal 12,000-man security forces or intransigent foes on the left and right, is the civilian-military junta that ousted President Carlos Humberto Romero only last month.

Backed by liberal academics and some members of the Roman Catholic clergy, the junta had announced a crash program of political reform. Though it quickly won support and a pledge of “significant aid” from the U.S., the five-man junta may fall apart before the program is carried out. Rumors of a countercoup by right-wing military officers swept through the capital last week, together with reports that the oligarchy was prepared to pay as much as $20 million to any group that could restore the country to military control.

The most pressing problem is the mounting outrage over the junta’s failure to determine the fate of some 300 dissidents who have “disappeared” during the past three years. Military officers have opposed the junta’s plan to create a special commission to investigate the disappearances, evidently out of concern that this might implicate the armed forces. Unless the junta can produce a convincing explanation of what happened to the missing 300, and quickly, warns Christian Democratic Leader José Napoleón Duarte, whose victory in the presidential election seven years ago precipitated a military takeover, “they will be digging their own graves.” Not to mention those of many other Salvadorans.

Until last month’s coup, most leftist groups, including the 75,000-member Marxist-Leninist Popular Revolutionary Bloc (B.P.R.), had not believed El Salvador was ready for a revolution against the Romero regime. With an unsteady new government in place, however, some of the leftists have sensed an undreamed-of opportunity to try to seize power. Their strategy: to provoke the new government into bloody efforts to suppress protest, thereby demonstrating that for all its promises of reform, the junta is not much different from the Romero dictatorship.

Toward that end, B.P.R. members invaded the Ministry of Labor and Economyand captured 300 hostages, including three members of the junta’s newly appointed Cabinet. Another group attacked the U.S. embassy, forcing Marine guards to fire tear gas to repel the assault. Still another machine-gunned the embassy of Guatemala, the country that has given shelter to the deposed Romero.

Not that the armed forces needed much provocation. One evening, a group of 80 leftist youths assembled in the streets near the central market for a political pantomime. Some carried toy guns, while others wore ape masks. A crowd of about 500 people gathered as one young man in a stovepipe hat portrayed Uncle Sam giving orders to the Salvadoran junta. Others in the carnival atmosphere acted out a “massacre of people” by the security forces.

As darkness fell, a truckload of soldiers happened upon the strange scene. In anger or perhaps merely in fear, the soldiers fired into the crowd, putting actors and onlookers alike to flight. Behind them they left six players dead in the street, one still clutching a plastic gun. The performance was over for the night.

As El Salvador’s crisis deepened, Bolivia was enhancing its sorry reputation as one of the Western Hemisphere’s most unstable countries. Only two days after the final session of this year’s Organization of American States meeting broke up in La Paz, Bolivian soldiers surrounded the presidential palace, overthrew the three-month-old government of President Walter Guevara Arze, and installed a military regime headed by Colonel Alberto Natusch Busch. The U.S. was particularly disappointed because it had hoped that Bolivia under Guevara, the country’s first civilian leader in more than a decade, would take its place alongside its Andean Group neighbors (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru) as a growing force for democratic reform in South America.

But Washington could hardly pretend to be surprised at the news; Natusch’s takeover, after all, was the 188th coup in Bolivia’s 154 years of independence and the third in the past 16 months.