Congress Should Play Salvador Card : Hope for peace may lie with Washington’s purse strings

The agonizingly slow peace talks to end El Salvador’s civil war have resumed in Costa Rica, with no resolution in sight after almost 12 years of fighting. But even if slow, talking is preferable to shooting. And stalled negotiations only reflect a battlefield stalemate. It’s clear there will be no breakthrough in El Salvador until Congress decides whether to renew military aid.

Compared to what could happen if an all-out war breaks out in the Middle East, the risk in El Salvador is certainly not in the same league. But for that small nation, the seemingly endless internal war has been a trauma of historic proportions, leaving 75,000 dead and one-fifth of a population of 5 million people displaced as refugees.

For better or worse, Washington, as the major regional power in the Western Hemisphere, is a key player in the bloody drama unfolding in El Salvador. That’s why the upcoming votes in Congress on military aid, and President Bush’s decision on whether to go along with them, will be pivotal to what happens there.

The Salvadoran aid package is part of a foreign-aid appropriations bill already approved by the House and pending before the Senate. The House allocated $85 million in military aid for the government of President Alfredo Cristiani, but also voted to withhold 50% of it unless the government makes progress in investigating last year’s murder of six Jesuit priests by Salvadoran troops and unless it continues negotiations with the rebels. Bush would prefer a more complex formula that would withhold only 30% of the aid, 15% in each half of the fiscal year.

The House version is preferable. It’s the simplest, most direct way to get a firm message across to the Salvadoran army: that U.S. taxpayers will no longer write a blank check to wage an inconclusive war.

The United States has sent more than $4.5 billion since 1980 to a series of governments in El Salvador. At least $1 billion has been spent on El Salvador’s military to “professionalize” it. That’s because, for the previous 50 years, the military was part of the problem in El Salvador--the corrupt, brutal guardian of a notorious oligarchy that ran the tiny nation like a medieval fiefdom.

Yet for all the United States has invested in the Salvadoran military, it remains part of the problem. That is the frightening and frustrating lesson of the massacre of the Jesuit priests last November--attributed to elite, U.S.-trained troops. They were shown to be capable of the same reactionary brutality that helped spark civil war. So continued military aid is no real solution for El Salvador. It only feeds the violence and compounds the political problems the country faces--as its martyred Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero warned 12 years ago.

To his credit, Cristiani has been trying to press for peace, renewing negotiations with the guerrillas. The rebels, both the guerrilla commanders and their civilian representatives, seem finally to have realized that they cannot win political power in battle and must fight for change peacefully.

The only faction still holding out against peace in El Salvador is the military. And the only actors powerful enough to make the generals come around sit in Congress and the White House.