EL SALVADOR: On The Brink

Edging toward civil war

"We are a country of hostages," moaned a beleaguered official of El Salvador's Education Ministry. "We are hostage to our political system and we have no escape." Even as he spoke, armed student radicals demanding reductions in high school tuition were holding some 1,500 hostages in his ministry. And on a tree-lined avenue across town, Madrid's Ambassador Victor Sánchez-Mesas and 14 others were being held captive in the Spanish embassy by members of a leftist group. The invaders demanded that El Salvador's civilian-military regime release 21 political prisoners.

Wishing to avoid a replay of the previous week's catastrophe in Guatemala, where a police attack on the occupied Spanish embassy resulted in 39 deaths, Salvadoran authorities kept their security forces away from the scene. Right-wing terrorists showed no such restraint: shortly after the embassy seizure, a leftist doctor was gunned down at his clinic; members of an ultraconservative group threatened to execute three kidnaped Communist leaders and burn down the embassy if the occupiers did not withdraw within 24 hours. Before that deadline was reached, the militants at the embassy freed seven of their hostages in exchange for the government's release of seven political prisoners. The rightists then liberated their Communist captives.

In an effort to avert all-out civil war, junior officers in the Salvadoran army had toppled the despotic military regime of General Carlos Humberto Romero last October and installed a five-man junta composed of two moderate colonels and three reform-minded civilians. The new government was immediately attacked by extremists on both the left and right. Further weakened by internal divisions, the junta was unable to stop the violence.

When all the civilian members of the junta and Cabinet resigned in protest last month, military leaders invited the leftist Christian Democrats to join them in forming a new government. But the shaky coalition seems no more likely than its short-lived predecessor to satisfy the far left.

The endless cycle of social and political upheaval has virtually destroyed the once flourishing economy of Central America's most densely populated state. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance has indicated that the U.S. was eager to provide $49 million in economic aid to help stabilize the junta. But money alone probably will not shore up the embattled government, and Washington policymakers concede that their options are limited. Says one Government analyst: "You get the very depressing feeling that all the U.S. can do is wait until it blows and then see what can be done."