El Salvador: Suggest, Persuade, Bargain

A U.S. campaign for change yields a few, but only a few, victories

It was either a bold bid for peace or aclever propaganda ploy. Shadowed by bodyguards in the venerable Mexico City Foreign Correspondents Club, Guillermo Manuel Ungo, 51, president of El Salvador's Democratic Revolutionary Front (F.D.R.), a leftist political alliance that boycotted last March's elections, faced an overflow audience. Alongside was Ana Guadalupe Martínez, a representative of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), the Marxist-led organization that unites the country's five guerrilla factions. Ungo and Martínez announced that their groups had offered to begin unconditional direct negotiations with the Salvadoran government to end the country's three-year civil war and to help reduce tensions throughout volatile Central America. Said Ungo last week: "We can now test the U.S. willingness to talk. The political will of the U.S. is a vital factor in leading to any dialogue."

Once again, Washington's attempts to draw the line against insurgency in tiny El Salvador were being tugged into the spotlight. The F.D.R. and F.M.L.N. leaders said that they had not yet received a formal response from the Salvadoran government, whose efforts to put down the guerrillas have been backed by about $122.4 million in U.S. military aid in the past three years. But in the capital of San Salvador, there was an immediate reaction. Said Right-Wing Leader Roberto d'Aubuisson, who is president of the Constituent Assembly: "We will permit no dialogue or negotiation with the criminal groups of the F.D.R. and F.M.L.N.!"

In Washington, the response to the guerrilla proposal was less negative, but equally skeptical. Said a State Department official: "It is the old, familiar line of cosmetic procedural devices. This is a proposal to exchange proposals, not a real deal." State Department Spokesman John Hughes noted that "if [the guerrillas] wish to participate in the political process as we have always urged, they should say so."

According to another F.M.L.N. spokesman in Mexico City, an additional reason for the peace offer is a rebel fear that the Salvadoran insurgency might broaden into a regional war. But in the view of many U.S. analysts, the rebels are beginning to sound more conciliatory because they know that the Salvadoran government, under U.S. pressure, is inching toward a proposal of its own for political reconciliation. The initial step would be for Provisional President Alvaro Magaña to name a peace commission that would be instructed to look for a way to include leftists in the presidential and municipal elections scheduled to take place by the end of March 1984. The main condition: that the guerrillas wishing to re-enter the political process lay down their arms.

Some U.S. experts believe the real aim of the latest F.D.R. and F.M.L.N. offer was to thwart any attempts toward reconciliation. Still, the rebels appear to realize that talks may be inevitable. To enhance their position in any future negotiations, three weeks ago the guerrillas launched a military offensive in El Salvador's northern and eastern regions. They overran five small towns and hamlets, claimed to have killed 189 members of the Salvadoran armed forces and captured, then released, some 90 "prisoners of war."