El Salvador Stricken President, Ailing Country

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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.