Cold War in Central America

THE Cold War has been declared officially over many times in the last few weeks. Poland has replaced its government, East Germany has opened the Berlin Wall, and Czechoslovakia has begun to give in to protestors' demands. All this is happening with the encouragement, if not the active participation, of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

Yet here in the Western hemisphere, our own government persists in believing in Soviet aggression. in Central America. Using "Marxism" as a synonym for evil, we justify our policies as attempts to root out the pernicious seeds of Communism.

We fund a rebel army and enforce a trade embargo against Nicaragua. We pay Honduras to house the Contras. We even send money to right-wing think tanks in Costa Rica in an attempt to destabilize the regional negotiations of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In El Salvador, the U.S.-backed right-wing government has spent the last two weeks battling leftist insurgents in one of the fiercest rebel offensives of the decade. Media attention has focused on the possibility of a rebel victory, allegedly presided over by the Soviets and their Cuban and Nicaraguan allies. No one mentions the possibility that the insurgents might be independently fighting to overthrow a brutal right-wing regime and to assert El Salvador's right to self-determination.

The Bush Administration clings to the notion of Soviet domination in Central America in the face of international and domestic pressure to cut off military aid to El Salvador. This pressure comes at a time when the influence of right-wing death squads--some closely affiliated with President Alfredo Cristiani's ARENA party--is increasing. The most outrageous of the recent human rights abuses include the killing and mutilation of six priests, their cook and her fifteen-year-old daughter, at the hands of 30 men in military dress.

THE fallacy of the Soviet domination thesis is easy to see. In the minds of U.S. conservatives, the still untrustworthy Soviets instigate the restructuring of Communist societies in their own sphere of influence while fervently supporting the victories of orthodox Marxist rebels thousands of miles away.

At the same time, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Bush believes neither Cristiani nor the military had any role in the priest killing. He believes "Cristiani would not lie to me in a matter of this importance." He believes--despite the fact that Cristiani's telling the truth might jeopardize the $1.4 million dollars a day in aid his government receives from the United States.

It is hard to imagine that even before perestroika, the Soviet Union was supplying an amount of cash and equipment to the rebels even remotely close to $1.4 million dollars a day. And the ravaged economies of Cuba and Nicaragua are hardly able to give the rebels any substantial aid.

Beyond economics, it is not in the best interests of Gorbachev to promote revolution in Central America at the expense of improved relations with the United States. Nor is it in the long-term interest of the United States to continue seeing a left-wing victory as the worst possible outcome of the war.

After 10 years and billions of dollars in aid, El Salvador's military has little to show for itself but a reprehensible human rights record that includes forced recruitment of boys as young as 12 or 13; the destruction and evacuation of border peasant villages; arrests, tortures, and disappearances of human rights advocates and civilians vaguely suspected of left-wing activity; and deep, friendly relations with the death squads.

A left-wing government, despite ideo-logical differences with the Bush Administration, would have to work quite hard to reach the level of human rights abuses the right has achieved. While Bush continues to claim that U.S. policy is on the side of democracy in El Salvador--democracy defined as allegedly free elections in a country where the military rounds up peasants to drive them to the polls--he is increasingly identified with terror and poverty in the region.

OUR government would do well in Central America to follow Gorbachev's example in Eastern Europe: withdraw support from unsuccessful, unpopular and brutal governments. While it is probably too late to win the hearts of the rebels, it is in our interest to come down on the side of human rights in our hemisphere by withdrawing military aid from El Salvador. In doing so, we might gain the praise of Costa Rica and set an example for Guatemala and Honduras.

The murder of the priests is only one of many horrific acts we have implicitly sponsored in El Salvador and in the rest of Central America. It's time we replaced a simplistic and dubious fear of Soviet domination with a concern for human rights.