The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; EL Salvador Certification

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Left-wing guerrillas launched new, bolder attacks in El Salvador today, just as the Reagan administration was preparing to rush emergency aid to the government. Reuters News Agency said about 100 people were killed when guerrillas stormed and occupied the town of Nueva Trinidad near the border with Honduras. The Associated Press said, "For the first time in 2 1/2 years of civil war, guerrillas attacked a city in daylight." The city is Usulutan, east of San Salvador. In Washington, a move was launched in Congress to stop President Reagan from sending further military aid to the junta which governs the country. Yesterday, declaring that El Salvador was the decisive battle for Central America, the administration said it was sending $55 million worth of emergency military supplies. Secretary of State Alexander Haig told Congress today the United States would do whatever is necessary to contain the guerrillas. Mr. Haig also said there was a worldwide press campaign to show the worst of everything in El Salvador -- a campaign that reminded him of Vietnam. Tonight, the issue that reminds many Americans of Vietnam -- how far to go in El Salvador. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, there are two fights underway over El Salvador. One is on the ground there between leftist guerrillas and government forces; the second is here in Congress and elsewhere over what the United States should do about the other fight. It came to an initial head last fall when Congress forced a certification test on the President requiring that before any further military assistance be given to El Salvador, Mr. Reagan certify in writing the government there was doing five things: complying with human rights standards, controlling the excesses of its army, implementing political and economic reform, seeking a political solution to the violence, and vigorously investigating the murders of six Americans one year ago. Last Thursday, President Reagan so certified, and yesterday followed up by advising Congress that he planned to send $55 million in emergency military aid to El Salvador. It was a two-stage action that has brought it all to a head again because it outraged some members of Congress who felt neither is in order -- not the certification, not the additional aid. Among the most outraged is Congressman Gerry Studds, Democrat of Massachusetts, a member of the House Inter-American Affairs subcommittee, who today announced the introduction of a congressional resolution aimed at overturning both Reagan actions. First, Congressman, why shouldn't the President have certified what he did about El Salvador?

Rep. GERRY STUDDS: Well, for the very simple reason that it's not true. It seemed to me when I --

LEHRER: He just made it up?

Rep. STUDDS: Well, someone's giving the President -- I think this is a terrible was to put it -- some very bad advice, and I think it's doing him a very serious disservice because he has been persuaded to lend his name to a series of assertions which run counter to every single observation by every observer -- church, journalists, independent organizations, the U.N., Amnesty International -- everybody that has said anything about El Salvador with the exception of the Reagan administration and the government-controlled press in San Salvador has said something which flies totally in the face of what the President managed to certify to the Congress a couple of days ago.

LEHRER: That there are still human rights violations?

Rep. STUDDS: That the President certified, as the law required him to do if he were to continue military assistance to El Salvador, that the current government there was making great progress in respect of the human rights of its own people and getting under control the barbarity of its own security forces who have been perpetrating acts of torture and brutality and murder against their own people. And this, of course, came at precisely the time that a whole series of reports have come out on the new series of massacres and atrocities in El Salvador. I think 1984 arrived two years early here. We were just told black was white and in was out by the President of the United States.

LEHRER: Why are you opposed to further military aid?

Rep. STUDDS: It seems to me that the administration -- Secretary Haig, in particular -- is operating on the assumption that the revolution in El Salvador is a product primarily of forces acting in Moscow and in Havana, rather than of the actual revolutionary situation in El Salvador. So long as we think that what's going on in El Salvador is occurring primarily because of outside forces, we will never understand what is happening there -- namely, a revolution, because there ought to be a revolution because of economic and social injustice -- and we will have policies based on an absolutely fallacious assumption.

If we think that the security of the United States and the freedom of the Western world -- or what did Secretary Enders say yesterday, that the decisive battle for Central Americais underway in El Salvador -- then we will in effect give a blank check to the military of that country. Because if that's what's at stake, rather than a revolution within an individual country, then we could justify anything, virtually, that the army of El Salvador does because so much else is at stake. That clearly is what the administration has decided, and there is no end to that. I'm glad something reminds Secretary Haig of Vietnam. President Kennedy got very angry in the early '60s at the American press for reporting what was going on in Vietnam. A similar pique, it seems to me, on the part of the Reagan administration is occurring now that The Washington Post, The New York Times and various network correspondents are reporting precisely what is happening with the guns and the bullets that are being supplied by the American taxpayer to the armed forces of El Salvador.

LEHRER: What about the administration's basic point, that if we do not come to the assistance of the government, then El Salvador is going to become another Nicaragua?

Rep. STUDDS: Let me suggest that if one wanted to virtually guarantee that El Salvador go to the extreme left, one could, in my judgment, do no better than to follow precisely the policies being pursued by the Reagan and Haig people at this time.

LEHRER: Explain that, sir.

Rep. STUDDS: Well, it seems to me that they've concluded -- and our ambassador Dean Hinton down there said over the weekend -- that we are essentially going to now have to pursue a military solution. We are getting deeper and deeper into a quagmire. We are now suddenly rushing $55 million -- more than twice the military aid of this entire fiscal year -- down there. Inevitably that will mean more U.S. military advisers. Sooner or later we're going to be committed irrevocably to a military solution on the part of the armed forces or we're going to find a military solution on the part of the extreme left. We are creating revolutionaries. It seems to me that if the President had done what the Congress gave him the opportunity to do by this law -- namely, said no, "we will not certify this; the government and the armed forces of El Salvador have got to clean up their act," -- that would have sent a signal to those forces within the government, Mr. Duarte, hopefully, and others, that they had better move toward a negotiated settlement because the United States is not going to tolerate what will inevitably now, it seems to me, be a military solution. And that means in the long run either another Vietnam for us, which will eventually be a tragedy for everybody, or it means a military victory by the far left.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Now a Congressman who supports the Reagan position on El Salvador. He is Robert Dornan, a Republican from California, and also a member of the Inter-American Affairs subcommittee of the House. Congressman Dornan visited El Salvador in April last year.Congressman, you heard what your Democratic colleague has just said -- that, first of all, the President's getting very bad advice and that there is no independent evidence that the reforms required by American law have taken place.

Rep. ROBERT DORNAN: Well, if the advice was bac, Robin, it started under the prior administration when the gentleman who is with us tonight, Ambassador White, asked for military aid to go down to El Salvador. I'd like to point out as a Californian for all of your viewers that El Salvador's capital, San Salvador, is closer to my home in Los Angeles than is Washington, D.C., where I sit tonight. Guatemala, the next country up the line, is actually closer to L.A. than the western border of Pennsylvania. This is our front yard, and you can already go into any of the restaurants in Los Angeles -- the larger ones -- and find Salvadoran citizens who are already immigrants into out country. There are 100,000 Nicaraguans, one of the Democratic colleagues of Mr. Studds pointed out in the committee hearing today, in just the Miami area alone.And Nicaragua is a low-population country, barely two million, compared to El Salvador, a much smaller land-mass country, that is heavy on population -- almost five million. And I predict that if El Salvador is allowed to slip away as Nicaragua was, out of the frying pan into the fire from the horrible oppression of a dictator like Somoza without passing through a Karinsky regime, but right into the Stalinist terror that Russia went through and the approaching that level of Nicaraguan extremism, what you're going to see is the greatest migration of people on this North American continent since the Baring land bridge brought the original indigenous people down here tens of thousands of years ago.

MacNEIL: But --

Rep. DORNAN: We have an indefensible southern border, and we already have a migration from Central America.

MacNEIL: Acknowledging that you think that is the threat and that the United States should move to stop it, how do you reply to the Congressman's point, though, that the conditions set down by U.S. law for resuming aid -- that is, that there should be progress in the various areas, including less violence and some observation of human rights -- just has not taken place, and that Mr. Reagan is calling black white by saying it has?

Rep. DORNAN: Well, what it really comes down to is not condemning what is the alternative, Mr. Duarte, a man that I think demonstrates a great deal of courage by even staying in a country that he described to me as having an endemic problem of institutionalized violence. He said it's very similar to the American old West -- that lots of blood debts are being paid. And he never exaggerated, and he said less than maybe 5%. He said, "But there's this proclivity toward violence there that your country went through --" and he could take his Notre Dame engineering education -- from our Notre Dame here in South Bend -- and come back to the United States or go to some safer clime in the South American world and make a lot of money. He's staying there at great threat to his life trying to thread his way down a middle course, and he has no more control over the right-wing terror there than, say, Great Britain does over terror on both sides in Northern Ireland. Do we cut off Canada because of separatist terrorism in Quebec? Are we going to un-ally ourselves with Great Britain because they can't control bombing and terrorism and -- I was in Los Angeles on the very street when the consul general of Turkey was killed by a teenage Armenian-American to avenge a blood debt that goes back 67 years.Now, we can't cut off the moderate government that's there, and it's not perfect -- neither is our government -- and leave them to the not-so-tender mercies of what I find is the great conclave of all leftist terrorism in the world today.I have been briefed by our CIA in Europe that Montenaros and Tupemaros and URP guerrillas from Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, who fled to throw bombs occasionally in The Netherlands or Spain or whatever is up for grabs there in Eurpose as some separatist movement, are told by Soviets that, "If you want to earn your spurs, go to El Salvador. That's the cutting edge of the left-wing revolution today, and if you perform well there -- kill a few people get the right-wing terrorists to overreact, then maybe we'll do something in your country that you've been banished from."

MacNEIL: Okay. Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: A very different view if it, now, from Robert White, a former career foreign service officer who was the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador from January 1980 until February 1981, when he was removed by the Reagan administration for his outspoken criticism of U.S. policy. Mr. White is now senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here in Washington, Mr. Ambassador, do you still believe the administration policy is wrong on El Salvador?

AMB. ROBERT WHITE: The administration policy is wrong because it is not seeking a negotiated solution to the conflict but is moving towards a military solution, a solution which is unobtainable and which will give victory to the insurgents -- a victory that's neither desirable nor necessary.

LEHRER: Do you think a negotiated settlement is possible?

Amb. WHITE: Yes, sir. It's clearly possible and this is -- you have to realize: the insurgents themselves have appealed to President Reagan for a negotiated solution and for elections. The Reagan administration wants elections, but without establishing, through negotiations, the necessary preconditions for elections. And that's the basic difference. And I would convict the Reagan administration very simply of a lack of imagination, a lack of creativity. These people want to be independent. They do not want to be enemies of the United States. There are some guerrillas on the far left who do want to be enemies of the United States, but the people who are bossing the political fortunes of the revolutionaries today do not want to be an enemy of the United States.

LEHRER: What do they want?

Amb. WHITE: What they want is the opportunity to negotiate a peace with Napoleon Duarte, and with our help. And Napoleon Duarte wants to negotiate, but he's prevented from negotiation by the hardlining military officers who want to kill their way to victory.

LEHRER: Do you not agree with Secretary Enders that the decisive battle over Central America is now being fought in El Salvador?

Amb. WHITE: But that's ridiculous. If El Salvador -- the smallest country in Central America, with no natural resources -- is crucial, what is Guatemala? Secretary Haig's and Secretary Enders' philosophy are going to have us backing the assassin regime of Guatemala on the same basis.

LEHRER: I assume that you're opposed to this $55 million in emergency aid.

Amb. WHITE: I'm opposed to it, absolutely, because all you're doing is throwing good money after bad, giving money to people whose policy it is to kill anyone whom they suspect is either a leftist or sympathetic to the left.

LEHRER: Well, doesn't it go through Duarte? I mean, is --

Amb. WHITE: No, sir. The real point is that a Pentagon-to-military relationship has been established, and Duarte is irrelevant to this. The most likely result, I want to point out to you, of these elections, is that the right --

LEHRER: Which are due in March -- I think March --

Amb. WHITE: Right. March 28th.

LEHRER: Twenty-eighth, right.

Amb. WHITE: A most likely result of this election is that Duarte will either lose the elections or he will be so weakened by the right that all the reforms will come to an end.

LEHRER: Congressman Dornan says that when you were the ambassador to El Salvador, you recommended to the Carteradministration that they send military aid.

Amb. WHITE: After the January offensive I authorized the replacement of stocks on a one-time basis in order to bring the military up to where they were before. But remember, at that time we were pursuing an intensive human rights policy. And we had suspended assistance -- we had never given any lethal assistance to those people in all that time because of human rights violations.

LEHRER: What is your position, in a word, about whether or not Duarte made a concerted effort, as President Reagan says, to do something about human rights violations?

Amb. WHITE: Duarte has certainly made a concerted effort. The problem is that Duarte's efforts have no effect on the military.

LEHRER: They're still running wild?

Amb. WHITE: Absolutely. Look, Duarte himself does not dare to go out and campaign in the countryside. He has to campaign by television. Roberto Daldison, enjoying the protection of the military -- this crazy, right-wing psychopath -- is out there campaigning in the countryside because he is the favorite of those people out there who control the various military districts.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Another perspective, now, from American labor. William Doherty is the executive director of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an operating arm of the AFL-CIO in Latin America. The organization has been involved in El Salvador and other parts of Central America for more than 20 years. In January, 1981, two members of Mr. Doherty's organization were killed in El Salvador and no one has yet been convicted of the crime. Mr. Doherty, first of all, do you think the administration is right to certify El Salvador as having improved sufficiently in human rights and the other qualifications?

WILLIAM DOHERTY: Very frankly, without addressing ourselves to the proposition of certification, I should tell you that the AFL-CIO supported very greatly in the last session of Congress that conditions should be attached to the continued economic and military aid to El Salvador. Those conditions were attached -- some of them, we think, weaker than they should have been, particularly in the military aspect of that aid. The problem of certification is two-edged. We believe that there has been some progress made in certain areas. When I say "we believe? it's because we are in direct consultation on a daily basis with the campesinos and the workers in a majority in that country -- perhaps more than any of my colleagues on this panel concerned about what the real people of El Salvador truly want. I can tell you that the campesinos support overwhelmingly the land reform process because for the first time in the 400-year-long miserable history of living in a feudal state where they, the campesinos, were treated by the oligarchy like chattels, they now see the possibility of owning a plot of land three or four acres, in terms of the land-to-the-tiller program --

MacNEIL: Could I ask --

Mr. DOHERTY: -- and that that process is proceeding.

MacNEIL: So there's some improvement. Do you think it's enough for Mr. Reagan to use it as the basis for resuming aid, and especially emergency aid?

Mr. DOHERTY: In light of the fact that perhaps, if the economic assistance from the United States is not continued to El Salvador, that the land reform process would automatically discontinue and some 22,000 campesino families, who already are enjoying provisional title, and some 62,000 families on the large estates that have been taken away from the oligarchy, I would be very, very hesitant to withhold economic aid to El Salvador.

MacNEIL: I see.

Mr. DOHERTY: You would turn back the progress of the true revolution that is already in place.

MacNEIL: I see. What difference do you think the elections in March can make?You've just heard a very pessimistic view that it's going to mean nothing but weakening or causing Mr. Duarte to lose power.

Mr. DOHERTY: Again, I'll refer to the people of El Salvador. The Catholic Church in El Salvador, supported by all the bishops, including Archbishop Rivera y Donas, not only support the electoral process as perhaps not the best but the only way out of the morass they're in right now, but they've declared that it's the duty of every Catholic citizen of that country -- a Catholic country -- to vote in those elections.All of the trade union movement -- both the urban trade union movement and the campesinos in the Union Comunal Salvadoreno -- are supporting the concept of elections without supporting a particular political party or a particular candidate. We're very heartened that the military has said that they will not only not participate in the elections, but they won't vote in the elections. It might be possible to see an election process that has some meaningful result, if only given the opportunity on March 28th, and we would like to withhold judgment -- there will be many international observers down there -- until after the elections. I would add that we regret that some of the democratic forces that have associated themselves with the Marxist guerrilla left have chosen not to participate in the elections. We would have preferred to see them participate.

MacNEIL: Finally, do you think that the administration, by its actions -- as two of the critics we've heard tonight have said -- are really going just for a military solution?

Mr. DOHERTY: Well, I really frankly believe that that could be partisan politics to argue military versus economic, social or political solution.The solution has to be both. We certainly don't want to see a Fidel Castro or the Sandinistas take over and completely destroy the free trade union movement as they have done in Cuba and practically have done in Nicaragua. But by the same token, we don't want a return of the oligarchy and the harsh treatment of the military. I must tell you that we're not unhappy at all that the military has cleaned up its act. We think an awful lot of innocent people are still being killed unnecessarily; we think that the military has to have stricter restrictions put on it by this administration before it continues to certify additional military aid.

MacNEIL: Well, thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Congressman Studds, Mr. Doherty says there is the very good possibility there could be a meaningful result in those elections in March.

Rep. STUDDS: I wish I agreed with that. I don't know anybody --

LEHRER: Why do you disagree?

Rep. STUDDS: Well, how does one have meaningful elections when all of the forces now in opposition to the government are not participating? The military put out a list last year of what they called 100 and some subversives, traitors and psychopaths. On that list, virtually without exception, is every single leader who still survives and hasn't already been killed by the armed forces of the various forces of the left -- everything from the extreme left to the democratic left. As Mr. Doherty says, those people would be killed if they set foot in El Salvador.

LEHRER: Congressman Dornan, what's your view on the elections?

Rep. DORNAN: Well, the night of the long knives always takes place in most socialist revolutions when those who are willing to follow Lenin's dictum, to secure your revolution in blood, begin to kill off the liberals, the libertarians, the social democrats. And I think that not letting the military participate in the election is a stunning victory for the people of El Salvador, and I believe that the hard-core left there, the ones who kill to get their objectives, hate elections. Castro has never had an election. There's never been one in the Soviet Union. The farces they go through are all one-party elections. Nicaragua shuts down La Prensa regularly -- the one free paper left there -- because they don't want elections there. These people are autocrats that are every bit as oppressive as the ugly Somozas and Battistas and all the others that preceded them. There simply has to be a course where anti-communist labor union, free trade movement people get together with people in both the administrations in our country and good people in the church, who have varying viewpoints -- after all, Robert White is a loyal Catholic, so am I, so is Duarte. There are viewpoints within the church -- you know --

LEHRER: Let me -- let's ask Ambassador White to respond to this view of these elections.You said it's going to be -- well, we heard what you think -- the result is going to be a disaster, that Duarte is going to be -- he's either going to lose or he's going to be very weakened.

Amb. WHITE: Well, I think that there's no question about that. Look, it's a funny kind of insurgent that keeps requesting negotiations. These people don't want the fight. They are being forced to fight. I think what is clear from the report in The New York Times, The Washington Post -- all independent journalists -- is that those 90% of the people who are fighting are fighting because they either fight or they get killed by the security forces. Those are the alternatives.

LEHRER: Mr. Doherty, do you believe --

Mr. DOHERTY: There aren't that many people fighting, Bob. I think you would have to admit that. Frankly, I hail Ray Bonner of The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post. They both recently spent a whole week up on Morazan with the guerrillas, observed them firsthand and gave the benefit of their observations to all of the American people. And I think it's interesting that they point out that there is a hard, insidious, continuous effort on the part of the leaders of those guerrilla forces to indoctrinate the young people fighting in their armies with Marxist-Leninist thought, where there'll be --

Amb. WHITE: But, Bill, look. This is the point you're missing. The point --

Mr. DOHERTY: But what I accept as the source of that information, these two heroic journalists that did go up into the Morazan province and report this back. Bob, I'm much more concerned that the people with the guns are Marxist-Leninist, and they've got to lay down those guns or we're going to have another Castro-Nicaraguan -- Cuban or Nicaraguan type solution that's going to --

Amb. WHITE: The point is, Bill, that they want to lay down the guns and United States' policy will not permit them to lay down the guns. The point you have to grasp above all else is that the cause of the revolutionaries is just. And that is why you and I fought for land reform and every other kind of reform down there with Duarte and the rest.

Mr. DOHERTY: But the revolutionaries are not part of the land reform. They want state farming. They don't want private ownership --

Amb.WHITE: Now, Bill, you're missing the point. The point is that --

Mr. DOHERTY: I'm not missing the point. I know that the revolutionaries are not for the land reform, Bob.

Amb. WHITE: The point is that they're trying to get an environment where elections are possible. And our country, which should be on the side of their elections --

Mr. DOHERTY: The revolutionaries don't want -- they don't want elections, Bob.

LEHRER: Let me ask Congressman Dornan a question. Do you believe, as Ambassador White does, that the United States should support negotiations with the leftist guerrillas?

Rep. DORNAN: No, I don't. While Bob White was the ambassador down there -- and he left many friends behind. I arrived shortly after his unceremonious removal, which I would have opposed had the Haig State Department asked me, because there was a different way to go about it. But all his friends --

LEHRER: Ease him out over a period of time?

Rep. DORNAN: Right. [general laughter]

LEHRER: Bob -- no, I'm just kidding, Bob.

Rep. DORNAN: Take the good of what was going on down there because he was described as an anti-communist who was so emotionally devastated by dining -- the evening before two of the sisters were killed and then being at the gravesite when these saints in our religion were removed from where they had been brutally murdered, that he lost an overall look at what was happening -- wouldn't allow gun turrets on the roof of our embassy because, he said, it was cosmetically not nice, even though two communist-made rockets had slammed into his conference room just a few months apart, right through a tiny window into the top floor of his embassy. And if anybody had been in there, there would have been an American slaughter. You don't negotiate with people like that.

Amb. WHITE: Look, I won't try to -- that's a minor point. I was trying to make an embassy not look like a fortress. I don't care how many turrets you put up there, that's not going to stop them. But I do want to say this: it is an emotional experience to serve in El Salvador, but I would contend that emotions are part of us, and for us to be cold-blooded about the systematic slaughter that's taking place today, and for us to be on the side of those who slaughter, is something, I'm sorry, I can't countenance.

LEHRER: Congressman Studds, the resolution that you introduced today -- what I read today was that it's already been judged an exercise in futility, that it isn't going to go anywhere.

Rep. STUDDS: Well, that remains to be seen. It depends whether or not the House of Representatives, for example, is representative. There is absolutely no support whatsoever amongst the people of this country of any persuasion that I know of for the Reagan policy. Let me just make one more point --

LEHRER: Let me ask Congressman Dornan. What do you think is going to happen to the Studds resolution?

Rep. DORNAN: Well, here's the Studds resolution when it came through as a House of Represenatives Bill 1509 one year and four days ago to cut off all military aid to El Salvador. It was crushed 22 to nine in the committee with four of the five leaders of his party on his side of the aisle voting against it. The American Congress convened, Senate and House, are not going to cut off aid to a small country closer to California than Washington, D.C., when it's under seige by every left-wing terrorist leader in the world.

LEHRER: We have to go. Robin?

MacNEIL: Congressman Dornan, Congressman Studds, Ambassador White, Mr. Doherty, thank you all for joining us.Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That's all for tonight.We will be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.