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Subject: Delivering in El Salvador=
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 92 04:39:11 EST
Message-ID: <31.1992Nov13.043912@AmeriCast.com>

Delivering in El Salvador=

 CREDIT THE Bush administration with defusing Central America. A
region that exploded in the Reagan years isn't ticking anymore.
President Bush saw a post-Cold War opportunity, and Secretary of
State Baker handed it off to an adept point man, Bernard Aronson.
Nowhere is their contribution more evident and welcome than in El
Salvador, where American diplomacy, with a crucial assist from
Alvaro de Soto of the United Nations, has just put in place the
crucial building block of a negotiated peace.

  The problem was how to turn from war to politics - specifical-
ly, how to carry off last January's agreement requiring the guer-
rillas to demobilize and the army to undergo matching structural
reduction. In the fall, the guerrillas had slowed demobilization
and cached arms. The army was gagging on a commitment - unpre-
cedented among Latin militaries - to allow an appointed commis-
sion, operating secretly and affording no due process, to purge
or transfer 100 of its officers linked to human rights abuses; no
human rights violators among the guerrillas face similar "purifi-
cation."

 This is the knot the outside negotiators, including El
Salvador's "four friends" - Mexico, Spain, Colombia and Venezuela
- were finally able to untie. The guerrillas, dissolving as a
military structure, get to join the political arena, apply for
the new civilian-led police or take up offers of land. The army
stays intact as an institution, but, if all goes well, will
shrink and lose its mission and means of internal policing; an
attempt will be made to organize an independent judicial system.
Insurgents and officials alike are taking a chance, but both
President Alfredo Cristiani and his opposite numbers are showing
political courage and skill.

Elections under the new order are due in early 1994. The di-
plomats will stay on tap, and U.N. monitors will remain on the
ground. But a crucial sequence is now underway: to deconstruct
the two military forces that fought a 12-year war that took
perhaps 70,000 lives and to put the political parties into play
under changed institutional conditions. The errors and excesses
of American policy cannot be undone, but the bottom line is that
the United States, with help, is delivering El Salvador the demo-
cratic opening it set out to give.

02:25 11-13C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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