[Reports in the last week from El Salvador…]

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Reports in the last week from El Salvador confirm that for the US imperialists the country is no longer simply one of the several post-Nicaragua trouble-spots in Central America to be handled through routine financial manipulation and CIA undercover activity.

Class conflict in this tiny country. has reached such pitch that in the last ten days it has become a major political and military front for the State Department.

This has brought the dispatch of counter-insurgency teams, new armour and construction equipment, and even preparations for an invasion involving not only the Guatemalan and Honduran armies but also former members of Somoza's National Guard (who have been re-trained, by the Israelis in special camps on the Honduran border with Salvador).

All the indications are that, in order to stem the tide of revolution in Central America, Washington will employ in El Salvador a widespread rural search-and-destroy campaign very similar to Operation Phoenix' in Vietnam.

Clearly the move to. 'Vietnamise" Central America, albeit as yet on a limited scale, nas been taken far more readily as a result of the shift of global class forces following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

But it also reflects very closely the escalation of class conflict in El Salvador itself.

In the last six months over a thousand workers and peasants have been killed by the military and assassination squads, though full civil war has yet to break out.

The first response of Carter and Vance was to organise a coup by young officers last October to oust the inefficient dictator Romero and institute a number of piecemeal reforms which, it was thought, would provide sufficient political space and time to rearrange the defence of capital against the increasingly militant and politically organised workers and peasants.

The Christian and Social Democrats as well as the Communist Party's electoral front UDN (National Democratic Union) eagerly joined the Junta with the backing of the small but significant industrial sector of capital. the land and forced into the rural proletariat on the cotton and coffee plantations owned by the '14 families'.

In 1961 30,000 peasants (11% of the total) were landless; in 1975 166,000 (or 40%) had no plot to work.

In 1967 the oligarchy set up the 20,000 strong paramilitary organisation ORDEN to counter the new radical peasant unions and police the countrysidewhile the bulk of the official security forces were concentrated in San Salvador to keep the proletariat in check.

The Junta officially disbanded ORDEN in October but it simply changed its name to the Nationalist Democratic Front (FDN) and increased its murderous activities in the campo.

The FDN now provides the important informants that Thousands of supporters of the BPR accompany the US-led reform teams touring the estates to point out union leaders who are taken off and shot.

On the estate of Colima, 40 km north of San Salvador, 24 peasants were shot two weeks ago on the very day that they were receiving the fruits of land redistribution.

In the department of Chalatenango the army ringed one village with a bush fire to prevent escape before they moved in to kill 40 people and abduct many others.

The US aim is to incorporate the FDN into its rural repressive apparatus and it is building three major military bases-complete with airfields and fleets of helicopters-on which to centre its counterinsurgency campaign.

Major Roberto d'Abuisson, second in command of the FDN march through San Salvador and much given to playing Chilean butcher Pinochet's declaration of 11 September 1973 on his TV broadcasts, has stated that to quell the peasantry "it may be necessary to kill 50 or 100,000." The imperialists are clearly preparing for such an eventuality.

At the same time, however, they are challenging the landed oligarchy by expropriating 36 fincas (estates)-comprising 25% of arable land in the country.

The agents of the rural bourgeoisie have answered by bombing the ministry of agriculture and murdering Social Democrats as well as peasants.

But the US State Department has a slightly long-term vision: There is nobody more conservative than small farmer. We're going to be breeding capitalists like rabbits.' Such expectations will be stillborn.

The existence of FDNORDEN and the strength of the peasant unions which the left organisations •now control almost completely means that unlike in Nicaragua where the peasantry was not a major force in the revolution, the civil war in the Salvadorean countryside will be exceptionally brutal, no doubt extended, and very probably decisive.

It will not, though, be a guerrilla war-for the country is only the size of Wales and extremely mountainous-there is simply nowhere to go.

Added to this the proletariat is substantially stronger and more concentrated than This has meant that the vanguard of the political struggle against the Junta, now shorn of all party political support except for the rump of the Christian Democrats, has been in San Salvador.

This has been stepped up with the general strike of 17-18 March which was 100% solid in the city and received 80% backing in the rest of the country.

This first national political strike was clearly a trial-run for the consolidated action of the working class that will be necessary in the future.

The cost was particularly high'-150 workers died on the 17th alone. in army raids on occupied factories and working class regions of the town.

The CP still retains a broad influence in the unions despite its early participation in the Junta but the more radical Front for Unified Popular Action (FAPU) and Popular Revolutionary Bloc (BPR) have built up a significant base.

Last month these three parties together with the Popular Leagues of 28th February (LP-28) formed a tactical alliance through the Coordinadora Revolucionaria which planned the general strike and coordinates armed actions.

With the exception of the LP-28 and its voluntarist guerrilla group the ERP) the parties agree that logistically the forces of the left are too weak to meet the provocations of the military which, unlike most of Somoza's National Guard, is a highly disciplined and professional body.

In either case the workers and peasants of El Salvador are now engaged in a bloody and absolutely critical front-line struggle against imperialism.