El Salvador: test for Hai

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The Reagan administration will this week step up its propaganda campaign accusing the Soviet and Cuban bureaucracies of fuelling the guerrilla struggle in El Salvador.

Sabre-rattling •Secretary of State General Haig is declaring that in doing so the Kremlin leaders are in breach of the reactionary 1972 "spheres of influence" deal signed by Brezhnev and Nixon.

Behind the convenient and hypocritical smokescreen the US imperialists themselves continue to ferry arms to the vicious military junta in E1 Salvador and to directly supervise the slaughter of left wingers.

Decision Reagan is faced in El Salvador and Nicaragua with a difficult tactical decision. Having come to office roundly denouncing "terrorism" (liberation struggles) he has now to choose whether to pursue further with Jimmy Carter's efforts to buy off the nationalist leadership in Nicaragua and seek a political compromise in El Salvador, or to cut off all aid to the Sandinistas and go all-out to militarily defeat the FMLN guerrillas in Salvador.

A course of outright confrontation would bring Reagan into conflict not only with popular resistance but also with the • bourgeois regimes of Mexico, Venezuela and other Central American states, which have looked towards measures to defuse the struggles in Nicaragua and El Salvador and ensure the consolidation of capitalist coalition governments.

Such a course relies heavily upon the political confusion and cross-class. composition of the Sandinistas and the political spokesmen of the El Salvador opposition-the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR).

Coalition

The FDR have recently denied reports that it has held talks with US government representatives in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa.

The FDR is not an essentially unified body with a coherent politics. It is a coalition of forces, only some of which can drive the revolution forward from the political to the social realm.

On the one hand, there are the bourgeois politicians, tried and tested in the first'. ', reformist' (and US-backed) junta of October 1979 to January 1980.

These men are deeply immersed in the international social democratic bureaucracy, and while in temporary opposition to the US, represent the reformist variant of imperialist control.

Their growing domination over the FDR may be perceived in a rapid dropping of the FDR's original plan of government, drawn up in May 1980 but never fully published. At that stage the FDR called for the "destruction of oligarchic establishment of the social and imperialist control estaoustmenl ownership of the means of production' and widespread Now much of this radical talk has gone. Instead the FDR talks of a 'participationist democracy'. Recently in London the FDR representative emphasised that their demands were only reasonable: there would be full respect for privates Prop the petty bourgeois groups in EI Salvador have been almost uniformly more radical than those of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua: but now the bourgeois press relays the promises of non-socialist governments, purely nationalist and antioligarchic' proposals.

This is not because the masses have become demobilised but because the bourgeois leadership of the FDR has met with considerable success in presenting its project to the 'international community'.

Political threat

Neither, however, is it superficial sham.

For while without the support of the guerrillas and the mass organisations, the besuited ambassadors of the FDR would be left with a substantial bank account in Mexico City and little more, they pose a serious political threat by virtue of the increasing acceptance of their positions by the petty bourgeois radicals that head the guerrilla organisations.

While Reagan deliberates whether or not to strike a deal with the FDR and calculates their ability to deliver a stable capitalist, regime in El Salvador, the anti-imperialist struggle demands that the guerrilla Organisations break from the FDR and put forward an independent programme of action for the working class and peasantry. Armed clash in El Salvador