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le is propping up a bloody junta in El Salvador.

While Reagan spouts "ABOUT 45 minutes further down the road, we entered another small town. Here the houses were also gutted and looted, but the overwhelming initial impression was of the sickly, sweet smell of decomposing bodies. ' This was Mozote."

Mozote was a village in the FMLN (guerrilla) held Morazan province of El Salvador. In early December, government troops of the elite, US-trained Atlacati Brigade launched an offensive on the area. Furina Amaya, a 38-year old mother, who talked to reporters a month later, is the only living human being to survive from Mozote.

Perhaps a dozen other people from the surrounding villages and countryside survived, including two children who watched their families being massacred before their eyes.

Rufina Amaya described to reporters how the whole village, men, women and children, were rounded up in the village square in front of the church and taken off and shot. Reporters describe sequently to the Politbureau. From then on Suslov, bar a short demotion under Kruschev in the mid-50s from the Politbureau, was central to the entire Soviet leadership.

Susior was the perfect. although destroying many of the conquests of the October revolution and raising to power a new bureaucratic elite, pretended to be the natural and beneficent conclusion of 1917.

Mortuary

Suslov as ideological arbiter, provided the political cement keeping the ruling elite together. The "eminence grise"-a latter day Delphic Oracle arbitrating on disputes with the notable difference that little of what he produced had anything to do with the future and the USSR's ever increasing problems domestically and internationally, and everything to do with maintaining a strict continhypocrisy about Polan EVEN the Financial Times, no fanatic enemy of US capitalism, felt moved to comment that Ronald Reagan's defence of union rights in his TV spectacular, 'Let Poland be Poland' 'must have drawn a powerful echo from any of the dismissed air traffic controllers who happened to be watching"

how, a month later, decomposing bodies were still visible in the rubble of the village and lying in nearby fields:

"Inside [the church] the stench was overpowering, and countless bits of bones-skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column-poked out of the rubble ... In the cornfields behind the houses were more bodies, unburned by fire but baked by the sun. In one grouping in a clearing in a field were ten bodies: two elderly, people, two children, one infant-a bullet hole in the head-in the arms of a woman, and the rest adults." uity with the hideous Stalinist past. He was the guardian of the Dead Sea Scrolis of Soviet "Marxism" and in priestly fashion banished, excommunicated and showered anathemas on the critics of the Soviet elite, critics who emerged increasingly even with the "socialist commonwealth"

It all these "political" methods failed, Suslov was never shy in recommending the ultimate arbitration. armed force, for Hungary, Czechoslovakia and in April this year with his trip to Warsaw, urging the PUWP to destroy Solidarnose. After the coup, Susiov urged the cleansing the POWP through mass purges.

Suslov was described once by the British ambasvador to Moscow, when giving one of his very rare smiles "like the glint of moonlight on the brass handle of a coffin."

A fitting description for this henchman ruling in the giant morluary that Stalinist Russia.

With Suslov's death- the main personality who wa ; 10 I ine working people of El Salvador had seen the show, they would have found it pretty sick, too.

The next day after its indignant TV protests against the Kremlin's role in Poland, the Reagan administration announced a trebling of military aid to the junta in El Salvador.

The same day, January 28, that this report of the massacre appeared in the Guardian (reprinted from the Washington Post), President Reagan signed a document certifying that the El Salvador junta were making "concerted and significant efforts" to respect human rights and were in "substantial control" of the security forces.

Rufina Amaya confirmed that the troops who murdered her husband and four of her children, were indeed acting under orders and were in constant radio contact with presumably their superiors: negotiate treacherous the transition the ever- after approaching demise of Brezhnev and the new "collective leadership" has been removed. His authority could perhaps have assured some orderly investiture of power onto younger shoulders.

Desperate

What threatens now is perhaps an inglorious and destructive scramble for power in the Politbureau. The rats are aligning themselves for the coming contest --a contest which may well sap their ability to rule in their time-honoured way. In that case, entirely new possibilities will open up for the Soviet working class and peasantry.

A desperate desire for change from below an unwillingness to continue living as before will be complemented with an inability by the elite to continue ruling as before. These are the preconditions for revolufionary change.

saw the lieutenant then. He was personally machine-gunning people ... An order arrived from a Lt. Caceres to Lt Ortega to go ahead and kill the children too. A soldier said, 'Lieutenant, somebody here says he won't kill children' 'Who's the sonofabitch who said that?' the lieutenant answered. 'I am going to kill him.'"

Because of its concerted efforts to respect human rights, the Salvadorian government will get its $65 million emergency military equipment to finish off the job it began at Mozote.

As Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Mr Thomas Enders says:

•The decisive battle for Central America is under way in El Salvador. If, after Nicaragua, El Salvador is captured by a violent minority, who in Central America would not live in fear?"

he is right. Except only •that the "violent minority" -the Duarte junta-thanks Gerry Byrne reports. to US arms and aid, is still just about in control, despite the loss of half its airforce. And the US wishes to ensure that that violent minority who ordered the assassination of babes-in-arms at Mozate retains control. Not. of course, for the professed reasons.

"We must use our assistance to help El Salvador control violence, make land reform work, develop a democratic process, and bring murderers to justice."

This is the almost surrea! double-think of US foreigr policy. But the real reasons slip out:

"How long would it be before major strategic interests-the Panama Canal, sea lanes, oil supplies-were at risk?"

And there you have it: you may tolerate mass murder, the gunning down of children, you may den! or talsity it, you may ever justify it as "bringing , down the level of violence" , but the one thing that is unim. aginable, the ultimate unthinkable, is to put your oil supplies at risk.