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compensate for its lack of trained officers, loyal troops or popular support.

Stubbornly

But it is in the USA itself that Reagan is now facing his most pressing problems. American public opinion, traumatically shaped by the horrors of the Vietnam war, has stubbornly refused to swing behind the US war effort in El Salvador.

And the growing unpopularity of the war makes it more and more difficult for Reagan to increase on the $325 million in aid already earmarked for the junta this year.

In military terms it is plainly impossible for the present junta to cling to power for long without direct external military assistance.

• Yet a recent poll by the right wing Newsweek magazine has shown no less than 89% against sending US troops to Salvador, 60% against sending military supplies and 54% against sending military advisors.

A clear 49% disapprove of Reagan's policy in Salvador, and 74% thought it either likely or very likely that the war could develop into a situation like Vietnam.

This opposition to involvement comes in spite of the fact that some 80% of those asked thought it likely that a toppling of the junta in El Salvador could lead to the same kind of thing elsewhere in Latin America.

THE strengthening of the forces of left wing guerrillas in Guatemala is only one of the factors now shaking Santa Ana SAN SALVADO SALVADOR Puente de Oro The campaign on El Salvador has gathered strength even among some diehard defenders of the Vietnam war. AFL/CIO leader Lane Kirkland has declared the US trade union movement opposed to sending any troops to El Salvador.

In an effort to turn this hostile tide of public opinion, Secretary of State General Haig has embarked in the last few weeks upon a series of public relations exercises designed to emphasise the "communist threat" in Central America.

Beginning at the top, Haig went to the Senate's intelligence committee, presenting CIA documents on Nicaragua and Cuban involvement in El Salvador.

Yet the effect was to persuade one Senator that the whole package of allegations was exaggerated!

Then Haig tried his hand with the press. A story was worked out alleging that a Nicaraguan trained as guerrilla In Mexico had been political stability in the wake of brazenly rigged elections last week. The government's Presidential candidate General Anibal Guevara allegedly topped the poll with a claimed 35% of the vote. But even government figures admitted that blank and invalid votes - called for by the regime's left wing opponents - had registered 10% of the total, and there is widespread scepticism as to the claimed turnout of 49%.

Fraud

Certainly Guevara's rival right, extreme right and "centre right candidates were unanimous in denouncing the results as a fraud.

Their anger is the greater because Guevara's ratification as President lies in the hands not of the newlySan Vicente San Miguef Usulután captured by the Salvadorean junta - but escaped into the Mexican embassy!

This story not only cast ridicule on Haig but has done nothing to improve US relations with the Lopez Portillo regime in oil-rich Mexico.

But there was worse to come. Another Nicaraguan was produced, who had allegedly admitted to being trained by the Cubans, and had been captured fighting in El Salvador.

But as soon as he was in front of the world's cameras and reporters this unfortunate youth insisted that the whole story was a pack of lies which had been extracted from him only under torture in San Salvador!

Embarrassed State Department officials were forced to put their recalcitrant stool pigeon on a plane home for Nicaragua.

elected Congress - the results of which have not yet been revealed, but are expected to show a majority for the opposition - but of the old Congress elected four years ago, with a built-in Guevara majority.

Hence the bizarre spectacle of Guatemala's savagely anti-communist armed forces using dear gas and brute violence on the streets against extreme right wing demonstrators from the country's ruling class.

This division within the right wing is bound lo increase the confidence of the lett among Guatemala' working class and peasantry - and intensify the gioom hanging over Ronald Reagan and the State Department. NICARAGUA *An almost equal credibility gap was opened up by General Haig's additional ploy - the publication of the CIA's illegal aerial reconnaissance photographs of Nicaraguan military installations.

In a deliberate attempt to echo the drama of the 1962 Cuban missiles crisis, reporters were ushered into the same State Department auditorium to hear the same photo-interpreter John T. Hughes.

But every one of the details pointed out related plainly to the development of a defensive military capacity in Nicaragua, whose Sandinista regime faces hostility not only from the USA but from the pro-imperialist dictatorship in Honduras (which has supported an army of 1,500 former Somoza National Guardsmen).

The Sandinistas have made no secret of their attempt to mobilise a militia of 100,000 to defend the country against cross-border raids from Honduras and other imperialist provocations: but Haig and the CIA have been quite unable to prove any Nicaraguan military activity in El Salvador or Honduras. spoke, the Washington Post was publishing highly classified material confirming that Reagan last November gave the go-ahead to a $19 million CIA operation to recruit a guerrilla force for raids into Nicaragua from Honduras.

The Post claims that such raids would seek to destroy Nicaraguan power stations, bridges and other installations. And it quotes from documents suggesting that the operation should be extended, with the use of another 1.,000 men - some of whom are being trained by the Argentine junta.

Against such a military threat the Sandinistas can rely only upon the mobilisation of their popular supnart in Nicaragua - since 1nd haininslat Duarte their blockaded and bankrupt economy lacks resources to buy adequate food let alone sophisticated arms. As Haig well knows, neither Moscow nor Havana have been willing to supply extensive military aid to Nicaragua.

Both Castro and Brezhnev are reluctant to become embroiled in support for the revolutionary struggles in Central America, which they see as an obstacle to their efforts to reach a political accommodation with US imperialism.

And they recognise that - for all the nationalist limitations of the Sandinista leaders - there is no guarantee that arms to Nicaragua would not be used to aid the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador.

So they are effectively withholding the weapons needed to defend the gains of the anti-Somoza struggle.

This scandalous state of affairs should be exposed -but in the context of a fight within the imperialist countries to halt Reagan's war drive in El Salvador.

Too slowly

Last week saw a 40,000strong rally in Bologna, Italy against US policy on Central America: but international solidarity is developing far too slowly.

In the USA, socialists should exploit to the full the opening offered by the AFL/ CIO stance against the involvement of US troops by demanding trade union action to block economic and military aid to the junta.

• In Britain the workers' movement must mobilise against Thatcher's support for Reagan. And throughout the workers movement the fight must be waged for concrete solidarity with the FMLN liberation forces as part of the anti-imperialist struggle throughout Central THE electoral threat to President Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador does not• come from the left wing. The murderous activities of semi official anti-communist death squads have seen to that.

Anyone foolish enough to have stood as a candidate for the opposition FDR coalition would have faced the same grisly fate as the hundreds of left wing activists and working class militants who have been assassinated in the urban districts of El Salvador.

Psychotic

The challenge to Duarte comes from the ultra-right wing who oppose thretora's phony agrarian TITOTAL. programme. Headed by Major "Bob" D'Aubuisson (described by former US Ambassador Robert White as a "psychotic killer") these elements want to see more direct US involvement -possibly including use of napalm - and they are calling for Duarte and his government to stand trial for treason.

It seems increasingly likely that the phony "elections" of March 28 could produce either a stalemate in which Duarte must seek out new coalition allies to his right, or a defeat of Duarte's Christian Democrats by the right wing Party for National Conciliation.

In either case Reagan's plight in El Salvador would be dramatically worsened, since even his present cynical pledges that 'human rights' are being upheld in El Salvador would be rendered patently ridiculous. As one of D'Aubuisson's campaigners put It:

iWe don't believe the army needs controlling. We are fighting a war, and civilians will be killed. They.

always have been. it's got to be that way."

It is perhaps fear of this political quicksand, together with the increasingly gloomy military prospects in the war that have forced Reagan this week to look towards the Well-publicised tic feelers have been extended by General Haig for talks with the Stalinist leaders of Moscow and Havana - plainly with a view for a joint effort to impose a "compromise" capitalist government on the people of El Salvador.

This is the kind of policy that has been advocated by the so-called "socialists" of the Second International and by the capitalist government of Mexico (which has made no secret of its disapproval of Reagan's tactics). It is also endorsed by many • of the reformist leaders of the FDR political opposition in El Salvador.

But for the guerrillas of the FMLN in the countryside and the workers of El Salvador such a "solution" would offer no escape from the crushing poverty, exploitation and repression which have driven them into There is no scope in an economically underdeveloped country like El Salvador for the development of the formal niceties of bourgeois parliamentary politics alongside the free organisation of trade unions and working class political parties.

The ultra-right of El Salvador recognise this, and are prepared to crush even the most rudimentary democracy.

Only the overthrow c capitalist rule and its mili:ary defenders and the estatlishment of a revolutionar workers' and peasants government can secure he rights of the toiling mari:

of El Salvador.

*El Salvador Solidarity Carpaign, 29 Islington Park 5:London N1.

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Thursday 18 March, 1982

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