FMLN/FDR—Duarte talks: What are the stakes?

Scan page 5

SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1984 5 The pressure for a negotiated settlement to the war in El Salvador had been mounting long before the Duarte regime and the Salvadoran FDR/FMLN agreed to meet on Oct. 15 in La Palma. It was not only the Contadora powers of Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Mexico-those citadels of "anti-imperialist" politics-which have urged peace talks upon the revolutionary movement of El Salvador.

Both the Cuban government and the revolutionists in power in Nicaragua have urged these talks. And the Salvadoran revolutionary movement has called for them unconditionally.

Democratic Party candidates, Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, who have baited Reagan for failing to take indiscriminate reprisals after the recent bombing in Beirut, have also berated him for being "late" in inaugurating negotiations in El Salvador.

"By any means necessary"

"Peace" negotiations have never been a problem for the ruling class, whether they are seeking "labor peace" at home or the "peace" to halt social change abroad. This is why the current talks between Duarte and the FMLN are claimed by Reagan as the real fruit and purpose of his policy-even as Mondale scrambles, intoning that they were his idea all along. Both are correct.

Richard Stone was dispatched by Reagan to negotiate with the FMLN over a year ago, and the Contadora powers, among the most repressive regimes on the continent-no matter their facade-have been a transmission belt for the Reagan administration. Secretary of State George Shultz himself has met directly with Sandinista leaders.

The purpose of negotiations from the point of view of the ruling class is to ratify the preservation of bourgeois power. If the ruling class believes it can gain the initiative, ensnare the resistance, stabilize the ruling order, or draw breath before the assault to come, it will never hesitate.

The ruling class are masters at applying for their own ends the maxim of Malcolm X: "By any means necessary."

Class issues

Revolutionaries, too, can use negotiations. The critical issue, whether in San Salvador or Detroit, is to what end? If the purpose is to secure a forum from which to articulate the class aims of the struggle, if the masses are prepared to rally around programmatic demands which strip away bourgeois legitimacy, out. In 1980 it was Reagan, like Nixon, who was for "moderation, while Carter, like Kennedy, made the case for intervention.

What is illustrated here is not only the classic policeman's gambit of hardcop/soft-cop, but, like Mutt and Jeff, the interchangeablility of roles, which is the defining interaction of the two parties that make up the One Big Property Party in America.

Training of militias by FMLN rebels in Usulatan.

The negotiations that took place during the Vietnam War had one essential feature that tends to be a consistent pattern in the reponse of the ruling class to a revolutionary challenge. The critical issue was to retain at all costs the arined apparatus of the old order while applying the maximum pressure in the field to secure a halt to the struggle of the mass movement. Even a temporary lull is essential, for the basic purpose is to start, by whatever ploy, a process of demobilization in the mass movement.

It is the separation of resistance leaders from their mass base that constitutes the stuff of ruling-class tactics in talks— whether over strikes or armed struggle.

For this reason, negotiations with the class enemy when the issue of power is on the agenda has invariably been accompanied by an even greater use of force. Some of the worst bombings in Indochina took place on the eve of— and at critical moments during-the negotiations in Paris. Indeed, as Richard Nixon was being toasted by Chairman Mao in Peking, the bombs kept falling on Haiphong.

A key issue during the Indochinese negotiations was the composition of the regime in Saigon-with the language of compromise translated to mean some form of amalgam between the regime in Saigon and the representatives of the National Liberation Front.

There was even a tentative agreement Michel Setboun discussed in Moscow based upon the removal of South Vietnamese Chief of State Nguyen Van Thieu, but the retention of Nguyen Cao Ky, Thieu's second in command. But to accomplish this, there had to be the implicit or explicit agreement that the guerrillas would suspend the struggle.

No question of power Jose Napoleon Duarte, in an interview in the November issue of Playboy, stated his attitude toward "dialogue."

"I say O.K. But what for?...Are they [the guerrillas] ready to say, 'Never again will I pick up a rifle to kill people?' Will the guerrillas in the mountains pay attention to their civilian leaders when they are told to disarm?"

Later, when pressed by the Playboy reporter as to what these negotiations would be designed to achieve, Duarte was explicit: "I propose a sincere dialogue in which the question of power is not on the agenda, with no guns on the KORESPONDENCJA table.

The Playboy reporter also asked Duarte if the armed forces were "sincere in their desire for peace? to which Duarte replied, "I'm sure of it."

Within three days of the meeting in La Palma, however, the Salvadoran army launched a massive surprise offensive. ''The war goes on, said Lt. Col. Domingo Monterrosa, army commander of the eastern third of the country, as his troops moved into rebel-held Morazan Province here today. 'There are times when you have to make war to gain peace" (New York Times, Oct. 19, 1984).

The New York Times article is instructive in other ways. Army Commander Monterrosa told the Times that the objective of the attack was "to try to capture guerrilla commanders who may have traveled here from La Palma to discuss rebel strategy."

Col. Adolfo Blandon also told the Times that this was the opening assault of a "six-month army offensive intended to keep the guerrillas on the run." while Col Monterrosa spoke of the "fall in rebel strength."

There is a clear relationship between the strategy openly declared by Duarte and the statements of his commanders in the field. The negotiations, they all agree, are designed to help break the back of the resistance. They too agree with the maxim: "by any means necessary."

Dumping of Mondale

Of course, the timing of the talks in La Palma is of more than passing interest. Ironically, many who have favored "dumping Reagan" have advocated support for negotiations on the grounds that the moderate posture of the U.S. antiwar movement would serve to bring into office a moderate spokesperson for the ruling class in America.

One charge against the ruling class will never be sustained-that of naivete. We have a nice paradox wherein it is Reagan who has promoted the talks in La Palma just weeks before the elections, thus facilitating the dumping of Mondale. Such are the wages of moderate sin.

The dangers, however, do not lie at the negotiating table as opposed to the battlefield. They lie, rather, in the incapacity of the revolutionary or antiwar movements to resist the shared strategy and pressures of all components of the besieged ruling class.

To avoid this danger, it is of critical importance to communicate to the masses of the population—those in El Salvador and in the United States-that there is no middle ground, no protracted dual power, no shared command at the heights of the state apparatus, no lying down with the fox and the hares, no temporizing with the apparatus of the oppressor state that will enhance survival—let alone ensure victory.