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Jean-Pierre BEAUVAIS In his November 29-December 4 tour of Latin America, Ronald Reagan has two stops in Central America. One, in Costa Rica, was planned long ago. The other, in Honduras, was added to his itinerary at the last moment.
In Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, the American president has several meetings scheduled. One, to be sure, is with the constitutional president, Suazo Cordova. But Reagan is also meeting Suazo Cordova's military chief of staff, General Alvarez, an avowed supporter of "military action" against neighboring Nicaragua.
Reagan will also meet the Guatemalan dictator, Rios Montt, who bears direct responsibility for the massacre of thou sands of Indian peasants, although this has not kept him from being classified as
"defender of human rights" by the White House bigwigs.
According to the official announcement, at the top of the agenda will be the bilateral relations between the U.S. and each of its two allies. What this involves is a new step-up in aid programs to the Guatemalan military, which is engaged in "counterinsurgency" operations of a growing scope, and an accelerated militarization of Honduras, so as to prepare it as soon as possible to assume fully its role of the bastion of counter-revolution and American military base in the region.
The importance of Reagan's visit to Tegucigalpa, however, goes far beyond this. Both in the case of Nicaragua and El Salvador, the American administration is facing some crucial choices. And Reagan's diseussions in Honduras may have a decisive effect on them. 12
For three years now, Washington has been waging an "undercover war" against Nicaragua, as the U.S. magazine Newsweek recently put it. The U.S. did not hesitate to back ambushes, sabotage, or the massacre of isolated communities in order to create a climate of insecurity in government to devote a growing part of its human and material resources to de-
Washington sought to get Nicaragua bogged down in a military confrontation at the same time as it took measures designed to strangle the country economi.
A lot of people in Washington and in the Central American capitals are convinced that it is time to move into a new stage of this "destabilization plan." They think that the time has come to make full use of the "three to five thousand" counterrevolutionaries "massed at a dozen bases along the Honduran frontier." (See the December 8 issue.) In other words, it is necessary to "create the conditions" for an invasion of Nicaragua.
This gives the full import to Colonel Buchanan's testimony: "The information I got in Central America is that a war between Honduras and Nicaragua is going to begin in December." That is what he told the U.S. legislators who questioned him.
Is Reagan going to follow the logic of his Central American policy to the end? Will he give the greenlight for a massive invasion of Nicaragua? That is unquestionably the most important subject for discussion in his stop in Honduras.
Obviously, many political factors, both domestic and international, will affect his final choice. Some of these factors weigh on the side of postponing such a decision, such as the change of regime in the Kremlin. But in Tegucigalpa there will be strong pressures for unleashing the military machine that has been built up steadily since the victory of the Sandinista revolutionaries.
Another no less crucial choice that the American imperialists will have to make concerns El Salvador. Here the decision will be linked to the one concerning Nicaragua, from which it is in many respects inseparable.
In El Salvador, the revolutionists of the FMLN launched a series of large-scale actions over October, the most extensive for at least a year. By occupying important towns in the provinces of Chalatethoroughfares, cutting off the capital several times, and successfully resisting a number of military counteroffensives, the guerrillas demonstrated that they had neither been "isolated" nor "decimated," as the government's spokesmen had claimed. At the same time, they showed that the government is by no means on the way to "controlling virtually all of the country," as Washington has been suggesting for some time.
Of course, the revolutionists are not yet in a position to win a decisive victory over the junta's forces. They are the first to recognize this. But the junta has shown itself still incapable of dealing any decisive blows to the FMLN fighters.
The political advantages the junta counted on getting out of the March 28 "elections," have proved finally to be very limited. Even the financial and technical aid of the imperialists, their massive arms shipments, and their intensive training of new "elite units" for counterinsurgency warfare have not enabled the junta to turn the relationship of forces on the ground in its favor.
It was in this context that the leaders of the FMLN-FDR dramatically renewed their offer of negotiations.
On October 26 in Mexico City, Guillermo Ungo for the Executive Committee of the FDR, and Ana Guadalupe Martinez for the FMLN, proposed a "rapid opening of direct dialogue without any preconditions." Such discussions would involve "neither humiliation nor surrender by either of the two parties." They would "put the unity of the Salvadoran family above any special individual or group
The very terms of this proposal have aroused debate among the Salvadoran revolutionists. But they were finally endorsed by all the sectors that make up the FMLN-FDR. What is more, while continuing to give total support to the fighters of the martyred Salvadoran people, the