Re-militarizing El Salvador

It's midnight on the tarmac at Los Angeles Airport. Four Salvadoran men are being unloaded from an Immigration and Naturalization Service van. The men, who have the tough look of survivors, join the crush of passengers pushing anxiously onto United flight 865 to San Salvador. These four Salvadorans didn't have to wait for their row to be called. They are being deported under the bored, governmental gaze of two armed INS agents.

Twenty years ago the United States shipped billions in war materials to El Salvador, and in return that tiny nation sent its best youths out of harm's way to America. This year those youths, their families, and a flood of newcomers will return more than $1.6 billion in American wages to their homeland -- propping up one of Latin America's poorest countries.

Some of those youths, members of transnational Salvadoran gangs like Salvatrucha, M18, will be deported by the INS when they commit street crimes, only to get caught up in El Salvador's gang scene. They are also caught in the middle of tenuous post-cold war U.S.-Salvadoran relations.

As crime plagues postwar El Salvador, South American drugs have replaced communism as the U.S. government's new bogeyman in Latin America. Seeking a Central American beachhead in the drug war, the United States is planning a new round of military buildup in this war-shattered country. Meanwhile, President Bill Clinton headed to Colombia last month to deliver $1.3 billion in mostly military aid to fight drugs and Colombian insurgents.

Just Watching?

At the height of the Reagan war in El Salvador in the 1980s there were 55 "official" U.S. military advisers in El Salvador, although the number was usually larger, as troops flew in from Honduras, wore civilian clothes at the Sheraton Hotel, or just plain lied about what they were doing in the country.

Fierce opposition among liberal Democrats in Congress and a vocal antiwar movement in the United States kept that number from growing, so instead, the conservative administration relied on training elite battalions of Salvadoran soldiers for the harshest anti-insurgency campaigns.

Today the United States wants to build a new military garrison in El Salvador -- this one larger, more complex, and more out in the open. A complex of hangars at the international airport outside of San Salvador would be taken over by U.S. pilots, support soldiers, and military hardware.

In late June, in yet another ironic twist in the aftermath of U.S. intervention in El Salvador, former FMLN guerrilla commanders faced off with then-U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson in the "Culture of Peace" conference room of the National Assembly building. Patterson told the fledgling democrats, some of whom were commanding guerrilla groups only a decade earlier, that the U.S. needs an antidrug listening post in Central America -- and that El Salvador is the perfect location.

In a hallway outside the closed-door meeting, a U.S. government official who would only speak anonymously explained, "We need to monitor airspace and sea lanes, and our only role under these agreements is to monitor suspected drug flights. There would be no interdiction. There is no offensive strategy."

U.S. officials insist the Americans would fly only two P-3 Orion reconnaissance planes, set up an array of radar, and have only 60 American soldiers and their families based in El Salvador. But the official accord, handed out to reporters and waved in the air by opposition leaders, has no limit on the total number of soldiers, planes, or buildings.

Leaders of the FMLN are wary: why build a new base in El Salvador? Is it a coincidence that this plan has been raised just as the FMLN appears poised to take power in the country? With the United States kicked out of Panama, shunned by Costa Rica and Mexico, and mired in a guerrilla war in Colombia, is El Salvador the new American station house for Central American "police actions"?