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Leaders in El Salvador were heartened by Reagan's speech. U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton invited seven prominent businessmen to his house to watch a tape of the address. Said Conrado López Andreu, president of the Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce and Industry: "Despite the twisted misinformation in the U.S., President Reagan finally told the truth about the region and El Salvador." But some who were not at the dinner expressed the fear that Reagan was still not paying enough attention to the political and social situation. "He said the problem in Central America was political, not military, but all he spoke about was military solutions," noted Jacinto Morales, an official of El Salvador's human rights commission.
In Nicaragua, the reaction was suited to Reagan's attack. The government called for a massive demonstration the next day to denounce U.S. threats to Nicaragua. THE PEOPLE WILL RESPOND TO REAGAN IN THE STREETS, blared the Thursday headline of Barricada, the official Sandinista paper. More than 50,000 gathered for the rally in the sweltering afternoon sun, a somewhat smaller crowd than had been forecast by the government. Carrying rifles, sticks, shovels and hand-carved replicas of guns, they marched past a theater showing the 1980 American film Brubaker to the Plaza de la Revolución.
Even if Reagan can line up political support in Congress and the country for his program, the U.S. will find it difficult to achieve the stability it seeks in Central America. The Salvadoran army is in trou ble, weakened by a corrupt and generally incompetent officer corps. Until recently the army was no more than an overgrown police force that kept 9-to-5 hours, five days a week, in its halfhearted struggle against the leftist guerrillas, and this attitude is changing only very slowly. The commanders had refused to adopt counterinsurgency tactics, like using small mobile units to pursue the rebels. Most of the army's activity consisted of massive sweeps, after which the guerrillas would return to the disputed territory.
The $30 million voted by the House subcommittee last week will be used as partial payment for a U.S. Army plan to restructure the Salvadoran forces through training of crack infantry troops and aggressive junior officers. American advisers hope that the newly appointed Defense Minister, Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, will be better than his predecessor in adopting sophisticated tactics and strengthening morale.
Fortunately for the U.S., the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, known as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), are also in disarray following an internal dispute that left two of their leaders dead. But they still dominate almost half of the countryside. Since the conflict began in 1979, they have disrupted the Salvadoran economy by inflicting up to $600 million in damages to farms, factories and utilities.