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The political progress in El Salvador is more encouraging, even though there has been less success than the U.S. had hoped for. Begun in 1980, the government's land-reform program faltered in the face of right-wing opposition. The American embassy put pressure on the Salvadorans in early 1982 to get the plan moving again in earnest. Last month 241 land titles were awarded to Salvadoran peasants, bringing to 1,764 the number of new owners. In three years, more than 750,000 of the nation's 5,260,000 acres of farmland have been transferred from the country's oligarchy.
Right-wing security forces are killing civilians at a rate of 100 a week, down from a peak of 250 in 1980. These figures are still shocking, but the prosecution of soldiers who commit murder or other crimes is being stepped up sharply.
Elections last year resulted in a fragile civilian government, headed by President Alvaro Alfredo Magaña. It is drafting a new constitution and, at the urging of the U.S., called a presidential election for December. The Christian Democratic candidate, centrist ex-President José Napoleon Duarte, is now the front runner. But the right-wing ARENA Party may nominate this month Major Roberto d'Aubuisson, the controversial president of the Constituent Assembly, whom American officials have tried to prevent from dominating El Salvador's interim government.
In Nicaragua, the military seems to be well supplied by its Cuban allies, with some 22,000 regular armed troops. But until last month, they have not entered the battle against the contra rebels struggling against the Sandinista regime. That work has generally been left to local militia and reserve units, which have been notably inept. American analysts speculate that the regular army has been held back either because it is not fully trained or, surprising as it may seem to North Americans, because it is preparing for a U.S. invasion. Recently some regular army troops, organized into mobile counterinsurgency battalions, have been effectively deployed against the contras.
The contra rebels, mainly organized under the banner of the Nicaraguan Democratic Front (F.D.N.), are a loose alliance pulled together partly by the CIA. The groups include some former supporters of the late right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who was deposed by the Sandinista takeover in 1979, and "anti-Sandinista" rebels who became disenchanted with the repressive ways of their former colleagues in the revolution. The CIA has tried to weed out the more extreme elements of Somoza's former National Guard. The F.D.N., which operates out of Honduras, is controlled by three levels of general staffs, at the top of which are CIA operatives. Another rebel group, the A.S.D.E., has been formed in Costa Rica. It is led by Edén Pastora Gómez, a Sandinista defector and war hero, who is now fighting in southern Nicaragua. Also waging the struggle against the Nicaraguan regime are the Miskito Indians, a fiercely independent tribe along the country's Caribbean coast that the Sandinistas have tried and failed to suppress.