Will Reagan get desperate?

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"WE SUCCEEDED in Chile, in Bolivia, in Guatemala militarily That's the only thing they understand: might is right"

This comment from a White House official cuts aside the flimsy veil of rhetoric on 'defence of democracy' which has been used to obscure the brutal policies of the Reagan government in Central America.

Reagan has insisted that, ''We will not permit dictators to ram communism down the throats of innocent people in one country after another in Central But if he is to stop the gathering momentum of struggle against American-sponsored dictatorships, he must reckon with the likelihood that US military intervention could prove to be his last and only resort.

As another official told week:

"Military intervention, which was inconceivable, now is only improbable, and if El Salvador is about to fall to the communists, it becomes inevitable. Another country is not going to fall to communism while Ronald Reagan is president"

In a desperate effort to turn the tide of the war in El Salvador which has been running consistently in favour of the FMLN liberation forces, and destabilise or overturn the anti-imperialist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, the US is pursuing a ruthless two-pronged policy.

On the one hand millions of dollars are being funnelled into strengthening the military forees of the Salvadorean regime: on the other, US cash and arms are being liberally dispensed to gangs of former Somoza National Guardsmen and mercenaries in order to create a counter revolutionary guerilla force aimed at undermining the Sandinistas.

In El Salvador, 5000 of the army's best troops with US trained officers and US advisers are currently mounting what could be a make-or-break sweep of San Vincente province, aimed at driving out the FMLN and implementing a Vietnam-style 'pacification' programme.

The tactic failed lamentably in Vietnm, and it is no more likely that the bloodthirsty government troops and their equally brutal American advisers will be any more successful in El Salvador.

In Nicaragua, however, where the counter-revolutionary guerilla forces have been assembled largely outside the country, with hefty transfusions of dollars, Washington now claims to have a reactionary fighting force of 8,000 men. They hope that in the more sparsely populated regions these forces can swiftly take cóntrol of substantial areas posing a major military headache to the Sandinistas. The 'contras' are increasingly supported by the Honduran army across the border to the North.

But the imperialist position in Central America is far from strong. The contras in Nicaragua have struck no chord of popular support, and even Washington admits that they are unlikely to overturn the Sandinistas.

And in El Salvador, too, the isolation of the army from the workers and peasants in the towns and countryside is a major weakness.

This was recently pinpointed by retiring General Edward C. Meyer. He told reports that he had no moral qualms about US intervention:

"If I thought that sending the 82nd Airborne would do the job, I'd recommend it today". The problem was that, "I don't know how to design right now a US military solution to the problem. Unless you have the support of the indigenous people, you're not going to solve a guerilla war"

Meyer also warned of the plight of American soldiers "off at the end of the string without the support of the American people"

Nevertheless there are plans te manh in a nau inflir of TTS arlvisers to operate in the front line in the event of a major setback. That could be the trigger to a Central American Vietnam.

It is ironic indeed that Reagan should be contemplating resort to such military methods in the very week in which the stirrings of the Chilean workers' movement and victorious struggles of the Bolivian miners have underlined the limits of even the most barbarous 'solutions' to the crisis ot imperalist authority.