SPOTLIGEN Book review Probing deeper on El Salvador

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ENRIQUE BALOYRA is a State Department advisor who has studied El Salvador For Baloyra, the "bad guys" of Salvadorean history are the close knit oligarchy of landowners who have pushed the peasantry off their land, dominate the financial institutions, and created a repressive "reactionary despotic" state necessary to hold down peasant unrest.

•The reliance of the economy on one or two export crops has made it particularly susceptible to world trade crises.

Unemployment and underemployment on a massive scale lead to social unrest and the impossibility of a stable democratic regime that would not pose a grave threat to the oligarchy's economic power.

Mix In the face of popular protest against oligarchic rule it has been necessary since 1948 for military governments in El Salvador to mix "repression with reform".

Limited trade union rights, some elemental social welfare, controlled political expression Paul Muddle reviews a new book on El Salvador which shows that imperialism has more options than just one.

and the development of an economic infrastructure were intended to buy off urban workers and the middle class.

No-one, however, challenged the fundamentals of oligarchic rule. When military radicals linked to the middle class have attempted any form of agrarian transformation (as happened in 1972, 1976 and 1979-82) the oligarchy has unleashed paramilitary terror, economic subversion and army conspiracies.

Baloyra (rightly) sees no umbilical cord linking imperialism to the big land-owners. Oligarchic domination of the land denies imperialism markets 14416418 and creates political il stability in an area of extreme strategic importance.

Carter, and even Reagan, have promoted land reform (primarily for political and not economic motives) and urged a transition to aemocracy. вшоута applauds such efforts but sees them as insufficient.

In attempting to reconcile the Christian Democrats and the far right whilst excluding the reformist left of the FDR Baloyra believes that Reagan is pursuing the unattainable.

Baloyra recognises that under certain circumstances imperialism would have to support the most reactionary ruling classes but argues that another alternative is available in Central • Support for the "obstructionist" right, he argues, should be ditched. Instead, negotiations should be employed to produce an alliance between the "democratic left" of the FDR and the christian Democrats.

Such a set-up could bludgeon the oligarchy into accepting reforms and steal the thunder of the far-left.

"Any attempt to about the official end of armed centre in Salvadorean politics will have to include the FDR. This entails bringing the groups under the FDR umbrella back into the political process.

This cannot come about without a restoration of the rule of law, and this restoration cannot come about without a confrontation with the rightist element On the other hand, this restoration could be completed even if one or more of the guerrilla groups continued fighting... the powers of the state could be used to deal with problems... including the neutralisation of those who continue to try to destroy the regime...

(pp.156-7)

Baloyra points out that under such circumstances most guerrilla leaders would be happy to lay down their arms quotes several to this effect.

He concludes by lamenting that:

'The ideological make-up of the Reagan administration makes it unlikely that the administration will perceive an alliance between the Social and Christian Democrats as a viable and legitimate option.

This is the greatest but not the only mistake that the US could FMLA V: is Theoretica' simplification of the relationship between imperialism and the third world leads us to underestimate the vitality of the middle classes and their capacity for an alliance with imperialism.

TE MI_1_1. II Irotsky sineory or permanent revolution" teaches us anything it is not the inevitability of socialism in the third world but the need for vigilance against the middle class.

There is nothing inevitable about socialism in the very unfavourable conditions of the aboa a deal with imperialism ruled out? third world. Working class socialist revolution there is only a possibility which may be fought for and won. An irreplaceable precondition for socialist revolution in the third world conditions is that the Marxists there Alsorrinto boon thair ideas and working class perspectives clear and that they resist both the lure of oversimpli: fication and the pressures of cross class populism which express themselves through the crude non-Marxist oversimplifications.

owners, but generally around 150,000 to 200,000 houses were completed each year in each sector.

Since 1978, new council houses have become a rarity. In 1982, only 34,000 new dwellings were begun in the public sector in Britain. (The decline in Northern Ireland has not been so steep.)

Private house-building has declined a bit, too, but not nearly so much. About 160,000 were started in 1982.