Theater of the Absurd

"WE HAVE to get out the facts we have so that people at least will agree on what's happening down there," a State Department spokesman explained in the middle of last week's Administration media extravaganza on the Communist threat in our own backyard: Nicaragua and El Salvador. Once the naive electorate is enlightened, "then we can worry about getting them [that's us] to accept the policy [presumably U.S. intervention]," the official added.

Part One of the presentation, choreographed by the CIA, went smoothly as far as the performers were concerned. Spewing charts and aerial photos enlarged to show Soviet license plates on Nicaraguan tanks, the spy bureau smugly assured reporters that the Sandinistas are arming themselves and receiving substantial aid from Moscow and Havana. John T. Hughes, the very same Government intelligence expert who first translated specks on the Cuban terrain as Soviet missiles in 1962, returned to the stage, pointer in hand. The eyeball-to-eyeball allusions were plentiful, though somehow outdated Russian T-55s parked near Managua seem less of a direct threat to U.S. interests than did medium-range missiles off the coast of Florida.

No matter; Mr. Hughes plowed ahead with diagrams of a Nicaraguan military camp, pointing out that its obstacle course is in the identical place that it would be on a Cuban base. Same thing with the jogging track. In short, not only are the Nicaraguans building a proportionally large army, but they are also jogging in the same direction as the Cubans. Except for rather doubtful protestations from the Sandinistas that "not a single foreign soldier" serves in their nation, nobody bothered to challenge the Administration's information. After all, if you squint hard, those specks could be tanks, and it would make some sense if Cuba, proud armorer of Third World leftists, were supplying them.

But then Al Haig's boys got involved, and the whole show went down the tubes. Promising a real-live captured guerrilla who would admit that he was Nicaraguan, had trained in Cuba and Ethiopia, and had fought for the rebels in El Salvador, the State Department called a briefing of its own. To the very apparent distress of the organizers this guerrilla refused to do his tricks.

Nineteen-year-old Orlando Jose Tardencillas proudly confirmed that he had voluntarily joined rebel troops in El Salvador after fighting to overthrow the Somoza regime in his native Nicaragua. He denied, however, ever having been to Cuba or Ethiopia and said that he had been coerced into that lie by U.S. officials after his capture by Salvadoran National Guardsmen last year. Describing brutal torture in a Salvadoran government jail, he said that U.S. Embassy representatives offered him a simple choice: "They gave me an option. They said I could come here or face certain death. All my previous statements about training in Ethiopia and Cuba were false." He added that he continued to lie to American officials until just before the press conference because "they would never have allowed me to say what I'm saying here."

As Tardencillas spoke, the Foggy bottom p.r. squad couldn't help but whisper anxiously in the back of the briefing room and give their uncooperative guerrilla dirty looks. Afterwards, chief spokesman Dean Fischer tried to laugh the whole thing off, acknowledging. "You win some, and you lose some. "But what the Reagan Administration is losing quickly is any chance of convincing anyone that we should have faith in current U.S. policy toward Central America.

REGARDLESS OF WHERE Orlando Jose Tardencillas learned to handle his rifle, parading a committed revolutionary in front of the TV cameras under a death threat cannot possibly be classified under "Thoughtful Argumentation" in the State Department hand-book. Even if the young man had recited his lines on cue, would that have proved he was telling the truth or that the Salvadoran civil war can be attributed to Communist infiltration via Nicaragua?

Lest we forget, it was only two weeks ago that the good Secretary of State himself told Congress that a different "Nicaraguan military man" had been captured in El Salvador after being sent there by the Nicaraguan Government to help the rebels. Mexican officials immediately claimed that the man was a student travelling from their country overland through El Salvador to his home in Nicaragua. Haig never introduced that guerrilla in public.

And assuming that there probably are Nicaraguans fighting for the left in El Salvador--with or without their Government's blessing--does that justify American military involvement of the sort Haig is clearly itching for? What would we defend--a corrupt, militaristic government which has allowed killer brigades to wander the countryside, aimlessly murdering civilians while battling the ill-defined forces of the left? And what of the Nicaraguan bases. Cuban-built or not? They only become dangerous if interpreted as the first falling dominos in a potential avalanche tumbling across El Salvador, Hondouras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and then the shipping lanes of the Panama Canal. Wouldn't the United States be better off working toward genuine economic and social reform in those countries, improving our chance of long-term ties, rather than stubbornly endorsing the status quo and whining about the pernicious Cuban influence? The opportunity to serve our own best interests may have already passed in Nicaragua, but instead of wasting energy on bad theater, the Administration should begin addressing the questions of the real world.