El Salvador Budget

Standing proudly, hands raised--some in fists--opposition party legislators voted recently to defy President Armando Calderon Sol. The issue was federal revenue-sharing. Calderon's 1998 budget proposal contained $330 million for El Salvador's cities. The National Assembly voted the mayors $700 million, which required a redrawing of the entire federal budget. But the lesson went far beyond government budgets.

Standing proudly, hands raised--some in fists--opposition party legislators voted recently to defy President Armando Calderon Sol. The issue was federal revenue-sharing. Calderon's 1998 budget proposal contained $330 million for El Salvador's cities. The National Assembly voted the mayors $700 million, which required a redrawing of the entire federal budget. But the lesson went far beyond government budgets.

For the students among the estimated 300,000 El Salvador refugees in the Los Angeles area to return to their war-torn Central American homeland today would be dangerous, an official of the University of El Salvador said Monday. "I could not recommend that they return to El Salvador because the danger is very real to all of us as members of the university community," Mauricio Guevara Pacheco, the university's vice chancellor, told a group of about 350 at Fullerton College.

It isn't news, but I have just learned from a reader, Gordon A. Marten, that the United States has no national flower. Marten writes with a sense of national disgrace and failure but not without hope. He happens to be a marigold man himself. Evidently, the nation suffers this lack of a floral symbol because Congress has failed to agree on one.

This will not be a merry Christmas in El Salvador. The land named for the Savior awaits salvation, but salvation tarries. Men and women of the church have not escaped assassins' guns; those who sought to serve the people of that troubled land have paid with their blood. And El Salvador is once again a sore point of U.S. foreign policy. The Bush Administration came into office with a promise of a more pragmatic world outlook. In East-West relations, that has been the case.

Panic struck the Salvadoran refugee community of Los Angeles last month when a rumor spread that the end of amnesty for illegal immigrants would also eliminate the long hoped-for possibility for political asylum. The rumor was false, but the error behind it is understandable. It is the flip side of an error that Americans make when we presume that every Spanish-speaker who crosses our southern border has come here for economic reasons.

The 10 minutes on CNN's "Sonya Live" television talk show passed by all too quickly for Jennifer Casolo, the American imprisoned in El Salvador for 18 days on charges she hid weapons for leftist rebels. "I wish, I wish, I wish I'd said more important things!" she moaned after abandoning the set at Cable News Network's Hollywood studio. "Instead of taking an opportunity and throwing it away!" But rarely does Casolo throw away opportunities these days.

Before he arrived, guerrilla sentries climbed surrounding hilltops and took up positions on the town's only cobblestone street. Another rebel, armed with an M-16 automatic rifle, searched an abandoned rural health clinic with a flashlight. In the darkness before a full moonrise, the sound of quick boot steps broke through the night, and bodyguards burst into the clinic ahead of him. "Hello, I'm Ferman Cienfuegos," the guerrilla commander said with the grace of a host at a cocktail party.