COLUMN LEFT : Fighting for Shreds of a Dream : All across Latin America, the generals are tightening their chokehold. The left has found that revolution is toothless.

Our flagging interest in matters south of the Rio Grande is scarcely rippled by news of the failure of the latest round of peace talks in El Salvador, the fifth since last November’s guerrilla offensive. But the reasons for their collapse are momentous for the whole of Latin America, since they center on the future role of the armed forces.

The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front has abandoned, one by one, each of its longstanding demands for the restructuring of Salvadoran society. It no longer insists on power sharing, or on the integration of its troops into the national army. And it accepts the validity of elections that it once derided--not without cause--as a U.S.-engineered public-relations stunt.

Only a single core demand remains: reform of the military, which means a reduction in its size, a purge of corrupt and abusive officers and the prosecution of egregious human rights violators.

All over Latin America, there is a similar scaling down of expectations, a similar loss of Utopian dreams on the left. El Salvador is simply the place where dreams and obstacles stand in sharpest conflict. Some of the reasons are obvious: the collapse of Soviet power and Soviet interest in bankrolling revolutionary experiments, and the intellectual vogue for “free-market” economic solutions--which, incidentally, hit Latin America before Eastern Europe.

Closer to home, there has been the electoral debacle of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the reduction of the socialist idea to a single isolated Caribbean island, where it snaps and snarls like a creature confined in a cage.

But there is another dimension, too, to this shrinking of dreams, and that is the enduring chokehold of the generals. El Salvador’s civilian president, Alfredo Cristiani, is a well-mannered, preppy sort of fellow with no discernible power base. He could have delivered nothing at last week’s peace talks. It is the country’s officer corps, many of whom make Saddam Hussein seem as mild as a New Hampshire judge, who hold veto power over all levels of political decisions.

The Salvadoran army may be an extreme case, but the paradigm holds for much of the continent. “Not a leaf moves in Chile without my knowledge,” Gen. Augusto Pinochet used to say, and if the center-left politicians who took office in Chile in March were asked why serious social reform is not on their agenda, they would not start by talking about Eastern Europe. Instead, they would say that Pinochet, his forces protected by a retroactive self-amnesty, would never stand for it. From Guatemala to Brazil, wherever the armies of the ancien regime survive, leftists would give a similar answer.

Many former guerrillas have quit the battlefield and opted for the risks of legal mass-based politics. But as Colombia’s recent election season illustrates, where the military remains in place, the risks involve more than just losing the vote. The leader of the M-19 rebels, who had just melted down their guns and surrendered, was one of three presidential candidates murdered during the Colombian campaign.

As they survey this bleak panorama in preparation for a sixth round of talks, the Salvadoran rebels will think hardest about Nicaragua--although they will surely disagree about what lessons it holds. Nicaragua’s former interior minister, Sandinista Tomas Borge, liked to say that the revolution was like the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. But the point about the Kingdom of Heaven is that it has no end. That belief in the irreversible character of revolution is an albatross that has now been lifted from the neck of the Latin American left.

Violeta Chamorro’s new Nicaraguan government has enacted economic policies not too different from those practiced by the Sandinistas in their latter years in power, and any radical rollback of social reform is blocked by continued Sandinista control of the armed forces.

This modest arrangement--what the French might call a “government of cohabitation”--may be the best the Latin American left can hope for these days. But the FMLN will not forget that even this much is possible only because the armies of the old order--first Somoza’s National Guard, then the Contras--were swept away. The Salvadoran army is a beast that the FMLN guerrillas may not be able to vanquish, but they would be fools to settle for anything less than chains to shackle it.