PRESIDENT Bush has only now begun to select a foreign policy team for Central America; Vice-President Quayle calls for "the elimination of human rights." Meanwhile in aid-dependent El Salvador two important initiatives--one toward the end of the eight-year civil war, another toward a new Central American peace--mark serious steps for regional autonomy.

As The New York Times has recently pointed out, American policy aims differ greatly from what El Salvador has in mind for its own future.

Facing the almost certain victory of the right-wing, death squad-linked ARENA party in this month's presidential elections, the Salvadoran leftist guerrillas have offered to end the war. In return they have requested a six-month delay in the elections, allowing them time to organize for and participate in the presidential race. Despite anticipated outrage from the right, the centrist President Duarte has offered a compromise six-week extension.

To address the continued disintegration of the Central American economies under spiraling debts and unfundable wars, the five Central American nations have come together in a modest plan for peace and the subsequent reduction of financial pressures. El Salvador is the site of this new regional pact, the highlight of which is Nicaragua's promise of free elections next February in return for the expulsion of the Contras from Honduras.

The last time the Central American governments coordinated a peace negotiation was in 1987 in Guatemala, when both the Reagan Administration and the Democratic Speaker of the House were concocting their own plans for the region. The regional agreement, known as the Arias Plan, was met with distrust and discouragement from the Republicans.

While the arch-anti-Communist Guatemalan government managed to trust Nicaragua to hold its part of the bargain, Ronald Reagan did not give them the chance. In urging further funding for the Contras, he explicitly violated a major provision of the treaty--that all outside help to guerrilla groups be cut off.

It is a happy coincidence, or perhaps a deliberate one, that the new trends toward peace are occurring while American diplomacy in the region lies dormant and uncertain.

SOCIOLOGIST Norbert Lechner has noted that revolutions in Latin America have not occurred in countries with the worst histories of human rights abuses; nor have they occurred in the poorest. Instead popular revolutions have succeeded with widespread support behind a class-unifying cause, namely, independence from a government controlled economically, and to a large extent politically, by the United States.

American foreign policies, Democratic and Republican alike, have consistently failed to recognize anti-imperialism as a key element in Latin American politics, one that crosses even the sharpest of class boundaries. One of the last countries in the hemisphere to achieve independence from the Spanish, Cuba remained under American political protectorateship until 1948. The final years of the Batista dictatorship were marked by high-volume American investment and advice.

In Nicaragua, a century and a half of American invasions and interventions--including one in which an American journalist, William Walker, declared himself president--fostered resentments that culminated in the overthrow of the U.S.-installed Somoza dictatorship. The insurgents in both Cuba and Nicaragua were largely able to mobilize cross-class support on promises not of Communism but of independence.

The United States is facing a similar crisis in El Salvador. Last year American aid to El Salvador doubled that nation's budget. And extraordinarily generous support for the Salvadoran military, besides encouraging corruption and removing any high-level army incentive to end the war, sends a message to all Salvadorans--left, center and right--that El Salvador is not in charge of its own policies.

In formulating a policy for the region, President Bush would do well to keep in mind the Cuban and Nicaraguan precedents. These are not examples of the American failure to contain Communism. These are examples of the American failure to contain its own tendencies to manage and mismanage El Salvador, Central America and the rest of the hemisphere.