Yesterday's election victory by the F.M.L.N. party candidate Mauricio Funes, and images of throngs celebrating supporters promises a new day for El Salvador, and with a new President in the United States perhaps a new day for our foreign policy in Latin America as well. In this, my first diary, I offer a brief history of the political struggle in El Salvador from my perspective as a former Peace Corps volunteer prior to the civil war.
Forty-three years ago, like most Americans, I had never paid much attention to Central America, a cluster of 7 small countries that occupy the space between Mexico and South America, much less to tiny El Salvador. That was before I learned that El Salvador would be my Peace Corps assignment. In the 80's El Salvador became a major focal point of the Reagan administration, a pawn in the battle with the evil empire of the Soviet union, with the US pouring massive aid into the Salvadoran army's Civil War with FMLN guerillas. In the 20 years since the Salvadoran Civil War ended, El Salvador has mostly been forgotten, like so many places where US blood and treasure have been spent. After pouring in nearly 6 billion to prop up the government, the US lost interest after the UN brokered a peace accord in 1991, and El Salvador was left largely on its own to recover. Forgotten that is until recently when polls showed the leftist FMLN candidate leading in the presidential election. A look back at El Salvador's violent past, and the role of the Reagan administration in the Salvadoran Civil War is in order.
When I arrived in El Salvador in the late 60's, it was peaceful, on the surface at least. Along with several other Volunteers, I was assigned to teach in the University of El Salvador. In Latin America, universities tend to be centers of political activism, and suspicious of government intervention, and with good reason. The University was actually occupied by the army twice during the Civil War, but in the late 60's its main conflicts with the government were mostly over funding, and every year the faculty and staff would go a few months without being paid. At first, the students thought we were CIA spies , but gradually they came to realize we were only the teachers we appeared to be. We lived as modestly as most of our students did. We had no car, and walked or rode the bus everywhere, much to the astonishment of the locals who were unused to seeing ordinary Americans speaking Spanish and mingling in the streets of San Salvador. More than once, we were assumed to be Canadian or perhaps German. At the time, the US Embassy was a new fortress-like structure that was the largest building in the country. I once overheard two women balancing baskets on their heads saying what a good place the embassy's impressive green lawn would be to spread out wet laundry to dry. Embassy employees typically spoke little Spanish, and lived in comparative luxury. The US ambassador actually had a heated swimming pool in a country where the temperature rarely drops below 75. At the time, there were no large stores or shopping malls, no McDonalds, only one US style grocery store, few private cars, and virtually no middle class.
El Salvador is a country with little land and a lot of people. With an average of 900 people per square mile, people live literally everywhere, even on the slopes of the volcano that rises over the capitol city of San Salvador. Then, as now, most people were incredibly poor, and many had come to the capitol from the countryside in search of work in small factories being built as the Central American Common Market developed. Then, as now, there were squatters shacks, and people living in cardboard shacks without electricity or running water. Manual labor was the norm. It was not uncommon to see men pulling huge loads in handcarts, or women gracefully balancing enormous loads of firewood or jars of water on their heads. Then as now, people borrowed money at exorbitant interest from money lenders to buy produce to sell in the open air market. Without refrigeration, if they didn't sell their wares by the end of the day they were unable to pay back the loan. We once bought pineapples from a woman going door to door at night trying desparately to recoup her losses. Campesinos labored on coffee fincas of the oligarchy , 14 famiies who owned most of El Salvador's land , and thought nothing of sending their children to the most elite US universities, or flying to Houston to be operated on by Michael Debakey. Medical care for ordinary people was quite different. It was a shocking site to see tiny coffins in the hospital entrance I passed every day as I walked to work. El Salvador did have a medical school, and there were some villages with health clinic visited once a week by a doctor, but we frequently saw many children with stomachs distended from parasites bourne in the contaminated drinking water.
There were rumors of death squads , and some of the students whispered about white hand prints, the mark of the feared Mano Blanco, ( White Hand), being left on doors of suspected communists as a warning of violent retribution. El Salvador has a history of brutal repression. The coffee growers who owned the fincas where campesinos labored tending and harvesting coffee beans also controlled the government, and anyone who disagreed was accused of being a communist, and met with brutal reprisal by the military. In 1932, 30,000 indigenous peasants were murdered in what is known as La Matanza ( the Massacre).
The Salvadoran Civil War between the government and the FMLN guerillas lasted 12 years from 1979 to 1992. 75,000 were killed, most of whom were civilians, killed by their own government and death squads composed of former Salvadoran National Guard officers and right-wing civilians. Ronald Reagan's role in this sad part of El Salvador's history is conveniently forgotten by those who perpetuate the Reagan mythology. Beginning with Reagan's election in 1980, El Salvador received $6 billion in mlitary and economic aid from the Reagan administration, which was preoccupied with fighting what it saw as a communist threat to the hemisphere, and got Congress to increase aid to the Salvadoran military and government.
Atrocities were numerous- 1000 peasants were massacred by the Salvadoran Army in the village of El Mozote, Archbishop Romero was murdered by a death squad while he was saying mass, 4 American churchwomen were raped and murdered, and land reform activists and two US labor advisors were gunned down in the Hotel Sheraton. It took the 1989 murder of 6 Jesuit priests along their housekeeper and daughter who witnessed it which finally led the US Congress to investigate and challenge the Reagan administrations policies, uncovering the role of the Salvadoran army at the highest levels. UN peace negotiations followed, and ended the war in 1991. The FMLN Party was formed by the former guerilla groups. Ironically, Roberto D'Aubisson, who was later found to have planned the murder of Archbishop Romero, formed the right-wing Arena Party, which has won every election for the past 20 years- until yesterday.
Commenting on the victory of the FMLN on Democracy Now, Robert Lovato, a child of Salvadoran immigrants, and a contributing associate editor with New America Media and a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine, said of the victory of the FMLN in yestereday's election said,
This is the defeat of Ronald Reagan, nothing less.
The new government faces huge problems including recovery from the Civil War, unrepaired damage from Hurricane Mitch, the recession, and perhaps most of all, crime. El Salvador's murder rate is one of the highest in the world. Funes is a former television reporter, not a former guerilla. He is regarded as a moderate who got 46% of the evangelical vote, and who has said improved relations with the US are one of his foreign policy goals. Unlike the Bush administration, the Obama administration has said that it will work with the new government. Two Republican Congressmen have already threatened to punish Salvadorans by not allowing them to send remittances home El Salvador if FMLN were to win the election. Let us hope that under President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a more rational approach will prevail, and we can take advantage of this opportunity to repair relations so badly damaged by Ronald Reagan's legacy in Central America. As Funes said last night at the victory rally
This is the happiest night of my life,” .... And I hope it is also the night of greatest hope for El Salvador .
For an excellent accounts of the history of the conflict in El Salvador, see NPR's documentary Enemies of War.
,