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El Salvador: Can the Wounds Be Healed?
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19910 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
2,767 Words |
| Author
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Howard J. Wiarda
Howard J. Wiarda is professor of political science at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, professor national
security studies at the National Defense University, and
visiting scholar at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS). He was lead consultant to the National
Bipartisan (Kissinger) Commission on Central America and is
the author of Rift and Revolution: The Central American
Imbroglio and The Democratic Revolution in Latin America. |
El Salvador has long been one of the nastiest and most brutal countries in Latin America. It is riven by immense social and racial gaps; next to Haiti, it is the most overpopulated country in Latin America; its class relations are tense and bitter; and until the 1980s it had virtually no democratic experience. Its brutal civil war from 1979 to 1991 was also intensely divisive in U.S. domestic politics. And now, with the signing of the historic peace accords between the government and the guerrillas, El Salvador may finally be poised to embark on a new course.
El Salvador, along with pre-Castro Cuba, had one of the most violent political cultures in all of Latin America. The tradition of dealing with political enemies was the paredon--"to the wall." The violence pervaded all lasses. When I first traveled in the El Salvador countryside 29 years ago, the driver of my busito ("little bus", really a van) stopped the bus to tell me I should not dangle my arm out the window because "those peasants with their machetes" as he put it, "they see an arm hanging out and Whoosh … it is gone-- just for the spirit of it."
On that same trip I went to a party at a fancy hotel, built with U.S.Alliance for Progress funds, on the top of a volcano, looking down into another, live volcano. Since there was no way to get water to this hotel, it had never been opened commercially but was frequented on weekends by military officers who could use their helicopters to get supplies to the top. They would take their girlfriends up there and, while drinking in front of the windows overlooking the live volcano, cheer wildly as military helicopters dropped peasants and "leftists" into the boiling lava.
Poor, severely fractured El Salvador--thanks to the agreement--now has a moment of peace, which we must hope will be lasting. The question is whether the older, deeper habits of violence, brutality, and hatred that, with the slaughters of the guerillas and the murders of the death squads, became so tragically familiar to us over the last decade, can also be ameliorated.
The Accords
The accords provide for the demobilization of the Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and its reconstitution as legitimate political force openly contending in a democratic political system. Without Sandinista Nicaragua as a source of rest and recreation for the guerrillas, with Cuba ailing and giving up its support for guerrilla movements, and with the Soviet Union
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