THERE IS NO END IN SIGHT TO THE
war that has ravaged El Salvador for the last
four years. 45,000 people have died or dis-
appeared. The Army has more than tripled in size
while the best estimates of guerrilla strength sug-
gest a doubling of their ranks. And if President
Reagan’s request for a quadrupling of military aid
to El Salvador is approved by Congress this year,
more weapons, more helicopters and more bullets
will find their way to both sides in El Salvador’s
escalating conflict.
Over the last four years, we have written
extensively on the crisis unfolding in El Salvador, attempting to add an historical dimension to the
daily reporting in the press and the “bang-bang”
coverage on television. In this issue of NACLA’s
Report on the Americas, we open our pages to the views of those who experience El Salvador’s
agony as their own.
The Jesuit-run Central American University
(UCA) has been a center of academic excellence
since its founding in 1965. In wartime, it has
become an oasis for those who seek an objective understanding of events. The university’s jour- nal, Estudios Centroamericanos (ECA), has meti-
culously documented the impact of the war on all
levels of society and provided the most insightful
analyses available of the social forces in conflict.
For this reason, we have invited the ECA editorial
board, a team of respected social scientists living and working in San Salvador, to share their
thoughts on El Salvador’s future with an American audience.
The content of “El Salvador 1984,” is entirely
the responsibility of the ECA editorial board. It is
their assessment of the political actors in El Salva-
dor’s drama, the war, the upcoming presidential
elections, the prospects of peace. It is also a view
from El Salvador of our own government’s ac-
tions and impact on events.
It is our hope, in publishing this special report
on the eve of El Salvador’s presidential elections, to shed light on the context of those elections; to
pre-empt, in a sense, the many false conclusions
that were drawn from the last elections in 1982.
Two years ago, the massive voter turnout in El
Salvador’s Constituent Assembly elections was
interpreted as a resounding repudiation of the
Left. Virtually no attention was paid to the real
and perceived consequences of not voting in a
country terrorized by the armed forces and para-
military death squads. The elections were hailed
as an exercise in pluralist democracy, save for the
rebels’ unwillingness or inability (depending on the interpretation) to participate. They were seen
as posing a clear choice between two options-the
moderate center and the extremist Right. Yet two
years later, as the same parties dominate the
presidential race, it appears that the practical dif-
ferences between the two were exaggerated and
profoundly misunderstood.
The options for El Salvador in 1984 are steadi-
ly narrowing, with the door to dialogue still firmly
shut and both sides pouring all their energies into
a war that threatens the very survival of a nation. American perceptions of El Salvador are neces-
sarily filtered through the eyes of the American
press and shaped by our government’s claims.
The voices of Salvadoreans themselves, which we
now present, are all too rarely heard.
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