One of El Salvador’s leading businessmen was holding forth recently on his compatriot’s near-mythical reputation for hard work and industriousness in the face of adversity. To illustrate his point, he ran down a list of public and private projects — roads, factories, housing, shopping centers — built in the middle of a raging war. “The problem here,” said Roberto Murray Meza, “was that the guerrillas were also Salvadorans.”
That apparently obvious statement was a recognition of so much that the country’s political, military and business leaders — and their U.S. patrons — were loath to admit throughout the long war. Contrary to the counterinsurgency propaganda that too often substituted for sober analysis, El Salvador was a divided society engaged in a bloody fight over very different visions of its future. Although the conflict also came to be played out in the larger geopolitical and ideological context of the Cold War, it was fundamentally a homegrown popular response to an intolerable system of governance by military boot.
The outbreak of war in the late 1970s was the result of the increasingly brutal use of state repression and terror to eliminate – rather than placate – dissent. Its settlement was based on peace agreements that basically granted the most rudimentary opposition demands, made long before the conflict started. The guerrillas laid down their arms in return for an agreement to dismantle the state terror apparatus, and to legitimize dissent and opposition in politics and daily life.
That modest political opening was not the gift of moderate politicians or so-called military reformers, nor of enlightened U.S. policy and quiet diplomacy. The political space was created by tens of thousands of people who struggled for a much more fundamental kind of social change. By the conflict’s end, the revolutionary demands of the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (FMLN) had been scaled down to demands for political and civil rights. Guerrilla priest Rogelio Poncelee described the transformation this way: “In our marches, we used to chant ‘Socialismo, Socialismo, Socialismo.’ These days, we say ‘Democracia, Democracia, Democracia.’”
“Since 1972, they denied us access to power through elections so we took up the armed struggle, not as an end, but as a means,” said rebel field commander Chano Guevara, who abandoned his life in the Guazapa cane fields just north of San Salvador to take part in the armed struggle for 18 years. Campesinos like the Guevara family had long been under the military’s thumb. For decades the National Guard enforced the law of local land barons whose riches depended on their domination of the peasant farmers working in their sugar cane and coffee plantations.
Chano’s 81-year-old grandmother Soledad–better known as Mama Sole–was the oldest FMLN member in the historic recognition ceremony held in Guazapa at the start of the cease fire. Many of the old-timers who had begun the war had by then crossed over the often-blurred line from the military sector into the civilian sector of the FMLN. Some were included in the final lists of members the FMLN compiled for United Nations monitors; some were not. When Mama Sole learned she was not on the list, her protests showed her comandante grandson that he wasn’t the only one who could give orders. “I guess they didn’t want us to show up in uniform. They thought it would be scandalous,” she said. “The struggle of women has been distinct, maybe not with guns, but they have worked hard.”
“I did whatever I could,” she said. “When tortillas were needed, I made tortillas. I’d make the fire, the food for the muchachos. I would go out on the mountain with my rope and my machete to get firewood. The army troops sometimes found me, but I was alone, an old woman, and they didn’t do anything. So I could send word back, saying where the army was, advising them how many and where they were headed, things like that.”
“The women have fought, suffered,” Mama Sole continued. “It pains me to think how much the mothers suffer. We grew up in poverty. Nobody had nice houses, not even adobe. We lived in shacks of sticks that you’d put some mud between, that’s all. When the massacres started it was horrible. What barbarity! They burned some alive. They’d pour gasoline on them and the poor things would scream and end up like roasted pigs.”
A group of progressive clerics, armed only with liberation theology, set about “awakening” the peasantry in the 1970s. Soon they too became targets of the repression. Foreigners among them were deported, and death squads were sent after the Salvadorans. Six were killed, including Father Rutilio Grande in 1977. Convinced that they, like the early Christians, were being unjustly persecuted, Grande’s peasant followers kept his memory and teaching alive in hushed candlelit meetings that had become crimes punishable by death.
The radicalization of Archbishop Arnulfo Romero, and his martyrdom in 1981, gave new impetus to the revolutionary clergy. Their work with growing numbers of refugees, as well as their own victimization, laid the groundwork for increasingly radical stands. But while many worked together with progressive forces, others with the honorary title of “Colonel” blessed government troops and equipment before battle and bombing raids.
“I remember Father Grande. My God his explanations were beautiful,” Mama Sole recalled. “That’s why they killed him. The priests have made a great effort, look how much they struggled. But not all of them. There are also priests who were not with us.”
Recognizing the internal conflict and residual mutual resentments among the clergy, Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas is now calling for detente. “We can’t very well demand national reconciliation if we have a divided Church,” he said recently. As part of his vision of a cooling-off period, the archbishop said he is recommending that revolutionary priests in his diocese take a few years away from the parishes and communities with which they worked so closely in the 1980s. “I think it would do them good to have a period of holy reflection,” he said. When asked if he sought the same for the right wing bishop-colonels, he rolled his eyes and said: “First there aren’t that many of them; and second, you can’ really tell them what to do.”
“William” is the pseudonym of a Salvadoran lawyer who joined the Communist Party when, in the late 1970s, it was recruiting students from the best high schools. He had lived through the nightmare of death squads in his native province of Usulután. Like many promising young cadre, he was sent by the party to Moscow for a year of advanced schooling including training in ideology, political organization and some military skills. The Soviet Union created a colony of Latin American students in Moscow, with Spanish-speaking professors. The students told parents and friends that they had won scholarships to study in Europe. On their return, technicians in Havana ingeniously erased Socialist Bloc visa stamps from their passports, replacing them with falsified stamps from a dazzling array of Latin American and Western European countries.
“I don’t know how they did it, but they’d pass this thing, over the passport and it would look like new,” William said, still amazed at the memory. “Then they’d ask you where you wanted to have been, and they’d produce rubber stamps, tax stamps, everything you needed for whatever country.”
Back in El Salvador, many of these students went into underground organizing. Revolutionary cells were developed, because the party recognized that torture would eventually crack even the most committed. Cadre were instructed to hold out for at least 24 hours–preferably 48–before giving key information to allow the other cell members time enough to take security precautions. Weapons were brought in through a variety of sources and methods, including piece-by-piece mailings from the United States.
William took a job as a janitor in the Treasury Ministry and revitalized the union local, becoming shop steward. While passing through offices with his broom, he became friendly with clerks and secretaries who unwittingly showed him how pressing a few buttons on the ministry’s computers would bring up lists of vehicle registrations cross-referenced with names and addresses. Death-squads killed their victims so openly that witnesses were able to record license plates and car models. The authorities refused to investigate kidnappings, so William passed that information on through FMLN intelligence networks.
Later he went to law school and became a human rights lawyer, working closely with church groups, peasant organizations and all the FMLN parties. Recalling his own experiences and the FMLN’s evolution, he said, “We could never have accomplished all we did without the help of the Soviet Union.”
But what fed the insurgency were the brutal conditions at home. As government repression against legal forms of opposition increased, more and more people went underground or collaborated with the clandestine groups. Many others took to the hills to join the guerrillas. But one did not have to choose to be involved in the struggle in order to be killed. Many members of the moderate Christian Democratic party became targets of both the insurgency and the extreme Right.
In 1980, Rafael Campos was the Christian Democrat mayor of San Miguel, El Salvador’s third largest city. He says army officers pressured him to collaborate with the death squads. After he refused, two of his teenage sons were tortured and murdered. He was threatened, and his pharmacy was bombed. In 1983, soldiers murdered his brother’s family. A year later, the national police captured and tortured him for 17 days. Campos says the time has come to acknowledge the truth of El Salvador’s nightmare.
“They say the death squads were not the army,” he said. “Of course they were. I was the mayor and I knew who was going around doing these things. Everyone knew. It was all out in the public view. They operated out of the Third Brigade. Major Fuentes called me several times on the phone, pressuring me. They wanted to use the municipal jail cells to hold their prisoners and then take them out at night to kill them.
“The people know what happened. And I believe the United States government, the CIA, the U.S. ambassadors all know it. They can’t admit it, because these occurrences are called state secrets. But everyone knows that all these massacres have been the work of the military.”
Rafael Campos’ surviving son, Nelson Antonio, was only nine years old when his brothers were murdered. For him, the matter is clear: “I’d like to see justice done; I’d like to see those people behind bars, at least. Because I don’t think it’s right for anybody to take someone else’s life, just like that. I think only God can take away lives, and these people should be punished. My brothers were just kids.”
The country’s healing process is a quiet drama being played out on many levels. Leftists and church officials who represent thousands of victims agree on the need for forgiveness as a matter of social and political policy. But individual forgiveness–as in the case of Nelson Antonio Campos–cannot be dictated.
The rapid military advances made by rebel forces in the early 1980s were contained with U.S. help, but the highly adaptable guerrillas always managed to stay one step ahead of government forces. When in 1984 the United States introduced helicopters an air cavalry tactics on a large scale, the FMLN realized it could not win a conventional war of attrition against an army backed by the United States, with virtually unlimited money, resources and recruiting power. Guerrilla units numbering as many as 1,000 men and women were broken down into squads of fewer than 10, and the FMLN settled into a truly guerrilla-style insurgency that helped to negate the millions of dollars in military aid supplied by Washington.
The linchpin of that shift in strategy was an emphasis on “politicizing the war” by renewed mass-based organizing in the cities and countryside. The repression and the army’s repeated accusations that internal refugees were all guerrilla fronts pushed heretofore non-political peasants to organize for their own needs and protection. The army’s charges thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the same time, the Salvadoran government’s reliance on U.S. aid forced it to take the sensibilities of the U.S. electorate into account, which meant scaling back the most overt forms of repression.
The Christian Committee for the Displaced (CRIPDES) was one of several mass-organizing groups linked with the FMLN that grew out of those conditions. Its longtime leader is a fiery, green-eyed, 23-year-old campesina named Mirtala López, who openly joined the FMLN after the ceasefire.
In 1980, at the age of 10, López fled her native village of Las Vueltas in Chalatenango after soldiers killed her father. “If we hadn’t fled, they would have killed us too,” she said. Five years later, she co-founded CRIPDES within the confines of San Jose de la Montaña, one of several San Salvador churches where revolutionary organizing flourished behind the protective cloaks of Catholic priests and nuns. The government responded to the new generation of popular groups with more arrests, tortures and killings.
“All of that generated more sympathy and support at the international level, specifically regarding human rights,” she said. “Foreign delegations began coming here more often, and this gave us more confidence. So many of the massacres–the Sumpul, Mozote, Aceituno in San Vicente–occurred precisely because there was no outside knowledge. But tell me if they could get away with that now, or even after 1986? They couldn’t kill so many people because the political situation had become more complicated, and their military aid would be curtailed if they continued with the massacres.”
By the time the five Central American presidents signed the Esquipulas II regional peace plan in August, 1987, the revolutionary organizations and their vast support networks were well-positioned to take advantage of international monitoring protection. The peace plan called for each country to accept the return of its refugees. The FMLN responded almost immediately by moving its highly organized civilian infrastructure back into the rural war zones.
Several thousand men, women and children returned from refugee camps in neighboring Honduras and the internally displaced communities and setup demilitarized zones between the guerrillas and army battalions. By demanding their right to live on the front lines, the refugees–many of whom supported the FMLN–severely complicated the army’s counter-insurgency strategy. “It is a terrible problem,” one U.S. military adviser said. “But there is nothing we can do about it.” The army’s efforts to get at the proverbial fish by draining the sea had failed. The tide just came back in.
Sister Olympia is a Roman Catholic nun and Chalatenango native who lives and works in Las Flores. She betrays a hardened revolutionary resolve that reveals the extent of commitment throughout the vast liberation network. When a reporter was seriously injured covering combat near Las Flores last year, she merely scoffed, “Maybe now you’ll feel more solidarity with these long suffering people.” She also shows a keen sense of political and military awareness not normally associated with her vocation.
“Poor Bracamonte got beaten badly around here,” she said, referring to one of the army’s brutal counter-insurgency battalions. “They lost all respect, and it showed. They were demoralized. They couldn’t do anything here. When they got chased into Honduras it was a bittersweet moment for the people here: the army had to flee from the same place by the Sumpul River where so many people were killed trying to escape that massacre. God makes justice, the people said.
“The battalions must feel like Martians. They didn’t speak with anybody, and nobody spoke to them. They’d pass through the village to ask for food, some times stealing, sometimes paying, but they wouldn’t stay. They knew the villagers don’t like them, and maybe they worried about their security, ever since the time the whole village ran them out with sticks and stones.
“They were lost,” she reminisced. “I remember one time Bracamonte called a meeting in the plaza, telling the people they had changed their ways. Yet the next day, they called an air strike. There was a delegation of Spaniards here, and you know many Spaniards have beards, so maybe the army thought they were guerrillas. There was artillery and aerial fire. Only God saved the children who were leaving the schoolroom when the bullets rained down on the corridor. The lieutenant later said he called the strike because the comandantes were in town.
“Another time they sent two female psychologists here,” she said. “They called the people together and told them they needed to learn to forget the past, their dead, and the people jumped all over them with details of all the massacres. In the end, the psychologists had to call a helicopter to take them out of the zone. They never returned, not them nor anyone like them. That experiment failed.”
In the first days of April, 1989, dozens of riot police cordoned off the street in front of the CRIPDES office, two blocks from the U.S. Embassy. Mirtala López exhorted the foreign press and other onlookers through a bullhorn while government troops surrounded the house and climbed the roof looking for an entry. An officer growing weary of the standoff approached the front door behind which Lopez and several other women and children were barricaded. Sooner or later, he told her, they were going to search the house.
“If you want to come in here, you had better put a bomb in the door, because nobody is going to open it for you,” López screamed in defiance. The police did force their way in, several hours later, after most of the press had left. After ransacking the office, they arrested everyone and confiscated flasks of gasoline and tire-puncturing “miguelitos,” commonly used in street disturbances.
Most of those arrested were released within a few days. López ended up in a hospital with a severe concussion, after being beaten and hung up by her breasts. It was the third time she had been tortured since she began leading the urban organizing strategy. The incident occurred just weeks after the right-wing ARENA party defeated the discredited Christian Democrats in the March presidential election. It marked the beginning of a predicted escalation of the conflict, now defined more clearly between the Right and the Left.
As expected, human rights violations and wholesale captures of suspected Leftists increased. Instead of shying away, the FMLN and its supporters confronted the new dangers head on. In fact they stepped up the conflict through an escalation of urban bombings, sabotage and bus-burning campaigns led by members of the popular organizations. Within El Salvador, the close links between those popular groups and the FMLN became one of the country’s worst-kept secrets. Urban commando operations were regularly coordinated within the network of church groups, labor federations and human rights offices which provided logistical support. The commandos themselves often operated under the cover of those groups.
As the year progressed, with neither the Left nor the Right willing to cede politically, the stage was set for the ultimate military test of the November offensive. The limits of the rebel siege proved to the FMLN that mass insurrection was not possible. But by destroying the thesis that the rebels were weak and lacking popular support, the offensive became the defining event that finally brought the government around to negotiating the war’s end.
The battlefield chess game that continued through the late 1980s ended in a stalemate. The series of U.S.-backed Center-Right governments did not have enough support either to negotiate a settlement or to put down rebels and their civilian support network. As the low-intensity conflict dragged on, the world began to change around it, with the Communist bloc headed for disintegration. FMLN commanders modified their ideological stances, talking less about Marxism and more about social democracy. By the time Nicaragua’s Sandinistas lost the 1990 election–a blow to revolutionary morale in EI Salvador–FMLN commanders were already speaking of the need to court private capital and their desire to participate in electoral politics, if only the system were just. And while the traditional ruling elite resisted any recognition of the revolution’s legitimacy, the country’s new generation of businessmen and neoliberal economic planners finally–in the wake of the 1989 rebel offensive–accepted the need for a political settlement.
In this post-war period, the Left must offer a clear and coherent alternative to Salvadorans. To be able to do that it must maintain the broad alliances that it developed in response to the common threat that is now softening. It must also, of course, constantly defend the political space that it opened up after years of struggle, so that the equal political participation that now exists on paper continues to exist in reality.
On February 2, 1992, the FMLN General Command hosted a luncheon for invited supporters and the press in a large banquet room of the Salvador Sheraton Hotel. The scene resembled a class reunion of graying, balding revolutionaries with middle-age paunches and ill-fitting suits. In the center of the hall, several tables were filled with familiar faces of teachers, priests, labor leaders and peasant organizers like Mirtala López who for the last decade had protested publicly that they were separate from the FMLN. Pointing in their direction, Comandante Fermán Cienfuegos offered a special toast: “To all the clandestine cadres that have now ceased to be clandestine.”
But in the uncertain climate of the on-again, off-again peace process, many Salvadorans are still reluctant to reveal publicly their participation and methods during the civil war. Clandestine structures still exist, the product of years of extreme mutual distrust and security considerations.
“Many of those in the death squads are still around, in the towns. Everything’s calm now, but who knows what might happen later?” explained Mama Sole, whose 81 years of cautious campesina wisdom is reflected in her feeling that the conflict is not over. “I don’t want to die yet. I want to live to see the liberation.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Alder and Thomas Long are freelance journalists who live in San Salvador. They have been filing radio and print reports on Central America since the mid-1980s.
