Can this war ever end?:
Lacefield, Patrick
CAN THIS WAR EVER END? NARROWED OPTIONS IN EL SALVADOR "All priests are Communists and Jesuits are the worst scum." That's what Roberto D'Aubuisson had to say in the early eighties about...
...So, too, is the truth...
...We have a center, a right, and a left.'" Over the next six months, El Salvador will turn either in the direction of a negotiated political settlement or-absent genuine progress-toward an intensification of the war and further repression...
...Aviles was placed under detention for a time...
...For his part, Cristiani has refused to speculate about the involvement of "higher-ups," saying that he awaits further investigation...
...They spoke of extraditing her and her husband and baby daughter back to El Salvador-to take their chances with the killers and their allies...
...The economy is a disaster and getting worse...
...The FMLN is a home-grown product, and a relatively self-sufficient one at that...
...Foreign humanitarian workers are, following the expulsion of church worker Jennifer Casolo, under intense pressure to leave or are hampered in doing their work...
...When he explained that his wife had worked as a cleaning woman for the priests for eight years, one FBI agent asked, "Are you sure that was all that she did for them...
...That's what Roberto D'Aubuisson had to say in the early eighties about Ignacio Martin-Baro, S.J., and his compatriots who taught at the University of Central America (UCA) on the outskirts of San Salvador...
...Everybody has this idea that an insurrection is a whole people rising up Hollywood-style," Guillermo Ungo told me...
...The latter would be a serious miscalculation...
...The prospects for a political solution were affected in large measure by the FMLN November offensive...
...Ungo's second-in-command, Hector Oqueli, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by death squads in Guatemala in January...
...The judiciary system down there is not exactly a model of justice," Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson testified in January before Congress...
...The embassy then went to Salvadoran military Chief of Staff Rene Emilio Ponce with the information and the name of the source...
...None, he responded, telling instead of his two brothers in the army...
...Her husband, Jorge, was called "a queer," was told not to discuss his interrogation with his wife, and was asked how many family members fought with the guerrillas...
...Guillermo Benavides-director of the military academy and commander of the zone that included the UCA-had ordered the murders...
...The fragile democratic political space that permitted the left Democratic Convergence to field Ungo as a presidential candidate in March 1989 is gone...
...Nobody, but nobody has any illusions about the army now," Ruben Zamora told me...
...assistance to the ARENA government a point of contention...
...When a witness to the slayings, Lucia Barrera De Cerna, came forward to accuse the military, she was taken with her husband under the protection of the Jesuits and the Spanish Embassy...
...Enraged by the killings, they pledged Cristiani political support to find those responsible...
...Salvadoran Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas claimed that the woman had been "brainwashed" and attacked the U.S...
...When the army recaptured neighborhoods, the soldiers looted shamelessly...
...That will determine whether the deaths of the Jesuits will be, in the words of their Central American provincial, "the seeds of peace with justice in El Salvador" or simply another chapter in an epic of death and injustice that will not end...
...Manuel Antonio Rivas Mejia of El Salvador's Special Investigative Unit...
...That killing-and the storm of protest that swept over the Salvadoran government-made U.S...
...But the strategy of Cristiani and the U.S...
...But, then again, neither had Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was cut down by a rightist assassin while celebrating Mass in March 1980...
...we know...
...Jose Napoleon Duarte was replaced by the rightist ARENA party...
...The perception by the army was that the 'normal' rules didn't apply...
...The FMLN, in approaching the coming round of talks with Cristiani and UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar, has dropped its demands for power-sharing prior to an election, for a merging of the two armies, and for a wholesale change in the existing constitution...
...Ellacuria judged that the rebels' ongoing tactics of assassinating mayors and of economic sabotage and transportation boycotts had cost them popular support...
...Security forces and death squads stepped up their activities against opposition parties, unions, and popular groups-as spectacularly demonstrated by the October 30 bombing of the FENASTRAS union offices, killing eleven people...
...What looked to be a bumper crop of coffee in the eastern part of the country turned out miserably...
...The account Lucia Barrera later provided the Jesuits and her U.S...
...My guess is that they had two or three families instead of twenty...
...The Honduran Liberals, at least historically more hostile to the military, dropped the recent elections to the Nationalists...
...embassy knew that the killers were from the Atlacatl Battalion, U.S.-trained and the pride of Salvador's increasingly "professional" army...
...Martin-Baro didn't look like a dangerous character...
...That wasn't true even in Nicaragua...
...On top of all this, Cristiani will have to make do with $50 million less in U.S...
...Army Maj...
...World prices for coffee, Salvador's number-one money-maker, are way down...
...The army, publicly and privately, expressed the view that the FMLN was finished militarily...
...This is no small admission from a man who won the 1989 elections largely on a "can-do" promise of economic vitality...
...Still, the pressure continued to build for a fundamental reevaluation of Salvador policy in Washington, even as Cristiani scrambled to defuse the...
...That's very different...
...Buckland, who earlier had vowed to resign his commission if it turned out the military was involved in the killings, reported the Aviles news to his superiors...
...Time will tell whether the Cristiani government and the United States opt for the "let's make a deal" mentality of a growing sector of the business class or yield to the overweening power of the military, most of whom emerged from the FMLN offensive more hardened in their attitudes...
...They do not represent a majority in the oligarchy but they are significant...
...State Department now boldly talk of the necessity of a political solution to the conflict...
...That way they can say, 'See, we are a democracy...
...They didn't believe him and forced him to take a polygraph test...
...Gone are the days when U.S...
...The November offensive by the FMLN caused millions of dollars in damages...
...Martin-Baro's charts and graphs and papers told uncomfortable truths about the privileged few in Salvador who have much and the many with too little...
...The rest of us were in hiding...
...lawyers shows that the questioners were as abusive as they were relentless...
...They call him 'El Gringo.' The U.S...
...To this day, no Salvadoran officer has ever been convicted of a serious crime in connection with human rights abuses...
...Calley of sorts...
...They think the population is radical and very militant...
...It was both a success and a failure for the rebel cause...
...The army had exploited a unilateral guerrilla cease-fire to attempt to attack the FMLN's rear-guard areas...
...Is Benavides a sacrificial lamb, a Lt...
...Walker said that "any group can get uniforms," again implying that the FMLN could have done the dirty deed...
...government doesn't have to pressure Cristiani nearly as much as the army...
...The resounding defeat of the Sandinistas by the UNO coalition in Nicaragua must figure heavily in the FMLN's rethinking of revolutionary prospects in the region...
...In 1986, Vinicio was a Guatemalan Christian Democrat with high hopes...
...According to Zamora, two points on which the FMLN will not retreat are the purging of the army of human rights violators and a substantial reduction in the army's numbers...
...They were dangerous stuff...
...In fact, Salvadorans do not have a judicial system worthy of the name...
...In otherwise analyzing the "correlation of forces," the rebels are not unaware of the retreat of Soviet power and they realize that in the region as a whole a shift to the right is underway...
...It was support Cristiani sorely needed: he had almost totally lost effective authority to the army at the start of the FMLN offensive...
...I believe that each zone commander was issued orders that night to 'take out' certain people," offers Zamora...
...and a guarantee of full political, trade union, and human rights...
...They are the real power-more than ever...
...A return to power of the old money...
...Segundo Montes, another of the slain Jesuits, once said, tongue-in-cheek, that "Salvador is not a small country with a big army...
...Rivas spat at her...
...The well-prepared offensive was launched out of frustration with the pace of the previous round of talks with the government...
...they demanded...
...In early January, before Cristiani went public with the results of the official investigation, the U.S...
...Finally, some FMLN planners hoped that what began as an offensive would develop into a full-fledged insurrection that would topple the government...
...Perhaps...
...Rather it is a big army that has a small country...
...What did the rise of the far-right ARENA party mean for El Salvador, I'd asked in a spring 1989 interview with Martin-Baro...
...Far from home and intimidated, the Barreras changed their story and insisted they had seen nothing...
...The reasons are simple...
...and the Salvadoran government that the fall of the Sandinistas necessarily means the beginning of the end of the FMLN would be a mistake...
...Carlos Aviles, that Col...
...I am disgraced that both you and I are Salvadorans," Lt...
...The rebels went into the offensive with three levels of expectation...
...They see the FMLN militarily strong enough to threaten the capital...
...Trade unions are hampered by the militarization of the situation...
...It can be counted on likewise to resist any diminution in its size, budget, and consequent political power and autonomy...
...You have to understand that these people are businessmen," Ruben Zamora, the leader of the Popular Social Christian party, said in explanation during a February visit to New York...
...Both the woman and her husband were isolated and interrogated for four days by FBI agents and by Lt...
...They want us not to grow-like a bonsai tree-but to simply exist as a beautiful little tree that bears no fruit and decorates the garden of Cristiani and Bush...
...We will not play into the 'bonsai' strategy of the counter-insurgency," argues Ungo...
...Any presumption by the U.S...
...He is now released but his career is a thing of the past and-once attention is focused elsewhere-his life may be short...
...You need twenty families in each neighborhood...
...On the second level of expectations, the rebels hoped to create a split within the army and between the army and ARENA, perhaps provoking a coup d'etat...
...On January 16, President Cristiani announced the arrest of eight military men, including Col...
...Panama...
...Immediately after the massacre, the Bush administration easily turned aside efforts in the House and Senate to cut 30 percent of the $85 million in military aid in the 1990 budget...
...The end of Sandinista rule next door may either boost those realpolitik elements within the FMLN who seek a negotiated settlement or may drive more hard-line elements to refuse talks in favor of a long-term project for revolution in the area...
...D'Aubuisson was widely regarded as the architect of that slaying...
...Oscar Arias's Liberation party lost narrowly to conservative Rafael Calderon in Costa Rica...
...A return to the old ways," he sighed, remembering with me the early eighties when Salvador was the "killing fields" of the Western Hemisphere...
...At the very least, they looked to show their ability to make the country ungovernable, to bleed the army, and to strengthen their negotiating hand at the next round of talks...
...One enlisted man is still at large...
...Eric Buckland heard from a close friend, Col...
...Now his star has faded, "his" military runs the show, and the right is favored to recapture the presidency in upcoming elections...
...The progress-or lack of same-in prosecuting those arrested in the killing of the Jesuits and in pursuing the responsibility of higher-ups in the military will tell the tale...
...UCA rector Ignacio Ellacuria, one of the slain Jesuits, was prophetic in his assessment of this...
...Ruben Zamora is back in San Salvador, cautiously rebuilding the party network torn asunder during the November offensive...
...Human rights groups are charged by the government as being "fronts" for the guerrillas...
...embassy...
...proconsuls and their military group leaders would confidently forecast the defeat of the guerrillas in five to seven years...
...The initial reaction from Cristiani and the embassy was to cast doubt that the army could be guilty and to throw suspicion onto the FMLN guerrillas...
...Ambassador William Walker noted that "whoever committed this heinous crime-whether the extreme right or the extreme left-is doing the work of the FMLN...
...And you have to realize that many in the army-in the hard-line sector-are accusing Cristiani of selling out to the Americans...
...It can also get you killed, as the six Jesuits, their cook, and her daughter discovered November 16...
...Later, in fact, in depositions given to a judge by two lieutenants involved in the attack, Benavides is quoted as saying that "we have to carry out our part of the plan...
...uproar over the killings-with the assistance of the U.S...
...Spirited out of the country, she was separated from her Jesuit escorts by the FBI who explained that several days questioning was required to "evaluate" the risks to her life...
...Ungo is in exile, though he plans to return...
...The arrest of Benavides was, in the words of Guillermo Ungo of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, "the tip of the tip of the iceberg...
...embassy...
...Maj...
...The army can be counted on to circle its wagons and protect its own officers from censure...
...Truth is the most revolutionary weapon, someone once said...
...Others swear that the truth can set you free...
...The point is that even in the unlikely event that Benavides is convicted, there is no guarantee-given the power of the army-that he wouldn't be released once the heat is off...
...Today he is the power behind President Alfredo Cristiani...
...Benavides, on charges of killing the Jesuits and/or covering up the deed...
...There cannot be an economic revitalization without peace," Cristiani admitted publicly for the first time last month...
...Cristiani and the embassy immediately spread the news far and wide...
...Some time after the slaying, according to reliable sources, Cristiani was visited by a group of businessmen, including some from the "fourteen families...
...This they achieved, holding parts of the capital much longer than they had hoped and later escaping to their mountain strongholds through government positions ringing the city...
...They see the economy in ruins...
...economic assistance...
...They have even suggested that the Salvadoran people vote directly on the terms of any negotiation...
...Aviles also confided that Benavides would not have issued such an order without a go-ahead from higher-ups in the army...
...The Jesuits were unlucky enough to be at home...
...He smiled, a little sadly...
...The FMLN thinks insurrection is possible...
...government now is "damage limitation...
...They are wrong...
...A number had been educated at the UCA and knew several of the priests...
...They know that when the FMLN overran neighborhoods, they didn't steal anything from the stores...
...Released to the Jesuits by the FBI, the Barreras returned to their original story...
...They know how to make deals...
...Cristiani and the U.S...
...As late as January 2, in a conversation with Congressman Joseph Moakley (D-Mass...
...When judges are not "connected" already to the army and cannot be bought off or intimidated, they are killed or forced to flee for their lives...
...Who among the priests told you to lie about what you saw...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 6
