Ruben Zamora
Palumbo, Gene
RUBEN ZANORA: POLITICS & BELIEF AN INTERVIEW FROM EL SALVADOR GENE PALUMBO uben Zamora is the forty-five-year-old vicepresident of the Salvadoran Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), the...
...Gene Palumbo interviewed Ruben Zamora in El Salvador on December 1. A free-lance journalist based in El Salvador, Gene Palumbo has reported for National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, and the National Catholic Reporter...
...We carried the image of St...
...We received a theological, a religious formation that allowed us to go with our political work...
...But at the beginning of the seventies it was a very difficult situation...
...Many observers saw in his eleven-day visit, undertaken despite the danger of assassination, a potential way out of the Salvadoran stalemate...
...Their military strength developed from there...
...For example, on Jannuary 22, 1980, hundreds of thousands of people were 18 December 1987: 733 in the streets...
...Zamora: We have certain factors in our favor...
...Did the army become convinced of the need to separate itself from the political parties and the government...
...I was very anti-Communist...
...in spite of the growth of the Salvadoran army, which has quadrupled in the last seven years...
...In that period it was very difficult for us to try to determine the limits of religious commitment and political option...
...Sometimes our efforts were really funny...
...I suppose that if we had only gotten the political involvement, I would be an atheist...
...On the other hand, because the FDR political parties have decided to develop an open political presence in the country, relations between the two fronts have to be modified...
...Once a Christian Democrat and associate of El Salvador's President Duarte, as well as chairman of the social and political science department at the University of El Salvador, Zamora went into exile shortly after an older brother was killed by a death squad in 1980...
...We need to construct a coalition of forces that will be able to enter into a real discussion with the United States in order to regain a greater level of national independence...
...Maybe now we have a more mature attitude...
...Ten years ago it was inconceivable that the political party in power would not be a party set up by the military...
...with themes departing from the orthodox Marxist thinking in the FMLN...
...But the Guard didn't understand...
...In that sense, pluralism doesn't mean that if the war ends, the FMLN are finished...
...Palumbo: If the army and elements in the FMLN are not ready to accept pluralism, then how can they be persuaded or compelled to do so...
...I sometimes feel myself torn, telling myself okay, now I am a lecturer at the university, so I stay in the Christian Democratic party...
...But I have always valued the fact that I discovered politics first as a personal experience and afterwards as an intellectual experience...
...And once you are inside a political party, you begin to develop other political activities...
...This won't happen overnight...
...no, this was what I believed at the time...
...Later, would you say that your approach changed, toward a concern with development or liberation, and were you also able to have a new understanding of your faith, one that correlated with your political work...
...It is not tense...
...And of course it was not the official political party, it was the opposition political party, the Christian Democratic party...
...But in terms of Medellin you have to be with the people, so someone came up with the idea of having a procession for St...
...Given geopolitical realities, do you think the United States can take a neutral stance...
...I would see too many contradictions with traditional theology or religious formation...
...The FMLN started with mass political organizations...
...That has geopolitical consequences, whether we like it or not...
...The temptation to manipulate your faith for politics is great...
...The only explanation lies in basic popular support...
...How large this support is, or how much this support would be manifested in political activities — elections or demonstrations—will depend on other factors, especially whether political life is opened or remains closed...
...PALUMBO: It is charged that the United States has been too dominant here...
...As for the government, it does not have real decision-making power...
...But in my case that formation helped me a lot...
...Joseph around the town and with it a sort of placard stating the demands of the people...
...You destroy your faith if you politicize it completely...
...Now, although the army is more powerful than the Christian Democrats, we cannot say that the Christian Democrats are the party of the Salvadoran armed forces...
...We started with the idea that a Catholic has to give something to the people, especially to the poor...
...He spoke publicly in favor of a non-military resolution to the Salvadoran conflict and urged a "pluralism for all" that would allow an open political role for forces to the left of the Christian Democrats...
...They continued trying to destroy the cooperatives...
...Medellin was more of a concentrated fact that hit us immediately...
...PALUMBO: Many people have pointed to a trajectory: Someone begins, let's say, as a catechist or a "delegate of the word," and they begin to see the implications of that, and then the next thing you know they're in a mass political organization, and then they reach a point where they say to themselves "not enough," and then they go on, as part of their faith, to join a military group...
...Insofar as we were able to keep together political activity and a religious understanding, which was deeper, closer to reality, there was no dilemma...
...Political options started to become polarized inside the progressive Catholic movement...
...It's a process...
...Those other people, who are peasants, who are suffering more than I suffer, are moving to other options...
...Do you see your religious beliefs as part of the reason for deciding on a career in politics...
...And in that way, we started to discover politics, to discover that behind our humanitarian effort there was a political power problem...
...ZAMORA: The pluralism I was advancing is not shared by the army, which sees itself as the maker of the country...
...THE EDITORS ALUMBO: Do you think the army, the government, and the FMLN, share your belief in pluralism...
...Both agree on a basic understanding of the Salvadoran reality, and a basic design for overcoming that situation...
...For instance, on May 1 there was usually a demonstration only by left-wing people...
...That was my first real social contact with peasants...
...But it is very difficult to articulate these personal processes...
...AMORA: Oh yes...
...Catholic Action was a very defining experience...
...Sometimes that drew us into conflict...
...But if we end up with a level of polarization, or with only a single strong political force, then the chances of pluralism are very slim...
...This was not something we told the National Guard as a trick...
...That is something that at certain moments you have to do...
...Zamora founded a left-wing Christian group, the Popular Social Christian Movement, which he heads today, and with other members of the FDR, he entered the alliance with the FMLN...
...People began to see they could move toward an active political position without abandoning their religious beliefs...
...We saw it as a means to make some noise about what the National Guard was doing to the peasants...
...ZAMORA: The alliance between the FDR and FMLN is based on the recognition that they represent two different fronts...
...To continue the struggle at the political level is a real possibility...
...Now when I look back at that period it seems we were making a mistake not being able to distinguish with enough clarity between religious commitment and political option...
...ALUMBO: You say that when you began, your approach with the cooperatives was humanitarian or ameliorative...
...It happened because reality imposed it...
...The United States will look at anything in Central America as a possible threat to its own national interest...
...I come from a very Catholic family, a practicing Catholic family...
...Another important factor: the political-military organizations (FDR-FMLN) are not just military organizations...
...I left the seminary when I was nineteen...
...When the military saw that they had no alternative, they accepted that reality...
...This is a good indication of how things stand here: people are willing to hear new ideas, to accept new ideas, but they are still afraid to participate, to make a personal commitment to those new ideas...
...For instance, how is it that in spite of all the U.S...
...PALUMBO: Your intellectual and religious formation came at the time of Vatican II and Medellin...
...But the National Guard saw such efforts as a Communist attempt to organize peasants...
...At first we reacted in a very conciliatory way, trying to convince the National Guard that we were not Communists, we were Catholics...
...Immediately after Medellin, in the parish we started to organize meetings with peasants, with people in the town, to study what Medellin was saying...
...ZAMORA: That's why Catholic Action was so important...
...We were touching the power structure that had existed in El Salvador so many years...
...ZAMORA: The only way of assessing that question is by negative indicators, not positive ones...
...They have not lost their social base and their political organizing capacity...
...I saw many of those people going from humanitarian work into political work, for instance, joining the Christian Democratic party, participating in elections, then getting angry about the repression, the voting fraud, losing any confidence in the electoral process, and radicalizing themselves...
...During a certain period there was a lot of conflict inside the church because of this problem...
...18 December 1987: 735...
...For instance, a tradition of opposition political parties has developed, even during the period of military dictatorship...
...RUBEN ZANORA: POLITICS & BELIEF AN INTERVIEW FROM EL SALVADOR GENE PALUMBO uben Zamora is the forty-five-year-old vicepresident of the Salvadoran Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), the civilian political grouping that is allied to the guerrilla Farabundo Marti National Liberation Movement (FMLN...
...If we are able to develop strong political forces, we are going to have pluralism in El Salvador...
...For instance, when we were invited by the Catholic University to speak, the whole room was really packed with people, and they were very supportive...
...The FDR is a political organization and the FMLN is an armed organization...
...If you could maintain this balance of forces for a period of time, democratic culture or a culture of pluralism would arise in El Salvador...
...I discovered politics through activity associated with a religious task...
...But in the FMLN, I see a tendency toward a more open attitude...
...Yet important ideological elements there are not very open to advancing pluralism...
...On 734: Commonweal the contrary, for the last year each side has felt less tense because we have reached a clearer understanding of what each has to do...
...What is the state of the alliance...
...I remained close to the church, and in my local parish the priest started some cooperatives...
...It was a paternalistic attitude...
...We operated with the idea of commitment and in El Salvador commitment very easily and very rapidly becomes politics...
...In the end, they become members of left-wing organizations and I suppose now some of them are guerrillas...
...Zamora's message combined strong criticism of the Duarte government for incompetence and subservience to the Salvadoran military and the U.S...
...Is it tense...
...PALUMBO: Do you think there is any way to measure how much potential strength there is for the FDR-FMLN...
...That was a way for people to raise their consciousness...
...What is encouraging is that this is a process developing throughout Latin America...
...The army is very reluctant to open up the society to a wider expression of views and tendencies...
...Whether the United States has a Republican or Democratic administration, it is not going to be indifferent to what happens in El Salvador, and for a simple reason: the world has been divided into spheres of influence, due to the confrontation between the East and the West...
...You don't know at what moment you really started...
...ZAMORA: I saw many cases of that...
...For us, at the grassroots level, it was even more exciting than Vatican II...
...Later,on, especially when I left the country and went to Europe to study, I came to have a more intellectual understanding of society, a more scientific approach to the problem...
...ZAMORA: The only way to convince them, especially the army, is with realities...
...If the peasants got together, it would be easier for them to buy fertilizer and tools at cheaper prices...
...We have a stronger interplay of political forces and parties than we once did...
...We joined a political party...
...Pluralism is the result of a balance of forces in society...
...military aid...
...In El Salvador the massacre of 1932 [fifteen to thirty thousand deaths in putting down a peasant uprising—The Editors] was so terrible that it put up a wall to political ideas in the minds of the peasants...
...We would even say, look, this is the real way to fight against Communism, to better the standard of living of the peasants...
...The FMLN is militarily stronger today than in 1981 when they launched the general offensive...
...They see it as part of their faith...
...PALUMBO: Do you believe it will be possible to develop those kinds of forces...
...You could see that in the applause, in the attention of the people— the sympathy that was there...
...ZAMORA: Medellin was one of the most exciting things that happened inside the church...
...In these new circumstances it will, as always, take trial and , error to see how the alliance can be developed...
...Of course, other people abandoned the faith...
...Have you seen that kind of trajectory take place...
...That has been our tradition since 1932...
...As for the FDR, and more specifically for our political parties, during this visit I have seen contradictory factors: the desire for participation or expression, and the fear of participation...
...But two days later, we invited the political parties to a meeting...
...ZAMORA: No...
...I cannot imagine Medellin without the council but the council was something happening in Europe which we didn't understand very well...
...If not, it doesn't matter how many speeches you make, how many good ideas you have, there is not going to be pluralism...
...First, I was in a very traditional seminary...
...Those numbers are not in the streets now...
...I kept contact with the people with whom we started the cooperatives...
...Joseph, because St...
...PALUMBO: A recent New York Times report refers to the FDR-FMLN alliance as increasingly tense...
...That was a dynamic process...
...In late November, Zamora returned to El Salvador in the wake of the Arias plan...
...Still, I consider that as a person my main motivation for being in politics is because I am a believer...
...If you take such a decision, are you more authentic...
...PALUMBO: Talking about the intellectual part of your development, was the Medellin document eye-opening for you...
...and in spite of the fact that in this country there are no jungles, no isolated places, how is it possible that the FMLN has not only survived but has developed over the years...
...With all the new theology, with Medellin, and so on, that wall started to be destroyed...
...Joseph was a worker, a carpenter...
...The strongest personal motivation for me to enter and to stay in politics came from my religious beliefs...
...Pluralism or democracy doesn't come out of the blue...
...Basically only our own militants were present...
Vol. 114 • December 1987 • No. 22
