ENEMY COLLEAGUES: A READING OF THE SALVADORAN TRAGEDY
Zaid, Gabriel
We print this remarkable article—perhaps the most comprehensive portrait yet drawn of the inner workings of Salvadoran politics—as part of a group commissioned by the Mexican monthly Vuelta,...
...But what did Jovel think, shortly before his 17 death, of these "comrades" with whom he had again become allied...
...So the towns empty out: those who are able flee, with good reason...
...What post did Alvarez hold until January of that same year...
...We'll leave it to history to investigate and to the revolutionaries as a body to judge...
...a visible, personal head, always the same, of a long-standing bloody dictatorship, which made the union of all those opposed to it much easier...
...Questioned as to whether the LP-28 would agree to join the junta, if invited, the commission stated that "we would have to study it...
...92 Excelsior, Jan...
...34 Newsweek [New York], Mar...
...In Nicaragua, Somoza disappeared and what follows is a problematic joint rule...
...For this purpose it is not necessary for the one being "executed" to have collaborated: what counts is that the witnesses be convinced it could happen to them...
...They join in assemblies with them and have formed a cooperative to administer the funds from the sale of handicrafts . . . . Three military squads operate inside: one commanded by Recinos, another by Morales Carbone11...
...San Jose High is, "ad majorem Dei gloriam," the great Catholic high school of the Salvadoran bourgeoisie...
...The Salvadoran Communist party would have been confirmed in its strategy, and the few guerrillas would have been left without that important urban connection...
...30, 1980...
...21, 28, and 29...
...The open-mindedness of a progressive bourgeois was to be rejected as insufficient or as stealing from the proletariat...
...89 Time (New York), Mar...
...4 As minister of agriculture, Alvarez took part in the agrarian reform decreed by the junta...
...At the same time they launch an intense campaign against "internal retisionism" —identifying that deviation with the political positions that seek closer contact with the masses and the combination of all forms of struggle useful to the revolutionary process...
...Nobody in the opposition speaks of dismantling it (which would sound utopian) but rather of forming alliances with certain heads and expelling others, without much precision as to just which ones...
...In El Salvador, there is not even this joint rule: the constellations of allies and enemies have been changing constantly since October 15, 1979, and not only among those in power or only in the opposition camp, but crossing from opposition to power and from power to opposition...
...He had income, security, recognition, travels abroad, connections...
...Translated from the Spanish by DAVID PRITCHARD All publications, unless otherwise described, are Mexican...
...But it is not possible to do so while the guerrillas are shooting at you...
...More than 100 guerrillas burned a coffee plantation in the town of Acaguapa...
...But there were new constellations...
...Q: The FARN published a list of Salvadoran journalists in favor of the regime...
...Political intention constitutes the end, whereas war is the means...
...However, we cannot say that the enemy's power is apt to diminish...
...It must also be understood that the town is surrounded by army soldiers...
...In 1972 the outgoing president was General Fidel Sanchez Hernandez, a career soldier educated abroad, who became (in a sphere heavily weighted with South American military men) president of the Inter-American Defense Council...
...3 Ungo replaced Enrique Alvarez COrdoba, assassinated on November 27, 198Q, while head of the FDR...
...Perhaps that is the reason the groups and groups of groups and subgroups proliferate among the opposition, among the commissions and letterheads and chiefs and spokesmen...
...This document is not even brought to the rank and file's attention...
...9 El Dia, Oct...
...With the preconceived idea of "getting rid" (politically, for the moment) of comrade Roque Dalton as a step toward advancing in their positions, they increase their campaign of provocative acts aimed at eliminating him from the discussions and, in passing, at setting in motion a further scheme: the implication in the "frame-up" of certain members of the National Command, who would then have to consider Dalton as against the Military Staff of the ERP...
...the threats of a North American big stick...
...popular justice is at hand...
...Knowing that the military conception itself was in question, they realize that their first task is to present as soon as possible a document on the military conception, so that it can be discussed and approved by the organization's membership...
...In effect, the guerrillas called a plebiscite to demonstrate before all the world that, though the government had rigged the 1972 and the 1977 elections, the guerrillas had the majority vote, to be proved by the overwhelming majority supporting their offensive...
...It was the guerrillas who took power in an empty town, and a power fragmented at that into four separate parts...
...For some other country to intervene militarily and impose order, as in Santo Domingo, Vietnam, Lebanon, Cambodia, or Afghanistan, would be worse...
...But next Castro takes up those who have rights:] How are we trying to do this...
...April 20: In an effort to preserve the organic unity of the ERP, those sectors among us that [did eventually split off and] now make up the [Armed Forces of the] National Resistance [FA RN] send out a call to all cadres of the organization to hold a congress to determine once and for all the line and the strategic conception...
...Those on top cannot agree about how to treat those on the bottom: this is the conflict that makes Salvadoran blood run...
...1980...
...51 Excelsior, Jan...
...To quote Cayetano Carpio, commander of the FPL: "In Nicaragua, Somoza held all the cards...
...Don Guillermo Ungo comes from the educated layer of Salvadoran society, the middle or bourgeois strata, which have become aware of the need to transform the oligarchic scheme into a social democratic order...
...76 Uno mbs uno, Dec...
...He was not a founding member of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) nor did he devote himself and his whole life to the work of the People's Revolutionary Army...
...82 Uno mas uno, Apr...
...To liquidate the murderers would be to become like them...
...45 Proceso, Oct...
...10, through May 16, 1980...
...In all the uproar and ballyhoo it's hard to be completely certain, but I keep wondering, isn't this whole case just another sign that the bourgeoisie is out to rob the proletariat even of Marxism itself?'" The bourgeois are the others, always the others...
...Jose Napoleon Rodriguez...
...Four months later, the new leadership of the FARN announced that "Mr...
...Razones, Dec...
...Though we are making up lists of names and exact addresses of the principal elements of the regime...
...and still there are too many to all come to lead...
...People who come into contact with armed troops (military, paramilitary, or guerrilla) are afraid...
...because Somoza built up an overwhelming consensus of disapproval...
...38 Almost immediately there were rumors of foul play, because two days later the same command declared that "we do not blame any other revolutionary organization...
...6, 1980...
...By calling everyone...
...The intention was apparently to secure Cuba's international support by allowing Dalton to join the organization...
...Besides being "Secretary General of the Party of the Salvadoran Revolution and supreme military commander of the People's Revolutionary Army,"25 he is no less than "the second most important figure in the joint command of the FMLN," the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation...
...66 Excelsior, Mar...
...San Jose High included in its sociology curriculum several aspects of Marxism (as a "healthful vaccine," not a "carrier of disease...
...Dalton's execution touched off a furious campaign on the part of the petit-bourgeois "intelligentsia," which gradually settled into an effort to make a political banner of Dalton, to which rallied the most obscure and contemptible factions among the Latin American revolutionaries...
...8 It is an indication of the professional standing of military officers from El Salvador that the Central American Defense Council has almost always been headed by a Salvadoran...
...2° What did the Peoples' Revolutionary Army, or ERP (now represented by Ungo, who heads the Diplomatic Political Commission) think of the incorporation of Ungo and the two other civilians into the junta...
...How do revolutionary associates bargain with each other...
...And there is no doubting the capacity of the Democratic Christian military junta to assassinate Majano...
...25, 1981...
...55 Dalton wanted to be a Salvadoran Che Guevara: a writer who sacrifices the writer for the sake of the revolutionary...
...63 Ibid., pp...
...52 Proceso, Aug...
...A member of the junta...
...Of these seven, how many had been members of the junta...
...New York Times, February 21, 24 and 26, 1972...
...Oct...
...and the fact that, according to statements by Sebastian Urquilla, Dalton "confessed" to him that he had been involved in the defection of his political superior (Lucrecio) in September 1974...
...48 Excelsior, Nov...
...Armed Forces of Liberation Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN) Cultural Commission of the FDR Democratic Christian Party (PDC) Democratic Nationalist Union (UDN) Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) Farabundo Marti Popular Forces of Liberation (FPL) Foreign Press and Propaganda Commission of the FDR Independent Movement of Professionals and Technicians Movement of Military Youth Movement of Popular Liberation (MLP) National Association of Salvadoran Educators (ANDES) National Coordinative of the Popular Church (CONIP) National Democratic Union National Federation of Workers (FENASTRAS) National Opposition Union (UNO) National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) Party of the Salvadoran Revolution (PRS) People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) Political Diplomatic Commission of the FMLNFDR Popular Democratic Union Popular Leagues-28th of February (LP-28) Popular Revolutionary Bloc (BPR) Popular Rural Leagues (LPC) Popular Social-Christian Movement Popular University Leagues (LPU) Popular Worker Leagues of Secondary Students (LPOES) Proletarian Vanguard (VP) Revolutionary Campesino Movement (MRC) Revolutionary Coordinative of the Masses (CRM) Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers (PRTC) Revolutionary Syndicated Federation (FSR) "Salvador Allende" University Front of Student Revolutionaries (FUERSA) Salvadoran Communist Party (PCS) Unified Front for Popular Action (FAPU) Unified Revolutionary Directorate (DRU) 14 The monetary reward for being a soldier is substantially smaller than the average in any other profession...
...5° Excelsior, Jan...
...Another poem in the series goes, 20 Advice no longer needed anywhere in the world except El Salvador Never forget that the least fascist among the fascists are still fascists Dalton began studying for a law degree at the National University of San Salvador, but quit school to devote himself to political and literary activities...
...80 Excelsior, Mar...
...Also slain were the propaganda spokesmen of the Popular Revolutionary Bloc, the Unified Popular Action Front, and the Nationalist Democratic Union...
...6, 1980...
...He was scornful where such militants were concerned: they were "second-class...
...Roque Dalton was exposed, captured, and shot by the forces of the ERP...
...The job has not been performed by the government directly but by those in charge of all the dirty work: the paramilitary organizations...
...16 and 29...
...In parallel fashion, the FDR was formed as purely political...
...4, 1981...
...70) But who is to assure the young Morales that he will get to be a Castro, and not a Majano (or worse, a Roque Dalton), who came into a share of power and was unable to impose what he believed...
...Rene Cruz [Joaquin Villalobos] from the ERP, and Shafick Handal, secretary general of the Communist party...
...81 Uno mizs uno, Feb...
...Proceso, Aug...
...The clique, however, keeps this declaration of separation secret from the cadres, and thus assumes responsibility for all the subsequent events...
...16, 1981...
...In the wake of his death, Pueblo Internacional, the publication of the Unified Popular Action Front (FAPU), a member of the FDR, recalled: In the years 1974-75, divisions deep within the ERP shook comrade Jovel...
...26, 1981...
...And they're toying with that possibility...
...The least little thing that smacked of fascism (and what is there that hasn't smacked of fascism...
...Each acts to provoke the others...
...37 It was very hard for Jovel to sit down with a comrade who had murdered another, who had tried to crush the newborn Armed Forces of National Resistance and had issued orders (unsuccessfully) for his own liquidation...
...Uno nibs uno, Dec...
...9° Proceso, Oct...
...He is the second most important figure in the FMLN...
...Their calls for insurrection were suicidal...
...Who are we to go putting conditions on the power of the people, when this power never sent for us, never summoned us to support it...
...19 and 20, 1979...
...It would be important not to treat this group too harshly: to let it continue in its diminished form, as a kind of guarantee that it would comply with the political opposition...
...Q: How much fire power do you currently have...
...11, 1981...
...3° El Dia, Dec...
...April 16: A bulletin is issued by the Military Staff reporting the arrests, the court-martial, and the detention sentences handed out against the comrades...
...88 Excelsior, Jan...
...19 In the merry-go-round of coups, it seems, everyone speaks according to his shifting perspectives...
...Who's to surrender to whom...
...The true question for now is how to get those who believe in violence out of the picture...
...Failing to alarm the rank and file with 25 this accusation, they launch their cowardly accusation in the following days that he is a CIA agent, and they prompt the organization to declare a "military emergency...
...it allowed its organization, which played so important a role in Nicaragua, to continue under the control of the other branches...
...His article was written several months ago and therefore does not take up more recent developments...
...But those elements who do not come to the same conclusion . . . will be executed...
...In the case of El Salvador, the precedents of 1932, the current slaughter and shifting makeup of enemy constellations raise the fear of endless 28 slaughter between two thousand-headed hydras...
...Ungo the friend turns enemy and then friend again...
...Its gross national product is some $3 billion...
...In certain cases, these were important cities, such as San Francisco Gotera or Zacatecoluca...
...On October 18, 1979, it thought that . . . the three civilians are considered traitors to the popular cause...
...33 The commanders of these two groups, formerly enemies, joined with others in the Unified Revolutionary Directorate (DRU) in 1980...
...We do not point to these incidents as proofs, only as the framework that made it possible, by way of a scheme devised personally by Sebastian Urquilla, to support the charge that Dalton was a CIA agent...
...In contrast, the Jesuits attacked by the government are nothing but bourgeois trying to rob the proletariat even of Marxism...
...May 1: It is under these circumstances that the leaders of what then becomes and now makes up the National Resistance [FARN], in full consultation with our cadres, hold an emergency meeting...
...We print this remarkable article—perhaps the most comprehensive portrait yet drawn of the inner workings of Salvadoran politics—as part of a group commissioned by the Mexican monthly Vuelta, edited by Octavio Paz, and the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, the publisher of Dissent...
...But in El Salvador there is a vacuum of power: there is no Castro and no Somoza...
...And who's 23 right...
...Then followed the spectacle of the industrialmanager soldier, the big-businessman soldier and the multinational-stockholder soldier...
...6, 1980...
...And also that "I do not view coups d'etatthough I was in one myself—as proper ways of promoting a change...
...SOME OF THE PECULIAR FACTS surrounding Dalton were: his apprehension and interrogation by CIA agents and his subsequent and remarkable escape from the Cojutepeque prison...
...62 The intellectual as implanter of revolutionary consciousness in the exploited classes...
...To support one bunch so as to get rid of the others is counterproductive, because it is to join in their game (prove them right) and promote the continuing slaughter...
...What background did Alvarez bring to these reforms...
...5, 1981...
...This is not a problem for those on the bottom: it's a problem of those on top...
...Ens...
...In Dalton's urge for the perfection Che represents, he speaks of unconditional surrender but not of who should surrender to whom...
...On this date, three criminal assaults are mounted, all of which, despite the ferocity with which they were carried out, end in failure, frustrating their criminal designs against members of the National Resistance...
...Its willingness to make changes without resorting to violence reached the extreme of cooperating with the military rulers and even with the coup leaders...
...23 Most remarkable of all is that, in this pact, Villalobos declares himself in agreement with the coup's program...
...No less than that it was "a removal of the fascists who were in power" and that it "has initiated a process of change that' will allow the country to emerge from the profound political, economic, and social crisis into which it has been plunged during 50 years of military governments...
...In any case we will achieve victory, because history has shown that the people win in spite of a fire power inferior to the enemy's...
...But it can certainly be observed that there is a growing trust, sympathy, and support on the part of the Front toward the four armed organizations in this country...
...The Popular Forces of Liberation have always been cautious, but I can tell you that we are now in the final phase, she stated...
...Remarks by the Sandinista commander Humberto Ortega: We saw that it was necessary to bring these things together at the same time and in the same strategic space: the insurrection of the masses on a national level, the offensive by the front's military forces, and the nationwide strike in which the business community took part or that at any rate it condoned...
...We recovered .38 caliber revolver in excellent condition...
...10, 1980...
...Thus they hope to establish them26 selves as a sector under the banner of Dalton, poet and writer, this being [to them] what his death makes important, and making a hero of him, while the truth is that he was both victim and agent of his own death...
...No less than Christian...
...The Church Militant, in its battle against the devil, flesh and the world, rests on a sluggish base: first the unpracticing laymen...
...Who was the presidential candidate of the Salvadoran Communist party (PCS) in 1972...
...We admit this grave error because self-criticism is the ideological motor by which we advance...
...The clique now embarks on a new phase of maneuvers: they reveal internally [to the ERP's membership] the identity of comrade Roque Dalton (who was known in the organization as Julio Delfos Marin), declaring him a right-wing revisionist and pro-Cuban agent who had infiltrated the ERP...
...36 Here, too, there is a notable similarity with the tactics of terrorizing or exterminating the leftist news media and communicators...
...17 Salpress, the insurgent news agency, was still using this double-talk in recent days: Romero's fall was caused in large part by the role of the Military Youth, whose most prominent member, Colonel Adolfo Arnoldo Majano, joined the civilian-military junta that replaced the toppled general, until last December, when the fascist and right-wing forces within the regime deemed Majano too liberal to remain in the government and removed him...
...Excelsior, March 6, 1980...
...4, 1980...
...17, 1980: Distribution (of leaflets) in Bosques del Matazano...
...The clique pushes for the short-term and cowardly insurrectionist thesis, attempting to center the ideological struggle around accepting or rejecting this thesis, flatly denying the need for discussion at the level of strategic conception, arguing that such a course exhibits intellectualized tendencies that deviate from concrete action and, in passing, using the acceptance or rejection of their insurrectionist theses as a thermometer to "gauge" the degree of decision or vacillation among the rank and file...
...1979...
...When the new fraud ensued, there followed killings, a state of siege, and the exile of Claramount and Morales Ehrlich...
...74 It might seem to be a family business, as Nicaragua was for the Somozas...
...A: Maybe yes, maybe no...
...This burden could not be shouldered if we understand the revolutionary culture of Latin America to be simply a labor of "starry-eyed poets" and aesthetes...
...2 and 12, 1981...
...8, mid-Jan...
...Q: How is that...
...He never subjected his conduct to a politics of principles . . . but rather kept temporizing, accepting whatever was convenient, avoiding discussion, and maintaining a conspiratorial stance (encouraging Pancho's insubordination, for example) in order to strengthen his own hand in the struggle for hegemony in the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP...
...But the CRM hasn't disappeared: "it joined the Democratic Revolu33 tionary Front and continues to function...
...It can also be less attractive: the risk of being liquidated in the hierarchical conflicts of the new entity might be more than the risk of being liquidated in isolation...
...that by October 18 three civilians had been added—Dr...
...It seems more practical to grant them a kind of amnesty in exile, to get them quickly out of the country, even to give them money to make it possible...
...his disappearance for approximately ten days while on secret organization business...
...In El Salvador, there is no Castro and no Somoza, nor are conditions the same...
...5, 1981...
...31 It was formed in 1970 by "radicalized Christians from the petite bourgeoisie...
...23, 1981...
...But since the problem is also the illegitimacy of the government, it is evident that this can galvanize forces and then the people will definitely come out winning...
...Popular Abstention On January 22, 1981, more than 25,000 people in Mexico City marched in support of the Salvadoran guerrillas...
...And this for one very simple reason: as long as he wields the arms (whether his own faction's or the coalition's), he'll be his own law, as he has been till now: truth, justice, the historical meaning of the revolution, will remain in his care...
...What he did not wish to accept but rather to violently reject was his being bourgeois...
...the Church and the university, a certain weight each...
...7 The incoming president was Colonel Molina, son of a career soldier and a career soldier himself, who graduated from the Military College, where he returned as professor after postgraduate studies abroad...
...Perhaps this is why Captains Mena and Cruz supported the insurrection, while "the people did not offer the first sign of an uprising...
...53 Perhaps Dalton came to feel bourgeois in Havana...
...Uno Inas uno, Dec...
...6, 1980...
...23, 1981...
...41 El Salvador, Sept...
...and means conceived independently of the end have no place...
...No less than that he was a CIA agent...
...Through the Nationalist Democratic Union, the (outlawed) PCS, along with the Democratic Christian party and the National Revolutionary Movement, backed a leftist coalition—the National Opposition Union—which lost the elections due to fraud, after which Duarte and the commander of the presidential guards staged a short-lived coup.' And who was Duarte's partner, the vicepresidential candidate...
...10, 23, 30, and 31...
...What's the point of killing a presumed enemy collaborator...
...Castro had an extraordinary talent for arriving at power ahead of his comrades and then was lucky enough not to be saddled with them: Camilo Cienfuegos died opportunely, Che Guevara went away opportunely, Hither Matos committed an opportune error that made it possible to jail him, and a word to Carlos Rafael Rodriguez reminding him how he'd supported Batista was enough to ensure that Castro and not Rodriguez emerged as the party's top leader...
...Now then: the umbrella organism of several (not all) of the armed opposition groups, the FMLN, along with the umbrella organism of several (not all) of the political opposition groups, the FDR (none of which is subordinated to any other), have formed in tandem a Political Diplomatic Commission of the FMLN-FDR, which Ungo heads and which in this case, incidentally, is cited in reverse order as the FDR-FMLN...
...21, 1980...
...And this was reciprocated on their part . . . . What happened was that everyone wanted to hegemonize the movement, wanted to see who came out best in the struggle...
...If we couldn't manage to join these three strategic factors in one time and space, there would be no triumph...
...22 Excelsior, Mar...
...Their posture has greatly disoriented those of us fighting to democratize this country...
...2. Dalton did not come of his own free will, he came as a result of negotiations that were never made entirely clear (at least to the current members and leadership of the Party of the Salvadoran Revolution—PRS--and the People's Revolutionary Army—ERP...
...26 Uno mas uno, Dec...
...The political and social sectors that will fashion that government are today the cadres of the FDR, that is, democratic forces and revolutionary forces who are not trying to deal out quotas of power for themselves:75 It is notable that he doesn't mention the FMLN and that he limits himself to speaking of the political and social sectors, not the guerrillas...
...1980...
...25, 1981...
...133-34...
...21 This second retraction and the call to insurrection can be understood by reading the statements of Joaquin Villalobos, commander of the ERP, five months later: Perhaps one of the boldest steps we have taken is the insurrection of October 16, 1979, the day after the fall of General Carlos Humberto Romero's government...
...31 El Dia, Oct...
...Those who let themselves be swept along by heroic rhetoric always lament the disunity, the conflicts between revolutionary groups, as if it were natural for private interests to be subordinated to the general good...
...even more so when it concerns a declaration of that magnitude...
...54 Ibid., p. 26...
...They maintain and create networks of veritable "eyes and ears" in the organization who inform them as to the opinions expressed in the ideological struggle...
...Terrible enough, neither the most thorough accord between thought and action, nor the most absolute and unconditional surrender, nor even taking to the mountains, strapping on arms and offering himself up to kill the Chief of Police saved Dalton from the final spit in the face at his death, accused by his comrades as a bourgeois...
...The important thing is that the others never stop being bourgeois...
...Some believe that reformism is dangerous because it leads to communism, others that it's dangerous because it impedes the revolution...
...But the moment he subordinates himself, he will no longer have control over the official truth...
...Who has the right to the privileged positions...
...El Dia, Dec...
...And now, instead of the CRM, there is the tandem FMLN-FDR or FDR-FMLN...
...In recent days they have finished compiling a book of all the poems written in that jail...
...10, 1980...
...6 Alvarez was an engineer, like Duarte...
...But you don't need figures to realize that the January 10th offensive had a larger public and greater solidarity worldwide than popular support in El Salvador...
...1979...
...102 The above-named captain stated . . . that he is neither a traitor nor a murderer...
...But that doesn't appear to be the case: word has it that Villalobos is the second most important man in the FMLN, not the first...
...69 Uno más uno, Feb...
...If someone were to say that, in profound meditation, he'd heard a call to be pope, he would be ridiculed as a bad Christian...
...The reverse order—does that have any significance...
...Roman Mayorga, rector of the Central American University, and Dr...
...Against the army...
...The militarists now undermine the political cadres, starting smear campaigns against those leaders who do not share their ideas...
...Whatever the merits that each may have, comrades, there is a still greater merit, and it is the merit of what lies ahead...
...106 Una mhs uno, Feb...
...The following day,] at a press conference at the University of San Salvador, [the Popular Leagues-28th of February,] political arm of the ERP . . . at the offer of participation and the promises of change given by the junta . . . re15 tracted the label of traitors as applied to the civilian members, whom they now term reformists and progressives, the same as Colonel Adolfo Majano...
...107 Proceso, Jan...
...105 The merging of forces, according to the base document, will not aim at demilitarizing the government...
...its closing was preceded by the exile of its editor, Jose Napoleon Gonzalez, and by the slaying of one of its staff writers,laime Suarez...
...s 1 This would imply that they have the authority to do so: that they are the respective heads or their authorized representatives...
...32 Gilly, Guerra y politica en El Salvador, p. 40...
...A: Well, militarily it is difficult, because of the military power of the armed forces...
...Given their violence, it is clear how utopian it would be to renounce legitimate violence...
...None other than the current president: Jose Napoleon Duarte...
...But it is there in his own argument: like Villalobos, like Jovel, Dalton assumes the necessity of assassination...
...Now they're even more anonymous: "the 14 great families, now put at 244...
...and the fact that the armed opposition has killed far fewer than the regular and irregular army and police forces-all suggest the purging of murderers in the army and the police as an indispensable first step...
...That is, we do not mean to say that a writer is good for the revolution only if he takes to the sierra or kills the Chief of Police, but we believe that a good writer is closer as a guerrilla to everything the struggle for the future stands for, the onset of hope, etc., . . . than as one who limits himself to striving, at best, to be the critic of his society with three meals a day on his plate...
...April 14: The "court-martial" takes place, and members of the militarist clique accuse Roque Dalton as instigator of Pancho's "rebellious" conduct and of plotting against the Military Staff, demanding his immediate execution...
...Items from the Boletin Informativo No...
...2, 1980...
...28, 1980...
...Their activities are aimed at the "common" prisoners as well...
...4, of FAPU, Nov...
...It's the speech of a bourgeois who'd like to quit being one by accusing the others...
...But is that the case...
...22, 1979...
...But undoubtedly those most eager to fuel the flames have been the enemies of our people, who have resorted to malignant rumors...
...comrade Marcial from the FPL...
...Items from the bulletin FA RN Parte de Guerra No...
...Majano, also in an interview, put it explicitly: Q: Colonel, based on your military experience, do you believe that the armed opposition to the government has a chance to triumph...
...98 Uno mks uno, Jan...
...Gilly Guerra y politica en El Salvador, p. 40...
...We're in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism and the Catholic Church is running to catch up...
...But in El Salvador, against whom is the general alliance to take place...
...Have they at least shunned him...
...His firm line of conduct earned him a "death sentence" on the part of the militarist clique who were trying to destroy the ERP...
...Items from the bulletin FARN Parte de Guerra Nos...
...28 Excelsior, Mar...
...that, meanwhile, the Christian Democratic leader Dr...
...A: Excuse me, who's mentioned him...
...They show a police mentality in "recruiting" members of the cadre whom they entrust with tasks of "political vigilance" against their own comrades and cell leaders...
...4, 1980...
...This is how the slaughter began: as pressure against the conciliators on both sides...
...Thus an isolated victory might prove useless and even counterproductive...
...But legitimacy does not come from arms, rather from consensus...
...As of last October 23, the National Resistance has rejoined the DRU and the FMLN.43 Earlier, as the FARN communique reports, Our general command paid respectful homage at the spot where our first commander and comrades Augusto Cotto and Anabel Ramos fell...
...These people —turning out their pronouncements, their essays and poems, from the safety of their parasitic exiles, from the banality of their existentialist lives or in academic positions—have come to see in Dalton something more than the simple opportunity of justifying themselves as petit-bourgeois intellectuals who consider themselves fathers and mothers of the leftist revolution...
...And likely as not, some commander is dreaming of how, by one of those fortunes of war, it might suddenly happen that he and only he is left in command: to "hegemonize the movement...
...27 Among the prisoners in the Santa Tecla penitentiary can be found "Morales Carbonell (a son of the current junta member Morales Ehrlich) who, for having aligned himself on the side of the people's forces, for his integrity and family connections, poses a serious problem for the dictatorship...
...Minister of agriculture in the junta...
...Or, as Dalton would say: the bourgeoisie assures its own continuity, appropriating even Marxism...
...8. 16 El Dia, Oct...
...Several other unpublished works were military tracts exhibiting his militarist and folkish tendencies concerning the formation of guerrilla columns, etc...
...Moreover, it was agreed that there would be "respect for the rank and seniority of the officers of the Military Youth and of the FMLN" and that the "military profession would receive just and adequate compensation for its contribution to society...
...51 A terrible path: to be assassinated by a comrade-in-arms so that he could prosper and go on to declare: "It is our fate to harvest the fruit of the seed our fallen brothers have sown...
...All have changed signs at least once: Abdul Gutierrez the enemy becomes friend and then enemy again...
...On April 22, 1981 it was announced that "the Salvadoran revolutionary movement has entered into negotiations with the ruling 32 junta...
...For example, the ERP does not limit itself to its military function: it tries to cover the other two branches with its own Party of the Salvadoran Revolution and its own Popular Leagues-28th of February...
...96 On January 10, 1981, scarcely ten days before President Reagan is to take office (which shows they were hoping for an eruptive event that, for that very reason, could not be purely military but rather a chain reaction throughout the entire population following the military initiative), the FMLN announced: At 5:00 this afternoon the general offensive was launched...
...40, 63...
...The most important thing is the unity among all revolutionaries in the effort to overthrow the dictatorship...
...DALTON'S EXECUTION was a political ideological error, no petit-bourgeois adventurer deserves death for that fact alone...
...we have him surrounded...
...79 It is clear enough that not all the guerrillas were ready to leave the formation of the government in the hands of the politicos...
...On the same day, one sector of the organization denounces the maneuvers of one Military Staff member who has personally attempted to defy the National Command and to assume political leadership of the sector, requesting that he be dismissed for his actions...
...Killing the Chief of Police is the highest achievement for a writer who truly wants to be a revolutionary...
...The official truth will be subject to political bargaining, in which his position is vulnerable: at any moment his comrades could liquidate him politically, exposing him as Roque Dalton's assassin...
...21, 1979...
...84 From the name of the CRM and from the scope of the request, one might have thought it to be "the" opposition and even more than that: the legitimate power out of power...
...No less than three: Ungo, Salvador Samayoa who was minister of education, and Rubeh Zamora who was minister of the presidency...
...Hence they condemn the assassination but try to downplay its significance...
...2° Excelsior, Mar...
...that Majano is the leader of the Military Youth, not Mena Sandoval...
...III...
...76 When the time was up, it was announced that "The Democratic Revolutionary Front [FDR] will in the coming days give out the names of the team of the provisional government of El Salvador, and the outlines of the revolutionary regime...
...6, 1980...
...4. With those who believe in violence out of the picture, it would not be difficult for the quarreling leaders to come to terms with each other...
...64 Ibid., pp...
...Back then, San Salvador was a city of a few hundred thousand inhabitants...
...Dalton isn't bourgeois: he's "upper middle class...
...Isolated as its members were from the political development of broad sectors of the organization, they were unable to comprehend that while comrade Roque Dalton shared that conception, he had not, 24 in his coordination of development and defense, played the fundamental role that they, in their deviationist minds, wished to assign him...
...But the needs of our people's struggle require it...
...Heavy gunfire was exchanged with our militia, the watchman and a second individual with him were shot down...
...Two pistols recovered, a .45 and a .22 caliber...
...At the level of the [National] Command, the ideological struggle has been arrested by the flat refusal of the militarist clique to allow the Command...
...No less than "the leader of the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN), commander Ana Maria...
...Jovel himself, in his interview, had considered assassination a valid and useful tool: Q: As for executions, are many taking place in El Salvador...
...when harvests, houses, and cars are burned...
...There are shifting constellations of leaders grappling for power, who haven't managed to establish a consensus even among themselves...
...The poem's solemn voice condemns the Jesuits: your goods are stolen...
...Those army sectors that take a progressive position and patriotic and revolutionary viewpoints have an important role to play . . . . We are counting for victory on the genius and heroism of all our people...
...The ERP lost at least five men, but the casualties among the civilian population were much higher...
...To set up or keep a separate house, separate syndicate, separate party, separate faction, separate armed band or enterprise can be more attractive than what you might get in exchange for giving up your independence...
...At times it is hard to get anything to eat, or to get it quickly...
...10 From 1965 to 1973, the annual number of graduates at the University of El Salvador increased five-fold (and the number of engineers ten-fold...
...This process of unrevolutionary maneuvers and stratagems soon leads them to define themselves as a clique that constitutes a double power: safely ensconced in the "Military Staff" of the ERP, it now also begins functioning from there parallel to the National Command...
...13 Excelsior, Mar...
...Majano the enemy becomes friend, then enemy, then friend...
...The purge is not inconceivable: the testimony of the opposition in favor of purging a good part of the army is convincing...
...47 Cambio, Oct...
...The civil opposition did what it had to do: win the elections in 1972 and 1977...
...a jurisdictional conflict over who is invading whose territory by issuing statements...
...The very same Colonel Majano, after staging the coup and then leaving the junta, declared no less than that "The position of the present ruling body is illegal...
...The peasants die silently, flee silently...
...From this point of view, everyone advocates union...
...Though the LP-28 are supposedly coordinated with the "ERP and the Party of the Salvadoran Revolution, which directs them both," they announced that "the ERP is also reconsidering its attitude and we expect to learn their position this afternoon, which should agree with our own...
...Who says this...
...An engagement took place, and one of the tenants of the estate was shot down in the crossfire...
...In our country many humble men and women of the people have died setting valiant and heroic examples of combat, ideological solidarity, and revolutionary conviction...
...In El Salvador, the successive puppets have never been able to form a dynasty...
...Jose NapOleon Duarte remained in exile in Venezuela (since the 1972 coup...
...These negotiations were entered into between Sebastian Urquilla and the Cuban Communist party...
...A: I saw clearly, I understood that the transformation in Latin America is by the path of war...
...31, 1981...
...Perhaps because, having no access to other means of socioeconomic advancement, they view the military profession as a springboard...
...It seems there is a National Democratic Union, but since there's a Democratic Nationalist Union, which sometimes gets called the Democratic National Union, it isn't clear whether the former is a separate body or a typographical error...
...Nor is it necessarily a question of being small: if someone has risked his life to achieve what he believes in, it is very hard, after so many sacrifices, to sacrifice what has given his sacrifice meaning: the achievement of what he believes in...
...No mention is made of purging the murderers...
...At that time comrade Jovel continued in legal practice, and it was on leaving his offices that the criminal attempt was made (from which he fortunately escaped unhurt, though he had been unarmed) on the part of the clique that had already assassinated Roque Dalton and Armando Arteaga and was viciously pursuing other combatants...
...the Nicaraguans, with a generosity that deserves to go down in history (and that, let us hope, will shape their revolution as a change not of power brokers but of relations between men), did not...
...The talk is of militarizing the people...
...In other words, everyone knew each other...
...The progressive officers come from the middle classes . . . . Q: Why has the Junta's Colonel Adolfo Majano been mentioned as the possible head of a coup d'etat fomented by the United States...
...25, 1980...
...84 Excelsior, Mar...
...It meant that we mutually respected the work of the other branches...
...Though they have private interests (which would presumably allow for negotiations on the basis of real interests), the true problem lies in their unreal interests: in the illusion that violence can establish a consensus, in the passion for imposing their ideas and their interests through violence...
...An army that tolerates its own murderers not only makes blood run: it keeps destroying power, finally creating a vacuum that can be filled by an alternative consensus...
...We cannot, without inspiring a useless measure of vanity that can only amount to impotence, assume the defeat of nazism, for example, and not assume the Stalin of the concentration camps...
...A few months later the DRU appeared, which promptly lost the FARN, later winning it back...
...V. Leaders in Conflict One will notice that none of these allegations and interpretations even remotely resemble peasant allegations...
...35 Excelsior, Mar...
...5, 1981...
...the per capita power of subordinating yourself might be greater than of not subordinating yourself, and so on...
...And what's to be done if the young economist Joaquin Villalobos hears the same call as Dalton, feels the same radical urgency for moral superiority, the same impatience with "starry-eyed poets" and aesthetes...
...living in Havana as foreigners accepted into a second country, and not remaining to bask in it, but instead going off to make the revolution in another Latin American country, down an armed, clandestine, and backwoods path...
...It isn't hard to predict that he will move to block any government headed by the political (rather than the military) opposition from taking office, and that he will try to block any general command not headed by himself...
...In the military capture of San Martin] 10 "ears" were taken, who were submitted to summary popular justice and executed, .. . then, when our forces had withdrawn in orderly fashion and without losses . . . [guards arrived and] committed all manner of atrocities and 36 the murder of innocent people...
...7 Roque Dalton, Las historias prohibidas de Fulgarcito (Mexico, D. F.: Siglo XXI, 1974), p. 213...
...85 The CRM was a political-military umbrella organism that Cayetano Carpio ("Marcial," commander of the FPL) was apparently seeking to control...
...86 Perhaps for this reason, the DRU first and later the FMLN were formed as purely military in makeup, with first four, then three, then four, then five guerrilla groups taking part in equal measure, though clearly they did not all have the same capacity (at least three of the five, at different times, have claimed to be the most important...
...He was executed in May 1975...
...Since we know this article is likely to arouse strong feelings, we declare ourselves ready to print any serious, documented refutation that may be submitted...
...And it wouldn't seem easy...
...95 On January 4, 1981, this announcement appears: "Strike in El Salvador Until Power is Seized: FDR...
...50 "He showed us the path and we followed it in the highest homage that could be paid to him...
...87 Uno mas uno, Jan...
...This coming to terms could take many forms of cooperation or competition along lines that exclude violence...
...then the secular clergy, the congregation, the most ardent believers, and other lay militants...
...It was first reported that "The commander-in-chief of the powerful Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN), Ernesto Jovel, died last Saturday in this capital [San Salvador], in a traffic accident, according to the official announcement here today by the General Command of that 18 organization...
...Flinging the doors wide open so that everyone can join this party...
...21, 24, 99, 100-101...
...7, mid-Dec...
...11, 1981...
...87 It is an umbrella organism that is now part of another umbrella organism, which operates alongside yet another umbrella organism...
...Again and again they have sought accommodation: if none has held up it has essentially been because of the desperados, both left and right...
...At 11:00 A.M., capture of Radio Sefiorial, FARN message broadcast...
...Maybe Che's death (a year and a half earlier) had shaken him...
...But those things were gradually overcome...
...Ungo, leader of the National Revolutionary Movement (social democratic), Dr...
...1, 1980...
...49 Cambio, Oct...
...One must surrender unconditionally, not worry about who's on top...
...10, 1980...
...27 But it turns out that Joaquin Villalobos, also known by his code name "Rene Cruz," is none other than Roque Dalton's assassin...
...Then why do so many in El Salvador choose the military career...
...Dalton and the FARN: A Victim of Guerrilla Militarism On March 5-14, 1980, Manlio Tirado published in Excelsior a series of articles, testimonies, and documents concerning the situation in El Salvador...
...21-29, 1980: "A guerrilla assault group from the FMLN early this morning dynamited the Social Security offices at Ahuachaphn...
...1°9 Karl von Clausewitz, Arte y ciencia de la guerra (Mexico, D. F.: Grijalbo, 1972), p. 32...
...12 There next appeared [says Dalton] the phenomenon of the soldier who, after gaining administrative experience to state institutions, passed on . . . to private industrial companies...
...We believe the North American imperialists work fundamentally for various alternatives to thwart the present revolutionary situation...
...There is a historical, dialectical continuity, upward and positive, which displays many errors along the way...
...It must be understood that San Lorenzo, which in better times had some 3,000 inhabitants, now held no more than 300, of which some 100 were guerrillas...
...13, 1980: Execution of the night watchman Maximo Hercules, alias El Vaquero, who has been terrorizing the population of Reparto Santa Margarita, Ciudad Delgado...
...7, 1980...
...At this meeting one of the members of the clique designates himself "political chief of the organization," denies the authority of the fully seated National Command to prevent the court-martial, denies the National Command its right to appeal to the cadres in defense of the comrades, and raises direct threats of death against those members of the National Command who might attempt in any way to oppose the will of the Military Staff...
...These statements make all the more cogent Mr...
...60 Dalton, El intellectual y la sociedad, pp...
...2) To instruct and organize the people militarily...
...37 Excelsior, Oct...
...April 13, 1980: A situation is provoked in which comrade "Pancho" is forced into behavior that the clique considers "military rebellion," and he is seized immediately in a crude and violent manner...
...Moments before convening the court-martial, which is to be run by the clique—which has instigated the provocation and arrests and whose members are about to enact the farce of setting themselves up as the judges—the other members of the National Command call an emergency session in hopes of heading off the irrational events now in progress...
...Neither the government nor the guerrillas won the "plebiscite...
...A: Oh yes, some time ago . . . [long silence...
...88 According to Time, 89 the guerrillas have 4,000 men under arms as against 16,000 in the regular army...
...He had credentials: he had served in the Communist party, fighting against Lemus, suffered tortures, published books...
...It was the pragmatism of Sebastian Urquilla backed by the [ERP's] former National Command, which accepted these arguments that brought about the enlistment of Roque Dalton...
...21, 1980...
...28 Excelsior, Mar...
...The anthropological error of Che and his followers is in not seeing that the revolutionary culture is an integral part of the culture of progress, and therefore opposed to the peasant culture...
...9 According to the writer Roque Dalton, From the early '70s on, the officers of the Armed Forces began attending university (first in the humanities, the idea apparently being to broaden the cultural outlook of certain officers, and later in studies of law, engineering, economics, medicine, sociology, journalism, business administration, etc...
...Neither Batista nor Somoza lost power principally on account of arms...
...31, 1981...
...22-23...
...In connection with the DRU the FMLN was formed, supposedly as one single army, though as yet this isn't so...
...Uno mits uno, Jan...
...There's a big stink in all the papers and on TV the Attorney General of the Republic comes on and then the President of the Republic after him and they talk about the flag and the heroes of the Republic and about the true Christianity of the Republic all very sweet and soothing...
...If one recalls that the guerrilla groups sprang up precisely because they would not submit to the Communist party and its political path to power, it is scarcely believable that they would now be ready to hand over their arms to a politico, and one just arrived from the opposition at that...
...The fact that, this commission existing, commander Ana Maria acted as spokesperson for the FMLN—does that mean anything...
...In a student movement, in an urban guerrilla movement: not in a peasant uprising...
...Adolfo Gilly, Guerra y politica en El Salvador (Mexico, D. F.: Nueva Imagen, 1981), pp...
...8 El Salvador Libre, No...
...a slaughter of innocents carried out by Stalin is in the good, the upwardly positive column...
...6, 12, 18, and 23...
...In other words, the three groups have the same origin: impatience, not only with regard to power, but with their own opposition comrades as well...
...A: Certainly, very hard...
...He offers no advice as to how, once called to be a perfect revolutionary, a complete intellectual, a whole man, one is in fact to arrive at the power of a Castro or a Che...
...29-32: Last Monday, Aug...
...Note that the names change constantly and yet they are always described as the key or one of the key figures of the principal or one of the principal organizations...
...Some Conclusions 1. According to Alexander Haig, the Salvadoran situation has little to do with the Salvadorans: El Salvador is simply the stage where two great powers are confronting each other...
...They unseat each other, and in the brief period when it's their turn to kill and rob, they fatten till they burst...
...Mario Andino, manager of a North American subsidiary (Phelps Dodge...
...Such matters, it is presumed, do not exist...
...This support came into competition with that of the other leftist organizations in the country...
...1. Dalton arrived in the country in December 1973, after spending 11 years abroad, where he pursued the life of a poet and writer in Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and other countries, moving among the revisionist bureaucracies and circles of the parasitic leftist, petit-bourgeois intelligentsia...
...But it's a fact that the inhabitants of Zacatecoluca did not come out in force during the attack to help fight...
...35 And besides, what's wrong with assassination...
...We understand that, in the interest of unity, it had to be laid aside, though accounts of the incident keep surfacing...
...Or insist on emphasizing the conditions that I as a lily-white intellectual attach to supporting the Cuban Revolution...
...36 Proceso, Oct...
...93 Excelsior, Dec...
...You need a directory just to follow the news in the papers...
...It is significant that Pueblo (publication of the FAPU) should think fit to reprint "the most important excerpts from the speech on `The Formation of the Party' given by Dr...
...the FLP: A Petit Bourgeois Not Worth the Killing In reading the following paragraphs, 66 it must be borne in mind that the [Farabundi Marti] Forces of Popular Liberation (FLP) acted as mediators to end the mortal combat between the ERP and the FARN...
...But this is not the speech of a worker...
...Do you really intend to execute those journalists...
...Back in March of 1980, the Mexican Committee of Solidarity with El Salvador called for "the recognition and support of the Mexican government for the Revolutionary Coordinative of the Masses" (CRM—made up of the Popular Revolutionary Bloc, the Front for Unified Popular Action, the Democratic Nationalist Union, and the Popular Leagues-28th of February) "as the genuine representatives of the Salvadoran people...
...Roque Dalton: The Unconditional Surrender Roque Dalton "was born May 14, 1935, in San Salvador, to an upper-middle-class family...
...One month earlier, in an interview titled "FMLN: Triumph Cannot Be Military Alone," Joaquin Villalobos had declared: 34 Our enemies have taken to spreading misleading reports that what we're after is the physical death of all members of the armed forces...
...1°8 Proceso, Feb...
...11, 1980...
...Q: Could you tell me why...
...He also gives their program his blessing...
...Roque Dalton was slain by a comrade who beat him at the use of his own arguments, in an internal power struggle...
...If the Salvadoran government had allowed Duarte and Ungo to take over in 1972, blood would not now be running so freely...
...25, 1981...
...In Cojutepeque "3 businesses were destroyed whose owners are linked to the repressive forces...
...It, too, ignores the economic-political contradictions of Salvadoran society and subjects everything to an overemphasis on the specific war of Yankee imperalism...
...They take a series of hasty measures in connection with "preparing the conditions for insurrection" and set about militarizing [the ERP] as much as they can...
...Who says this...
...A: Definitely...
...10, 1980...
...They give us food, though, and show us where to escape...
...We have to maintain unity...
...74 El Mercado de Valores, May 24, 1981...
...Razones, Feb...
...more than 10 innocent civilian elements, of whom 6 were termed "subversives" by the fascist bourgeois press, were murdered in cold blood by the enemy to boost his sagging combat morale...
...34 At about that time Jose Napoleon Duarte gave the same kind of reply to an interviewer: "Of course [the armed forces] must be purged...
...The series includes two documents quoted in their entirety, which seem to be official statements from the other two guerrilla groups on the death of Dalton and the conduct of the ERP...
...In Tepetitan a sugar mill was also burned at the same time as 3 towns in the rural zone were occupied, 5 paramilitaries executed...
...Actually it's more of a psychological than a destructive weapon: we've already gotten reports of several proregime journalists who have fled the-country for fear of being executed...
...23, 1980...
...Proceso, Oct...
...The DRU agreed that no organization was to publicly attack any of the others, since it was within the DRU, by means of dialogue and general consensus, that the correct methods for guiding the ideological struggle of positions would be decided...
...Morales Carbonell goes right on commanding, administering, collecting, fashioning theories, poems, declarations...
...But those who lead, or attempt to lead, know perfectly well that behind the lovely haze of unity looms the private interest of a big shot over the private interest of a little shot: the decisive fact of who is subordinate to whom...
...75 Uno mas uno, Nov...
...at approximately the same age (mid-life, two or three years short of forty) and with other similarities besides: being university-educated, interested in writing and making politics, with underground experience, with the experience of "having arrived" (though at very 21 different levels...
...18 [In the first days of the coup, it was strange that,] contrary to what might reasonably be expected, the Christian Democrats have not joined the ruling junta, to which three civilians have been added, and the reasons for this are by no means very clear...
...Once an accord has been reached, with the immediate goal of ending the slaughter, many problems would still lie ahead, but that is a separate question...
...The ERP was to split in 1974, as a result of differences that culminated with the assassination of Roque Dalton...
...Shortly thereafter, however, the FARN withdrew from the DRU, and almost immediately its commander, Ernesto Jovel, died amid confusing circumstances...
...24, 1981...
...4, 7, 17, and 28...
...15, 1981...
...a situation confused in its own right, plus further confusions from those who report the news...
...Arrest is also decreed for those members of the National Command who happened to be present at the time of the seizures, and in less than 24 hours a court-martial is called against the comrades...
...Time (New York), Feb...
...especially on how to manage those on the bottom...
...But this is neither true nor possible...
...iron-willed, unwavering, he energetically fought all deviations that broke out during this critical period...
...20 Uno mas uno, Dec...
...32 The two groups attempted to exterminate one another from within until "the Farabundo Marti Popular Forces of Liberation (FPL) assume the historic role of intermediaries, demanding, in the name of the revolutionary movement, the end of hostilities and mutual respect for the physical integrity and the independent political existence of both organizations...
...We trust in them because they are poor people, laborers, peasants...
...8; Uno mar uno, Jan...
...In the discourse of reason, the winner is the one with the reason...
...38 The military and above all political defeat of the January 10th insurrection...
...In other words: Villalobos approves of the army members (Majano, the Military Youth) and of the opposition (Ungo, the PCS) who allied themselves in October 1979...
...48 During that same period and eves in the same communiqués, differences among the guerrilla leaders came to light...
...How do they distribute shares...
...What finally became of Jovel, who was so accepting of political murder...
...and they declare that under these conditions it is not possible to take up the ideological struggle, much less hold an extraordinary session such as the congress —until the [party's] army can guarantee the total purging of the infiltration effected, according to them, by comrade Roque Dalton...
...8, 1980...
...Instead of viewing it in practical terms, as a failure, he saw it with Christian idealism, as a success more desirable than that of belonging to a triumphant court...
...Naturally, if Mexico had recognized the CRM as such and backed it strongly, some opposition forces (not all) would have considered it advisable to join this constellation...
...At the same time, those attempts have a political objective: to weaken the possibility of convergence between the democratic sectors and the revolutionaries.24 16 In denying the possible accusation, Villalobos gives an interpretation that implies a similarity of methods: just as he did not hesitate to cause deaths to prevent the convergence between the democratic sectors and a part of the army, another part of the army did not hesitate to resort to assassination attempts for analogous purposes...
...Rather there seems to be a kind 29 of cooperationist motive, but at the top, not the bottom...
...The FARN scattered flowers and dropped the organization's flag on the site of 19 the oil slick, the sole vestige of the "crashed" plane...
...They preferred taking the January 10th military initiative so as to install it in liberated territory—that is, under their control instead of the politicos'—though surely various parallel governments were being established, as in San Lorenzo...
...Those on the bottom are the subject, not the participants, in these discussions...
...Twelve days before his death and the rift between the FARN and the DRU, Ernesto Jovel granted a clandestine interview , . . . Q: Not long ago, the four military-political groups now in El Salvador announced that they had formed a common general staff: the DRU...
...Proceso, August 8, 1980...
...The General Office of Transportation was attacked north of San Salvador, and vehicles set on fire in various parts of the city...
...1°3 El Universal, Feb...
...Roque Dalton vs...
...On September 5, 1980, the commander of the Armed Forces of National Resistance declared: "This year will not end without the overthrow of the current Democratic Christian military dictatorship...
...11, 1980...
...Many have fallen in our land who were worth a hundred times more than Dalton...
...But the coup produced, a weak government, incapable of controlling the power struggles it unleashed...
...28 In other words: the Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade invokes the name of the murdered poet in order to benefit his murderer...
...In the first place, it is difficult to supply ourselves with food under the conditions we live in...
...21, 1980...
...May 10: Furious and impotent after the failure of the assassinations they had plotted against members of the National Resistance, the members of the clique turn their anger against the detained comrades and ruthlessly murder Pancho and Roque Dalton...
...El Universal, Mar...
...7, 1980...
...Integration implies a bitter pill for all those who lead (except one): to quit leading...
...27 Excelsior, Oct...
...73 Uno mks uno, Mar...
...But if he's not going to head, the alternative to keep on heading something smaller can be perfectly acceptable...
...A: You could say that at this point it is the army of the people...
...Proceso, Feb...
...Rather, there is a crisis of leadership that gives the elaboration of principles, lines, and norms for the revolutionary struggle the character of an extremely delicate and conflictive task, to be substantiated with an intelligence fed by the deepest knowledge of reality, in the service of a scientifically motivated policy...
...May 16: In an act of desperation and political blindness, which has earned them the total repudiation of the national and international revolutionary conscience and the condemnation of history, they sink forever into the abyss of ignominy by publicly declaring themselves responsible for the assassination of Roque Dalton, whose memory they attempt to besmear...
...In the town of Las Delicias . . . an FMLN assault group dynamited a fumigation hangar, leaving 3 planes destroyed and the rest badly damaged...
...77 And 15 days later, instead of giving the names, Ungo declares that the formation of 31 the Democratic Revolutionary government "will be a process parallel to the military and political offensive going on at this moment...
...31, 1981...
...and finally the peffect, who have renounced all and made an unconditional surrender of their lives to a rule of militant perfection: the monastic clergy (Jesuits, and so forth...
...The contradictions remain secondary...
...5 13 To which class does the new president of the FDR belong...
...95 El Salvador Libre, No...
...But it isn't Ungo who issues the statement...
...Siempre, Feb...
...Fidel Castro in Havana on December 2, 1961...
...If they don't, they will have to deal with the FMLN...
...There exist countless proofs of his traitorous activity in the inner workings of the organization...
...15-28, 1980...
...Does that mean anything...
...1980...
...9, 1981...
...The following paragraphs are from reports by the Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN...
...Any combatant who is not content to be simple cannon fodder is a contender in the internal struggle for power—whether by hook (distinguishing oneself, winning over the leaders, the rank and file) or by crook...
...Castro consolidated his power after ousting Batista...
...Once this basic perspective is accepted (which binds us directly or indirectly to the only viable means of taking political power in Latin America, namely armed struggle...
...2. Those responsible for the Salvadoran tragedy that began in October 1979 are the leaders who cannot agree among themselves...
...Let us go back to the prologue to the interview with Jovel42: [The death of Jovel] was another blow to the Salvadoran revolutionary movement, at a time when it is facing divergences that led to the withdrawal of the FARN from the Unified Revolutionary Directorate (DRU...
...The difference between son and father (who goes about the country handing out land to the peasants, as Alvarez's successor69) is a difference of sides...
...If further, as is natural, those armed troops need provisions, need information —capable as they are of carrying out unpredictable whims—such contact is hardly desirable...
...28, 1980...
...25, 1981...
...59 Out of the ERP comes the FARN (Armed Forces of National Resistance...
...3. The greatest obstacle to establishing that minimum consensus lies with those who believe in violence...
...And this ever more fragmented economic power is not the only power: the army has a decisive weight...
...5. Dalton's career in the organization was that of a cadre member handicapped by excessive liberalism and indiscipline, the product of his low ideological character and of his pragmatic bourgeois tendencies...
...Two hours later, comrade Roque Dalton is seized, accused of having incited Pancho to his rebellious stance...
...to frame a document responsibly detailing the two conceptions, so as to provide the basis for an ideological struggle and to orient the rank and file for such a discussion...
...68 In other words, the ruling class in power is mirrored in the opposition...
...Feb...
...The talk is of respecting the rank and seniority of the officers of both parties...
...The language is academic, opaque, tortured...
...it acts on its own account and, to the contrary, tries to win over (that is, subordinate) the political opposition...
...For the students, guerrilla activity is the continuation of the rise to power by other means...
...1978...
...7, 1980...
...Some of our comrades killed in heroic battles couldn't even read or write...
...55 Ibid., p. 24...
...This action was carried out by the Militia Platoon "Israel Rodriguez...
...El Dia, Feb...
...The feeblest thing in this feeble poem is that it tries to end with an ironic twist, without enough irony to see that the twist comes back like a boomerang: Dalton is, precisely, a bourgeois grasping at Marxism...
...56 Eric R. Wolf, Las luchas campesinas del siglo XX, Siglo XXI, 1972...
...when civilians are "executed" under accusation of being "ears" (enemy informants) or paramilitaries...
...This irregular situation could continue until elections were held, preferably supervised by an international agency...
...A: We can't give any public statements...
...1°5 Uno mas uno, Feb...
...53 Roque Dalton et al., El intelectual y la sociedad (Mexico, D. F.: Siglo XXI, 1969), pp...
...A pact could be sought with the political opposition, disconnecting it from the armed opposition...
...What was the origin of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP...
...In these struggles, the main enemies are the hardliners on both sides: the conciliators keep changing signs (friends or enemies) according to the shifting alignments within the battle for power...
...93 And commander "Ana Maria, describing herself as second in command of the Popular Forces of Liberation, formed in 1970 by university students and dissident members of the Communist party," declared "I can't give you the exact date or hour, but we are very near to our final battles...
...In reality, Clausewitz argues against senseless military actions, those not part of an overall plan...
...The scurrilous story has been circulating that the FARN had disappeared, satanic rumors have been started that there has been a purge within the FARN, and it has been given out that certain leaders of the FARN have fostered the division and break-up because they are enemy agents...
...29, 1980...
...21, 1980...
...Villalobos signs a pact with Mena Sandoval and announces it as if it were a pact between the FMLN and the [Movement of] Military Youth...
...30 Who are the proprietors of a revolution...
...14, 1981...
...5, 1981...
...This can be interpreted as to include both sides...
...19 El Dia, Oct...
...The presses of the Central American University, of the newspaper El Independiente and of Ediciones El Pulgarcito were seriously damaged...
...As it happened, there were "attempts against some of the figures who resigned from the first Ruling Junta...
...And just when one might imagine that all the armed forces of opposition had been counted, it happened at the end of the year that the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers was incorporated...
...In Nicaragua, an alliance of leaders challenged Somoza under similar conditions...
...On the other hand, it's clear enough that the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation, sometimes abbreviated as FFMLN but more generally as FMLN, is not the same as the Farabundo Marti Popular Forces of Liberation, abbreviated FPL: Note the frequency of combination words: bloc, coordinative, front, league, national, unified, union...
...11, 1981...
...And, finally, it must be understood that a village like San Lorenzo, an advertisement for the more fanatical press, is also a sign that matters are still not totally reconciled among the guerrillas: last week there were four command posts operating in the town, each under the charge of a different guerrilla organization...
...Not only do you repeatedly have to give to one and all: what was given to one today puts your life in danger when the next bunch shows up...
...16, 1981...
...Is it a case of errors and confusions on the part of the press, or is it the situation itself that is confused...
...What is Villalobos's opinion...
...Q: Because, as we understand it, it was he who assassinated Roque Dalton...
...7. 96 Uno mas uno, Jan...
...20, 1981...
...12 Excelsior, Mar...
...all the more so now that the talk is of 244...
...Comrade Ernesto Jovel could never understand how comrades he held in esteem could have become his murderers...
...42: Sept...
...5, 1980...
...52 Dalton did not believe that the path lay in forming cultural brigades...
...For its part, the CRM is made up of the Popular Revolutionary Bloc, the Front for Unified Popular Action, etc., and each one seems to be still another umbrella organism...
...1978...
...When those acts occurred, we immediately issued a declaration condemning them, to let the honest and reputable democratic forces know that the revolutionaries envision one main enemy and that we do not consider as enemies those who honestly tried to bring about a program of changes as members of the first Ruling Junta...
...8, 1980: Engagement in Santiago Texacuangos, execution of 3 "ears" and a local excommander who had been wounded...
...This is why Marxism catches on more readily in a "bourgeois boys' school" than among Bolivian Indians...
...Ana Maria called this skepticism understandable but explained that her group, the strongest of the guerrilla organizations, had never before declared that a final offensive was imminent...
...As for the coup itself, the BRP held that it was "engineered with the help of the United States...
...6 ' Anyone familiar with Catholic culture will recognize in this moral urgency the theology of perfection...
...5, 1981...
...Resorting to violence does not create power: it costs power...
...1981...
...22 In other words: Villalobos did not hesitate to sacrifice cadres and ordinary citizens, to disorient "those of us fighting to democratize this country" or to provoke the army murderers, in order to get some blood flowing and make it awkward for Ungo, the Communist party, etc., to go on supporting some of the coup members...
...Ungo is a lawyer...
...The political prisoners in Santa Tecla publish their own newspaper...
...They hold irreconcilable positions as to how and who should govern, but they agree (for different reasons) on a scorn for legitimacy, for elections, for reforms, for the minimum rights of every human being...
...La CrOnica, a'liberal daily, was shut down...
...Another difference: Castro carried out a summary elimination of enemies when he came to power...
...29 The People's Revolutionary Army was the target of enemy infiltration in the person of the Salvadoran Roque Dalton, who served for a time in our revolutionary organization and who was collaborating with the enemy's secret services...
...10 Excelsior, Mar...
...the democratic officials resigned, and the tactics of their enemies stood revealed to the people...
...Uno mtis uno, Dec...
...Antonio Morales Ehrlich was the vicepresidential candidate for the National Opposition Union—UNO---against the official party, when they faced each other again in the 1977 elections...
...In the same way, once out of power, Majano is viewed sympathetically and a pact is even signed with the Military Youth, under which the officers of this movement become (subordinate) allies...
...Even less so if, repeatedly, first one and then another band comes in and takes what it wants, one way or the other...
...His successor, Guillermo Ungo, declared on December 20, 1980, in Managua that "before Christmas is over" they would announce the formation of a government backed by the FDR and the FMLN...
...Because that policy of support made the guerrillas superfluous: it cast the military coup members (not the military guerrillas) in the role of carrying out the program of change...
...The Salvadoran Communist party held that the path was politics and that only at the end, when the final blow was to be aimed, should arms be used...
...The Economist (London), December 20, 1980...
...notwithstanding the good intentions of those who joined the first ruling junta, our policy consisted of applying a line of constant pressure, so that the military sectors that held the real power would thus be forced to assume the defense of the true scheme devised by imperialism, the oligarchy, and their allies...
...But an opposition that tolerates its murderers also keeps destroying the opportunity for creating such an alternative consensus...
...That is, when we speak here of Latin American intellectuals, we're concerned with a heightened perspective: that of their responsibilities toward the giant task of Latin American Revolution...
...29, 1980: At 7:15 A.M., at the Guatemala estate, execution of the . . . goon Jorge Chavez...
...46 Excelsior, Nov...
...Against the junta...
...46 The reference is to the following poem: A Salvadoran worker ponders the famous case of San Jose High The Catholic Church, historically, is a feudal-bourgeois institution...
...For example, the insurrectionist branch was not fighting to create another student revolutionary front...
...16 Suffice it to note that, on October 15, 1979, the new military government was headed by two colonels—Jaime Abdul Gutierrez and Arnoldo Majano...
...Days later, the LP-28 occupied the Rosario church in protest "against the newspaper reports that describe our organization as ready to support the junta...
...The presidential candidate for the UNO was "the retired military colonel Ernesto Claramount, a professional army man who belonged to no party and had not been active in politics . . . . The UNO, in offering a military candidate, was attempting to 'mend fences with the armed forces,' . . . win over the military reformists, and grant asylum to the rightists...
...Execution of an "ear" (the only name he gave us was Quique) 10 meters north of the Cine Paris, San Salvador, at 4 P.M...
...9, 1981...
...A: Because of the Cuban Revolution...
...The information bulletin of the FDR headlined an article: "The People Prepare for the Final Offensive...
...13 The Diplomatic Political Commission, an alliance of the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation and the Democratic Revolutionary Front, is made up of seven members, of whom five have been university professors (two of them rectors), one a newspaper editor and another, a woman, the author of a book (translated into French...
...A: Myself [Ernesto Jovel] from the FARN...
...18 Siempre, Feb...
...The thing is not to forge alibis for ourselves with our jail cells, our sweat or our scars—and this was the fear Regis Debray had on my account, watching me drink all that beer in Prague—but rather, all of us, to take a step forward...
...It is easier to make university students aware of their right to grab for power than to convince the peasants to take up arms in order to cease being peasants...
...Clearly, this involves a long process...
...3. Dalton was not a military chief in the organization and he took part in only one military action as combatant (the capture of Radio YSR in March 1974...
...The political connections that army membership at the command level could offer have launched meteoric careers for top officers who today are industrial millionaires...
...And, of course, foreign interventions that reinforce those who believe in violence are equally destructive: they aggravate the problem instead of resolving it...
...Nevertheless, reports have surfaced alleging problems of coordination...
...67 El Salvador Libre, No...
...Captain Francisco Emilio Mena Sandoval gained celebrity in El Salvador when on January 10, coinciding with the announced guerrilla general offensive, and together with Captain Marcelo Cruz, he led the uprising of the 2nd Infantry Brigade in the city of Santa Ana (second largest in the country), and joined with a full company of well-armed soldiers of the FMLN...
...Zaid's conclusion warning against such policies...
...He joined the Communist party while still very young . . . . He took part in the popular struggle against the tyranny of Colonel Jose Maria Lemus from 1956 to 1960, was persecuted and jailed, and just when he was about to be shot he escaped from prison .. . and traveled to his second country, Cuba, where he was an active contributor to the Casa de las Americas...
...45 II...
...5, 1981...
...sectarian manifestos were disappearing, just as exclusivism is disappearing now...
...Like the clergy in other times and places, the Salvadoran army provided those not born to wealthy families with access to education...
...The other leaders, fellow comrades of both Villalobos and Dalton—have they brought Villalobos to justice...
...Hence the dividing line between those in power and in the opposition keeps shifting, leaving relatives, friends, classmates and colleagues on opposite sides...
...The combative pressure of the masses plus the revolutionary actions of a military character hastened the crisis of the first ruling junta...
...1980 marked the end of "five years since he surrendered his own life to the cause and the people of El Salvador...
...In Cuba, Castro challenged Batista under the permissive conditions of the North American big stick...
...God will provide...
...72 The anonymity implicit in "the 14 families" is significant...
...26, 1981...
...109 What's the use of destroying the Social Security offices at Ahuachapin...
...None other than his current enemy: Guillermo Manuel Ungo, now president of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR...
...In June, in a matter of weeks...
...17 El Dia, Oct...
...78 Uno mas uno, Jan...
...Those on top cannot agree on how to treat those on the bottom: this is the conflict, in which those on the bottom are both subject and victims...
...But it is important how it is done...
...Nevertheless:] By absolutely no means must "I was a Communist" or "I planted bombs" or "I was in the Sierra" be worn on our sleeves...
...25, 1981...
...The participants of that meeting agree on organizational separation from the militarist clique, which, having violated all Leninist principles, lacks the moral and revolutionary viability to continue in positions of leadership within our organization...
...A: For the moment, both politically and within the pursuit of unity among the revolutionary forces, it is too delicate, too complex to explain...
...each commander acts on his own account, though in coordination, until such time as subjective interests can be overcome, that is, until one commander wins out over the rest...
...there are problems of trust among the organisms, diminishing as time goes on...
...They declare the ideological struggle as ended, announcing the triumph of their position and launching a new subjugation of those that oppose them . . . . They try to crush, under threats of expulsion, exile, and execution, all opposition and divergence from the line of the "political majority...
...The junta changes constantly...
...In the discourse of guns, the winner's the one with the gun...
...The legendary "14 families" were too many for any one of them to impose itself...
...7, 1980...
...15, 1980...
...5, 10, and 11, 1980...
...He answers his own question in the affirmative:] We're not in a seminar here on aesthetic problems but rather a discussion of revolutionary responsibilities, of the revolutionary responsibilities of the writer...
...In other words: the armed opposition is not the army of the political opposition...
...his possible links to the disappearance of comrade Mauricio in April 1974, who was in charge of counterespionage for the organization...
...I realize that someone might come and say to me: But you always speak of the intellectual as a man whose only option is to actively embrace armed combat...
...Negative alliances are easier than positive ones (as is now beginning to be seen in Nicaragua, and was seen in Mexico after the fall of Porfirio Diaz...
...There were several "honest and progressive" officers who responded to the "final call...
...Their opponent was General Carlos Humberto Romero...
...17, 1980...
...A: That's right...
...The brief rupture of revolutionary unity in El Salvador has now been recognized as a tactical error and, following a long process of criticism and self-criticism at the level of the United Revolutionary Directorate (DRU), all the revolutionary organizations have been able to overcome the barriers and solidly reinforce unity, guaranteeing revolutionary triumph in El Salvador in the near future...
...Gabriel Zaid is a distinguished Mexican writer and social critic...
...as president of the FDR he took part in criticism of these same reforms...
...In one bulletin from the FARN, 41 the death of Jovel was announced, but the largest space was given to problems of internal unity ("Ernesto's thinking and guidance draw our organization in greater unity around the struggle for power") and with the other groups: "The DRU [Unified Revolutionary Directorate] was a historic agreement entered into by our commander Ernesto Jovel Funes, who signed an act under which the four organizations (FPL, PCS, ERP and FARN) committed themselves to initiating a process of unification...
...April 17: The final meeting of the National Command of the old ERP is held, in which the clique seizes political power, dissolving the [National] Command organism on the pretext that certain of its members formed part of a right-wing opportunist faction supposedly headed by Roque Dalton, and arguing that the clique and its cadres constitute the "political majority" within the organization...
...194 [The future army] will result from the merging of forces and not from the absorption of one force by the other . . . . Villalobos, of the general command of the FMLN, and Mena Sandoval, for the Military Youth, made public a so-called Base Document emphasizing that the programs of the coup d'etat that overthrew General Carlos Humberto Romero in October 1979, and those . . . proposed by the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) "are identical," and stressing that the actions initiated on the tenth of last month, the beginning of the 35 insurgents' general offensive, "are the first step toward convergence" between the Military Youth and the FMLN "in the construction of the new army...
...26, 1972...
...30 The "executioner"—has he withdrawn the charges...
...Novedades, March 8, 1981...
...28, 1980...
...In recent weeks ominous statements have come from Secretary Haig about the possibility of widening the war in El Salvador, intervening militarily, etc...
...5, 1981...
...but that isn't the case: there are too many heads for such a small business...
...92 Carlos Torres of the FPL concurred that "conditions are ready for the final offensive in El Salvador...
...P." or official for a father...
...The list, on page 14, is neither complete nor exact...
...83 Note: "the leader of the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation" makes Ana Maria sound like "the" leader of that group of groups...
...Excelsior, Jan...
...65 IT IS EVIDENT that during this whole process of intense ideological struggle at the level of the ERP's National Command, the militarist elements, which are weak in matters of ideology and politics, start plotting various maneuvers by which they might obstruct or take over the mechanisms of ideological struggle...
...Against some member of the junta...
...Siempre, Feb...
...A more careful reading suggests something else: the true conflict is above all internal and above all at the top...
...Siempre, Feb...
...14 Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), May 5, 1981...
...mi.] and has less than 5 million inhabitants —and that back when many of those now fighting each other were at the universities (20 or 30 years ago), only a few dozen were being graduated in all the country...
...15 El Salvador Libre, No...
...And at that point the Armed Forces of National Resistance make their appearance...
...it was won by the abstainers...
...15, 1980...
...w 3 Going further, Captain Francisco Emilio Mena Sandoval, representative of the designated Military Youth, signed with commander Joaquin Villalobos, of the FMLN, the basis for the constitution of the future army of El Salvador, according to announcements to the international press...
...83 El Universal, Apr...
...Sept...
...But he agreed to it...
...But there was no agreement and the hard line prevailed...
...The most backward and colonized feudalbourgeois in El Salvador start screaming that San Jose High is indoctrinating their sons in Communism...
...but it would mean counting the political-military groups on the political side and counting the FMLN as the army of the FDR...
...From the perspective of those already armed, the desire for sacrifice on the part of a writer setting out in Che's footsteps could be seen as simply the desire for power of an upstart seeking the limelight: Che's leading role...
...This change was the target of "bitter commentary" by the Popular Revolutionary Bloc (BPR), "considered the largest organization of the masses in the country": "They have acted in a manner unheard of until now," it stated...
...The articles are scheduled to appear as a booklet in the near future...
...This took place on May 12, 1975...
...6 Siempre, April 19, 1981...
...Duarte the friend turns enemy, and nothing is to keep one from supposing that he could turn friend again...
...To submit them to military justice, the proper course, does not seem politically possible: it would be a long process, subject to all kinds of pressures and provocations, which would be criticized as a farce or an injustice, depending on the case...
...These bear the greatest responsibility for the slaughter, and they have grown with the outcome of the January 10th insurrection and the renewed North American support...
...to gain the experience, the credentials, the access to power that one must have in order to change things from the center and from above...
...The only slight difference, to justify provoking a slaughter, is who should be in charge...
...Dalton's defense is taken up by a member of the National Command, who succeeds in getting the Military Staff, constituted as self-appointed tribunal, to agree to hand down detention sentences against the accused comrades...
...4, 1981...
...Time (New York), Dec...
...25, 1980...
...An electric power boosting station near the city of Acajutla" was dynamited...
...For Dalton, the people are blind and the intellectuals one-eyed...
...The smug voice of a legitimate propertyholder adds implicitly: but not mine . . . . To justify this voice, Dalton attributes it to a Salvadoran worker...
...48 "He died tragically in 1975, after joining the guerrilla movement in his country...
...Now, who knows...
...The opposition seems quite aware that they have a problem of integration, but they have not resolved it...
...Some believe that to give ground spurs new demands, others that not to give ground will spur further demands...
...He studied with Jesuits at San Jose Day School (a bourgeois boys' school), which became the object of satire in several of his poems...
...He was no less than a plantation owner, one of the Alvarez clan (of the "14 families"), and had taken part in a previous agrarian reform: in 1972 he was minister of agriculture under Colonel Arturo Armando Molina, none other than the official candidate who stole the elections from Duarte and Ungo...
...4° Uno mks uno, Oct...
...104 Siempre, Feb...
...71 Nicaracuac (Managua), May-June 1980...
...The population explosion, quite high in El Salvador, seems also to be taking place among those who aspire to lead and for that very reason there is an overpopulation of organized bodies: Salvadorans do not seem much given to subordinating (and pyramidizing) themselves, rather to setting up separate houses...
...Q: It must be hard for the rest of you to be seated alongside Rene Cruz...
...October 18 and 22, 1979...
...It can't help but surprise that a harsher regime (the former) should have caused fewer deaths than a reformist junta...
...100 Uno mcis uno, Dec...
...How do you settle what's to be done (which in the final analysis is to settle who commands...
...16, 1981...
...3, 1981...
...Dalton vs...
...Unesco Statistical Yearbook (Paris, and Unipub New York), 1975, p. 310...
...That is: contrary to the normal preferences of Communist parties, which are for big cities, strikes, and the electoral process...
...It is said, on the one hand, that the Christian Democrats wanted to have majority representation in that body and that their proposal was rejected...
...A: Yes, he personally was the one who assassinated comrade Roque...
...A: No...
...No, because when they sit down with the military, it is as university colleagues...
...39 And later still "all biased accounts or rumors `aimed at undermining the unity of our organizations' are 'categorically' denied...
...There is a notable similarity between this attitude and that of the Salvadoran officer who admits that the murderers would have to be purged from the army but that "now, while we're under attack, is not the best moment to clean house...
...But it also earns the hatred of numerous sick people...
...It proves that the government can't put down the guerrillas...
...In such matters, of course, there are vested interests to add to the confusion: interviewers, their subjects, and we readers have a common interest in supposing that the person interviewed is a great figure, that the interviewer has obtained important statements from a top figure, and that we are reading important things said by an important man...
...But it later turns out that she is a second-rank leader of one of the member groups—whose name, as it happens, is confused with that of the umbrella group: it is the Farabundo Marti Popular Forces of Liberation, not the Popular Forces of National Liberation...
...26, 1980...
...A: . . . Work is under way toward joining all the forces under a single command...
...14, 1980...
...There is not one good socialism and another bad...
...17, 1980...
...Clausewitz's maxim—that war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means—is usually understood as a simple expression of the arrogance of power...
...They must be disarmed...
...9, 1981...
...28 and Dec...
...During the two days the people's forces submitted to summary justice 20 "ears" on whom fell the full weight of the Revolutionary Laws...
...El Dia, March 26 and 27, 1972...
...Jovel says, . . . We trust, and we feel certain, that our struggle will be joined by the soldiers and corporals, by the troops as a whole and the progressive officers, who do indeed exist within the dictatorship's army...
...One might see them as university-trained progressives sitting across from illiterate gorillas...
...65 Excelsior, Mar...
...Nobody can dominate without aligning himself, but the coalitions are shifting and the power blocs unstable, because there is great disagreement as to how to manage the country...
...25, 1981...
...What if there are no focal points of political-moral-doctrinal prestige like Castro or Guevara, and thus a conflicting array of principles, lines, and norms for the revolutionary struggle...
...21 El Dia, Oct...
...86 Proceso, Aug...
...97 . . . The general command at the same time summoned the people to set up "local powers" throughout the country, alternatives to the present municipal authorities, and to erect barricades and supply food and water to the popular combatants . . . . People of El Salvador, we have begun the national liberation...
...Only against the United States, if they should commit the blunder of invading...
...Joaquin Villalobos: We are not advocates of the traditional concept of unity, that is, of organic unity to be achieved all at once . . . . We conceive of unity as a process that starts with permanent coordination, not incidental, not one in which the interests of one particular hegemony take priority within the alliance of revolutionary forces . . . , moving eventually toward the organic phases . . . . Today there aren't even any political differences among the revolutionary organizations, but subjective interest almost demands that differences exist because they are different organizations . . . . An ample criterion must prevail so as to allow the revolutionary forces to win over the democratic ones...
...As it turned out, the Cuban with the best claims to head the army happened opportunely to be one of the family...
...The son gets impatient: he thinks it is better to turn militant, to overthrow the others and impose what he thinks must be done...
...Nor did it intervene in the work being carried out by "proletarian" comrades in various production centers...
...Marxism-Leninism is, besides the theory of the proletarian revolution and all that sort of thing, the science of the History of the proletariat...
...It is hardly surprising that those who renounce the force of arguments and choose the arguments of force in confronting oppression should use the same arguments in settling their differences...
...Naturally, they do not constitute any proof beyond establishing a series of puzzling incidents...
...The [ERP's] army now assumes total control of the organization through its military staff so as to save the party...
...Execution of an "ear" infiltrated in the FARN...
...9-22, 1981...
...This places great demands on the people who live in the zones of support...
...In the same way as Zavala learned to read the epic of the conquistadores without letting himself be drawn in by heroic rhetoric —just as he came to view the conquest as an enterprise with outlays, costs, profits, contractors, partners, employees, problems of management, of ownership and distribution— so must there be a reading of our own revolutionary epic...
...in particular, those who believe in violence, both in power and in the opposition...
...In Mexico, no imprisoned Zapatista had a "V.I...
...But the government still does not exist: it isn't easy to accept that someone else might head it and deal out quotas of power...
...May 9: Hastily and in order to justify their criminal actions of the previous day, they draft a communiqué, signed by the Military Staff, in which they condemn to death or exile all those they consider political leaders of the National Resistance [FARN...
...All of this takes place on top...
...In the town of Las Vueltas "10 paramilitary loan offices were burned...
...23 Proceso, Oct...
...the fact that the guerrilla groups can resist almost indefinitely in the remote mountainous interior when limited to the defensive...
...What charges did Villalobos make in "executing" Roque Dalton...
...After his death in late September] Proceso printed this interview with Jovel on October 6, 1980: Q: What is the current status of the matter of Roque Dalton's assassination...
...All this implies, for that very reason, problems of representation...
...I see now that whoever consciously and responsibly affirms Che Guevara as his ideal cannot then go on making idle talk without ending up being a bastard...
...The student guerrillas go to the country in order to return to the city...
...Q: What are the names of the other commanders who make up the DRU...
...Clearly it's some of each, who knows in what proportion: a conflict between leaders who support and those who reject the negotiations...
...67 Such striking cases—under what circumstances do they usually occur...
...Everyone likes to head something bigger, as long as he's heading...
...In the two days there was no engagement with the Bourgeois Army...
...They lost it because Castro built an overwhelming consensus of approval (beginning among his own comrades...
...24 Excelsior, Mar...
...while, on the other, it is claimed that they were never invited to join the junta...
...14, 1980: Bus barricade on the Northern artery, San Salvador (11:00 A.M...
...With regard to this problem, Jovel's death was opportune: the new commander of the FARN led it back to the DRU...
...We are convinced, nevertheless, that they will do so when we have sufficient strength.'" The problem gets worse when the guerrilla actions against the government cause hardships among the population: when people are left without water, without lights, without bridges, when their work places are destroyed, clinics, and public service offices...
...The moment has come to take to the streets . . . . A final call [went out to the] honest and progressive [sectors of the army, to support the insurrection...
...Q: Concerning the DRU, can it be said that officially it is the army of the Democratic Revolutionary Front...
...6, 1980...
...6, 1980...
...YSAX, the radio station of the Archbishopric, has been silenced by bomb blasts...
...To write social criticism, form cultural brigades, put one's pen at the service of the first-class revolutionaries, while eating three meals a day, is for poor slobs who don't dare to take up arms...
...64 It is fitting to note that in the theology Of perfection there is no mention of power struggles, nor is any advice offered as to how to get to be pope...
...of FAPU(E1 Salvador), Nov...
...6, 1980...
...In support of this point, see the analysis of Eric R. Wolf, 56 concerning the Mexican, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Algerian, and Cuban revolutions...
...39 " Excelsior, Mar...
...Today there are officers and other army personnel, even from the security forces (not counting members of the secret services with university educations) pursuing academic careers in every university department in El Salvador...
...What position will the FARN take concerning this assassination after the triumph of the revolution...
...And since he is unable to laugh at his own ironic situation, the attempted humor is flat and the actual humor unintentional...
...2 What post did Ungo hold one year before presiding over this front against the junta...
...6, 1980...
...54 It isn't enough to be an office, a classroom, a café revolutionary, to travel abroad, to rub shoulders with celebrities, to prattle elegantly: Debray told me in Prague, when I got drunk with him: don't be a bourgeois living offyour nice little revolutionary capital...
...33 Excelsior, Mar...
...But it also convinces them that they are caught between two repressive fires, and that the best thing is to get out, or, in any case, not to side with anyone, since it might cost them their life when the next ones come along...
...Just as if he'd remained a writer signing manifestos and eating three meals a day...
...No one has yet written a history of the private interests in the Mexican, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and other Latin American revolutions, who has been inspired by Silvio Zavala's Private Interests in the Conquest of New Spain (Los intereses particulares en la conquista de la Nueva Espana, which was published in Madrid, 1933, and should be reissued...
...In other words: Ungo collects the mail of his enemy of 1972, Alvarez is assassinated by his allies of a few months earlier, and the Democratic Revolutionary Front was headed, until recently, by a member of the "14 families...
...The Morales, the Alvarezes, the Daltons change sides but not places: they stay on top...
...The two primary objectives are: "(1) To defend the national sovereignty and guarantee the victories of the revolution, protecting it from counterrevolutionary attacks, both from inside and outside El Salvador...
...15, 1980...
...But further along in the same item she is said to be "also second in command of the Popular Forces of National Liberation (FPL...
...Power is not founded in violence but rather in a consensus of approval whose highest expression is never again having to resort to violence...
...His work Ejercito nacional y contrarevolucion en El Salvador ("National Army and Counterrevolution in El Salvador") is also in a vein similar to the above...
...The results of the general offensive called on January 10 showed that militarily the guerrillas have enough strength to resist but not to win...
...5 Excelsior, Nov...
...and that the Communists' noble words were for a militarycivilian . junta, not a social democratic military junta...
...The revolutionary's support of a revolution is, in essence, unconditionaro For Dalton, the errors and horrors of Stalin were supportable—unconditionally acceptable as part of something positive and upward...
...Yet, in spite of this, documents are drafted whose discussion arouses the rank and file, and this forces the clique ever deeper into the gutter of slander and dishonesty . . . . The role of "mastermind and conceptual coordinator" was assumed to belong to comrade Roque Dalton, in whom the militarists thought to find their "greatest adversary"—the only one "capable," because of his theoretical skills, of being the source and mainstay of conception...
...19, 20, and 24, 1979...
...was as fascist as Hitler's crimes...
...85 El Dia, Dec...
...Evidently the commander was misquoted by the press," Rodriguez points out, "or else she was simply stating positions that do not correspond to the views currently held by the FDR-FMLN...
...Q: But not that it is the army of the Democratic Revolutionary Front...
...102 Siempre, Feb...
...We thought then, in all good faith, that the gravest danger had passed and that the clique would respect its own agreements with regard to the sentenced comrades . . . . However, the clique now felt it could not allow any such process its ultimate conclusion without emerging defeated...
...What direction do you take if there is no unified leadership (if nobody has secured power: taken charge of his comrades, like Castro...
...71 (Observe, in comparison, that in El Salvador overlapping is frequent...
...37 VII...
...For 12 hours, and in soMe cases longer, we maintained the Military occupation of various towns...
...4. Dalton's political participation during this period has little significance . . . although certain tasks did have some political value, those related to his capacity as writer and historian, for example, Realidad Nacional, Dictadura Fascista ("National Reality, Fascist Dictatorship...
...38 Uno mbs uno, Sept...
...The FARN was surprised by a communiqué in the name of the DRU . . . without all members of the DRU having been consulted, which, by bringing an internal debate of the DRU to public light, paved the way for questions and doubts to be raised among leaders and organizations in the international field...
...The day he was kidnapped, Alvarez C6rdoba spoke clearly about this problem, though assuming it would be overcome in a future government whose members . . . will have to have great moral validity and will have demonstrated a love of the people...
...20, 1981...
...He left Havana for El Salvador like Che for Bolivia...
...A serious misjudgment on the part of the militarist clique...
...Well, it meant among other things hundreds, thousands of cadres . . . of people who had undergone sacrifices . . . . It wasn't easy, and it was a long process too, but finally they were coming together...
...break-aways from the Communist party, the university, the Church, who around 1970 began to take up arms...
...The "crisis in leadership" pointed to by Dalton, the fact noted by Ortega that "everyone wanted to dominate," impose himself on the rest, is no small problem...
...18 (1980), at 9:30 P.M., a militia squadron of the FARN carried out an action of burning the cantina Los Blancos, District of La Paz, producing an engagement that yielded one "ear" name of Echegoyen, executed, and another "ear" . . . gravely wounded . . . . On Monday the 25th and Tuesday the 26th of August, several squadrons of our Regular Army in progress secured over both days a broad rural zone lying on either side of the Chalchuapa-Ahuachapân highway between El Arado Canton and Atiquizaya...
...43 Pueblo Internacional, Nov...
...Oct...
...Those on the bottom stay on the bottom...
...Violence can be legitimate, but it is not a source of legitimacy...
...This can be better understood by keeping in mind that El Salvador is the size of Mexico's state of Hidalgo [about 8,100 sq...
...Some believe in violence, others in negotiation...
...9, 1981...
...mi.—or of Massachusetts, which has 8,257 sq...
...107 A commander of the FPL: The people in the countryside are afraid...
...98-100...
...Thus was born the Brigade that today bears his name...
...23, 1981...
...63 Inasmuch as the Latin American revolution has emerged from a deep theoretical void, inasmuch as we are now in a time of resurgence of a new revolutionary vanguard in the countries on the continent (and I'm speaking of a political-military vanguard that will orchestrate the directional needs along the path of Latin American revolution, the armed struggle, and not of a literary vanguard...
...At that point, equal terms could be offered to those guerrillas willing to accept such terms...
...25, 1981...
...If, besides, there is not much of a middle class in El Salvador, then everything must go on in a limited circle of acquaintances, neighbors, classmates, colleagues, friends, and relatives, who make up the privileged minority...
...the intellectuals have a broad field of labor within the overall revolutionary scheme, above all because in Latin America there are no focal points of political-moral-doctrinal prestige, which in Cuba have been personified in Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara, the revolutionary leadership in general...
...If these figures are correct, the Salvadoran opposition is capable of putting six times as many Mexicans on their feet to protest in the streets as Salvadorans to wage war at home...
...39 Uno mas uno, Sept...
...23, 1979...
...Because the situation was a guise of imperialism to deceive the Salvadoran people: to have united behind it would have signaled a defeat, passing, if you like, but defeat nonetheless, of a revolutionary alternative . . . . the necessary risks had to be taken, beginning with the loss of our cadres...
...A confusing death, which gave rise to ugly interpretations...
...and that their political strength is analogous...
...Despite the declaration of commander Ferman Cienfuegos, chief of the FARN, that "In reality the political diplomatic commission (headed by Ungo) will assume plenipotentiary status— it is not yet the democratic-revolutionary government but it is the germ of the future official arrangement...
...97 El Dia, Jan...
...Oct...
...2 El Salvador Libre, bulletin of the FDR (El Salvador), No...
...82 And the following day a denial is issued: "The political-diplomatic commission of the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) and the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) this morning emphatically deny the existence of any negotiations with the Ruling Salvadoran Junta...
...It has allowed us to support it, at any rate, and I for one feel grateful...
...The widening of this avenue of social ascent was perhaps more important for the military than for civilians...
...106 Amid the frightful Salvadoran slaughter, there is a certain black humor in speaking of compensation to the military profession for its contribution to society...
...1980...
...But they weren't poets or writers, nor did they spend 10 years playing revolutionary tourist, serving among the bureaucracies of international revisionism, nor did they attend congresses and conventions to show off their leftist rhetorical accomplishments...
...In October 1979, Villalobos acts to stir up repression in order to spoil the game for the political opposition, which had joined behind the coup leaders...
...58 Excelsior, Jan...
...Uno mils uno, Oct...
...Uno mas uno, Nov...
...Cayetano Carpio ("Marcial"), ex-seminary student, founds the FPL: Q: You resigned from the Communist party...
...In contrast, those who believe in violence have in fact created a vacuum of power...
...comrade Edith was savagely raped by the 8 goons and then assassinated . . . . The heroism of these two fallen comrades in the clutches of the enemy, and the savagery of the Dictatorship goons, are the clearest proof of the class nature of the engagement taking place on a daily basis in our country...
...101 In other words: instead of the overwhelming majority taking over local political power, they fled from San Lorenzo...
...42 ,Pueblo Internacional, publ...
...The father is willing to deal with the military in order to do what he thinks must be done...
...For its part, there is no general commander within the armed opposition...
...In other words: each looks after its own business...
...The only whole men are men like Castro, like Che: The capitalism that left all the exploited people blind and dispossessed took only one eye from us and set out to charm our other one with treachery and profit...
...57 The [Farabundo Marti] Popular Forces of Liberation (FPL) was "formed in 1970 by university students and dissident members of the Communist party," 58 the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) by "radicalized Christians from the petite bourgeoisie...
...99 In other words: the fire power was insufficient for a military victory, but it was hoped that it would be sufficient as a civic detonator of the overwhelming majority...
...There are passages that sound as if the ERP is speaking, more than the FLP, but there is no indication that this is actually so...
...Capture of Radio International, FARN message broadcast...
...199 But, as was later reported. . . the people did not offer the first sign of an uprising, . . . there was nothing but a few crumbs of support on the part of the population . . . . There were a few cities that remained mostly under the control of guerrilla forces for several days...
...This impatience with talk, this glorification of guns as the continuation of debate by other means, is what kills Roque Dalton...
...17, 1979...
...Still in the same interview with Jovel, it can be seen how opinions keep changing as to who are friends and who enemies...
...and of these, above all the ones in power...
...91 Excelsior, Dec...
...In effect, they accuse the victim of having been murdered and leaving a problem to the living...
...Q: The DRU...
...This speech addresses the problem of the contributions of associates and the distribution of shares: What did it mean, the moment that brought about the union of all the revolutionary organizations...
...We are finally positive, at least I myself am— pardon the smugness—that our opportunity for social-revolutionary status is here at last, bright and clear, the possibility to stop being "second-class revolutionaries" as we have always been, and not always exclusively by our own fault...
...27 Uno mas uno, Dec...
...But then again, the young Morales is not just any prisoner...
...A11 indications are that El Salvador is not a very pyramidal country...
...The true peasant guerrilla has always been conservative, defensive, on his home ground: not offensive, progressive, assaulting power...
...6, 1980...
...Those who talk, those with the microphone, are on top: university colleagues from the faculties of engineering, law, military science, theology, economics, who have some claim to authority, or have had it, or aspire to it: officers in the army or the guerrilla movement, the junta or the opposition, the parties, the Church, the university, the press, businesses...
...26, 1980...
...The absence of a framework for adequate discussion, when added to our immaturity as men, as revolutionaries, and to the repressive situation, led to our further separation, our splintering in practice into the three tendencies mentioned above . . . . The oldest comrades began to distrust the newer comrades who were beginning to gain prominence as leaders in different areas, while the newer ones, ignorant of how difficult the struggles had been in former years, underestimated their more veteran comrades . . . . You must remember that we were working in the midst of the most brutal repression, that we could not undertake a whole nationwide movement, that each one had to pursue the work that his particular reality imposed on him . . . . Now the fact that we sprang from a common trunk greatly helped us...
...31, 1980...
...The announcement stated: "in an accident whose causes we are investigating...
...With this alternative sidelined, the traitors now become progressives and even representatives of the guerrillas...
...El Dia, Jan...
...At the same time FARN's General Command reported that, on investigation, it had not been an automobile accident in San Salvador but rather a plane crash, in a light craft flying over the sea, in which "one of the engines failed and the other dropped off...
...52 Uno miss uno, Jan...
...Uno mas uno, Dec...
...Roberto Roca, one of the five commanders of the DRU of the FMLN, remarked on the fact that, in the general offensive, "popular participation has not been all the FMLN had hoped for": The difficulties we have to overcome, not only at this moment but throughout this long and hard war are many...
...then come the second-class revolutionaries...
...All these organizational constellations keep evolving, and tend to be more organic on paper than in reality, where the member groups go on acting on their own account, or even worse: in the collective name on their own account...
...Who is Joaquin Villalobos...
...Though we consider it a double-edged weapon...
...Why did we proceed in this manner...
...At this point, however, it can be said that the alternative they've gone for is the Junta...
...Dec...
...A superficial reading of the press leaves a very different impression: the Salvaidorans on the bottom, exploited and murdered by those on top, have taken up arms against an oppressive regime backed by the United States...
...72 Proceso, July 25, 1980...
...They have turned Dalton into a "revolutionary" of "great talents," ignoring the truth as to his role in the Salvadoran revolutionary movement and exalting his ephemeral militancy...
...Alvarez "toured various nations on the continent and in Europe in quest of international solidarity," the same article goes on: which implies having his own supporters, not depending exclusively on guerrilla arms...
...Reagan will find an irreversible situation in El Salvador when he arrives at the White House," 91 and that the insurgents' final offensive "will come before the new president of the United States takes power...
...61 Ibid., p. 21...
...101 Proceso, Jan...
...Today's guerrillas are break-aways from the capital up into the mountains (not peasant insurgents...
...only poet and writer Dalton lived his life where publicity and the cult of personality were what counted, and now that he's dead everyone is rushing to condemn the "assassins" of such a famous poet, writer, good guy, and close friend...
...the strike "will last an indefinite time, will include all services in the country, and will end only when the revolutionary organizations" take power...
...May 8: The blind and irrational response of the militarist clique entrenched in the ERP was to try to assassinate the members of the new National Resistance [FARN] without the slightest warning...
...68 Uno mks uno, Dec...
...And there are also the threats to national and foreign journalists, and tpe slaying of Ignacio Rodriguez, correspondent for a Mexican paper...
...there will be no government in exile, it will be a government firmly rooted in native soil...
...And, as a persistent denial of the government's persistent claims, until Thursday one small village, named San Lorenzo, continued welcoming dazzled journalists to see what a town under guerrilla control was like...
...62 Ibid., p. 16...
...26 This Front—through manifestos, demonstrations, meetings, drives, auctions, cultural events, donations of a day's wages, etc.—has received the generous support of diverse groups in Mexico, among others the Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade...
...The enemy is lost...
...AndA university professor and leftist sympathizer, speaking of the final offensive, stated: "In January of last year they said it would come in a matter of a few days...
...And so, as no doubts may remain as to what is now going on in the Salvadoran army, it is worth mentioning that Captains Mena Sandoval and Cruz ordered the execution of the second commander and highest-ranking officer present at the time of the events . . . . [This is offered as] the most eloquent proof of the headlong collapse of the military dictatorship...
...Today, curiously enough, when we are supposedly more scientific and materialistic than ever, we are letting ourselves be most carelessly swept up in heroic, Manichean, idealistic rhetoric...
...Propaganda offices of the labor unions and of popular and student organizations have been destroyed...
...15 What did the Salvadoran Communist party think of the military coup of October 15, 1979, which toppled General Carlos Humberto Romero and brought, the junta to power...
...each might well have its own explanation but together they warrant investigation...
...Another factor for unity against Somoza was Somoza himself...
...It dissuades the witnesses from collaborating with the enemy...
...El Dia, Dec...
...In the same way, to point out how, in revolutionary groups, parties, and regimes, there tends to be a greater turnover at the summit than at the base, to speak of power struggles at the top, or of possible successors —such matters are all indecent...
...73 There is no Somoza to unite against: only an anonymous crowd, a shifting constellation...
...16 and Mar...
...He journeyed to Chile, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Korea, and North Vietnam, and won numerous prizes and awards for his poetry . . . . He died on May 10, 1975, shortly before his 40th birthday and soon after joining the Salvadoran People's Revolutionary Army...
...The Committee asked that this recognition and support be expressed "morally, politically, diplomatically, and materially...
...1, 1980...
...A slaughter of inno22 cents carried out by Hitler is in the evil, the sinister, the negative column...
...This same day, militia comrades Edgardo and Edith, of Soyapango, were captured . . . . Edgardo was assassinated on the spot...
Vol. 29 • January 1982 • No. 1
