Readers Respond
The Alliance's Failure NACLA staffers Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk recently completed a book on El Salvador for South End Press called El Salvador: The Face of Revolution. We sent a...
...I described the effort (five years after the fact) in a letter which the New York Times published July 22, 1969...
...When Lyndon Johnson took over, it was not Vietnam that drew attention from El Salvador...
...Why did the Alliance [for Progress] fail...
...Guillermo Ungo, leader of the MNR (National Revolutionary Movement), a social democratic party, was a member of the first junta that took power after the fall of Carlos Humberto Romero in October 1979 and is now the president of the Democratic Revolutionary Front...
...In 1963, I1 had already asked the U.S...
...I told visitors it was evidence that an explosion was coming...
...it stands across the street from the Presidential Palace...
...Many people have written about it, but I have a simpler explanation...
...Fort Zapote is one of the two key garrisons in San Salvador...
...It was that LBJ's Latin American expert, Thomas C. Mann, did not believe in the Alliance and immediately reversed the signals that Rivera had been getting from Washington...
...We sent a copy to Murat Williams, former U.S...
...colonel who was photographed at Fort Zapote as if he were running the coup that overthrew Fabio's junta in January 1961.** (Ten days before I arrived...
...I can personally witness to the mutual esteem between the two men...
...It was Kennedy's assassination that took the spirit and steam out of [Salvadorean President Julio] Rivera...
...Those barrancas, or gullies, teeming with people, without water, seemed to me so much worse than any shanty-town or bidonville I ever imagined...
...Get Fabio Castillo or [Guillermo] Ungo to tell you of the U.S...
...military presence reflected no credit on us and even then obstructed our effort to support popular aspirations...
...Since the book is very much a product of the NACLA collective and reflects our continuous research on El Salvador, we are publishing the response with his kind permission...
...Having spent so much of my life there-or dealing with El Salvador-I can taste the atole [a corn-based porridge] or smell the wood, as I read...
...ambassador to El Salvador during the Kennedy Administration, for his comments...
...In my office, behind my desk, I used to hang a huge aerial low-level photo which showed the gulley-slums then ad52 jacent to San Benito...
...He was then an exambassador to El Salvador and was serving in Mexico, where he was in close touch with the Catorce.* When Kennedy died and Mann took over Latin American affairs, the Catorce had their friend in Washington...
...The U.S...
...Ambassador to El Salvador, 1961-64 Madison Mills, VA *The fourteen families who are said to rule El Salvadoi **Fabio Castillo was a member of the short-lived reformist junta that ruled from 1960-61 and is now a member of the Political-Diplomatic Commission of the rebel Democratic Revolutionary Front and the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FDRI FMLN...
...Mann had already told me that I was making a mistake in not working with the rich families...
...Lazarus could see Dives, but Dives could never notice Lazarus...
...No one seems to know much about the effort I made to get our military missions reduced...
...You have been remarkably successful in capturing the spirit of the place and the people...
...Many thanks to you for El Salvador: The Face of Revolution...
...generals in Panama to limit their visits to El Salvador to once every six months...
...Our policy changed course and Rivera was in effect rudderless...
...I do think you raise the level of the slums when you call them "shanty-towns...
...Murat W. Williams U.S...
Vol. 16 • May 1982 • No. 3
