DUARTE Prisoner of War
SINCE THE SPRING OF 1984, THERE HAS been no serious debate in Washington about what is happening in El Salvador. It takes an effort to recall that there was once a time when the halls of...
...While the Administration wanted an attractive piece of human packaging for its war effort, Congress wanted a magician to lead it out of the Salvadorean quagmire...
...The theory in Washington was that elections were the answer...
...And if he is weaker than the military, he is also weaker than the private sector, the FMLN and-most of all-the U.S...
...In the following pages, the scholars of El Salvador's Central American University describe the erosion of the Duarte presidency with stunning clarity...
...The evidence is unambiguous: Duarte is no closer to exercising "complete control" over the armed forces than he was eighteen months ago...
...To be more accurate, there were two theories in Washington...
...Duarte swore that year that he would leave the government unless he got "complete control of the Army...
...From 1964-1970, Duarte served as mayor of San Salvador and swelled the party's mass following with his adroit populism...
...Or are our memories just playing tricks on us...
...More than eighteen months have elapsed since then, time enough to evaluate his presidency...
...The party's November 1985 National Convention produced nothing beyond a set of vaguely worded platitudes...
...Ambassador to El Salvador Deane Hinton, which concluded that the Christian Democrats "without the Army would be nothing...
...The longer he occupies the presidency on Washington's terms, the tighter he draws the leash around his neck...
...But he stayed, and inside him there still burned the ambition one day to wear the blue-and-white presidential sash of office...
...The reasons for the change can be summed up in three words: Jos6 Napole6n Duarte...
...but instead, the electoral coalition they had formed with social democrats and communists saw its rightful victory snatched away, first through fraud and then through Army violence...
...Image has been as important to Duarte's political career as substance: he is the honest democrat, the perpetual victim of fraud and torture, with an appearance to match-the pouchy eyes and the sunken cheekbones, the ill-fitting suits and the broken English...
...In Duarte, both sides agreed they had found their man...
...And though their work is a study of the dynamics of power, not an essay in character flaws, the reader is inescapably drawn to question the integrity of a man who has agreed to manage a ruinous war in exchange for the right to wear a presidential sash of increasingly dubious value...
...The fact is that a study of the Duarte presidency has less to do with his intentions than his power...
...Beaten and bloodied, Duarte ended up in exile rather than in the Casa Presidencial...
...Embassy...
...N JUNE 1984, DUARTE WAS INAUGURATED as president of El Salvador...
...The logical yardstick should be to measure Duarte's results point-for-point against his original program...
...Did legislators really use words like "certification" and quarrel over whether U.S...
...In 1980 he returned, to be head of a civilian-military junta which the State Department fancifully referred to as "the Duarte government...
...Today, the debates in Washington are simpler: would the Reagan Administration prefer its blank check for aid to El Salvador to be served on a china plate or a silver platter...
...In his book Weakness and Deceit, former New York Times correspondent Ray Bonner quotes a secret 1981 cable from then-U.S...
...During its rule, 25,000 Salvadoreans were slaughtered...
...The point is not to argue Duarte's good or bad faith, but to look at where he stands in the force fields of Salvadorean politics...
...Then in 1972, it seemed as if the Christian Democrats' moment had come...
...The other came from Reagan's opponents in Congress, who wanted an electoral mandate to strengthen Duarte's hand and help him turn his democratic image into a democratic reality...
...It takes an effort to recall that there was once a time when the halls of Congress rang to polemics about human rights, land reform and negotiated settlements...
...military personnel in El Salvador should be called "trainers" or "advisers...
...Duarte's Christian Democratic Party was founded in 1960 to find a middle-class middle way in a savagely unjust society...
...But since 1980, El Salvador's Christian Democrats have never offered a coherent program of government...
...To make his predicament worse, the constraints on Duarte are not static ones...
...One came from the Administration, which sponsored, financed and massaged four rounds of voting in 1982, 1984 and 1985 as the democratic face of its intervention in El Salvador...
Vol. 20 • January 1986 • No. 1
