Will history record this war as just a waste, or as the tragic but inevitable throes of a small, backward society passing into a more modern era? The war’s origins lie in a crisis of modernization: in the ’70s, the corrupt military and the agrarian oligarchy responded with election fraud and repression to the demands of rising middle and working classes. Radicalized by what they saw and experienced, urban students, unionists, priests and teachers, as well as campesinos influenced by liberation theology, turned to revolution. They were met by ruthless forces for whom anticommunism was a kind of religion. This war was a class conflict, a power struggle–but also a war of ideologies. By 1980, 800 death-squad victims a month were being dumped on the dusty streets.
The United States said it intervened in El Salvador not just to stop Cuban-backed insurgency but to build democracy. In fact, U.S. policy, designed by a fractious bureaucracy at an ultimate cost of more than $4 billion, was a clumsy instrument. At first, the Reagan administration countenanced counterrevolutionary slaughter; only when Congress balked did Reagan seek to meld an elected civilian government, led by Jose Napoleon Duarte, with a more efficient and disciplined Army. But in March 1989, Duarte’s corruption-plagued party lost power to Cristiani; the November massacre of six Jesuits, among other crimes, proved the Army’s enduring lawlessness. Even more sobering for the United States, the murders came amid a furious FMLN offensive that nearly toppled the government.
The rebels were undone by their own political myopia. FMLN plans hinged on a popular insurrection that didn’t materialize; the comandantes never grasped that most Salvadorans had grown weary of their murder and sabotage. Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that revolt against tyranny is legitimate-as long as it does not compound the people’s misery. El Salvador’s guerrillas broke that rule.
Marxist revolution; a forced return to the repressive past; a foreign-financed hybrid of militarism and centrism: these were the three futures for which people killed and died in El Salvador. Yet the peace treaty, if it holds, will prevent any of them from becoming El Salvador’s actual future. This is because the cold war ended. But it is also because somehow, in the crucible of national calamity and foreign intervention, Salvadoran political culture did converge on a vision of democracy that rejected both military praetorianism and millenarian collectivism. Cristiani and the guerrillas accommodated this political maturation-a statesmanlike act to which neither had any alternative. In elections two years hence, the FMLN will get its chance to prove it speaks for a majority. The left will be hard pressed to beat Cristiani’s right-wing ARENA party, which will say it kept its promise of peace and prosperity. That hardly seems fair, given the right’s past. But as any Salvadoran could tell you, history isn’t fair.
