“Those Plans Have Gone Nowhere”

During the early years, American policymakers tended to be pessimistic on the Salvadoran government's chances to win the war. These fears largely ebbed during the middle of the decade when it appeared that, through vigorous U.S. support, the government and FAES had the upper hand. Yet the outlook changed again by the late 1980s when even some of the most fervent supporters of U.S. engagement were concluding that it had failed. In November 1989, for example, a former Salvadoran official surveyed the 10 years of American involvement in his country and concluded that “the U.S. wanted to achieve three things: a measure of peace, the respect for human rights, and the institutionalization of democratic processes. All three objectives have failed.” Speaking a year earlier, California congressman George Miller echoed a similar sentiment, observing:

In 1988, a widely distributed evaluation based on field reporting by four U.S. military officers concluded that “unhappily, the United States finds itself stuck with that war.”