The Carter Option

Given the fear of “another Nicaragua,” the October 1979 coup came as a deep relief to the Carter administration. As ambassador in El Salvador at the time, Frank Devine, stated, “The finest hour that El Salvador had in its memorable history was that coup of October 15, 1979.” Yet, while clearly eager to see General Romero go, declassified cable traffic from San Salvador seeking guidance on how to respond to the coup reveals that American officials had only limited prior knowledge of the putsch. The United States did, however, move quickly to help the new government. State Department spokesman Hodding Carter told the press that the new leaders appeared to be “centrist and moderate” and that the direction they had laid out for the new government was “encouraging.” Ambassador Devine later recounted that the coup members’ program “emphasized the correction of past wrongs, respect for human rights, release of all political prisoners, return of political exiles, and the implementation of a program of thoroughgoing reform of the nation's antiquated economic, social and political structures.” The big threat to America's interests, Devine contended, was that the far left would undermine the new junta. “[It is] increasingly clear that [the] extreme left will continue its violent effort to undermine [the] new junta and at some point [the] very survival of [the] latter might depend on greater outside assistance to cope with these elements.”

Two weeks after the coup, U.S. officials announced that Washington would provide the new government with “significant” military aid as well as moderate amounts of “nonlethal” riot control and military gear as an inducement to get the junta to implement further reforms. However, there was no consensus among the senior officials. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, for example, feared that greater aid and more training would lead to even higher levels of U.S. involvement, creating a “quagmire effect” similar to what had happened in Vietnam.

The Other War

U.S. military assistance and advisors were the most controversial expenses of the enormous amounts of aid that Washington was sending to El Salvador in the 1980s. No less significant, however, were the even greater amounts that the United States pumped into the Salvadoran economy. Between 1980 and 1989, economic assistance totaled $2.6 billion. With other sources of foreign financing reluctant to enter the war-torn country, this money was primarily used to reduce the Salvadoran government's enormous debt burdens as well as provide cash reserves to purchase key imports. Another big portion went to development projects to repair infrastructure destroyed by the guerrillas. For instance, according to the Central Bank annual report, repairing the destruction caused by the FMLN offensive that began on November 11, 1989, cost $500 million. The remainder of the economic funds went to cash transfers, food loans, food donations, among other types of assistance.

The major frustration of many U.S. and Salvadoran officials working on these programs was that all of the spending was basically an attempt to return El Salvador to its status before the war began, leaving it still a very poor and underdeveloped country. U.S. money also supported the troubled but massive agrarian reform initiative, which began soon after the 1979 coup that ushered in the reformist junta. Aid also went to education and rural health projects subtly intended to help win the hearts and minds of a traditionally neglected population susceptible to FMLN propaganda and recruitment. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, spent a total of $40 million for the construction and rehabilitation of roughly 1,000 rural classrooms that benefited 70,000 students. More than $70 million was used to aid displaced persons, providing temporary jobs, daily food rations to 200,000 people, and medical visits to 400,000 people.

“Once You Identify Your Enemy, He Will Probably Die”

We have seen that the relationship between the military and the oligarchy dated back at least to the 1930s with a sense of common interest: stopping communism and other threats to their privileged place in Salvadoran society. One explanation for the rise of death squads in the 1970s is that officers realized they did not need the oligarchy to remain in power – and at times social reform was in the military's interest. So the oligarchs created their own paramilitary forces – or death squads – closely or loosely tied to government security forces, most notably the military, often employing off-duty soldiers desperate for a “second income.”

These death squads shared such a deep antipathy for the revolutionary left that they aggressively targeted them starting in the late 1970s. The CIA reported in 1985 that death squads were in fact a function of the small “extreme right” versus the “mainstream right.” Both camps were nationalist and anti-communist but only the extremists were characterized by a “willingness to confront that change with active subversion of the constitutional system and with violent terrorism.” Interestingly, the CIA explained to U.S. officials that the “extreme right” did not “predominate in any one social, economic, or political sector. Rather, it is a fanatic fringe drawn from all elements of society.” This can be explained by the fact that, while few Salvadorans were active in death squads, many more from “all economic classes,” including rural peasantry, quietly condoned their behavior since they thought it was working against the revolutionary left – “however repugnant the methods used.

While not very apparent at the time, a significant shift in President Reagan's El Salvador policy came when George Shultz replaced Alexander Haig as secretary of state in July 1982. Asserting that American foreign policy no longer reflected “consistency, clarity, and steadiness of purpose,” Haig had serious differences of opinion with NSC Advisor William Clark and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger over Israel's 1982 incursion into Lebanon. It is also likely that White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker urged Haig to resign. Shultz served in the top diplomatic posting for six and a half years – the longest tenure since Dean Rusk in the 1960s.

Like his predecessor, Shultz saw the Central America issue as a clear case of global communist aggression, reflecting in his memoir: “The old forces of dictatorship had taken a new form: that of a command economy, a self-appointed elitist vanguard, and guerrilla warfare. Nicaragua had become its base, all of Central America its target. El Salvador was first on the list.” Unlike Haig, though, Shultz believed that there were deep structural forces at play in the conflict. He told a House subcommittee in March 1983 that there were “legitimate social, economic, and political grievances” fueling the conflict. Yet, given the continued external assistance to the FMLN from Cuba and the Soviet bloc, the United States could not simply focus on the underlying inequalities. Rather, the United States had to help alleviate suffering through political and economic reform as well as “counter a Communist strategy which seeks to aggravate and exploit these problems and so to seize power by force of arms.”

It appeared that Shultz had become the engagement strategy's proponent par excellence, developing a grin-and-bear-it attitude in balancing the contradictions in American foreign policy in Central America.

This chapter explores in particular depth the significant but chilling case of Marxist insurgency and military counterinsurgency in Guatemala – and the American reaction to it. This episode is especially salient as Guatemala's internal war, unlike the war in El Salvador, took place largely without U.S. involvement. It thus provides an interesting historical counterfactual in terms of what could have happened in El Salvador had the United States not gotten involved.

More specifically, starting during the Carter administration in the late 1970s, Washington lost influence over the Guatemalan state, especially the military. Contrary to what is often assumed, the Guatemalan government suspended American military assistance, not the other way around. This unprecedented act ensured that U.S. military trainers and materiel did not enter into Guatemala, as was the case in El Salvador. Yet, the absence of American advisors did not prevent the Guatemalan military from launching a genocidal, scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign against Marxist guerrillas – or, more specifically, against the civilian and desperately poor Mayan population believed to be supporting these guerrillas.

Six years after the CIA-hatched Operation PBSUCCESS in 1954, junior army officers in Guatemala attempted a coup against the ruling authoritarian regime headed by General José Miguel Ramón Ydígoras, who had taken power after Washington-backed strongman Castillo Armas had been murdered. Interestingly, the revolting officers were upset that the CIA was using Guatemala to train anti-Castro Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs operation. When the uprising foundered, a few of these officers retreated to the hills to organize a guerrilla insurgency, which they believed would be the surest avenue to radical social and economic change. Not surprisingly, they soon established contact with Havana.

Tiny El Salvador represented one of the largest foreign policy challenges when Reagan entered the White House. In an indication of the attention El Salvador was getting, television reporter Walter Cronkite began his interview with the new president by asking, “Mr. President, with your administration barely six weeks old, you're now involved in, perhaps, the first foreign policy crisis…much concern about El Salvador and our commitment there. Do you see any parallel in our committing advisors and military assistance to El Salvador and the early stages of our involvement in Vietnam?” Later in the same interview Reagan explained that Soviet expansionism was at the core of the conflict. “Without actually using Soviet troops, in effect, the Soviets are, you might say, trying to do the same thing in El Salvador that they did in Afghanistan, but by using proxy troops through Cuba and guerrillas.” Reagan added that he was “watching very carefully” to see if the Sandinistas were sending arms to the FMLN.

Earlier that same month, at one of President Reagan's first press conferences on March 6, 1981, he was asked, “How do you intend to avoid having El Salvador turn into a Vietnam for this country?” Reagan's complaint back to reporters was, “I didn't start the El Salvador thing. I inherited it. And the previous administration, which probably was as vociferous as anyone in talking about my threat to peace, they [the Carter administration] were doing what we're doing: sending aid to El Salvador.” When the president was charged for leading the nation into war in Central America, he joked, “I've been here more than six weeks now and haven't fired a shot.”

The Haig Approach

Upon taking office on January 20, 1981, the victorious Reagan administration wasted no time in reinforcing its campaign rhetoric by taking a harder public stand against communist intrusion into the hemisphere.

El Salvador's history has revolved around its scarcest commodity: land. From the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early 16th century and through the turbulent decades of the late 20th century, rural land and agriculture lay at the core of the country's tumultuous and deeply inequitable social and economic history. El Salvador's searing legacy of unequal distribution can be linked back to the Spanish colonial system whereby land ownership was vested in the crown. The land now known as modern El Salvador was ruled before the Spanish Conquest by an assortment of indigenous civilizations, including the Aztec and Maya; the local Pipil nation was active in the area at the time of Spanish exploration in 1524. Lacking precious metals and mineral resources, El Salvador was a backwater in Spain's colonial empire. Under the formal administration of the captaincy-general of Guatemala during this time, local landowners held de facto sway. Along with the rest of Central America, in 1821 El Salvador declared its independence from Spain. It was initially incorporated into newly independent Mexico and then joined the United Provinces of Central America – a failed attempt to create a federal republic modeled on the United States. In 1841, El Salvador declared itself an independent country.

The smallest country in Central America, El Salvador's early independence was marked by considerable political tumult. Filled with large plantations owned by a tiny elite, El Salvador's first key cash crop was indigo. Between the 1870s and 1930s, however, another export crop replaced the ebbing indigo: coffee.

No Room for Additional Cubas

Events across the globe deeply influenced the mood in America leading up to the November 1980 presidential election between Republican challenger Ronald Reagan and incumbent Jimmy Carter. In 1978, the Panama Canal – “long the great symbol of U.S. say in Central America” – was transferred by treaty to full Panamanian sovereignty. The Iranian revolution in 1979 resulted in the removal of a regime in Tehran that had long been well inside the American orbit. A national humiliation ensued when Iranian radicals held U.S. Embassy staff hostage for over a year. By July 1979, the Sandinistas had overthrown the Somoza dictatorship in nearby Nicaragua. Five months later, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan.

For the rising tide of American foreign policy conservatives, these events were viewed as a step backward for the United States. The root cause of this perceived impotence was a Carter administration paralyzed into inaction by fear of another Vietnam-style morass. In the summer of 1980, Ronald Reagan stood before his fellow Republicans in Detroit, Michigan, where he accepted his presidential nomination in a convention filled with foghorns and the whistles and cheers of a wild crowd. He told his audience when “we cast our eyes abroad…[a]dversaries large and small test our will and seek to confound our resolve, but we are given weakness when we need strength.” American might, Reagan contended, would restore freedom and world peace.

“This Democratic and Anti-Oligarchic Revolution”

One night in March 1980, a “slightly built man wearing glasses and the three gold stars of a full colonel in the Salvadoran army” announced on television to the nation that more than 200 of the largest private farms would be expropriated as part of the government's effort to promote social and economic justice in this desperately poor country. In El Salvador, less than 2 percent of the population owned more than half of the arable farmland; 40 percent of the rural population owned no land at all and worked as sharecroppers on large estates or on the land of absentee owners. The next day army troops “led by officers waving the new decree” arrived at the farms to establish the new cooperatives that would be run by the peasants.

Over the next weeks, in a makeshift army command center, an officer monitored the expropriations by placing pins on a wall map indicating the designated farms. Militaries in Latin America were historically aligned with the oligarchy – and this was certainly true for much of El Salvador's history. So it was especially ironic that the military was considered the critical institution for implementing the land reform given that “power and security” were certainly needed – something impossible for a civilian agency. After the October 1979 coup, the military had benefited from the purging of around 20 percent of the entire corps – which according to the CIA had the effect of “neutralizing many corrupt senior officers and their subordinates who had long ago been co-opted by rightist civilian elites.” Now with the army backing reform, the “political and economic power of the oligarchy was quickly reduced.”

The sweeping land reform was promulgated with the “Basic Agrarian Reform Law, Decree 153” in March 1980 and had three fundamental components. Phase I (Decrees 154 and 842) included the expropriation of landholdings of all persons controlling more than 500 hectares.

“Guerrilla Universitaria”

Travel writer Paul Theroux was visiting El Salvador in the late 1970s to deliver a lecture at the National University in San Salvador on “little known books by famous American authors.” With the literary event concluded, it occurred to him that he had “nothing more to do in San Salvador.” He then had a question for his local hosts that no one seemed to have a good answer for: why was there a mural of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in the university during the rule of a right-wing dictatorship? Theroux had visited the National University at a time when it was actually open. In 1972, the military regime forcibly closed it using tanks and artillery and kept it shuttered until 1974. In 1980, the military/civilian junta once again moved troops onto the campus, leaving dozens dead and offices and classrooms destroyed. The government did not open the university for four years.

American novelist and literary journalist Joan Didion described the state of the campus after visiting in 1982:

Another foreign correspondent described the government's justification for closing the university: “It claimed, with some plausibility, that it was a recruiting and training ground for rebels. Some of us sneaked onto campus soon after the closure and found some classroom blackboards still covered with diagrams for bomb-making.” The paradoxes that Theroux and Didion experienced lay at the heart of El Salvador's emerging ideological and eventually armed insurrection.

“They Were Never Ours to Lose”

American nuns Ita Ford and Maura Clarke were members of the Maryknoll order, which specialized in international mission work. In 1980 they were working in the Salvadoran mountain town of Chalatenango assisting in a project for the resettlement of refugees fleeing the unfolding violence. Sister Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a lay volunteer, were conducting similar work for a parish in the coastal town of La Libertad.

Jean Donovan had previously worked at an accounting firm in Cleveland, Ohio, but in 1977 she quit her job and joined the Maryknoll Lay Mission, a Catholic order. Donovan was sent to El Salvador where she worked as an accountant. Not surprisingly, Donovan greatly admired Archbishop Romero and even worked with him. She regularly baked him chocolate chip cookies and dropped them off after Sunday mass. Although increasingly terrified as violence levels escalated in the late 1970s, Donovan continued her work: “Things are so much worse, it's unbelievable,” she reflected to a friend in May 1980. “People are being killed daily. We just found out that three people from our area had been taken, tortured, and hacked to death.” Not long after, two close friends were murdered immediately after walking her home. She considered returning to the United States. “I almost could,” she wrote, “except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.”

Dorothy Kazel and Maura Clarke also revealed their fears through their writing but, like Donavan, neither could bring themselves to leave El Salvador.

The painful debacle in Vietnam that officially ended in 1975 led many Americans to conclude that the United States should avoid fighting in far away jungles and swamps alongside dubious local allies in the name of defeating global communism. Growing inflation sparked by Vietnam War spending and the first “oil shock” in 1973, and the searing Watergate domestic political scandal that brought down Richard Nixon's presidency were two of many other factors that weakened the American public's confidence in their government's competence and honesty. Most notably in the 1975 hearings chaired by Democratic senator Frank Church, congressional revelations about the CIA's involvement in seemingly morally dubious covert operations that unseated sitting governments in countries from Iran (1953) to Chile (1973) only further weakened Americans’ self-given identity as a beacon of freedom and transparency.

The United States endured a period of “imperial presidency” following World War II when anti-communism fears inclined Congress to defer to presidential prerogatives in places like Vietnam. Now, by contrast, it was as if an imperial Congress sought to use its powers to check the Executive Branch. One way Congress attempted to redress these excesses was to focus on the internal nature of regimes receiving American aid, especially military.

Las Catorce

The decades leading up to the civil war were a tumultuous time that up-ended El Salvador's relatively predictable and stable political climate. To give a full sense of this harrowing story, this chapter addresses several key actors and movements that emerged on the left, right, and center of Salvadoran politics and society in the 1960s and ’70s. It seems appropriate to begin with the power that stood the test of time in this tiny Central American country – the oligarchy.

When foreign journalists during the war years wrote about the Salvadoran oligarchy, they almost invariably used the term “las catorce” for the fourteen families that were said to rule the country. The revolutionary left also described the oligarchs in such terms. According to one guerrilla leader interviewed in Havana in 1980, “Some 14 families own most of the land in El Salvador. These families are also linked to North American capital through the interests they have in the American-controlled industries.”

While the term las catorce was widely used, there were in fact around 100 clans that were the effective owners of Salvadoran industries and land. But even that number was suspect as some contended that it was in fact much larger, even if a tiny fraction compared to the country's total population. According to Jorge Sol Castellanos, a 66-year-old businessman and minister of the economy, “It's different from an aristocracy, which we also have. It's an oligarchy because these families own and run almost everything that makes money in El Salvador.

“Communists Win These Kinds of Negotiations”

In an endeavor to bolster regional peace efforts in an isthmus racked by revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence, the foreign ministers of Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela established the Contadora Group, named after the Panamanian island where the first meeting took place in January 1983. Under the informal leadership of Colombian president Belisario Betancur, five Central American governments (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua) began talks under the Contadora auspices. Within a year, the Contadora Group had come up with a draft treaty that focused on security and stability as opposed to domestic democracy. This version would have required the Sandinistas to end their aid to the Salvadoran guerrillas as well as evacuate Cuban and Soviet-bloc military personnel.

Perhaps assuming that Managua would reject it, the Reagan administration reacted positively to the draft. Remarkably, though, within weeks, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega announced that his government supported the treaty “in its totality, immediately, and without modifications.” Citing that U.S. assistance to the contras as well as Nicaragua's dependence on Cuban and Soviet military support undermined the treaty, the Costa Rican, Salvadoran, and Honduran governments failed to embrace the draft.

By 1986, the Contadora process struggled to develop a credible program that all the regional governments would endorse, but another accord, Esquipulas II, would come to fruition. Esquipulas II was named after the Guatemalan town where it was signed by the five Central American presidents in early August 1987. Based on a plan created by Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, Esquipulas II called for an end to hostilities, open elections, and the end of external assistance to irregular actors. Of particular significance to the Salvadoran case, Esquipulas II emphasized the “incorporation of [the] region's insurgents into the political process” through “internationally supervised democratic elections.