Our Enemy's Enemy: Human Rights and the US Intervention in El Salvador, 1977-1992 By Adam R ...

385 Pages·2014·3.01 MB·English

Our Enemy's Enemy: Human Rights and the U.S. Intervention in El Salvador, 1977-1992

By

Adam R. Wilsman

Dissertation

Submitted to the Faculty of the

Graduate School of Vanderbilt University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

History

May, 2014

Nashville, Tennessee

Approved:

Thomas A. Schwartz, Ph.D.
Gary Gerstle, Ph.D.
Marshall Eakin, Ph.D.
Michael Bess, Ph.D.
Lesley Gill, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2014 by Adam R. Wilsman

All Rights Reserved
i
To my teachers
ii
Acknowledgements

A favorite pastime of graduate students everywhere is complaining about the graduate school
experience. Graduate students are busy and often stressed out as they try to balance their various
responsibilities with writing a book-length document. While I empathize with these sentiments,
the years since August of 2007 have represented some of the best of my life, and the process of
writing the dissertation, while always challenging, has also been deeply gratifying.

My great experience at Vanderbilt University owes overwhelmingly to the wonderful people
around me. First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation adviser, Dr. Tom Schwartz,
for his kindness, selflessness, and constant support and encouragement. Over six years ago, I
decided to uproot my life and move hundreds of miles from home, all in order to work with Dr.
Schwartz. Never once have I questioned that choice.

I would also like to thank my dissertation committee members: Dr. Gary Gerstle, Dr. Marshall
Eakin, Dr. Michael Bess, and Dr. Lesley Gill. Your classes and advising fundamentally shaped
me as a writer, researcher, and student of history. I owe a debt of gratitude as well to the
Vanderbilt History Department, College of Arts and Sciences, and the Center for Teaching, each
of which provided generous support that facilitated my improvement as a scholar and teacher.

Besides the tremendous faculty at Vanderbilt, a number of other influential individuals have been
key to my success. Thank you to Dr. John Stoner and Dr. Elisa Camiscioli, my two closest
advisers at my undergraduate institution, Binghamton University, without whom I would have
never reached this point. To my many graduate student friends and colleagues at Vanderbilt, who
have come to represent my Nashville extended family: I would not have made it through without
the strength of your community. And to my new colleagues and students at Harpeth Hall School:
you have inspired me intensely, and proven central to pushing me over this finish line.

I would like to thank my parents, my sister Carly, and the rest of my family for their continued
help as I undertook the challenges of graduate school and life in a new city. To my newborn son,
Charlie: frankly, you made the process of finishing in a timely manner more challenging, but I
love you anyway. Finally, to my wife, Luisa, who has been by my side throughout this process,
who knew what she signed up for when she married me, and still stuck around: I could not have
done it without you.

Thank you one and all.

iii
Table of Contents

Page

DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................ ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii

LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... vii

INTRODUCTION: AN UNLIKELY INTERVENTION ................................................................1

Chapter

1. A COUNTRY DIVIDED: THE FOUNDATIONS OF SALVADORAN REVOLUTION ......17

La Matanza and Its Legacy .......................................................................................................17

The Christian Democratic Party: An Electoral Alternative ......................................................28

1972: An Era of Political Crisis ................................................................................................37

The Violent Alternative ............................................................................................................45

A Society in Crisis ....................................................................................................................50

In the Shadow of the Colossus ..................................................................................................59

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................63

2. UNFORESEEN EMERGENCY: CARTER AND THE SALVADORAN CRISIS .................65

Carter, Human Rights, and Latin America: A Pragmatic Approach ........................................74

From Rhetoric to Reality: Carter’s Human Rights Program ....................................................83

Central America: An Early Testing Ground .............................................................................87

iv
The Struggles of the Romero Administration ...........................................................................93

The Revolutionary Government Junta Enters the Scene ........................................................106

Happily Ever After ..................................................................................................................111

The Central American Response to Human Rights ................................................................120

Central America: From Backwater to Strategic Focus ...........................................................127

Reaching Out ..........................................................................................................................137

An International Pariah ...........................................................................................................143

Lethal Aid Returns ..................................................................................................................150

Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................157

3. TWO-FRONT WAR: THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION CONFRONTS THE
SALVADORAN CRISIS, 1981-1982 .........................................................................................160

Massacre in No Man’s Land ...................................................................................................160

Reagan’s Human Rights .........................................................................................................167

A Mess in Our Own Backyard ................................................................................................172

First Steps: Diagnosing the Problem.......................................................................................181

Opposition Coalesces ..............................................................................................................185

The Reagan Response .............................................................................................................200

The Election of 1982 ...............................................................................................................210

Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................221

4. CONFRONTING A DILEMMA: U.S. SECURITY INTERESTS AND THE PROMOTION
OF DEMOCRATIC REFORM IN EL SALVADOR, 1982-1984 ..............................................224

Reform and Its Unexpected Champions .................................................................................224

The Trouble with Bobby .........................................................................................................230

v
Papel Aguanta Todo ................................................................................................................240

Pedicarias Alive, Raisult Dead ...............................................................................................247

The Public Relations War Continues ......................................................................................254

Tipping Point ..........................................................................................................................263

Among Friends........................................................................................................................268

The Trouble with Bobby, Part II .............................................................................................283

Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................291

5. The Transplant Has Been Made, but Will it Take?: The Limits of Salvadoran Democratic
Progress, 1984-1990 ....................................................................................................................293

The Death of Lt. Col. Monterrosa ...........................................................................................293

High Marks .............................................................................................................................302

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea .............................................................................317

Godfather ................................................................................................................................326

Backslide .................................................................................................................................336

The More Things Change .......................................................................................................343

EPILOGUE: PEACE AT LAST ..................................................................................................352

CONCLUSION: LESSONS OF THE U.S. INTERVENTION IN EL SALVADOR .................362

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................373
vi
List of Figures

Figure Page
1. “Joven pero Vigoroso” .............................................................................................................. 33

2. “Alto a las Masacres”...............................................................................................................112

3. “Duarte: Stop Bombing Salvadoran Civilians .........................................................................314
vii
Introduction

An Unlikely Intervention

From the perspective of the United States, El Salvador bears none of the marks of a
strategically important country. The tiny nation, only the size of Massachusetts, has never
represented a world power with which the United States needed to contend. Militarily, as
politically and economically, El Salvador has never been a country of international repute. Nor
does El Salvador possess resources that make its security vital to the well-being of the United
States. El Salvador is not a petroleum-exporting nation, nor even a sugar- or banana-exporting
nation. There has been no United Fruit Company in El Salvador, as in Guatemala, or any single
American business that dominated El Salvador and its workers to such a degree. Thus, the
American intervention into El Salvador during that country’s civil war, which lasted from 1980
to 1992, makes little sense to many observers. The seeming lack of strategic interests in El
Salvador led many opponents of the American intervention to draw parallels to Vietnam. That
nation, a world away in more ways than one, seemed similarly tangential to American interests.
Why would the U.S. bother to expend resources on a country with so little import to American
interests, and work in tandem with a Salvadoran government whose regular human rights
violations made it an international pariah throughout much of the conflict? Critics would pose
such questions throughout the American intervention. Yet, despite all of these realities, for a
brief moment in the early 1980s, to many in Washington, El Salvador was the most important
little nation in the world, a nation upon which significant political capital was expended,
reputations staked, and American lives lost.
1
By the 1970s, El Salvador was a small nation on its way to a big conflict, and one in
which the United States would become deeply involved despite lacking interest in the country for
a century-and-a-half. In the aftermath of profound economic growth in the mid-20th century, the
1970s brought about economic crisis that ripped El Salvador apart. That crisis highlighted and
exacerbated already existing societal tensions tied to the economic disparity between El
Salvador’s powerful oligarchy and the landless or near-landless masses. This disparity stemmed
from a century long tradition of dispossession of land that started with the abolition of Indian
communal lands in 1880. El Salvador’s oligarchy and the economic inequality that it oversaw
quickly gained notoriety in the aftermath of the publication of a Time magazine article in
February of 1961, entitled, “El Salvador: Return of the Right.” This article discussed the
existence of the “fourteen families” that dominated Salvadoran economic and political life. The
idea of the “fourteen families” has held sway over how many have conceptualized El Salvador
for decades. While fourteen families represents a seemingly arbitrary number, the article’s
argument that a small group of families dominated the Salvadoran economy, owning most of the
land and capital, and wielding disproportionate influence in political life, certainly rang true.
This inequality, when combined with a stubborn political system dominated by a military-
oligarchy alliance first established in 1932, all but ensured the inevitability of revolutionary
violence. Economic crisis in the 1970s represented fertile ground for the seeds of violence. Latin
America’s “lost decade” of economic despair in the 1980s ensured that the conflict would be a
long and bloody one. So too did American dollars and weapons that after 1981, arrived in El
Salvador in massive amounts.
How did this happen? In contrast to Latin American countries like Nicaragua and Cuba,
there was little legacy of American interventionism in El Salvador. Ultimately, the Nicaraguan
2