Table Of ContentOKANAGAN COLLEGE LIBRARY
BRITISH COLUMBIA
THE LONG WAR
Dictatorship and Revolution in El Salvador
JAMES DUNKERLEY
VERSO
© 1982 James Dunkerley
First published in Great Britain by Junction Books
This edition published by Verso 1985
Verso
15 Greek Street
London W1V 5LF
ISBN 0 86091 831 9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Typeset by Elephant Productions
Printed in Great Britain by
Whitstable Litho Ltd, Whitstable, Kent
To the memory of Mercedes Recinos,
killed in Chalatenango on 27 May 1979,
one of tens of thousands
that this plague of tears compel
not pity but victory
over the barbarities of capital,
the treason of reform
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 The Rise of the Oligarchy 7
2 The Crisis of the 1930s 15
3 Militarism Readjusted 32
4 The Failure to Modernise 45
5 ‘Repression with Reforms’ 72
6 The Rise of the Left 87
7 The Model in Crisis 103
8 The Impact of Nicaragua 119
9 Revolution and Reaction 132
10 Civil War 162
Conclusion 206
Postscript 215
Notes 263
Select Bibliography 285
Appendix One: Chronology 290
Appendix Two: The Landed Oligarchy 295
Appendix Three: Glossary of Major Organisations 299
Appendix Four: The Organisation of the Opposition 303
Appendix Five: Protecting Civilisation 305
Index 311
INTRODUCTION
Although this book contains more than its fair share of footnotes, it is
the product not only of study and political conviction but also outrage.
There is nothing especially commendable in this; indeed, angry books
are often extremely hard to read and far from edifying. However, it is
more than likely that many of the people who pick up this book will
have shared, at some time and in some form, that sense of deep disgust
and anger that I experienced one sunny day in August 1981. On my
way home from work I picked up Meridiano, the midday paper of La
Paz, Bolivia, to read that the armed forces of El Salvador were using
guillotines to execute their prisoners. Some months later I saw the
detailed denuncia of the workers of‘Quality Meats of Central America’
which described how the victims were first stunned with an electric
needle and then decapitated with the modern equipment of the
slaughterhouse.
After reflection of the type that is not the privilege of those likely to
have their lives ended in such a manner it became plain that this event
stood apart from countless-ot^ier instances of murder in cold blood in
El Salvador precisely because of the needless trouble taken to kill. It was
an almost cartesian act, undertaken with care and precision; the
calculated nature of the butchery betokened a distinct sadism.
Objectively there is nothing to distinguish this from the more common
practice of the Salvadorean security forces of dragging sleepy peasants
and workers into the cold night and beating, raping and burning them
with cigarettes before they are shot and dismembered with machetes.
However, I was reminded of the incident when listening to Luis De
Sebastián of the Frente Democrático Revolucionario speak in London in
October 1981. De Sebastián forcefully made the point that the
barbarism in El Salvador was not unique to that country nor the sole
responsibility of the indigenous forces of reaction; this Moloch is
2 The Long War
equally the product of the earnest desk-ridden managers of‘counter-
insurgency employed in Washington (or London, Tel Aviv, Pretoria,
Moscow). No doubt the compilers of those neat manuals on anti
guerrilla warfare would be better pleased with operations that are
undertaken under conditions of maximum hygiene in an abattoir than
in the customary style of peasant violence.
This would all be idle speculation were it not for the millions of US
dollars pumped into the Salvadorean repressive apparatus and the vast
resources given over to train its personnel. It may have become
somewhat hackneyed to insist on the parallel with Vietnam, but in this
sense at least it stands up very well. As in Vietnam, ‘freedom’,
‘democracy and ‘stability can only be defended in El Salvador by
means that are their very opposite. As in Vietnam, the vileness of the
measures taken against faceless ‘communists’ progressively reveals the
ideals of liberal democracy to be unrealisable; the ideological construc
tion of individual liberty becomes the rationale for atrocity on a massive
scale. The contradiction at the heart of the ideal nurtured by monopoly
capitalism has been made so acute by the ferocity of the struggle that it
takes the form of a transparent hypocrisy, a phenomenon conducive
as much to anger as to understanding.
Yet, while the violation of human rights is an extremely tangible and
terrifying activity, these rights are themselves ideals; even as defined in
the UN Charter they remain unrealised in every nation on the fáce of
the globe. A ‘human right’ represents the margin of inhumanity; if we
wish to understand how and why this margin is traversed or, very
frequently, completely discarded we have to move into the terrain of
history and politics in a manner that questions the very notion that such
rights exist sui generis, evacuated of any ideological bias. This becomes
even more manifesdy the case when the norm of a‘human right’ in its
political and stricdy juridical sense (right to life, freedom from torture,
extralegal encarceration, etc.) is expanded to include ‘social’ rights,
such as those to an adequate calorie and protein intake, pure drinking
water, medical care, guaranteed wages, employment, control over
one’s body and sexuality, etc. It is, therefore, no good simply to view El
Salvador as the site of exceptional inhumanity; indeed, as De Sebastián
suggests, in a number of respects this does not just obscure but is
positively regressive.
The aim of this book is not to tabulate the incidence of barbarism in
El Salvador but to locate it in a social and political context. The most
transparent flaw of the text as a piece of history is that it has no
Introduction 3
determinate conclusion; the manuscript was concluded at the end of
March 1982 when the outcome of the struggle was neither known nor
sensibly prophesiable in any but the most general terms. However, to
have waited until the battle is decisively lost or won would have been to
seek a spurious succour in events rather than engage with them.
This becomes more obvious if one views the civil war in El Salvador
not just in its own terms but as a'moment’ in a regional upsurge that is
gripping all of Central America. This aspect is underlined by the
enormous impact of the Nicaraguan revolution, but it is also evident in
the continuing political crisis and progressive polarisation in
Guatemala, the growing confusion and instability in Honduras, and
the deepening economic crisis in Costa Rica, hitherto the most
becalmed nation in the region. Clearly, the decision taken in
Washington to ‘make a stand’ in El Salvador accounts for the extra
ordinary ferocity and extended nature of the war there even compared
with Nicaragua. However, there is much to suggest that the revolution
that is brewing in Guatemala could result in a conflagration greater still
in its effects on the human condition and balance of political power in
Central America.
The mandarins of the State Department have, as a consequence,
speedily dusted down the domino theories of yore. Although these are
suffused with all manner of incomprehensible jargon and have been
stretched to idiotic lengths, they do at least register a recognition of the
international dimension of the conflict that was not for some time
paralleled on the left It has not been possible to give this aspect its
proper due here but it is worth noting that revolution is not being
‘exported’. It has been nurtured in the social conditions of states that
comprise a region that re politically balkanised but of a relatively
homogeneous economic and social fabric. If the peculiarities of
N icaragua under the Somoza dynasty proved to be the weakest link in
the chain, and the small size, high population and remarkable
omnipotence of the local oligarchy in El Salvador provided an obvious
sequitur, there is nothing so remarkable in the physiognomy of the
other countries that would confer upon them some kind of immunity.
The 19 million people who inhabit the five core states of Central
America (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and
Nicaragua) live in backward capitalist states which rely upon agri
culture for 72 per cent of their exports and at least 25 per cent of their
GDP. Although they have over the years become known as ‘Banana
Republics’, it is upon coffee that they depend, coffee beans accounting
