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By Root 2631 0

Five of its top leaders were seized in El Salvador in November 1980 by official and paramilitary forces, and were tortured, mutilated, and killed. A year before the March 1982 election, the army published a list of 138 “traitors,” which included virtually all politicians of the left and left-center. Colonel Gutiérrez, a powerful member of the junta, had stated forcefully that the FDR could not participate in the election because it was a “front” for the guerrillas. The invitation to the FDR and the FMLN to lay down their arms and compete in the election was thus fraudulent, a fact confirmed by the admission of the U.S. embassy that the FDR could not safely campaign in El Salvador, with the accompanying suggestion that they might do so by means of videotapes sent in from outside the country’s borders!38 Subsequently, even Duarte, the preferred candidate of the United States, was unable to campaign outside San Salvador in 1982 for fear of murder, and scores of Christian Democratic politicians were killed in the years 1980–84.39 In short, not only radical but even pro-U.S., mildly reformist parties could not escape decimation by political murder during those years.

It should also be emphasized that no party could organize and run candidates in El Salvador that put high priority on terminating the war by negotiations with the rebels. What makes this especially important is that reporters and observers were unanimous in 1982 that the main thing the public wanted out of the election was peace. The propaganda formula for getting out the vote in 1982 was “ballots versus bullets,” with the implication that ballots were a possible route to a reduction in the use of bullets. If, in fact, no peace candidate was eligible to run, the election was a fraud for this reason alone.

Defenders of these elections have argued that there was a substantial difference between the candidates, especially between D’Aubuisson and Duarte, so that voters had a meaningful choice.40 But D’Aubuisson and Duarte did not disagree on the central issue of interest to the Salvadoran people—whether to fight to win, or to strive for a negotiated settlement with the rebels. Both were members of the war party, with only tactical differences. Although Duarte made occasional demagogic claims that he would talk with the rebels and bring about peace, he never spelled out a peace-making agenda, never went beyond suggesting “dialogue” (as opposed to “negotiations,” which imply the possibility of substantive concessions), and never departed from the position that the rebels should lay down their arms and participate in the new “democracy” that Duarte and the army had established.

Duarte joined the junta at a moment of severe crisis in March 1980, when all the progressive civilians had left and immediately after the murder of the Christian Democratic attorney-general, Mario Zamora, by the newly prospering death squads. It was clear that the army and affiliated death squads had embarked on a policy of large-scale massacre. Duarte provided the fig leaf and apologetics that the army needed for the second matanza.41 We believe that Duarte never would have received U.S. support and protection, and could not have survived in El Salvador, unless he had made it clear that he was in basic accord with the aims of the U.S. administration and the Salvadoran army. From 1980 onward, Duarte always accepted fully the pursuit of a military solution and no compromise with “the subversives” (a phrase that Duarte uses continually, just as do the army and death-squad leaders). As Raymond Bonner points out,

The repression in 1980 reached a magnitude surpassed only by the [first] matanza and was far worse than anything imagined under General Romero . . . By the end of the year the number [murdered] had reached at least 9,000. Every day mutilated bodies, missing arms or heads, were found: behind shopping centers; stuffed in burlap bags and left on dusty rural roads; hurled over cliffs into ravines.42

And through all of this, Duarte not only provided the facade of “reform,” he regularly complimented