‘Forget Grudges,’ Salvadoran Urges : Duarte Era Ending With Nation’s Future Unclear

Before leaving El Salvador for medical treatment in Washington last week, President Jose Napoleon Duarte arranged his affairs in the manner of a man who did not expect to return to his office.

Duarte left behind a state of the nation speech, urging the country “to forget grudges and forgive,” and a letter to his Christian Democratic colleagues pleading for an end to infighting that threatens to destroy the party. At the airport, Duarte embraced members of the National Assembly, his Cabinet, the Supreme Court, the diplomatic corps and friends who came to bid him farewell.

“I want to think I am going to die and to arrange things so I can leave in peace,” Duarte told a close friend upon learning that he was seriously ill with cancer of the stomach and liver.

He is scheduled to undergo exploratory surgery at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington today to determine the extent of the malignancy, but whatever the ultimate outcome, his friends and political analysts here do not expect him to actively govern during the last year of his scheduled term.

His illness thus marks the end of an eight-year era during which Duarte first sat on a governing military-civilian junta, then became the country’s first elected civilian president in half a century. As such, he was the centerpiece in this country of U.S. policy, a primary aim of which was to defeat a stubborn guerrilla uprising that quickly assumed the dimensions of a civil war.

A man of such zeal that his political enemies accuse him of being messianic, Duarte has believed that he alone could create a political center between the leftist guerrillas in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and the rightist oligarchy represented by the Nationalist Republican Alliance, popularly known as the Arena party.

He has governed through some of the most violent years in Salvadoran politics. His admirers believe he will go down in history as he would wish--the president who implanted a democratic political system here after years of military dictatorships. They say he fought tenaciously to break an alliance between the oligarchy and the armed forces and to allow legal political dissent that had not previously existed in the country.

To do so, his critics say, he “mortgaged” the country to the United States and was subservient to Reagan Administration policy in Central America. He was sustained over the years, they assert, more by Washington than by the Salvadoran people.

$3 Billion in U.S. Aid

For the United States, Duarte has been the answer to leftist guerrillas who were on the verge of a military victory in the early 1980s. The Administration has spent more than $3 billion in economic and military aid to prevent that victory. In eight years, the guerrillas have not won the war, but the government hasn’t done so either.

Duarte’s platform was peaceful reform rather than violent revolution. Yet most of the lofty goals he set for himself have not been fulfilled. Duarte seemed to acknowledge the frustration this has caused him in his state of the nation speech.

“When people expect easy and fast solutions, they are not conscious of how arduous it is to realize these dreams,” he wrote in the speech read by Vice President Rodolfo Castillo Claramount.

During his presidency, Duarte has held three rounds of peace talks with the guerrillas but has failed to achieve peace or reduce the level of fighting.

In his speech, Duarte urged the nation to continue fighting against “economic and institutional collapse.” The war has displaced hundreds of thousands of peasants and consumed at least half of the government’s budget each year. That, plus the guerrillas’ strategy of sabotage, has prevented economic development in El Salvador. The country’s poor--a majority--are worse off today than when Duarte took office.

Elite Families

Duarte has worked to break the economic and political monopoly held for generations by El Salvador’s elite coffee-growing families with the backing of the army. In this, he has had mixed success. He failed to win passage of a law that would have made children of the rich serve in the army, made up largely of the poor. But he presided over the nationalization of the country’s banks and coffee exports and a modest agrarian reform program that has redistributed about 20% of El Salvador’s farmlands. Privately, he referred to a “fourth reform.”

“The fourth reform was that from here on, the president and not the (political) right would make decisions,” a close friend says.

With U.S. financial aid, the armed forces were wooed away from the oligarchy. Military leaders learned to express respect for elections and other democratic institutions, and the army is less likely to engage in a coup d’etat today than it was eight years ago. But the U.S.-backed armed forces have grown fourfold in the Duarte era. Stronger and better armed than ever before, they remain the most politically powerful institution in the country.

Eroding Power

Duarte’s power had been severely weakened by events occurring even before his illness was discovered. Today, the future of his government’s reforms are awash with uncertainties, as are the future of El Salvador and of U.S. policy here.

Amid charges of government corruption and inefficiency, the Christian Democrats suffered a stunning defeat in National Assembly and municipal elections in March. The party lost its majority in the assembly to the rightist Arena party, and Duarte’s son, Alejandro, lost the mayoralty of San Salvador, a post that the Christian Democrats had held since Duarte was elected mayor in 1964.

In the aftermath of those elections, divisions within the Christian Democratic Party broke into the open. Two former Cabinet ministers have split the party by stubbornly competing to become its candidate in next year’s presidential election. In a bid to heal the rupture, Duarte proposed a third “unity candidate.” The move was rejected, a demonstration that Duarte was no longer in control of his party.

In keeping with the constitution, Duarte has turned his official duties over to Vice President Castillo, who is politically weak and distrusted by the armed forces and the American Embassy. To assuage their concerns, Duarte named a four-member council that includes Defense Minister Carlos Vides Casanova, which, in effect, will be making decisions.

Arena Victory Seen

Given the current political panorama, the rightist Arena party is widely expected to win the presidential election in March, 1989, with its candidate, coffee-grower Alfredo Cristiani. By next year, the ultra-rightist party is also expected to have control of all three branches of government, since the present Arena-controlled assembly will name a new Supreme Court.

If that happens, the oligarchy represented by Arena is expected to roll back Duarte’s economic reforms by creating new private banks and export companies and privatizing farm cooperatives set up under the agrarian reform.

Arena is still ruled by such extremists as former military intelligence officer Roberto D’Aubuisson, but the party has a new facade of soft-spoken politicians such as Cristiani, who talks of “a humanist doctrine and neo-liberalism.”

Arena leaders of the assembly, including a retired army officer, appeared in a recent newspaper photograph accepting a petition from the “mothers of the disappeared” requesting them to create a commission to investigate political violence. The photograph struck a strong note of irony since Arena and its backers have long been accused of heavy involvement with the military and with paramilitary death squads blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of Salvadorans earlier this decade.

There has been a resurgence of death squad-style killings in recent months, especially since the Christian Democrats lost control of the National Assembly. In the first five months of 1988, at least 36 such killings were reported by the Roman Catholic Church legal office, while 24 such cases were recorded in all of 1987.

Some of the killings appeared to be intended as warnings to the guerrillas against their announced plan to step up activities in the capital and press for a military victory by attempting to inspire a popular insurrection.

It is not known whether elements either of Arena or of the armed forces control today’s death squads. Death-squad activities do not appear to be in Arena’s political interest at present, while they are winning in the legal political field.

Arena politicians have criticized a U.S.-designed “low-intensity warfare” strategy for fighting the guerrillas that has been employed during the Duarte era. They are pressing for a stepped-up war that they believe could be won more quickly, and human rights groups fear that this could mean a sharp increase in civilian casualties and rights abuses.

The military is pushing for an anti-terrorism law that would allow the armed forces to arrest and hold suspected guerrillas for lengthy investigations. The Arena-controlled assembly is likely to grant such a law, and labor union and political activists say they fear it would be used to close the possibilities for political dissent that have been opened during the Duarte administration.

The U.S. Embassy, a key player here, is in transition. A new ambassador is expected to be named this fall and, with U.S. presidential elections in the offing, the future of American policy in El Salvador has yet to be determined.