El Salvador: The War Goes On

There has been much talk of peace in Central America following the summit meeting where the region’s presidents agreed on a plan to end the Contra war in Nicaragua. While such talk is welcome, it must not obscure the fact that an even longer war, one perhaps more intractable, continues in El Salvador.

October will mark the 10th anniversary of the military coup that sparked El Salvador’s civil war, a conflict that has already claimed more than 50,000 lives and displaced a quarter of the country’s 5 million people. And the recent election of a hard-line rightist president, Alfredo Cristiani, has exacerbated the political alienation that tore the country into warring factions. Since Cristiani’s election, there has been an upsurge in assassinations, bombings and other acts of terrorism aimed at government officials and leaders of his Arena Party. Recently, Times correspondent Marjorie Miller reported that many conservative Salvadoran businessmen are reluctant to accept jobs in Cristiani’s government, despite their ideological affinity for him and their financial support for Arena, because they fear for their safety.

One of the more worrying aspects of Miller’s report is the fact that investigations into the most widely publicized assassination--the murder of Cristiani’s presidential secretary, Jose Antonio Rodriguez Porth--have come up with very different factions that had reasons to kill him. They include urban commandos aligned with the leftist guerrillas fighting the Salvadoran government, right-wing death squads who distrusted the president’s secretary for being a political pragmatist and supporters of an ambitious military officer who blamed Rodriguez for blocking their man’s appointment to a top government job.

El Salvador has been a violent, dangerous place for the last decade, but the wide spectrum of possible suspects in the Rodriguez killing points up just how complex the political struggle there has become. And it explains why some analysts wonder aloud if El Salvador is not slipping towards a more chaotic, almost tribal, warfare. In their darkest scenarios, these analysts warn that El Salvador could become Central America’s Lebanon if the crisis there is not resolved soon. For now such a parallel seems a bit strained--but for how much longer?