Salvador Embarking on Peace : Cease-fire: With today’s signing, open political action can replace violence in the troubled nation.

A week after the government and guerrillas agreed to a cease-fire in the 12-year civil war, a discreet young man delivered a letter to a meeting of El Salvador’s National Council of Churches condemning 11 of its leaders to death “to show that we are not willing to surrender our country to the hands of decaying communism.”

“According to our intelligence service,” the letter said, “all are proven members of the Communist Party and throughout the war have actively collaborated in the search for economic and logistic support” for the guerrillas.

Although the signature on the letter--the Secret Army of National Salvation--was not a familiar one, the medium was all too familiar. This was the sort of list routinely circulated in El Salvador in the early 1980s, when hundreds of church leaders, students, union activists, peasants and other suspected leftists were killed each month by right-wing death squads.

In the early 1980s, such threats left their targets only two viable alternatives: to flee the country or take up arms in the mountains.

Now, after 12 years of war and a negotiated peace, political and religious activists say they have another choice--to stay and fight openly in the legal political system.

“Things have changed,” says Julio Cesar Grande, one of the 11 Protestant church leaders targeted in the letter delivered Jan. 6. The changes were evident in the Council of Churches’ reaction to the death threat. First, it made the letter public on Salvadoran radio and television, which are far more open today than they were a decade ago. They rallied newly elected leftist legislators to publicly condemn the threat.

And they appealed to the international community, turning a copy of the letter over to a U.N. peacekeeping force that now oversees human rights in El Salvador as a result of the negotiated peace.

The availability of these public and private institutions is one of many reasons why political activists and observers predict that El Salvador’s violent history will not repeat itself after the cease-fire agreement is signed today.

Most people familiar with Salvadoran politics expect right-wing extremists to carry out some assassinations in the coming year as guerrillas return to civilian life to battle the country’s economic elite by legal means. The extreme left is likely to respond in kind. But few expect a repeat of the massive repression unleashed upon the left during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Another key reason is the fundamental change in army and security forces required by the accord. Grande said he believes that the death threat delivered to the church leaders originated within the National Guard because the list of names is identical to one that appeared on a forced confession signed by one of the church members detained by the National Guard a week earlier.

“There is no recipe to prevent massive repression,” said Ruben Zamora, vice president of the National Assembly and leader of a small leftist party once allied with the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. “But there is a high probability it won’t happen again because of the conditions in which the army ended up,” Zamora said.

Under the accords, the militarized National Guard, National Police and Treasury Police will be eliminated and replaced by a new civilian National Police, which former rebels will be allowed to join.

The army will be reduced to about half its current size, and its role will be redefined from that of a counterinsurgency force to that of a regular army charged with defending the nation from outside threats. It is to be purged of officers and soldiers deemed by an independent commission to have violated human rights.

Zamora said that both left and right have access to democratic institutions that were dysfunctional or nonexistent before the war. “The right killed because they had nothing else to sustain themselves in power,” he said. “Now they see that they have not done badly with elections.”

Historically, El Salvador has been ruled by a repressive military establishment and a tiny, right-wing economic elite that made its fortune in coffee, the country’s principal export crop. Many political observers trace the origins of the civil war to the 1972 presidential election, which the military stole from a center-left coalition headed by Jose Napoleon Duarte, a Christian Democrat. Duarte was arrested, beaten and exiled, and many leftists were driven underground into revolutionary groups that took up arms.

The war began early in 1980 after progressive young army officers who had deposed a military strongman in October, 1979, failed to effectively consolidate power. A civilian-military junta that replaced the strongman, promising land reform and other economic benefits for the impoverished two-thirds of the population, lost out to extremists of the right.

In the aftermath, right-wing death squads unleashed a reign of terror. Allegedly under the leadership of Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson--a cashiered military intelligence officer who later founded the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena party) which is now in power--the death squads kidnaped, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of suspected leftists. The mangled bodies of the victims were left on street corners as a “message” to others or were tossed into “body dumps.”

Paid with money from wealthy landowners, thugs were hired to eliminate the left. Among the prominent figures they killed were San Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero; Atty. Gen. Mario Zamora, brother of Ruben Zamora, and two American agrarian advisers and the Salvadoran head of a land distribution institute.

While international pressure led to the arrests and trials of some gunmen, the so-called intellectual authors of the killings remained free. By and large, the death squads did their work with impunity. So did the armed forces, which--backed by the United States in the Cold War battle against communism--dedicated itself to fighting the enemy within.

The guerrillas launched their first major offensive in January, 1981, and their last in November, 1989. In the interim, the United States spent about $4 billion to support the government and its counterinsurgency efforts. An estimated 75,000 people died in the war.

With the signing of the peace agreement, the war moves back into the political arena where it started, but with the country even more impoverished.

The government calculates war-related losses at $1 billion--about $329 million in damage to infrastructure and $708 million in such indirect damage as lost investments.

More than 1.5 million people were uprooted from their homes during the war. Two-thirds of them, suffering poverty or persecution, fled to the United States and other countries; others moved from the violent countryside into urban areas of El Salvador.

Still today, an estimated two-thirds of the population lives in poverty, with incomes insufficient to meet basic needs.

This is the environment in which the Farabundo Marti Front will organize a legal political party to confront the government’s neo-liberal economic policies and compete in the 1994 presidential and National Assembly elections. The new party can be expected to use some of the tactics that enraged the business elite before the war, such as strikes and street demonstrations.

But today the rebels are moving away from the radicalism that motivated them to take up arms against a repressive government. And a significant sector of the business elite, which has lived through kidnapings, sabotage, guerrilla war taxes and disappointing profits, also appears to have changed its thinking.

“The conflict has matured us at the expense of many lives,” said Ricardo Siman, whose family owns the country’s largest chain of department stores. “We have to accept that the people decide what government they want to have and what economic model.”