This Peace Is Only the Beginning : El Salvador: Both sides seem satisfied, but real victory lies in changing the conditions that brought on and sustained war.

After countless false starts and repeated postponements, peace seems to have come to El Salvador. The cease-fire worked out at the end of last year is under way; the amnesty for the guerrillas has allowed the leadership of the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) to return to their country somewhat triumphantly, and the Peace Commission charged with implementing the terms of the accord has begun its work in San Salvador.

It is much too early to tell whether the arrangement will work, much less whom it vindicates. One side, mainly the United States, has implicitly claimed that it achieved its purpose, as laid out since 1981: to stop the Marxist guerrillas from taking over. The revolutionaries, for their part, assert that they have won what they wanted: the establishment of political, economic and social conditions that will improve the situation of the impoverished majority of the country.

The return of peace and civil political competition may bring surprises or disappointments to both sides, by revealing either the left’s hidden strength or its marginalization--by showing that it has kept the grass-roots support it had in 1977-80, or that more than a decade of war has made the population weary of conflict, military or political.

But the larger lesson of El Salvador, if things don’t unravel, is already emerging. The rest of the Latin American left as well as the regional right will be scrutinizing its implications for consensus politics and pacts of national reconstruction. This is perhaps the real meaning of El Salvador’s “negotiated revolution” (a term coined by the U.N. mediator or by the FMLN--it has been attributed to both). If the peace agreements ultimately do nothing more than stand Clausewitz on his head and transform the country’s civil war into a conflict waged by other means, they will nonetheless represent an enormous step forward. Simply to have guerrillas and the oligarchy’s death squads fight out their differences politically, freely accepting their adversaries’ victories and their own setbacks, will constitute a sea change in Central American politics.

But if the agreements go beyond this, as rebel leader Joaquin Villalobos suggested in his homecoming speech in San Salvador on Saturday, and in fact mark the beginning of a new era in Salvadoran politics, then there will a greater lesson for the rest of Latin America. The gist of that lesson is that after a decade of civil war--with 75,000 dead, with up to 1 million expatriates (20% of the population) and overwhelming destruction of infrastructure, agriculture, governance and basic services--El Salvador is in no shape for further conflict, no matter how civil. The only way to avoid that is for every faction to participate in government and reconstruction, not in an authoritarian, corporativist way--the old Latin American way--but in a new, electorally sanctioned, democratically resolved, consensual manner.

But since no one is going to willingly give up his (or her) interests and aspirations without something in return, there has to be a negotiated agreement on economic and social policy. If the factions involved agree only to resolve their differences at the ballot box, a lot will have changed, but the basic, underlying divisions of the country will remain intact, as will the causes that led to the civil war. The temptation to do just that is immense: for the FMLN, to believe that it can build an unbeatable coalition for the 1994 presidential elections; for President Alfredo Cristiani’s party, that it can maintain itself in power electorally and indefinitely by capitalizing on the peace agreements and the aid that will flow in from abroad. Both sides have sound reasons for believing that their chances of success are considerable, but the practice of civilian politics is no guarantee that the nation’s problems will be addressed.

Conversely, if fundamental agreements on economic and social issues, touched upon in the peace accords but not fleshed out, can be reached and sustained for a decent interval, then the Salvadoran outcome can truly be a model. On matters such as land reform, wage policy, taxation, health and education, the role of the state and the place of the private sector, El Salvador needs not 51% of its population to agree and rebuild but a much broader majority. If on such matters a “historical compromise” can be reached (to borrow a phrase coined by the Italian Communist Party in 1973) and if the majority that supports it has a clear electoral expression, El Salvador can go a long way toward becoming a model for much of Latin America. After all, what nation in the hemisphere doesn’t face a mammoth task of reconstruction and reconciliation?