Salvadorans Celebrate End of 12-Year War

A still-divided El Salvador formally ended 12 years of brutal civil war Tuesday, declaring a new era of peace and reconciliation but recognizing it will take a long time for this battered society’s deep wounds to heal.

With Central America’s heads of state and Vice President Dan Quayle looking on, President Alfredo Cristiani and the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) signed a final pact certifying “authentic peace” throughout the land after 11 months of a successful but tense cease-fire.

“The armed conflict in El Salvador has come to an end,” U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali proclaimed to a spirited, at times confrontational audience that brought together the extremes of the country’s political spectrum.

The ceremony inside a convention hall at San Salvador’s International Fairgrounds marked the conclusion of more than two years of U.N.-sponsored negotiations to end bloodshed and bring about democratic change.

In a swift succession of events, Tuesday’s festivities followed official recognition of the guerrilla front as a legal political party, and the last of rebel fighters turned in their weapons to U.N. peacekeepers. In exchange for demobilization of the guerrilla army, the government has agreed to sweeping political and military reforms.

“The history of El Salvador has taken a turn of momentous importance--from war to peace, from confrontation to reconciliation,” declared Cristiani, whose remarks drew a standing ovation from friends and foes alike. “There is no reason why we cannot now construct among all of us bridges of trust and understanding.”

The civil war in this tiny nation claimed more than 75,000 lives as Washington spent some $4 billion to support the Salvadoran government and its military against what the Reagan Administration termed the advance of communism in the hemisphere.

The war, fueled also by startling inequities between rich and poor, devastated El Salvador’s economy and infrastructure, tore apart families and sent thousands of Salvadorans fleeing to neighboring countries and the United States, especially to Los Angeles.

U.S.-trained and -financed Salvadoran government forces eventually fought the guerrilla armies, supported by the Soviet Bloc, to a virtual standstill. That impasse, combined with the end of the Cold War and dwindling interest on the part of both sides’ sponsors, sent the government and the guerrillas to the negotiating table under U.N. auspices.

Although peace was formalized Tuesday, participants in the day’s events--which also included marches, rallies and a soccer game--noted somberly that the rebuilding of El Salvador is only just beginning.

“The reunification of Salvadoran society is still not within reach,” Boutros-Ghali said. “The scars of the past are still present. It is essential that those in a position of responsibility should play a leading role in healing the wounds.”

Cautioning his audience that democracy remains an “elusive goal,” he urged Salvadorans to become tolerant of differing views and respectful of human rights.

The theme of Tuesday’s ceremony was national reconciliation. Speakers such as Cristiani and former rebel commander Shafik Handal were careful to praise and thank their recent enemies, as well as their own supporters.

When Quayle lauded Cristiani as “the man known around the world as the person who brought peace to El Salvador,” the five Farabundo Marti leaders, seated on the stage a short distance from the vice president, joined in the applause.

“The American people are proud to extend the hand of friendship to all of you,” Quayle told the audience, “regardless of which side you took in the past conflict.”

Quayle also drew sustained applause when he announced that the U.S. government is forgiving 75% of El Salvador’s debt, or $466 million of a total debt of $617 million accumulated in the last 15 years.

But other reactions from the audience showed just how polarized El Salvador remains.

Supporters of the former guerrillas and members of Cristiani’s right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) tried to outshout each other. The left booed Cristiani’s praise for the “professionalism” of the armed forces; the right booed mention of Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas and other church leaders who have advocated working in behalf of the poor.

Members of the Arena party, from whose ranks allegedly came organizers of some of El Salvador’s brutal death squads, sat in stony silence when Boutros-Ghali emphasized the need to explore atrocities committed in the name of war. And FMLN supporters interrupted the national anthem with shouts of revolutionary slogans.

The loudest exchange came when Handal, the former guerrilla leader and head of the Salvadoran Communist Party, enthusiastically thanked Cuba and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, who supported the guerrillas with weapons, money and sanctuary. Amid loud boos and hisses, Handal insisted on repeating the expression of gratitude as the crowd exploded.

Despite lingering mistrust and doubts on both sides, officials and former fighters praised dramatic reforms that the U.N.-brokered peace accords, signed in Mexico City on Jan. 16, have brought to El Salvador.

“The country has lived the most extraordinary period of change in its history,” said former guerrilla commander Joaquin Villalobos, considered the architect of the rebels’ most effective military strategy. Francisco Jovel, another former guerrilla commander, observed, “This is a revolution--a democratic revolution.”

Besides legalizing the FMLN as a political party, the former rebels now openly operate what were once clandestine radio stations, and former fighters have been able to move about the capital with relative ease. The 8,000-member guerrilla force has been demobilized, and rebels gave the United Nations an inventory of their weapons, including 55 antiaircraft missiles.

An army battalion implicated in the war’s most egregious atrocities--the 1981 massacre of more than 700 civilian peasants and the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter--has been dismantled, and an academy to train a new, civilian police force has been established.

But still incomplete among reforms promised in the peace accords is the removal from the military of its worst human rights abusers, a step that many consider crucial to El Salvador’s ability to build a new country.

A coalition of leftist parties charged Tuesday that the government is trying to negotiate a deal with the FMLN whereby some of the officers who are to be purged would be spared. More than 100 officers, including Defense Minister Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce, are believed to be on a list drawn up by a civilian committee established by the peace accords to clean up the military.

Villalobos, the former guerrilla commander, denied that a deal was being struck, but he said his group and the government are discussing certain “mechanisms” to avoid “instability” as the purge is carried out. Some politicians are speculating that Ponce could be allowed to remain beyond the first of the year, the deadline for the purge.

Boutros-Ghali pointedly praised the purge commission’s work, saying the Salvadoran people will benefit from having a newly professional military “under civilian authority (and) adapted to the needs of tomorrow.”

He also said that a “watershed in the process of reuniting Salvadoran society” may come with the report of the Truth Commission, another panel established in the peace accords. It is investigating hundreds of human rights violations and is expected to come down hard on the military in a report next month.

“Salvadorans will only put the past behind them once the truth about the past is brought to light,” Boutros-Ghali said.