Salvadoran Revolutionary Is a Compromiser in Exile

A decade ago, the search for Joaquin Villalobos required a bone-grinding jeep trip past hostile army checkpoints, across a mined riverbed and into the rough mountains of El Salvador.

Even that might come to naught if one of Latin America’s ablest and most ruthless guerrilla leaders refused to show his face to outsiders, as he often did for years at a time.

Today, a visit with Villalobos calls for a short train ride from here into the English countryside, past velvety green hills and Cotswold stone cottages, to the neat row house he shares with his wife and three sons near Oxford.

The “baby-faced killer,” as U.S. officials called him while spending $4 billion trying to defeat his rebel army in the 1980s, can be found in the cozy living room where his boys play Nintendo games and he relaxes at the end of a day.

Villalobos is ensconced at Oxford University now, reflecting on the U.S.-backed war against his rebels in El Salvador, writing about that country’s national elections on Sunday and reinventing himself as post-Cold War peacemaker rather than guerrilla warrior.

He has abandoned the Marxist-Leninist ideology that dominated his armed movement and has rejected the use of violence as a means for bringing about political change.

Instead, the man who once ordered dozens of kidnappings and assassinations now criticizes his old comrades for their failure to moderate their views and win over middle-of-the-road voters in a peacetime presidential election that they are almost certain to lose.

“There must be a viable opposition that can compete in elections,” Villalobos, who considers himself a social democrat now, said the other day. “You have to win the undecided votes, and they tend to be conservative people, difficult to convince because they are afraid of brusque change.”

Old Cohorts See a Self-Interested Sellout

Negotiation, compromise and education have become his catchwords. A career in conflict resolution may be in his future. But along the way, Villalobos has fallen out with most of his cohorts from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, who see him as a self-interested sellout to bourgeois ideals.

Reviled by the right for his leading role in the war and by the left for his politics of pragmatism, Villalobos has become El Salvador’s equivalent of Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary assassinated by extremists in 1922.

As a result, Villalobos heeded the warnings of foreign diplomats who feared for his safety and left his homeland three years ago. He now lives in the kind of exile he had refused since his father offered him a ticket out of the country before he took up arms at the age of 19.

“It was a very difficult decision for me to leave El Salvador. After the war ended, what I most wanted was to live in my country, where I had fought for 20 years,” Villalobos said. “It is a rather sui generis exile, since normally exile happens when there is persecution, and I left when it was finally possible to live in the country.”

At 47, Villalobos has a fuller face than he did in the 1980s. His black hair is lightly flecked with gray, and his round spectacles are bifocals. He is not a cynical or bitter man, yet clearly the move has not been easy.

The toughest challenge for the ex-commander, who fought the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army to a stalemate and whose views were published in Foreign Policy magazine, has been to learn the basics of English grammar.

“You can’t imagine how difficult it is after 40 to learn a foreign language when you have never learned one before,” he said.

“That is why I say that the new illiterates are the ones who do not speak English and do not know how to use computers,” he continued. “It is why I am convinced that education, the struggle for access to information, is as important a goal now as the struggle for property was in the past. And all the better, because you don’t have to expropriate education.”

His own struggle with English has paid off.

Last year, Villalobos earned a degree in political science with the highest honors from St. Antony’s College, Oxford. It was, he said, one of the most joyous days of his life, along with the one in January 1992 when El Salvador’s peace agreement was signed.

Villalobos also enjoys living in a house without bars on the windows and moving about without bodyguards--liberties he did not have in El Salvador.

Britain Offers the Pleasure of Anonymity

He hates the gray weather of England but loves the cloud cover of anonymity that the country offers.

“What I like most is that here I am an average person, like everyone else,” he said. “I go to the supermarket and nobody knows me.”

Yet there is isolation in that freedom. Villalobos spends much of his day on the Internet and talking long-distance on the telephone, reading Salvadoran newspapers and discussing with friends the political situation in the country that seems to have no place for him.

He is intimately familiar with the polls that put his onetime co-commander, Facundo Guardado, far behind Francisco Flores, the candidate of the far-right Nationalist Republican Alliance party, known as Arena, in the run-up to Sunday’s presidential balloting.

In poor neighborhoods of El Salvador, it is often said that Villalobos is at Oxford “studying to be president.” He laughs at the idea that this is something one could do in academe or abroad.

“Politics is a vocation. I was more of a guerrilla than a politician,” he said.

This is hard-learned humility for Villalobos, who has often been accused of arrogance by allies and enemies alike.

The son of a middle-class family from San Salvador, Villalobos was a university student leader before he went underground in the early 1970s to form the People’s Revolutionary Army, one of the five groups that eventually made up the FMLN.

The guerrillas were determined to defeat a brutal army and replace the country’s oligarchy with a leftist government. With the backing of Cuban President Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, they fought a 12-year war that became President Reagan’s line in the sand against communism. The result was more than 70,000 dead and a military standoff.

The United Nations brokered the 1992 peace agreement that allowed the FMLN rebels to put down their guns and enter legal politics in El Salvador.

Villalobos quickly became a regular at embassy receptions and a friend to American diplomats who not long before had demonized him as the hardest of hard-liners.

Rebel Stance Was ‘Least Ideological’

His wing of the FMLN was “always the least ideological group, but because we were the most active militarily they saw us as the worst,” Villalobos said. “We hurt their strategy. But we were always the most pragmatic.”

So pragmatic that Villalobos confessed to wartime kidnappings and assassinations before a U.N. truth commission while the rest of the ex-guerrillas kept quiet and saw his testimony as a betrayal.

His embrace of free-market ideology further alienated his allies on the left, and Villalobos broke away from the FMLN in 1995 to form his own small Democratic Party. His idea was to make alliances with moderates from the left and right--to alienate the extremes--but it failed, in part because his own name was so tied to the extreme.

He left for Oxford and a period of reflection, with financial help from the British government.

“I feel proud of my past, with all that implies--the errors, the responsibilities. I belonged to a generation that didn’t have an option, and in that reality we did well. We made war well, and we made peace well,” Villalobos said.

“If I judge what we won in light of the ideology that at one time was dominant in the front, we lost. But if I judge it by the real changes we made, then we won,” he said. “If we lose this election on Sunday, it’s because we lost it, but the rules of the game are there. We reformed the police, the army. That is real change. They used to do what they wanted in the country. Now they can’t.”

The FMLN made great strides in the 1997 elections, winning city halls in the capital, San Salvador, and 55 other cities, along with 27 of the 84 congressional seats--one fewer than Arena.

However, public infighting over whether to remain an ideologically pure leftist party has hampered its presidential bid. Villalobos argues that other former combatants and FMLN radicals should step aside and let a moderate left take center stage.

“The ultimate proof of democracy in El Salvador will be when Arena delivers the government to the left,” he said.

Villalobos, meanwhile, hopes his stay in Oxford is long enough that his children become bilingual and he is able to finish writing three books on El Salvador.

Does he yearn to return there?

“I don’t know. But one thing is for sure: I am concerned about my country,” he said. “I would like to help, which is not always the same as being in the front line.”