Post-transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador

6. El Salvador’s Long War

The Counterinsurgency War (1980–1992) El Salvador was ruled for much of the twentieth century by an oligarchy that, according to James Dunkerley, “has a good claim to be one of the . . . most pugnacious and reactionary in the world.”1 Left-wing guerrilla groups emerged in the late 1970s in response to this exclusionary tradition; the regime under which massive HRVs were carried out in El Salvador was a right-wing civilian-military alliance engaged in a counterinsurgency civil war against these groups. Government forces confronted the leftist insurgent group Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) for just over a decade until a series of UN-sponsored peace accords in 1991 and 1992. El Salvador’s conflict quickly became a proxy war. The United States, driven by cold war anticommunism and the desire to avoid a repeat of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, became the “mentor and military, economic and political mainstay” of the Salvadorean regime (Zamora 2001, 65), pouring extensive military and economic aid into the country with the aim of preventing a guerrilla victory (Call 2003). A mixture of military stalemate and changing international attitudes finally helped send both sides to the negotiating table. The United States eventually joined the UN and other Central American governments in calling for a political rather than military settlement to the war. 1. Dunkerley (1982, 7). See also Stanley (1996). 6 el salvador’s long war 150 post-transitional justice Patterns of HRVs Political violence during El Salvador’s civil war is notable for its sheer scale as well as for the difficulties it presents in reaching an accurate final death toll.2 Many victims were from rural communities where institutional reach, never comprehensive, had been disrupted further by the war. Military tactics such as the massacre of civilians and forced displacement of entire villages blurred the boundary between combat deaths and HRVs. Right-wing death squads, closely linked to state security forces, were also used to disguise official involvement in repression. Both state and death squad agents made use of extreme exemplary violence, such as extrajudicial executions accompanied by severe mutilation. By comparison with the Southern Cone, El Salvador therefore suffered a higher absolute and relative3 incidence of fatal violence, with proportionately less reliance on an infrastructure of repression involving clandestine detention centers and the like. El Salvador also saw much more significant political violence from the left. The official Salvadorean truth commission report4 documented such FMLN practices as kidnappings, bombing campaigns, and assassinations. Fatal violence was at its height between 1978 and 1983, becoming less frequent and more selective between 1983 and 1987.5 According to the truth commission, a “marked decrease” in death squad activity was attributed to public denunciation of the practice by the U.S. government (UN 1993, 31) as well as to the 1984 election of José Napoleón Duarte as president. Duarte had been supported by the United States precisely as a moderate alternative who would “tone down” HRVs. Deaths and displacement, however, remained high, with aerial bombardments used to dislodge the FMLN from whole expanses of territory (34). The years 1987 to 1989 saw the first signs of progress in peace talks. Attacks nonetheless escalated in the run-up to the 1989 presidential elections, won by Alfredo Cristiani of the right-wing ARENA 2. Call (2002, 386) suggests seventy-five thousand war-related deaths, mostly of noncombatants . Stanley (1996, 1) suggests fifty thousand. 3. Fatal violence was higher in El Salvador relative to the full total of serious HRVs and also per head of population. See Stanley (1996, 3). 4. Published in 1993 as UN document S/25500. Page references cited here are from the official English edition, titled “From Madness to Hope” (UN, 1993). 5. Call (2002) and UN (1993). Before the FMLN’s formal emergence in 1980, right-wing violence was targeted at the five leftist groups that were its precursors, as well as at supposedly “subversive ” popular organizations. el salvador’s long war 151 party. In the final two years of the war, although both sides had virtually acknowledged that a military victory was not possible, violence continued as combatants attempted to secure the upper hand for eventual negotiation of a cease-fire. external intervention and hrvs The key external actor in the Salvadorean war was undoubtedly the U.S. government. Although winning the counterinsurgency war was the prime U.S. concern, human rights atrocities soon sparked...