El Salvador in Transition, and: Salvador, and: Revolution in El Salvador (review)

BOOK REVIEWS. BernardJ. Wolfson, editor El Salvador in Transition. By Enrique Baloyra. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. 236 pp. $19.95 ($8.95, paper). Salvador. By Joan Didion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. 96 pp. $12.50. Revolution in El Salvador. By Tommie Sue Montgomery. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982. 252 pp. $22.50 ($10.95, paper). Reviewed by Leonel Gómez Vides and Thomas P. Anderson. Mr. Gómez Vides, former deputy director of El Salvador's Agrarian Reform Program, L· currently in exile in Washington, D.C. Professor Anderson, a longtime observer of El Salvador, teaches at Eastern Connecticut State University. These three recent studies of the current crisis in El Salvador each offers a unique perspective on that wartorn land. Enrique Baloyra writes from the standpoint of a political scientist. Most of his work has dealt with electoral studies, particularly in Venezuela. Professor Baloyra's perspective is no doubt conditioned by the fact that he is a Cuban exile once trained to overthrow Fidel Castro. Joan Didion, on the other hand, is a professional novelist writing a factual account of the very sort of events she fictionalized in A Book of Common Prayer. Tommie Sue Montgomery is an academic, but also a political activist who has worked in Sandinist Nicaragua. The title of Professor Baloyra's honest and scholarly work is carefully chosen. He views El Salvador as a country in transition, whereas Professor Montgomery sees it as being in revolution. Professor Baloyra notes that the country passed from a period of "military reformism" in the 1960s to a "militarized capitalism" and "reactionary despotism" in the late 1970s. The coup of October 15, 1979, was an attempt to move in a reformist direction once again, but this effort was sabotaged by the "disloyal Right," including such figures as Roberto D'Aubuisson. Ironically, the election of March 1972, which made Major D'Aubuisson president ofthe Constituent Assembly, is seen by Professor Baloyra as basically honest, although he does admit to certain flaws in the process. And despite the fact that the Right managed to control the assembly, he contends that 227 228 SAIS REVIEW the Christian Democratic party emerged from the election as the strongest force in Salvadoran politics. El Salvador in Transition quite rightly emphasizes the interlocking control of the oligarchy and the military in El Salvador. El Salvador for over fifty years has been a gangster state; what has held the country's power-brokers together has been a network of corruption so entrenched that only a basic change in the structure can bring any sort of peace. It is a country in which power, naked and unashamed, comes out of the barrel of a gun. While acknowledging the economic and social problems, this book does not emphasize the reality that El Salvador is a stricken land; a land that cannot feed or find work for a population that doubles every twenty to twenty-five years. It is a land, still largely agricultural, in which the overworked soil blows away in the dry season and washes away in the wet; a land with one person per acre of its surface. Professor Baloyra also overemphasizes the role of political parties. The political parties of El Salvador, even when they appear to be in power, actually only front for the military. A politican—whether in the party of National Conciliation, the army's official party for almost two decades, or in the Christian Democrats, which found favor with the army more recently—is on display, offering his services in much the same way as the girls of San Salvador's Calle Celis. The particular tanda (class year at the military academy) that has risen to the top chooses from among the available politicians, allowing them their own campaign and electoral displays while weaving them into the network of corruption. The individual politician may well practice self-deception, assuring himself that if he has been coopted he has only allowed this with the intention of setting things right and preventing worse men from coming to power. But, inevitably, the moment of truth arrives when one must either submit or quit, and the consequences of quitting...