The Foreign Service Journal, May 2012

M A Y 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53 B OOKS War and Peace Seeking Peace in El Salvador: The Struggle to Reconstruct a Nation at the End of the Cold War Diana Villiers Negroponte, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, $90, hardcover, 258 pages. R EVIEWED BY T ED W ILKINSON Though it passed almost without notice, Jan. 16 marked the 20th an- niversary of the entrance into force of the three agreements that ended El Salvador’s civil war, a conflict that lasted a decade and cost 75,000 lives. How fast that bloody decade has faded into the distant past! During the administration of Ronald Reagan, Washington’s firm support for the Sal- vadoran armed forces stemmed from concern that Central America might follow Cuba into the Soviet orbit, sending hordes of “feet people” refugees swarming across our borders. But as truth commissions in El Sal- vador and Guatemala later made clear, the greatest threat to American values in the region didn’t come from the left, but from the ruthless tactics of the armed forces in suppressing any per- ceived disloyalty. As Diana Negroponte, spouse of retired Ambassador John Negroponte, observes in this book, there has been a dramatic “threat inversion” in El Sal- vador over the past 20 years. Whereas in the 1980s “the challenge to citizen safety came from a powerful state, now the challenge comes from non- state actors” — transnational crime or- ganizations and maras (gangs). Seeking Peace in El Salvador spot- lights the period from the late 1980s through 1991, during which events aligned to move the country toward peace broke the stalemate in the civil war. Foremost among the external factors were Mikhail Gorbachev’s an- nouncement at the United Nations that the USSR would no longer sup- port wars of national liberation, and the pragmatic attitudes of Secretary of State James A. Baker and Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Bernard W. Aronson. Internally, both sides in the war had been weakened: the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN in Spanish), by the failure of its Novem- ber 1989 “final offensive;” and the Sal- vadoran armed forces, by public and international horror at the U.S.- trained Atlacatl Brigade’s murder of a would-be mediator, the rector of the Jesuit University, along with five of his fellow professors and two witnesses. These events provided a window for a formal United Nations mediation effort headed by two Peruvians: Sec- retary General Javier Perez de Cuel- lar and Alvaro de Soto, his personal representative to resolve the dispute. Negotiations under de Soto’s aegis began in early 1990, alternating among sites outside El Salvador. The Salvadoran government even- tually signed on to a broad range of changes: amendment of the constitu- tion; creation of a U.N. truth commis- sion and an internal ad hoc commis- sion to vet the armed forces for human rights violators; formation of a parlia- mentary commission to draft enabling legislation; a ceasefire and demobiliza- tion of forces on both sides; an obliga- tion to reform the security institutions of the state; and reintegration of the FMLN into civilian life. After the ad hoc commission con- cluded that most of the top com- manders in the armed forces were implicated in human rights violations, U.S. chargé d’affaires Peter Romero had the temerity to tell the assembled commanders that the peace agree- ments obliged them to retire. When this was reported back to Washington, as Negroponte relates, Romero’s courage won him the admiration of his State Department colleagues. But Romero’s courage won him the admiration of his colleagues.