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Tremors Subside in Volcanic El Salvador
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11376 |
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Current Issues
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11 / 1986 |
3,401 Words |
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Victor J. Bonilla
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Standing in the shadow of San Salvador's volcano, a visitor is apt to let his gaze wander over the lush semitropical beauty of the countryside and think of time immemorial when neither man nor his handiwork marred the landscape. Today, the sound of an army convoy carrying troops and material to the latest site of military encounter with armed insurgents brings that reverie to an abrupt halt. Past and present merge, symbolized by the volcano; it belies its surface appearance of tranquility with a potential for sudden apocalyptic destruction. This is El Salvador today.
Wandering through the crowded streets of the capital, San Salvador, one can imagine that the gaiety is here to stay. There is a construction boom under way. New shopping malls, cinemas, restaurants, and homes are going up amid a sense of renewed vigor after years of war-caused fear and privation that the people, who are optimistic by nature, endured. El Salvador in 1986 is a very different country from what it was only five years ago.
At that time, stories of countless atrocities committed by extremists of the Far Right dominated the news media. Nicaragua's misnamed Sandinista leadership declared solidarity with the people of Cuscatlan (the aboriginal name for El Salvador), all the while denying allegations that they were in any way providing arms and training to the struggling band of guerrillas who numbered as many as 15,000 by some estimates. In response to the insurgents' threat, the national armed forces swelled from 20,000 to 50,000 between 1980 and 1986.
Since the beginning of hostilities, the army has become more professional and no longer fights a 9-to-5 war. It has ceased to meddle with daily political life and has devoted its full attention to fighting a six-year-old war. A new breed of officers and noncommissioned officers are pushing out the entrenched old-boy network of school chums--where the class you graduated from at the National Military Academy meant more than how well you fought and led in the field.
A democratic political machinery is in place and, to all appearances, is likely to stay. Since 1981, three national elections have been held in spite of threats and actual acts of sabotage and violence perpetrated by those who would rather see chaos reign. People who fled the turmoil of the late 1970s and early 1980s are slowly returning from self-imposed exile abroad. Capital is being repatriated from Miami and Zurich banks. El Salvador, once the cause celebre of anti-Reagan administration Hollywood revolutionaries, liberal establishment Vietnam nostalgics, and campus new wave radicals, hardly raises an eyebrow anymore. These critics have discovered more fertile fields in Nicaragua, where their sympathies with the Leninist government permit them to exercise their anti-American proclivities. In El Salvador, the only people who object to the course the country is taking are the radical leftists and guerrillas and their mirror image on the Far Right. The U.S. Congress now almost routinely approves military and economic assistance, to the tune of $100 million in 1986 and $140 million in the preceding year. By most accounts, much of the turnabout in the country's fortunes can be directly attributed to the pivotal role President Jose Napoleon Duarte has played since he returned from exile in early 1980.
Products of the soil
But to understand
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