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El Salvador: Tet II
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17249 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1990 |
2,957 Words |
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F. Andy Messing, Jr.
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El Salvador is a land of extremes: unbelievable beauty and horrible ugliness, the very rich and the sickly poor, the powerful and the helpless. Understanding the country's historic and cultural aspects gives clues to the present conflict.
In fact, the current upsurge in military action in El Salvador was predicted in detail a year ago. In an op-ed article for the Los Angles Times dated January 29,1989, Allen B. Hazlewood, a senior fellow from the National Defense Council Foundation, accurately outlined the events that have happened since the start of the latest guerrilla offensive on November 11.
Hazlewood's observations and calculations result from several factors. His experience in Indochina as a Marine infantryman and later as a U. S. Army Special Forces adviser helped, but 14 years in Central and South America as a Special Forces adviser (7 years in El Salvador) were major factor in his foresight. Another key factor was that he examined the conflict in a multidimensional way, using formulas developed by Sun Tzu and the late Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale. To both these men, warfare was complex and the killing of the adversary not the sole objective. Sun Tzu's premise was that "supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." Lansdale realized during his efforts to defeat communist guerrillas in the Philippines in the late1940s and early 1950s that "taking the cause away from the guerrillas was the essence of a counter-insurgency action." The merging of these concepts produces a comprehensive strategy that negates the "body-count" theory often applied to low-intensity conflict scenarios.
Two of the previous U. S. ambassadors to El Salvador, Deane Hinton and Thomas Pickering, understood this approach. They developed a full-spectrum strategy to complement the visionary elements of Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte's government. This plan for economic reconstruction stressed the importance of political plurality, social justice, economic opportunity, low-key small unit action, civil defense, and civic action.
Then several events collided to derail the significant progress that had been accomplished by 1986. Two were man-made, two were natural disasters. The man-made elements were the consolidation of the communist Farabundo Marti National Liberation (FMLN) leadership and its subsequent change in long-term strategy, and the arrival of another U.S. ambassador who allowed Duarte's plan to be amended. The natural disasters were the economy-shattering October 1986 earthquake and the onset of terminal cancer in Duarte. These elements combined to disrupt the steady lowering of violence. Accordingly, the stage was set for Hazlewood's warning of an impending guerrilla offensive.
'LEBANONIZATION' PROCESS
The election of Alfredo Cristiani in March 1989 was the beginning of the "Lebanonization" of El Salvador because it further polarized the political environment. The socialist/communist political Left, called the Democratic Convergence Party, was resoundingly defeated in the election. This caused it to lose power to the extreme Left, led by Commandante Joaquin Villalobos, the central guerrilla commander who insists on a military victory by the FMLN. Simultaneously, within Cristiani's own right-of-center party, ARENA, a nebulous faction dedicated to the same objective of crushing the
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