Doug Stokes. Cold War History. Volume 3, Issue 3. April 2003.
From 1979 to 1992, the US supported the El Salvadorian government in its counter-insurgency war. The insurgents were characterized by the US as Soviet backed communists. US support for the El Salvadorian government was sold as supporting a pro-US ally to contain Soviet expansionism within Central America. This article examines the documentation that the US used to substantiate this justification, and argues that the facts and interpretations that the US used cannot sustain the characterization of the insurgency movement in El Salvador as Soviet backed. Furthermore, even in the event of a rebel victory, and in the absence of US hostility, the insurgents would have almost certainly sought good relations with the US.
From 1979 to 1992 El Salvador’s civil war claimed over 80,000 lives. Most of these were civilians killed by government forces and its clandestine paramilitary forces. Throughout the civil war, the United States supported the El Salvadoran government through extensive arms supplies, economic aid and the training of Salvadoran state forces in counter-insurgency warfare. The central justification for this support was the US. stated need to contain alleged Soviet expansionism within Central America. The 1979 overthrow of Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaraguan dictatorship by the left-wing Sandinista movement added to Washington’s fears of the spread of subversion in Central America.
This article examines the social portrayal of the El Salvadoran insurgency. US security was explicitly linked to the balance of forces throughout the Central American region. Then US President Ronald Reagan argued ‘the security of our own borders depends upon which type of society prevails [in Central America], the imperfect democracy seeking to improve, or the Communist dictatorship seeking to expand’. However, the Reagan administration went further than merely providing a bipolar ideological lens through which policy makers viewed the unrest. It also led to the active social construction of the El Salvadoran insurgency in the popular media.
The El Salvadoran civil war was portrayed as a superpower confrontation between Soviet backed guerrillas and a pro-US state. To create this portrayal in the public mind the US government published three documents which were widely circulated to domestic and international audiences. These documents put forward two primary arguments. The first was the travels of El Salvadoran communist party leaders to various Soviet aligned states to secure arms commitments. The second was the subsequent flow of arms to the rebels from these states. This article examines these arguments and considers a number of alternative facts and critical interpretations that refute the US’ empirical evidence. It argues that the empirical evidence shows that the Salvadoran insurgency received very little Soviet, Nicaraguan or Cuban support. Furthermore, the interpretations given to the crisis by the US were largely spurious and could not sustain the characterization of the insurgency as a case of Soviet expansionism.
Although the El Salvadoran insurgency was not a case of Soviet expansionism, US support for the regime could still have been justified within a Cold War mindset if there had been a significant chance of a pro-Soviet alignment through a guerrilla victory. The article considers the record of interstate relations between the US and Soviet backed governments in Latin America and argues that in the event of a rebel victory in El Salvador, and without significant US hostility to the new government, there is little to suggest it would have aligned to the USSR. It then moves on to consider why the US backed the Salvadoran government. It argues that the US sought to destroy any movement that could potentially present an alterative developmental model and that the prevailing ideology of the Reagan administration made it more predisposed to seeking a military solution. Given the terrible human consequences of US support for the El Salvadoran government, coupled with the broad base and popular support for the insurgents, the conclusion is that the US was not justified in supporting the El Salvadoran regime and that it contributed significantly to widespread human rights abuses of civilians in El Salvador.
Historical Background
During El Salvador’s period of insurgency (1979-92) the economy was largely agriculturally based and socio-economic power was concentrated in the hands of a minority landholding autocracy. Out of a population of five million, 14 families controlled 95 per cent of the nation’s wealth. This unequal distribution of national resources was maintained through a highly authoritarian state backed by a compliant military. Demands for reform were typically heavily suppressed. Since the 1930s only two reform governments have held power in El Salvador.
During the 1970s two elections were held in El Salvador. In 1972 the Christian Democratic Party (the PDC), El Salvador’s most prominent opposition party, secured a popular mandate for reform. However, the military candidate Colonel Rivera employed blatant electoral fraud to deny the PDC power. With the denial of a democratic outlet, and an increase in state repression, reformist movements increasingly turned to armed struggle. Jose Napoleon Duarte, the leader of the PDC, argued that the 1972 elections were pivotal in transforming the El Salvadoran political landscape in so far as people concluded that the ruling powers would never allow democracy to defeat them. With further electoral fraud in the 1977 elections, the stage was set for the further alienation of reformist Christian democrats, socialists, peasant organizations and progressive military officers. The last attempt at reform was made in 1979 by a group of young military officers who staged a coup that removed the hard-line conservative General Carlos Romero. The Carter administration supported the coup as a way of promoting a viable political centre in El Salvador. With the toppling of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua by the Sandinista movement, the US viewed the officers’ coup as the best non-revolutionary mechanism for addressing the most pressing needs of El Salvador’s poor. The Carter administration argued that this would help prevent another popular revolution that could potentially lose Washington another key regional ally.
The new government, however, reverted to form as rightist elements in the military coupled with the oligarchy continued to rule behind the scenes. By January 1980 most of the civilian members of the ruling coup had resigned from the government in protest at continued military repression of the civilian population. Under the direction of the Carter administration, however, Duarte, who had been a CIA asset, joined the coup and in 1980 became its president. Despite the escalation of paramilitary murders the US continued to support the coup and in 1980, amid pleas from prominent Salvadoran citizens, the Carter administration reversed its human rights foreign policy (Carter had refused to supply the Salvadoran government prior to the Sandinista revolution) and resumed military aid.
When Reagan took office in 1980 he radically increased US military assistance to the Salvadoran government and made the ongoing insurgency a major US foreign policy priority. The new administration characterized the guerrilla umbrella organization, the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN), and its political arm the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) as a communist insurgency movement backed by the Soviet Union and armed and trained by Nicaragua and Castro’s Cuba. For the new administration, ‘the defence of the Caribbean and Central America against Marxist-Leninist takeover [became] vital to national security’. Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Reagan’s US ambassador to the UN argued: ‘I believe this area is colossally important to the US national interest. I think we are dealing here not … with some sort of remote problem in some far-flung part of the world. We are dealing with our own border when we talk about the Caribbean and Central America and we are dealing with our own vital national interest’. In short, the El Salvadoran crisis was interpreted as a pressing and vital matter of US National Security. How then did the Reagan Administration justify this threat perception?
Indirect Aggression by the Soviet Union and its Proxies: The Official US Position
In 1981 the Reagan administration produced a White Paper which it argued contained definitive evidence of the transformation of the El Salvadoran conflict from a civil war to ‘another case of indirect armed aggression against a small Third World country by Communist powers acting through Cuba’. It was based on captured guerrilla documents and US intelligence reports. The white paper succeeded in shifting debate as to the nature of the El Salvadoran conflict and managed to move the focus of public attention away from questions as to whether the US should provide military assistance to ‘how much should be given and under what conditions’. One week after the publication of the paper the US sent 20 additional military advisers to El Salvador for training purposes and $25 million in military assistance. In 1985 further evidence was produced by the US that again attempted to show the international dimensions to the conflict and the alleged involvement of Communist states in El Salvador. The 1985 report was entitled ‘Revolution beyond our Borders’; a quote taken from Tomas Borge, the Sandinista’s Minister of the Interior, and which purportedly further affirmed the US. central claim as to the internationalist Communist dimension to El Salvador’s war. These two extensive reports were critical in producing consent in favour of US security assistance to El Salvador through the construction of the conflict as a bipolar confrontation. Using these papers the US argued that the Soviet Union was using its alleged regional proxies (Cuba and Nicaragua) to channel arms to the FMLN. Meanwhile the FDR (the political wing of the FMLN) was taking advantage of ‘the propaganda networks of Cuba, the Soviet Union, and other Communist countries’ to misrepresent US policies.
Alongside this assistance a number of other states hostile to the US such as Libya and Vietnam were also providing training and arms to the Salvadoran insurgency. Reagan argued that the FDR-FMLN guerrillas were ‘directed from a headquarters in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua’ whose government had ‘imposed a new dictatorship’ and wishes to ‘infect its neighbours through the export of subversion and violence’ using ‘weapons and military resources provided by the Communist bloc’. This communist conspiracy was designed to topple the El Salvadoran government and install a Marxist Leninist regime loyal to the Soviet Union, the ‘most aggressive empire the modern world has seen’.
Two primary theses put forward by the US to substantiate its major claims were outlined in a series of documents released by the US over a six year period. The first thesis, focusing on the travels of El Salvador’s communist party secretary general, Shafik Handal, to various anti-US and communist states to secure arms and training, can be called the international arms acquisition thesis. The second, highlighting the alleged flow of arms into El Salvador from these states via Cuba and Nicaragua, can be called the Communist arms flow thesis. Outlining and critically engaging with each thesis serves to refute empirically the US’ portrayal of the El Salvadoran insurgency as a case of Soviet expansionism and allows an examination of the methods and ways in which the Reagan administration interpreted the insurgency as a threat to US security.
Internationalizing the Salvadoran Insurgency: Communist Arms Acquisitions
The State Department’s 1981 report relied on 18-pounds-worth of captured classified FMLN documents which outlined the travels of Handal to secure communist arms commitments for the Salvadoran insurgency. The state department had acquired these documents in 1980. The US considered the ‘battle plans, letters and reports … some written in cryptic language and code words’ to offer ‘incontrovertible’ evidence of the involvement of ‘Cuba, other communist countries and several radical states’ in equipping the FMLN ‘in less than 6 months with a panoply of modern weapons’.
The white paper argued that in 1979 the leaders of El Salvador’s guerrilla groups had sent a letter to Fidel Castro of Cuba thanking him for his help in ‘signing an agreement which establishes very solid bases upon which we [can] begin building coordination and unity of our organisations’. The guerrilla leaders then travelled to the Hungarian Embassy in Mexico City where they met with representatives of various East European communist states, Vietnam, Cuba and the Soviet Union. The report argues that at this meeting the guerrilla leaders made ‘requests (possibly for arms)’. After the Hungarian Embassy meeting, the majority of the guerrilla leaders travelled to Nicaragua whilst Handal travelled on to Moscow. In Moscow, the documents outline Handal’s meeting with the Deputy Chief of the Latin American section of the Foreign Relations department. The Latin American section offered to pay for Handal’s visit to Vietnam. Moscow also arranged Handal’s travel itinerary, which included East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Ethiopia. In Vietnam Handal allegedly managed to secure a commitment of 60 tons of arms. In the East European states Handal received further guarantees of weapons transfers alongside assurances that this assistance will include searches for western style weaponry ‘in an apparent effort to conceal their sources’. Hungary was alleged to have agreed to trade Eastern bloc weaponry with the Angolans and Ethiopians in exchange for US made machine guns.
The white paper argues that between 3 and 6 July Handal travelled to Ethiopia. Here he met Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu, chairman of Ethiopia’s Provisional Military Administrative Council. Mengistu promised ‘several thousand weapons … and all the necessary spare parts for these arms’. Handal then travelled back to Moscow on 22 July 1980, and the documentation alleges that the Soviets agreed in principle to transport the Vietnamese arms. Meanwhile, other senior guerrilla leaders met with Yasser Arafat as he travelled in Nicaragua. Arafat purportedly promised not only weapons but also aircraft for the FMLN. On 27 July 1980 the guerrilla leaders flew from Nicaragua back to Havana where ‘Cuban “specialists” add[ed] final touches to the military plans formulated during the May meetings in Havana’. In parallel to the finalization of the military plans, the FDR along with Nicaraguan and Soviet psychological warfare experts were said to have disseminated propaganda alleging the US-supported regime in El Salvador had murdered 10,000 civilians in 1980. In sum, the documents argue that 800 tons of the most modern weapons had been promised to the guerrillas from various communist and radical states. Two hundred tons of these weapons were said to have already been delivered to them in El Salvador via Cuba and Nicaragua. It was not until mid-August 1980, however, that ‘Handal’s arms shopping expedition begins to bear fruit’.
Were there Major Commitments of Arms by Communist and Radical States?
The White Paper argued that Handal’s communist party had been committed to a military solution to address El Salvador’s problems since 1976. However, Handal’s party, the Official Communist Party (PCS) was the last leftist party to form a military wing (the Armed Forces of Liberation-FAL), which it did in 1980, and whose forces were the smallest in the FMLN. Furthermore, the PCS had backed the Christian democrats in the 1972 and 1977 elections and had supported non-violent protest to the regime right up to the formation of FAL. However, the central charges hinged upon the travels of Handal to various states and the subsequent agreements to arm the FMLN by these states. Can these charges be made to stand?
As outlined above, when Handal travelled to Moscow, the deputy chief of the USSR’s Latin American section met him. The deputy chief was a middle-ranking officer and made no firm assurances of any arms shipments to the guerrillas. Meanwhile, other guerrilla leaders had travelled on to Mexico City to meet with representatives of various communist states where ‘requests (possibly for arms)’ had been made. The parenthesis here is crucial in so far as it imputes an interpretation to the alleged requests. The guerrilla leaders may or may not have requested arms. We cannot know this and nor could the US State Department. Yasser Arafat was also said to have promised both arms and airplanes to the FMLN’s struggle. It was later discovered that the document upon which the commitment by Arafat was allegedly made only contained a passing reference to Arafat himself, and made no mention of any promises of planes or arms for the FMLN. Arguably, the attempt to link Arafat in with the Central American revolutions was used by the US to provide a pretext for Israeli arms and expertise to pro-US regimes in the region. This need on the part of the US became especially acute when the US congress imposed caps on spending for the US-backed Contra army in Costa Rica. Thus Israeli know-how and equipment was used by the US to fill the gap.
Whilst the examination above severely weakens one of the Reagan administration’s central justifications for supplying military aid to the El Salvadoran government, it was the alleged flow of arms to the FMLN from these Soviet-aligned states on which the US based most of its arguments to sustain its communist conspiracy thesis. We will now examine the US’ claims of the inward nature of communist arms to the FMLN guerrillas which formed the bulk of the empirical material used by the US.
The Communist Arms Flow Thesis: Weapons from Anti-US States begin to Flow to the FDR-FMLN
The flow of communist-supplied weaponry to the FDR-FMLN was outlined by a series of reports produced by the US over a five-year period. The two most extensive reports were the 1981 White Paper and a 1985 State Department report entitled ‘”Revolution beyond our Borders”: Sandinista Intervention in Central America’. Also relevant is a ‘Background paper’ which was used by members of the State Department to brief members of congress and was subsequently released.
The white paper of 1981 relied on the thesis that Cuba and Nicaragua were central conduits of Communist bloc arms for the FMLN, and substantiated this with the central claim that 800 tons of weaponry had been promised to the FMLN, whilst 200 tons of these promised weapons had already been delivered via Cuba and Nicaragua. The paper argues that in mid-September the FMLN’s guerrilla coordinator in Nicaragua informed his Joint General Staff that ‘130 tons of arms and other military material supplied by Communist countries have arrived in Nicaragua for shipment to El Salvador’ and correspondingly in September and October the ‘number of flights to Nicaragua from Cuba increased sharply’. However, there was a suspension of supplies to the FMLN by the Nicaraguans in late September for one month due to a formal complaint lodged by the US against Sandinista arms trafficking. The shipments begin again in October with ‘120 tons of weapons and material’ still in Nicaragua and ‘300–400 tons’ still in Cuba.
In July 1984 the State Department released its Background paper, again characterizing Nicaragua as an aggressive and well armed state backed by the Soviet Union which was involved in regional subversion through its arm transfers to the El Salvadoran guerrillas. The paper reiterates the charges made in the 1981 paper but also adds that various Salvadoran guerrilla sea supply routes have been discovered. The supply routes used heavily disguised shipping vessels and left via
Nicaragua’s north-western coast and then transfer arms to large motorized canoes which ply the myriad bays and inlets of El Salvador’s southeast coast … local fishermen reported seeing wooden crates being unloaded from military vehicles and put into motor-powered launches. The site was littered with empty ammunition boxes.
The most heavily used FMLN arms transhipment point was at Potsoi on the Gulf of Fonseca which provided one of the clearest water based delivery routes from Nicaragua to El Salvador’s southern shore. It was not until the publication of the State Department’s 1985 report, however, that more serious charges were laid against the Sandinistas in both supplying the FMLN and being directly involved in directing the insurgency through a series of command posts.
The 1985 report again uses the figures from the 1981 report. That of the extensive (800 ton) nature of Communist arms commitments for the Salvadoran insurgents. After reiterating these figures, the report then shifts to using the testimony of two FMLN defectors to substantiate its arm trafficking thesis. The first defector, Luis Alvarado Saravia, made a lengthy statement to the Salvadoran press where he outlined Cuban assistance to the guerrillas and the movement of arms from Nicaragua into El Salvador. The arms he described included ‘2,200 rifles (FALs, M-1s, and M-2s), two radio transmitters, ammunition, grenades, more than 15 rocket launchers, at least three.50 calibre and one.30 calibre machine gun, 125 boxes of TNT and 10 M-79 grenade launchers’. The second defector, Napoleon Romero, described how just prior to the FMLN’s ill-named ‘final offensive’ of 1981, the Sandinistas had supplied ‘300 weapons’ via air routes which were suspended after the Salvadoran armed forces managed to capture a large quantity of arms infiltrated via air. It was at this point that the Sandinistas shifted to sea-based smuggling routes. The Costa Rican police discovered a further FMLN smuggling network on 15 March 1982 in Costa Rica. The network was composed of ‘Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, an Argentine, a Chilean and a Costa Rican’. However, perhaps the most serious charge of the report is the alleged role of the Sandinistas in directing the FMLN guerrillas. The report argues, ‘Planning and operations [of the FMLN] were (and to a large extent continue to be) guided from Managua, where Cuban and Nicaraguan officers provide advice. The guidance is radioed to the guerrilla units throughout El Salvador’.
Was There a Major Global Communist Arms Smuggling Network to the FMLN?
In all of the documents produced by the US, the figure of ‘nearly 800 tons of the most modern weapons and equipment’ committed by ‘Communist leaders and key officials of several Communist states’ was cited time and again. Two hundred tons of these weapons were said to have already reached the FMLN guerrillas. The original ‘800/200 ton’ figure came from the 1981 white paper, which in turn relied on captured intelligence material for these conclusions. A subsequent investigation of the figures and the documents on which the white paper relied found that ‘much of the information in the white paper can’t be found in the documents at all’. The author of the 1981 paper admitted that large parts of it were ‘misleading’ and ‘over embellished’ and that its collation involved ‘guessing’ and ‘mistakes’. Indeed, none of the documents, when independently examined, mentioned a figure of 200 tons of weaponry (communist or otherwise) that had allegedly already reached the FMLN in late 1980. The author agued that this figure had been ‘extrapolated’ from ‘other intelligence’. This ‘other intelligence’ was also found to be an ‘extrapolation’ from the original captured documents. In short, the central ‘800/200 ton’ figure used by the US to signify the vast commitment of various Communist states arming the FMLN was based on a series of guesses and extrapolations. Furthermore, this was illustrated in 1981, after which Reagan continued for years to argue that the ‘weapons, supplies, and funds are shipped from the Soviet bloc to Cuba, from Cuba to Nicaragua, from Nicaragua to the Salvadoran guerrillas’.
As outlined above, the white paper argued that the FMLN’s guerrilla coordinator in Nicaragua informed his General Staff that ‘130 tons of arms and other military material supplied by Communist countries’ had already arrived in Nicaragua for shipment to the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador. Between September and October the number of flights from Cuba to Nicaragua which ‘had the capacity to transport several hundred tons of cargo’ increased sharply. After a one-month suspension of arms shipments from Nicaragua to the FMLN guerrillas, the arms shipments begin again and ‘when the shipments resume in October, as much as 120 tons of weapons … are still in Nicaragua’. Through employing some mathematical deduction it is obvious that if Nicaragua has 130 tons of FMLN destined arms in late September, and throughout September and October there are hundreds of tons of FMLN destined arms being flown into Nicaragua from Cuba, how is it that when the Nicaraguan arms shipments to El Salvador begin again in October (after a month’s suspension) there are only ‘120 tons of weapons’ in Nicaragua? A deficit of ten tons from the original figure and after an alleged Cuban shipment of hundreds of tons of arms.
The charge made in the 1984 background paper that the Nicaraguan government had switched from using airborne arms drops to water-based arms smuggling networks was also demonstrated to be unsustainable. Former Lt. Colonel Edward King visited the small Nicaraguan village of Potosi (the US alleged that this village was a ‘major transhipment point’ of FMLN-destined arms) shortly before the release of the 1984 paper. He reported that there ‘was neither a road suitable for truck traffic nor any sign of passage of vehicles carrying heavy cargo to a debarkation point … The main road into Potosi port area is overgrown with grass and weeds, not a sign that cargo-bearing vehicles had passed through recently’. Furthermore, the US operated a radar station on Tiger Island (just off the coast of Potsoi) and employed extensive satellite and communications coverage of the coastal region between Nicaragua and El Salvador. During the ten-month period in which the US alleged that the Nicaraguans were sending arms to the FMLN via sea networks, the extensive surveillance by the US.did not reveal a pattern of systematic night-time supply to El Salvador from Potosi’.
Further discrepancies can be found in the 1985 white paper which takes as its title an alleged excerpt from the speech of Sandinista leader Tomas Borge. The quote used by the 1985 paper was ‘This revolution goes beyond our borders. Our revolution was always internationalist from the moment Sandino fought [his first battle]’. The quote was also used many times by US officials in attempting to prove the regionally subversive nature of Nicaraguan foreign policy and the subsequent internationalist nature of the Salvadoran conflict. The real quote from Borge however indicates the precise opposite of that imputed to it by the US.
We are proud to be Nicaraguans. This revolution transcends national boundaries. Our revolution has always been internationalist, ever since Sandino fought … this does not mean that we export revolution. It is enough—and we couldn’t do otherwise—for us to export our example, the example of courage, sensitivity and determination of our people. Our internationalism is primarily expressed by consolidating our own revolution.
The real quotation, then, makes no reference to arms shipments and in terms of regional intervention merely talks of the Sandinista revolution presenting a moral example to other nations. The speech also quite clearly indicates the desire to concentrate on national consolidation of the revolution. The meaning given to Borge’s words and their use out of context is clearly a spurious interpretation related to the wider US objective of constructing the Nicaraguan regime as regionally subversive.
The 1985 paper makes a number of other claims largely based on the evidence of two defectors. Even if we discount entirely the questionable nature of defectors’ evidence and presume that they are telling the truth, we again find contradictions that undermines the US extensive arms shipment thesis. For example, both defectors allegedly provide evidence of arms shipments during the same period and yet both provide radically different versions of the amount flowing in. Their versions also drastically differ from the assertions made in the same report. For example, the 1985 report again uses the ‘800/200 ton’ figure and yet the second defector, Romero, argues that ‘300 weapons [were] infiltrated at the end of 1980 in preparation for the January 1981 “final offensive”‘. How then do we account for the fact that the US argued that 200 tons had already been smuggled in when Romero states that only 300 weapons were infiltrated at precisely the time when the 200 tons were allegedly shipped?
The final charge by the US was the existence of a FMLN command network in Nicaragua. This was alleged to prove that the Sandinistas were in operational command of the FMLN. Washington argued that the Sandinistas suggested the FMLN guerrilla leadership should relocate to a region 20 miles outside El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador. Romero claimed there was a ‘secondary directorate’ which relayed Sandinista instructions to the FMLN leaders. It was this secondary directorate that provided the crucial missing link between the alleged Nicaraguan and Cuban officers and their FMLN ‘proxies’. However, within the paper there is no discussion (aside from its mention) of the composition of the secondary directorate or the process by which they transmitted commands to the FMLN. This crucial linkage via the existence of a secondary directorate relies on mere assertion from a defector. Again, the fact that the US can produce no signals intelligence (given the massive surveillance in operation) to substantiate its claims and has to instead rely on the testimony of a defector further illustrates the questionable existence of a Sandinista ‘secondary directorate’.
There is evidence to suggest that there was a small amount of arms smuggling to the FMLN via Nicaragua in the very early part of the campaign. The arms flow was meagre and was terminated in early 1981. The state department itself acknowledged this fact. Most independent witnesses confirmed that the FMLN rebels were badly armed. Indeed, the 1981 White Paper argued that the guerrillas in September 1980 were ‘ill-equipped, armed with pistols and a varied assortment of hunting rifles and shotguns’. A hypothesis more in accordance with the evidence would be the existence of informal arms networks working through a number of countries supplying weapons sporadically and in meagre quantities in comparison to Washington’s claims. This ‘informal network thesis’ is largely supported by evidence supplied in the US white papers themselves. For example, the 1985 report outlines the discovery of a Costa Rican arms network operated by a multinational team of ‘Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, an Argentine, a Chilean and a Costa Rican’, none of whom were linked in any way to a regional government. Elsewhere the report notes that a Salvadoran guerrilla group, the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL), ran a supply network through Nicaragua. It is important to note here that this informal supply network is run by Salvadoran guerrillas and not by Nicaraguan government officials. This would seem to tally with the fact that the Nicaraguans had actively sought to prevent arms from reaching the FMLN. Cuba had also ‘urged their Nicaraguan allies to maintain their economic and political ties with the West in general and the United States in particular’.
So far there is very little empirical evidence to suggest that the FMLN insurgency was a case of Soviet-backed aggression. However, it could be argued that even if the insurgency was not backed by the Soviet Union, and it cannot be proved that there were inward flows of communist arms, there was a possibility that a leftist government in El Salvador may have aligned itself with the Soviet Union. This in turn justifies the US campaign of support for the El Salvadoran government. The next section provides three arguments to render this point unsustainable, followed by a consideration of what drove the US to construct the war in East versus West terms.
The FDR-FMLN Government, the Soviet Bloc, and US Support
Even if, as shown, there is little or no evidence to support the thesis that the FDR-FMLN insurgency movement in El Salvador was Soviet-backed, it can still be claimed that a leftist government in El Salvador may have aligned itself with the Soviet Union. This argument can be challenged in a number of ways. First, historically ‘every nationalist regime of the Left that has come to power in the Western Hemisphere has preferred to do business with the United States and to receive aid from the United States rather than relate to the Soviet Union’. Reasons for this include the fact that since the late 1960s Soviet policy in Latin America had been conducted with a view to maintaining good diplomatic and economic ties with as many countries as possible. In so doing the Soviets had ‘put support for revolution low on its list of priorities … it failed to give material backing to the numerous urban and rural guerrillas operating in most Latin American countries during the [past] two decades’.
Ideological orientation was no guarantee of Soviet support either. For example, in 1979, due to the US grain embargo imposed on the Soviet Union as a result of its invasion of Afghanistan, Soviet reliance on Argentinean grain increased substantially. By 1982 the Soviet Union was taking approximately one-third of Argentina’s entire grain crop. During this same period the Argentinean anti-Communist Junta was carrying out a US-backed ‘dirty war’ on its own internal opposition that included the outlawing of the pro-Moscow Communist party. The Soviet Union abstained from votes condemning Argentina within the UN and crucially refused to break off any diplomatic or economic ties to the Argentine regime. There is thus no guarantee that on ideological grounds alone the USSR would have sought to place El Salvador under its influence. The USSR had no intention of economically underwriting another Cuba in the region (which by 1979 cost the USSR $3 billion annually) and there is no evidence to suggest that a FDR-FMLN-based government would immediately align itself or subordinate its foreign policy to that of the Soviet Union. Indeed, when one considers the proximity of EL Salvador to the United States, its reliance on US business and good favour with multilateral lending organizations coupled with the threat of a US-backed sanctions regime and the possibility of covert destabilization (which would have rendered any FDR-FMLN victory still-born) it seems unlikely to say the least that a FDR-FMLN victory in El Salvador would have meant another pro-soviet Cuba-style state in the region.
Second, to have portrayed the opposition to the Salvadoran regime as pro-Soviet communists under the control of Moscow was to vastly misrepresent the political composition of the opposition forces. The FDR-FMLN was composed of a number of Christian democrats, Marxists, Social democrats and, most crucially, Christian organizations. At a Catholic bishop’s conference held in Medellin, Colombia in 1968 large parts of the Catholic Church in Latin America adopted a ‘preferential option for the poor’. This liberation-based theology taught that poverty was not natural and social inequality was unjust. Christian Base Communities (CEBs) were formed which organized large parts of the peasantry in El Salvador. This in turn helped raise awareness as to the structural nature of inequality. The formation of a preferential option for the poor and the organizational modality of the CEB helped to shatter ‘the centuries-old alliance of Church, military and the rich elites’. This antipathy between elements of the Catholic Church and the Salvadoran regime reached new levels in 1977 when waves of bombings, arrests, tortures and disappearances of local priests were carried out ‘quite openly by the uniformed security services’. However, the turning point in the war came with the March 1980 assassination of Archbishop Arnulfo Romero during mass by plain-clothes security forces. Before his assassination Romero had acted as interlocutor between the Junta and popular forces in El Salvador. His murder helped to solidify the authoritarian nature of the Junta. With the climate of repression increasing and dialogue broken, a broad coalition was formed to represent progressive political parties under the umbrella arm of the FDR which merged with the FMLN in 1980. The political programme of the FDR-FMLN alliance called for socio-economic reform to displace the overwhelming power of the oligarchy. It also called for ‘a long term role of the private sector … a pluralist political system [and also] a foreign policy of “nonalignment” ‘. The FDR-FMLN, then, were hardly slavish pro-Moscow communists, but a political force representing a plurality of political opinion ranging from the conservative economic nationalists to the revolutionary left. Their political programme closely mirrored the programme of a number of centre-left, social democratic governments in Europe with a mixed economic policy and a large private sector role combined with a commitment to political pluralism.
Third, the notion that a FDR-FMLN victory would equal a Soviet alignment rests on a dubious historical narrative which gets the cause and effect of post-revolutionary Soviet alignment in Latin America and US policy the wrong way around. Cuba and Nicaragua serve as examples. As Robins argues, the breakdown in relations between Cuba and the US was initially triggered by US hostility to Cuban domestic policies, not its later alignment with the Soviet Union. Weldes highlights an alternative understanding of Cuban-US relations and argues that ‘an alternative narrative might highlight the flip-flopping of hostile actions … much of the responsibility for this escalation rested with the United States’. For example, the Cuban economy was heavily dependent on its crucial sugar exports to US markets which the US sought to use as leverage for bargaining purposes to ameliorate Cuban domestic reforms. As a result of this and Cuba’s fear of ‘an imminent cut in its sugar quota, the Cuban government signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union, arranging to barter sugar for oil’. American-owned oil refineries, under US government encouragement, refused to refine Soviet crude oil, crucial for an energy-dependent Cuban economy. In response to this situation, and amid increasing fears of a complete US cut-off of sugar purchases, the Cubans nationalized a number of the largest American-owned refineries. This in turn led to a complete cut-off of American sugar purchases. The Soviets then offered to make up for this shortfall through increased purchases of the now surplus Cuban sugar crop.
In short, the US sought to exercise an economic strangulation of post-revolutionary Cuba prior to any significant alignment with the Soviets. It can therefore be strongly argued that this pushed Cuba into the arms of the Soviets. How else could the Cuban economy have stayed alive? These series of US provocations also took place against the backdrop of increased calls for US military intervention in Cuba and an increasingly warlike posture on the part of the new Kennedy administration, which culminated in the US-backed ‘Bay of Pigs’. In August 1961 (four months after the ‘Bay of Pigs’), one of Cuba’s revolutionary leaders, Che Guevara, met with Richard Goodwin, President Kennedy’s assistant special counsel. Guevara told Goodwin: ‘Cuba was prepared to forswear any political alliance with the Soviet bloc, pay for confiscated American properties in trade, and consider curbing Cuba’s support for leftist insurgencies in other countries. In return, the United States would cease all hostile actions against Cuba’. Upon Goodwin’s return to the US, he advised President Kennedy to ‘quietly intensify’ economic pressure on Cuba and the offer was never seriously pursued.
Similarly, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas sought to maintain good relations with the US after their revolution. As outlined above, Cuba had encouraged Nicaragua to maintain strong diplomatic and economic ties to the US, having realized that ‘small states … cannot afford the luxury of opposing the United States’. This was in line with a Cuban foreign policy cultivated over two decades that had rejected the 1960s approach of supporting indigenous insurgencies in Latin America and, like the Soviets, Cuba sought to expand trade and diplomatic ties with regional states regardless of ideology. Mexico became Nicaragua’s largest backer with $500 million in credits given by 1984. Western European countries supplied $282.9 million whilst multilateral lending institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and World Bank provided $632.2 million by 1984. A report prepared for the US State Department concluded that ‘aid from Western Europe and UN agencies has been … substantial, and hence crucial. Furthermore, it must also be said that in the context of her overall aid to Third World nations, Moscow’s commitment to Nicaragua is modest’. (Eastern Bloc aid combined amounted to only 24.2 per cent or $605.6 million by 1984.)
Nicaraguan reliance on Soviet aid increased when the US applied pressure on lending countries and multilateral organizations. For example, in 1985 the Nicaraguan government asked the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for a $100 million loan to develop its private-sector agriculture. The then Secretary of State, George Shultz, sent a letter to the bank after the request was received threatening to withdraw US support for the bank if the loan was made. A senior IDB official later remarked: ‘I have never seen such political pressure on the bank as in the last four years’. The blocking of the loan is made all the more perplexing when one considers the fact that the private agricultural sector was the very area that Washington had said it had hoped to preserve against an alleged Marxist takeover. Similarly, Nicaraguan reliance on Soviet-supplied arms did not start until 1982. The Nicaraguans had attempted to secure arms from Western sources for two years after the revolution, even approaching the US itself for military aid. The Nicaraguans did manage to secure a $15.8 million deal with France; Alexander Haig declared that the deal was a ‘stab in the back’. In March 1982, the French President Mitterrand assured President Reagan that the delivery of helicopters included in the package would ‘face indefinite delays’. Under mounting American hostility, the US-backed Contra war, and the diminishing prospects of securing Western supplied arms for self-defence, the Sandinistas increasingly turned to Moscow. Thus the US was instrumental in further cementing Nicaraguan reliance on Soviet-supplied arms, which according to a classified US intelligence report seen by the Wall Street Journal were primarily ‘defence orientated’ and ‘may have been prompted by the escalation of the CIA-backed contra war’. It is interesting to note that Mitterrand’s assurances to President Reagan came in the same year that the World Health Organization awarded Nicaragua its prize for the ‘most significant achievement in public health by a Third World nation’ and two years after UNSECO honoured Nicaragua for its 1980 literacy campaign, which reduced illiteracy rates amongst adults from 50 per cent to below 15 per cent. A 1985 Americas Watch report also noted that human rights abuses in Nicaragua by government forces had virtually disappeared (unlike El Salvador where, as examined above, they grew exponentially with US aid). The report goes on to note that in Nicaragua ‘there is no systematic practice of forced disappearances, extra judicial killings or torture—as has been the case with “friendly” armed forces in El Salvador’. In sum, the US was hostile to both Cuba and Nicaragua prior to any significant Soviet alignment on the part of those states. Both of these states sought good relations with the US, before and during overt US military action against them. There was thus no objective need for the US to remain hostile to these states, or indeed be hostile towards a FDR-FMLN government in El Salvador.
Why did the Reagan Administration Support the El Salvadoran Regime?
So far it has been argued that the US interpretation of the El Salvadoran insurgency as a direct military threat to its national security was unsustainable. The central documents used to portray the El Salvadoran guerrillas as pro-Moscow communists, and therefore the insurgency as a case of Soviet expansionism, have very little empirical proof for their assertions. Also, there is very little to suggest that a FDR-FMLN victory in El Salvador need necessarily equal a direct threat to US security interests.
Some have argued that the hawkish ideological predisposition of the Reagan administration led to a militaristic approach to the Salvadoran insurgency. Whilst the ideological focus of key Reagan administration officials may have led to a hardline approach, it must be remembered that it was the Carter administration (which had an alleged human rights-based foreign policy) which began to supply the Salvadoran coup with weaponry and training once the insurgency began. That is, regardless of the ideological orientation of the administration the insurgency was viewed as a crisis, and US intervention took place. Also, El Salvador had enjoyed many years of uncritical support from the US prior to the Reagan administration, and US interests had long been viewed as linked to the maintenance of a pro-US government in El Salvador. This point leads to the fact that US hostility existed primarily because the FDR-FMLN were not considered sufficiently pro-US. They were struggling for an alternative socio-economic model that rejected the free-market model favoured by the US. Any attempt to try an alternative form of social or economic organization, and particularly socio-economic systems that do not compliment the interests of US capital, have traditionally been viewed as subversive and threatening to US hegemony in Latin America. There has been a long history of US intervention to destroy nationalist and leftist governments and movements which are deemed inimical to US capitalism. An FMLN government threatened to provide what OXFAM called the ‘threat of a good example’. As outlined above, Nicaragua succeeded in raising adult literacy, installing universal health care, carried out a series of land reforms which benefited the nation’s majority, increased national food production and so on. A FDR-FMLN victory threatened to potentially do the same. It was therefore necessary to destroy the FDR-FMLN threat that put forward an alternative vision of development. This threat to US interests by internal reform is illustrated clearly through the fact that US hostility toward Cuba and Nicaragua occurred when domestic reforms took place, and prior to any significant Soviet alignment. Lars Schoultz explained the value of the US support for authoritarian regimes in place of popular governments:
The great advantage of bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes … is that they are able to eliminate some of the political pressures surrounding the formulation of economic policy. Because these regimes destroy the ability of popular groups to exert pressure on policy makers, they are able to implement economic policies that emphasise accumulation over distribution, growth over consumption, and … a free market over government intervention in the production and distribution of goods. These are the traditional Western monetary and fiscal policies that command the respect of major public and private financial institutions, including the United States government.
In this way, then, the FDR-FMLN insurgency was a threat to US elite interests through its potential for a workable alternative to a pro-US market orientated developmental model.
Conclusion
This paper has examined the primary documentation that the US used in portraying the El Salvadoran conflict as a case of Soviet expansionism within Central America. It took the central claims and facts used in these documents and subjected them to critical analysis and counter-interpretations. Cuba and Nicaragua did send meagre quantities of arms to the rebels, but as US agencies stated, these arms shipments ceased once US diplomatic pressure was brought to bear in the early 1980s. Having critically engaged with the US portrayal of the El Salvadoran insurgency as a case of Soviet expansionism, the analysis was widened to counter the argument that even if the FDR-FMLN were not Soviet-backed, there was still a very strong chance that upon victory the FDR-FMLN would have aligned themselves with the USSR. The orientation of Soviet foreign policy in Latin America, the political composition of the Salvadoran opposition and the fact that a historical prerequisite for pro-Soviet alignment in the region was US hostility (and therefore the US could easily chose not to be hostile to an FDR-FMLN regime in El Salvador) pointed to the unlikelihood of an FDR-FMLN victory in El Salvador equalling an immediate pro-Soviet orientation.
The primary purpose of portraying the insurgency as a superpower showdown in America’s backyard was to transform perceptions of the civil war into a full blown confrontation with the US enemy number one, the Soviet Union. If popular opinion had viewed the war as a case of systematic repression by a state committed to maintaining a vastly unequal distribution of national resources, the US policy of supporting that state would have been rendered unsustainable. It was thus necessary to portray an indigenous civil war, and a poorly armed peasant movement, as a Soviet-backed insurgency, trained and funded by what Washington claimed were its regional allies, Cuba and Nicaragua. This perception allowed a ‘two for the price of one’ bonus for US foreign policy makers. Not only did they create consent for their Salvadoran policies at crucial moments but they also characterized the Sandinista government as a regional exporter of communist subversion through its alleged linkages with the FDR-FMLN insurgency. This in turn allowed a militarization of Nicaragua’s borders by pro-US proxy forces, ostensibly to interdict Sandinista arms supplies, but in reality to launch cross-border destabilization raids in Nicaragua. Thus, by initially interpreting the ‘Salvadoran crisis’ as part of a Soviet plot to subvert Central America and threaten the US way of life, the initial terms of debate were delineated and the framework for discussion both in the popular media and within congressional debate were set. The US directly sponsored highly authoritarian and abusive regimes on a pretext which was unsustainable, given the evidence. US support had terrible human consequences for El Salvador’s civilian population that last to this day.