They Also Made History

By James Kelly

It is not just that he became El Salvador's first elected civilian President in half a century. Nor that he began peace talks with leftist rebels after five years of convulsive bloodletting. Those achievements, impressive as they are, only hint at why Jose Napoleon Duarte has come to embody the desperate hopes of a nation. His singular quality is his bravery.

Duarte's best moment came in October at La Palma, the slumbering mountain town where the first meeting with the guerrillas was held. He spurned the offer of a bulletproof vest and arrived with only a few aides. No armed guards were visible: only Boy and Girl Scouts in shorts and red kerchiefs stood between the President and his enemies. The sight of Duarte strolling the cobbled streets of La Palma captured both the promise and the risk of his presidency. As thousands cheered, their hands reaching out to touch him, Duarte's face creased into a smile. He was showing that he was not afraid to walk among his people unprotected.

Such courage is especially admirable in El Salvador, where 50,000 people, one out of every 100 citizens, have been killed over the past five years. Murder knows no political allegiance: the right-wing death squads, often linked to the military, have terrorized the country, as have the rebels. Duarte, moreover, was already acquainted with his new job's physical risks. Robbed by fraudulent vote counting of what seemed like certain victory during his first presidential run in 1972, he was severely beaten by Salvadoran soldiers before exiling himself to Venezuela for seven years. His pug face, with its slightly sunken cheeks, still reflects the maulings that crushed the bones beneath his eyes.

Duarte not only returned, he returned to run for President again, this time against Roberto d'Aubuisson, a cashiered army major with a brutish past and some unlovely friends. The whispered threats resumed, but Duarte persevered through a March election and May runoff to capture 54% of the vote. The U.S. proclaimed Duarte's victory proof of El Salvador's progress toward democracy, but the new President cautioned against great expectations. "Are we going to arrive at perfection?" he asked. "It is a satisfying thought, but I think not. We are human."

From his first day in office, Duarte moved on all fronts. He proved an able lobbyist in Washington, charming a reluctant Congress into approving some $200 million in economic and military aid. He shuffled the command of El Salvador's security forces, long considered the breeding ground for the death squads, and watched the number of killings sink from 40 a month to less than a dozen. He assured businessmen, deeply suspicious of his left-leaning economic and social policies, that he would listen to them.

Aware that he could not survive in office without the army's allegiance, Duarte asserted his control over the military with the care reserved for a freshly housebroken tiger. He toured barracks and plotted strategy, but always in consultation with the beribboned officers who once ran El Salvador.

Basketball may have been Duarte's game in college, but now he played the high-wire artist, poised between his country's extreme right and radical left. His dramatic initiative for peace talks surprised his closest supporters (including Washington) and elicited more than one death threat. A second round of discussions produced rebel demands, quickly rejected, for a new constitution and fresh elections. Progress, if any, will come by inches, but at the least both sides are speaking as well as fighting.

Sometimes, at the end of a long day, Duarte's eyes betray an ineffable sadness. It is as if he alone were carrying the burden of his country's past and future. No one knows as well as Duarte how much remains to be done. The economy is still comatose. The war sputters on, always capable of flaring suddenly. And in the end, Duarte must cope not just with the wounds of the past five years but with a tradition of violence that is as old as the country. "The blood of dead peasants has not dried, time does not dry it, rain does not erase it from the roads," the poet Pablo Neruda once wrote. "A bloody flavor soaks the land, the bread and wine in Salvador." Duarte, slowly, cautiously, is trying to cleanse his land.