El Salvador: Hapless Peacemaker: Jose Napoleon Duarte: 1925-1990

He was a man possessed of a messianic conviction that he and he alone could bring peace and democracy to his bloodstained nation. And for a long time after Jose Napoleon Duarte became President of El Salvador in 1984 Washington shared his belief that he could make a difference. Six years later, however, El Salvador remains as desperate as ever. The bitter civil war lurches on, with the country’s 5 million people still hostage to the brutal campaigns of the far-right death squads and the left-wing guerrillas. Duarte’s economic and social reforms are mostly in ruins, and his pledges to punish human-rights abuses and corruption remain unfulfilled. Last week, at the age of 64, Duarte died in his home in San Salvador, his body ravaged by cancer, his spirit diminished by the disappointment of unrealized dreams.

The promise that was Duarte flickered most brightly in 1984, the year he rode to the presidency on a wave of popular enthusiasm. Pledging an end to the civil war and the beginning of an era of stability, Duarte became El Salvador’s first freely elected civilian President in half a century. It was a particularly satisfying victory, since Duarte had been robbed of the presidency in 1972, when Salvadoran soldiers halted the vote count and beat the candidate severely. Duarte fled into exile in Venezuela, not venturing home until seven years later, when a coup paved the way for his participation in a military-civilian junta. When the presidential nod finally came, he proclaimed, “This moment is just the beginning of a much longer road.”

Little did he suspect just how long — or rugged — that road would be. For most of his early life, there had been ample good luck. His father, a tailor, struck it rich in 1944 by winning the national lottery. That, and a partial scholarship, enabled Duarte to attend the University of Notre Dame, where he earned a degree in civil engineering. When he returned home, Duarte married the daughter of his father’s best friend and joined his father-in-law’s lucrative construction firm as a partner. In 1960 Duarte helped found the Christian Democratic Party, and four years later he began the first of three consecutive terms as mayor of San Salvador.

The initial months of his presidency were a heady time, as Duarte set his agenda in motion. He created a commission to investigate death-squad killings, shuffled the command of the security forces and toured the richer capitals of the West in search of foreign aid. He found his most receptive audience in Washington, where a charmed Congress soon approved more than $200 million in military and economic assistance. Over the next five years, U.S. spending would surpass $3 billion; Washington’s faith in Duarte endured long after his support at home had eroded.

The steady downward slope of Duarte’s tenure could be charted from one October to the next. His first October, in 1984, was a time of triumph as he strode into the small town of La Palma for the first of three meetings with leftist rebel leaders. A year later, as hostilities continued, tragedy hit home when Duarte’s eldest daughter, Ines Guadalupe Duarte Duran, was kidnaped and held by rebels for 30 days. That October, Duarte personally supervised the complex negotiations that secured Ines’ freedom, briefly abandoning his tough line with the guerrillas and freeing 25 political prisoners in exchange. The double standard aroused the contempt of some, especially within the powerful military, who charged that he had compromised his ability to govern.

In the months that followed, Duarte tried unsuccessfully to get the peace talks back on track. He also implemented an austerity program that enjoyed greater support in Washington than in San Salvador. A hefty devaluation of the Salvadoran colon and a tax on coffee, the country’s main export, pushed inflation to the 40% mark and raised unemployment close to 50%. Wary businessmen sought investments abroad, while some of the unions that had once supported Duarte joined a new opposition labor confederation. In October 1986 an earthquake flattened much of San Salvador, killing 1,500 people and inflicting $1 billion in damages. When hundreds of millions of dollars poured in, including $250 million from the U.S., the Duarte government was accused of squandering the funds.

During the next year, charges of corruption haunted Duarte’s government. The death squads returned; mutilated bodies once again littered the roadsides. And the leftist guerrillas regained their momentum, waging successful assaults on military and economic targets throughout the country. As the country spun back toward chaos, Salvadorans came to regard Duarte as little better than a pawn of the Reagan Administration. That October, when Duarte journeyed to Washington for a White House visit with Ronald Reagan, he touched his hosts by kissing the American flag. At home, that same image came to symbolize the power that Duarte had forfeited.

The waning months of Duarte’s administration were beset by political turmoil. In March 1988 Duarte’s bitter political rivals, the ultraconservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), won control of the national legislature. Duarte’s attempts to heal a deepening rift within his Christian Democratic Party failed, and one year later ARENA’s presidential candidate, Alfredo Cristiani, triumphed, with 54% of the vote.

Friends eulogize Duarte as the man who, as one close adviser put it, “started a process, a tendency toward democracy.” Detractors, such as Jesuit scholar Ignacio Martin Baro, assert that “history will remember Duarte as the President who mortgaged the sovereignty of his country to the Americans.” Duarte may best be remembered, however, as the leader who could not live up to his own best intentions.