Msgr. Oscar Romero: ¡Presente!

Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty.

Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, assassinated March 24, 1980.

FMLN wins presidency in El Salvador

Of course I'm pleased.

But I feel about the victory as I did about Obama's: I've viewed it as a certainty for almost a year now. It's long overdue. The candidate's program is far less progressive than I'd prefer. And the road ahead is daunting, with the country in sorry shape from so many years of right-wing rule.

On the other hand, I should take my own advice, so:

Woo-hoo!

Tim's El Salvador Blog has an excellent round-up of excerpts and links from post-election coverage.

Update: 4:30 pm, 17 March - {Sigh.} Many reports and opinion columns in the English-langage press repeat the same lie: "Funes is the first FMLN presidential candidate who was not a combatant/guerrilla commander/etc. in the civil war."

In the elections of March 1994, the first in which the FMLN participated as a legal political party, their candidate was Ruben Zamora, who was never a combatant or an FMLN member at any point in the decades of armed conflict before the peace agreement of 1992. He was one of the leaders of the FDR (Democratic Revolutionary Front), a political coalition formed in 1980 that allied with the FMLN.

Given the historic nature of the 1994 elections ("the elections of the century"), you might think it would be hard for such a bogus factoid to get going. But ignorance of what happened in El Salvador before, during, and after the U.S.-sponsored war was vast, and remains so. Mainly, the first non-combatant candidate bit is just too convenient to give up, true or not, for the "FMLN grows up" narrative the media have decided to push.

[Disclosure: I was a volunteer for the FMLN election effort in 1994, doing data entry and computer support. Despite serious, systemic fraud on the part of the governing-party-dominated Elections Tribunal, mainly worked by the omission of FMLN voters' ID numbers from the lists posted at the polling places, the FMLN won 25% of the legislature, coming in second to ARENA's 45%. Zamora got 25% of the presidential vote; ARENA candidate Calderon Sol was denied an absolute majority at 49%, but in the later runoff crushed Zamora 68%-32%.]

Update 2: 12:40 pm, 2 April - A fine post-election report by Robert Lovato that captures the double-edged emotions of the FMLN victory. Salvadorans have moved forward only by reclaiming their history; we could learn a thing or two from them. A detail from the story that embodies the fusing of defiance, sadness, liberation, memory, and commemoration: the FMLN's official celebration (in image above) was staged on Escalon Boulevard, a main street through the richest neighborhood in San Salvador and the site of intense fighting in the November 1989 offensive.
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Lessons we pretend we never learned

Groundhog Day: The U.S. military writes a new counterinsurgency manual, and the reporter covering it pretends that such a thing hasn't happened since Viet Nam:

The distaste for counterinsurgency can be traced, like so many other things in the military, to the residue of Vietnam. After more than a decade of crushing failure, the generals vowed, more or less, never to get mixed up again in a guerrilla war. Hoffman says war colleges across the country literally purged their libraries of books on fighting guerrilla warfare ... Then came 9/11.

I've written about this phenomenon before:

[George Packer:] "the Army’s most recent field manual on the subject is two decades old."

That would be the manual with which they ran the counterinsurgency war in El Salvador. By the mid-1980s, the United States funded 90% of the Salvadoran national budget. U.S. military "advisors" (many more than the 500 legally allowed or acknowledged, and many of whom were in combat) directed that war in detail. That level of involvement lasted for a decade.

The Newsweek writer is even more dishonest or clueless than Packer, who at least acknowledged that there was a counterinsurgency manual in use twenty years ago (though he was no better at drawing any inferences from that fact).

The recurring pretense that nothing like this has ever happened before, where 'this' is torture, or counterinsurgency, or domestic repression, makes me crazy. If a search for 'El Salvador' comes up empty in an article on U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, even just reading it makes me feel as if I'm participating in airbrushing history.

Maybe I should institute a regular feature like the "Letters We Never Finished Reading" fillers in the New Yorker of old. Well, maybe not; a better move would be to maintain the one regular feature already promised. This Monday, garden blogging for sure...

Lessons learned?

From George Packer's interminable 'Letter from Iraq' piece in the April 10 New Yorker, 'The Lesson of Tal Afar':

Counterinsurgency cuts deeply against the Army’s institutional instincts. The doctrine fell out of use after Vietnam, and the Army’s most recent field manual on the subject is two decades old.

That would be the manual with which they ran the counterinsurgency war in El Salvador. By the mid-1980s, the United States funded 90% of the Salvadoran national budget. U.S. military "advisors" (many more than the 500 legally allowed or acknowledged, and many of whom were in combat) directed that war in detail. That level of involvement lasted for a decade.

So in what sense did counterinsurgency doctrine "fall out of use after Vietnam"? Is Packer young enough to have missed the whole sorry, prolonged, despicable collection of U.S. interventions in Central America? Or are they simply inconvenient for the picture he'd like to paint of a good-hearted but sadly ill-prepared military? The truth about U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine in El Salvador is that it did not defeat the insurgents. That's why it "cuts deeply against the Army's institutional instincts."

This is the kind of eyes-wide-shut garbage that makes me hold Packer in lower esteem than do many in the blog world. That, and his pissy defensiveness when called on his condescension towards those who got it right before the invasion of Iraq (on display last fall when Assassin's Gate was featured at TPM Cafe). His position is that noble intentions entitle him to be taken seriously despite large failures of judgment, for which he refuses to apologize (because those noble intentions actually absolve him).

If we're doing counterinsurgency, we're somewhere we shouldn't be. And noble intentions have so often served as cover for the ugliest, most brutal actions taken in our names that they should be a signal for intense scrutiny, not a free pass.

I'm not sorry

Too large to ignore, too small to take power. That was my sad, sobered analysis of the left's dilemma in the aftermath of the 1994 elections in El Salvador, the first after the end of the war. The country was so polarized that the alternative to an FMLN government was continued rule by the far right.

Rightist control has been continuous since. Women are paying an especially horrifying price. It makes our failure all the more bitter.