El Salvador, U.S. Military Involvement in

El Salvador, U.S. Military Involvement in. Unlike most other Central American republics, El Salvador never had U.S. troops land on its territory, even during the 1932 Communist uprising. Internal security was left to various gendarmeries and the regular army, acting at the behest of a tiny planter elite. However, during the Cold War, Salvadoran officers trained in U.S. installations and received minor amounts of military aid, and in the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency helped found a rural paramilitary organization, ORDEN, birthing the “death squads” of the next two decades.

In the late 1970s, various small left‐wing insurgent groups allied to “popular organizations” of peasants, students, and slum dwellers began challenging the military government. Following the 1979 Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, U.S. national security experts feared El Salvador would be the next “Cuban‐Soviet proxy” on the American mainland. From late 1979 on, the Carter administration shipped arms to weak civilian‐military juntas, while death squad killings reached 1,000 per month, including 4 U.S. Catholic churchwomen and the country's archbishop, Oscar Romero, killed in March 1980 after requesting that President Jimmy Carter cut off aid.

In October 1980, five Marxist‐Leninist guerrilla organizations formed the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). In January 1981, they launched a “final offensive,” just before Ronald Reagan assumed office. This attempt failed due to lack of arms and trained troops, and the guerrillas turned to consolidating their control over parts of the countryside.

Meanwhile, U.S. counterinsurgency experts and aid flooded in, as El Salvador became the first showplace for the new “Reagan Doctrine” of stopping and rolling back Third World revolutions. Eventually, $6 billion was funneled into a country the size of Massachusetts, with a population of 5 million. U.S. advisers managed the war down to the company level, and trained ten air‐mobile “hunter‐killer” battalions to seek out the elusive FMLN units. For all sides, from a widespread protest movement in the United States to North American military planners to the guerrillas, it seemed a replay of Vietnam. The one signal difference was that U.S. officers at all levels, and the president himself, were deeply committed to avoiding a ground war involving U.S. troops and casualties. This was the major innovation of the so‐called Low‐Intensity Conflict doctrine.

Between 1981 and 1989, the FMLN and U.S. specialists played a minuet involving all the classic elements of peasant‐based insurgency and counterinsurgency. A skirmishing war or “permanent offensive” by guerrilla columns drove demoralized government forces back in 1982–84, threatening a seizure of power. It was met by an effective political charge when a pro‐U.S. Christian Democrat, José Napoleon Duarte, defeated extreme rightist Roberto D’Aubuisson for president in a carefully staged 1984 election, promising peace. Meanwhile, a sophisticated air war utilizing U.S.‐supplied helicopter gunships, “Puff the Magic Dragon” minigun platforms, and the heaviest bombing in the hemisphere's history punished the FMLN's “zones of control,” driving out civilians and inflicting heavy losses on main force guerrilla units, which had reached a peak of more than 12,000 in 1984.

In response, the FMLN dispersed its troops throughout the country and focused on rebuilding an urban political base. Mines and constant ambushes depleted the government forces, which had quadrupled in size to 60,000 through heavy conscription. Army bases were periodically overrun, to demonstrate the guerrillas' capacity, while “solidarity organizations” in the United States and Europe supported the FMLN's civilian network. But the Left's popularity was limited by the growth of mass‐based electoral politics for the first time in Salvadoran history, led by the right‐wing ARENA Party, and containment of FMLN forces within thinly populated rural zones.

Growing urban unrest, the collapse of the Christian Democrats, and an increasingly professional FMLN army all led toward a massive guerrilla offensive in November 1989. In an odd valedictory for the end of the Cold War, rebel units held large parts of San Salvador for a week before retreating, their hopes for a popular uprising dashed. But the vigor of FMLN attacks, and the bankruptcy of the government forces—the U.S.‐trained Atlacatl Battalion butchered prominent Jesuit priests at the offensive's height—encouraged the Bush administration to support peace negotiations with a chastened FMLN.

The negotiating process, under UN auspices, lasted from spring 1990 through New Year's Day, 1992. It was punctuated by a renewed FMLN offensive late in 1990, using surface‐to‐air missiles obtained in Nicaragua, which threatened the government's air superiority. Eventually, an accord was signed that led to the retirement of most of the armed forces' senior officers, and the creation of a new civilian police incorporating members from both sides. In return, the FMLN gave up its armed struggle, and in the 1994 elections became the country's second‐largest civilian political party. The bitterest military conflict in late twentieth‐century Latin American history came to an end with all sides claiming a measure of victory.
[See also Guerrilla Warfare; Nicaragua, U.S. Military Involvement in.]

Bibliography

Hugh Byrne , El Salvador's Civil War: A Study of Revolution, 1996.
William LeoGrande , Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1998.

Van Gosse