I WENT TO WAR IN El Salvador with former Vietnam War veteran Bob MacKenzie, a good choice because Bob had originally been a captain in the Rhodesian SAS. He managed that achievement despite having a crook arm from a war wound that got him invalided out of the United States Army. Some years later he fought with Renamo guerrillas in Mozambique. Bob had also worked as a mercenary in the Balkans, where he trained Serbs in the esoterics of insurgency warfare.
This always-smiling, unflappable American freebooter – by then a colonel – went on to become the first white officer for many decades to head a West African fighting group. In a remote area adjacent to the Malal Hills in Sierra Leone, he was killed and eaten by savages, who ambushed the pathetic bunch of bush warriors he’d been trying to mould into something of an effective fighting force. In the Central American guerrilla war, however, he was the unit’s star.
The conflict in El Salvador was a very different conflagration from most other insurgent struggles. There were several reasons, the first being that both the Soviet Union and Cuba had a marked influence on its outcome. As might have been expected, Washington backed the noncommunist side, not only politically but with men, machines, hardware and whatever else was needed to keep San Salvador, the country’s capital, from becoming a Comintern clone.
A lot of people died in the terrible conflict that totally ravaged this tiny Central American state, but in the end, with solid US and Latin American support, a peace of sorts was negotiated. Against all odds, it survived the strains of some of the most convoluted and conflicting Cold War interests in the hemisphere. Critics called it a loveless, arranged marriage, but in the end, it worked. At least the shooting stopped and more recently El Salvador sent 11,000 of its troops to fight in Iraq.
Not bad for a country of only eight million people.
The country’s civil war took an atrocious toll, not only in lives, but also on an economy that was stripped of just about everything. After almost a decade of fighting, there were about 75,000 people dead and several million exiles, more than a million of them in the United States.
Looking back, it would seem that El Salvador had always laboured under a tyranny of sorts. By the time we got there, the country reflected hope and desperation in equal parts, always a recipe for revolt. Its real misfortune – like that of Nicaragua next door – was to become a pawn on the great international chess board.
In Central America, it all began as a domestic quarrel. In 1980 a group of landowners and coffee traders in El Salvador launched a military coup. They were supported by the police, the judiciary and obviously, the military. The reason for the putsch was a wish to perpetuate the old system that kept the establishment rich and the rest of the people on the breadline.
As one paper phrased it at the time, ‘those sweaty, growling masses who opposed the plotters – including many churchmen – were murdered, exiled or driven into rebellion’. Small wonder then that the Russians and their Cuban surrogate friends – quite justifiably in hindsight – armed the oppressed and took over the revolution, for that was what it was.
Such was the leaden symmetry of the Cold War that that old warriorleader Ronald Reagan chose El Salvador as the place to ‘draw the line’. He was doing so, he said at the time, ‘against communist encroachment in the Americas’.
With the benefit of hindsight, he probably did the right thing. In the end, however, it cost the US taxpayer six billion dollars, not much by today’s standards when the American taxpayer doles out hundreds of times as much in Iraq, but in those not-so-long-ago times, it was a sizeable sum.
Washington’s tactics in El Salvador included a grand strategy to sap rebel support by fostering democracy, land reform and civil rights. To some extent these moves, while moderating the homicidal propensities of the army, didn’t altogether stop them. The Rand Corporation, in a report to the US Department of Defense, calculated that in 1981 alone, the army and its agents murdered 10,000 people. The new dispensation that followed – a truce of sorts between the government and the guerrillas, almost a decade later – was effective enough to reduce that figure to roughly a hundred-a-year, though for a long time there were bloody incidents in and around the city after dark.