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COVER STORY

El Salvador:
A Global Stability Success Story

By J. Michael Waller

Nowhere in the world is there a better example of a modern-day global stability success story than El Salvador. Twenty years ago, a communist insurgency was tearing apart the small Central American republic. The United States led a massive effort to help El Salvador crush the guerrilla and terrorist movement in an integrated strategy that emphasized not only military but political, economic, and social means.

Many had written off El Salvador as a fruitless cause. Others were prepared to accept the Soviet-backed Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN) insurgents as a legitimate political force. While the U.S. goal was to bring about stability by breaking the insurgency and creating new institutions in the country for a more equitable society, few could imagine at the time that El Salvador would not only stabilize, but would prosper.

El Salvador has even gone on to become a player in global stability activity in the region and around the world, leading Central American integration, educating people from other countries about privatization and civil society, providing antiland-mine expertise to stricken countries, and serving as the only country in the American hemisphere to join the United States with troops in Iraq. The country also has the freest economy after Chile in all of Latin America.

Roughly the size and dimensions of the state of Massachusetts and with a population of about 7 million, El Salvador hugs the Pacific side of Central America. A combination of features creates a nightmarish perfect storm from a global stability perspective: a string of active volcanoes stretches the length of the country, shifting plates offshore bring destructive earthquakes, and deadly hurricanes are a frequent menace. The land suffers from severe deforestation and erosion; once-beautiful rivers and streams are clogged with refuse and sewage.

Human problems include rampant corruption, widespread poverty, a poor public education system, an inept judiciary, violent organized crime, and an extremist opposition political party of unreconstructed Marxists that is allied with Colombian narcoguerrillas and funded by the Hugo Chavez regime of Venezuela.

Yet El Salvador has managed to progress despite all. Determined to succeed, El Salvador is known as “the little country that could.”

U.S. Integrated Strategy

Faced with the spread of communist political violence in Central America, with a Soviet-backed Sandinista regime consolidating its control in Nicaragua, President Jimmy Carter, in one of his last acts in office, rushed weapons to fortify the Salvadoran army. The country’s notorious military and security services were in no shape to wage an effective counterinsurgency, and proved to be ham-handed, inept, and brutal when they tried. In one of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as president, the United States “drew the line” in El Salvador and determined that Marxism would stop there. Reagan began an integrated strategy to defeat the FMLN guerrillas.

That strategy included supplying the Salvadoran military and security forces with modern weapons and gear while purging them of their worst elements, abolishing some services, and reforming others. Training would be a core part of U.S. military action; the strategy was to let the Salvadorans fight for their own country with American personnel helping to show them how.

Winning the support of the people and cutting off outside aid to the enemy required much more than military and security assistance. The stability strategy included the following:

Izalco Volcano: El Salvador's natural beauty beckons tourists. © Photographer: James Steidl | Agency: Dreamstime.com

• Building a new civil society and establishing rule of law. This required extensive support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and private contractors. It included assistance to reform the constitution and basic laws and regulations, and to build a transparent and credible electoral system to ensure voter confidence.
• Increasing economic aid to the country to offset the economic warfare damage caused by the FMLN, and rebuilding infrastructure such as bridges and power lines that the insurgents destroyed.
• Investing heavily to reform the dysfunctional economy. This was another big USAID initiative that included everything from agricultural development and an extremely controversial land reform program, construction or modernization of transportation infrastructure, training and equipping of small farmers and craftsmen, and sound fiscal practices.
• Social reform, including health care, education and literacy, vocational training, labor, family development, sanitation, and improved human rights practices.
• Political reforms, including extensive covert operations to build a moderate, center-left political party, the Christian Democrats, and ensure the victory of its leader, Jose Napoleon Duarte, in elections for president.
• Counterattacking the Sandinista regime in neighboring Nicaragua, which was providing the sanctuary, staging points, and weapons transshipment resources for the FMLN insurgents. The United States counterattacked in two principal ways: economic warfare to weaken the Sandinista junta, and support for a guerrilla army of Nicaraguan peasants who were resisting the junta’s takeover of their lands and political repression. This resistance force, which the Sandinistas derisively nicknamed the contras, grew to become one of the largest peasant guerrilla armies in Latin American history and is credited with forcing the Sandinistas to hold free elections and step down from power, ending the war in 1990. The resistance fighters demobilized, and the Nicaraguan military was significantly reduced in size and driven from politics.

An airman sits on a box of water donated by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) during a humanitarian aid flight.

Many of these policies were extremely controversial in the United States and around the world. The land reform program, begun during the Carter years in an effort to take land away from the wealthy farmers and redistribute it to the poor, had a short-term effect of undermining the FMLN’s appeal among the rural poor, but it destroyed the country’s thriving cotton production and damaged its ability to earn foreign exchange through coffee exports.

The FMLN had political and financial support groups around the world that generated hostility to U.S. foreign and defense strategy, working in concert with anti-NATO and anti-U.S. groups that operated under Soviet sponsorship. The World Front in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, based in Mexico, was an international coordinating body for the FMLN, and was integrated with Soviet international front organizations under Communist Party and KGB control.

The American affiliate, known as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador or CISPES, held high-profile demonstrations and pressure campaigns to discredit the Salvadoran government in the United States and undermine U.S. policy in Central America. Independent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like Oxfam America openly supported the FMLN guerrillas and the Sandinista regime at the time, and caused confusion about the nature of the conflict. I document the record in my book, The Third Current of Revolution: Inside the North American Front of El Salvador’s Guerrilla War (University Press of America, 1991).

Victory in El Salvador was so important to the Reagan administration that the White House established a daily, top-level process to coordinate and monitor the El Salvador strategy. That process, developed in National Security Decision Directive NSDD-82, included an interagency working group that would report “on at least a daily basis,” development of an action plan, weekly meetings of a core group, and a daily interagency conference call to provide a status report to give to the president in his morning briefing (see sidebar).

A large new containerized port under construction in Cutuco, El Salvador, will be the gateway of a “dry canal” to deliver goods overland between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The project will compete with the Panama Canal.

Defeating the Insurgency

Key to defeating the FMLN was offering the guerrillas a way out of the war without suffering recriminations. This was a very difficult notion for the winning side, many of whom believed that the group responsible for so much destruction should be wiped out and never emerge as a political force. Various “peace processes,” they argued, were little more than a trap to save the guerrillas from extinction while forcing needless concessions from the government.

While that argument had much merit, political realities in the United States and even in El Salvador demanded a prompt conclusion to the war. And the peace process of 1992 did succeed in stopping the bloodshed, disarming and demobilizing the insurgents, passing a general amnesty for both sides, integrating the insurgents into civilian society, and putting national reforms into place.

Results of Integrated Campaign

The results of the integrated strategy brought an end to the war and preserved the entire political, social, and economic stability effort—an effort that included both the United States and other countries, including Canada, Western European allies, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Salvadorans have repeatedly elected the conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) party since it won the presidential election of 1989. ARENA embarked on a difficult but largely successful effort to reverse the often socialistic, government-centered counterinsurgency-era policies of USAID, and, like Chile, turned El Salvador’s economy into a thriving free market. The government underwent a large privatization effort to sell state-owned businesses and services so that there would be, in one official’s words, “nothing left to steal.”

An infusion of investment and cash remittances from workers in the United States and other countries is crucial to the success of El Salvador’s economy, accounting for 16 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to the CIA World Factbook. GDP growth in 2006 was an impressive 4.2 percent.

Corruption, however, remains a major problem that continues to cripple the country’s progress, as the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation note in their 2007 Index of Economic Freedom (see "The Second Freest Economy in America" sidebar).

Even so, El Salvador has been attracting foreign investment. Japan has been a major contributor to the country’s new highway infrastructure, with a high-speed road and bridge network traversing the mountainous topography and shrinking the distance between crops and markets. German speculators have bought up significant amounts of land. Construction has been booming for two decades, with networks of high-end gas stations, clinics and hospitals, shopping centers, hotels, and free-trade zones that house factories and assembly plants to manufacture clothing, shoes, and other value-added items for export.

Foreign investment also provides much better jobs and labor conditions for poor workers. The sprawling construction of simple but tastefully designed homes and housing projects shows that a middle class has emerged and entrenched itself for the first time.

The country’s famed coffee industry is taking off again, thanks in large part to U.S. and other economic training and aid, and to a more conscious world market that pays premiums for the finer coffees that flourish in El Salvador. Starbucks is a major coffee purchaser in the country, and Salvadoran coffees win competitions around the world.

Ecological Recovery

The Second Freest Economy in Latin America The economic reforms instated by the ARENA party have made El Salvador the second freest economy in Latin America after Chile, and the 29th freest in the world. The annual Index of Economic Freedom, produced by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal as a means of gauging the link between economic opportunity and prosperity, has given El Salvador relatively high marks amid a two-decade economic recovery campaign. more >>

As countries prosper, they can afford to become more environmentally conscious. After the destruction from the war and from agrarian reforms, and with strong foreign support, El Salvador placed a premium on environmental protection. Enforcement is still spotty, but a gradual attitudinal shift in the population, steered by local NGOs and foreign donors, has raised awareness of the importance of a clean and healthy environment.

The local private sector has contributed to environmental renewal, and the powerful coffee sector has been at the backbone of the movement. “Coffee’s importance for El Salvador has been changing over the last years, from being the backbone of our economy to a social source of stability,” says the Salvadoran Coffee Association, “and now, more than ever, it has become the last ecological refuge.” Large coffee growers have restored near-depleted fruit and hardwood trees to provide shelter from the sun for the fine, shade-grown, high-altitude coffees that command high prices.

Market approaches to agricultural reform have also benefited the smaller farmers. USAID has been a leader here, too, promoting cooperatives of small growers who can demand higher prices for their coffee beans, and who receive training and resources to produce high-quality beans that can compete on the free market.

As the Index of Economic Freedom shows, El Salvador still has a long way to go in many areas. But given the near-hopelessness many felt during the war, the country has made a remarkable recovery. And the country is giving back. After current President Tony Saca took office in 2004, a senior United Nations official was taken aback when he asked a Salvadoran official what the country wanted from the international community. The Salvadoran’s answer: “We want nothing. The international community helped us in our dark times. Now it’s time for us to give back.”

Salvadoran professors, teachers, and trainers are helping people in other countries to understand and embrace free competition and markets. Salvadoran troops and well-seasoned first responders offer rescue and recovery services to other countries in time of disaster. During Hurricane Katrina, President Saca and the National Assembly offered to send soldiers to help patrol New Orleans and other stricken areas, and to do the tough work of recovering bodies.

Twenty-five years of commitment pays off with better jobs and a higher quality of life in a country many had written off as a basket case. © Poco_bw | Dreamstime.com

Salvadoran businessmen have been buying up property, industries, and other enterprises across Central America, dominating the economic revival of places like Nicaragua. El Salvador’s privately owned airline, TACA, has bought up most of the failing state-run airlines of the rest of Central America, and now owns an airline in Peru. TACA boasts the most modern passenger jet fleet of any airline in Latin America. Now other emerging airlines, such as the five-star Qatar Airways, are hiring away Salvadoran pilots.

The military is a fraction of its old size and no longer involved in domestic politics. Its relatively new professionalism, and the skills learned during and after the successful counterinsurgency, are now benefiting other countries. Salvadoran antimine personnel were among the small military contingents who assisted demining operations in Iraq. About 380 Salvadoran troops are presently serving in Iraq—at El Salvador’s own expense—and have built an impressive record for themselves in Iraq’s central and southern areas. Private security contractors in Iraq tell Serviam in private that they value the skill, professionalism, and patience of former Salvadoran troops now serving in the private sector.

El Salvador stood down an Islamist terrorist threat in August 2004, in which the “Mohammed Atta-Al Qaeda Jihad Brigades” gave the country 20 days to pull out its troops “before we carry the war to El Salvador itself.” Salvadoran President Saca stood his ground, and the terrorists never made good on their threat.

A tough little country that has been to hell and back, El Salvador is a real success story. The Central American republic is a case study of successful global stability operations and the public-private partnerships that have made great things happen.

The author has visited El Salvador more than 50 times since 1983, and was a participant in various parts of the U.S. strategy to defeat the FMLN, stabilize the country, and help rebuild civil society. He worked with the Salvadoran army, served as a private contractor with the State Department and USAID, and was the youngest member of the White House Central America Task Force. He was also a private contractor hired to train the Nicaraguan Democratic Force and Miskito Indian resistance fighters against the Sandinista regime. He is author of The Third Current of Revolution: Inside the North American Front of El Salvador’s Guerrilla War (1991). His most recent visit to El Salvador was in December 2007.

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From the January/February 2008 issue of Serviam.