Introduction
Democracy by Transition I
excerpted from the book
In the Name of Democracy
U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan
Years
by Thomas Carothers
University of California Press, 1991
p7
Definition of democracy by Juan J. Linz, a leading comparative
scholar of democracy, offers the following criteria for a democracy:
Legal freedom to formulate and advocate political alternatives
with the concomitant rights to free association, free speech,
and other basic freedoms of person; free and nonviolent competition
among leaders with periodic validation of their claim to rule;
inclusion of all effective political offices in the democratic
process; and provision for the participation of all members of
the political community, whatever their political preferences.
Practically, this means the freedom to create political parties
and to conduct free and honest elections at regular intervals
without excluding any effective political office from direct or
indirect electoral accountability.
p8
... in attempting to promote democracy abroad, the U.S. government
tends to use an overly narrow version of the conventional Western
political science conception of democracy that emphasizes elections
at the expense of everything else. In this view, the U.S. government
does not question whether an elected government genuinely exercises
full authority or is simply a facade covering entrenched undemocratic
structures. Moreover ... the U.S. government assesses political
participation only by looking at voting and not by inquiring whether
citizens are free on a day-to-day basis to oversee the full range
of political and civil rights included in the conventional definition
of democracy, such as free speech and free association.
El Salvador
p14
For much of this century, El Salvador has been dominated by a
reactionary economic oligarchy allied with a brutal, repressive
military. Starting in the 1930s the oligarchy's hold on power
was periodically but unsuccessfully challenged by a variety of
reformist elements, including peasant groups, moderate civilian
politicians, and occasional reform-minded junior military officers.
In the late 1960s, the Christian Democratic party, allied with
the Social Democratic party and the Communist party, mounted a
major political challenge to the ruling military-oligarchy elite
that culminated in an apparent victory for the Christian Democratic
candidate, Jose Napoleon Duarte, in the 1972 presidential elections.
The military intervened in the vote-counting process, declared
the military candidate the winner, and arrested and tortured Duarte.
The failure of this reform movement provoked a serious polarization
of the already turbulent political process.
In the early 1970s a number of leftist guerrilla groups formed
and began fighting the Salvadoran armed forces. At the same time,
a number of popular movements, such as labor unions, teacher associations,
and student groups, formed and began mobilizing to promote political
and economic reforms. The stagnant Salvadoran military governments
of the 1970s responded to this ground swell of political opposition
in heavy-handed fashion, launching a violent counterinsurgency
campaign based on indiscriminate rural and urban terror. A number
of junior military officers were increasingly concerned by the
rising civil conflict and the government's inflexible response.
They saw an obvious parallel to Nicaragua, where a stagnant, corrupt
dictator had fallen to a relatively small group of rebels who
combined an armed insurgency with popular mobilization efforts.
In October 1979 these junior officers in El Salvador overthrew
the regime of General Carlos Humberto Romero and installed a civilian-military
junta that incorporated political forces ranging from the moderate
left to the right.
The Carter administration was in the midst of formulating
a new Central America policy when the 1979 Salvadoran coup occurred.
Alarmed by the rise of radical leftist guerrilla movements in
Central America, the Carter administration had begun moving in
1978 away from its human rights policy to a policy more focused
on combating leftism. The new policy incorporated a dual military-political
approach: the United States would renew assistance to Central
American militaries, both to strengthen their capability to meet
the guerrilla challenges and to gain political leverage over those
militaries; and the United States would promote the emergence
of centrist civilian governments committed to political and economic
reforms as a means of alleviating the underlying causes of leftist
revolutionary pressures.
The October 1979 coup in El Salvador was the opening the Carter
administration needed to apply this new policy to a country it
recognized was far down a dangerous path of political stagnation
and polarization. The Carter team quietly welcomed the coup and
committed itself to supporting the civilian-military junta, in
the belief that it represented a nascent but legitimate political
center that must be developed against the extremes of the left
and right. In early 1980 the Carter administration renewed military
aid to El Salvador, despite the worsening human rights situation
there, arguing that the junta must have the means to defend itself
against the rebels. At the same time the State Department pushed
the junta to adopt an ambitious set of economic reforms-most notably
a broad land reform program and the nationalization of the country's
commercial banks-that it believed would weaken the oligarchy's
hold and improve the lot of the long-suffering Salvadoran peasantry.
The fledgling political center in El Salvador only barely
held together in 1980. The reins of power passed from one weak,
divided junta to another with each unable to assert any controlling
authority over the Salvadoran military and economic oligarchy.
The civil war intensified furiously. The rebels, who unified in
1980 as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN),
expanded their field of action and gained control over substantial
areas of the Salvadoran national territory. The Salvadoran security
forces responded with increasingly savage, indiscriminate attacks
on villages and towns suspected of harboring the rebels, resulting
in the deaths of thousands of Salvadoran civilians. The extraordinary
political violence in El Salvador forced its way into the U.S.
public's consciousness in December 1980 when four Americans, three
nuns, and a Catholic lay worker, were murdered in cold blood by
members of the Salvadoran security forces. On January 10, 1981,
the FMLN launched its "final offensive," with the aim
of toppling the Salvadoran government and presenting the incoming
Reagan administration with the fait accompli of a second leftist
revolution in Central America. President Carter hurriedly restored
U.S. military assistance (it had been suspended after the murder
of the nuns) and approved an additional $5 million of military
aid. The rebels fell short of victory but succeeded in making
clear the very precarious state of affairs in El Salvador.
p16
The incoming Reagan administration wasted no time in sounding
the alarm bells on El Salvador. For President Reagan and his top
advisers, El Salvador was not a civil war in a small, remote country,
but a geostrategic crisis of major proportions. It was the hottest
flashpoint of the perceived Soviet-Cuban campaign to spread communism
throughout Central America. As Secretary of State Alexander Haig
said in February 1981, "Our problem with El Salvador is external
intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation in
this hemisphere, nothing more, nothing less." 3 El Salvador
was seen as a test of U.S. will on the order of the communist
invasion of South Korea, the Berlin crisis, and the Cuban missile
crisis. The Reagan administration quickly resolved that in El
Salvador it would draw the line against Soviet expansionism. Just
as it viewed the Salvadoran conflict in almost purely military
(rather than political) terms, the incoming Reagan team was certain
that the only possible solution was a military one. U.S. policy
was to be directed toward all-out support for the El Salvadoran
armed forces to help them achieve a quick total defeat of the
FMLN.
The early Reagan team was not especially concerned by the
nondemocratic character of the Salvadoran junta or the abysmal
human rights record of the Salvadoran security forces. It was
strongly influenced in this regard by the ideas of Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Kirkpatrick held that the only immediate political alternatives
in much of the developing world were left-wing totalitarians and
right-wing authoritarians, that no democratic middle ground alternative
was feasible, at least in the short-term. In this view, the United
States should recognize the need to choose between authoritarians
and totalitarians, and choose the former because they are less
repressive, more pro-U.S., and more likely to evolve toward democracy.
The United States should not distance itself from shaky authoritarian
regimes (as the Carter administration had done with the Shah in
Iran and Somoza in Nicaragua) because the result would likely
be leftist revolutions leading to governments inimical to U.S.
interests. The early Reagan administration applied these ideas
to El Salvador and resolved not to back away from and risk "losing"
El Salvador simply because of some political shortcomings of the
Salvadoran government and military.
p17
Although by mid-1981 the Reagan administration's El Salvador policy
appeared to be clearly launched on a hard-line path, in fact a
debate was going on within the administration over the appropriate
policy direction. The debate was between two groups that were
just beginning to differentiate themselves but that would come
to form a dualist opposition that would define much of the Reagan
administration's Latin America policy, particularly in Central
America. On the one hand were the hard-liners, the "Reaganaut"
ideologues preoccupied with Soviet expansionism. In the early
1980s the hardliners dominated the top level of the foreign policy
process with Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Secretary of Defense
Casper Weinberger, U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, CIA Director
William Casey, National Security Adviser Richard Allen, and his
successor William Clark.
p19
The moderates differed with the hard-liners over the causes of
the Salvadoran conflict and the appropriate U.S. response. They
believed the conflict stemmed from the glaring economic inequalities
and repressive political structures of Salvadoran society. They
shared the hard-liners' view that the Salvadoran rebels were receiving
substantial support from outside communist powers, but saw that
assistance as an aggravating factor rather than a cause of the
conflict. With respect to policy, they agreed that the United
States should step up assistance to the Salvadoran military. They
were adamant, however, that a military policy alone would not
succeed, that the United States must combine military assistance
with an effort to encourage economic and political reforms, particularly
a transition to elected civilian rule. The economic and political
components were necessary both to undercut the "roots of
revolution" in El Salvador and to gain the support of liberals
in the U.S. Congress who were unlikely to approve large amounts
of military assistance unless there were clear signs of political
progress in El Salvador.
p21
... hard-liners ... dominated the policy-making process and the
bulk of the administration's energies were directed toward the
military domain. An ambitious U.S. military assistance effort
took shape in the second half of 1981 when a special U.S.-Salvadoran
military planning team, led by a U.S. Army general, Frederick
Woerner, drew up a long-term strategy and planning paper, known
as the Woerner Report, for rebuilding the Salvadoran military
and winning the war against the rebels. The United States played
a key role in all aspects of the rebuilding effort, funding the
dramatic expansion of the Salvadoran military and the modernization
of its equipment, sponsoring a major training program for Salvadoran
military personnel of all levels, and overseeing the restructuring
of the antiquated Salvadoran military command structure.
This military assistance policy proceeded only with great
difficulty, encountering serious problems in both El Salvador
and the United States. In El Salvador, it rapidly became evident
that the war was not going to be a short, decisive campaign but
instead a messy, protracted struggle that would require a long-term,
steady commitment from the United States. The Reagan administration,
or at least the U.S. military advisers in the field and their
superiors at the Pentagon, quickly confronted the fact that the
Salvadoran military was a poorly trained, badly led force fighting
a nine-to-five war against rebels who were dedicated, disciplined,
and able to draw on strong support in some areas of the countryside.
Furthermore, the Salvadoran military and police were regularly
committing atrocities in the countryside, weakening their already
tenuous popular legitimacy. After recovering from their defeat
in the final offensive, the rebels began to operate actively again
in late 1981 and throughout 1982. In 1983 they harassed the Salvadoran
military effectively, and succeeded in holding significant portions
of eastern and northern El Salvador.
In the United States the policy was dogged by a lack of public
and congressional support. The U.S. public was extremely wary
of anticommunist crusades in obscure countries where the United
States was defending a government of dubious character and flirting
with the possibility of an escalating military involvement. The
constant reports of brutal political violence by the Salvadoran
security forces, in particular the December 1980 murder of four
U.S. churchwomen by members of the Salvadoran security forces,
ensured an extremely negative image of El Salvador in many Americans'
minds. The churchwomen were just four out of thousands of victims
of right-wing violence in El Salvador, but the fact that they
were American and that they were nuns gave the case a special
visibility in the United States. The Reagan administration's initial
cavalier attitude toward the case (Secretary of State Haig joked
about it in testimony before Congress)9 and the Salvadoran government's
long delay in solving and prosecuting the case galvanized liberal
opposition to U.S. policy.
Human rights concerns were the foundation of the U.S. Iiberal
view of El Salvador policy. U.S. Iiberals emphasized the roots
of the Salvadoran conflict in the deeply entrenched repressive
structures of Salvadoran society and viewed the Salvadoran military
more as the problem than the solution. In their view, the conflict
was clearly a civil war; they did not believe external assistance
to the Salvadoran rebels was significant in quantity or impact.
Liberals also held that the rebels had a genuine base of political
support in El Salvador and represented a part of the political
spectrum that must be incorporated into any political solution.
This liberal view became a steady and fairly powerful oppositional
chorus against the Reagan administration's efforts in El Salvador
during the early 1980s. Many organizations, including church groups,
human rights organizations, and nonprofit political advocacy groups
with an interest in Latin America, actively lobbied against U.S.
policy.
The U.S. Congress was the main battleground of this clash
between the Reagan administration and its liberal critics. The
Senate was controlled by the Republicans, but the House of Representatives
was in Democratic hands and became the focal point of liberal
lobbying efforts. Many Democrats in Congress were sympathetic
to the liberal view of El Salvador. They did not want to approve
large sums of military assistance for a government involved in
political terror. But most Democratic Congressmen were also very
reluctant to stand aside and risk the possibility of a leftist
takeover in El Salvador. After months of arguing with the Reagan
administration and among themselves, congressional Democrats (and
some moderate Republicans) settled in 1981 on a middle ground
approach. They would permit military assistance to El Salvador
but only if the President certified that the Salvadoran government
was making "a concerted and significant effort to comply
with internationally recognized human rights" and was "achieving
substantial control over all elements of its armed forces, so
as to bring to an end the indiscriminate torture and murder of
Salvadoran citizens by these forces.'' By accepting the need for
military assistance and giving the President the power to decide
when human rights conditions for aid were being met, congressional
Democrats actually went at least halfway to accepting the administration's
policy approach.
The Reagan administration certified El Salvador for military
aid twice in 1982 and twice again in 1983. These certifications
provoked fierce congressional-Executive Branch debates. The Reagan
administration took a hard line on the human rights issue, denying
that large numbers of abuses were occurring and blaming the rebels
for much of the political violence. To the extent the administration
did admit that the Salvadoran right was involved in political
terror, it argued that the death squads operated outside the security
forces and were led by shadowy, unknown figures. U.S. and West
European human rights organizations and journalists consistently
reported a very different picture: very large numbers of serious
human rights violations were continuing to occur in 1982 and 1983;
the Salvadoran military and police were the perpetrators of much
of the violence against Salvadorans not involved in the war; and
the death squads were made up of active duty Salvadoran security
personnel and led by well-known right-wing military officers.
The administration's stonewalling on the human rights issue
reflected several interrelated attitudes on the part of the Reagan
Latin American policy team. Many administration officials, particularly
hard-liners, did not believe that the Salvadoran security forces
were guilty of extensive political violence. They were convinced
that the guerrillas were responsible for much of the violence
and whatever civilians were killed by the security forces were
persons involved in some way with the rebels. Other officials
were aware that a great deal of right-wing political violence
was occurring but felt that human rights issues should be dealt
with only once the war was over; they did not want to slow down
the Salvadoran military by \1 burdening it with human rights concerns.
p25
The political component of the Reagan administration's El Salvador
policy also got underway in the early 1980s. The early Reagan
I administration translated its stated goal of "promoting
democracy" into an effort to foster an electoral process
that would culminate in presidential elections and a transition
to elected civilian rule. The administration, or at least the
moderates in the administration, did not want just any elected
civilian president, they wanted a moderate. They believed that
only a moderate could heal the left-right division in the country.
And they knew that if a rightist became president, such as the
notorious Roberto D'Aubuisson, a powerful, charismatic former
military officer associated with the death squads, Congress would
likely remain hostile to military aid.
Jose Napoleon Duarte, the prominent Christian Democratic leader
who led the Salvadoran junta in 1981, announced in the first half
of that year that elections for a Constituent Assembly would be
held in 1982 with presidential elections to follow a year or two
later. The Reagan hard-liners were skeptical of the capability
of the Salvadoran junta to carry off elections and of the wisdom
of engaging in an electoral process in the midst of a chaotic
war effort. The moderates, however, backed the electoral process
strongly...
The Constituent Assembly elections were held in March 1982
and, to the surprise of most observers, including many administration
officials, actually came off despite the ongoing civil war and
the general incoherence of the civilian political sector. The
administration championed the elections as a major advance for
the democratization of El Salvador, capitalizing on the elections
as a public relations victory in the struggle for congressional
and public support...
Although the fact of the elections was a success for the administration,
the actual results were not. The Salvadoran right did better than
the administration expected; four rightist parties, including
ARENA, together won a majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly.
The U.S. embassy had to act quickly and exert all the influence
it could muster to prevent D'Aubuisson from becoming the provisional
president. The embassy engineered a compromise in which D'Aubuisson
became the president of the Constituent Assembly but a political
independent, Alvaro Magana, was given the post of provisional
president, with a mandate to rule until national presidential
elections were held...
p27
The administration ... could not avoid the fact that congressional
and public support for its policy remained extremely weak. In
El Salvador the war was going badly despite the $55 million of
U.S. military assistance. President Reagan sent U.S. Ambassador
Jeane Kirkpatrick on a fact-finding tour to Central America in
early February of 1983. She returned with a very pessimistic account
of the war, one that caught President Reagan's attention and spurred
him to action.
Reagan and his advisers did not interpret the policy's lack
of success as a sign that a different substantive tack should
be taken. In particular, the administration continued to reject
the idea of some kind of negotiated power sharing agreement that
was increasingly being proposed by U.S. liberals as the way to
end the war. When Assistant Secretary Enders floated the idea
of publicly supporting the possibility of negotiations between
the Salvadoran government and rebels (largely as a means of winning
congressional support) he was forced out of his job by the hard-liners.
Instead the White House decided to redouble the military effort
by seeking large new amounts of military assistance.
p29
... the first round of the long-awaited presidential elections
in El Salvador were held [1983]. The elections were the culmination
of the electoral process the administration had been nurturing
since 1981 and were a critical juncture for both El Salvador and
U.S. policy. The administration approached the elections with
two goals: ensuring that technically credible elections were held
and that the Christian Democratic candidate, Jose Napoleon Duarte,
won.
p30
Duarte fulfilled U.S. hopes by winning the presidential elections
gaining 53.6 percent of the second round vote against 46.4 percent
for D'Aubuisson. Duarte's ascension to the presidency led to a
shift in emphasis in U.S. policy. Duarte was popular among many
congressional Democrats and U.S. Iiberals; although some questioned
the validity of the elections (because of the intense U.S. involvement
in the electoral process and the nonparticipation of the left),
they accepted the idea that the new Duarte government must receive
strong U.S. economic, political, and military backing. The problem
of weak congressional support that had plagued the Reagan policy
since 1981 almost disappeared. In May 1984 Congress approved a
large military and economic aid package for El Salvador that removed
most of the human rights conditionalities imposed on military
aid in December 1981. The vote was a turning point; from that
time on Congress approved essentially every request for military
and economic assistance the Reagan administration made for El
Salvador.
p36
By late 1988 the Duarte presidency was in bad shape. The Christian
Democrats had lost most of their public support, a fact evidenced
by their defeat in the 1988 legislative elections where ARENA
captured a majority in the National Assembly and control of 200
out of 244 municipalities. The war was heating up, human rights
violations were rising, and the economy was still stagnant. President
Duarte had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in midyear and
was both physically and politically a greatly diminished man.
The Reagan policy was reduced to a stubborn effort to keep the
Duarte government afloat, with the hope that Duarte would at least
make it to the March 1989 presidential elections.
p36
The incoming Bush administration pledged itself to continuing
the Reagan policy in El Salvador and faced the first policy juncture
early on when presidential elections were held in March 1989.
As expected, AETNA, led by Alfredo Cristiani, a moderate conservative
who had replaced Roberto D'Aubuisson as party leader after the
1985 legislative elections, soundly defeated the Christian Democrats.
The election did mark a broadening of the political process.
p39
The Reagan administration's El Salvador policy was an anticommunist
policy. The United States engaged itself in El Salvador in 1979
and stayed intensely engaged throughout the 1980s to prevent a
takeover by the FMLN. Promoting democracy, which the Reagan administration
interpreted in the very narrow sense of fostering the emergence
and maintenance of an elected civilian government, was one operative
element of that anticommunist policy, alongside large military
and economic assistance programs.
p40
Controversy over the administration's conception of democracy
and the process of democratization in E1 Salvador also contributed
to the uncertainty over the place of democracy in the policy.
Most critics of the administration's policy disagreed strongly
with the administration's election-oriented view of democracy.
This disagreement led many critics to dismiss the democracy element
altogether. They lapsed into the tendency to assume that because
the administration was pursuing democracy promotion in a way they
did not believe in, the administration was not serious about promoting
democracy.
p43
El Salvador did not become what the Reagan administration claimed,
that is, a working democracy. Yet neither did it remain the same
archaic political fiefdom as before. E1 Salvador became a kind
of semidemocracy in which the traditional ruling alliance of the
military and the economic elite was weakening and being replaced
by a new and different sort of alliance between the civilian political
sector and the military. The military does not act in concert
with the civilian political sector, or subordinate itself to it,
but tolerates civilian rule as necessary to ensure the continuation
of U.S. military aid that feeds what has become a bloated, economically
voracious military establishment. Civilian rule also puts the
military out of the direct line of blame for terrible socioeconomic
problems of the country and helps El Salvador maintain a certain
legitimacy in the international community.
The fact that El Salvador did not become a democracy should
not automatically be seen as a consequence of a misconceived U.S.
policy. U.S. policy was an important factor in E1 Salvador's political
evolution in the 1980s but by no means a determinant factor that
could point the country in any direction it chose with no regard
to the historical configuration of forces or the political culture
of the society. Nonetheless, it is evident that in terms of promoting
democracy, the Reagan administration's policy was seriously flawed.
The most serious problem was the fundamental tension inherent
in trying to foster an authoritative civilian government while
simultaneously strengthening the military. Both in attitude and
practice the Salvadoran military was and is a profoundly antidemocratic
institution. Among the military's cardinal values are a refusal
to obey any outside authority, an abiding disrespect for civilian
politicians and civilian political life, and a reflexive, violent
opposition to any political activism outside narrowly defined
forms or bounds. Strengthening the military inevitably clashed
with the goal of promoting democracy. With U.S. assistance the
military grew enormously in size and power, becoming the best
financed, most technically modernized sector of Salvadoran society.
The increase in the military's strength gave it that much more
weight as a force within the Salvadoran political system. And
the U.S. assistance led to the military gaining a formidable,
highly corrupt economic empire in El Salvador, a fact that only
increased the military's domestic political T interests and powers,
as well as its insistence on remaining a force outside civilian
control.
p46
The U.S. officials involved, particularly the U.S. ambassadors
to El Salvador, were well aware that the level of U.S. involvement
in Salvadoran political affairs constituted a significant infringement
on Salvadoran sovereignty, but they were convinced that this involvement
was in El Salvador's best interest and was necessary as a small,
short-term deformation to produce large, long-term gains. Inevitably,
however, the extraordinary degree of U.S. involvement weakened
the democratic legitimacy of the Duarte government. The Duarte
government was trying to establish itself as the sovereign authority
of the country and such authority implied freedom from external
as well as internal controls. The U.S. role continually undermined
this effort at the same time it was supporting it. Duarte was
widely seen in El Salvador as being in the U.S. government's pocket,
a perception that contributed to his decline. In some sense at
least, the more the United States tried to bolster what it saw
as a democratic government in El Salvador, the more it undercut
the legitimacy of that government.
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