A Jan. 29 article about the legacy of El Salvador's civil war misidentified Walter Araujo as president of El Salvador's Supreme Court. He is president of the country's Supreme Electoral Tribunal. A photo caption with a Jan. 29 article incorrectly identified José Wilfredo Salgado, the mayor of San Miguel, El Salvador, as José Miguel Salgada. The article also identified him as Salgada in some references.
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Former Salvadoran Foes Share Doubts on War
Salgada and Chica Argueta now share a point of view, a common phenomenon in El Salvador today, where former soldiers and guerrillas often work together and intermarry. Chica Argueta said he believes the intermingling of former enemies was made possible by peace accords signed in 1992 without declaring a loser, thus leaving the guerrillas and the government soldiers on an even plane.
While Salgada and Chica Argueta struggle with doubts about the war, El Salvador's ruling party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA, presents a less nuanced image. ARENA prides itself as a bulwark against communism. The party's official hymn, sung often at political and government gatherings, boasts that "El Salvador is the tomb of the red ones," a reference to communist sympathizers.
  Former guerrilla Benito Chica Argueta, stepping out of a cave that hid the rebels' Radio Venceremos, now says ideology played no role in his decision to take up arms. (By Manuel Roig-franzia -- The Washington Post) Special Report
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Walter Araujo, an ARENA stalwart who is president of El Salvador's Supreme Court and former head of the party, said in an interview that the civil war "put up a barrier against communist expansion. . . . To say communism wasn't a threat at that time would be to deny history."
Araujo is quick to point out that some rebel factions received support from Fidel Castro in Cuba and Daniel Ortega's Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And those countries might have played an outsize role in shaping El Salvador if the war had ended differently, Araujo said.
"We would have suffered the same fate as Nicaragua if there had been a victory by the left," Araujo said.
Today, Araujo and others describe what they portray as a similar threat -- the rise of populist socialist movements in Latin America -- and worry that El Salvador once again will be swept up in a bitter ideological fight.
"The risk has resurged," Araujo said.
A group of former guerrillas watched Araujo speak on television a few days before the Jan. 16 anniversary of the peace accords and scoffed at his comparisons between the present and the civil war era. On the patio of a small hotel in Perquin, where a civil war museum promotes the guerrilla version of history, they fretted that their struggle is still misunderstood.
The conversation drifted toward their disappointments about postwar El Salvador: the continued mass migration to the United States by Salvadorans who cannot find work at home, their fears about violence in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world, their worries that the government isn't doing enough to address either problem.
"We have no historical memory here in El Salvador -- has everyone forgotten what we fought for?" said Adolfo Sanchez, a 47-year-old former guerrilla whose left arm is several inches shorter than his right because a bullet obliterated his elbow.
Then Sanchez paused. A smile grew on his face.
"You know," he said, "before the war we never could have sat here, right out in the open, and said such things."
Maybe, they all agreed, it had been worth it after all.
