El Salvador’s Cold War Martyrs

The curfew broke after dawn. But the massacre took place in the middle of the night. The high command of the Salvadoran armed forces, who were receiving a million dollars a day in U.S. aid, made their decision near midnight. They had been on the defensive over the past four days and nights, as Marxist guerrillas took over and held poor as well as wealthy neighborhoods throughout the capital city. The strength of the rebel offensive took Salvadoran and U.S. officials alike by surprise.

El Salvador's Gold Fight

As El Salvador transitions from decades of conservative rule to the administration of leftist President Mauricio Funes, the country faces an international showdown triggered by a restrictive free-trade agreement between the United States and Central America. Canada's Pacific Rim Mining Corporation is suing the government for its refusal to allow it to mine gold in El Salvador's rural north. If Pacific Rim succeeds in securing the $100 million settlement it seeks, that would set a troubling precedent.

A Salvadoran Resurrection

SAN SALVADOR - At The Plaza Libertad today, inauguration day of President Mauricio Funes, I will be thinking back to Feb. 28, 1977, when security forces opened fire there on hundreds of unarmed civilians protesting a fraudulent presidential election. Less than a week earlier, Oscar Romero, then considered a priest of the privileged, had been installed as the archbishop of El Salvador.

El Salvador Votes Away Its Bad Past

Last Sunday's election in El Salvador, in which the leftist FMLN (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation) won the presidency, didn't get a lot of attention in the international press. It's a relatively small country (7 million people on land the size of Massachusetts) and fairly poor (per capita income about half the regional average).

Leftist Victory in El Salvador Closes an Historic Cycle

The apparent victory of leftist candidate Maurico Funes in Sunday's presidential election in El Salvador finally closes out the Cold War in Central America and raises some serious questions about the long term goals of U.S. foreign policy.

Can Obama's Change Find El Salvador?

More than a quarter century ago, the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan drew a Cold War line in El Salvador and made the defeat of the leftist Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (the FMLN) a major foreign policy goal.

Over the next decade, El Salvador became synonymous with death squads and massacres, leaving some 75,000 dead, with the vast majority of the killings blamed on the security forces armed and supported by Washington. Finally in 1992, a U.N.-brokered truce ended the slaughter and left the FMLN on the outside of power looking in.

Could Obama Say a Few Words for Democracy in El Salvador?

We all know that President Obama has a lot on his plate. On the other hand, as candidate Obama reminded us, "words matter," especially the words spoken by the President of the United States, and with El Salvador facing a watershed Presidential election on March 15, President Obama could do a lot for the people of El Salvador and the future of U.S. relations with Latin America simply by saying something along the following lines between now and March 15: