Duarte : my story

299 Pages·1986·7.524 MB·English

by  José Napoleón Duarte

Jose Napoleon Duarte
with Diana Page
with a preface by
The Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C.,
of the University of Notre Dame
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Publishers Since 1838
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 1986 by José Napoleón Duarte
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published simultaneously in Canada by
General Publishing Co. Limited, Toronto
Typeset by Fisher Composition, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duarte, José Napoleón.
Duarte: my story.
1. Duarte, José Napoleón.
2. El Salvador—Politics and government—1979- .
3. El Salvador—Presidents—Biography. I. Title.
FI488.42. D83 A3 1986 972.84'053'0924 [B] 86-16983
ISBN 0-399-13202-3
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
To the youth of the world, especially the Scout
movement, to my own children and to the Sal­
vadoran people:
Above all, I believe that we must have convictions
and principles in order to serve our fellow citizens,
in order to leave this world a better place than we
found it.
1 want to dedicate this book to my wife, Ney, who
has not only inspired me, but also renewed my de­
termination to live according to my principles
through her own total dedication to the needy.

Contents
PREFACE 9
PROLOGUE 18
1: GROWING UP 28
2: SAN SALVADOR'S MAYOR 54
3: THE 1972 RACE 70
4: EXILE 84
5: THE WORST OF TIMES 104
6: THE WOMEN OF GOD 135
7: 1981 157
8: ELECTIONS 177
9: PEACE TALKS 208
10: TURNING POINT 229
11: BAD NEWS 241
12: LOOKING FORWARD 268

Preface
I began this preface with the sure knowledge, born of many
years of experience, that there will be not a few readers who
will severely criticize me for doing so. They will read this book,
not to attempt to understand José Napoleón Duarte, but as a
means of finding old or new chinks in his armor.
All of us have chinks in our armor. The only way to avoid
criticism is to sit on the fence and do nothing, except maybe to
criticize others who are trying to create a better and more just
world. I have received dozens of letters from critics who wrote
them safely from comfortable quarters far from the fray. I am
sure President Duarte has received many more, because he has
been sitting, by his own choice, in the middle of the target, the
most critical spot of all.
He is attempting to change a situation that has existed for over
a half century, in a “culture of violence," to use his own words.
Neither he nor his programs of action are perfect. But at least he
9
DUARTE: MV STORY
is and has been trying to ameliorate a situation he has inherited.
Either the Right or the Left could kill him at any time. God
knows, both have tried often enough. No matter how hard he
tries, there is no assurance whatever of either success or survival,
for himself or his family. I know that Ñapo, as I have called him
for over forty years, is an honest man, vowed to justice and a
better life for his people. He tells his story in an honest and
straightforward way. While he shares his dreams, he also admits
to his mistakes.
When he asked me to write a preface to this autobiography, I
was happy to do so, even while acknowledging the risks involved.
One does not do less for one's friends, and Napo has been my
friend from the day in 1945 when I threatened to toss him out of
the first class I taught at Notre Dame, Christian Virtues, because
he was talking Spanish to a countryman sitting next to him in the
front row. More of that later, in his own account.
All I would ask of the honest reader is to try to understand, in
the pages that follow, how one man has tried and is trying to
make a difference, despite the heavy odds against him. More than
all-knowing criticism from afar, he needs prayers.
This is a book about a man who started out to become a civil
engineer and ended up—partly at my urging—a social engineer,
and one, I might add, who has found justice a lot more difficult to
construct than public housing. It also is the story of his small,
anguished country, bent by poverty, violence and political corrup­
tion.
And it is yet another affirmation of his dream for his land, an
affirmation not stitched together from old campaign oratory, but
rooted in deed. Whatever one might think of José Napoleón
Duarte's ideas, they come earned in suffering. Time and again,
his convictions have been put to stern tests, from being beaten
near to death in the wake of a stolen election, through seven years
10
PREFACE
of exile, to the despicable 1985 kidnapping of his daughter by
Salvadoran guerrillas.
Duarte's political philosophy is not a complex, nuanced one. It
is as simple and as straightforward as the Boy Scout oath that so
impressed him as a boy. It began, as he relates, when he joined a
Catholic study group in San Salvador in 1960. There, he found
inspiration in the social teachings of Pope Leo XIII as refined by
others, including the great French philosopher Jacques Maritain,
and Chilean President Eduardo Frei, who set them in contrast to
the atheistic determinism of Karl Marx. "Christians must reject
class warfare and materialism," Duarte notes early on in this
autobiography. "Christian Democrats believe in a new social
order built not on materialist values, but on solidarity among
human beings," a solidarity resting on the dignity each has as a
child of God.
Duarte began to seek that new social order in 1964, shortly after
founding the Christian Democratic Party in El Salvador. He ran for
mayor of the country's capital only to find himself speaking to
streets emptied by the fear of the ruling military. He is still seeking
it more than two decades later as the first freely elected president of
El Salvador in more than half a century. And, while no one has to
cower inside out of fear for one's life anymore, democracy has not
made life easy for the citizens of this Central American country.
The continuing problem is described by Duarte as the lack of
"political space." The political space he refers to is in the middle,
between the Right of the old oligarchy-military coalition and the
Left, whose guerrillas want to wrest power violently by civil war
rather than try to win it peacefully by vote.
The two other major players in El Salvador's drama are the
Catholic Church, exercising a newly articulated "option for the
poor" in distancing itself from the former ruling classes with
whom it has been historically associated, and the United States,
11