Enrique Alvarez Córdova : life of a Salvadoran revolutionary and gentleman

294 Pages·2006·94.222 MB·English

by  John Lamperti

Enrique Alvarez
Córdova
Life of a Salvadoran
Revolutionary and Gentleman
John Lamperti
Foreword by Charles Clements
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
Library of Congress Online Catalog data
Lamperti, John.
Enrique Alvarez Cordova : life of a Salvadoran revolutionary
and gentleman / John Lamperti; foreword by Charles Clements,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7864-2473-7 (softcover : 50# alkaline paper) ©
1. Alvarez Córdova, Enrique, 1930-1980. 2. Revolutionaries—
El Salvador — Biography. 3. Politicians—El Salvador —Biography.
4. El Salvador —History —20th century. I. Title.
F1488.A48L36 2006 2006008888
British Library cataloguing data are available
©2006 John Lamperti. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: Enrique Alvarez Córdova at a 1980
Washington, D.C., press conference
(Sandoval/Maryknoll Missioners)
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www. mcfarlandpub. com
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
-------.tu nc M RFRTA
Contents
Foreword by Charles Clements 1
Preface 5
Prologue: A Bad Day in San Salvador 11
1—A Salvadoran Family 19
2 —Social Explosion; Peaceful Childhood 41
3 —Young Man on the Go: Socialite, Sportsman, and Farmer 67
4 — National Reform: Minister of Agriculture 95
5 — The El Jobo Years 121
6 — A Moment of Elope: The 1979 Coup 146
7 —From Reform to Revolution: The FDR 169
8 — Traveling for the Cause 205
9 —Into the Fire 228
Epilogue 256
Appendix: Letter from the FDR 261
Notes 265
Bibliography 281
Index 285
v

Foreword
by Charles Clements
Many Americans know about Archbishop Oscar Romero, the modern
martyr of El Salvador. Few know about Enrique Alvarez, who belonged to
one of the catorce, the fourteen families that ruled El Salvador through their
extreme wealth. He, too, was a modern martyr, but not because of his reli­
gious faith. It was rather because of his rationality, his sense of fairness, his
generosity of spirit, all of which caused him to be called a communist.
Enrique Alvarez didn’t need a philosopher like John Locke to explain
that the right to accumulate private property should be limited by a uni­
versal right to subsistence. He could know it by observing the lives of the
peasants who helped accumulate his family’s wealth. It is the reason that
toward the end of their lives Enrique Alvarez and Archbishop Oscar Romero
became close friends. They had come to understand that the structural vio­
lence that the poor in El Salvador often call “our daily bread” was becom­
ing a vortex of inevitable revolution.
In the fall of 1980 Alvarez was president of the Revolutionary Demo­
cratic Front (the acronym is FDR in Spanish), a group of civilian leaders
who openly opposed the military installed junta that was abetting the ter­
ror in El Salvador. He had three times been the minister of agriculture. He
had been a popular national basketball star. He was one of the largest coffee
growers, and hence also one of the wealthiest men, in El Salvador.
Sometime back, Alvarez had begun to convert his profitable coffee
plantation, El Jobo, to a cooperative. According to his friends he used to
say, “We who have the most must share a little. That would be the life insur­
ance for this country to avoid bloodshed.”
But El Salvador’s life insurance of which he spoke had been spiraling
out of control for some time. On Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1980,
Enrique Alvarez was one of six civilian leaders abducted at gunpoint as they
1
2 Foreword
prepared to hold a press conference at a Jesuit high school in downtown
San Salvador. Later reports that day indicated their mutilated bodies had
been found and that a “death squad” boasted its responsibility for the kid­
nappings.
One thousand was the monthly average that year — that is, of civilians
that were kidnapped, murdered, mutilated or “disappeared” by security
forces— the same security forces who, when they changed their uniforms
for civilian clothes, changed their name to “death squads.”
For many North Americans, as people in Latin America refer to us,
one thousand is just another statistic, not even a significant one by most
standards. At that time the population of El Salvador was about five mil­
lion, one-fiftieth that of the United States. So in proportion to the United
States, El Salvador was experiencing the equivalent of fifty thousand deaths
a month — nearly the total of America casualties in a decade of warfare in
Southeast Asia. That was the monthly carnage in El Salvador in 1980 — and
the civil war had not yet begun. This is the context for the story of this
remarkable and gentle man.
Privilege generally weaves a cocoon around itself. When the protec­
tion and isolation it affords fail, an individual can be considered a traitor
to his class. Such was the case of Enrique Alvarez. What enabled him to
first hear the voices of the poor who toiled on the extensive coffee planta­
tions of his family? Why did he begin to identify with the plight of peas­
ants rather than the concerns of those with whom he played polo? And
when his life was repeatedly threatened, what led him to ignore his own
safety and continue to fight for land reform?
These are a few of the questions that John Lamperti explores in his
compelling biography of Enrique Alvarez, a work that delves deeply into
the events that led to El Salvador’s most recent civil war.
Not long after Alvarez died, I worked as a family physician serving a
dozen villages in rural El Salvador. The area became a free fire zone and
was bombed, rocketed, or strafed daily by American supplied aircraft. The
guns on some of those aircraft could put a bullet in every square foot of a
football field in sixty seconds. As the aircraft swooped down spewing
destruction, the Salvadoran peasants would respond with rifle fire. Later
when I led Congressional delegations to El Salvador, instead of trying to
understand what conditions could fuel such determination in the face of
overwhelming firepower, too often the question would be, “Where did they
get the rifles?”
In his last speech the day before he died, the one entitled “I’ve been to
the mountain top,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “...in the human rights
revolution, if something isn’t done, and done in a hurry, to bring the ... peo-
Foreword 3
pies of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt
and neglect, the world is doomed.”
I believe the places in the world where people grow tired of being
plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleak­
ness of chronic despair, where they grow bitter from watching their chil­
dren die as they can do little to protect them from dirty water, common
diseases, and insufficient food, become breeding grounds for resentment
and hatred, for spawning violence.
In his preface, Lamperti says, “I hope this book will help preserve the
memory of a good man who should be counted among his nation’s true
heroes.” I think it does more than that. It vividly illustrates John Kennedy’s
belief that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent
revolution inevitable. The message herein is not historical; it is current.
Charlie Clements, M.D., M.P.H.
President and CEO of the Unitarian
Universalist Service Committee
Author of Witness to War
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Preface
It used to be said of El Salvador that fourteen families, “Las Catorce,”
controlled the economy of the country and owned most of its resources.
The number fourteen was arbitrary and the saying seems to have originated
with a cocktail party conversation followed by an article in Time maga­
zine.1 Still, there is no question that for many years a relative handful of
extended families largely ran El Salvador and enjoyed most of the fruits of
its coffee-based wealth, using the nation’s armed forces as their private
police.
One of those oligarchy families bore the surname Alvarez. On my first
trip to Central America twenty years ago, I heard of a rich man from “the
fourteen” who had rejected the privileges of his class and joined the cause
of the impoverished and oppressed common people of El Salvador. I learned
that in April 1980 Enrique Alvarez Cordova became president of the Demo­
cratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), a broad coalition of nearly all the center/
left civilian opposition to the regime. This made him the top political leader
of the country’s radical movement and potentially its first post-revolution
president. But Enrique Alvarez did not become president of El Salvador,
nor did he head the FDR for very long. In the fall of that same year Alvarez
and five companions were kidnapped and murdered by elements of the
armed forces and their ultra right-wing backers.
I learned too about Archbishop Oscar Romero, the conservative cleric
whose honesty and loyalty to his people led him to struggle against the
growing oppression by the military-dominated government and brought
about his martyrdom. This surprised me less, for it seemed to be the logi­
cal consequence of his Christian faith and the theology of liberation. Of
course Christians must oppose repression and work for justice — the big sur­
prise was that this could be a controversial position. But many (not all) of
the Salvadoran oligarchy put greater faith in the theology of wealth, and
were ready to defend their interests and privileges by any means necessary.
5