Aquino’s crumbling peace: Lessons from El Salvador

SAN FRANCISCO — In the 1980s, Ernesto Godoy lived through the kind of violence now destroying parts of southern Philippines.

Actually, as he recalls it, the killing and bloodletting he and many others endured in El Salvador seemed even more brutal.

“Early morning, you’d see heads hanging on fences,” he told me in a phone interview. “You’d ride a bus early morning, and you’d see the bodies.”

But then, in 1992, the violence and the killings stopped.

That year, Salvadorans – government officials, politicians, rebels, the military, the church and even the country’s oligarchy — with the involvement of the United Nations, came together to forge a peace agreement.

El Salvador will celebrate the 20^th anniversary of that peace next year.

In the tiny Central American nation’s history are important lessons in waging peace.  El Salvador and the Philippines are two different countries. But they are similar in many ways.

Each country saw the rise of repressive regimes that used the military to brutally suppress dissent. Repression gave rise to guerrilla resistance movements, which led to protracted wars in which civilians became the biggest losers.

In a shocking crime that recalls the brazen murder of Ninoy Aquino, Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, the country’s popular and courageous church leader who spoke out against the Salvadoran military’s abuses was gunned down – as he was celebrating mass.

Another atrocity would remind one of the slayings of Father Fausto Tentorio, and before him, Father Tullio Favali. In 1980, three nuns and a lay missionary, whose work with El Salvador’s poor made them targets of the right-wing forces, were raped, tortured and murdered by military-backed Salvadoran death squads.

Godoy himself joined the underground Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) becoming an organizer and an international representative.

But eventually, he said, both sides had enough.

“Each side decided that nobody will win that war – not the FMLN, not the government,” he told me. “One group couldn’t defeat the other. The country was being destroyed. .. There was no way any side will win. … People got tired.”

The fight for peace wasn’t easy.

There were factions within the Salvadoran military that did not want it. And even within the FMLN coalition, some guerrilla leaders were opposed to negotiations. The infighting, at times, led to violence.

“Unfortunately, you have people who died because of those differences,” Ernesto said.

It’s a lesson that should resonate among Filipinos today.

For as Noynoy Aquino is finding out, it’s hard to fight for peace when, there are individuals and groups — on all sides — who don’t want you to succeed, who don’t want the fighting to end.

This is playing out in the collapse of peace negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

It was already widely expected that a breakaway faction from within the MILF opposed to the talks would do everything it can to derail the process.

What makes P-Noy’s peace campaign even harder to move forward is this: These rogue elements in the MILF have now given factions within the military who are also opposed to negotiations the excuse to call for all out war.

And that call is being echoed by the warmongers outside the military. “I say kill them all,” one reader said in reaction to my previous column.

Now, I will concede one point to those calling for all-out war.

Yes, perhaps a purely military solution could work – but only if the country has a united, cohesive and ultra-professional military, one that respects the human rights of civilians and combatants while waging war.

But time for a reality check: the Philippine military is not that kind of organization!

A quick review of recent events underscores this.

Tens of thousands of civilians have been displaced in the AFP campaign for renegade rebels in Zamboanga – and the bandits are still on the loose.

The AFP’s former comptroller is on the run after being accused of massive corruption.

An Italian priest admired for his work with poor people in North Cotabato was mercilessly gunned down after he was tagged by the AFP as a communist sympathizer.

And you even have a former military rebel warning his fellow officers not to be duped by those wanting to destabilize Aquino’s government.

How can you win an all-out war with a military organization that is clearly broken and obviously divided?

And there are, of course, compelling reasons for some in the military to oppose an end to the wars. After all, peace clearly means a smaller budget for the AFP. It means fewer opportunities for promotions.

And let’s not forget the ecosystem, the powerful economic interests that would feel the pain of peace – from those who make money making uniforms, servicing the military’s needs, to the arms manufacturers locally and overseas.

Now, to be clear, the military also has a point.

It’s also tough to talk peace with rebel groups who are themselves divided, and within whose ranks are leaders who are not sincere in wanting peace and just want to use the talks to regroup.

P-Noy’s own mother, the late Cory Aquino, wrestled with this problem.

In 1987, peace talks with the National Democratic Front collapsed after the massacre at Mendiola where police mercilessly gunned down peasant protesters and their supporters. It was a vicious act that rightfully should be condemned to this day.

But there have been credible accounts of how the underground Left had pushed for the bloody confrontation, that hard line cadres wanted the brutal crackdown – even if it meant the deaths of those farmers. For it gave the most politically dogmatic elements within the UG the excuse to abandon the peace talks and resume fighting.

For while the UG movement began as a reaction to the inequality and injustice in Philippine society, inspiring young heroes such as Edgar Jopson, Eman Lacaba and Lorena Barros to commit their lives to the cause of revolutionary change, it also was led by hard-core cadres with incredible capacity for violence and cruelty.

Of course, the big irony is that while Cory gave the military a free hand to go after the UG, factions within the military ranks also later, to use her own phrase, “unsheathed the sword of war” – against her in a series of bruising coup attempts.

Indeed, it’s tough to fight for peace when there are forces on all sides who don’t want you to succeed.

The biggest challenge for P-Noy is to find elements within the military who genuinely want peace, and for them to find allies and partners in the MILF and the NDF to move the process forward.

And their very first objective should be: Isolate and neutralize the hard-liners within their own ranks.

I have no doubt they are there, even if their voices are getting drowned out by the macho chest-pounding within the military and in media.

I have no doubt there are senior and junior officers in the AFP who also take the long view that these decades-old conflicts can never be resolved militarily.

Officers who understand that while it is their job to fight war, their most solemn duty is to disdain war — to do everything they can to avoid it, or, as in the case of the Philippines where war has been raging for decades, to find the most effective way to end it.

The challenge for the Philippines is to find people on all sides with the burning passion for social change, but who are humble enough, strong enough, courageous enough to acknowledge an indisputable fact: The wars must end. That the wars have turned into a pointless, vicious cycle of vindictive violence.

That was a key to the success of peace negotiations in El Salvador.  As Ernesto Godoy said: “The country was being destroyed. … There was no way any side will win. … People got tired.”

As part of the Salvadoran agreement, the guerrillas ended their armed campaign, but the Salvadoran military also underwent a serious reform process. Notorious units were dismantled, and some FMLN guerrillas were even integrated into a new police force.

It was a gamble for both sides. But was it worth it?

Ernesto Godoy was quick to respond: “Oh, yes. The repression stopped.”

Now, El Salvador did not suddenly turn into a paradise with the peace agreement, he said.

There’s still poverty and inequality. The war between guerrillas and government forces may have ended, but the country, like the rest of Central America, is now also dealing with violence related to the war against drug cartels in the region.

El Salvador is also still working to strengthen its democratic institutions. But there are signs of a more stable, stronger democratic order. In 2009, a candidate of the FMLN, Mauricio Funes, was elected president.

The FMLN is now the party in power in El Salvador, although Ernesto said the party is ready and willing it to give that up if another party gets voted into power. That’s the way democracy works after all.

Still, there’s much work to be done to build a more democratic order, Ernesto said.

“That is taking time,” he said. “The whole question of transparency. The whole concept of a democratic society that we never had.”

Twenty years after daring to make peace, Salvadorans are still reaping its rewards.

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