The Long

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"James Dunkerley's book 'The Long War' is the only substantial account of the present situation in El Salvador. It is written by a revolutionary socialist. It is well-researched, well-organised, and readable. Buy it, or order it from your library (Junction Press, July 1982: paperback £5.95, hardback £12.80)"

BILL McKEITH reviews and summarises the book.

For two years, up to the 'election' of last March, the ruling junta in El Salvador embarked on a US-sponsored programme of 'repression with reforms. The ailure of this project under resident Juarte resultec in the 'electoral' victory of Roberto D'Aubuisson iong-time leader of the country's death squads, and the appointment of a puppet president (Alvaro Magana) to front the military's all out 'pacification' of the population.

The Long War Ful-scale war may be said to have begun in El Salvador in April 1980.

'hen the armed opposition o the iunta tormea a uni. fied command, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN.

But armed actions by different guerrilla organisations against the country's rulers have been continual since the early 1970s. And, in the consciousness uf the Salvadorean masses, the 'long war' goes back to the rebellion of 1932 and beyond - to the 1880s, when today's oligarchy seized lands from communal and municipal ownership in order to establish the coffee plantations from which it still plunders its wealth.

Socialists must deepen their understanding of why solidarity with the FMLN should be a priority of work in trade unions, the Labour Party and other Labour movement organisations.

James Dunkerley's book The Long War is heartily to be welcomed on this count. It is the only substantial account of the present situation in El Salvador and its background. It is written by a revolutionary socialist who is active in solidarity work.

It is well researched, well organised, readable and deserves to be read widely.

Contents of the book The tirst part covers political developments from the 19th century up to 1961, emphasizing the 1932 Revolution. Chapters 4 and 5 describe the formation in the 1960s of the economic and social fabric of present day El Salvador. the third part covers the marked polarisation of class forces in the 1970s, and two final chapters analyse the collapse of the reformist October 1979 junta, the move to unrestrained civil war in the international cuntext of renewed Cold War.

in the Conclusion, Dunkerley returns to the theme of the regional nature of the conflict. The book's value is much enhanced by the endmatter including a really useable index, bibliography, chronology of main events, and glossary of organisations (over 50 acronyms!)

US intervention There is another respect in which the present, military, phase of political struggle in El Salvador is relatively long war' Between the first big offensive of the FSLN in Nicaragua and the Sandanista's overthrow of Somoza in July 1980 was a war of 10 months. It is now 30 months, and one 'final offensive' since the formation of a single military command of opposition forces in El Salvador.

The decisive factor here is the attitude of the US government. In place of the vacillation in its support for Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, in El Salvador the US government has reasserted its traditional role of increased military intervention in the face of popular movements in the Central American region.

More 'aid' now goes from the US to the butchers of El Salvador, a country of 5 million people, than to the rulers of any other Latin American state. Since the installation of a 'reformist' junta in October 1979 -'pacification-withon reform' platform in the US's Vietnam mold land with the same leading advisor) - over 40,000 Salvadoreans havr been massacred by: forces trained and armed in the USA, equipped with US helicopter gunships and guns and ammunition shipped in by daily flights from the USA, alongside over 800 US " troops l'advisors') i El Salvadot The US government now ranks El Salvador top in the struggle against 'Soviet expansionism' - New Cold War terminology, covering the threat of independent anti-imperialist movements. (Certainly USSR, like Cuba offers no concrete aid to the FMLN, any more than either did before the FSLN victory in Nicaragua).

By its bloody intervention, the US government demonstrates an understanding that a victory for the workers and peasants of El Salvador over the US-backed oligarchy and military will be a devastating blow to the ability of US banks and corporations to exploit the.. rest of the Americas. In crude terms, the US government has been obliged in the Central American context to resurrect the "domino theory' This is the reason for US 'internationalisation' of the conflict. Diplomatic support from Britain, Israel client states such as Egypt and all the Latin American dictatorships, underpins direct military intervention. In this the USA, Argentina, Israel and South Korea have provided arms, troops and training on a regional basis, to prevent the linking up of Central American struggles (notably those in Guatemala and El Salvador).

The coordinated support from the Honduran and Guatemalan armed forces (as well as former sections of Somoza's National Guard) is of a kind the Nicaraguan FSLN rid not have to cope with and is an escalation that has vastly increased casualties and homelessness (an estimated 700,000 refugees) in the civilian population.

The 1932 Revolution Part of the histor, of today's war in El Salvador is the intervention of US Marines in Central America politics, when US financial and strategic interests have been seen to be threatened by a reformist government or by popular revolt. Stationed in the Pacific off El Salvador during the few days of the abortive 1932 Revolution were three US and two Canadian warships. British marines landed briefly from one of the Canadian vessels until the Salvadorean military pointed out they were not needed.

If 'revolution' seems exaggeration for a rebellion which failed to take off at all in the capital, when rebel control of the few towns taken was lost in a couple of days, we must remember that the young Communist Party (PCS) had endeavoured to organise an armed insurrection on January 22nd, that barely armed and illprepared peasants engaged superior forces in a number of battles, and above all, that over 30,000 peasants were killed in the pogrum that followed (government casualties were about 80).

Role of the PCS In this, 'perhaps the single most important TE FARABII. Roherto D'Auhuisson with friends event in Salvadorean history, as Dunkerley describes it, argument and inadequacies in the PCS foreshadowed questions which are still unresolved today.

One faction, including the youth wing led by Miguel Mármol, called for immediate preparation for armed insurrection, following the military coup that had brought a brief liberal interlude to an end. "he majority, including the intellectuals m and party leader, Agustin Farabundo Marti, argued for intervention in elections in order to unmask the military. strengthen contact with the masses, and secure support from section of the San Saivador garrison. When the first round of voting proved a fraud and PCS victories in some districts were annulled, the PCS reversed its position and fixed, then postponed, a date for insurrection.

During the posiponeany possibility of winning over sections of troops was denied, Marti and others were arrested.

It was in these conditions with no mass membership, no organised cell structurr and with a political line that had zigzagged over the crucial 2-3 weeks before the iffiliate to the El Salvador Solidarity Campaign, 29 Islington Park Street, London N1 22nd January, that the PCS decided to go ahead with its attempt to coordinate 'the uprising.

Dunkerley's own view is that the failure of the uprising had another, underlying cause - 'above all else, these absences reflected a greater weakness - an unborn working class that was so tiny and young it could rot yet form the nucleus of a mass revolutionary party' The PCS was virtually destroyed in the genocide that followed. Marti, who had admired Trotsky (then leading the Left Opposition), and who had failed to convert the Nicaraguan Sandino to communism, was shot. Miguel Mármol survived miraculously, later to pen memoirs which Dunkerley describes as an ignored classic of Latin American revolutionary writing.

Such was the trauma of 1932, it was to be 40 years before any coordinated independent armed opposition to the landowners represented all this time in government by a succession of military juntas and dictators.

The 1960s US response to the Cuban Revolution was to launch the 'Alliance for Progress' in Central America: US economic intervention in the 1960s accelerated the increasing poverty, unemployment and alienation from the land of the peasants, the trebling of the urban working class, the creation of a large under- and unemployed population in shanty towns on the edges of the cities, continued concentration of land ownership, radicalisation of the students, teachers and other petit bourgeois sections.

Dunkerlev covers the occasional reformist attempts government and introduce some agrarian reform. In one of these, in 1972, Napoleon Duarte (for two years recently nominal head of the junta), had as his successful running mate in presidential elections the same Guillermo Ungo who resigned from the junta and now heads the FDR, the broad grouping of which the FMLN is the military wing. In 1972 a military coup put paid to Duarte-Ungo election victory.

the But the political developments in the working class and peasantry can best be recorded in the PCS, which throughout the 1960s - while still paying lip-service to a distant overthrow of the regime -through its trade union activity backed what detected as progressive industrial employers against the still-dominant oligarchy, in the vain quest for a non-existent national industrial bourgeoisie that would lead a bourgeois democratic revolution.

The PCS majority backed the so-called football war against Honduras over a border dispute. Soon after, in 1970, a PCS minority, led Cayetano Carpio, left to form the Popular Liberation Forer: - Farabundo Marti (FPL). The FPL described itself as Marxist-Leninist in character, with a strategy of 'prolonged people's war' • First of the politico-military organisations to arise in the 1970s, the FPL was and is the largest. Dunkerley's analysis of the political and social origins and trajectory of these forces is one of the most interesting parts of the book, summarised roughly here.

In 1972, rejecting a Christian Democrat party unable to deliver any

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Socialist Organiser no. 98 Séptember 21982 Page s reforms in the face of the military, radicalised middle class grouping established the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) with a guerrillaist perspective divorced from building a mass movement in the working class, and developing a strategy of 'people's armed insurrection' The ERP itself split in 1975 the new organisation being the Armed Forces of National Resistance (RN) which favoured a defensive 'anti-fascist' resistance to allow for the building of a Christian Democrat ministers, as the counterinsurgency character of the agrarian 'reforms' became inescapably apparent.

The armed organisations came under unified command (DRU, then FMLN). Unification of the popular organisations' followed the same month, January 1980, under the banner of the Revolutionary Coordinator of the Masses (CRM).

The FDR native and oppressors.

This must mean calling not for a 'democratic' popular front government, but for a workers and peasants government based on their councils and defence committees, built now wherever possible, and alongside the military organisations; only such a government can open the way to establishing a Socialist United States of Central America.

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