Struggle For Peace Salvadoran Adversaries Heal Hatred ‘We Are Learning To Forgive Because There Is No Other Way’

If ever a man had reason to be cynical about reconciliation and forgiveness, he is Rene Olivar.

In 16 years as a rebel fighter, sniper and field commander in northern El Salvador, the 42-year-old father of three said, he killed more young Salvadoran soldiers than he cares to remember. He counts the bullet wounds and torture scars on his body without emotion, as if they were so many mosquito bites.

What does bring a wince to his unshaven, creased face is the memory of a massacre near the northern mountain town of Sensuntepeque, a horror that Olivar came upon in the mid-1980s.

Children four and five years old had been gunned down. A pregnant woman had been cut open with a bayonet and her fetus impaled on a fence post.

To forgive the army soldiers who committed such an act, Olivar said, once would have been tantamount to a betrayal of the revolution waged throughout the 1980s by the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front, known by the acronym FMLN.

But Olivar says he finally has buried the bitter memories. He did it for the same reason he went to war in the first place - for the future of his children and his nation.

“We are learning to forgive because there is no other way. If I gave myself over to feelings of vengeance, I would be a lost man. My children would have to grow up without a father,” he explained.

So when Olivar heard last summer that Salvadoran army veterans were planning a march to demand postwar compensation, the former rebel gave up a day of work in this steamy farming community and rode by bus for two hours to the Salvadoran capital. There he marched alongside his former enemies - the men he once denounced as barbarian murderers.

“The soldiers are ‘campesinos’ (peasants) just like us. The only difference between us is ideology,” he said.

Olivar is not an isolated example. El Salvador’s 5-year-old peace experiment is being touted inside and outside the country as one of the great reconciliation success stories. Soldiers, army officers, former guerrillas and peasants are, for the most part, putting aside their differences and slowly trying to piece their tattered nation back together again.

“In all this time (since the accords were signed), we have not had one major act of revenge by either side. I don’t think there’s any other country in the world that can make that claim,” said Monsignor Gregorio Rosa Chavez, the auxiliary archbishop of San Salvador.

What are the forces behind this nation’s extraordinarily quick transition to peace and reconciliation? Ask any five people in El Salvador and you are likely to get five entirely different answers: Many say a government land redistribution program created a new future for the nation’s poorest. Others point to radical reforms that ended decades of rule by a tiny, wealthy group of families known to Salvadorans as the “oligarchs.”

Former soldiers say the blanket amnesty for those who committed wartime atrocities made it easier for them to put down their weapons. A U.N.-mandated Truth Commission helped ferret out the worst human-rights abusers in the army, but amnesty ensured that a lynch-mob mentality would not develop.

Then there are those who say Salvadorans were not deeply committed to the war in the first place. They note that one million people - one-fifth of the population - opted to emigrate rather than stay and fight.

But these disparate answers all point to what peacemakers say is a critical underpinning of successful reconciliation: It must be built on a platform that mingles truth, justice and mercy for all involved.

El Salvador was able to accomplish much - though not all - of that platform through its peace process, building a base of reforms that provided both sides hope for the future.

But the process is far from complete, cautions Monsignor Rosa Chavez. Although he acknowledges many positive results of the peace, he is troubled by the darker aspect yet to be addressed. Because the U.N.-backed accords ensured that war criminals would not be brought to trial or forced to confess, he said, Salvadorans have missed the opportunity to truly forgive one another.

Struggle for forgiveness

Monsignor Rosa Chavez’s concerns are echoed throughout the Catholic Church in El Salvador. Although priests had steeped Salvadorans in the ideal of forgiveness, the amnesty issue has made some within the church among the most reluctant to forgive and go on.

But those involved in the 1992 peace negotiations stand by their amnesty decision. The Truth Commission was essential, they said, but convening a long series of war-crimes trials would only force the nation to relive the war and reopen wounds better left alone.

“We studied examples of peace agreements from all over the world … even as far back as ancient Rome,” said retired Gen. Mauricio Vargas, the former army chief of staff.

“We decided to accept what happened during the war as a part of the historical record,” he said. “We all knew what horrible things happened back then. We knew we would accomplish nothing by seeking punitive action and exacting revenge for what happened.

“Our goals were simple: One, reconcile our society; two, reunify.”

For most of the country, worn out by a decade of bloodshed, the time was right for forgiveness.

The death count during the war, in which the United States officially supported the Salvadoran government, exceeded 75,000, roughly 1.5 percent of El Salvador’s people. Tens of thousands more became refugees. Houses and farms were seized by occupiers, families split apart, cherished possessions lost forever. It is hard to find anyone in this country who has not suffered a major loss.

Vargas’ aging father, for example, was shot and crippled for life in 1989 when guerrillas came to the general’s San Salvador home to kill him.

Transforming hate

For some Salvadorans, forgiveness is essential for true reconciliation. For others, reconciliation means simply being able to coexist without killing one another.

Ernesto Cortez was born, literally, into the guerrilla movement. Both of his parents were FMLN guerrillas; of his seven brothers, four died in combat.

“Just about all of my youth was spent in war,” the 27-year-old said, recalling the first time he was handed a gun and told to fight. “I was 15 years old. You didn’t wait around to see if you killed anyone. You shot; you ran. You never knew if you hit your target.”

Outside the ramshackle Museum of the Revolution in San Carlos, Cortez leaned against a captured army machine gun on display as an exhibit of FMLN’s wartime bravery. During a tour of the museum - an abandoned schoolhouse that was the scene of a 1981 battle in which the army killed 28 civilians and guerrillas - Cortez said he still has vivid memories of wartime atrocities committed by the army.

So, for him, the dramatic reduction in the size of the military and abolition of the nation’s dreaded paramilitary Treasury Police was a critical step in reconciliation.

“Now the army is gone. The Treasury Police are gone,” Cortez said. “The police forces are entirely different. They receive human rights training. They don’t treat us like animals any more.”

These are changes he believes he helped bring about. “I fought for justice, and that’s what we achieved,” he said. “I’m proud that I helped accomplish that.”

But he remains cautious about embracing those he was taught all his life to hate. “I’d like to say that, no, I don’t still hate the people on the other side,” he said. “But the fact is, I do. I still regard them as enemies, but they’re political enemies.”

Leaders on both sides say it is no accident that they converted wartime hatred into the benign political enmity described by Cortez. The accords called for full disarmament of the FMLN, and the group is now a thriving political party that holds one-quarter of the seats in the 84-member national Legislature.

Peace without justice

Both sides say they continually work publicly to show they have settled their differences in hopes that their loyalists will follow the example.

Each weekday at dawn, Vargas sits down with former FMLN leaders at a San Salvador radio station for a live, two-hour discussion of current political issues. They laugh; they joke; they casually banter. A newcomer with no knowledge of their bloody pasts might never suspect they were once bitter enemies.

Vargas and other former warriors agree that their energy now needs to go into righting the country’s postwar problems.

Unemployment, especially among dismissed soldiers, remains high. Many former combatants have turned to crime, while some of the nation’s notorious, right-wing death squads have re-formed as anti-crime vigilante groups.

But the peace process does have its detractors, particularly within the Catholic Church. Some priests say that until war criminals publicly admit their crimes and submit themselves to the mercy of the people, they cannot rightfully ask for forgiveness.

The church claims to have been one of the most injured parties in the conflict. For years, the armed forces justified its opposition to the church by saying that priests were fomenting rebellion through their teachings of “liberation theology.”

The 1980s began with the death-squad slaying of San Salvador Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero; the decade ended with the army’s execution-style slaughter of six Jesuit priests during the FMLN’s 1989 attack on San Salvador. In between, scores of catechists, nuns and other church activists were tortured or gunned down by the armed forces. Pro-army death squads once distributed fliers around the country urging: “Be a patriot! Kill a priest.”

So a lingering sense of bitterness is evident in the words of many Salvadoran priests. Their skepticism is exacerbated by statements from armed forces leaders, such as Vargas, who contend that allegations of atrocities have been blown out of proportion.

“They evaded justice to arrive at peace,” said Father Rogelio Pedraz, a Jesuit priest who had lived with the six Jesuits killed by the army.

Father Miguel Ventura, a protege of Archbishop Romero, spent the 1970s and ‘80s teaching liberation theology to peasants in the guerrilla heartland, the northeastern province of Morazan.

Because the blanket amnesty limited the ability of prosecutors to go after those who committed atrocities, Father Ventura said, the men who ordered the killings of Archbishop Romero or the six Jesuits probably will never be brought to justice. Thus, for him, El Salvador’s peace has a hollow ring to it.

“The guns are silent, but we have not reconciled. … You cannot have reconciliation without truth, and to have truth, you must expose the impunity. But in El Salvador today, the impunity continues,” he said.

‘I did my job’

El Salvador’s Truth Commission also is criticized by those who feel unfairly singled out for censure. One of those is Marcelino Abarca, whom FMLN leaders say planted land mines that killed or maimed hundreds.

The army inducted Abarca in 1981, snatching him as the 16-year-old left a school bus in the Pacific coast town of Tamanique. He said he never even had the chance to go home and say goodbye to his mother, who died while he was away at war.

Years later, guerrillas came knocking at the home of his aunt, hoping to capture Abarca, who had gained a measure of local notoriety as a soldier. When they didn’t find him, they shot his aunt, then hunted down and killed her two sons.

But after the war, the army he served for so long - at such great personal cost - didn’t defend him, Abarca said.

“I felt so much resentment toward the FMLN. Now I feel the same resentment toward the government. They used me, then they threw me away,” he said.

“During the war, they told us that we had to wipe out the FMLN at all costs. I did my job.”

But soldiers should not lean on such reasoning to excuse their wartime activities, Abarca said. He and other former combatants say that for full reconciliation to take place, each individual must take responsibility for his own actions.

“We are all ‘campesinos.’ We are all veterans. We were all demobilized,” said Abarca, who today heads an organization of former soldiers demanding jobs and pressing for quicker land distribution.

“Before I can accuse anyone else, I have to accuse myself. How many people did I kill? I took away life, too. I have to accept my responsibility.”