In all the international interest in the crisis of El Salvador, the voices of the mass guerilla organisations have gone largely unheard. We reprint excerpts from interviews with two leading figures from the FDR-FMLN.
Today, when the smallest country in Central America is about to open the door that will lead to a new society, it is worth reflecting politically on some of the more interesting aspects of the Salvadorean process. We sincerely and modestly believe that the organisational, social and political experiences that our people have accumulated will be useful for all those Latin American liberation movements for whom the taking of power is still some way off.
We are always asked one question without fail during our tours and interviews with government and media representatives: What sort of society will exist in El Salvador after the triumph of the popular struggle? Our immediate reaction to this question is that if these questioners understood the character of the Salvadorean revolution and the origins of the present struggle, then they would themselves find the answer to their query.
Only a few doubt the existence of a strong mass movement based in every oppressed sector of Salvadorean society. This organised mass movement has had a clear objective of taking power since the very beginning of its formation. It has understood the long and patient task of constructing the political and military instruments which will lead to victory.
This organised mass movement — and with it the great majority of the people — has learnt, first and foremost in the rich school of experience, that the different forms which the holders of political and economic power used to preserve their status were only tricks to deceive them. Thus, after the electoral experiences of 1972 and 1977, the Salvadorean people understood in a simple way something that theory had outlined many decades earlier: that electoral democracy, in our present socio-economic formations and with the coercive apparatus in the hands of the dominant class, is meaningless. It is understandable then, that Salvadoreans, with this experience, grimace when Duarte and others like him, start spouting off with promises through elections. Since 1932, and above all in the last decade, the Salvadorean mass movement has cemented the bases on which the new society will be built.
As the history of previous revolutions teaches us, the conditions that define the process after the overthrow of the dominant class are intimately tied to, and determined by, the political and social characteristics that the process acquired during the previous stage. Therefore we can foresee that the new Salvadorean society and its ideological, political and economic transformations will have a common denominator: the broadest and most active participation of the masses. If this were not to be the case, then the Salvadorean revolution which is costing us so dear in blood, would be condemned in advance to failure.
The Salvadorean masses will not only demand of their governments and of their Revolutionary Democratic Government an honest administration in their interests, but also, and this is something that we will always push, they will demand the broadest participation. The Salvadorean people will not only be the beneficiaries of the new society, they will also be its designers, and in this way they will be able to build the country and face all the difficulties and sacrifices which will be the most [illegible].
It is on this immutable basis that the revolutionary democratic alliance which will synthesise the government and the institutions of power must be understood. We are conscious that the homogenisation of the democratic and revolutionary sectors and of the social democratic, social Christian currents, of the Patriotic soldiers, and the Marxists won't be a straightforward process. But we are also convinced that the most difficult task, the convergence around a common project, is already achieved.
In this long road that we have travelled apart, the social democratic and social Christian currents have understood that no third way exists, that a policy of social reforms which does not alter the basic structures and does not question the state apparatus, is no more than a vain illusion. The patriotic soldiers have grasped in the same way that their commendable loyalty to a sovereign and just fatherland cannot coexist with a power that serves the imperialist interests.
We, the Marxists, the new Salvadorean Left, have begun to elaborate — and we have further to go — a genuine strategy by learning from our successes and failures at key points in our relationships with sectors that do not see themselves as Marxist, the conception of the pluralist profile of the revolution, the international policy based on the principle of non-alignment, and much else.
All the currents of the Salvadorean revolution are forced to enrich their understanding through an effort at synthesis. If we eliminate vacillation and distrust on the one hand, dogmatism and sterile radicalism on the other, we will be able to crystallise — we are already doing it — a single revolutionary democratic project which will open the way towards the solution of the great evils of Salvadorean society.
Our people, who can show the world how to suffer but also how to hope, have demonstrated enough vitality to achieve the insurrectional triumph today and the revolutionary victory tomorrow. The swords are raised and the most diverse final assaults are just beginning. Many of the best will not reach the final reckoning; the situation is as the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano once wrote: 'A close relationship exists between the intensity of the threat and the brutality of the reply.'
ANA GUADELUPE MARTINEZ is a Comandante of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a member of the Diplomatic-Political Commission of the FMLN-FDR, and a member of the national leadership of the ERP (one of the five revolutionary organisations making up the FMLN). This article has been reproduced from the 19 February issue of Nuevo Diario, published in Managua, Nicaragua.