(1925-1990) presidentof El SalvadorJose Napoleon Duarte Fuentes was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, on November 23, 1925, the son of an affluent tailor. After receiving a strict Catholic education, he attended the University of Notre Dame in the United States and obtained his degree in civil engineering four years later. Back home, Duarteentered the family business and did not became politically active until I960. That year the dictatorship of Colonel Jose Maria Lemus was overthrown by a leftist clique, a move prompting Duarte, with other middle-class adherents fearful of communism, to seek a political alternative. That year he helped found the Partido Democratica Cristiano (PDC), the Christian Democratic Party, which was moderately conservative yet beholden to the social teachings of the Catholic Church. In 1964 he was elected mayor of San Salvador and distinguished himself by erecting street lights in the poorer districts and forcing the rich to pay retroactive taxes for city services. Though denounced by right-wing elements as a communist, Duarte was reelected mayor in 1966 and 1968. By 1972 he felt ready to try for the presidency and headed the Union Nacional Opositora (UNO), National Opposition Union. This coalition comprised the PDC and two small leftist parties. Initial election results suggested that Duarte handily defeated his conservative opponent, Arturo Armando Molina, but the military stopped counting ballots and declared their candidate victorious. Duarte subsequently backed a group of reform-minded officers whose coup attempt against the government failed, and he was arrested, beaten, and exiled to Venezuela. He still remained head of the Christian Democrats and coordinated party affairs from abroad.
Duarte remained overseas for seven years until October 1979, when a coup by reformist officers toppled the regime of Carlos Humberto Romero. In March 1980 he was invited to join the ruling junta and did so willingly. But this move alienated many leftist PDC supporters, who deserted the party and took up arms. Duarte, moreover, was convinced that no meaningful reforms could transpire without the tacit support of military moderates. In December 1980 the junta disbanded and elected Duarte provisional president of El Salvador. He then tried pushing through badly needed land and labor reforms but was perpetually thwarted by conservatives in the Constituent Assembly. However, he won major backing from the United States as the only candidate who could both promote democracy and defuse a communist guerrilla insurgency.
Since the mid-sixties El Salvador had been racked by the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN), Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which waged a pitiless guerrilla war against the government and its supporters. In 1979 itsefforts were aided and abetted by the communist regime of DANIEL ORTEGA in neighboring Nicaragua. This subversion stimulated the rise of right-wing death squads, and 70,000 civilians were killed between the two groups. Duarte nonetheless resolved to establish dialogue with the guerrillas and achieve a peaceful settlement. This gained him the ire of the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena), National Republican Alliance, of army major Roberto d’Aubuisson, who controlled the legislature and who removed Duarte from office in 1982. But Duarte, motivated by a sense of destiny, commenced a two-year campaign to win back the presidency by a popular mandate. On May 6, 1984, he defeated d’Aubuisson in El Salvador’s first democratic election in 50 years. His victory did much to promote the rise of political pluralism in El Salvador but FMLN guerrillas proved intractable, and conservatives were unwilling to compromise. Worse, El Salvador was beset by a devastating earthquake in 1986 that killed thousands and threw the economy into a tailspin. Only the continued financial assistance of President RONALD REAGAN allowed Duarte to hold the country together and the guerrillas at bay.
By the time his term in office ended, Duarte had failed in his quest for peace. Both the guerrillas and the death squads were as active as ever. His own daughter was kidnapped and he had to free 100 guerrilla prisoners to gain her release. Worse, when the army forbade the guerrillas to participate in the election, they launched a costly nationwide offensive. Duarte, meanwhile, offered continuing negotiations for a setdement, but the public’s attitude hardened. On March 19, 1989, Arena candidate Alfredo Cristiani defeated the PDC nominee Fidel Chavez Mena, and the conservatives took control. Duarte thus became the first Salvadoran president to peacefully surrender power to another elected civilian. Disillusioned by failure and fatally stricken by cancer, Duarte took no further part in public life and died in San Salvador on February 23, 1990. His country remained badly divided between reformist, reactionary, and revolutionary factions until 1992 but the multiparty system he pioneered survives until the present day.
