Duarte: My Story (review) (1987)

BOOK REVIEWS Peter Goldstein, editor Adam and Moodley, South Africa Without Apartheid .......... 218 Chalfont, A., Star Wars: Suicide or Survival? ................. 214 Colton, TJ. , The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union ...... 226 Duarte, J.N., Duarte: My Story ............................. 212 Harbutt, F.J., The Iron Curtain ............................. 221 Mishal, S., The PLO Under Arafat .......................... 222 Nishihara, M., East Asian Security .......................... 227 Pierre, A.J., ed., A High Technology Gap? ................... 217 Ramazani, R.K., Revolutionary Iran ......................... 229 Seliktar, O. , New Zionism .................................. 224 Smith, W.S., The Closest of Enemies ........................ 230 Stubbing, R.A., The Defense Game ......................... 219 Union of Concerned Scientists, Empty Promise ................ 214 Yaniv, A., Deterrence Without the Bomb .................... 224 211 212 SAIS REVIEW Duarte: My Story. ByJosé Napoleón Duarte with Diana Page. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1986. 284 pp. $18.95/hardcover. Reviewed by Frank Smyth, SAIS M.A. 1986. Few presidents would publish their autobiographies midway through their elected term; even fewer would publish them in a language that their constituents cannot understand. But this is precisely what El Salvador's PresidentJosé Napoleón Duarte has done. For the past year, perhaps longer, Duarte has been more popular abroad than at home, where he is facing the most serious political crisis of his career. Suffering from a widespread loss of domestic popular support, the Christian Democratic president knows that his most important consitutency is in the United States. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, this U.S. -educated politician has irresistible appeal. The preface for My Story, written by Reverend Theodore Hesberg, Duarte's former mentor at the University of Notre Dame, sets the tone: "The only way to avoid criticism is to sit on the fence and do nothing," he writes, "except maybe to criticize others who are trying to create a better and more just world .... [Duarte] has been sitting, by his own choice, in the middle of the target, the most critical spot of all." The predominant theme of the book is Duarte as the white knight of Central America. Striking messianic chords, Duarte depicts himself as the only individual capable of saving El Salvador. His own political fortunes are Duarte's only gauge for the progress of democracy, and his Christian Democratic party is the only legitimate representative of the country's political center. In Duarte's egocentric worldview, he consistently emerges as the most important political actor in El Salvador for the past fifteen years. Duarte ran for president in 1972 as the candidate for a broad-based coalition in which even communist groups participated. Fraud kept the coalition from taking power, and the military eventually sent the Christian Democratic leader into exile. In hindsight Duarte says, "When the armed forces threw me out of El Salvador, faith in the electoral process faded away." His followers, says Duarte, were "orphaned because so many leaders like myself were forced into exile." Rather than behaving like orphans, however, opposition organizations rose up in the late 1970s to build the most powerful mass movement that Central America had ever seen. For Duarte this movement lacks significance because he and El Salvador's Christian Democratic party were not at its helm. Duarte returned to El Salvador in 1979 and within ten months he was indeed president. Ironically, this time he was given the job by the military when Duarte's Christian Democratic party had a weak popular base. Duarte served as president from 1980 to 1982 because the military needed him to legitimize its own repressive campaign. Thus the Christian Democratic party had reached an "agreement" with the armed forces, who, according to Duarte, had taken the party's program "as its own." In return for the party's complicity in what is BOOK REVIEWS 213 described in My Story as "the worst of times," the military promised to repay the Christian Democrats in the future. Indeed, times could not have been worse for the people of El Salvador. In 1981 civilians and opposition activists were being killed at a rate of thirtyfive a day— the worst violence that El Salvador had seen in fifty years. Duarte states that during this period he struggled with his participation in the military junta but ultimately elected to stay...