Alfredo Cristiani

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Alfredo Cristiani Burkard born on November 22, 1947 in San Salvador in El Salvador, was President of El Salvador between 1 June 1989 and 1 June 1994.

[edit] Career

Born into a wealthy coffee-producing family and educated at Escuela Americana (American School) in San Salvador, and then graduated with a degree in Administrative Sciences at Georgetown University in Washington, DC in the U.S.. He returned to El Salvador to work in the family business, which included pharmaceuticals and cotton. He also married Margarita Llach, with whom he has 3 children. He remained outside politics until the beginning of the 1980s when the leftist FMLN guerrillas and their campesino followers began squatting on farms. As the civil war became more widespread, he became involved with the rightist ARENA party, founded by military intelligence officer Roberto D'Aubuisson. In March 1985 D'Aubuisson resigned after ARENA suffered a defeat in the congressional elections, and Cristiani took over as leader of the party. In the local and congressional elections of March 1988 ARENA won 80% of the local votes and 31 of the 60 seats in the Congress.

[edit] President

In May, ARENA chose him rather than D'Aubuisson to be their presidential candidate and on March 18, 1989 he won the election in the first round, gaining 53.8% of the vote over the Fidel Chavez Mena, the candidate of the ruling Christian Democratic Party. This result seemed to ensure that, with hard-line elements in charge of both the Salvadoran government and the Marxist FMLN insurgency, the on-again, off-again negotiations to conclude the 10-year insurgency would not succeed. Defying the expectation that Cristiani was a mere pawn of hard-line ARENA powerbrokers, on September 13, 1989 the government did begin negotiations with the FMLN, first in Mexico and later in Costa Rica. The FMLN continued military offensives in the course these talks, as did ARENA. These attacks poisoned the atmosphere in the talks, making progress impossible.

The FMLN dropped its talk-and-fight strategy definitively on November 11, when all five factions of the FMLN launched a massive attack on the capital, San Salvador, and other key cities. Some 3,000 armed guerrillas invaded the city, ensconcing themselves in poor neighborhoods and daring the Salvadoran Armed Forces (ESAF) to dislodge them. While the FMLN clearly hoped that this dramatic action would lead to popular insurrection -- guerrillas carried additional weapons into the city to arm citizens who presumably would join them -- the citizenry rejected this approach. The FMLN also invaded some of the richest areas of San Salvador, previous bastions of sanctity for right wing leaders.

The ESAF's response to the FMLN invasion was tardy and inadequate, with the high command slow to understand the importance of the action, and clumsy in the execution of its counterattack. In a step highly questioned at the time, the ESAF's air wing conducted bombing and strafing runs on fixed FMLN positions located in poor neighborhoods, endangering the local population.

As the ESAF attenpted to regroup and mount a militarily sound response to the FMLN's invasion of San Salvador, ESAF affiliates on November 17, 1989, murdered six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter at the University of Central America (Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas"). Included among the dead were the Rector Ignacio Ellacuría Beascoechea, a prominent Liberation theologian. Ellacuria and his fellow Basque Jesuit colleagues had during the course of the 1970s made the intellectual case for insurgency as a legitimate response to represssion by the military dictatorship of that time. Consequently, some in the Salvadoran hard right viewed Ellacuria and his colleagues as the masterminds of the insurgency. In addition to Ellacuria, a number of his distinguished academic colleagues at the UCA were murdered, including Ignacio Martín-Baró, a social psychologist and Vice-Rector of the university.

International revulsion at the crime was swift and universal. Despite an effort by the perpetrators to make it appear that the FMLN had killed the Jesuits, attention immediately focused on the ESAF or other hard-right elements, including within the government. In January 1990, a special ESAF commission identified four officers, the highest ranking of whom was Colonel Guillermo Benavides, three non-commissioned officers and two soldiers as having been involved in the crime. Except for Benavides, all were members of the "Atlacatl" Immediate Reaction Battalion, one of several such elite units specially trained and equipped by the United States. Atlacatl was a death squad group responsible for the gravest human rights atrocities of the civil war, including the Suchitoto massacre and, notoriously, the massacre at El Mozote, where more than 1,000 villagers were tortured and killed.

All of those identified were arrested and eventually convicted and sentenced to prison. While there are lingering perceptions that responsibility for the crime went higher within the ESAF, it remains unclear how far Cristiani himself had been brought into the plot.

Paradoxically, the FMLN offensive helped bring about a negotiated settlement to the bloody conflict. The offensive utterly destroyed a central and defining belief held by the two sides of the military conflict. First, it exposed that the ESAF was incapable of militarily defeating the FMLN. Seven years of military training, advice, and materiel provided by the United States, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, had made the ESAF a better-equipped and -trained organization. Corruption, poor leadership, and a refusal to behave in a strictly professional manner undercut the effectiveness of the military force, which was obviously unable to quell the insurgency. By invading and occupying the homes of the elite in San Salvador, the FMLN had taken a further step, definitively demonstrating that the ESAF could not fully secure even those final bastions.

Second, the offensive destroyed the FMLN's mythology about its level of popular support. While not even the most optimistic FMLN strategist believed the insurgency was capable of military victory, the FMLN held as an article of faith that they enjoyed massive support among the poorest segments of Salvadoran society. The failure of the offensive to bring about a popular uprising showed that that belief was in error.

Within three years, in 1992, the Chapultepec Peace Accords ended the civil war. The end of the bloody conflict was the greatest achievement of the Cristiani administration.