Bitter Grounds: Roots of Revolt in El Salvador

J. Frank Harrison taught at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

In the time since the first edition of this work was published, the attention of the North American media has moved away from El Salvador toward Nicaragua. This new and updated edition of Professor North’s book serves, therefore, as a reminder that American foreign policy continues to interfere in the politics of all of the Central American republics, and that that interference most often takes the form of support of bloody-handed murderers.

We see again here the image of a society sunk in the depths of economic exploitation and military domination, working together for their mutual purposes of continued domination and the prevention of any development of the democratic process. Land reform has been reversed. The death squads are still rampant. The army remains the most powerful and most undemocratic of institutions in the country. And, since the “election” of a Christian Democrat as President in the person of Napoleon Duarte, there has been an escalation of American aid in pursuit of a “military solution” to the liberation front — the facade of corrupt elections hiding the continuation of a system that has already left more than 30,000 dead victims of officially-sponsored torture and assassination of anyone suspected of opposition. The organizer of the death squads, D’Aubuisson, controls the Constituent Assembly elected in 1982. Twenty percent of the population (of a little less than five million) has been displaced by the actions of the military, becoming “internal refugees.” The official posture of the Reagan administration in the United States is to advertise the fraudulent representation and to ignore the actualities.

All of this is made perfectly clear in the new edition. The background chapters remain the same and are as good as ever. This is a Third World society of the dispossessed. What is less than clear is the logic of American support of this abominable system. North quotes the Mexican poet Carlos Fuentes: “Cuba and Nicaragua could well sink into the sea, and the U.S.S.R. contract to medieval Novgorod: the local bitter struggle in El Salvador would continue..,” (p.120). El Salvador’s problems are not produced by communist theory and practice. Communism, however, will always benefit from the idiocy of a politics which supports the oppressors against the oppressed. As North reminds us, the United States continues to provide that support, and Canada continues to tag along behind.