The following post by Tommie Sue Montgomery reflects on the late US Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White. Tommie Sue wrote the post shortly after Ambassador White's passing and was kind enough to allow me to reproduce it here. Tommie Sue has been one of the foremost experts on El Salvador for the last several decades and I will forever be grateful to her for inviting me into her home in San Salvador during one of her three Fulbrights and sharing her contacts and wisdom.Ambassador Robert White’s passing in a sense marks the end of an era. He is being justly lauded for speaking truth to power and losing his job—U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador--for it. In the 1980s he became one of the most eloquent, vociferous critics of the Reagan Administration’s ideologically-driven, misguided and destructive Central America policy. In Washington no one was more outspoken that Bob White in denouncing the policy and advertising its flaws—and for that, Central Americans, especially Salvadorans, can be grateful.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that it wasn’t always so, that it took the murder of four US churchwomen in December 1980 to effect Bob White’s epiphany. In the months before that, he was the dutiful ambassador, the voice for a Carter Administration desperate to avoid another Nicaragua (the Sandinistas had overthrown the US-supported Somoza dictatorship the year before). I know because I was there, doing research for a book that would be published in 1982.
Bob arrived in El Salvador in late February 1980, three months after a coup d’état, led by young, progressive army officers, ousted the brutal president-General Carlos Humberto Romero. The ambassador invited me for a long breakfast at his residence, where I shared everything I had learned during my previous months in El Salvador. The fundamental problem, I said, was that even before the coup occurred, right-wing officers managed to reassert control over events, thus derailing the good intentions of the new civilian-military junta. In this they were abetted by then-US Ambassador Frank Devine, a clueless functionary who believed that the new junta represented a thinly-disguised slide toward socialism. Thwarted at every turn, the junta resigned in late December and the second junta lasted just two months. Many of their members, threatened by death squads, went into exile. I said that El Salvador was headed for civil war, that the leftist organizations had broad popular support, and that the only alternative was to condition all military assistance on major reforms in the army—which meant cleaning out the top brass.
White arrived as the third junta was being formed. With some U.S. arm-twisting, the army accepted the hated Christian Democrats as partners and José Napoleon Duarte, who had won the presidency in 1972, been denied victory by the army, and then forced into exile for several years, now saw his chance to be “president”—of the military-dominated junta—and seized it. Ambassador White and the Carter Administration hailed this as an advance toward democracy and pretended that Duarte actually had power—until the nuns and church worker were murdered by the National Guard.
A month after Ambassador White arrived, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while saying Mass. The embassy expressed outrage and the Ambassador attended the funeral, but he did not press for an investigation, although it was obvious to everyone who knew anything about El Salvador that Romero had been murdered by a right-wing death squad tied to the military. Years later this would be confirmed.
In the intervening months state-sponsored terrorism reached new levels with hundreds of real and suspected leftists as well as prominent human rights advocates disappearing and usually turning up dead. The US Embassy lamented the deaths but downplayed their magnitude. The official line was, “El Salvador is facing a leftist (or communist) threat but is on the road to democracy.” The proof was always that Duarte was president of the junta.
In November leaders of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, a centre-left coalition, were seized from a Jesuit high school where they had scheduled a press conference. The kidnappings occurred in broad daylight; the surrounding streets had been sealed off by police, and the six men turned up dead on roads near the capital. Ambassador White expressed dismay but little more. El Salvador was still on the (difficult) road to democracy. Also in November Ronald Reagan was elected president and his foreign policy transition team wasted no time announcing to Latin America’s many military rulers that Carter’s human rights’ policy was a dead letter. The Salvadoran military and death squads understood, correctly, that they had just been given carte blanche.
Then Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan were raped and murdered. For Bob White, the veil of hypocrisy that enveloped the Salvadoran government was torn away. He finally saw the government, the military for what it was: a bunch of right-wing, murderous thugs who would stop at nothing to preserve their power.
A month later the civil war began, lasted 11 years, cost over 70,000 dead and over $6 billion in U.S. military assistance. After peace accords in 1992 the former guerrillas became a legal political party, won the presidency in 2009 and repeated their victory in 2013. I have often wondered how different history would have been had Bob White and the Carter Administration understood in March 1980 what they finally grasped nine months later.
