Nobody here but us roadbuilders: the Pentagon keeps busy in El Salvador.

AuthorWatrous, Steve

The question is how an army maintains its budget, its image, and maybe its power, when the enemy is gone.

The U.S. Defense Department's answer is joint military exercises described as "Humanitarian and civic action Missions," where the two armies make like Boy Scouts and build schools, wells, latrines, and other apparently good works. They call it "nation building." In Latin America, the title of the program is "Fuertes Caminos," or Strong Roads, although they don't do roads anymore.

But El Salvador just came off a twelve-year civil war and the Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas signed the peace accords only because a key point was getting the military out of civil society. Critics in the United States and El Salvador, both within the establishment and among progressive forces, believe these feel-good projects violate the peace agreement and undermine El Salvador's fragile road to democracy. Some call the exercises illegal and complain that they improperly influenced El Salvador's spring elections.

"The peace accords defined a very narrow role for the Salvadoran military: defend the country's borders," says Geoff Thale, director of the National Agenda for Peace in El Salvador. "The peace accords redefined their role: to stay out of politics, to stay out of internal affairs, and to be under civilian control. This is a hard role for the Salvadoran military to accept. What the military needs to learn is that it has to take direction from civilians. Any other encouragement by the United States harms this process."

Sending U.S. troops to build schools and roads sounds innocuous to people in the United States, but in countries afflicted by violent conflict and human-rights abuses, these military-led projects have a negative impact. Responding to a new Fuertes Caminos exercise in war-torn Guatemala, Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu asked President Clinton to keep the soldiers home: "While they say the troops are in Guatemala for social projects, like road construction, their presence is perceived as support for the repressive policies of the Guatemalan army."

The U.S. troops, driving trucks so big that some roads were damaged, rumbled into eighteen Salvadoran communities starting in August 1993. The Pentagon says the exercises are rebuilding a country destroyed by war. The two provinces selected had seen some combat, but not in the project areas. The soldiers stopped in San Luis Talpa, not far from the main airport, to build a three-classroom addition to the small town's school and drill two wells in outlying areas.

Fredi Arnoldo Castillo is the subdirector of this public grade school. Local people had some concern at first about the arrival of the soldiers, he said, but then they warmed up to the idea of troops constructing things for nonmilitary purposes. It took only one month to erect the building.

Castillo likes the new structure--painted bright blue and white, opening onto a plaza, and decorated with a large metal plaque honoring the two militaries--except for one thing. The school administration had wanted to use the new classrooms for kindergarten and first grade. Only one classroom was being used in March 1994, however, because the school doesn't have the money to hire enough teachers. Funds for public education are scarce in a country where the average rural person attends school for only three years.

Castillo also mentioned proudly that his school had been a polling place in the March 20 election. What he didn't mention was who won. ARENA, the party of the death squads, swept the municipal elections in San Luis Talpa and every other community where U.S. troops had...

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