Alfredo Cristiani
Alfredo Cristiani was president of El Salvador from 1989 to 1994, the coffee grower and Georgetown-educated businessman whom the ARENA party of the death squads' founder D'Aubuisson chose as a presentable face for the election of March 1989. He ended the civil war that his party's founders had fought. He took office in June 1989 and offered the FMLN talks in September. The guerrillas answered with the November offensive that reached the capital's suburbs. During it the army's Atlacatl battalion murdered six Jesuit priests of the Central American University, their cook and her daughter, on 16 November, on the orders of the high command. That was the crime that turned the American Congress against the war it had paid for and made the negotiation possible. The talks under the United Nations ran from April 1990 to the last night of 1991 in New York, when Pérez de Cuéllar's term had four hours to run. The accords were signed at Chapultepec castle in Mexico City on 16 January 1992. The army was cut by half, the officers of the ad hoc commission's list retired. The National Guard and the treasury police were abolished. There was a new civilian police with the guerrillas in it, the FMLN was made a party, and the land for the ex-combatants. All of that he carried through against the officers and against his own party. In October 1992 he stood with the FMLN's commanders at the ceremony that ended the war. He also passed the amnesty law of March 1993, five days after the truth commission's report. It put the Jesuit murders and El Mozote beyond the courts for twenty-three years. He privatised the banks, which his family and friends bought. The economy grew at six per cent. He was born in San Salvador, played squash for the country, and ran the family's coffee and pharmaceutical businesses. He became ARENA's president in 1985 when the party needed someone the Americans could photograph. He was charged in 2022 with covering up the Jesuit murders. He is in Italy and says he will not come home to Bukele's courts.
- Lived: 1947 CE – ?
- Nationality: Salvadoran
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
