Jose Napoleon Duarte
Jose Napoleon Duarte was the moderate both sides of the Salvadoran civil war needed and neither side obeyed. He was a Notre Dame-trained engineer who founded the Christian Democrats, was elected mayor of San Salvador three times, and won the presidential election of 1972 - which the army annulled. He was arrested, beaten badly enough to lose part of a hand, and exiled to Venezuela for seven years. The country he returned to in 1979 was owned by very few people. Coffee had concentrated the land through the nineteenth century until a small number of families held most of it, and a peasant rising in 1932 had been answered with a massacre that killed perhaps thirty thousand and gave the Spanish word for it, la matanza, to the national memory. A junta of reformist officers took power in October 1979 promising land reform, and he joined it in 1980 as the civilian face of a government whose security forces were killing people faster than any before it. Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot at the altar in March 1980 after asking soldiers publicly to disobey orders to kill; four American churchwomen were murdered in December; and the following year a battalion trained in the United States killed close to a thousand villagers at El Mozote, which both governments denied for a decade. Washington's calculation is the structure of the whole period: a Christian Democrat president made the aid defensible to Congress, and the aid kept an army in the field that he could not command. He won the presidency outright in 1984, opened talks with the guerrillas, and got nowhere. He died of cancer in 1990; the war ended two years later in a negotiated settlement close to what he had proposed.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 1990 CE
- Nationality: Salvadoran
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
