José Napoleón Duarte

UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography, (2003)

José Napoleón Duarte

José Napoleón Duarte (1926-1990), a civilian reformer who was elected president of El Salvador in 1984, enjoyed the support of the United States and had a substantial popular following. But the government was badly divided between reformist and reactionary forces, leading to a continuous struggle for survival.

Duarte was born in San Salvador on November 23, 1926, to a family of comfortable means. He received an excellent education in El Salvador and the United States, graduating in civil engineering from Notre Dame University in 1948. Upon his return to El Salvador, Duarte joined his father-in-law's construction firm and devoted his time to his profession, to part-time university teaching, and to work with service organizations. By his own account he took little interest in politics until 1960.

In 1960 a leftist-supported coup d'état overthrew the government of Col. José María Lemus (1956-1960), raising fears that El Salvador might succumb to radical contagion from Cuba where Fidel Castro had seized power the previous year. Responding to these concerns, Duarte joined other middle-class Salvadorans in founding the Christian Democratic party and was elected its first secretary general. Because of its claim to represent a "third way," one that was neither capitalist nor Communist, Christian Democracy enjoyed a brief vogue in Latin America in the 1960s. The Christian Democratic party of El Salvador grew rapidly during the decade, gaining a following especially in urban areas among professionals, teachers, organized labor, and women. Duarte, the best known and most charismatic Christian Democrat politician, won election three times (1964, 1966, and 1968) as mayor of San Salvador, the nation's capital and largest city. In 1970 he retired from the mayoralty to begin a campaign for the presidency in 1972.

First Try for the Presidency

El Salvador had not had a civilian president nor a truly free presidential election since 1931, but many progressive politicians saw 1972 as the year in which that might change. The right was alienated by what it perceived as the leftward drift of military men who controlled the government. The army had permitted greater political activity on the part of civilian opposition parties and had even promoted reforms which made opposition electoral victories more likely. The Christian Democrats joined together with two other parties to their left to form a progressive coalition called the Unión Nacional Opositora (UNO). The UNO nominated Duarte for president and Guillermo Manuel Ungo of the democratic socialist Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) for vice-president.

Duarte's chief rival in 1972 was Col. Arturo Armando Molina, the candidate of the army-backed Partido de Conciliación Nacional (PCN), which had dominated the government since 1961. In early returns Duarte appeared to be leading. Later, however, the government ordered a halt to broadcast coverage of the counting. The following morning the authorities announced a victory of Molina. Duarte's subsequent support of an attempted coup d'état by a group of disgruntled officers led to his arrest, torture, and expulsion from the country. He spent the balance of the 1970s in exile in Venezuela.

Following another coup d'état, on October 15, 1979, in which a group of reformist officers overthrew the corrupt and unpopular regime of Col. Carlos Humberto Romero (1977-1979), Duarte returned to El Salvador. When other progressive civilians—some of them, including Guillermo Manuel Ungo, his former political allies—resigned their positions in the new government in frustration over their inability to influence the behavior of the country's repressive armed forces and police, Duarte himself consented in March 1980 to join the ruling civilian-military junta. This action split the Christian Democratic party and led a number of its younger members to join the armed opposition on the left, but Duarte persisted in his own belief, asserted several times after his defeat and exile in 1972, that no successful program of change could come about in El Salvador without the cooperation of moderate elements in the military.

Moved to the Presidency

Duarte remained in the junta until its dissolution in December 1980, at which time he became provisional president. Once in power he pushed through a number of important measures, including an agrarian reform and the nationalization of the banking industry. These changes met violent opposition from El Salvador's right, which manifested itself in a number of assassinations, including that of San Salvador Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, widely respected as a champion of social justice for the country's exploited poor, on March 24, 1980. During succeeding months the Duarte government survived several attempts to overthrow it, thanks to the continued support of key elements in the armed forces and of the United States, which considered Duarte's "moderate" reforms the best approach to neutralizing the appeal of the leftist guerrillas and arresting the spread of radical revolution from nearby Nicaragua.