The Structure of Negotiation: Lessons from El Salvador for Contemporary Conflict Resolution

After years of bitter and violent conflict involving the military, rebel forces, and paramilitary “death squads,” El Salvador had suffered some 75,000 casualties, most of whom were civilians. As the conflict descended into a protracted “mutually hurting stalemate,” political will began to build in support of peace talks. The negotiated settlement that ended the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador was largely the result of a strategic reevaluation of priorities, capabilities, and options by both the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) insurgents and the Salvadoran government. Both sides were forced by changing realities over time and by events on the ground to reconsider their relative positions, their chances of decisively defeating the other side militarily, and the cost–benefit ratio of continued fighting versus a political settlement.

Nineteen eighty-nine was the watershed year when both sides began to reevaluate their own strategic positions and the advisability of continuing with the armed struggle. The election of George H. W. Bush to the United States presidency was a major factor, especially in combination with the decline of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. In what some commentators observed to be a less ideological administration than that of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, El Salvador was no longer as large a strategic priority for the United States, and lower aid levels were accompanied by a shift in North American involvement from massive military assistance to greater pressure for a political solution. This brought into question for the Salvadoran government and military whether U.S. military assistance would continue at the same time that the end of the Cold War decreased the likelihood that Communist countries would provide aid over the long term to the FMLN. (Although guerrilla leaders and their political allies claimed not to be dependent on Cuba and the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War did underscore the message that time was not on their side.)

Within El Salvador, war weariness was beginning to set in for a population tired of violence and seeing little improvement in their daily lives. A major military offensive by the FMLN in November 1989 was designed to demonstrate the insurgents' continued relevance and sustainable viability as a military opponent capable of withstanding the superior firepower employed by the government forces. The Salvadoran military's victory, amid heavy losses imposed by a stronger than expected FMLN (Corr 1995), suggested that a mutually hurting stalemate might be developing, in which neither side was likely to be able to defeat the other militarily, while a political settlement to the war through a peace agreement might be in the interest of both sides (Zartman 1989; Stern and Druckman 2000).

In this article, I analyze the conditions that led to the initiation of negotiations as well as to the successful culmination of the peace talks in 1992 with the Chapultepec Peace Accords. I also seek to identify the elements of the Salvadoran case that can be instructively applied to contemporary conflict cases, especially in Colombia and Iraq. The “lessons of El Salvador” that have been advanced by U.S. policy makers and other commentators often include the importance of U.S. counterinsurgency aid tied with human rights strings (Goldberg 2005), as well as of the active involvement of a neutral, empowered, high-profile mediator in getting distrustful parties to talk with one another and make concessions. Other lessons that have been identified include the importance of addressing social justice issues as part of a negotiated settlement (avoiding quick fixes), while trading off on enough major economic reforms to make agreement possible (De Soto 1999).

The first of these claims, concerning the role of U.S. aid to counterinsurgents is, I believe, a more suspect lesson than the others, and the idea that U.S.-backed military strength combined with an imposed third-party mediator's services is enough to jump start a peace process when the parties have been unsuccessful in doing so themselves is misleading. In fact, the conditions making a genuine dialogue possible in El Salvador were, I argue, largely structural and reflected the “ripeness” of the parties for negotiation. Third-party mediation was an important factor in facilitating the negotiation once the parties committed themselves, but it does not explain why the genuine dialogue began in the first place. This article affirms the validity of ripeness theory in the case of El Salvador, and it proposes refinements to the model of a mutually hurting stalemate that include more procedural explanations for negotiation and mediation effectiveness. I offer these refinements as hypotheses generated from the Salvadoran case that can be applied to contemporary conflict cases such as Iraq and Colombia and tested in future empirical analyses.

According to the literature on de-escalation and negotiation, it is important that the parties to the conflict believe that neither side can defeat the other militarily. When this perception becomes dominant, both sides will recognize that a “mutually hurting stalemate” exists, in which each side can block the other party's ability to win militarily (even if their military capacity is unequal) and that both sides are incurring significant costs through the continuation of the conflict. The presence of both a mutually hurting stalemate recognized by both parties and the existence of one or more realistic options for finding a way out of the stalemate creates the condition in which the conflict is “ripe” for negotiation (Zartman 1989 and 2000).

Ripeness theory remains a persuasive conceptual tool to describe necessary, but not by themselves sufficient, conditions favoring the initiation of meaningful negotiations in a conflict situation. In this article, I test ripeness theory in the context of the El Salvador case, but I also acknowledge that the presence of a mutually hurting stalemate is not enough to explain why negotiations are initiated at certain times and not at others. And, while ripeness may also explain why dialogue is initiated at a particular time, it does not explain the successful completion of negotiated agreements.

I argue that it is important to refine ripeness theory by explicitly pointing out the role of “indicators of ripeness.” In other words, because of misperception, the fog of war, disinformation, ideological predisposition, entrenched political commitments, or any number of other distorting factors, it is possible for the conditions of a mutually hurting stalemate to be in place, while one or both sides in the conflict (mistakenly) believe that they have superior capabilities and thus have the potential to win unilaterally. Only after some attention-grabbing event occurs that clearly indicates the unlikelihood of a unilateral victory do both sides acknowledge the presence of a mutually hurting stalemate. This event, which serves as an indicator of ripeness, is a key factor in moving from war to dialogue.

The presence of a hurting stalemate, which is signaled to parties by “indicators of ripeness,” is an important factor in why serious negotiation is likely to emerge at a particular time — timing is key. Once conditions are favorable for the initiation of dialogue, however, we must go beyond ripeness theory to explain how these negotiations can proceed effectively toward a mutually acceptable resolution.

According to Karen Rasler, the revision of expectations that accompanies a mutually hurting stalemate must be exploited by strong policy entrepreneurs with the flexibility to try new ideas and “sufficient political control to overcome internal commitments to older strategies” (Rasler 2000: 701). In the hands of committed and empowered policy entrepreneurs, the political opening provided by the mutually hurting stalemate can lead to a reciprocal process of confidence-building measures and concrete concessions.

The third major factor that is central to the effectiveness of negotiations — in addition to the recognition of indicators of ripeness and the presence of strong, empowered policy entrepreneurs — is pressure to continue making concessions in order to reach a mutually acceptable settlement. The parties to the negotiation may face internal pressure from a war-weary population or external pressure from allies or patrons threatening to cut aid or cease legitimizing the continuation of conflict. Pressure may result from external deadlines that present limited time windows for taking advantage of particular opportunities or even from an escalation by the other side that demonstrates strength while offering a reasonable proposal for ending violence.

Mediation and other third-party initiatives such as “groups of friends” or “good offices” provide pressure by increasing the political costs of defection and by placing greater expectations on the parties. At the same time, they offer a structure for gradual and reciprocal de-escalation and exchange of concessions. In order to be effective, both of these roles must be based on the consent of the parties as well as other interested actors with the capacity to block implementation of agreements. The importance of consent is prominent in the literature on postconflict peacebuilding: “The mobilization of political will embodied in consent, when combined with the wide array of dimensions of implementation, has proven to be crucial to the success of multi-dimensional operations” (Doyle, Johnstone, and Orr 1997: 375; see also Caplan 2002). When both parties have consented to mediation by a high-profile third party such as the United Nations, the peace process is often much stronger as a result of the high-level attention, which puts pressure on both parties to make concessions, while the third party's vigilance also provides some degree of reassurance to deeply distrustful parties that fear the consequences of any concession to their enemies.

To summarize, I propose that peace processes to end civil war are most effective when:

• indicators of ripeness lead to a recognition by all parties that a mutually hurting stalemate exists;

• committed and empowered policy entrepreneurs on both sides can take advantage of revised expectations in order to make realistic proposals and meaningful reciprocal concessions;

• internal and external pressure for a political settlement raises the costs of defecting and abandoning the negotiations and demonstrates that delay will result in increasingly higher costs to the parties; and

• a third party offers both verification of agreement implementation to overcome the mutual distrust of the parties and technical assistance to help craft workable proposals.

I apply this framework to provide insight into how the parties in El Salvador were able to break out of the entrenched patterns of conflict that had dominated during the decade-long civil war and to establish a meaningful dialogue that eventually led to a negotiated agreement ending the war. Renewed talks about negotiations began in earnest in 1989, in part as a response to the political opportunity that accompanied George Bush's accession to the U.S. presidency and his administration's decision to support and push for negotiations, in contrast to the Reagan policy that focused on the military defeat of the insurgents. In the months leading up to the March 1989 presidential election in El Salvador, the FMLN offered a proposal that reflected a dramatic departure from previous initiatives, in that it offered to participate in the upcoming elections, dropping the previous condition that the FMLN must be included in a power-sharing arrangement before participating in elections. FMLN spokesman Salvador Samayoa claimed that this move, responding to new post-Reagan political opportunities, put the ball in the government's court: “For eight years the U.S. has been saying that the only obstacle to a political solution in El Salvador was our demand for power-sharing before the elections. We are removing that obstacle. It's their move” (Samayoa 1989: 322).

The FMLN's demand that such elections be delayed by a few months to allow time to prepare a campaign ultimately sank the proposal, as the government claimed that a change in the schedule would be unconstitutional. Nonetheless, this proposal marked the preliminary stages of serious negotiations, and international interest in and support of the FMLN's election proposal demonstrated the changing external context that now favored a political settlement. Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Bernard Aronson told me in an interview, “For the first time, the whole world was pushing for peace” (Aronson 2008). According to Aronson, with the change in U.S. policy, there was no longer an external party supporting an ongoing military confrontation (Aronson 2008). A war-weary Salvadoran population increasingly came to favor negotiations over the course of 1989, with some 76 percent of respondents in one survey believing that the government should negotiate with the FMLN (Montgomery 1995:215).

A combination of internal and external shifts reinforced these positive moves toward change, bringing the parties closer to the point of engaging in serious negotiations. The FMLN launched an aggressive attack on November 11, 1989, which included occupying the homes of a number of wealthy elites in San Salvador, in order to prove their strength and to spark a popular uprising against the government. The offensive was defeated by government forces, however, and the FMLN was forced to contend with the idea that a massive rally of people rushing to join its military cause was unlikely, and as such, it was improbable that the rebels would be able to defeat the Salvadoran military anytime soon. On the other side, the FMLN offensive proved the insurgency to be stronger than the government had assumed, and the regime's inability to prevent the insurgents from bringing the conflict to the rich neighborhoods of San Salvador increased the domestic perception that the armed forces were incapable of providing adequate protection or of defeating the FMLN directly.

All of this led both sides to revise their expectations and acknowledge that their current strategies were likely to perpetuate a stalemate characterized by continued violence. In addition, six Jesuit priests suspected of sympathizing with the rebels were murdered by members of the armed forces under orders from senior officers, including the director of the Military College (Betancur, Planchart, and Buergenthal 1993). This murder, and the military's cover-up of what happened in order to protect their own, sparked an enormous outcry from the international community, which resulted in the United States threatening to reduce or cut off direct aid to the Salvadoran regime (Walker 1991).

During El Salvador's tragic decade-long civil war, brutal atrocities, including many attributed to members of the Salvadoran armed forces, were not uncommon (Arnson 1982; Sundaram and Gelber 1991; Betancur, Planchart, and Buergenthal 1993; Danner 1994; Montgomery 1995). But the Jesuit murders were nonetheless unique and important in shaping the trajectory of negotiations. Aronson has argued that the Jesuit murders, and the consequent strong backlash in the U.S. Congress and North American Catholic community, created a situation in which “the military finally began to realize that time was not on their side” (Aronson 2008). With the passing of an amendment in the U.S. Congress sponsored by Massachusetts Congressman John Joseph Moakley to decrease aid to El Salvador as a direct result of the government's failure to adequately investigate the murders, the Salvadoran armed forces were faced with the possibility that U.S. military aid would really be withheld, which would dramatically affect their ability to continue the war against the FMLN (Aronson 2008). The U.S. Congress did, in fact, decide in 1990 to cut military aid by some 50 percent to signal that it was serious in demanding that the Salvadoran government uphold its agreement to reform the military, form a national civil police, and investigate adequately the murder of the priests. As Table One shows, U.S. funding decreased steadily as the Cold War ended, stalemate set in, and the legitimacy of the Salvadoran government was increasingly called into question, which intensified pressure for the government to reach a political settlement.

The threat of military aid withdrawal that followed the Jesuit murders and the government's cover-up served as an indicator of ripeness that signaled to the Salvadoran government and military that a hurting stalemate was developing. Likewise, the November offensive had served as anindicator of ripeness for all sides. The offensive showed the military that the FMLN was stronger than they had thought, and it jolted the Salvadoran elite who faced the reality of war directly when the FMLN was able to attack even in rich neighborhoods of San Salvador. The failure of the offensive to fatally cripple the military also served as an indicator of ripeness for the FMLN. In the words of Aronson, “it broke the back of the revolutionary dream to be like the Sandinistas,” underscoring the FMLN's repeated failure to provoke a mass citizen uprising as the Sandinista rebels in nearby Nicaragua had successfully done when they overthrew the government of that country in 1979 (Aronson 2008).

As a result of their recognition of a hurting stalemate and their perception that the new Bush administration presented political opportunities for a negotiated settlement, the FMLN began to consider alternative strategies, sending out tentative feelers to explore the possibility of U.N. involvement (Perez de Cuellar 1997). The Salvadoran government began to reevaluate the feasibility of its plan to defeat the insurgents militarily, and, responding to pressure from internal public opinion as well as from the United States, it also began to explore political alternatives for resolving the conflict (Karl 1991; United Nations 1995). As a result of both parties' requests for U.N. mediation, which were supported in a joint letter from the U.S. Secretary of State and Soviet Foreign Minister (United Nations 1995) and approved by the U.N. Security Council (De Soto 1999), a mediated peace process was established that would ultimately prove successful in helping the parties reach a series of negotiated settlements.

The Salvadoran civil conflict grew out of the exclusion by the oligarchy of the popular classes and rising discontent with social, economic, andpolitical conditions throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, and, in particular, the late 1970s. This situation of massive exclusion, inequality, and repression of the agrarian and working classes had been a feature of Salvadoran society for much of its history, going back to the dismantling of communal lands in favor of privately owned coffee plantations relying on cheap and abundant wage labor in the late 1800s (Arnson 1982).

The so-called “Fourteen Families” who controlled much of Salvadoran wealth and property dominated the economic and political arenas in the country, while the majority of the rural campesinos, urban poor, and even the middle class felt disenfranchised and deprived of opportunities in the face of this dramatic inequality. According to Ana Guadalupe Martinez, who became one of the FMLN leaders, this socioeconomic and political hierarchy set the stage for violent resistance. “No one supported the oligarchy; we were all on the other side. [There was a] very profound division between rich and poor, between those who owned everything and those who owned nothing; because even the middle class felt deprived given that there was no political freedom – they may have lived comfortably at home but they had no political freedom, so they felt deprived just like the poorest of the poor. That was the ideal stage for the development of conditions which would lead to a confrontation” (Martinez 1997).

During this period, modernization and the emerging political consciousness of the lower classes contributed to rising levels of resistance against traditional military governments. The repressive tactics employed by the military against this growing opposition served to polarize the Salvadoran political space into more radical camps of left and right that were more willing to employ violence to increase their power. Over a decade later, even rightist politicians, such as President Alfredo Cristiani and Minister of Justice Oscar Santamaria, would acknowledge the role that military repression and socioeconomic inequality played in creating the conditions that lead to war (Ramos and Briones 1999; Santamaria 2007).

In 1979, a coup carried out by reformist members of the military and their civilian allies attempted to impose a number of changes such as agrarian land reform and more inclusive socioeconomic policies in order to rectify some of the most egregious inequalities and injustices while maintaining the military's traditional role as the primary force in national politics. Supported by the United States, the coup planners also hoped that through the implementation of limited land reforms, they could defuse the strength of militant pressures for total political reform and prevent a revolutionary victory by leftist forces. This short-lived junta, however, was attacked from both the left and the right, as it angered right-wing elites whose traditional monopoly of power was threatened by the reforms it sought to impose, while those on the left were disillusioned by the regime's failure to achieve the changes it promised or to control the wave of reactionary violence that followed the coup, largely instigated by an intransigent and repressive military and its death squad allies (Manwaring and Prisk 1988; Stahler-Sholk 1994).

One of the principle causes of the escalation to violence was the widespread perception, based on the junta's inability to stop military repression and dominance over politics, that reform could not occur through political channels until the existing institutions of the country were dismantled and rebuilt. Salvador Samayoa, who left his position as education minister in the junta's government to join the leftist insurgency, explained, “In that experience with governing we found out that not even being inside the government would we have any possibility of doing anything to bring change. If you are combating ideas with weapons, it really shuts down all of the political space” (Betancourt 2008). The intransigence of the Salvadoran military and hard right oligarchy in their refusal to allow meaningful reform and their willingness to use brutal force to stop it was noted in U.S. government communications at the time as well (Derian 1979; White 1981a, 1981b, 2008; Krauss 1986).

The armed left expanded rapidly, and in 1980, five major leftist insurgent groups coalesced to form the FMLN. Unifying this alliance was a formidable challenge given the deep ideological and tactical differences and animosities that existed among the different factions. The five major groups ultimately decided, with Cuba's encouragement, that it was more in their interest to unite than to stay separate, especially given the diminishing prospects of political reform and the specter of massive U.S. aid to the Salvadoran government.

The Salvadoran civil war raged throughout the 1980s, with the fighting growing more intense in the early years as both sides received increasing levels of funding, arms, and training from external sources before moving to a strategy of low-intensity conflict in the second half of the decade. There were sporadic talks of negotiations and peace, but both sides focused mostly on a military strategy aimed at defeating the opponent and controlling the government in order to maintain or reform the system to their liking.

Regional pressure for peace negotiations in El Salvador began to grow in 1987 as representatives of the Central American governments met in Esquipulas, Guatemala to hammer out their differences. Under the guidance of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sánchez — who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts — they signed an agreement in which each government agreed to stop financing each other's rebel movements and to cooperate in a number of areas. They also developed a common framework setting interstate peace and the end of conflict within the individual states as primary goals. These objectives included negotiated agreements to end the wars; demilitarization, democratization, and electoral inclusion in the respective states; cooperation on refugee issues; and an end to support of insurgent movements (Wehr and Lederach 1991).

Although the establishment of these common objectives did not produce direct results in El Salvador (in part because representatives of the guerrillas were not invited to the table in Guatemala for these negotiations), it did provide a blueprint for future negotiated accords, and it increased regional pressures and support for a peaceful settlement to the Central American civil wars, including the one in El Salvador. Furthermore, the Esquipulas process was an explicitly Latin American enterprise, and the achievement of an agreement was an important step in introducing an element of independence from the narrow dictates of the American foreign policy agenda (Arnson 1999).

Another factor that formed the context for the eventual peace talks was the juxtaposition of elections for national office against the backdrop of the ongoing civil war during the 1980s. The United States for much of this time supported the centrist Christian Democratic Party, and periodic elections were held in which the Christian Democrats did for a time gain power. The legitimacy and truly democratic nature of these elections was contested, and they excluded large sectors of the population from participation, either directly or through intimidation. Nonetheless, the periodic elections were a departure from El Salvador's long history of military rule, and they did begin to change norms and alter the relative power balance between the opposing sides. The election of civilian Alvaro Magaña to the presidency in 1982 and José Napoleon Duarte in 1984 began to change the political landscape. According to Joaquín Villalobos, the commander of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP), “The democratic changes that took place before the Peace Agreement were partial and imperfect but felt tangibly by the insurgency. This gave credibility to the idea that working politically in a context of peace was more beneficial than continuing war” (Ricigliano 2005).

With the advent of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika in the USSR and the decline of global communism, the United States was less worried about an FMLN victory sparking a communist wave in Latin America, so it disengaged somewhat from a narrow agenda of preventing the FMLN from gaining power, focusing instead on supporting a moderate, democratic transition to a legitimate, elected government, especially one that would provide stability for U.S. investment (Corr 1995).

One factor influencing the way the negotiations took place was the nature of the insurgents themselves. The FMLN had certainly employed violence in its struggle against government forces, and as the Salvadoran military was strengthened by U.S. foreign assistance, the rebels increasingly resorted to the use of guerrilla tactics, land mines, and sporadic, high-profile violence instead of traditional military operations. Throughout the conflict, however, the FMLN maintained a strong political presence through its alliance with the nonmilitary Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR). In an interview, former U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program officer Don Boyd told me that the military conflict never completely severed the political dialogue between the parties, and “even during the conflict, people were talking about the future” (Boyd 2006) This ongoing interaction made the insurgents sensitive to political considerations, legitimacy, and popular opinion. The FMLN was particularly sensitive to the political ramifications of human rights abuses and thus held its members accountable for appropriate behavior through internal trials. Samayoa claimed that the day the FMLN's tactics began to “really affect the population, we will be committing political and military suicide. We will have the whole population against us” (Samayoa 1989).

The FMLN had been calling for negotiations on a power-sharing arrangement for several years, and in 1987 it offered in conjunction with its political wing the FDR an eighteen-point proposal for starting a dialogue to end the war. In addition to a cease-fire, the proposal insisted on direct negotiations that would include the Salvadoran military's high command, not just political officials from the Duarte government. This demand was a response to the perceived weakness of the Duarte regime and the uncertainty about its ability to enforce any agreement and to counteract institutional blocking from the military (Zamora Rivas and Handal 1987: 484–485). This proposal, which ultimately failed like so many other abortive peace attempts, demonstrates the importance of strong political entrepreneurs who are capable of attaining buy-in from their own parties. Duarte's reputed difficulties controlling the military and the Salvadoran right wing diminished his ability to make commitments in a negotiation that the FMLN would see as credible. I believe that another reason for the failure of this earlier initiative was that the parties had not yet been convinced by indicators of ripeness that a mutually hurting stalemate existed. As such, the FMLN viewed dialogue at this time primarily as a tactical maneuver to improve its own positioning (Le Moyne 1989).

One of the challenges in negotiation analysis is to identify and measure the relative power existing between the parties in conflict. In the Salvadoran case, it is not clear that either of the two parties was unambiguously more powerful than the other, which contributed to the growing stalemate leading up to the negotiations. While U.S. military assistance clearly gave the Salvadoran government the advantage in brute financial and technological resources, the FMLN adopted a strategy of low-intensity guerrilla tactics combined with public relations, political efforts, and communal social-welfare programs that lent the movement moral and political legitimacy in the eyes of many sectors of Salvadoran society as well as with much of the international community.

Villalobos has claimed that the insurgency possessed greater moral and political legitimacy than the government, especially after the murder of the Jesuit priests in 1989, and as such, the FMLN was better able to translate its power into negotiated gains during the peace talks (Ricigliano 2005). Villalobos's colleague Samayoa wrote that “you can only be flexible when you are strong,” and that the FMLN's issue flexibility came about as a result of the political capital earned through heightened legitimacy and military strength (Samayoa 1989). As the FMLN maintained a relatively consistent military capability and increased its international legitimacy, its position with respect to the government and armed forces began to resemble a stalemate.

Despite the FMLN's confidence, “the government was confident as well,” according to Latin American studies scholar Terry Karl. “Persuaded that the Sandinista defeat in Nicaragua's February 1990 elections meant the loss of the FMLN's closest ally and a substantial weakening of the rebel military position, and secure that its own control over the Legislative Assembly and the Supreme Court was sufficient to reject unwanted initiatives, it agreed for the first time to outside mediation” (Karl 1991: 155).

This juxtaposition of two parties, both of whom were confident in their own advantage over the other but also aware of their likely inability to completely defeat the other side militarily, reinforced the mutually hurting stalemate. The convergence of the perceived power relationship between the parties, however, as well as both sides' high expectations for their own advantage, may have contributed to the protracted nature of the peace talks, which stretched over the next several years.

The negotiations between the Salvadoran government and the FMLN featured both historic breakthroughs and frustrating impasses and derailments when one side or the other dug in behind a particular entrenched position. The presence and facilitation of an engaged, active mediator in the person of United Nations Special Representative Alvaro de Soto of Peru was critical to the significant progress that was achieved during these negotiations. The strength and coherence of the two parties, which allowed for creative issue flexibility and credible commitments, were also important factors. The legitimization of the U.N. effort and the participation of the group of “friends of the Secretary General” also lent important urgency and credibility to the process. This informal group of friends, which consisted of representatives from Colombia, Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela who were interested but not completely aligned with either party in the Salvadoran conflict, provided important diplomatic support for the mediation process.

Neither party could militarily defeat the other, and they both seemed to grasp this fact, but the leaders of both parties were in a better position to speak authoritatively and keep their side in line than previous leaders in El Salvador and leaders in other countries facing similar situations, whose weakness and fractious constituencies made negotiation difficult to impossible (Walker 1989; Perez de Cuellar 1997; Call 2002). Unlike weak former President Napoleon Duarte of the centrist Christian Democratic party, President Alfredo Cristiani, who was elected in 1989, was from the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance Party (ARENA). As such, Cristiani was able to make more credible commitments at the table because of his greater influence within the business elite, traditional landowners, and Salvadoran military.

Starting with his inaugural speech, Cristiani pledged to pursue a political solution through negotiations with the FMLN (although this in itself was not necessarily unique, as previous leaders had also used the rhetoric of peace). U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, along with U.S. government officials and other observers, became convinced over time that Cristiani was genuine in his commitment to negotiation and his ability to move his own party forward: “Facing continuing opposition from the more extreme elements, [Cristiani] unquestionably had serious problems in holding his party together as the negotiating process went forward. That he succeeded was perhaps the most important factor in arriving at a settlement because only the ARENA party could have brought the powerful right-wing elements, including the Salvadoran military, to accept an agreement that contained provisions that were distinctly not to their liking. Cristiani is a man of the right but not an ideologue” (Perez de Cuellar 1997: 417). Although certainly disagreements persisted within the government and its allies, Perez de Cuellar recalls that Cristiani's personal intervention was key, especially in the final stages of the negotiation, to closing the deal: “I called President Cristiani and urged that he come and assume the leadership of his delegation since only he had the authority to make the decisions needed to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion.  . . . With Cristiani able and willing to make compromises, the FMLN team also moderated its demands” (Perez de Cuellar 1997).

Alvaro de Soto's effectiveness as a mediator was a function of his legitimacy in the eyes of the international community and the parties, the consent of the affected actors, and the power and credibility lent by his status as the direct representative of the U.N. Secretary General. The procedure of the negotiations was shaped in large part by the relationship between the U.N. and the parties. The FMLN negotiation delegation, headed by Shafik Handal, was especially insistent that the U.N. be present, arguing that “by ensuring an authoritative, third-party participation and presence throughout the negotiation, the seriousness of the parties could be independently guaranteed. Thus, in a sense, they wanted the United Nations to keep the parties honest” (De Soto 1999: 360). According to Handal, “The participation of the UN Secretary General gives the negotiations added weight” (New York Times 1990).

On the government side, Cristiani sought to balance the status and power of the negotiators by not participating personally in the negotiations except at critical junctures. The government (and its U.S. backers) favored intensive, ongoing negotiations to work quickly toward a cease-fire, while the FMLN insisted that the negotiations be separated by substantial interim periods of several weeks in order to consult widely with their constituencies and to allow time to discuss strategies among the five organizations of the FMLN (De Soto 1999). These opposing positions reflected the differing internal structures of each side: the government's decision-making authority was more hierarchical while the FMLN General Command and its political allies in the FDR had a more consensus-based, horizontal structure.

The mixture of historic breakthroughs and frustrating impasses that characterized the two-year negotiations was shaped, like most negotiations, by the political will and skill of those at the table, the evolving military reality on the ground, and the context of international pressure and assistance. In contrast to previous episodes of negotiation attempts in which there was little cost to using dialogue in order to gain time to rest and rearm, or to get credit for being reasonable without having to sacrifice anything, the negotiators in 1990 recognized the much higher political cost that would come from abandoning the peace process. At least, as the U.S. ambassador claimed in a secret cable in 1989, “Both parties understand the country wants the violence to end; both are willing to use dialogue as a way to show that the other side is not interested in peace. That and the procedures of the process about to begin, however, mean that both sides increasingly will be pressed to offer reasonable sounding propositions to those across the table, and to the world” (Walker 1989).

Policy entrepreneurs on both sides began engaging in peace talks under the auspices of the United Nations, formally agreeing at Geneva in April 1990 to negotiate (Geneva agreement 1990) and setting an agenda and tentative timetable for negotiations the following month in Caracas, Venezuela (General agenda and timetable for the comprehensive negotiating process 1990). In Costa Rica in July, the parties reached the first substantive agreement by consenting to the creation of a U.N. human rights observation mission that would be charged with verifying the progress of the parties on improving their human rights practices (Agreement on human rights 1990).

Negotiations thereafter stalled in the face of FMLN demands for a complete dissolution of all armed forces, both government and insurgent, which were refused by the government. It was not until April 1991 in Mexico that a real breakthrough was reached at the negotiating table, when the parties agreed on a number of constitutional measures for judicial and electoral reform, as well as a number of military reform measures and the establishment of a truth commission to investigate past human rights violations. Perhaps most importantly, these agreements provided for the establishment of the National Civil Police as an independent security force outside of the jurisdiction of the armed forces (Mexico agreements 1991). The FMLN dropped its demand that demobilized insurgents be guaranteed integration into the ranks of the military in exchange for assurances that they would be included in the new Civil Police. In this manner, a pattern of mutual concessions emerged in which a degree of reciprocity was maintained.

The achievement of the Mexico agreement was aided in large part by the pressure of an external deadline imposed by the Salvadoran constitution, which requires that constitutional amendments be approved by two consecutive legislative assemblies. If the constitutional amendments were not agreed upon and placed before the assembly before the end of April, it would be more than a year before they could be ratified. After the parties finally reached an agreement on a proposal, a number of these constitutional reforms were, in fact, adopted by the legislature following heavy pressure from the United States and the international community, which represented a significant breakthrough in the negotiations (Karl 1991).

This is a key lesson of the Salvadoran negotiation process: the strategic use of real, externally imposed deadlines can be crucial to providing political cover for the parties to make necessary concessions to reach agreement (Aronson 2008). Indeed the deadline represented by the end of Perez de Cuellar's term as U.N. secretary general provided the urgency and pressure needed to push the parties the final step to initial an agreement at 11:56 p.m. on the last day of the term. This agreement would later turn into the Chapultepec Accords, signed in early 1992, which officially brought the Salvadoran civil war to a close (Peace agreement 1992; Perez de Cuellar 1997). De Soto (1999) has distinguished, however, between the value of external deadlines like the constitutional requirement or the impending end of the secretary general's term and arbitrary deadlines and ultimatums fixed by the mediator, whose enforcement risks undermining the credibility and neutrality of the mediator.

According to Ruben Zamora Rivas, the negotiators decided to tackle an ambitious, far-reaching, agenda that included broad social and political reforms, not just a narrow cease-fire agreement (Zamora Rivas 2003). The result of this was an agenda that included provisions for reforms in human rights, land distribution, and other socioeconomic issues; judicial and police reforms; and demilitarization (Stahler-Sholk 1994). Such a comprehensive accord inevitably made later implementation much more difficult, but it was essential to reach agreement on each of the core contentious issues, and doing so formed an important base on which trust for future interaction and cooperation between the two sides could be built. As Aronson has recalled, the progressive achievement of concrete, visible reforms that were implemented without waiting for a final agreement created the basis for important confidence-building measures that assured both sides of the value of the negotiations and the seriousness of the opposing party (Aronson 2008).

Despite many setbacks and ongoing mutual suspicion between the parties, a number of political entrepreneurs were apparently willing to negotiate in good faith and stay committed to the implementation of the Chapultepec Accords to solidify an inclusive, sustainable, democratic order that would genuinely open the political space to include all segments of society. De Soto's continued involvement, along with the involvement of Marrack Goulding, the U.N. chief of mission in El Salvador, even after the achievement of a peace agreement, provided important continuity and follow-through that kept the attention of the Security Council on the Salvadoran peace process, helping to continue the implementation when external assistance was needed. The value of this attention to peace agreement implementation and the continuity of international actors through the entire follow-through stage is a lesson that has too often been lost, or ignored, in subsequent international interventions (Call 2002).

El Salvador presents a particularly interesting case that affirms existing theories of negotiation and mediation and generates promising lessons that could be tested as hypotheses using contemporary conflicts as empirical cases. The preceding analysis shows that a combination of ripeness theory and refinements drawn from the negotiation process and mediation literature is necessary to explain fully the initiation and form of the negotiations, as well as the nature of the resulting peace agreement. The successful synthesis of these conflict resolution models holds out the promise that such a combined framework can usefully be applied to other cases of negotiations to end civil war. The historical evidence in the Salvadoran case indicates that a mutually hurting stalemate emerged between the two parties, and that this was ultimately recognized by both parties in 1989 as a result of several key indicators of ripeness.

In addition, the change from the more ideological Reagan administration to the more pragmatic Bush administration created political opportunities for dialogue that had not existed before, at the same time that the administration, in partnership with Congress, made more vigorous demands for human rights accountability and made the Salvadoran armed forces realize that the continuation of military aid was no longer a given. Finally, the November 1989 FMLN offensive and the murder of the Jesuit priests by the Salvadoran military (with the subsequent U.S. threat to cut off aid) were the immediate triggers that forced both parties to reassess their positions and come to the negotiating table, a decision that was strongly reinforced by the end of the Cold War.

With the election of President Cristiani, the government finally had a stronger policy entrepreneur who was committed to seeking a political settlement and whose position in the ARENA party empowered him to exercise greater control over his government and make credible concessions in the negotiation that would have been impossible for his predecessor. The change in U.S. policy to active support of a political settlement and the deep involvement of United Nations mediation and observation missions were instrumental in providing the pressure to push the process along.

El Salvador is regularly held up by policy makers as an example of a successful negotiated settlement to a civil war in Latin America, and the historical parallels have been used to provide prescriptions for policies in Colombia, Iraq, and other countries facing contemporary conflict, especially from protracted civil insurgencies (Passage 2000; Goldberg 2005; Hirsh 2005; Villalobos 2005). The detailed analysis found in this article allows us better to evaluate calls to apply “the lessons of El Salvador” to contemporary conflicts and to think about which aspects and strategies of the peace process might helpfully be replicated in other situations.

Depending on the political persuasion of the analyst, the lessons drawn from the case of El Salvador can be quite varied, even contradictory. In some circles, El Salvador recalls memories of U.S.-trained military and private security allies taking the conflict aggressively to terrorist opponents while leaving U.S. personnel out of the direct line of fire. In 2005, Newsweek reported that the U.S. Department of Defense was actively considering a “Salvador option” for Iraq, which would entail U.S. Special Forces training local militias and paramilitary squads to target Sunni insurgents and anyone who might be a sympathizer. By drawing on this Salvador “lesson,” the idea would be to weaken the insurgent forces while not drawing U.S. troops further into the active combat of Iraq, hoping to repeat what proponents claim was a successful test of this counterinsurgency-by-proxy technique in El Salvador (Goldberg 2005; Hirsh 2005).

This proposal — which has so far not been adopted in Iraq — would offer only a superficial and ill-planned quick fix in its call for U.S. military trainers to equip local militias with weapons and training to weed out insurgents, sympathizers, and anyone else who might present a threat in order to reduce direct U.S. involvement and casualties while still claiming to be opposing terrorists. Justifying such a policy by invoking the “lessons of El Salvador” requires significant historical revision because U.S. aid to El Salvador propped up a military that engaged in atrocious human rights abuses, and it dragged out an incredibly destructive conflict over more than a decade. Ambassador Robert White told me, “It is a stupid argument that El Salvador has any lessons for Iraq — we are talking about one of the smallest, weakest countries, and they [the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military] weren't actually successful. They ultimately had to negotiate” (White 2008). U.S. policy was focused exclusively on military victory, and several times American intervention helped to kill nascent peace efforts. In the vocabulary of ripeness, U.S. counterinsurgency aid ensured that the Salvadoran government and armed forces never recognized that military victory was impossible. Only when U.S. policy changed and the continuation of military aid was credibly threatened (in combination with the other factors described in the preceding analysis) did a negotiated settlement become possible.

The more appropriate lesson for contemporary conflict resolution efforts, which draws on ripeness theory and the refining hypotheses generated from the El Salvador case, is to keep in mind the limits of an outside power's ability to achieve a sustainable end to an insurgency solely through military means. In particular, the United States is unlikely to produce either a favorable military victory or the conditions for meaningful negotiations solely by pumping large amounts of military aid into a civil conflict in the hopes that this will rapidly create an effective, professional force that can maintain security, protect human rights, and enforce the rule of law. In the context of a protracted and complex civil war, external military aid can change the balance of power between the parties, but it is very difficult to achieve a quick victory without the kind of long-term commitment of troops, money, and time that Americans are frequently unwilling to make for economic, political, and moral reasons. Ambassador White has argued that in El Salvador, the expectation of a quick, easy military victory through proxy support of the Salvadoran government was misguided. “I think what they [the Reagan administration] were trying to do in El Salvador was that, in contrast to the namby-pamby Carter administration that was trying to focus on human rights considerations and diplomacy, they could wrap this thing up quickly. I tried to tell [Secretary of State Alexander] Haig that that was unrealistic. It is one thing if you put in U.S. troops, but if you are relying on local forces, it is going to take a long time” (White 2008).

If outside support is provided before both parties feel the pain of a hurting stalemate, military aid is as likely to prolong the conflict as it is to resolve it.

A third-party intervention that calls for renewed dialogue between the parties is unlikely to produce an effective negotiated agreement if one or both parties believe that they can prevail militarily, if the leadership of either party is too weak to be able to act as an effective policy entrepreneur, or if there is no internal or external pressure creating expectations for a negotiated settlement. A mediation or external intervention that is imposed or that ignores the genuine consent of the parties is likely to be ineffective, or at least short-lived. El Salvador shows that external parties can play a key role in supporting a political negotiation process, but that this can be done most effectively with the consent of both parties after a hurting stalemate has emerged. El Salvador represents a success story for negotiation and for U.N. mediation, but not for quick counterinsurgency victory through military assistance.

Ambassador David Passage, the former U.S. chargé d'affaires in El Salvador, has argued that El Salvador illuminates important guidelines for U.S. policy toward Colombia, where a multiparty internal conflict has produced four decades of violence. These include encouraging the government to eliminate human rights violations and paramilitary ties and to pursue more inclusive economic and democratic policies. Just as the United States Congress tied the continuation of military assistance to the improvement of human rights practices by the Salvadoran government and armed forces, military aid to Colombia, Passage has argued, must be conditioned on similar human rights protections and have no illusions about a “quick fix.”¹ Passage has also argued that the United States must make clear that it supports the resolution of underlying injustices at the root of the conflict rather than favoring a purely military strategy that raises the expectations of the military that victory will be achieved through superior equipment provided by external aid. Indirect intervention through military assistance strengthened an intransigent institution in El Salvador (the military), which resisted U.S. efforts to achieve human rights reform. In the same way, critics have alleged that the Colombian military has used equipment received from the United States in 2000 through the multibillion dollar assistance package Plan Colombia to commit atrocities while paying lip service to human rights reform.

A number of lessons from the Salvadoran peace process remain useful today. These include the importance of political legitimacy as a source of negotiating power, the key role of issue flexibility in producing agreements (as seen by the FMLN's dropping of its demand to be integrated into the armed forces in exchange for a guarantee to be included in the newly created Civil Police), and the potential utility of outside pressure from the United Nations, United States, and others pushing for the protection of human rights and progression of negotiations. In particular, real deadlines associated with external parties can provide a much-needed push for parties to take the final steps to an agreement, just as the end of Secretary General Perez de Cuellar's term served as a catalyst for the final agreement in El Salvador (Perez de Cuellar 1997).

This analysis has both affirmed the validity of ripeness theory in the case of El Salvador and suggested several refinements to explain the effectiveness of the peace process itself. Unfortunately, space limitations require that the analysis leave a number of questions unanswered. The comprehensive nature of the final peace accords ending the Salvadoran civil war, and the historic political and social reforms brought about as a result, demonstrate that the negotiations followed a broader resolving formula rather than merely an agreement formula designed to reach a narrow cessation of hostilities. As a result of the comprehensive political settlement, the military was restructured and removed from its traditional role controlling political power, a truth commission was given broad powers to investigate past human rights abuses in order to promote a just national reconciliation, the constitution was reformed to guarantee greater political inclusion and a fairer and more effective judiciary, and agreement was reached on a number of socioeconomic reforms.

It is not clear, however, whether the peace accords have successfully achieved a genuine transformation of the Salvadoran social and political sphere, or whether life is better for the average person now than it was before. Many of the reforms that were agreed upon in the peace process have been implemented slowly or in an incomplete manner, and violent crime has become a major problem. To date, the FMLN has been unable to field electable candidates for the presidency, and power has remained in the hands of the conservative ARENA party, despite the greater electoral success of leftist political actors at the local and legislative levels (although this may change if the FMLN wins the presidency in 2009, which it has a credible possibility of doing).

This does not attempt to cover the degree to which these reforms and negotiated commitments have been implemented or sustained since 1992, so the question of whether or not the underlying conflict has been truly resolved arguably remains open, making this a fruitful area for further inquiry, especially if and when an alternation of political power occurs through an FMLN presidential victory. What is clear within the scope of the negotiation itself, however, is that the resolution of the Salvadoran civil war relied on strong, empowered political entrepreneurs whose parties recognized a mutually hurting stalemate. Revising their expectations and faced with pressure, encouragement, and assistance from the United Nations and other external actors, the parties struggled for two years in order to produce a creative and multifaceted agreement upon which to build a joint future. Despite the very real limitations in the progress that has been achieved through the negotiated agreement and its implementations, the Salvadoran case does represent an impressive example of a peace process that successfully brought to an end a brutal and bloody civil war. Learning from both the pitfalls and the triumphs of this negotiation, we can draw instructive lessons for improving the prospects for conflict resolution practice in other cases in the future.