Ruben Zamora is the forty-five-year-old vicepresident of the Salvadoran Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), the civilian political grouping that is allied to the guerrilla Farabundo Marti National Liberation Movement (FMLN). Once a Christian Democrat and associate of El Salvador's President Duarte, as well as chairman of the social and political science department at the University of El Salvador, Zamora went into exile shortly after an older brother was killed by a death squad in 1980. Zamora founded a left-wing Christian group, the Popular Social Christian Movement, which he heads today, and with other members of the FDR, he entered the alliance with the FMLN.
In late November, Zamora returned to El Salvador in the wake of the Arias plan. He spoke publicly in favor of a non-military resolution to the Salvadoran conflict and urged a "pluralism for all" that would allow an open political role for forces to the left of the Christian Democrats. Zamora's message combined strong criticism of the Duarte government for incompetence and subservience to the Salvadoran military and the U.S. with themes departing from the orthodox Marxist thinking in the FMLN. Many observers saw in his eleven-day visit, undertaken despite the danger of assassination, a potential way out of the Salvadoran stalemate.
Gene Palumbo interviewed Ruben Zamora in El Salvador on December 1. A free-lance journalist based in El Salvador, Gene Palumbo has reported for National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, and the National Catholic Reporter. THE EDITORS
PALUMBO: Do you think the army, the government, and the FMLN, share your belief in pluralism?
ZAMORA: The pluralism I was advancing is not shared by the army, which sees itself as the maker of the country. The army is very reluctant to open up the society to a wider expression of views and tendencies. As for the government, it does not have real decision-making power. But in the FMLN, I see a tendency toward a more open attitude. Yet important ideological elements there are not very open to advancing pluralism.
Pluralism or democracy doesn't come out of the blue. Pluralism is the result of a balance of forces in society. If you could maintain this balance of forces for a period of time, democratic culture or a culture of pluralism would arise in El Salvador. But if we end up with a level of polarization, or with only a single strong political force, then the chances of pluralism are very slim.
PALUMBO: If the army and elements in the FMLN are not ready to accept pluralism, then how can they be persuaded or compelled to do so?
ZAMORA: The only way to convince them, especially the army, is with realities. Ten years ago it was inconceivable that the political party in power would not be a party set up by the military. That has been our tradition since 1932. Now, although the army is more powerful than the Christian Democrats, we cannot say that the Christian Democrats are the party of the Salvadoran armed forces. Why? Did the army become convinced of the need to separate itself from the political parties and the government? No. It happened because reality imposed it. When the military saw that they had no alternative, they accepted that reality. If we are able to develop strong political forces, we are going to have pluralism in El Salvador. If not, it doesn't matter how many speeches you make, how many good ideas you have, there is not going to be pluralism.
PALUMBO: Do you believe it will be possible to develop those kinds of forces?
ZAMORA: We have certain factors in our favor. For instance, a tradition of opposition political parties has developed, even during the period of military dictatorship. We have a stronger interplay of political forces and parties than we once did. Another important factor: the political-military organizations (FDR-FMLN) are not just military organizations. The FMLN started with mass political organizations. Their military strength developed from there. They have not lost their social base and their political organizing capacity. In that sense, pluralism doesn't mean that if the war ends, the FMLN are finished. To continue the struggle at the political level is a real possibility.
PALUMBO: Do you think there is any way to measure how much potential strength there is for the FDR-FMLN? For example, on Jannuary 22, 1980, hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets. Those numbers are not in the streets now.
ZAMORA: The only way of assessing that question is by negative indicators, not positive ones. For instance, how is it that in spite of all the U.S. military aid; in spite of the growth of the Salvadoran army, which has quadrupled in the last seven years; and in spite of the fact that in this country there are no jungles, no isolated places, how is it possible that the FMLN has not only survived but has developed over the years? The FMLN is militarily stronger today than in 1981 when they launched the general offensive. The only explanation lies in basic popular support. How large this support is, or how much this support would be manifested in political activities—elections or demonstrations—will depend on other factors, especially whether political life is opened or remains closed. As for the FDR, and more specifically for our political parties, during this visit I have seen contradictory factors: the desire for participation or expression, and the fear of participation. For instance, when we were invited by the Catholic University to speak, the whole room was really packed with people, and they were very supportive. You could see that in the applause, in the attention of the people—the sympathy that was there. But two days later, we invited the political parties to a meeting. Basically only our own militants were present. This is a good indication of how things stand here: people are willing to hear new ideas, to accept new ideas, but they are still afraid to participate, to make a personal commitment to those new ideas.
PALUMBO: It is charged that the United States has been too dominant here. Given geopolitical realities, do you think the United States can take a neutral stance?
ZAMORA: No. Whether the United States has a Republican or Democratic administration, it is not going to be indifferent to what happens in El Salvador, and for a simple reason: the world has been divided into spheres of influence, due to the confrontation between the East and the West. That has geopolitical consequences, whether we like it or not. The United States will look at anything in Central America as a possible threat to its own national interest. We need to construct a coalition of forces that will be able to enter into a real discussion with the United States in order to regain a greater level of national independence. This won't happen overnight. It's a process. What is encouraging is that this is a process developing throughout Latin America.
PALUMBO: A recent New York Times report refers to the FDR-FMLN alliance as increasingly tense. Is it tense?
ZAMORA: The alliance between the FDR and FMLN is based on the recognition that they represent two different fronts. The FDR is a political organization and the FMLN is an armed organization. Both agree on a basic understanding of the Salvadoran reality, and a basic design for overcoming that situation. What is the state of the alliance? It is not tense. On the contrary, for the last year each side has felt less tense because we have reached a clearer understanding of what each has to do. On the other hand, because the FDR political parties have decided to develop an open political presence in the country, relations between the two fronts have to be modified. In these new circumstances it will, as always, take trial and error to see how the alliance can be developed.
PALUMBO: Your intellectual and religious formation came at the time of Vatican II and Medellin. Do you see your religious beliefs as part of the reason for deciding on a career in politics
ZAMORA: Oh yes. The strongest personal motivation for me to enter and to stay in politics came from my religious beliefs. I come from a very Catholic family, a practicing Catholic family. I discovered politics through activity associated with a religious task. Catholic Action was a very defining experience. We operated with the idea of commitment and in El Salvador commitment very easily and very rapidly becomes politics. Still, I consider that as a person my main motivation for being in politics is because I am a believer.
But it is very difficult to articulate these personal processes. You don't know at what moment you really started. First, I was in a very traditional seminary. I left the seminary when I was nineteen. I rmained close to the church, and in my local parish the priest started some cooperatives. If the peasants got together, it would be easier for them to buy fertilizer and tools at cheaper prices. That was my first real social contact with peasants. We started with the idea that a Catholic has to give something to the people, especially to the poor. It was a paternalistic attitude. But the National Guard saw such efforts as a Communist attempt to organize peasants. At first we reacted in a very conciliatory way, trying to convince the National Guard that we were not Communists, we were Catholics. We would even say, look, this is the real way to fight against Communism, to better the standard of living of the peasants. This was not something we told the National Guard as a trick; no, this was what I believed at the time. I was very anti-Communist. But the Guard didn't understand. They continued trying to destroy the cooperatives. And in that way, we started to discover politics, to discover that behind our humanitarian effort there was a political power problem. We were touching the power structure that had existed in El Salvador so many years. We joined a political party. And of course it was not the official political party, it was the opposition political party, the Christian Democratic party. We saw it as a means to make some noise about what the National Guard was doing to the peasants. And once you are inside a political party, you begin to develop other political activities. Later on, especially when I left the country and went to Europe to study, I came to have a more intellectual understanding of society, a more scientific approach to the problem. But I have always valued the fact that I discovered politics first as a personal experience and afterwards as an intellectual experience.
PALUMBO: Talking about the intellectual part of your development, was the Medellin document eye-opening for you?
ZAMORA: Medellin was one of the most exciting things that happened inside the church. For us, at the grassroots level, it was even more exciting than Vatican II. I cannot imagine Medellin without the council but the council was something happening in Europe which we didn't understand very well. Medellin was more of a concentrated fact that hit us immediately. Immediately after Medellin, in the parish we started to organize meetings with peasants, with people in the town, to study what Medellin was saying. Sometimes our efforts were really funny. For instance, on May 1 there was usually a demonstration only by left-wing people. But in terms of Medellin you have to be with the people, so someone came up with the idea of having a procession for St. Joseph, because St. Joseph was a worker, a carpenter. We carried the image of St. Joseph around the town and with it a sort of placard stating the demands of the people. That was a way for people to raise their consciousness. In El Salvador the massacre of 1932 [fifteen to thirty thousand deaths in putting down a peasant uprising-The Editors] was so terrible that it put up a wall to political ideas in the minds of the peasants. With all the new theology, with Medellin, and so on, that wall started to be destroyed. People began to see they could move toward an active political position without abandoning their religious beliefs.
PALUMBO: You say that when you began, your approach with the cooperatives was humanitarian or ameliorative: Later, would you say that your approach changed, toward a 'concern with development or liberation, and were you also able to have a new understanding of your faith, one that correlated with your political work?
ZAMORA: That's why Catholic Action was so important. We received a theological, a religious formation that allowed us to go with our political work. I suppose that if we had only gotten the political involvement, I would be an atheist. I would see too many contradictions with traditional theology or religious formation. Insofar as we were able to keep together political activity and a religious understanding, which was deeper, closer to reality, there was no dilemma. Of course, other people abandoned the faith. But in my case that formation helped me a lot.
PALUMBO: Many people have pointed to a trajectory: Someone begins, let's say, as a catechist or a "delegate of the word," and they begin to see the implications of that, and then the next thing you know they're in a mass political organization, and then they reach a point where they say to themselves "not enough," and then they go on, as part of their faith, to join a military group. They see it as part of their faith. Have you seen that kind of trajectory take place?
ZAMORA: I saw many cases of that. I kept contact with the people with whom we started the cooperatives. I saw many of those people going from humanitarian work into political work, for instance, joining the Christian Democratic party, participating in elections, then getting angry about the repression, the voting fraud, losing any confidence in the electoral process, and radicalizing themselves. I sometimes feel myself torn, telling myself okay, now I am a lecturer at the university, so I stay in the Christian Democratic party. Those other people, who are peasants, who are suffering more than I suffer, are moving to other options. In the end, they become members of left-wing organizations and I suppose now some of them are guerrillas. That was a dynamic process. During a certain period there was a lot of conflict inside the church because of this problem. Political options started to become polarized inside the progressive Catholic movement. Sometimes that drew us into conflict. Ifyou take such a decision, are you more authentic? Now when I look back at that period it seems we were making a mistake not being able to distinguish with enough clarity between religious commitment and political option.
That is something that at certain moments you have to do. You destroy your faith if you politicize it completely. The temptation to manipulate your faith for politics is great. In that period it was very difficult for us to try to determine the limits of religious commitment and political option. Maybe now we have a more mature attitude. But at the beginning of the seventies it was a very difficult situation.
