ARENA

This chapter examines ARENA in El Salvador and argues that, like the UDI in Chile, its success was the product of authoritarian inheritance and counterrevolutionary struggle. The first section discusses El Salvador’s long history of right-wing military rule. The second section examines the October 1979 coup and the resulting establishment of a left-wing Revolutionary Governing Junta. The third section discusses the intense counterrevolutionary response that the junta triggered. This included large-scale death squad violence, with future ARENA founder Roberto D’Aubuisson playing a key role. The fourth section examines the formation of ARENA in response to an impending transition to competitive elections. The fifth section shows how D’Aubuisson’s role as a high-level official in the pre-1979 military regime endowed ARENA with several valuable resources. The final section discusses how ARENA’s origins in counterrevolutionary struggle served as a powerful source of cohesion.

The Drug Menace as Contributor to the Duterte Electoral Victory

We construct the drug menace as a standard 2×2 collective action problem with two self-interested households A and B, each facing a strategy set (C, D) = (Cooperate, Don’t Cooperate). If the households cooperate, that is attain (C, C), they stop the drug menace; if not, which is the usual outcome of these games under laissez faire, non-cooperation rules instanced by the Nash equilibrium (D, D) and the drug menace overruns the community. We introduce a game transformation via a third party-intervention-by-statute (TPIS) mechanism: a third party promulgates and enforces a statute S which penalizes non-cooperation D, spells out the contribution c of households, the statutory penalty p for, and the likelihood f of being caught, playing D. For certain combinations of c, p and f, the intervention is efficient, that is, attains (C, C) as the Nash equilibrium of the transformed game. The likelihood of an efficient statute rises the lower is c and the higher the expected penalty pf, features associated with a strong and wise third party. The TPIS mechanism is a parable for the role of governments in general: to consolidate and galvanize the local forces to overcome collective action problems. The third party is normally identified with the government in the hands of persons who hold the mantle of government. When the mantle is contestable and the basis of contestability is electoral, there is a vent for good governance in the form of welfare-improving interventions. The perception of households matter in elections and aspirants with a perceived superior track record on or one that promises superiority at solving the most salient community problems will rise to the top of the voting preference. Whether the track record is real or constructed matters little as long as it is perceived by the voter as true. Duterte won the Philippine presidency for a variety of reasons but the most cogent and tailor-made for his persona was the narrative that he got rid of the drug problem by employing a death squad which carried out extrajudicial executions in Davao City. By showing himself capable of bypassing the widely despised corrupt due process was an electoral plus for many poor people. Duterte’s electoral victory was rooted in the narrative that drug menace was a collective action problem number one and that if there was a solution it was inexorably tied to Duterte’s real or imagined persona.

Saving the House of Islam

This chapter describes the alliances between the Pakistani state and nonstate actors during the 1971 counterinsurgency campaign in the country’s eastern wing. The Pakistani army enlisted the help of nonstate allies to tilt the local balance of power in its favor, but only when it was able to satisfy their varied interests. Thousands of Razakars (civilian “volunteers”) joined the counterinsurgency because of the patronage and protection the state was able to offer once it regained some footing in the region. The activists, notably the members of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s youth wing comprising the al-Badr Brigade, became allies only after the Pakistani army built robust links with Islamist organizations and made a credible commitment to the Islamist agenda. In September 1971, even though Pakistan was clearly losing the war to the insurgents (and India), the activists created a death squad targeting high-profile supporters and sympathizers of the secessionist movement.

'Duterte death squad' is unlikely in Philippines

Headline PHILIPPINES: 'Duterte death squad' is unlikely

Assassination of a Saint

In 1980, a death squad linked to business tycoons and military commanders murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero for denouncing widespread repression and poverty in El Salvador. Romero was known as the “voice of the voiceless,” and his criticism of the oligarchs who dominated the economy and the Security Forces that tortured and murdered civilians made Romero a military target. Two decades after his assassination, the Center for Justice & Accountability (CJA) found one of the conspirators, Álvaro Saravia, living in California and launched a wide-ranging investigation into the death squad and its financiers. This book chronicles the life and death of the Catholic martyr, examining his actions and situating his years as archbishop in the broader context of the Salvadoran clergy’s embrace of Liberation Theology. It also analyzes, through excerpts from witness interviews and trial testimony, the mindset of the death squad members, their leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, and their wealthy backers, that propelled them to want Romero dead. The U.S. government played an important and contradictory role in developing the death squads and funding the military from which they sprang while also investigating their crimes and seeking to keep them in check. Within this complicated historical context, the book provides a first-hand account of the investigation and U.S. legal case that led to the only court verdict ever reached for Archbishop Romero’s murder.

“Informational Goulash”

Over three decades, there have been several investigations of Romero’s murder that have uncovered significant information but never led to a trial. In 1980, Judge Atilio Ramirez Amaya attended the autopsy and started gathering evidence but the police who normally assisted were entirely absent, and three days later an assassination attempt caused Ramirez Amaya to flee. Later that year, authorities raided an estate called Finca San Luis, arrested several extremists, including Roberto D’Aubuisson, and seized documents showing death squad operations, including a datebook called the Saravia Diary that contained a page titled Operation Piña that is thought to describe Romero’s murder. In the next few years, the U.S. embassy developed an insider military source who claimed to have attended a planning meeting for Romero’s assassination. In 1987, the getaway driver for the operation, Amado Garay, testified before Salvadoran judge and implicated Roberto D’Aubuisson and Alvaro Saravia in the plot.

“A Rabid Anti-Communist”

The legal team returns to El Salvador for interviews crucial for gathering evidence about the death squad financiers and understanding further details of the Romero assassination. A worker for the ARENA party in the early 1980s discloses significant information about party members and their links to violence. She confirms testimony that she previously provided to the Truth Commission and provides a new statement for the legal team detailing payments made by party faithful and insider information about the facts of Romero’s murder.