The Good American Read online

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  A few months later, two scientists at the Bureau of Mines and the U.S. Geological Survey, Brian Brady and William Spence, predicted that the Lima, Peru, region would experience major earthquakes during the summer of 1981, on June 28, August 10, and September 16. Predictions that specific were highly unusual and sent the real estate market in the Peruvian capital into a tailspin. Moreover, a certain USAID adviser, influenced by the doomsday spiritualist Elizabeth Clare Prophet, decided that someone had to journey to Lima to prepare for the seismic events. The predictions would later be repudiated, but in the meantime USAID had sent Gersony to Lima.3

  Gersony was in a bind. He knew the mission was useless—preposterous. And the U.S. Embassy people with their cold stares let him know that, too, in no uncertain terms. Adding to his depression, it rained constantly. During the months he was there, he would never even get to visit the famed Inca citadel of Machu Picchu.

  “Lima was a mess. Because of a failed land reform program, millions of people had migrated into the outskirts, building ‘young slum’ towns called pueblos jovenes. It was an overwhelming urban nightmare. So never mind the earthquake predictions, I decided I was going to surprise everyone with a report that could be useful for any natural emergency in the future.”

  With his fluent Spanish, Gersony interviewed municipal officials in the electricity, water, and sewage departments, as well as plant managers and people in the foreign NGO community. He learned that areas of the inner-city slums were owned by the Catholic Church and that people had been killed in the past there by broken power lines that sparked fires. Again, he worked seven days a week, received an education in urban planning, and tried to get the city to install seismic monitors to shut off electricity in the event of an earthquake. The written result after many weeks in Lima was eighteen small volumes, a sector-by-sector analysis, about what Lima had to do to withstand earthquakes and floods.

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  Gersony was still in the very early stages of building a caseload of experiences rather than credentials that he could put on paper for a job interview. He was just very good—and getting better—at figuring out the truth of a local situation quickly, and developing a plan, within the boundaries of resource and other constraints, that promised to improve the lives of ordinary people—yet was tied to U.S. national interest during a global ideological struggle where every country was in some small sense strategic. He was fated to be essentially a freelancer whose experiences lay wholly outside the classroom and government and academic bureaucracies. He was the opposite of a careerist.

  And what united these early forays in the Western Hemisphere was the various lessons he learned about how to deal with people in power, in his own government and in others, while helping the powerless.

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  One assignment quickly followed another…

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  El Salvador. Flat, minuscule, the smallest country in Central America, yet with the region’s highest population density—and full of hardworking and competitive Ladinos. “They’re a hot people,” Gersony recalls, “sparky, business-oriented, not fatalistic like the Mayans in Guatemala or the laid-back campesinos in Honduras”: harsh generalizations to be sure, which at first helped him orient himself geographically and culturally, before he began to be immersed in the world of individuals, from where his solutions would always emerge. This was a big, small country with suffocating, fish-tank air, whose vast landscape of war and atrocity in the 1980s made it appear overwhelming. Between September 1980 and September 1981, according to the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, there were almost seven thousand political murders, with most assumed to be the work of government forces, often trained by the U.S. military. Famously, in December 1981, the remote hamlet of El Mozote was completely exterminated in a series of massacres. The men were all blindfolded and killed, the women raped before being burned and murdered. Nor were the children spared. A “thicket of automatic weapons” brandished by several different security forces greets the visitor at airport immigration, writes the novelist and journalist Joan Didion, who visited the country the same year Gersony was there. Leaving the airport she observed a panorama of “underfed cattle and mongrel dogs and armored vehicles…fitted with reinforced steel and bulletproof Plexiglas.” And everywhere the “clicking of metal on metal” and walls atop walls with barbed wire.

  “Didion’s description of civil-war-torn El Salvador is exactly what it was like,” Gersony says. Beneath the carapace of Cold War Right and Left, there were no issues at stake really—only ambitions. El Salvador was the ultimate frontier, with Spanish colonial life mainly located in Guatemala to the north and Colombia and Panama to the south. Even the great Mesoamerican cultures barely got this far in their expansions. “There is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history,” writes Didion, “by a certain frontier proximity to the cultural zero.”4

  Gersony arrived in the capital of San Salvador in December 1981. San Salvador back then was vanilla, antiseptic, with modern residential areas and a sense of security that vanished the moment you left the city. It was very pleasant and walkable—unlike steeply hilled Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, or congested, smog-bound Guatemala City. You could actually stroll the streets of San Salvador at night in the midst of a dirty war.

  At the time in the country, there were hundreds of thousands of displaced people out of a population of under five million. The lines of battle were basically these. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, were left-wing guerrillas sponsored by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and facilitated by the Cubans. “But the causes of dissatisfaction were rooted in the social and economic conditions,” Gersony explains, “and not invented out of nothing by the Nicaraguans or the Cubans.”

  The large wealthy families owned all of the prime real estate on the Pacific coast, with order enforced by a right-wing military, a number of whose units had been trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Traveling north from the coast toward Honduras, the land became poorer. The left-wing guerrillas were in the north, and so were the migrants who journeyed to the Pacific coast to work in the cotton and sugar fields, and on the cattle ranches of the wealthy estates along the Pacific seaboard. As a response to a growing, anti-government, pro-socialist movement, organized around the FMLN, the ruling establishment set up death squads, which notoriously “stamped a white hand, or Mano Blanca,” on the bodies of its victims and on their houses, Gersony remembers. The Salvadoran death squads “were vicious, efficient killers,” he says.

  Gersony put up at the Sheraton. This was after two American advisers and the Salvadoran head of the land redistribution agency had been slain by national guardsmen in the hotel coffee shop the previous January. Prior to the Sheraton killings there had been two other infamous murders carried out by right-wing death squads. In March 1980, Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador—an indefatigable advocate for the poor, associated with liberation theology—was assassinated with a single bullet as he said mass in a small chapel. A month earlier Archbishop Romero had written to President Jimmy Carter asking him to end U.S. support for the Salvadoran military. A United Nations truth commission would later find that the murder was planned by officers organized by Roberto (“Bobbie”) d’Aubuisson, a former army major and national right-wing political leader. Romero’s killing was a factor in the rapid escalation of the civil war.5

  Months afterward, on the night of December 2, 1980, three American nuns and a lay worker were kidnapped, raped, and executed, their bodies discovered along an isolated road the next day by peasants. Again the murderers were Salvadoran national guardsmen.6

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  It was Gersony’s job to do an assessment for USAID and the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assista
nce about what could be done to alleviate conditions for the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons from the war, whose numbers kept growing. It was unsafe to drive around, and so the offices of the defense attaché and the MILGROUP (Military Group) within the U.S. Embassy arranged for Gersony and two others to travel by helicopter, interviewing inhabitants at displaced persons camps. Helicopter travel was not altogether safe, as bullets whizzed a few feet away at low altitudes. Still, Gersony was able to get around the country.

  The MILGROUP was at the heart of U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran government, which turned out to be a great success or abject failure depending upon how you looked at it: geopolitically or morally. Those focused exclusively on human rights such as the late New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis would point out that $1 billion of the $5 billion the United States spent in El Salvador in the 1980s was for military aid, during a time when the Salvadoran armed forces killed 40,000 civilians.7 Yet the MILGROUP’s fifty-five Army Special Forces trainers, or Green Berets, arguably accomplished more than did 550,000 American troops in Vietnam: instructing the Salvadoran military on how to slow down a communist-inspired insurgency, even as it transformed itself from a 12,000-man, ill-disciplined constabulary force to a more professional 60,000-man army. Whereas in 1980, there were 610 murders per month, by 1987 the number was down to 23.8 It was messy, thankless, and morally tainted. As in the case of Guatemala, El Salvador was simply too close to the United States for Washington to countenance the establishment of a pro-communist regime there, so it held its nose at the horror. The United States had already gotten deeply involved fighting wars for decades in Vietnam and Laos for the same reason, even though they were on the other side of the globe. This was the abject cruelty of the Cold War, which started in Europe and ended there, but which was fought in the developing world.

  However, perhaps the ultimate reason why El Salvador was not “lost” had to do with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which for a time robbed the Latin American Left of momentum, and was consequently a psychological boost to the Salvadoran Right.

  Meanwhile, Gersony was in the middle of it all, merely trying to help people. Yet because he worked out of the U.S. Embassy, he understood just how rotten the predicament American diplomats found themselves in was: another Cold War case of legitimate interests colliding head-on with legitimate humanitarian concerns.

  “We discovered that as the war got worse, everyone was on the move to the next safest settlement, leapfrogging from farms to villages, to towns, to the departmental capitals which the army could protect. Rural areas were under the protection of the guerrillas. But with so many on the move,” Gersony explains, “and squeezed into the camps, there was no thought about sewage, electricity, inoculations. There was no clean water, no place to crap. It was a packed, dirty, petri dish of a country. You couldn’t grow subsistence food. The economic crisis had devalued wages. The camps were filled with young men just wandering around. It was a formula for crime, chaos, and continued guerrilla war.”

  What could he do?

  “Dignity of work was always important to me,” he says. “I had created thousands of jobs in linguistics and rebuilding in Guatemala, and perfected a system in Dominica. I had admired [Franklin] Roosevelt’s WPA,” the Works Progress Administration, which had employed unskilled laborers during the Great Depression. “But when I got to El Salvador it was all food handouts, with the army getting the first cut. So there was little cash employment. With no jobs, the towns were hotbeds of resentment, ready for even more violence. There is nothing more destabilizing and politically dangerous than people—otherwise used to work—doing nothing. They were easy to pull into right-wing death squads; or into left-wing guerrilla units.”

  Gersony saw the beautifully rounded stones in the rivers, and yet saw how people were walking in mud up to their ankles. The solution became clear: employ people to lay cobblestone streets, for one thing. “I always insisted on paying a practical wage; after all, farmers have to be able to pay people to harvest their fields. If you pay too much, the more likely that jobs will go to cronies—because unemployment is so rife in these countries, big shots always want their friends and friends’ kids to get the good jobs. I did market surveys, with the idea that we should always want to be the employer of last resort. If nobody wanted to work for us, it meant that we were not needed in the first place.”

  He recommended a massive cash employment program for the displaced heads of households. “No more food handouts. They will build latrines, sewage canals, storm water drainage—and cobblestone streets. It was a lot cheaper than road paving.” USAID put twenty thousand Salvadorans to work for several years, all because of Gersony’s idea. The cobblestone streets are there to this day. Every payday, displaced people bought food from local vendors. As in Guatemala and Dominica, the economic theme was using markets as a tool to alleviate suffering. Again, the use of credit unions and cooperatives at the local level, through which the program ran, meant that there was little or no corruption. The credit unions had been established by the Catholic Church in the 1950s and the Peace Corps worked through them. They were rustic frontier banks that were trusted. “I’m an opportunistic parasite,” Gersony explains. “I have never been interested in starting something new,” but rather in working through existing organizations in the private sector that had a track record.

  “The guerrillas didn’t attack us because it would have imperiled twenty thousand jobs and turned the population against them,” he says. USAID pumped $100 million into the program over five years. It became the go-to project for visiting congressional delegations from Washington to see.

  It was at this point that Gersony came up against the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Deane Hinton. Hinton was an old-time, scars-on-his-back, don’t-fuck-with-me ambassador. He was a diplomat who knew how to be very undiplomatic: a human force field that concentrated on the application of personal pressure. He once said that the novels of V. S. Naipaul and Joseph Conrad would have prepared him better than all the briefings he got in Washington for his first ambassadorial post in Zaire, where he would later lock horns with its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, and be declared persona non grata. Hinton spoke Spanish badly with a high Montana twang, but he spoke it. He would be the first of a series of formidable—in some cases larger than life—ambassadors and foreign service officers that Gersony would encounter in the course of his career: the kind of powerful thinkers and operators (as opposed to ideological crusaders) who were, nevertheless, all Cold Warriors of the moderate Left and the moderate Right, and who, once again, barely exist anymore in the State Department. These men were powers in their own right. For the most part they were generalist troubleshooters who belonged to an earlier age, rather than area specialists.

  In a somewhat sympathetic portrait in her book Salvador, Joan Didion, writing for the left-wing New York Review of Books, described Hinton as a force of nature who simply never got discouraged.9

  In El Salvador, Hinton truly had a lot to contend with. As he himself writes in his diplomatic memoir, “Every day brought appalling reports of bodies, often mutilated, found here and there. Some killings seemed to be attributable to the left, but far more looked like victims of right wing ‘death squads.’ ” He goes on to write about how with all the murders, especially those of the nuns, El Salvador had “echoes of our debacle in Vietnam,” with highly critical media reports discouraging the morale of foreign service officers. The embassy felt genuinely caught in the middle between trying to prevent a Leftist, pro-Cuban takeover on one hand and dealing with a critical international media on the other.10 Though the media often did get things right. Hinton’s cables had downplayed the massacres at El Mozote, which required journalists, notably the New Yorker’s Mark Danner, to later expose.

  America’s hopes were pinned on Napoleón “Napo” Duarte, a passionate Christian Democrat and engineering graduate from the University of Notre Dame in Indian
a, who had been elected president in 1972. But before he could take office, the oligarchic families intervened and he was imprisoned and tortured. International pressure saved his life and he went into exile in Venezuela, from where he returned to join the Salvadoran junta in 1980. In the March 1982 election for the Constituent Assembly, Duarte’s Christian Democrats had won more votes than other parties, but had little chance of governing. The five rightist parties said that they had enough votes to form a coalition and that the new president would therefore be the death squad leader Bobbie d’Aubuisson.11

  So Hinton went to work behind the scenes, subverting the local democratic process in order to install a more civilized government. A loser needed to be installed as the winner for the sake of a Cold War contingency, which in this case was also the right thing to do. “Publicly,” Hinton writes, “I stressed the need for national unity to confront the Marxists. Privately I worked to convince the security forces that d’Aubuisson would be the kiss of death for their hopes of continued American equipment, money, and support.” Senior officers, not wanting to lose tens of millions of dollars in military assistance—and who preferred to be harassed by the Pentagon and State Department rather than to have to take orders from d’Aubuisson, a young ex-major—pressured the politicians to relent. As Hinton later told Joan Didion in reference to d’Aubuisson, “We stopped that one on the one-yard line.”12

  Hinton’s logic has prevailed: the Salvadoran right wing had no place else to go except to America for help, so pressuring them to appoint a less toxic guy as president was always destined to succeed. El Salvador was not a world of black-and-white moral absolutes.