theatree weeks to leading members of the SalIvadorean FMLN have been assassinated by the reactionary death squads which still exist. This is symbolic of the failed promises given to the insurgent forces which ended with the 1992 peace deal. Land reform has hardly begun. Former FMIN guerrillas have not been given the jobs promised. Murderers and torturers in the army have not been punished. The oligarchy is still in place. It is true that the FMLN leaders faced an impasse of the military struggle when the peace deal was concluded. The masses were war weary and demanded peace; the guerrilla war had been fought into the ground by the military aid provided by the US. A transition to a different form of struggle - one based on the neglected mass organisations, especially in the towns -was on the agenda.
But the peace deal itself, and the reception given to it in sectors of the left internationally, mystified the process underway and gave crucial concessions to reaction which are unacceptable from a revolutionary stand point.
In particular, the decision to integrate sectors of the FMLN fighters into the national army was profoundly wrong. This either hands over insurgent fighters to be used by the class enemy, or submits these same fighters to the tyranny of bourgeois military discipline.
The issue here armed strug gle versus other forms of struggle: the issue is the class character of the state and the political in dependence of the popular masses under the leadership of the working class.
Typical of the response of the left internationally was the widely read, but now defunct US Guardian 'non-aligned' left magazine which characterised the deal as a 'negotiated victory. Even if it were necessary to accept everything in the peace deal, then socialists would have to characterise it as a diktat imposed by imperialism and reaction, not a 'victory'.
In order to portray this as a victory it is necessary to radically redefine the goals of the movement to the right.
In Nicaragua the 1990 electoral defeat of the FSLN unleashed a sharp process of political differentiation in the Sandinistas. Theories of 'cogovernment from below cre ated an impossible tension. between those who wanted to defend the gains of the revolution, particularly the mass organisations, 'from below; and those who put the stress on 'co government'. The result has been the growing social democratisation of the right wing of the FSLN, in particular those grouped around Sergio Ro driguez. These people openly defend a market economy and a close, albeit 'new, relationship with the United States.
What we are seeing in the Central America is a situation where defeats are leading to a terrible political collapse in left wing forces.
theory + practice • No Historic Compromise with Imperialism • page four