Jose Napoleon Duarte; Former El Salvador President

SAN SALVADOR —  Jose Napoleon Duarte, who became El Salvador’s first democratically elected president in half a century but who was not able to end the civil war that still afflicts this tiny Central American nation, died Friday after a long fight against cancer. He was 64.

Doctors had given Duarte only six months to live after they diagnosed his condition as untreatable liver cancer in May, 1988. But after surgery in the United States, he served out his term as president, which ended June 1, 1989, and continued to cling to life. He underwent intermittent therapy, here and in Washington, until his death.

His condition was recently complicated by a pulmonary embolism, doctors said. A daughter, Maria Eugenia Duarte, said her father died Friday morning of a heart attack.

Duarte was a staunch supporter of U.S. policy in Central America, which the White House took note of Friday with a statement describing him as “a dedicated servant to the people of El Salvador and a firm friend of the United States.”

Saying that President and Mrs. Bush were “deeply saddened” by his death, the statement praised Duarte’s work for “human rights and social justice” and ‘ the courage he exhibited in building the foundation of democracy in El Salvador.”

Vice President Dan Quayle will represent the Administration at Duarte’s funeral Sunday morning.

Duarte, who wrote his official biography in 1986, said at that time that he hoped to live long enough to write a sequel in which he could describe an end to the Salvadoran civil war, a change in his country’s economic structure “from a rigid, lopsided, dependent system to a dynamic, evenly distributive, self-sustaining one,” and a political order that was “vibrantly democratic.”

At his death, the Salvadoran civil war was entering its 10th year with no signs of a settlement. Duarte lived long enough to see the leftist guerrillas mount their most threatening offensive of the war in mid-November.

The economy is not as severely skewed in favor of the wealthy oligarchy as it was a decade ago, but it is neither dynamic nor self-sustaining nor evenly distributed. The country, to his partial credit, managed a series of relatively clean elections, but not even Duarte could claim that the system is vibrantly democratic or that the social structure represents everyone with dignity.

Last year, Duarte suffered the indignity of seeing his own party’s candidate resoundingly defeated by the candidate of an ultra-rightist party in the election that picked his successor. Shortly thereafter, death-squad activity, which had been relatively quiescent, picked up.

Duarte’s biography, “Duarte: My Story,” revealed the duality of his political life: good intentions undermined by the inability to carry them out. In the eyes of many, he reached the end of his life as a good man but a failed leader.

Born Nov. 23, 1925, Duarte was the son of Jose Jesus Duarte, a tailor who was not formally married to the mothers of his several children.

At that period in this country, it was unlikely that anyone from such a humble background could hope for prominence. Then, and for a long time afterward, the nation’s decisions were made by a handful of wealthy landowners or the graduates of the country’s military school.

Duarte’s prospects were further dimmed by his father’s failed attempt to get into politics on the side of anti-government forces. That effort led to the elder Duarte’s arrest and bankruptcy.

But his mother, Amelia, persuaded the priests who ran the Liceo Salvadoreno, one of the country’s best schools, to give scholarships to Duarte and her other two sons, setting young Jose Napoleon on a course toward middle-class prosperity and religiously inspired political activity.

In his senior high school year (1944), he joined a student movement protesting the brutality of a military dictator, Gen. Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, who had ruled El Salvador since 1931. Duarte was not a leader of the movement, but his participation was judged risky enough that his parents decided to send him to college in the United States.

By then, his father had won a small fortune in the national lottery and was able to send Duarte to Notre Dame University, where he studied civil engineering and developed a liberal political and social philosophy that became the guidepost for his future public life.

Upon his graduation in 1948, however, starting a family and making a living were his first priorities. Marrying Ines Duran, literally the girl next door, in 1949, he went to work for his father-in-law’s construction firm in San Salvador.

A decade of full-time devotion to private life began to erode in 1960, when he joined a group of Roman Catholic intellectuals seeking to apply to public affairs the liberalizing encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and Pope John XXIII. The group evolved into El Salvador’s Christian Democratic Party, part of a movement in Latin America that took its name and some of its inspiration from the more conservative Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe.

Duarte moved quickly into the leadership, becoming the party’s secretary general. In 1964, he was elected mayor of San Salvador and took a series of energetic measures that included paving streets and installing electricity citywide. He was twice reelected and became one of the most popular politicians in the land, so much so that in a coalition with Social Democrats and Communists, he ran for president in 1972.

Outside experts and independent Salvadorans said that Duarte won that election easily, but in the way of El Salvador at that time, the military-supported government stopped counting votes publicly and declared itself the victor.

A handful of army officers attempted a coup in support of Duarte but failed. Duarte was arrested, beaten and tortured and sent into exile.

Finally, after a reformist military coup overthrew the old-line government in October, 1979, Duarte returned and entered into a series of collaborations with the military that ultimately made him president. But those compromises also put him at odds with old allies and left him open to charges of complicity in murderous policies.

While he served as the appointed president of a military-dominated junta from December, 1980, until he resigned in 1982, after calling for free elections, Duarte headed a government accused of permitting and even encouraging death squads considered responsible for thousands of killings. At the same time, he was able to obtain millions of dollars in U.S. military and economic aid, which eventually totaled more than El Salvador’s annual economic production.

But if he held office through compromise with the armed forces and overdependence on the United States, Duarte can be credited with keeping right-wing extremists at bay, with slowing down and moderating military power and its death squads, and with finally winning generally free and honest elections in 1984 and 1989.

El Salvador’s economy was a basket case by the time Duarte left office. Corruption by his Christian Democratic colleagues not only helped undermine the nation’s financial structure, but also left roads unpaved, public services undelivered and a malaise among the citizenry so intense that in the March, 1989, presidential election, voters turned away from Duarte’s Christian Democratic candidate, Fidel Chavez Mena, and decisively elected Alfredo Cristiani, the candidate of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena Party.

An event that clearly marked the ambivalence of Duarte’s presidency was the 1985 kidnaping of his daughter, Ines Guadalupe, by leftist guerrillas. After more than 40 days of negotiations and against the strong opposition of the military, Duarte obtained his daughter’s freedom by agreeing to free 22 captured rebels and permit 96 wounded and ill guerrillas to leave El Salvador.

Diplomats and other observers reckon that by negotiating with the rebels, Duarte yielded whatever sway he had over the military, which in recent years has operated almost entirely independently of the president in fighting the guerrilla war and setting internal policy.

In his autobiography, Duarte described the pragmatic philosophy that enabled him to negotiate with the kidnapers and give in to military pressures.

“I shape the program according to the political space I perceive at any given moment,” he wrote.