Part 5

From the June 10^th, 1978 Washington Post:

From Firefights and Fruit Stands by Jim Rykers:

I was covering the Hong Kong Stock Exchange when they asked me if I wanted to cover the Honduras summit. At first I was tempted to say no because the Salvadoran civil war had just about put me through the wringer, but curiosity got the better of me and within a week I was in Costa Rica...

From the June 13^th, 1978 broadcast of CBC News at Six:

Talks between Salvadoran and Honduran negotiators resumed this afternoon in Costa Rica, and there are hopeful signs tonight that an accord may be reached on the issue of alleged Marxist infiltration from El Salvador into Honduras...

From the June 17^th, 1978 New York Times:

From the August 8^th, 1978 broadcast of BBC’s 9 O’Clock News:

The Salvadoran-backed guerrilla movement in Nicaragua has been dealt a major setback tonight, according to official spokesmen for the Nicaraguan defence ministry. The spokesmen claimed that two battalions of regular Nicaraguan army infantry troops have captured a key Sandinista munitions dump south of the coastal town of Puerto Cabezas...

From the October 10^th, 1978 New York Post:

GOP TO CARTER: GIVE ‘EM EL

 

Republicans urge White House to confront El Salvador

about its aid to Nicaraguan Marxist guerrillas

From the February 21^st, 1979 broadcast of BBC’s 9 O’Clock News:

The Salvadoran National Restoration Party has announced that it will hold a rally tomorrow in Guatemala City to protest alleged human rights violations by the leftist NEC regime that has been ruling El Salvador since 1972. The current leader of the NEC, Salvadoran president Nicola Mendes, has been frequently accused in the past of harshly repressing criticism of El Salvador’s government...

From the front page of the March 4^th, 1979 edition of the Mexican newspaper El Universal:

From the March 18^th, 1979 Manchester Guardian:

No. 2 Sandinista Leader Defects, Citing Disillusionment With Rebel Cause

From the June 21^st, 1979 Washington Post:

SALVADORAN PRESIDENT MENDES WOUNDED IN ASSASSINATION TRY

SAN SALVADOR UNDER MARTIAL LAW

From the November 14^th, 1979 broadcast of The CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite:

For the second time in less than a decade El Salvador appears to be plunging into civil war. A Reuters dispatch from San Salvador filed late this afternoon reports that dissident Salvadoran army soldiers and their officers have attacked the headquarters of the Salvadoran interior ministry...

From the November 15^th, 1979 New York Times:

From the January 16^th, 1980 broadcast of NBC Nightly News:

The Salvadoran-backed Marxist guerrilla rebellion in Nicaragua faces the possibility of collapse before the end of the year as the Mendes regime in El Salvador turns inward to confront an uprising on its own doorstep...

From the February 4^th, 1980 Boston Herald:

El Salvador Expected To Be Major Factor In NH Primary, Iowa Caucus

From a report by the Soviet embassy in San Salvador to Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko dated June 26^th, 1980:

The situation in this country is noticeably deteriorating; the counterrevolutionary bandits seeking to overthrow Comrade President Mendes are gaining support among the younger segments of the population and there are disturbing rumors that two People’s Army officers have defected to the counterrevolutionary side...

From the September 7^th, 1980 Los Angeles Times:

NICARAGUAN GOVERNMENT CLAIMS FINAL VICTORY IN CIVIL WAR

WITH SANDINISTAS

Regular Army Said To Be Overrunning Last Surviving Rebel Outpost;

Ortega Seeking Political Asylum In Cuba

From the April 16^th, 1981 broadcast of 10 News(Australia):

The Salvadoran rebel armies led by Jose Napoleon Duarte are claiming a significant victory tonight in their 18-month-old campaign to overthrow the leftist government of Salvadoran president Nicola Mendes. A press release issued by the Salvadoran National Restoration Party headquarters in Guatemala reports that rebel forces have wiped out a battalion of the elite 35^th Infantry Division of the Salvadoran People’s Army five miles east of Santa Ana....

From the October 27^th, 1981 Boston Globe:

As the guerrilla war against the NEC government in El Salvador approaches its third year, Salvadoran president Nicola Mendes finds himself captaining a ship of state which is growing danger of sinking. His regime has lost much of its credibility abroad and is under literal and figurative attack at home; younger El Salvadorans, angered that the reforms promised by the NEC when it took over the government nine years ago have either failed disastrously or never materialized at all, are swelling the ranks of the rebel forces in growing numbers...

From the February 8^th, 1982 Toronto Globe & Mail:

MACHADO BIRTHDAY GATHERING IN SAN SALVADOR DISRUPTED

AS PROTESTORS CRASH FESTIVITIES

 

Five people arrested, one police officer injured in melee at memorial rally

honoring Salvadoran revolutionary leader; Machado’s tomb defaced

From the July 16^th, 1982 broadcast of Nightline:

From the Wikipedia entry on El Salvador’s NEC era:

From Red Sunset:

Five years after the SNRP began its uprising against the NEC government, it was in control of most of El Salvador. The Salvadoran People’s Army defeat at Gotera ate away at the government forces’ morale like sulfuric acid; as the SNRP troops kept improving as a fighting force, the SPA suffered a corresponding deterioration in its own combat effectiveness....

From the December 11^th, 1984 broadcast of BBC’s 9 O’Clock News:

An SNRP spokesman at the organization’s headquarters in Guatemala City has confirmed that two SNRP divisions are attacking an SPA base east of Zaragoza...

From President Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural address:

To the tyrants who have kept the people of El Salvador in bondage for nearly thirteen years I say to you: the day is fast approaching when you must either give them the freedom they want and deserve, or suffer the full fury of their righteous anger for all the wrongs you have done them...

From the March 23^rd, 1985 Miami Herald:

From 10 News that same evening:

From the April 13^th, 1985 broadcast of NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw:

Less than a month before the NEC government of El Salvador is scheduled to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the beginning of the 1970 Salvadoran Revolution, it finds itself fighting for its very life as SNRP insurgent forces have begun their final offensive on the capital, San Salvador. Political science analysts suggest that if the Mendes regime is toppled, it would leave Fidel Castro’s Cuba as the only viable socialist government remaining in the Western Hemisphere and deal a devastating blow to Soviet efforts to expand Moscow’s influence in Latin America....

From a dispatch by the KGB station chief in Havana to agency director Viktor Chebrikov dated April 18^th, 1985:

The situation in El Salvador has drastically worsened since my last report to you. The reactionary forces in the country have the upper hand, and I believe it is only a question of time before Comrade President Mendes is overthrown. I therefore request authorization to evacuate all remaining field agents from Salvadoran territory effective immediately...

From the April 20^th, 1985 broadcast of CBC News At Six:

Associated Press correspondents inside San Salvador have confirmed that SNRP forces have entered the city...

From Red Sunset:

Early on the afternoon of April 21^st, 1985 SNRP rebel troops reached the heart of San Salvador. Inside the presidential palace, Nicola Mendes’ senior advisors were pleading with him to end hostilities and accept a cease-fire with the SNRP forces, but Mendes would have none of it...Grabbing an AK-47 from one of his army officers, he took a jeep and eight of his most loyal supporters to the battle lines to personally confront the SNRP guerrillas...

From the April 22^nd, 1985 New York Times:

From a CNN special report the next day:

Within the past half-hour we have received confirmation from a reporter with the Swiss television network Schweizer Fernsehen 1 that Nicola Mendes, head of El Salvador’s left-wing NEC party and Salvadoran president since 1976, has been found dead. According to eyewitness accounts, Mendes was apparently killed yesterday while leading Salvadoran People’s Army troops in a firefight against SNRP forces...

From Ocho de Mayo:

The death of Nicola Mendes effectively sealed the fate of the Machadoistas as a political and military force in El Salvador. With his demise, what was left of NEC power collapsed, and on April 24^th the acting NEC party chairman, Raoul Facienda, agreed to a cease-fire with the SNRP. After nearly fifteen years, the SCNL/NEC era in El Salvador had ended. The repercussions of the NEC regime’s collapse would not only be felt in El Salvador, however-- Ronald Reagan, then President of the United States, saw the SNRP victory over the Mendes forces as a vindication of his tough anti-Communist foreign policy. Within less than a year after the NEC was overthrown, their chief overseas ally, the Soviet Union, would see its own government begin to crumble as it tried to cope with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster...

Along with Chernobyl, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Duarte Rebellion’s victory over the Mendes government of El Salvador is viewed by modern historians as one of the seminal moments in the end of the Cold War. Today, twenty years after the end of the 1970 Salvadoran Revolution, the appeal of the Machadoista ideology is limited strictly to unreconstructed hardline Marxists like the aging Fidel Castro in Cuba or North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and fringe agitators like failed two-time Venezuelan presidential candidate Hugo Chavez...