High Cost Success

This chapter evaluates how the counterinsurgency campaign during the Salvadoran civil war provides support for the compellence theory. In El Salvador from 1979 to 1992, the U.S.-backed government fought the Communist and nationalist insurgency to a draw, preserving the government from an insurgent takeover. Elite accommodation took place largely among civilian and military officers in the government as hard-liners and slightly more liberal political and military entrepreneurs jockeyed for influence. The Salvadoran government resisted U.S.-pressed reforms but accepted U.S. efforts to strengthen its security forces. It used its increased fighting ability to clear civilian areas, creating vast refugee flows that reduced provision of material support to the insurgency. It also used U.S.-provided air power to break down the insurgency's conventional formations but was never able to successfully pursue and destroy the smaller bands of insurgents or gain more popular support than it began the war with. Continued insurgent political and military strength, along with the end of the Cold War, forced the United States and the hard-liners within the military to accept peace talks and a political settlement to the war rather than the military victory they had pressed for.