This page was created by Dianne Sanchez Shumway.
Scholarly Article Tying the Symbolic Fall of Berlin Wall to Central American Politics
Article by Elana Zilberg
Excerpt:
"The cold war had been symbolically drawn to a close with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That same year the FMLN launched its final offensive. While the FMLN did not succeed in taking over the state, the offensive did make clear that the ruling right wing would not be able to defeat the FMLN militarily. The electoral defeat of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua the following year, however, also signaled the success of the U.S.strategy that included the overt, then covert, funding of the Contras, the right- wing counterrevolutionary forces. Nonetheless, the FMLN offensive of 1989 marked a turning point, and soon thereafter the U.S. government gave up on its policy of pursuing the military defeat of the FMLN and began to support a negotiated solution to the civil war. The assassination of six Jesuit priests along with their housekeeper and her daughter by the Salvadoran military during the offensive was finally a human rights violation to which the U.S. government could not turn a blind eye as it had done with one brutal murder and massacre after another."
