Word: palmas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Napoleón Duarte stood on the outskirts of the dusty provincial town of La Palma, poised for a meeting that few of his countrymen had dared to imagine would take place. "They said we could never do it, but we are here," declared the stocky populist President before plunging into a crowd of camera-laden journalists and citizens waving paper flags. Then Duarte and his unarmed four-man entourage moved toward the town's Sweet Name of Mary Church, an angular structure built in 1960. Inside the building they faced the most important confrontation of Duarte...
...crucial day dawned, hordes of ordinary Salvadorans began streaming into La Palma. The Duarte government urged the President's supporters to make an appearance at the peace talks. The guerrillas had also turned out their followers, and strands of red flags joined the white banners overhead. In the town square a group of 100 schoolchildren waving white pompons were soon surrounded by lean, stony-faced fieldworkers and their families. Between 15,000 and 20,000 witnesses eventually filled the town. None of them, impressively enough, carried the ubiquitous machetes that serve the peasants as both tools and weapons...
...Casanova, who was included as a further gesture of good faith to the guerrillas. As Duarte later told it, the emotional high point of his roughly two-hour trip to the talks came as his red Toyota pulled away from the last army checkpoint, 16 miles south of La Palma. Two officers stepped up to say goodbye. Recalled Duarte: "They said, 'God bless you, and may you bring back peace.' That means I had convinced them of what I was trying...
...Palma meeting seemed to uncover a craving in almost every sector of Salvadoran society for an end to the bloodshed. Evelio Sorto, a teacher displaced by the war from his home in the northern department of Morazán, was among the crowd that trekked to La Palma. "If this opportunity is lost, we may never have another," he observed. Said Oscar Martínez, a local peasant: "This is a beautiful country, but the war is destroying it. I hope the leaders can forget their differences and think about what they are doing to El Salvador...
...peace mission. The secret Anti-Communist Army, one of El Salvador's death squads, named Duarte as a target for execution. The President was bitterly criticized by Roberto d'Aubuisson, leader of the ultraright Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and a former presidential candidate. The La Palma meeting, D'Aubuisson said, was "a monologue between old buddies for the same cause: socialism." But D'Aubuisson is increasingly the odd man out in Salvadoran politics: conservative business elements in ARENA supported Duarte's initiative...