Word: palmas
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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...
Duarte set a time and a place for the encounter: Monday, Oct. 15 at 10 a.m., in the town of La Palma (pop. 3,000), 50 miles from San Salvador, the capital. His choice of the site was also courageous: the area around La Palma has long been a guerrilla hotbed. Indeed, in the days following Duarte's proposal, young guerrillas armed with M-16 rifles and hand grenades openly strolled the village streets...
Nonetheless, Duarte intended to drive up the rutted highway to La Palma, accompanied at most by a small contingent of aides, in his cocoa brown Jeep Cherokee. Even though his meeting might end in complete deadlock, El Salvador's first freely elected civilian President in 50 years was confident, as he told the U.N., that he could present the guerrillas with a "new reality." Said Duarte: "The Salvadoran people now have no doubt that subversive violence has lost its mystique and reason for existence." He backed his assertion with the offer of an amnesty if the guerrillas agreed...
...guerillas. But at the same time the guerillas are understandably wary about answering Duarte's call to join elections; they know too well the propensity of the Salvadoran military to shoot up anyone to the left of Roberto D'Aubisson. Even Duarte's meeting with the rebels at La Palma has been met only with the snarls of the death squads, who vow death to those offering a middle way out of El Salvador's problems...