SAN SALVADOR — Jose Napoleon Duarte, who became El Salvador's first democratically elected president in half a century but who was not able to end the civil war that still afflicts this tiny Central American nation, died Friday after a long fight against cancer. He was 64.
Doctors had given Duarte only six months to live after they diagnosed his condition as untreatable liver cancer in May, 1988. But after surgery in the United States, he served out his term as president, which ended June 1, 1989, and continued to cling to life. He underwent intermittent therapy, here and in Washington, until his death.
His condition was recently complicated by a pulmonary embolism, doctors said. A daughter, Maria Eugenia Duarte, said her father died Friday morning of a heart attack.
Duarte was a staunch supporter of U.S. policy in Central America, which the White House took note of Friday with a statement describing him as "a dedicated servant to the people of El Salvador and a firm friend of the United States."
Saying that President and Mrs. Bush were "deeply saddened" by his death, the statement praised Duarte's work for "human rights and social justice" and ' the courage he exhibited in building the foundation of democracy in El Salvador."
Vice President Dan Quayle will represent the Administration at Duarte's funeral Sunday morning.
Duarte, who wrote his official biography in 1986, said at that time that he hoped to live long enough to write a sequel in which he could describe an end to the Salvadoran civil war, a change in his country's economic structure "from a rigid, lopsided, dependent system to a dynamic, evenly distributive, self-sustaining one," and a political order that was "vibrantly democratic."
At his death, the Salvadoran civil war was entering its 10th year with no signs of a settlement. Duarte lived long enough to see the leftist guerrillas mount their most threatening offensive of the war in mid-November.
The economy is not as severely skewed in favor of the wealthy oligarchy as it was a decade ago, but it is neither dynamic nor self-sustaining nor evenly distributed. The country, to his partial credit, managed a series of relatively clean elections, but not even Duarte could claim that the system is vibrantly democratic or that the social structure represents everyone with dignity.
