4 A Brief History of El Salvador

Pre-Columbian Era

When Pedro de Alvarado arrived in 1524 in the Río Ceniza Valley . . . of modern-day western El Salvador, he met formidably large, well-equipped armies of the Izalcos Pipil. The Izalcos Pipil belonged to the Nahua linguistic group . . . Nahuat speakers in Central America were called pipil, an ethnic identifier that appears to be related to pipiltin “noblemen.”^[4]

The region that is now El Salvador was once comprised of three Indigenous nations, several principalities, and various different groupings. El Salvador was originally called Cuzcatlán, which means land of joy or good fortune in Nahuatl. The main inhabitants of Cuzcatlán were the Pipil, who lived in the center of the region, and the Lencas, who lived to the east. Other than the Pipil and Lencas, the region was also inhabited by Incas, Maya, and Aztecs.

It is said that the mythological Toltec Ce Acatl Topiltzin, more familiarly known as Quetzalcoatl, founded the city of Cuzcatlán, capital of the Indigenous kingdom, in 1054 CE. Cuzcatlán was ruled by a head of state called the Tagatécu (lord); below the Tagetécu were Tatoni, princes; then elders and priests; then the commoner caste. Military service was obligatory in Cuzcatlán, starting from fifteen years old until soldiers aged out of service. The economy was mostly agrarian, exporting crops such as cacao throughout the isthmus; there was also gold and silver mining, and trade in handcrafted goods such as textiles.

Colonization and Spanish Rule

The territory that now comprises El Salvador was conquered by the Spanish in 1524–1525 as an offshoot of Hernan Cortes’ expedition against the Aztec Kingdom of Central Mexico. The Indigenous inhabitants were the Pipils and Hauhautls, tribes related to the nomadic Nahua peoples of Mexico. The Spanish established, through land grants (encomienda) to the colonizers, the system of large landed estates (latifundia) which evolved in the 17th and 18th centuries into the hacienda system, and which in a specifically capitalist form still dominates the country today.^[5]

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, who led the conquest of México, granted permits to brothers Gonzalo and Pedro de Alvarado to explore the region. The Alvarados focused primarily on Guatemala until 1524, when Pedro led an invading army of two hundred fifty Spaniards and three thousand Guatemalan allies into El Salvador to continue the conquest. They were met with resistance from the Pipils, and they engaged in their first battle in Acaxual (present-day Acajutla). Alvarado was seriously injured in the engagement, along with many other Spaniards—but the Indigenous forces suffered far greater casualties. Several more battles followed, including one six days after the Acaxual battle in Tacuxcalco. It took until 1539, with an overwhelming armed force invading Cuzcatlán, for the Spanish to officially conquer the Pipils and subjugate them. The Spanish carried out massacres, destroyed temples to eradicate the Pipils’ places of worship, and enslaved those who survived.

Pedro de Alvarado named the region El Salvador (“the Savior”) for Jesus Christ. El Salvador was part of the bigger Viceroyalty of Spain, which encompassed much of North and Central America. Pedro’s brother, Gonzalo, founded the Villa de San Salvador in 1525, but it was later destroyed during a Pipil uprising in 1526. San Salvador—the present-day capital of the country—was moved to its current location in 1545.

Independence

In 1821, Spain’s Central American provinces declared their independence. A Federal Republic of Central America was formed in 1823. Throughout Latin America in the early 19th century, the break-up of Spanish colonialism resulted from the political and economic discontent of a proto-bourgeoisie.… The Central American Confederation broke apart by 1838, the year El Salvador emerged as a sovereign nation. By 1880, the Liberals had consolidated their hold on the state apparatus. Between 1880 and 1912, the communal lands of the villages were disentailed, expropriated, and sold to wealthy families at give-away prices. The economic basis of the oligarchy was thus established.^[6]

In 1825, Liberal Salvadoran army officer Manuel José Arce was elected as the first president of the United Provinces. Arce wanted to unite the Liberals and the Conservatives, two political factions with opposing ideas about how the United Provinces should be led, but unfortunately he was largely unsuccessful. In 1830, Honduran Liberal Francisco Morazán was elected president of the Federation, serving two terms until 1838. At that point, he was elected the Head of State of El Salvador, and continued trying to keep Central America united. Morazán created the first liberal reforms in Central America, including the right to divorce and religious freedom, among other proclamations, which were evidently intended to benefit the entire republic, although the population did not always accept them: “Some of the . . . legislation and much of that subsequently enacted was of too radical a character for the masses of the nation, who inclined to oppose it because it was new and incomprehensible.”^[7]

Despite the efforts of Morazán, the situation for the Indigenous peoples in the region continued to be fraught. Many were forcefully displaced from their land yet still had to pay taxes that they were not able to afford. Growing discontent led to several uprisings throughout the area, the most important of which occurred in the department of La Paz, where the Nonualcos—the “tribe of mutes” in Nahuatl—lived. This 1832–1833 uprising was led by Anastasio Aquino, who was called “the rebellious heart of the motherland.”^[8] Aquino organized the Nonualcos into a fortified army to attack the elites and mestizos; Aquino’s army took San Vincente and Zacatecoluca, and Mariano Prado, the head of state, fled the country.

In 1840, the Federation was dissolved, and El Salvador, along with its four fellow states, became independent republics. The primary export crop in El Salvador since 1600 had been indigo, which the mestizo elite depended on heavily. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the indigo market declined with the introduction of chemical dyes. In 1846, President introduced coffee cultivation, an export crop that had been steadily spreading through Central America. “A major step toward economic consolidation occurred between 1870 and 1890 with the privatization of communal and ejidal lands . . . inhabited by indigenous subsistence farmers.”^[9] Land was seized from people—primarily low-income farmers and Indigenous people—based on new vagrancy laws, making a large segment of Salvadorans landless. This land was used for coffee plantations. The expansion of coffee cultivation granted the wealthy land-owning elite a new level of power.

By the late nineteenth century, an oligarchy or ruling class had emerged, referred to as “las catorce familias”; these were the fourteen families who controlled the coffee industry and therefore the wealth and power in El Salvador, as well as the “decisions of whomever held political power and they passed the presidency back and forth between their family circles.”^[10] Heavy handed, “the state used extreme terror in order to ensure the continued hegemony of [a] small agro-export elite, ‘one of the smallest, most omnipotent, pugnacious and reactionary in the world.’”^[11] The “fourteen families” created the conditions for maximum control over the resources of the nation at the expense of the majority of inhabitants. Historically, then, violence and economic oppression have been intertwined.^[12] In addition to the ruling families of the early independence period, European immigration to El Salvador expanded the list to include Hill, De Sola, Sol, Parker, Schonenberg, Dalton, Deinninger, and Duke.^[13] To this list of families, Wood adds the D’Aubuisson last name.^[14] Today, a short list of the most wealthy and powerful families includes such last names as Cristiani and Llach, Regalado, Wright, Kriete, Poma, Quiñones, Murray Mesa, Simán, and Calleja. Though there may have been exactly fourteen families at some point, today the expression is still used and refers to the eight to ten alliances between very wealthy families from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who have amassed most of the wealth and power in the country. Indeed, many of these families retain their dominant position even during border conflicts, civil war, and drastic changes in the international economy.^[15] Today, in fact, the concentration of wealth remains constant, and these elites have merely transferred their interests to international capital and real estate, among other investments.

Early Twentieth Century

The period from 1912 to 1932 is generally accounted [as] the Golden Age of the Salvadorean coffee bourgeoisie.… A National Guard had been established to police the countryside and put down the periodic uprisings of colonos or Indians resisting dispossession.… In 1911, a Central American Workers Congress was held in San Salvador. On the heels of the Russian Revolution in 1917, embryonic Communist and Socialist groups appeared.… They helped organize El Salvador’s first trade union, the Regional Federation of Salvadorean Workers (FRTS), which began in 1920 to organize both urban and rural workers.^[16]

The turn of the century saw the United States replacing England as the dominant world power. The United States took interest in Central America for its abundance of raw materials, as well as its strategic location for the construction of a canal that would allow fast and cheap transportation of goods and military forces between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. In 1908, the United States began construction of a railroad that ran from San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, to the United States. Plans were also made for a U.S.-military base on the gulf of Fonseca, which borders El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

In 1913, Carlos Meléndez took office following the assassination of his predecessor, Manuel Enrique Araujo. The inauguration of Meléndez was the beginning of the Meléndez-Quiñónez dynasty which would last for eighteen years; the presidency was moved back and forth four times between brothers-in-law Carlos Meléndez and Alfonso Quiñónez Molina, then given to Carlos’ younger brother in 1919 before Alfonso was re-instated in 1923. The Meléndez-Quiñónez alliance was comprised of coffee growers who strongly encouraged U.S. involvement in El Salvador, which helped to keep them in power. “El Salvador had less blatant dictatorships in the early twentieth century and appeared to encourage some democratic practice along with important expansion of economic opportunity for the middle class, but in reality the coffee elite discreetly monopolized the power, with the Melendez family getting the largest share.”^[17] The dynasty saw much repression of the common people; there was a mass killing of women, for example, who had gathered to rally support for Miguel Tomás Molina, an oppositional candidate.^[18] Toward the end of the dynasty in 1924, the FRTS (Federación Regional de Trabajadores de El Salvador or Regional Federation of Salvadoran Workers) was founded. The dynasty ended in 1927 with the presidency of Pío Romero Bosque, who was a distant relative of the Meléndez-Quiñónez families interested in replacing the tradition of nepotism with democracy.

In 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed, which led to the Great Depression and caused a world-wide economic crisis. El Salvador suffered greatly as the export price of coffee dropped 54 percent, leading to cuts in pay for agricultural workers (workers who had before the crisis earned 50 cents per day now earned only 25 cents).^[19] Arturo Araujo was elected president in 1931 in the first democratic elections since the fall of the Meléndez-Quiñónez dynasty, representing the Labor Party, which he had created using inspiration from the Labor Party in England. He was largely opposed by the elite class due to his goals to seize the latifundios, the large estates privately owned by elites; to redistribute state land to the people; and to reduce the hours of the workday.^[20] “President Araujo’s failure to carry out any significant reforms forced him to reimpose repressive policies toward protests and labor organizing. As a result, many of his ardent supporters drifted to the left.”^[21] Araujo’s failures led to his overthrow by Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, Araujo’s vice president and a general in the Salvadoran army. First fraudulent elections and then repression unfolded under Martínez. This led to protests among workers, farmers, and Indigenous communities, whose growing poverty and disenfranchisement catalyzed their activism. “A cadre of ladino and indigenous leaders, with roots in the cantons, haciendas, towns, and workshops, propelled this movement forward. Often communist militants were themselves rural Indians, many of whom had been union activists on the coffee plantations for several years. Others merely shared the movement’s goals: radical agrarian reform and overthrow of the regime and oligarchical rule.”^[22] The culmination was an uprising in January 1932, led by Augustín Farabundo Martí, early revolutionary leader and communist party founder, in conjunction with the FRTS, Chief Feliciano Ama of the Izalco tribe, and Chief Francisco “Chico” Sánchez, also of the Izalco tribe. The Salvadoran army met the insurrection head-on, carrying out a nation-wide massacre of ten to thirty thousand people—referred to as La Matanza (The Slaughter)—many of them people with Indigenous identities and practices. For Indigenous culture, many claim that La Matanza was genocidal because of the targeted killing of many Indigenous people during the massacre and how the fear afterward pervaded the local population. Indigenous people stopped wearing their traditional garb and ceased to speak Nahuatl with their children.^[23] The Matanza left a lot of fear about communism in the population: “The memory of the uprising is the cause of the almost paranoid anti-communist fear that has gripped the nation ever since. This fear is expressed in the accusation of a communist that is launched against any reform movement, no matter how modest.”^[24] It also ushered in the beginning of thirteen years of authoritarian rule under General Maximiliano Martínez.

Martínez passed several laws that favored the elite class, including one that liquefied private debts, as well as creating a central reserve bank that was backed by the cafetaleros or coffee growers. He established a foundation that built inexpensive housing meant for people with limited resources, and the majority of them went to members of the political party that Martínez had founded in order to keep their support for his re-election. He also had an ambivalent relationship with religion and the Catholic Church. Although he did have the Church’s support, he tended to tout “strange religious ideas,” such as barefootedness being a healthy practice as it allowed people to better absorb the planet’s benefits.^[25] His ideas earned him the nickname “el brujo,” the warlock. Martínez was re-elected in 1935 for a four-year term and again in 1939 for a six-year term. However, his attempt to extend his term past 1944 prompted a united group of military officers, civilian politicians, and businessmen to overthrow him. The first effort to oust Martínez by force failed, but soon after, a general strike that included university students and public workers, among others, finally resulted in Martínez’s resignation.

General Andrés Ignacio Menéndez succeeded him; he called for free elections for the next year, 1945. General Salvador Castaneda Castro won the 1945 elections with the help of the elites, manipulating the results to ensure that the National Worker Union party (UNT) and their candidate, Arturo Romero, did not win. Castaneda tried to prevent any retaliation against him and his conservative supporters by sending young, liberal-minded people abroad for training. Still, this measure did not deter upheaval when Castaneda tried to remain in office afer his term ended; in what would become known as the Revolution of 1948, the Juventud Militar or Military Youth ousted Castaneda from power. Following the Revolution, a junta comprised of the coup leaders was established, called the Revolutionary Council. The Council remained in the presidential seat for almost two years, helping prepare the conditions for open elections in 1950. One of the leaders within the junta, Major Óscar Osorio, left the Council in order to make a bid in the elections as a candidate of the PRUD (Partido Revolucionario de Unificación Democrática or Revolutionary Party of Democratic Unification). He ultimately won, defeating Colonel José Menéndez of the PAR (Partido de Acción Renovadora or Renewal Action Party). Osorio’s policies focused on economic development, diversification of agricultural policies, and the introduction of important public programs such as social security. He also encouraged public organization in the form of unions and collective bargaining.

Osorio’s successor in 1956, Lieutenant Colonel José María Lemus, was also a member of the PRUD, and he supported many of the same policies that Osorio had in addition to enacting other liberal policies, such as granting general amnesty for political prisoners and exiles, and voiding repressive laws that were in place from past presidents. In 1957, the CGTS (Confederación General de Trabajadores Salvadoreños or General Confederation of Salvadoran Workers) was formed, which represented the people, and there was the Confederación General de Sindicatos de El Salvador or General Confederation of Salvadoran Unions, which the government formed as an alternative labor organization on the recommendation of the United States. The government opposed the CGTS, which they felt aimed to overthrow Lemus.

The CACM (Central American Common Market or Mercado Común Centroamericano) was established in 1960 on the heels of the creation of the ODECA (Organización de Estados Centroamericanos or Organization of Central American States) in 1951, which included Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. CACM was formed in order to respond to the interests of the elite classes in Central America, as well as the interests of U.S. capital.

In 1969, the Football War, a conflict between Honduras and El Salvador, took place. Tension had been growing between the two countries for some time, particularly due to the large number of Salvadorans that had immigrated to Honduras seeking income generation opportunities—by 1969, that number was over three hundred thousand. The majority of these immigrants were there without documents. Tensions finally erupted into violence during a soccer match between the Salvadoran and Honduran national teams in San Salvador, when Honduran team members were harassed by Salvadoran fans. The Salvadoran team had received similar treatment when they were playing in Honduras. Honduras decided to expel Salvadorans from the country and persecute those who remained. El Salvador responded by launching an attack against Honduras, regardless of how this would affect the CACM. El Salvador invaded Honduras and launched air strikes against Honduran airports. Two thousand people, mainly civilians, were killed during the conflict, which lasted for four days, giving it the alternative name “the Hundred Hour War.” Obviously, CACM collaboration was heavily disrupted in the wake of the conflict.

After the Football War, there was a surge in guerrilla organizations due to the increasing economic disparity that the poor people in the majority were suffering. In 1971 the UNO (Unión Nacional Opositora or National Opposition Union) was formed, a party integrating the PDC (Partido Demócrata Cristiano or Christian Democratic Party), the MNR (Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario or National Revolutionary Movement), and the UDR (Unión Democráta Nacional or National Democratic Union). UNO’s candidates, José Napoleón Duarte Fuentes and Guillermo Ungo, won the 1972 elections, but the military and elites aggressively opposed this; UNO’s leaders cited various counts of kidnapping and assault against the party’s supporters and activists. Ultimately, Colonel Arturo Armando Molina, a candidate for the PCN (Partido de Conciliación Nacional or National Conciliation Party), was imposed as the leader on behalf of the elites. Molina enacted several economic policies in an attempt to pull the country out of the problems caused by the Football War, as well as the oil crisis in 1973 that resulted in food price hikes and decreased agricultural production. He created free trade zones for factories, which mostly favored big businesses in El Salvador since the government already did not tax them. The government also prohibited unionization in the free trade zones; coupled with a decrease in wages, the result was an increase in worker exploitation.

In 1977, PCN candidate General Carlos Humberto Romero won against the National Opposing Union using fraud and voter intimidation by government-sponsored paramilitary groups such as ORDEN (Organización Democrática Nacionalista or Democratic Nationalist Organization). This same year, Monsignor Óscar Romero was named the fourth Archbishop of San Salvador; he would eventually become an important representative of the poor and marginalized. Public unrest once again began to stir in the wake of President Romero’s policies, which he called “the plan for the well-being of all” but actually resulted in increased repression, assassinations, government-sponsored kidnappings or “disappearances,” and numerous paramilitary forces or death squads. Many low-income people across the country began to organize for increases in wages and better treatment from the government, which took the form of marches, demonstrations, and protests. Animated by the “preferential option for the poor,” Archbishop Romero publicly began to support the rights of the poor, putting the Church in opposition to President Romero’s government.

Civil War (1980 – 1992)

As a Salvadoran and archbishop of the archdiocese of San Salvador, I have an obligation to see that faith and justice reign in my country, I ask you, if you truly want to defend human rights:

• To forbid that military aid be given to the Salvadoran government;
• To guarantee that your government will not intervene directly or indirectly, with military, economic, diplomatic, or other pressures, in determining the destiny of the Salvadoran people.

—Letter from Archbishop Óscar A. Romero to President Jimmy Carter (February 17, 1980)^[26]

The country’s excluded majority continued to organize and unrest spread as many protests and demonstrations were held against the government’s policies. They were encouraged by the victory of the Nicaraguan revolutionary forces, the Sandinistas, over their own repressive government regime in July 1979. In El Salvador, the Military Youth formed a junta to make several demands of the government, including: the dissolution of the ORDEN paramilitary group; an increase in salary for workers; and the formation of a commission to investigate the forced disappearances that had been occurring. But given that the junta did not wield any real power, the repression against the people continued, and thousands of campesinos were massacred or disappeared by the army. The Popular Movement grew in the face of this treatment, forming a coalition called the CRM (Coordinación Revolucionaria de Masas or Revolutionary Mass Coordination) that absorbed members from several other groups.

After the Cuban Revolution in 1954, the United States decided to use the carrot and stick approach with El Salvador. This involved promoting agrarian reform, on the one hand, while also strengthening the construction of an anti-insurgency apparatus.^[27] In March 1980, U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced that he would increase military aid from the United States to El Salvador. Archbishop Romero wrote President Carter a letter, imploring him to cancel all military aid, but Carter ignored him and sent the money. President Ronald Reagan increased military aid to the Salvadoran army. By the end of the war, the United States had sent six billion dollars in aid to the Armed Forces and government of El Salvador.^[28]

On March 23, 1980, Monsignor Romero spoke out against the military’s actions in his Sunday homily, beseeching them to stop massacring the people. The very next day, the archbishop was assassinated while celebrating mass. This murder of a beloved and popular leader was the final straw that would spark the Salvadoran Civil War. Targeting of civilian leaders was common by the Salvadoran Armed Forces and death squads and sadly explains why 80 percent of the deaths of the civil war were carried out by the army, police, other security forces, and the death squads.

As space for civic protest closed, guerrilla groups coalesced to form the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional or Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), named for the communist leader of the 1932 peasant uprising. The FMLN was comprised of five leftist factions: the PRTC (Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadores Centroamericanos or Revolutionary Party of the Central American Workers), the ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo or People’s Revolutionary Army), the RN (Resistencia Nacional or National Resistance), the PCS (Partido Comunista Salvadoreño or Salvadoran Communist Party), and the FPL (Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí or Popular Forces of Farabundo Martí Liberation), which is the oldest of the five groups. Thirty percent of the FMLN was made up of women.^[29] Although many of the early organizers and leaders of the FMLN factions had Marxist-Leninist leanings, their ideologies within the broader FMLN differed. As such, the creation of the FMLN was already characterized by ideological differences. These polarities were also held in tension with its overall desire to gain the support of more moderate citizens. The FMLN began their pushback against the military in January 1981, seizing the departments of Morazán and Chalatenango as FMLN territory. Between January and February, 168 people were killed for violating curfew by the Salvadoran Army. In March, the Salvadoran Army decided to adopt a scorched earth policy to suppress the guerrilla insurgents; they implemented wide “sweep operations” in the Cabañas department, indiscriminately killing anyone they captured. A second sweep occurred in November in the Morazán department. The Morazán operation ended in the massacre of up to a thousand unarmed citizens—this event would come to be known as the El Mozote Massacre. Rufina Amaya, the one adult survivor of the massacre, described it in the following way:

The army had come early in the morning. They separated the men, the women, and the children. Over there, near the side entrance to the church is where they killed the men. They blindfolded them and tied their hands behind their backs. They shot them all on our church’s doorstep. When they came to get us women, I managed to slip away. This tree saved my life. I hid behind it and heard the cries of my children, ‘Mommy, they’re killing us . . . Mommy . . .’ I had two choices: stay and die with my children or escape to tell what the Army had done.^[30]

The FMLN began taking steps toward the establishment of a democratic government in 1982, calling for elections. The U.S. government, under President Ronald Reagan, feared the FMLN would lead El Salvador down the path of communism. To that end, they began to increase military aid and to put a significant amount of money toward the elections.^[31] Presidential elections were held in 1984, costing some three million dollars, making them the most expensive election in El Salvador’s history.^[32] José Napoleón Duarte of the PDC won with a 54 percent majority. The CIA supported Duarte’s campaign, ensuring that Duarte would act on the United States’ interests.^[33] Human rights abuses under Duarte lessened, but still continued. By this time, nearly sixty thousand people had died during the Civil War.

Peace talks between the Salvadoran government and the FMLN began in 1987. The FMLN demanded the dissolution of all death squads and that all paramilitaries and members of the armed forces be held accountable for the atrocities they committed during the war. The Salvadoran Assembly passed an amnesty law for the release of prisoners who were being held either as suspected guerrillas or guerrilla sympathizers; four hundred political prisoners were released in accordance with this law. Amnesty was also granted to members of the army and paramilitary forces that had committed human rights atrocities.

In late 1988, Amnesty International reported that death squads had continued to kill, abuse, and kidnap citizens, despite official lip service about peace negotiations. In the presidential elections the following year, Alfredo Cristiani of ARENA, a member of one of the richest families in El Salvador, won with almost 54 percent of the vote. He made the promise to govern “for the most poor of the poor.”^[34] He began implementing several neoliberal policies, such as privatization of public services and companies, liberalization of prices that had once been subsidized, and the lowering of trade barriers. The end result was the rich getting richer and, contrary to his campaign motto, the poor getting poorer.

The war continued. In September 1989, the FMLN proposed to hold a dialogue with Cristiani and the government, and the Governmental Commission of Dialogue was created. They met between September 12 and 15, but nothing was settled or achieved. Another dialogue was scheduled for October, but the FMLN abstained, due to the murder of ten members of FENASTRAS (Federación Nacional de Trabajadores Salvadoreños or National Federation of Salvadoran Workers), whose headquarters had been bombed by a death squad. Then, in November 1989 the FMLN staged a “final offensive.” They surrounded San Salvador in order to mount an offensive strike against the army and the government by bringing the war into the capital city of the country. The High Command of the Salvadoran Army decided to bomb the city in retaliation, with no regard to the safety of the civilian population. Another massacre occurred five days later on November 16, when the Salvadoran Army’s elite Atlacatl battalion was deployed to the Universidad Centroamericana, one of three Jesuit universities in Central America, where they assassinated six Jesuit priests and two women who worked with them. This set of assassinations targeted the leadership of the university and included the UCA president and other important administrators and professors. In great part due to international pressure after the UCA massacre, President Cristiani agreed to start negotiations under the condition that the FMLN cease their military activities. There were several meetings throughout 1990, with four main objectives, as established that April: (1) to end the armed conflict peacefully; (2) to encourage democratization of the country; (3) to guarantee human rights are respected; and (4) to reunify Salvadoran society.^[35] Peace was ultimately brokered between the FMLN and the Salvadoran government with support from the United Nations and the Catholic church. The Salvadoran Civil War came to an end January 16, 1992, when the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in Mexico. “Indeed, the accords constituted the blueprint for an extensive institutional reform process, which included, besides relatively free and fair elections, a new civilian police force, a significant reduction of the armed forces, and an overhaul of the judicial apparatus. The insurgents laid down their arms, demobilized their troops, and entered the electoral arena as a political party.”^[36] The Accords called for the dissolution of the National Police, of the National Guard, and of paramilitary groups, and for the creation of a new civilian police force. The FMLN became a formal political party, and another amnesty law was passed in 1993. “Considering these political developments in the mirror of the aspirations and sacrifices of revolutionary armed struggle, many former Salvadoran insurgents lamented what they saw as the postwar scramble for public resources, but few could afford not to participate in it. Hence, the experience of postinsurgent politics developed as a peculiar mix of political ascendency and disenchantment.”^[37] Central American sociologist Torres-Rivas sums up his analysis of the region’s revolutionary movements of the 1980s by saying they didn’t lead to revolutionary transformations, especially not economic transformations.^[38] Citing Torres-Rivas, Sprenkels agrees with this sentiment about Salvadoran postwar revolutionary leadership in the following way: “As the former insurgents amassed postwar power, they also frequently relied on mundane or traditional political practices rather than transformative ones.”^[39]

Civil Society Activism and Social Movements

In the early 1930s, workers, peasants, and indigenous communities launched a popular insurrection in the western coffee growing districts against a newly installed dictatorship. The events stand as one of the largest acts of civil unrest in Latin America during the Great Depression.… In the late 1970s, another colossal wave of disruptive protest swept across the entire country against the longest enduring military government in the Americas, which eventually degenerated into civil war. In the late 1990s . . . Salvadoran activists, NGOs, and public sector labor unions initiated one of the most momentous campaigns against privatization in the region.^[40]

For El Salvador, much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been shaped by the collective action of rural farming families, urban workers and teachers, women, students, Indigenous people, and Catholic lay ministers and the organizations they built to achieve their objectives. In response to the short-lived political opening of the 1920s, “civil society actors beg[a]n to solidify civic organizations and place demands on political authorities.”^[41] These efforts, in turn, created a generation of activists who joined the rebellion that was brutally repressed by General Maximiliano Hernández in 1932.

A new generation of activists and revolutionaries emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, taking advantage of political space opened by U.S.-supported reforms to dissuade a turn toward communist Cuba and of the tenets of liberation theology with its preferential option for the poor. From the early twentieth century, women’s organizing emerged and has only grown over the decades. Salvadoran women’s participation and leadership were a major force within the popular movement and the FMLN. And after the war ended, women’s organizing, including feminist organizations, expanded rapidly; they focused on a number of issues from local development, women’s rights, and also women’s political participation. “With this, institutional spaces were built to solve problems related to female subordination in the National Assembly. [Also] the Parliamentary Group of Women was formed along with Municipal Offices for Women and Municipal Policies of Gender Equality.”^[42] To this day, Salvadoran feminists—and the organizations they run—play an increasingly important role in charting the country’s development priorities.^[43]

Environmental organizations have had a lot of success lately in achieving policy changes and challenging government concessions to foreign mining interests.^[44] El Salvador’s anti-mining movement was formally launched in 2006. It created linkages between the movement and the government, addressed a variety of concerns from the local to the national level, and worked to include a wide array of other activists and their organizations. This gave the movement a dynamism that was advantageous in building an adaptable and effective movement, which led the Salvadoran National Assembly to vote overwhelmingly in 2017 to prohibit all mining for gold and other metals, making the country the first in the world to impose a nationwide ban on metal mining.^[45] Present-day organizing efforts in El Salvador continue to extend the efforts of those who come before them with a focus on addressing the effects of neoliberal policies and the deportation of Salvadoran migrants from the United States, protesting extractivist plans for mining, and calling for increased transparency and democratic practice from the Salvadoran government.

Present-Day El Salvador

Despite . . . appreciable advances, El Salvador’s democracy remains weak and exhibits important continuities with past practices. Neoliberal policies intensified economic inequalities, and poverty reduction is chiefly attributable to out-migration and remittances. Social exclusion remains pervasive and feeds the country’s gang problem. Deficient investigative procedures permit high levels of impunity, and PNC (National Civilian Police) members have been implicated in criminal activities, human rights violations, the torture of detainees, and death squads. The homicide rate has reached such alarming levels that El Salvador now ranks among the most violent nations in Latin America.^[46]

Following the end of the war, the Salvadoran public tended to favor ARENA candidates from the right, electing four consecutive ARENA presidents until 2009, when Mauricio Funes of the FMLN party was elected. Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the FMLN, served from 2014 to 2019; before that, he was vice president to his predecessor, Mauricio Funes. Cerén was a former guerrilla leader in the Salvadoran Civil War and was the first ex-rebel to serve as El Salvador’s president.

Currently, El Salvador suffers from a high crime rate from maras or gangs. The largest are rival groups Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13) and Barrio 18 (also known as 18th Street). These gangs originated in Los Angeles, California, and were exported to El Salvador with the deportation of Salvadoran gang members from the United States. El Salvador’s homicide rate jumped to 139 per 100,000 people in 1995 as a result of the rapid increase of gang activity. La Mano Dura (“Iron Fist”) and Súper Mano Dura (“Super Iron Fist”) were two government programs that were created in 2003 and 2006 respectively to combat gang-related violence, but unfortunately, they largely failed. Gang violence did decrease during the 2012 truce instituted by the government but there was an uptick in homicides when it ended in 2014. Gang violence is one of the push factors that compels Salvadorans to take on the risks of traveling from their country to the United States, often without legal documents. Many Salvadorans understand that during the journey northwards “some will be kidnapped for ransom, some will be sold into sexual slavery, some will perish in the desert, and other will perish in confined spaces.”^[47] Similar to Guatemala and Honduras, the remittances that Salvadorans in the United States send home on a regular basis comprise almost a quarter of the country’s annual GDP.

In a surprise to many, as recent elections have moved between ARENA on the political right and the leftist FMLN, Nayib Bukele—a third party politician and marketing consultant—won the presidential elections in El Salvador in early 2019. Whether a punishment vote to the traditional two-party system and their party members, or a desire for “new ideas,” this event is something to watch over the upcoming years. “Bukele was able to set up a strategy that allowed him to win in the first round an [electoral] contest in which he faced the two emblematic parties of the Postwar regime, with more experience, resources and, apparently, territorial roots.”^[48] While Bukele has been president, there have been many oversteps from the executive branch as well as from his majority group of legislators in the National Assembly. For example, on May 1, 2021, the National Assembly “ousted the judges of the Constitutional Court and the attorney general, and named replacements in line with their interests.”^[49] This action joins a list of other actions and decisions that many organizations in El Salvador, diplomats, and members of the international human rights community consider violations of the rule of law. El Salvador retains a robust civil society—a range of organizations committed to women’s rights, the environment, governance and rule of law, and sustainable development. Yet, El Salvador remains a country that is divided politically and continues to experience many of the same challenges that led to the civil war in the 1970s in the first place, such as poverty and exclusion, violence, impunity, and corruption.

Recommended Reading

Almeida, Paul D. Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in El Salvador, 1925–2005. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Anastario, Mike. Parcels: Memories of Salvadoran Migration. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019.

Abrego, Leisy J. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders. Stanford University Press, 2015.

Cosgrove, Serena. Leadership from the Margins: Women and Civil Society Organizations in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

Dalton, Roque. Miguel Marmol [English translation]. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Books, 1995.

Danner, Mark. The Massacre at El Mozote. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Gould, Jeffrey L., and Aldo Lauria-Santiago. To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920–1932. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Moodie, Ellen. El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Silber, Irina Carlota. After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022.

Silber, Irina Carlota. Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Post-War El Salvador. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

Sprenkels, Ralph. After Insurgency: Revolution and Electoral Politics in El Salvador. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018.

Todd, Molly. Beyond Displacement; Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010.

Tula, María Teresa, and Lynn Stephen. Hear My Testimony: María Teresa Tula, Human Rights Activist of El Salvador. Boston: South End Press, 1994.