Salvadoran Civil War

Based on Wikipedia: Salvadoran Civil War

A Massacre Called La Matanza

In 1932, the Salvadoran military killed approximately thirty thousand people in a matter of weeks. They called it La Matanza—"the slaughter" in Spanish—and it would cast a shadow over El Salvador for the next sixty years.

The victims were mostly peasants and indigenous people who had risen up against a government that served only the wealthy. Their leader was a man named Farabundo Martí, and though the rebellion was crushed with overwhelming brutality, his name would return to haunt the Salvadoran elite half a century later.

This is the story of the Salvadoran Civil War, a twelve-year conflict that killed more than seventy-five thousand people and became one of the bloodiest chapters of the Cold War. It is a story about coffee and land, about death squads and peasant insurgents, about American dollars flowing to a government that murdered its own citizens. And it begins, as so many tragedies do, with profound inequality.

The Coffee Republic

El Salvador is a small country—the smallest in Central America, roughly the size of Massachusetts. In the late nineteenth century, coffee became its economic engine, and with coffee came a peculiar form of social organization that would prove explosive.

By the time of the civil war, seventy-seven percent of El Salvador's farmable land belonged to one-hundredth of one percent of the population. Read that again: almost all the productive land in the country was owned by a tiny sliver of families. The rest—the vast majority of Salvadorans—worked that land for wages that kept them perpetually poor.

This was not an accident. The coffee economy had been deliberately structured to concentrate wealth. The most powerful families were not just the growers but the processors and exporters, and they had intermarried with the military officer class until the two groups were essentially one. If you threatened to change who owned the land, you were threatening both the country's economic elite and its armed forces simultaneously.

The stock market crash of 1929 made everything worse. When coffee prices collapsed, the meager wages of plantation workers fell even further. Hunger and desperation drove the 1932 uprising, and the response—La Matanza—established a pattern. For the next five decades, military dictatorships would hold political power while protecting the economic interests of the landed elite. Anyone who objected could expect violence.

The Football War

In 1969, something strange happened. El Salvador and Honduras went to war with each other for four days.

The conflict became known as the Football War because it coincided with a series of World Cup qualifying matches between the two countries. But the real causes had nothing to do with soccer. Honduras had enacted land reform laws that threatened Salvadoran migrants who had settled there, and tensions over immigration and border disputes had been building for years.

The war itself was brief and inconclusive. Its consequences were not.

Trade between the two countries collapsed, damaging both economies. An estimated three hundred thousand Salvadorans were displaced, many of them expelled from Honduras with nowhere to go. The Salvadoran government couldn't meet their needs. Meanwhile, the military emerged from the conflict stronger and more corrupt than before, and began purchasing weapons from Israel, Brazil, West Germany, and the United States.

The Football War added new pressures to a society already close to breaking point. More landless peasants, fewer economic opportunities, and a military flush with new weapons and political power—these were the ingredients for catastrophe.

Stealing Elections

The 1972 presidential election should have been a turning point. The opposition was strong, representing a broad coalition of people who wanted change through peaceful means. Instead, the military-backed National Conciliation Party—its Spanish initials were PCN—stole the election through massive fraud.

The winner was Colonel Arturo Armando Molina, and he faced opposition from both left and right. On the left, small guerrilla organizations began to form. The Farabundo Martí Popular Liberation Forces—named after the 1932 rebel leader—started conducting attacks. The People's Revolutionary Army emerged as well. These were not yet mass movements, but they were organized and they were armed.

The economy continued to deteriorate. The 1973 oil crisis sent food prices soaring while agricultural output fell. President Molina, recognizing that something had to change, actually attempted land reform—proposing that large estates be broken up and redistributed to peasants. The landed elite blocked him. Reform failed, and discontent deepened.

The 1977 election was even more fraudulent than the one before. The PCN's candidate was General Carlos Humberto Romero, and the methods used to ensure his victory were grimly creative. Paramilitary forces loyal to the government reportedly threatened peasants with machetes if they voted for anyone else.

On February 28, 1977, a crowd gathered in downtown San Salvador to protest the stolen election. Security forces arrived and opened fire. They killed indiscriminately—demonstrators, bystanders, anyone in their path. Estimates of the dead range from two hundred to fifteen hundred people. President Molina blamed "foreign Communists" and exiled opposition leaders.

The Death Squads

If you want to understand the Salvadoran Civil War, you need to understand the death squads. They were not incidental to the conflict. They were central to how the government operated.

Initially, the squads were organized and funded by wealthy landowners in the countryside, operating autonomously from the formal military. One of the most notorious was called Regalado's Armed Forces, led by a man named Hector Regalado. It had developed, bizarrely, out of a Boy Scout troop.

But the death squads were soon absorbed into El Salvador's military intelligence apparatus, run by an organization called ANSESAL and led by a major named Roberto D'Aubuisson. D'Aubuisson would become one of the most feared figures in El Salvador—a man credibly accused of ordering the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, among many other crimes.

Under military control, the death squads became systematic. They murdered union leaders, student activists, teachers, anyone suspected of leftist sympathies. The Christian Legal Assistance office, operating out of the archbishop's headquarters, documented 687 civilians killed by government forces in 1978. The following year, the number jumped to 1,796.

Even the Catholic Church came under attack. Priests and nuns who spoke out against the violence were themselves targeted. This was not a government fighting an armed insurgency. This was a government terrorizing its own people.

The Coup That Changed Nothing

On October 15, 1979, young military officers overthrew President Romero in a coup. They formed what they called the Revolutionary Government Junta, and for a brief moment, it seemed like genuine reform might be possible.

The junta announced land reform. It nationalized the banking and coffee industries. It disbanded the most notorious paramilitary organization, ORDEN. It scheduled elections for 1982.

But the junta contained a fundamental contradiction. It was a reform government that depended on a military that had no interest in reform. And behind the military stood the United States, which was terrified that El Salvador might follow Cuba and Nicaragua into the communist camp.

The Carter administration threw its support behind the junta, hoping to stabilize the country. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, American support increased dramatically. By 1984, the United States was spending nearly one billion dollars a year on economic aid to the Salvadoran government. American military officers embedded with the Salvadoran high command, making strategic and tactical decisions.

The land reform, meanwhile, was sabotaged from the start. When wealthy landowners learned the government intended to redistribute their property, they began slaughtering their own livestock and moving their farm equipment across the border into Guatemala, where many of them owned additional land. Peasant leaders who were elected to run the new cooperatives were assassinated or disappeared. The number of documented government killings jumped from 234 in February 1980 to 487 in March.

On January 3, 1980, all three civilian members of the junta resigned, along with ten of eleven cabinet ministers. Whatever hope the coup had represented was gone.

The FMLN

The guerrilla groups that had been forming since the early 1970s came together in 1980 as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front—the FMLN, using its Spanish initials. They took their name from the leader of the 1932 rebellion, explicitly invoking the memory of La Matanza.

The FMLN was backed by Cuba under Fidel Castro and by the Soviet Union. This made them, in American eyes, part of the global communist threat. But the guerrillas drew their strength from something more immediate than superpower politics.

Many of the people who joined the FMLN were campesinos—peasants—who had experienced firsthand the brutality of the Salvadoran government and the injustice of an economic system that left them landless and poor. They joined for reasons that had little to do with Marxist theory.

Some cited religious faith. Liberation theology—a movement within the Catholic Church that emphasized social justice and sided with the poor—had spread through El Salvador in the 1970s. For many peasants, joining the insurgency was an act of piety, a way of fighting for divine justice.

Others spoke of class consciousness, of standing up against an elite that had treated their communities with contempt for generations. They were not fighting for abstract ideology. They were fighting against the specific people who had exploited them their entire lives.

The FMLN operated differently from the Salvadoran military. Scholars have described it as an "armed group institution"—an organization that carefully educated its members about its mission and ideology, building genuine commitment rather than relying on coercion. FMLN fighters knew why they were fighting. Many soldiers in the Salvadoran army, by contrast, had joined because they had no other economic options or because they had been intimidated into service.

This difference showed in their conduct. The United Nations would eventually conclude that FMLN guerrillas were responsible for about five percent of the atrocities committed during the civil war. The Salvadoran security forces were responsible for eighty-five percent.

American Complicity

The United States government knew what was happening in El Salvador. It knew about the death squads. It knew about the massacres. It knew that the government it was funding was murdering civilians on a massive scale. It continued to provide support anyway.

American officials justified their policy by pointing to Soviet and Cuban backing of the FMLN. In the logic of the Cold War, preventing a communist takeover justified almost anything. El Salvador was a front in the global struggle against Soviet expansion, and if the Salvadoran government killed some—or many—of its own citizens in the process of fighting that struggle, that was an acceptable cost.

But the relationship went beyond tacit approval. In at least one documented case, American embassy officials actively collaborated with a death squad. In January 1980, National Guard troops arrested two law students named Francisco Ventura and José Humberto Mejía following an anti-government demonstration. The National Guard received permission to bring the youths onto embassy grounds. A private car drove into the embassy parking lot. Men in civilian clothes put the students in the trunk and drove away.

Ventura and Mejía were never seen again.

Critics of American policy argued that military aid would "legitimize what has become dictatorial violence" and that real political power in El Salvador lay with "old-line military leaders in government positions who practice a policy of reform with repression." A prominent Catholic spokesman insisted that "any military aid you send to El Salvador ends up in the hands of the military and paramilitary rightist groups who are themselves at the root of the problems of the country."

These warnings were ignored.

The Violence

The scale of what happened in El Salvador between 1979 and 1992 is difficult to comprehend. More than seventy-five thousand people were killed. Approximately eight thousand more simply disappeared—abducted by security forces or death squads and never seen again.

The violence targeted anyone who could be even vaguely associated with opposition to the government. Not just guerrilla fighters, but union organizers, student activists, teachers, priests, nuns. Anyone who "promoted ideas that questioned official policy" was assumed to be subversive. The phrase the government used was "draining the sea to catch the fish"—destroying the civilian population that might support the insurgency.

By the early 1980s, El Salvador had become one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a civilian. Death squads operated with impunity. Bodies appeared on roadsides, often showing signs of torture. Entire villages were massacred. The most infamous of these was El Mozote, where in December 1981 a U.S.-trained battalion killed nearly a thousand men, women, and children over three days.

The church was not spared. On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero—the highest-ranking Catholic official in El Salvador, who had become an outspoken critic of the government—was shot through the heart while celebrating Mass. The assassination was ordered by Roberto D'Aubuisson, the death squad leader. In December of that same year, four American churchwomen—three nuns and a lay missionary—were abducted, raped, and murdered by members of the Salvadoran National Guard.

The End

The war lasted twelve years. It did not end with a military victory for either side.

What ended it was the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the Cold War over, the superpower logic that had driven American support for the Salvadoran government no longer applied. At the same time, the FMLN could no longer count on backing from Cuba and the Soviet bloc. Both sides had reasons to negotiate.

On January 16, 1992, representatives of the Salvadoran government and the FMLN signed the Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico City. The war was formally over.

The accords called for significant reforms: a reduction in the size of the military, the creation of a new civilian police force, land reform, and a truth commission to investigate human rights abuses. The FMLN would disarm and become a legal political party.

Accountability for the war's atrocities, however, would prove elusive. In 1993, the Salvadoran legislature passed an amnesty law protecting perpetrators of human rights violations from prosecution. For more than two decades, this law shielded war criminals from justice.

Then, in 2016, the Supreme Court of Justice of El Salvador ruled the amnesty unconstitutional. The government could now prosecute those responsible for the killings, the torture, the disappearances. Justice, if it comes at all, will come slowly. Many of the perpetrators are old men now. Many of the victims' families have waited a lifetime.

What It Meant

The Salvadoran Civil War was many things at once. It was a class conflict, pitting a landed elite against the peasants who worked their land. It was an ideological struggle between left and right, between revolution and counterrevolution. It was a proxy war of the Cold War, with the United States and the Soviet Union backing opposite sides. It was a humanitarian catastrophe.

But perhaps most fundamentally, it was a war about land. In a country where almost all the productive farmland was owned by a tiny fraction of the population, where generations of peasants had been denied any stake in the economy they sustained with their labor, the question of who owned the land was the question of everything.

The Salvadoran elite answered that question with violence. They organized death squads. They massacred protesters. They murdered priests and nuns. They killed tens of thousands of their own countrymen rather than share what they had.

The United States helped them do it. American money paid for the weapons. American advisors trained the soldiers. American officials looked the other way—or, in some cases, actively participated—while the killing continued.

This is not ancient history. The peace accords were signed in 1992, within the lifetime of most people reading this. The generation that lived through the war is still alive. The wounds have not healed. The land has not been redistributed. The inequality that caused the war has not been resolved.

El Salvador remains one of the most unequal societies in the Western Hemisphere. The coffee families still have their fortunes. The descendants of the death squad leaders still have power. And in the countryside, the great-grandchildren of La Matanza's victims still work land they do not own, much as their ancestors did a century ago.