Tiny El Salvador caught the world’s atten-
tion in 1977, when two priests were
assassinated and the entire Jesuit order was
threatened with extinction by right-wing
death squads. The Carter Administration, a
few weeks in office, saw in El Salvador the op-
portunity to demonstrate its alleged commit-
ment to human rights.
El Salvador posed no threat to vital security
interests. It was considered a safe place to
push for overdue reforms. So the United
States attacked the Romero regime for its
abuse of human rights and encouraged an
alliance between “enlightened” business
sectors and the Christian Democratic Party,
to prepare for a changing of the guard.
The crisis should have come as no surprise.
As early as 1932, Salvadorean peasants, ar-
tisans and workers, armed only with machetes
and stones, rebelled against their misery and
joined an uprising led by the Communist Par-
ty. Within a month of the rebellion, 30,000
had been killed.
After the massacre, El Salvador’s “Fourteen
Families” returned to their ledgers, leaving
generals and colonels to rule on their behalf
for the next 50 years. More and more peasants
were pushed off the land to make room for
coffee, cane and cotton. Farmworker unions
were prohibited by law, but the rural pro-
letariat was growing into a latent social force.
By 1973, they would be earning only $1.10
per day. By 1975, they would be organized in-
to militant, extra-legal unions and mass
The United States could afford to be self-
righteous until July, 1979-the victory of the
Sandinista Liberation Front in Nicaragua. A
link had fallen out of the chain. Central
America-the backyard-was no longer a
place to grandstand about human rights.
From that time on, the primary goal of U.S.
foreign policy in the region would be to avoid
“another Nicaragua.”
Today, three inter-agency task forces exist
within the Carter Administration to monitor
crisis situations 24 hours a day. Iran and
Afghanistan are the obvious two. El
Salvador–ignored by the media, unknown to
the public-is now the third.
organizations. They would be demanding
more than higher wages.
By the 1950s, a sector of the ruling class
had branched out from agriculture into
marketing and finance. Now they were
pushing for industrialization, but recognized
that certain structural changes had to occur.
Wealth, generated and concentrated in the
agrarian sector, had to be more evenly
distributed to create a market for industrial
goods. Taxes had to be levied to finance the
required infrastructure. Political unrest had
to be quelled by superficial reforms.
A small schism developed within the ruling
class. The more “enlightened,” modernizing
elements managed to gain control of the state
(behind a military curtain, of course), but
were powerless to carry out reforms that
2would affect even minimally the interests of ducts of their own labor, markets would be
more traditional sectors. A compromise was found abroad.
struck: industrialization would proceed, with El Salvador did industrialize in the 1960s
support from the U.S. government and and 70s, first within the framework of the
foreign investors. But nothing would be done Central American Common Market and,
to affect the basic distribution of resources after its collapse, by seducing foreign capital
and wealth: 60% of the land would stay in the with tax incentives, free-trade zones and
hands of 2% of the population. If cheap labor. The average wage in the
Salvadoreans could not afford to buy the pro- manufacturing and service sectors, in 1973,NACLA Report
was $1.64 per day.
Economic expansion, and the growth of a
state bureaucracy, created its own contradic-
tions. Migrants from the countryside swelled
the slum communities, or tugurios, that cir-
cled the capital city. The urban working
class, growing in size and organization, tasted
the repression that guaranteed stability to in-
vestors. And a new middle class, caught be-
tween the poles of poverty and wealth, was
demanding a political voice and economic
reforms.
In the early 1960s, professionals,
bureaucrats and small businessmen formed
the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), sup-
porting a platform of moderate reforms. In-
tellectuals and middle sectors formed a social
democratic party, the National Revolutionary
Movement (MNR). And more radical sectors
sought to forge a mass party of the left in
alliance with the industrial working class.
By 1972, this electoral opposition was ready
to challenge 40 years of military rule. Chris-
tian Democrats, social democrats and the Na-
tionalist Democratic Union (UDN), the legal
arm of the outlawed Communist Party, form-
ed a united front, the National Opposition
Union (UNO, meaning one).
Most observers agree that the UNO can-
didate for president, Napoleon Duarte, won
the 1972 elections by a clear margin. But El
Salvador’s elite, like its counterparts
throughout Latin America, refused to accept
the people’s verdict. The ballot-box was in-
tended to legitimize military rule, not to end
it. So the ballot-box was stuffed overnight,
and by morning the victory had vanished.
Still, the ruling class refused to
acknowledge its own vulnerability. The new
Molina government tried to add a small dose
of reform to the standard formula of heavy
repression. It proposed a timid “Agrarian
Transformation” that was supported by a
small, more visionary sector of the ruling
class, and applauded by the United States.
The old agrarian interests immediately
cried treasonn” and mobilized to halt the
reform and take control of the state. In 1977,
General Carlos Romero, representing the
most retrograde sectors of the bourgeoisie,
became president by fraud and ruled by ter-
ror alone.
END OF THE ELECTORAL ROAD
After 1972, the electoral opposition, with
many of its leaders in exile, began to
disintegrate. Serious questions were raised
about the viability of an electoral strategy.
What would ensure a different outcome the
next time around, if votes were not enough?
An obvious answer was arms. A split in the
Communist Party led to the formation of the
Popular Liberation Forces- Farabundo Mar-
ti (FPL), named after the leader of the 1932
rebellion. A dissident group within the Chris-
tian Democrats, joined by other leftists, form-
ed the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP).
(See political map, p. 34).
These groups took a two-sided approach to
their work-focused primarily on the
country-side where 60% of the people reside.
One side was military: small scattered actions
against the security forces, retaliation against
government spys and torturers, and kidnap-
pings for ransom. But the FPL in particular
sought to avoid the fate of guerrilla groups in
Latin America in the 1960s–their isolation
from the masses and ultimate destruction. So
it began a slow process of building roots
among peasants and farmworkers–slow
because the rural population was still
traumatized by the massacre of 1932.
Organizers helped peasants build wells and
roads to inaccessible villages. Their work con-
cided with the efforts of progressive
clergy-imbued with the message of
Medellin*–to organize rural cooperatives
and teach that injustice was sin. Similar forms
of work began in the cities- among students, slumdwellers and factory workers.
Between 1975 and 1977, three new
organizations emerged, linked to the
underground groups but carrying out open,
mass work among all the oppressed sectors of
the society. These were the People’s Revolu-
tionary Bloc (BPR), the Front for United
Popular Action (FAPU) and the People’s
Leagues (LP-28). Each represented a broad
spectrum of constituencies, united in a non-
electoral coalition.
*The Conference of Latin American Bishops, held in Medellin, Colombia in 1968, urged the Catholic Church actively to take up the struggle of the poor against the social and political systems which oppress them.
4factories ana starvation wages.
In rural areas, peasant and farmworker
unions were organized despite the official
ban. In the cities, trade unions were
dominated by the government, aided by the
AFL-CIO, or the Communist Party. The
popular organizations urged militant
disregard of the elaborate web of laws de-
signed to stifle the workers’ movement. They
said to hell with the procedures and organized
defacto strikes and sit-ins. Very soon, existing
locals were in the hands of BPR and FAPU
workers. New unions were being formed by
the BPR. And in the fall of 1979, FAPU won
control of one of the largest federations, in-
cluding unions controlling electrical power,
water supplies and railroads.
Political education was an integral part of
the experience. Each action was analyzed:
why it won or lost, why victory did not solve
the basic problem, and why revolutionary
to De a necessity. i ne
popular organizations focused on demands
that were rooted in the daily lives of the peo-
ple. But organizers never hid their ultimate
goal-socialism-and never ceased to draw
the connections between poverty and depen-
dent capitalism.
Government troops accelerated the educa-
tion process. Demonstrators were machine-
gunned by the Molina and Romero regimes,
while para-military squads, the largest being
ORDEN, roamed the countryside. But the
political-military organizations of the
left – FPL, ERP and the RN* – struck back,
eliminating an ORDEN member, kidnapping
a factory owner who used goons against strik-
ing workers, harassing the National Guard.
*The National Resistance (RN). one of the political- military organizations, was formed after a split in the ERP in 1975 (See El Salvador. Part I).NACLA Report
Through kidnappings and bank expropria-
tions, the revolutionary forces were able to
finance the revolution without involving out-
side interests. At the beginning of 1980, they
were thought to have a war chest of $70
million.
By 1979, the popular organizations had
eclipsed the electoral opposition; had mobil-
ized tens of thousands of people, including
new sectors such as market vendors, public
employees and white collar workers; had
brought the brutality of the Romero regime
to international attention. They did so by
achieving a set of goals that had proved
elusive to the Latin American left since the
1960s:
1. The insularity of each oppressed sector was
broken down to achieve a basic alliance
between peasants and workers, and a
broader alliance with marginal and middle
class sectors.
2. The isolation of the left was dissolved by
developing a firm base within the working
class and peasantry, through long years of
steady organizing and political education.
3. Immediate economic demands, relevant to
the daily lives of the masses, were pressed,
within the context of struggling for fun-
damental change in the political and
economic spheres.
4. Open mass work–vulnerable to extreme
repression–was combined with military
actions that served to demonstrate the
vulnerability of the oppressors themselves,
to deter potential collaborators with the
regime, and to prepare for the larger battle
ahead.
5. While maintaining different analyses and
conceptions of the strugggle, the popular
organizations were able to complement
each other’s efforts and move consistently
toward greater unity.
6. The building of large, popular organiza-
tions, that permeated every sector of the
oppressed and encouraged their active par-
ticipation in decisions, planted the
political and organizational seeds for a
system of popular democracy–before and
after the victory.