Page 44 - The MoMA/ Guggenheim issue of World of Art magazine (2003)

ThE TERROR
ThE TERROR PROjECT
PROjECT

Wage earners were paid less than a dollar Economic refugees from the rural areas of El Salvador flooded into the squalid,
a day and vast numbers of Salvadorans and already over-crowded, barrios bajos of San Salvador. The political left began
were living at or below subsistence level. organizing these migrants and the working poor with the aim of raising the
The estates of the very rich, less than 2% political consciousness of the popular classes. A general strike against low wages
of the population, were encircled by high and working conditions was staged in 1967. This was followed the next year by
walls and well separated from the barrancas, a teacher’s strike called by the powerful Teachers Union ANDES 21 DE jUNIO.
the gullies or ravines, where the poor were The teacher’s strike signified that urban populations were also in readiness for
crowded together by the thousands in shacks political organization and militancy.
of cardboard and surrounded by garbage.
There was no healthcare available for the The first revolutionary organizations of what would later become the Frente
poor and very little food. More and more Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, the FMLN, emerged: Fuerzas
people descended into a situation of Populares de Liberación FPL, 1970; Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo ERP, 1971;
unemployment and impoverishment and Fuerzas Armadas de Resistencia Nacional FARN, 1975; Partido Revolucionario de
became vulnerable to extreme exploitation. los Trabajadores Centroamericanos PRTC, 1979; Partido Comunista Salvadoreño
In the rural areas, 64% of the land belonged PCS. The founders of the FMLN, finding the electoral route to change blocked
to 4% of the population while somewhere by fraud and repression, concluded that only an integrated political and military
around 60% of rural families were either struggle could defeat the entrenched military dictatorship and oligarchic system.
landless or were living on inadequate With this in mind, the FMLN proceeded to establish “mass fronts”, whereby the
allotments that did not provide sufficient aggrieved sectors of the population could organize and demand economic and
food to feed them. Of course the landed political change concerning their own specific needs. They also broadened their
wealthy required labour at planting time alliances to include marginalized people and the politicized middle class. Newly
and again for harvest. But those times only radicalized organizations became the political and military vanguard of the mass
added up to three months of the year. And movement while the nucleus of the future people’s army was incorporated.
wages were low. The landless workers on
the plantations were thus sentenced to a As early as the mid-1970s, unprecedented numbers of Salvadorans were creating
life of grinding poverty. Those who escaped and joining unregistered unions and forming their own mass fronts. These were
the countryside and went to the cities in people who had never been granted political rights: peasants, slum dwellers,
search of jobs did not fare any better despite the unemployed, farm workers, street peddlers, and marginalized peoples, a
a growing manufacturing sector, a precursor vast percentage of who were women. Many of the sectors that were already
of today’s maquiladora system. joblessness organized, especially teachers, students, and industrial workers, also started
became a national crisis. Even the boost in joining these newly created formations. The masses, the most cogent and
economic growth in the period after World volatile political force of any country, were being mobilized in El Salvador.
War 11 did not improve the lot of the vast They demanded betterment of working conditions, higher wages, and radical
majority of Salvadorans. The rich became changes to the intractable state. The government, led by Molina, answered with
richer but there was only increased misery repression. ORDEN was reactivated and the reactionary landowners established
for everyone else. A social eruption was new political organizations of their own, like the Growers Front of the Eastern
looming. Region FARO, an organization that became, in 1981, the Nationalist Republic
Alliance party ARENA. The National Association of Private Enterprise ANEP and
The U.S. government’s counterinsurgency the Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce, which had previously been strictly
package was welcomed by the Salvadoran economic institutions, took on a decidedly political role and began financing
wealthy ruling class and the U.S. pretext of and openly coordinating the formation of the paramilitary death-squad entities:
“containing communism” in El Salvador was White Warriors Union UGB and the Anti-Communist Armed Forces of Liberation-
used to justify gross violations of human rights War of Elimination FALANGE. The Romero administration came to power with
by the armed forces. In fact, U.S. military aid a policy of mass arrests, massacres, and widespread tortures of both the rural
became a major contributing factor to the and urban populations but the unconscionable overkill of the repression did
repression. CIA training and expertise led not succeed in incapacitating the popular movement. In fact, the excessive
to the formation of intelligence units that repression led to an increase in membership of the mass popular fronts and
spawned paramilitary death-squad entities made armed struggle inevitable.
like the Nationalist Democratic Organization
ORDEN and future politicians of the country
such as Roberto D’Aubuisson. be continued

42 WORLD of ART