The indigenous Pipil called their land Cuzcatlan, meaning, “land of
richness.” It was a domain of abundant volcanic soil and lush
vegetation, blessed with a natural water system of lakes and rivers.
Individual or privatized ownership of land was unheard of and all
socio-economic life in Cuzcatlan was based on free access to land and
produce.
Cuzcatlan’s name and destiny were changed forever with the onslaught of
the Spanish invasion. From inception, El Salvador was characterized by
war and genocide as massacres, rapes, and plunder were used to dominate
and extinguish the Pipil, Lenca, and Pokoman. Their ‘land of richness’
was confiscated for use by the Spaniards. Proprietorship of land and
enslavement of human beings came to be the rule of the day, giving rise
to privatized estates and El Salvador’s first export commodity, indigo.
With independence from Spanish domination, progressive libertarians,
exemplified by Simón Bolívar, attempted to create a Central American
confederation. They envisioned an independent Central American republic
extending from Panama to Guatemala and functioning as a crossroads for
the world, linking Europe, America, and Asia. Francisco Morazan led a
succession of wars of liberation against the established oligarchy in
the first half of the nineteenth century in an attempt to construct an
economically self-sufficient modern federation. The goal was to create a
sovereign state, ruled as a federated republic rather than by an
economic elite. But the libertarians lacked any real economic base. The
primary power source was in land, and the land was owned by an oligarchy
intransigent in its opposition to the political ideas of liberalism.
When England and the United States combined forces with the reactionary
landowners to build the Panama Canal, the liberal vision of a modern
confederation disintegrated and Central America was divided into the
five quasi-republics that remain, to this day, economically dependent on
external powers. The ‘land of richness’ was well on its way to becoming
one of America’s worst civic and environmental catastrophes.
Privatization of land was proclaimed by law and the oligarchy, the
“fourteen families”, came to own all the best land which they turned
into plantations to grow coffee as a cash crop for export to foreign
markets. Communal property was outlawed, and landlords were authorized
to expropriate the peasant’s lands, condemning them to a life of
servitude. The society became one of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. This
situation was exacerbated by the U.S. adoption of an aggressive
counterrevolutionary foreign policy aimed towards turning the Central
American region into the United States’ “backyard”, a zone they aspired
to control economically, politically, and militarily. As stated in the
Monroe Doctrine, U.S. policy was to be, “Central America for the North
Americans.” All the root causes for the future conflicts in twentieth
century El Salvador were in place.
The worldwide depression in 1929 shattered the coffee-based economy of
El Salvador and in 1932 peasants and workers, who were being forced to
work at starvation wages, armed themselves with machetes and sticks and
rose up in rebellion against the plantation owners. The fledgling
Communist party, which was not originally involved in planning the
revolt, tried to help by channeling the mass uprising towards the
formation of a more progressive state. At this point, the oligarchy, led
by the Melendez-Quinones families, had the option of implementing
economic and democratic reforms. Instead they chose genocide. The
peasant uprising lasted for only a few days. Defeat came even without
intervention of U.S. marines who waited on ships just outside the port
of Acajutla in case the government troops required support in their
slaughter. In less than a month more than 30,000 Salvadoran peasants,
including women and children, were assassinated in cold blood by the
army and by paramilitary groups that had been organized and paid for by
the coffee barons. Farabundo Martí, Secretary General of the Salvadoran
Communist Party, was captured and executed. El Salvador became a
military dictatorship. Militarism was institutionalized by the armed
forces while the business stratum, the oligarchy, expanded and
diversified the plantation system and export economics, adding sugar and
cotton to the cash-crop enterprises. More and more peasants were driven
off their land as foreign trade and banking became privatized. U.S.
investors moved in and the gape between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’
widened.
Wage earners were paid less than a dollar a day and
vast numbers of Salvadorans were living at or below subsistence level.
The estates of the very rich, less than 2% of the population, were
encircled by high walls and well separated from the barrancas, the
gullies or ravines, where the poor were crowded together by the
thousands in shacks of cardboard and surrounded by garbage. There was no
healthcare available for the poor and very little food. More and more
people descended into a situation of unemployment and impoverishment and
became vulnerable to extreme exploitation. In the rural areas, 64% of
the land belonged to 4% of the population while somewhere around 60% of
rural families were either landless or were living on inadequate
allotments that did not provide sufficient food to feed them. Of course
the landed wealthy required labour at planting time and again for
harvest. But those times only added up to three months of the year. And
wages were low. The landless workers on the plantations were thus
sentenced to a life of grinding poverty. Those who escaped the
countryside and went to the cities in search of jobs did not fare any
better despite a growing manufacturing sector, a precursor of today’s
maquiladora system. Joblessness became a national crisis. Even the boost
in economic growth in the period after World War 11 did not improve the
lot of the vast majority of Salvadorans. The rich became richer but
there was only increased misery for everyone else. A social eruption
was looming.
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The U.S. government’s counterinsurgency package was welcomed by the
Salvadoran wealthy ruling class and the U.S. pretext of “containing
communism” in El Salvador was used to justify gross violations of human
rights by the armed forces. In fact, U.S. military aid became a major
contributing factor to the repression. CIA training and expertise led to
the formation of intelligence units that spawned paramilitary
death-squad entities like the Nationalist Democratic Organization ORDEN
and future politicians of the country such as Roberto D’Aubuisson.
Economic refugees from the rural areas of El Salvador flooded into the
squalid, and already over-crowded, barrios bajos of San Salvador. The
political left began organizing these migrants and the working poor with
the aim of raising the political consciousness of the popular classes.
A general strike against low wages and working conditions was staged in
1967. This was followed the next year by a teacher’s strike called by
the powerful Teachers Union ANDES 21 DE JUNIO. The teacher’s strike
signified that urban populations were also in readiness for political
organization and militancy.
The first revolutionary organizations of what would later become the
Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, the FMLN, emerged:
Fuerzas Populares de Liberación FPL, 1970; Ejercito Revolucionario del
Pueblo ERP, 1971; Fuerzas Armadas de Resistencia Nacional FARN, 1975;
Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores Centroamericanos PRTC, 1979;
Partido Comunista Salvadoreño PCS. The founders of the FMLN, finding
the electoral route to change blocked by fraud and repression, concluded
that only an integrated political and military struggle could defeat the
entrenched military dictatorship and oligarchic system. With this in
mind, the FMLN proceeded to establish “mass fronts”, whereby the
aggrieved sectors of the population could organize and demand economic
and political change concerning their own specific needs. They also
broadened their alliances to include marginalized people and the
politicized middle class. Newly radicalized organizations became the
political and military vanguard of the mass movement while the nucleus
of the future people’s army was incorporated.
As early as the mid-1970s, unprecedented numbers of Salvadorans were
creating and joining unregistered unions and forming their own mass
fronts. These were people who had never been granted political rights:
peasants, slum dwellers, the unemployed, farm workers, street peddlers,
and marginalized peoples, a vast percentage of who were women. Many of
the sectors that were already organized, especially teachers, students,
and industrial workers, also started joining these newly created
formations. The masses, the most cogent and volatile political force of
any country, were being mobilized in El Salvador. They demanded
betterment of working conditions, higher wages, and radical changes to
the intractable state. The government, led by Molina, answered with
repression. ORDEN was reactivated and the reactionary landowners
established new political organizations of their own, like the Growers
Front of the Eastern Region FARO, an organization that became, in 1981,
the Nationalist Republic Alliance party ARENA. The National Association
of Private Enterprise ANEP and the Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce, which
had previously been strictly economic institutions, took on a decidedly
political role and began financing and openly coordinating the formation
of the paramilitary death-squad entities: White Warriors Union UGB and
the Anti-Communist Armed Forces of Liberation-War of Elimination FALANGE.
The Romero administration came to power with a policy of mass arrests,
massacres, and widespread tortures of both the rural and urban
populations but the unconscionable overkill of the repression did not
succeed in incapacitating the popular movement. In fact, the excessive
repression led to an increase in membership of the mass popular fronts
and made armed struggle inevitable.
Marlie BURTON-ROCHE
(be continued)
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