Civil War

Descent into Violence

After the Matanza silenced political opposition in 1932, the majority of the population in El Salvador continued to be marginalized and excluded from power. Wealthy coffee oligarchs – the “Fourteen Families” – and military officials continued to dominate the Government, and efforts by reformers – including middle-class professionals as well as landless peasants – were resisted.

In 1969, the four-day “Football War” between El Salvador and Honduras left 300,000 Salvadorans displaced and encouraged the government to ramp up military spending. Fraudulent elections in 1972 saw a military government returned to power: shortly afterwards, the “Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí”, a Communist group, started organizing low-level guerilla attacks in El Salvador.  Five years later, another fraudulent election saw General Carlos Humberto Romero elected President. When crowds gathered in the capital to protest, security forces opened fire, killing at least 200 civilians. Meanwhile, in the countryside the coffee oligarchs organized paramilitary squads to intimidate local communities and murder those suspected of sympathising with leftists.

A Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) soldier takes aim during a wartime “road advisory” near Suchitoto, El Salvador (1984). Credit: Mark Gary Smith, CC by SA 3.0

In 1979, a civil-military coup replaced General Romero with a more moderate junta, who attempted to enact some land reforms and nationalized the coffee industry. But the coffee oligarchs reacted with fury, deliberately sabotaging the process and instructing paramilitary death squads to assassinate opposition leaders, as El Salvador slid into violent and destructive civil war.

In September 1980, the five major leftist revolutionary organizations merged to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), organizing a guerilla army to overthrow the repressive military and restructure the economy for the benefit of the country’s poor majority. The government responded with a brutal counterinsurgency campaign, which included the use of death squads and indiscriminate bombings of civilian areas. Over the course of the next decade, an estimated 75,000 people were killed, the vast majority of whom were civilians.

Death of an Archibshop

Archibhop Oscar Romero in 1979. Public Domain

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the increasing political violence that marked the 1970s in El Salvador tipped into a full-scale, 12-year civil war. But many point to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero as a pivotal moment in the conflict.

Romero was a Catholic religious leader and activist in El Salvador during the 60s and 70s. Popular among El Salvador’s working classes, he freely spoke out for the rights of the country’s poor and oppressed through radio sermons and speeches.

In February of 1980, he wrote a letter to President Carter asking him to halt U.S military assistance to the Salvadoran government, warning that increased U.S. aid would “undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the political repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for their most basic human rights.”

“Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants. No one has to obey an immoral law. I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.”
— Archbishop Óscar Romero

On March 24, 1980, Romero was shot and killed while celebrating mass at a church in San Salvador. The assassination was widely believed to have been carried out by a death squad linked to the Salvadoran military, although the exact circumstances of the killing still remain unclear.

When 250,000 mourners gathered for his funeral, which became a protest against the government, snipers attacked the crowd. A BBC reporter captured the terror: “Tens of thousands of mourners…were filmed fleeing in terror as army gunners on the rooftops around the square opened fire…One person who was there told us he remembered the piles of shoes left behind by those who escaped with their lives.” 42 attendees were killed and over 200 wounded. The attack compounded the outrage sparked by Romero’s death, and served to further radicalize the population.

March to commemorate 30th anniversary of Archbishop Romero’s assassination. Credit: Jose CABEZAS/AFP/Getty Images, CC by SA-NC-2.0

The US: Funding the War

ERP combatants, Perquín 1990. Credit: Linda Hess Miller

El Salvador’s government did not fight the war alone. The United States provided significant funding and support during the course of the 12-year conflict. The Carter and Reagan administrations saw El Salvador as a Cold War battleground, and were anxious to prevent the ascendency of leftist rebel groups, who were viewed as Communist allies and a threat to U.S. national security and business interests. Cuba and Nicaragua had already fallen to Communist revolution: the U.S. was determined to stop revolution seeping further across the Americas.

Between 1979 and 1991, the U.S. provided El Salvador with over $6 billion of aid, including:

  • Weapons, ammunition, and training for the Salvadoran military and security forces, which were primarily responsible for the counterinsurgency campaign against the leftist rebel groups.

  • Direct finance to help the government pay for the war effort, including the salaries of military and security personnel.

  • Military advisors on counterinsurgency strategy and intelligence information on the rebel groups' activities, movements, and organization.

  • Diplomatic support, lobbying for the government in international organizations, such as the United Nations, and blocking efforts to impose sanctions on the government for human rights abuses.

U.S. intervention in El Salvador sustained the war effort and contributed to the escalation of violence and human rights abuses. The United Nations estimated that the FMLN guerrillas were responsible for 5% of the violence towards civilians during the war, while 85% were committed by the Salvadoran armed forces and death squads.

President Ronald Reagan During The State Visit of President Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador at His Arrival Ceremony on The South Lawn, 1987. Credit: White House Photographic Collection

1992: Ending the War

Despite multiple attempts through the 1980s to negotiate a ceasefire between government forces and the FMLN guerrillas, violence continued.  By 1990, El Salvador’s economy was decimated, with 75% of the population now living in poverty. The coffee elites, however, actually managed to increase their land holdings during this period of instability, so that economic inequality was was than before the war. It was only once the global political climate shifted in 1990 – when the end of the Cold War helped spark renewed American interest in fostering democratization – that peace negotiations in El Salvador were successful. On 16 January 1992, the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City, bringing the Civil War to an end. The Armed Forces were regulated, a civilian police force was established, and the FMLN metamorphosed from a guerrilla army to a political party.

Thirty years of formal peace have followed the Chapultepec Peace Accords, but the legacy of violence left deep scars and a weak state. When the United States started deporting Salvadoran thousand of gang members from jails in 1989, the gangs or maras started to gain power in El Salvador, often violently. By 2009, El Salvador suffered from the highest murder rate in the world. This violence, coupled with economic instability, helped to trigger another migrant crisis from 2015, with thousands of Salvadorans joining other Central Americans at the US southern border.

Text of the Peace Accord Statement between the El Salvador Government and the FMLN, 1992, Public Domain

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