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The coffee barons’ direct control of the presidency ultimately came to an end as a consequence of the Great Depression, which began in 1929. A coup installed Gen. Maximiliano Hernández Martínez as president in December 1931 and initiated a succession of military governments that controlled the country through 1979.
The persistence of military rule can be partly explained as a result of a two-day revolt by farmworkers in January 1932 that was organized by Augustín Farabundo Martí, head of the recently formed Salvadoran Communist Party. Hernández Martínez easily suppressed the rebellion and authorized the summary execution of at least 10,000 suspected participants. The uprising and its brutal repression, which is referred to as la matanza (“the slaughter”), were momentous events in the history of the country. The revolt demonstrated the value of the military dictatorship to the landed elite, which became convinced of the need for eternal vigilance against the menace of a communist revolution. It also eliminated the immediate threat from the left as well as most of the last vestiges of Indigenous culture.
Personally honest and austere, Hernández Martínez sought to emulate the fascist dictators of Europe, but he may be best known for his interest in the occult arts. His regime survived a coup in April 1944, but the following month a general strike launched by university students brought the country to a standstill and caused the dictator to resign from office. There was no real change, however, until 1948, when a revolt by young army officers installed a junta headed by Maj. Oscar Osorio. This “Majors’ Revolution” gave rise to policies and patterns of behavior that would have a central role in the practice of Salvadoran politics during the next 30 years.
Elected to a six-year term as president in 1950, Osorio organized the Revolutionary Party of Democratic Unification (Partido Revolucionario de Unificación Democrática; PRUD) and launched a variety of reform projects, such as the development of hydroelectric facilities and urban housing projects. He also extended collective bargaining rights to urban workers, but, for the most part, the reforms served to encourage economic growth and to benefit the middle class. Osorio’s successor, Lieut. Col. José María Lemus (1956–60), continued these programs, but there was no improvement in the living standards of workers. When faced with open discontent, Lemus resorted to repressive measures, and a military coup deposed him in October 1960.
A second coup, in January 1961, brought Lieut. Col. Julio Adalberto Rivera (1962–67) to power. PRUD was dismantled and replaced by the National Conciliation Party (Partido de Conciliación Nacional; PCN), which would control the national government for the next 18 years. Under the banner of the Alliance for Progress, Rivera advanced programs aimed at economic growth and diversification, which enabled El Salvador to take advantage of the increased trade opportunities offered by the recently formed Central American Common Market (CACM). A greater degree of political liberty seemed evident from the rise of the Christian Democratic Party (Partido Demócrata Cristiano; PDC) and the victory of its candidate, José Napoleón Duarte, in the 1964 mayoral election in the city of San Salvador. At the same time, the Rivera government oversaw the formation of the Democratic Nationalist Organization (Organización Democrática Nacionalista; ORDEN), a large, secretive, and predominantly rural paramilitary organization.
Col. Fidel Sánchez Hernández (1967–72) encountered difficulties as a result of the decline in world prices for coffee and cotton, but in 1969 the country’s attention was diverted from economic problems by the outbreak of what came to be known as the “Soccer War” with Honduras. This conflict broke out shortly after the two countries had played three bitterly contested matches in the World Cup competition, but the real causes for the war lay elsewhere.
In the first place, there was a long-standing dispute concerning the location of portions of the border between the two countries. Also, Hondurans resented the substantial trade advantage El Salvador held over them on the basis of the rules of the CACM. Most important was the problem raised by some 300,000 Salvadorans who had migrated to Honduras in search of land or jobs and who now found themselves threatened by an involuntary repatriation program begun by the Honduran government. Spurred by reports of the mistreatment of these refugees, the Salvadoran government opened hostilities on July 14, 1969. A cease-fire took effect on July 18, but El Salvador continued to force the action until the Organization of American States (OAS) threatened economic sanctions against the country on July 29. The brief war had cost several thousand lives, and a peace treaty between the two countries was not concluded until 1980.
Continuing economic troubles and the growing popularity of Duarte, the PDC candidate who headed a coalition slate, suggested that the military might lose control of the government in the 1972 elections. Members of ORDEN supervised voting in the outlying provinces, however, and managed to ensure the victory of the PCN’s Col. Arturo Armando Molina. An attempted coup afterward achieved little more than Duarte’s arrest and exile to Venezuela, where he resided until 1979.
During the period that encompassed the tenure of President Molina (1972–77) and that of his successor, Gen. Carlos Humberto Romero (1977–79), the country experienced more-frequent expressions of public discontent and growing abuses of human rights. The increasing opposition among Roman Catholic clergymen to the church’s traditional defense of the status quo provided one clear sign of widening concern about the problem of social injustice in El Salvador. This period also witnessed the formation of mass popular front organizations that expressed the grievances of groups of small farmers and labor unions by such means as strikes, demonstrations, and parades. By 1979 several separate guerrilla organizations were operating in El Salvador.
Apart from an agrarian-reform proposal that was offered (and quickly retracted) in 1976, the government had no response to this opposition other than tightening the screws of repression. Small farmers surely suffered the brunt of efforts to stifle dissent, but the most egregious example of government violence came in 1975 when at least a dozen university students were shot to death while protesting the use of public funds to hold the Miss Universe contest in El Salvador. The political situation steadily worsened until Romero was removed from office by a military coup in October 1979.
Civil war
Shortly after General Romero’s ouster, the country was plunged into a civil war that would last for the next 12 years. There were other significant consequences to be noted. Most obvious was the military’s loss of the monopoly it had held on the direct exercise of governmental authority for nearly 50 years. At the same time, there was a change in the relationship between the military and the country’s propertied elite. The latter group felt it could no longer rely entirely on the armed forces for protection and sought to broaden its base of support by the formation in 1981 of a new political organization, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista; Arena), led by retired major Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta.
In addition, the role of the United States, which previously had shown very little interest in the affairs of El Salvador, changed markedly with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president in January 1981. During the balance of the decade, the United States supplied El Salvador with financial aid amounting to $4 billion; assumed responsibility for the organization and training of elite military units; supported the war effort through the provision of sophisticated weaponry, particularly helicopters; and used its influence in a variety of ways to guide the political fortunes of the country.
The years following Romero’s downfall provided a kaleidoscopic array of events. The governing junta made up of civilians and army officers that had formed in October 1979 collapsed three months later when its civilian members resigned because of their failure to reach agreement on reforms and their inability to bring the military under control. Duarte returned from exile and became head of the second junta, which enacted a package of laws that included an agrarian-reform program. The reforms did not contribute to any reduction in the level of political violence, however. That was made clear in March 1980 when Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who had become a vehement critic of the military establishment, was assassinated while performing mass; it was further demonstrated at the end of the year when the military murdered three American nuns and a Roman Catholic lay worker.
By that time the guerrilla units had joined in a single organization, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional; FMLN), and announced the opening of a “final offensive” in January 1981. The offensive was by no means final, however, and the fortunes of the guerrilla army would ebb and flow throughout the balance of the decade. During that time the guerrillas initiated and survived hard-fought battles with government troops who were trained and supplied by the United States.
Elections held in 1982 enabled the formation of a constituent assembly that organized a provisional government and drafted a new constitution (the third since 1948), which was promulgated in December 1983. Duarte was elected president the following March. Although a meeting held with guerrilla leaders in the fall of 1984 raised hopes that Duarte could negotiate an end to the civil war, the talks led nowhere; furthermore, his presidency was plagued by misfortune. He made no progress in his efforts to achieve peace or advance social and economic reforms. At the end of his term, charges of widespread corruption in the government contributed to the victory of the Arena candidate, Alfredo Cristiani, in the 1989 presidential election. Duarte died of stomach cancer shortly after Cristiani’s inauguration.
Cristiani continued to enforce harsh strictures on dissent, but he also showed willingness to examine FMLN proposals for peace. In November 1989 the FMLN launched a major offensive on a number of urban centers in the country, including the capital city, San Salvador. The fierceness of the attack took the army by surprise, and it was only after weeks of intense fighting and indiscriminate aerial bombardment of San Salvador’s neighborhoods by the Salvadoran Air Force that the guerrilla units were forced to retreat from the city. In the course of the battle for San Salvador, the U.S.-trained Rapid Response Atlacatl Battalion killed six Jesuit priests and two housekeepers at the Central American University of José Simeón Cañas on November 16, 1989. Strong international pressure to prosecute the perpetrators of the crime and Cristiani’s loss of faith in the army’s capacity to defeat the FMLN strengthened the president’s commitment to reaching a negotiated settlement. UN-mediated peace negotiations began in the spring of 1990, and the two parties signed the Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico City on January 16, 1992. By that time more than 75,000 people (mostly noncombatants) had lost their lives, the economy was in shambles, and massive damage to the infrastructure was evident everywhere.
Philip F. Flemion