history of El Salvador

history of El Salvador, a survey of important events and people in the history of El Salvador from the time of European settlement. Bounded by Honduras to the north and east, by the Pacific Ocean to the south, and by Guatemala to the northwest, El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America. Traditionally it was an agricultural country, heavily dependent upon coffee exports, but, by the end of the 20th century, the service sector had come to dominate the economy. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, El Salvador was engulfed in a civil war, which pitted a militarily and politically capable left-wing insurgency against the U.S.-backed Salvadoran Armed Forces and was caused by decades of repressive, military-dominated rule and profound social inequality. Following the United Nations-mediated 1992 peace accords, which contained fundamental provisions for El Salvador’s democratization (including the removal of the military from political affairs), the country began to recover from years of political and economic turmoil.

Early history

Before the Spanish arrived in Salvadoran territory in the 16th century, it was occupied by a complex of Indigenous peoples. Of these the Pocomam, Chortí, and Lenca, all related to the Maya, were the more ancient, but the Pipil, whose civilization resembled that of the Aztecs in Mexico, were predominant. Archaeological ruins dating from pre-Columbian times are Tazumal, Pampe, El Trapito, and San Andrés. Of several large towns founded by Indigenous people, Sonsonate and Ahuachapán still exist.

The colonial period in El Salvador

The Spanish conquest and colonization of El Salvador began in 1524 with the arrival of an expedition from Guatemala led by Pedro de Alvarado. Alvarado’s troops met determined opposition from a Nahua tribe, the Pipil, that occupied much of the region west of the Lempa River. However, superior tactics and armaments enabled the Spaniards to push on to the Pipil capital of Cuscatlán. Alvarado soon returned to Guatemala, but a second expedition, in 1525, founded a Spanish town called San Salvador near the site of Cuscatlán. Pipil warriors forced the Spanish settlers to withdraw, however, and the community would be resettled several times before it was permanently established in 1528.

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El Salvador: History

Thereafter, the town of San Salvador would serve as the capital of a province of the same name that included most of the eastern three-fourths of the territory of present-day El Salvador. The area to the west (comprising the present-day regions of Sonsonate, Santa Ana, and Ahuachapán), which the Pipil called Izalcos, was organized in 1558 as the autonomous province of Sonsonate and would not be incorporated as a part of El Salvador until 1823.

The lands that would form El Salvador became the agricultural heartland of the captaincy general of Guatemala. Although most of the inhabitants were obliged to depend on subsistence farming, the more fortunate Spaniards found wealth in the export of a variety of local products, all of which experienced periods of boom and bust. Cocoa was the most important source of wealth during the 16th century. Increased competition from other colonies led to a marked drop in revenue from cocoa by 1590, and the following century was clearly a period of stagnation for the region. Recovery in the 1700s came as a result of increased exports of indigo.

The indigo trade led to the development of a fairly sophisticated form of commercial agriculture and the creation of large estates operated by families whose members played a leading role in provincial affairs. For the Indigenous people, however, the indigo boom chiefly meant that an additional burden was placed on an already exhausted workforce.

Independent El Salvador

A variety of considerations caused the Salvadoran indigo planters to take a leading role in agitating for Central American independence. These included the hard times caused by a sharp decline in indigo production during the first decade of the 19th century, a long-held hostility toward Guatemalan merchants who controlled much of the economy of San Salvador, and the conviction that the province should be organized as a bishopric so that it need no longer depend upon the archbishop of Guatemala for pastoral services.

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In November 1811 the arrest of a member of one of the planter families ignited an uprising led by José Matías Delgado, the provincial vicar of San Salvador, and his nephew Manuel José Arce. The rebels held the government for nearly a month before Spain’s authority was restored by the captain general of Guatemala, whose measures seemed more conciliatory than repressive. A second, shorter uprising in 1814 had wider popular support, and it provoked a more severe response from the captain general, costing Arce more than four years in prison.

In 1821 the province endorsed Guatemala’s declaration of independence from Spain. The Salvadorans, however, opposed the Guatemalan decision to accept incorporation into Agustín de Iturbide’s Mexican empire, a stance that led to confrontations with Guatemalan and Mexican armies. Faced with defeat late in 1822, a Salvadoran congress sought adoption of a resolution providing for the province’s annexation to the United States, but this scheme was abandoned when Iturbide’s government collapsed in 1823. Meeting in June of that year in Guatemala City, a Central American constitutional convention chose Delgado as its president, appointed Arce as a member of the provisional executive triumvirate, and went on to draft a constitution, which was completed in 1824. The state thus created was now called the Federal Republic of Central America, having earlier been termed the United Provinces of Central America; in 1825 Arce became its first president.

Nationhood

The state of San Salvador (the modern-day name, El Salvador, was not used until 1841) played an important part in the affairs of the Central American federation. Not only was it the birthplace of the federation’s first president, but it was also there that a revolt was sparked against Arce in 1827, beginning the civil war in which Central American liberals and conservatives contested for control of the new country. This conflict, which caused the collapse of Arce’s presidency, ended in 1829 with the seizure of the federal government by Francisco Morazán, commander of the liberal army. Having cast their lot with Morazán, the Salvadorans became his most loyal allies and were rewarded in 1834 with the transfer of the federal capital to the city of San Salvador. The Salvadorans were so attached to the ideals of federation that the state did not assume sovereign powers until 1841, one year after the other four member states had already left the federation.

Sovereignty did not signal the arrival of peace and prosperity for El Salvador; if anything, the new country experienced increased civil strife and international conflict for several decades after 1841. From that year until 1863, just one chief of state could claim continuous service that ran two full years. During this time, El Salvador was involved in wars with neighboring countries that usually arose from attempts to meddle in their politics. Often El Salvador found that the final arbiter of its political affairs was Rafael Carrera, conservative dictator of Guatemala from 1839 until his death in 1865. In the midst of this turmoil, El Salvador secured the establishment of the long-sought bishopric and saw the beginnings of the coffee industry, which was advanced in part by the policies of Pres. Gerardo Barrios Espinosa (1861–63).

A coffee republic

The presidency of Francisco Dueñas (1863–71) pointed toward greater political stability for the country. Real change, however, came when his overthrow in 1871 marked the beginning of a 60-year period of rule by liberals, who focused on the pursuit of economic growth and domestic tranquility. Late in the 19th century, a substantial shift in the country’s economy became essential when the development of synthetic dyes severely reduced the income normally generated by the export of indigo. Salvadorans solved this problem by means of a “coffee revolution.” New lands had to be opened to cultivation, a step facilitated during the administration of Rafael Zaldívar (1876–85), who authorized the sale of the land of Indigenous people. These proceedings provoked uprisings by the Indigenous people, which were put down by a newly created rural mounted police force.

The coffee planters developed a highly efficient system of plantation enterprises and formed a closely knit elite that used its growing economic strength to ensure that the government served its interests. Among the small number of controlling families, just two—the Meléndez and Quiñónez families—monopolized the office of the president between 1913 and 1927.

Military dictatorships

The rule of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the revolt of Augustín Farabundo Martí, and la matanza

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.

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 believed that 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 rest 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 Óscar 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.

The postconflict era

The peace agreement officially ended the civil war and mandated a major reduction of the country’s armed forces, the dissolution and disarming of guerrilla units, the creation of a new civilian police force (Policía Nacional Civil; PNC), and the establishment of a commission to investigate human rights abuses of the Salvadoran Armed Forces and the FMLN during the war. The FMLN subsequently became a political party. Also in 1992, a century-old territorial dispute between El Salvador and Honduras was settled by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which awarded Honduras two-thirds of the land in the Gulf of Fonseca and ensured Honduras’s free passage to the Pacific Ocean. El Salvador unsuccessfully appealed this decision before the ICJ in 2002.

Armando Calderón Sol of Arena triumphed in the presidential election of 1994, and his party also won control of the National Assembly. Under Calderón’s leadership the government reduced the number of its troops and turned over public security to the new PNC; however, violent crime increased dramatically during the same period, most notably through assassinations and terrorism inflicted by right-wing death squads. Indeed, the administration’s most serious challenge was the marked increase in criminal violence, partly due to the large number of weapons still in the possession of many Salvadorans in the aftermath of the war.

Calderón’s government largely failed to deliver the land and agricultural credits that had been promised in the peace accords to former combatants in order to assist their transition back into civilian life, prompting violent protests by thousands of demobilized soldiers in January 1995. (The land transfer issue continued into the early 21st century.) At the same time, harsh living conditions, the impact of neoliberal economic adjustment policies, and the weak performance of state institutions (namely the judicial system and the PNC) further contributed to a climate of insecurity and fear.

Midway through its second term in office, Arena was shaken by corruption scandals and internal feuds, and it lost a considerable number of seats to the FMLN in the 1997 municipal and legislative elections. Under the leadership of former president Cristiani, the party chose Francisco Flores Pérez as its candidate for the presidential elections in March 1999. The FMLN, by contrast, experienced difficulties in selecting its candidate but finally settled on former guerrilla commander Facundo Guardado. Flores defeated Guardado, and Arena continued to hold control. Flores’s government faced formidable economic and social challenges, including recovery from severe hurricane damage in 1998 and a series of deadly earthquakes in 2001.

El Salvador in the 21st century

The FMLN in power, rise of the gangs, and mass emigration

During his tenure Flores modernized the economy, strengthened relations with the United States, and advocated for El Salvador’s entry into the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) with the United States (which officially went into effect for El Salvador on March 1, 2006).

Arena candidate Elias Antonio (Tony) Saca was elected president in 2004 following a bitter campaign with the FMLN, which early on was expected to emerge victorious. The two most pressing issues facing him upon taking office were the increase in the maras (Salvadoran street gangs involved in drug trafficking and kidnapping) and growing opposition to the sending of Salvadoran troops to fight in the Iraq War. Moreover, in the early 21st century, land reform had not been achieved—indeed, it had been resisted by the powerful landowning elite—and pervasive poverty was contributing to continued crime and violence in the country.

Markus Schultze-Kraft

In the 2009 presidential election, with some 60 percent of El Salvadorans voting, leftist Mauricio Funes of the FMLN claimed victory, and the former guerrilla group took power for the first time. The country remained divided both economically and politically. Conservatives worried that the FMLN would align too closely with Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez. Funes’s attempts to accelerate the process of post-civil war reconciliation included investigations and arrests of military personnel suspected of having violated human rights during that period. On January 16, 2012, the 20th anniversary of the signing of the peace treaty that ended the civil war, Funes became the first Salvadoran president to acknowledge the crimes against humanity committed by the government during the civil war, when he apologized for the 1981 massacre at El Mozote, in which 936 civilians were killed during an army counterinsurgency campaign.

Meanwhile, Funes also called on the army to assist police in combating the growing violence that was mostly attributable to two street gangs, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street Gang (Mara 18). In March 2012 mediation by Roman Catholic clerics led to a truce between the gangs that resulted in a significant decline in the country’s skyrocketing homicide rate. In 2013, however, the truce began to collapse and violence again escalated. Large numbers of Salvadorans continued as they had done for years to flee their country’s turmoil and poverty by trekking at great peril through Mexico to the United States. As in nearby Guatemala and Honduras, fear of gang activity was an important factor motivating families to send children north in the hope of entering the United States illegally. The arrival on the U.S.-Mexican border of tens of thousands of Central American minors in 2014 posed a significant challenge to both the United States and Salvador Sánchez Cerén—Funes’s vice president, a former guerrilla commander, who had been elected president in March of that year.

The “cool dictatorship” of Nayib Bukele

The image of slain archbishop Óscar Romero was everywhere in San Salvador on May 23, 2015, the day of his beatification by the Roman Catholic Church, as thousands filled the streets to celebrate the final step on the path to sainthood. Having spurned the offer by the country’s most powerful gangs to suspend attacks on police and military forces in 2014, the Sánchez Cerén government took a hard-line, mano dura (“iron fist”) approach to curtailing organized crime and gang violence. Eschewing negotiation, the government instead initiated an aggressive law enforcement offensive, including joint patrols by the police and military. In July 2016 Operation Check took aim at the financial holdings of the gangs, freezing bank accounts while making dozens of arrests (the Honduran government had taken similar steps against MS-13 in February). Moreover, in 2016 Attorney General Douglas Meléndez began arresting and prosecuting law enforcement officials who had allegedly committed crimes while facilitating the earlier gang truce. In the meantime, the country’s homicide rate once again climbed.

In August 2018 Sánchez Cerén’s government severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan and recognized China, following in the footsteps of Central American neighbor Panama, which took those actions in 2017. Sánchez Cerén told the nation that recognizing China would bring with it “extraordinary opportunities.” In 2018 El Salvador’s homicide rate declined for the third straight year—falling from 60.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017 to 50.3 per 100,000 inhabitants—but it remained among the highest in the world. In February 2019 Nayib Bukele, the 37-year-old former mayor of San Salvador, broke the three-decade-long stranglehold Arena and the FMLN had on presidential politics in El Salvador by winning election to the presidency as the candidate of the small GANA (Grand Alliance for National Unity) party. Running as a populist on an anti-corruption platform and campaigning widely on social media, Bukele took nearly 53 percent of the vote to outdistance businessman Carlos Calleja, the Arena candidate, and former foreign minister Hugo Martínez, the standard-bearer for the FMLN.

Once in office, Bukele sought to take a strong hand in the exercise of power, but a number of his initial efforts were blocked by the opposition-controlled legislature or stymied by Supreme Court rulings. The balance of power shifted in February 2021 when New Ideas (Nuevas Ideas), the party Bukele had helped found in 2017, and allied members of GANA captured 56 seats in elections for the 84-seat legislature. That two-thirds majority meant that Bukele had the legislative support he needed to replace both the country’s attorney general and five of the Supreme Court’s justices. With some of the checks on his power minimized, Bukele began to take an increasingly authoritarian approach to addressing some of El Salvador’s pressing problems.

Most notably, in March 2022 he initiated a crackdown on the country’s gangs that began with the imposition of a state of emergency that granted special powers to the police and suspended the right of association, the right to be informed of the reason for an arrest, and the right of access to a lawyer. Moreover, the government was free to open the mail or monitor the phone calls of anyone it suspected of gang activity. By February 2024 some 75,000 Salvadorans (more than 1 percent of the county’s total population) had been arrested and incarcerated. Most of them were ordered to be held for six months pending trial. In the process gang activity and the homicide rate plummeted, and, to the delight of much of the population, the shadow of violence and extortion was lifted from daily life in much of the country.

At the same time, however, both domestic and international organizations have protested the resulting violations of the civil and human rights of Salvadoran citizens, claiming that innocent people are being ensnared in the police raids, that families are being torn apart, and that prisoners are being abused. But even as many observers bemoan what they see as the erosion of the country’s democratic institutions, Bukele continues to characterize himself as the “world’s coolest dictator” and enjoys wide support from a public that seems to have largely given up on El Salvador’s traditional ruling parties. Although the constitution bans a president from serving consecutive terms, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court—which has come to be dominated by justices loyal to Bukele—ruled in September 2021 that he could stand for reelection. The final results of the February 2024 presidential election were initially stalled by tabulating complications, which some critics argued were a consequence of diminished civil liberties, but Bukele was quick to claim that he had won a landslide victory. When the official results were finally announced, he had far outdistanced his nearest opponent by capturing some 85 percent of the vote, compared with only about 6 percent for the FMLN candidate, Manuel Flores.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica