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The Salvadoran Civil War (1980–1992) was a conflict in El Salvador. It was between the military-led government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition or umbrella organization of five extreme far-left-wing militias. Significant tensions and violence had already existed, before the civil war's full outbreak, over the course of the 1970s.
The United States supported the Salvadoran military government.[2][3][4] The conflict ended in the early 1990s. Some 75,000 people were killed.[citation needed]
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The FMLN insurgency originated in the 1960s, when reformers challenged the alliance of the military and the landed oligarchy.[citation needed] Because of the fraudulent presidential elections in 1972 and 1977, and long-standing landed-oligarchy/military repression of alternative political parties focusing on social and economic reforms, leftist political groups organized huge demonstrations demanding fair elections and improved social conditions. The government fought back violently to maintain power. Most Salvadorans were campesinos, peasants living at subsistence level without running water or electricity, while a tiny privileged minority lived in wealth and opulence.[citation needed] In 1976, the régime's token land reform did little to alleviate the economic inequity. The government replied to the consequent political unrest with state-of-siege declarations, the suspension of constitutional rights, and paramilitary death squads. These actions further alienated the population and prompted many in the Catholic Church to denounce the government violence. [5]
On 15 October 1979, the civil-military Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno (Revolutionary Government Junta) — JRG — deposed President General Carlos Humberto Romero. Inspired by left-wing politics, and wishing to project a moderately-civilised Salvadorian world image, the JRG — Col. Adolfo Arnaldo Majano Ramo, Col. Jaime Abdul Gutiérrez Avendaño, Guillermo Ungo, Mario Antonio Andino, Román Mayorga Quirós — governed El Salvador from 1979 to 1982, effecting some land reform (Decree No. 43, 6-XII-1979) restricting landholdings to a hundred-hectare maximum, nationalised the banking, coffee, and sugar industries, and disbanded the paramilitary private death squad ORDEN.
In 1980, José Napoleón Duarte, the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) leader, joined the JRG as provisional-head-of-government until the March 1982 elections, yet, the JRG were internally divided, vacillating about how strongly to manage the FMLN's armed insurrection and the military's institutional pressure against the JRG's moderates, seen as Marxist sympathizers; U.S. ambassador Robert E. White summarises contemporary Salvadoran society:
The major, immediate threat to the existence of this government is the right-wing violence. In the city of San Salvador, the hired thugs of the extreme-right, some of them well-trained Cuban and Nicaraguan terrorists, kill moderate-left leaders and blow up government buildings. In the countryside, elements of the security forces torture and kill the campesinos, shoot up their houses and burn their crops. At least two hundred refugees, from the countryside, arrive daily in the capital city. This campaign of terror is radicalizing the rural areas, just as surely as Somoza's National Guard did in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, the command structure of the army and the security forces either tolerates or encourages this activity. These senior officers believe, or pretend to believe, that they are eliminating the guerillas. [6]
The government-backed death squad terrorists most infamous assassination was of a Catholic Archbishop: on 24 March 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero was shot while giving a mass — a month after publicly asking the U.S. Government to stop military aid to the Salvadoran Government, and the day after he called upon members of the Salvadoran soldiers and security force members (National Guard, Treasury Police, and National Police) not to follow orders of their commanders and shoot at Salvadoran civilians. At his funeral a week later, government-sponsored snipers at the posted on the periphery of the Gerardo Barrios Plaza in front of the National Cathedral, were responsible for the massacre of some forty-two mourners.
On 7 May 1980, former Army Major Roberto D'Aubuisson was arrested with a group of civilians and soldiers at a farm. The raiders found documents connecting him and the civilians as organizers and financiers of the death squad who killed Archbishop Romero, and of plotting a coup d’état against the JRG. Their arrest provoked right-wing terrorist threats and institutional pressures forcing the JRG to release Maj. D’Aubuisson. In 1993, a U.N. investigation confirmed that Maj. D'Aubuisson ordered Archbishop Romero assassinated.[7]
In May 1980, the Salvadoran guerrillas met in Havana, forming the consolidated politico-military command, the DRU — Dirección Revolucionaria Unificada (Unified Revolutionary Directorate). In October, they founded the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (comprising the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional [FMLN] and the Frente Democrático Revolucionario [FDR]) honouring insurgent hero Farabundo Martí, whom the Salvadoran National Guard killed in 1932.
In preparing for a mass insurrection against the U.S.-sponsored military government of El Salvador, the FMLN's feasible military victory was a two-pronged strategy of economic sabotage and a prolonged guerrilla war-of-attrition (per the principles of Ché Guevara, Mao Zedong, and the Vietnamese) fought with rural guerrillas and urban civil political support; thus, in the 1980–1982 period political violence increased when mass political groups metamorphosed into guerrillas. [5] On 10 January 1981, the FMLN's first, major attack established their control of most of Morazán and Chalatenango departments for the war's duration.
The civil war escalated in the early 1980s, and the the Salvadoran military's infrastructure was severely degraded when the FMLN captured much countryside, despite the failed January 1981, General Offensive.
Elections occurred during the civil war, but were interrupted with right-wing paramilitary attacks and FMLN-suggested boycotts. In 1986, a major earthquake punctuated the war; and for three years fighting lessened and calls for negotiation grew within the context of the rising social movement, The National Debate for Peace; also the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador-non governmental (CDHES) published a 165-page report documenting the routine use of forty types of torture applied to political prisoners in the Mariona men's prison, and that U.S. military advisors often supervised said interrogations.[citation needed]
Meanwhile, the JRG re-allowed political activity; on 28 March 1982, Salvadorans elected a new Constituent Assembly that, in turn, elected Álvaro Alfredo Magaña Borja as interim-president. In 1983, the Assembly drafted a new, national, political Constitution ostensibly strengthening civil rights, limiting “provisional detention” and unreasonable search-and-seizure, establishing a pluralistic, republican government, strengthening the legislature, guaranteeing judicial independence, and codifying labour rights — especially of agricultural workers; the FMLN thought them too little.
Despite the nominal reforms, El Salvador's human rights record registered only death squad terrorism. In 1984, Christian Democrat José Napoleón Duarte won the presidency (with 54% of votes) against Army Major Roberto d’Aubuisson, of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), becoming the first, freely-elected President of El Salvador in more than fifty years; fearful of a D’Aubuisson presidency, the CIA financed Duarte's campaign with some two million dollars, because, per U.S. ambassador Robert White, the "pathological killer" D’Aubuisson and his ARENA party were the death squads.[citation needed] In 1989, ARENA's Alfredo Cristiani became president with 54 per cent of the votes; his inauguration was the first, peaceful Salvadoran presidential succession.
On 26 October 1987, Herbert Ernesto Anaya, head of the CDHES, was assassinated. His killing provoked four days' of political protest — during which his cadaver was displayed before the U.S. embassy and then before the Salvadoran armed forces headquarters. The National Union of Salvadoran Workers said: Those who bear sole responsibility for this crime are José Napoleón Duarte, the U.S. embassy . . . and the high command of the armed forces.
Moreover, the FMLN and the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) also protested Mr Anaya's assassination by suspending negotiations with the Duarte Government on 29 October 1987. The same day, Reni Roldán resigned from the Commission of National Reconciliation, saying: The murder of Anaya, the disappearance of university labour leader Salvador Ubau, and other events do not seem to be isolated incidents. They are all part of an institutionalised pattern of conduct. Mr Anaya's assassination evoked international indignation: the West German Government, the West German Social Democratic Party, and the French Government asked President Duarte to clarify the circumstances of the crime. United Nations Secretary General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Americas Watch, Amnesty International, and other organisations protested against the assassination of the leader of the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador. [8]
In November 1989, the FMLN captured parts of San Salvador city, though they failed to take power. Eventually, by April 1991, negotiations resumed, resulting in a truce that successfully concluded in January 1992, bringing about the war's end.
On 16 January 1992, the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in Chapultepec, Mexico, to bring peace to El Salvador.[9] A new Constitution was promulgated, the Armed Forces regulated, a civilian police force established, the FMLN metamorphosed from a guerrilla army to a political party, and an amnesty law was legislated in 1993. [10]
The peace process set up under the Chapultepec Accords was monitored by the United Nations from 1991 until June 1997 when it closed its special monitoring mission in El Salvador.
At war's end, the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador registered more than 22,000 complaints of political violence in El Salvador, between January 1980 and July 1991 — 60 percent about summary killing, 25 percent about kidnapping, 20 percent about torture — most attribute almost 85 percent of the violence to State agents, private paramilitary groups, and the death squads. The Salvadoran armed forces were accused in 60 per cent of the complaints, the security forces in 25 percent, military escorts and civil defence units in 20 percent of complaints, and the death squads in more than 10 percent of complaints, and the FMLN in 5 percent of complaints. The Truth Commission were able to collect only a significant sample, having had only three months to collect it. [11]
The retrospective assessments of human rights organizations and truth commissions document and reiterate, the Salvadoran complaint that most violence done them was by the National Guard and other military bodies; [12][13][14] per Amnesty International's 1985 annual report: many of the 40,000 people killed in the preceding five years had been murdered, by government forces, who openly dumped mutilated corpses, in an apparent effort, to terrorize the population. [15] More than 70,000 people were killed, many in the course of gross violation of their human rights, more than 25 per cent of the populace was displaced as refugees, before the civil warriors signed a U.N. peace treaty in 1992. [16][17]
Despite mostly killing peasants, the Government readily killed any opponent they suspected of sympathy with the guerrillas — clergy (men and women), church lay workers, political activists, journalists, labour unionists (leaders, rank-and-file), medical workers, liberal students and teachers, and human-rights monitors. [18] The State's terrorism was effected by the security forces, the Army, the National Guard, and the Treasury Police; [19][20] yet it was the military death squads who gave the Government plausible deniability of, and accountability for, the political killings. Typically, a death squad dressed in civilian clothes and traveled in anonymous vehicles (dark windows, blank license plates); their terrorism comprised publishing future-victim death lists, delivering coffins to said future victims, and sending the target-person an invitation to his/her own funeral. [21][22] Cynthia Arnson, a Latin American-affairs writer for Human Rights Watch, says: the objective of death-squad-terror seemed not only elimination of opponents, but also, through torture and the gruesome disfiguration of bodies, the terrorization of the population. [23] In the mid-1980s, State terror against Salvadorans became open — indiscriminate bombing from military aeroplanes, planted mines, and the harassment of national and international medical personnel; all indicate, that, although death rates attributable to the death squads have declined in El Salvador since 1983, non-combatant victims of the civil war have increased dramatically. [24]
In addition, the FMLN continuously violated the human rights of many Salvadorans, and other individuals identified as right-wing supporters, military targets, pro-government politicians, intellectuals, public officials, and judges. These violations included kidnapping, bombings, rape, and killing. [11]
In accordance with the peace agreements, the constitution was amended to prohibit the military from playing an internal security role except under extraordinary circumstances. Demobilization of Salvadoran military forces generally proceeded on schedule throughout the process. The Treasury Police and National Guard were abolished, and military intelligence functions were transferred to civilian control. By 1993--9 months ahead of schedule--the military had cut personnel from a wartime high of 63,000 to the level of 32,000 required by the peace accords. By 1999, ESAF strength stood at less than 15,000, including uniformed and non-uniformed personnel, consisting of personnel in the army, navy, and air force. A purge of military officers accused of human rights abuses and corruption was completed in 1993 in compliance with the Ad Hoc Commission's recommendations.
The new civilian police force, created to replace the discredited public security forces, deployed its first officers in March 1993, and was present throughout the country by the end of 1994. As of 1999, the PNC had over 18,000 officers. The PNC faced many challenges in building a completely new police force. With common crime rising dramatically since the end of the war, over 500 PNC officers had been killed in the line of duty by late 1998. PNC officers also have arrested a number of their own in connection with various high-profile crimes, and a "purification" process to weed out unfit personnel from throughout for force was undertaken late in 2000.[25]
More than 35,000 eligible beneficiaries from among the former guerrillas and soldiers who fought the war received land under the Peace Accord-mandated land transfer program which ended in January 1997. The majority of them also have received agricultural credits. The international community, the Salvadoran Government, the former rebels, and the various financial institutions involved in the process continue to work closely together to deal with follow-on issues resulting from the program.
Beginning with the Carter Administration and continued by the Reagan and Bush administrations, the U.S. sent seven billion dollars of foreign and military aid to El Salvador in ten years. The silent-partner-role of the United States in the Salvadoran Civil War became public when a National Guard death squad raped and murdered four American nuns and a laywoman on December 2, 1980; Maryknoll missionary nuns Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, and Ursuline nun Dorothy Kazel, and laywoman Jean Donovan were on a Catholic relief mission providing food, shelter, transport, medical care, and burial to death squad victims. After the murders of the churchwomen, President Carter suspended all aid to El Salvador, but domestic U.S. right-wing political pressure forced him to reinstate it
Unlike President Carter, President Reagan favoured the Salvadoran military régime, and increased military aid and sent more U.S. military advisors. In El Salvador's Decade of Terror: Human Rights Since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero, Human Rights Watch reported: "During the Reagan years, in particular, not only did the United States fail to press for improvements . . . but, in an effort to maintain backing for U.S. policy, it misrepresented the record of the Salvadoran government, and smeared critics who challenged that record. In so doing, the Administration needlessly polarized the debate in the United States, and did a grave injustice to the thousands of civilian victims of Government terror in El Salvador." [26] Despite the El Mozote Massacre that year, Reagan continued certifying (per the 1974 amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act) that the Salvadoran government was progressing in respecting and guaranteeing the human rights of its people, and in reducing National Guard abuses against them.
Per the Carter Administration, officially, there were 19 U.S. advisors in El Salvador, sent in January 1980. [3] Early in Reagan's presidency, 26 other military advisors joined the first 19; moreover, the U.S. Army was training Salvadoran military at the School of the Americas, in Georgia. Investigations, including a report by four U.S. Army lieutenant colonels at the Harvard University JFK School of Government, reporting that the current number of U.S. military in El Salvador exceeded the maximum 55 allowed by Congress. In the New York Times, Congressman George Miller (Dem. Calif.) wrote: the [Reagan] Administration has evaded a 55-person cap on military personnel in El Salvador, by redefining 'military personnel'. According to the Army analysts' report, the number of American military service people exceeded 150 in 1987. [27]
In December 1983, the Reagan administration promised President Álvaro Magaña an additional US $100 million in military aid if his government took action against the death squads and dismissed from their official posts or transferred abroad at least eight armed forces officers and one civilian who had been identified as death squad leaders. Vice President George H.W. Bush personally visited San Salvador, however, to deliver the more decisive message that aid would be cut off if the abuses did not stop. The United States specifically asked for a halt to secret arrests by the three security forces and demonstrable progress in the court cases involving the murders of the churchwomen and the AIFLD advisers.
In response, senior Salvadoran officials and the armed forces leadership pledged a major crackdown on right-wing death squad activity and asked the United States for technical and investigative assistance in dealing with these groups. The Salvadoran Army also quietly dismissed or transferred abroad the officers whose names were on the United States list of suspects. In addition, the PN arrested a captain who had been linked to the murder of the two AIFLD advisers, but he was held on charges unrelated to the killings.
Despite these actions, the existence of the death squads remained a controversial issue in the United States in the mid 1980s . In congressional testimony in February 1984, former United States ambassador to El Salvador Robert E. White identified six wealthy Salvadoran landowners, then living in exile in Miami, as the principal financiers of the death squads. Critics of the Reagan administration's Salvadoran policy also alleged that the United States had indirectly supported the death squads. After a six-month investigation, however, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported in October 1984 that there was no evidence to support such allegations.
In 1984 and 1985, President José Napoleón Duarte demoted several military officers with alleged links to death squads. During the 1984-88 period, the civilian government and armed forces reiterated their opposition to death squad activity and their commitment to dealing with the problem. As a result, death squad killings declined sharply.
Death squad activities began to pick up, however, in late 1987 after the signing of the Central American Peace Agreement. The number of right-wing death squad killings reportedly continued to creep upward in 1988, with suspected right-wing death squads killed thirty-two civilians during the first half of 1988.
On 16 November 1989, a death squad summarily killed six Jesuit priests — Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Joaquín López y López, Juan Ramón Moreno, and Amado López — and their housekeepers (a mother and daughter, Elba Ramos and Celia Marisela Ramos). This mass-murder occurred nine years after Archbishop Romero's assassination.In the middle of the night, these six priests were drug from their beds to a garden behind where they lived. There, they were each shot in the head. The soldiers were sent to kill the priests because they were thought to be helping the guerilla party, which they secretly were. They were shot in the head as a literal symbol of blowing the brains out of the head of the guerilla’s heads. It was a harsh warning to the guerilla party.
As for the housekeeper and her daughter, they thought that staying with the priests would keep them safe, and spent the night in one of the rooms. They usually live in their own house, but were frightened and sought safety that the priests generously offered. If this had occurred any other night, they might still be alive today. The soldiers that were sent to kill the priests were told to not leave any witnesses, and, therefore, killed the mother and daughter. [28][29][30][31] American society, it, and the rape-murders of the American nuns, re-started public interrogation of the Reagan Government about the killings, demanding public explanation for of United States support of the Salvadoran military régime.
Defenders of President Reagan's Latin American foreign policy say that defending U.S. national security necessitated supporting such a military government, and that the FMLN's military efforts, including terrorism, seriously threatened the Salvadoran Government, and — by implication — the United States, itself. In a televised national address on May 9th, 1984, President Reagan stated: San Salvador is closer to Houston, Texas, than Houston is to Washington, D.C. Central America is America; it's at our doorstep, and it has become a stage for a bold attempt, by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Nicaragua, to install Communism by force throughout the hemisphere. [32]
The U.S. State Department supported the President's contentions, detailing the international Communist conspiracy connections among the Salvadoran FMLN, Sandinista Nicaragua, Communist Cuba, and the Soviet Union, in the White Paper: Communist Interference in El Salvador explaining that — in the Russo-American Cold War context — the U.S. sided as it did, because that was its viable middle-path in the Right-wing vs. Left-wing Salvadoran Civil War. Publicly, Reagan supported President Duarte's Government, because it worked with some success, to deal with the serious political and economic problems that most concern the people of El Salvador. [33]
In 2002, a BBC article about President George W. Bush's visit to El Salvador, on the 22nd anniversary of Archbishop Romero's assassination, reported that U.S. officials say that President [George H.W.] Bush's policies set the stage for peace, turning El Salvador into a democratic success story, but challenged his claim's validity, because of the thousands killed by a U.S.-sponsored military government directly aided by U.S. military advisors in training and supporting the death squad leaders. [34]
Groups seeking investigation or retribution for actions during the war have sought the involvement of other foreign courts. In 2008, the Spanish Association for Human Rights and a California organization called the Center for Justice and Accountability jointly filed a lawsuit in Spain against former President Cristiani and former defense minister Larios in the matter of the 1989 slaying of several Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter. The lawsuit accused Cristiani of a cover-up of the killings and Larios of participating in the meeting where the order to kill them was given; the groups asked the Spanish court to intervene on the principal of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity.[35]
Long after the war, in a U.S. Federal Court, in the case of Ford vs. García the families of the murdered Maryknoll nuns sued the two Salvadoran generals believed responsible for the killings, but lost; the jury found Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, ex-National Guard Leader and Duarte's defence minister, and Gen. José Guillermo Garcia, not responsible for the killings; the families appealed and lost, and, in 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear their final appeal. A second case, against the same generals, succeeded in the same Federal Court; the three plaintiffs in Ramagozo vs. García won a judgement exceeding US$54 million dollars compensation for having been tortured by the military during the Salvadoran Civil War.
In October, 2009 the two generals were put into deportation proceedings by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), at the urging of U.S. Senators Richard Durbin (Democrat) and Tom Coburn (Republican), according to the Center for Justice and Accountability.
   | Supply Line for a Junta - Supply Line for a Junta - TIME |
| | Questionnaire for the New York Times on Its Central America Coverage - Questionnaire for the New York Times on Its Central America Coverage |
| | "El Salvador: Policy of Deceit", - El Salvador: Policy of Deceit - The New York Times |
| | Labor Movement in El Salvador Part 3 - YouTube - labor movement in el salvador 3 |
| | Labor Movement in El Salvador Part 1 - YouTube - labor movement in el salvador 1 |
| | Labor Movement in El Salvador Part 2 - YouTube - labor movement in el salvador 2 |
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