Stories of Civil War in El Salvador

A Battle over Memory

Erik Ching

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469628677
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

El Salvador's civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later. It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorizing and targeting of civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and the death and disappearance of more than 75, 000 people. Examining El Salvador's vibrant life-story literature written in the aftermath of this terrible conflict--including memoirs and testimonials--Erik Ching seeks to understand how the war has come to be remembered and rebattled by Salvadorans and what that means for their society today. Ching identifies four memory communities that dominate national postwar views: civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders, and working class and poor testimonialists. Pushing distinct and divergent stories, these groups are today engaged in what Ching terms a "narrative battle" for control over the memory of the war. Their ongoing publications in the marketplace of ideas tend to direct Salvadorans' attempts to negotiate the war's meaning and legacy, and Ching suggests that a more open, coordinated reconciliation process is needed in this postconflict society. In the meantime, El Salvador, fractured by conflicting interpretations of its national trauma, is hindered in dealing with the immediate problems posed by the nexus of neoliberalism, gang violence, and outmigration.

1 Setting the Stage

El Salvador’s Long Twentieth Century

In this chapter I set the stage for the rest of the book by offering a targeted overview of El Salvador’s long twentieth century, from the 1890s to the 2010s. I have chosen the content for this chapter purposefully, to introduce readers to the main players in the story and to provide the context for their actions. As an additional aid, an appendix appears at the end of the book with a list of these protagonists and brief biographical descriptions of them.

This chapter is divided into three sections: prewar, war, and postwar. The first section explains why El Salvador ended up in civil war in the 1980s. The second section charts the trajectory of the war and describes the overarching strategies of the opposing sides. The third section discusses El Salvador’s condition after the war, with a focus on political affairs. I offer the following caveat: what I say in this chapter makes no difference as to the claims in the rest of the book. My interpretation of El Salvador’s recent history could be totally wrong—and indeed some of the protagonists that appear in the following pages would find my version repugnant. Nevertheless, the fact remains that four distinct communities of memory exist in the medium of published life stories and their members narrate the civil war in mutually exclusive ways.

Prewar El Salvador

Salvadorans of all stripes, scholars and laypersons alike, have long been struggling to make sense of their civil war. A common point of departure for them is the relationship between structure and agency. Some analysts insist that El Salvador’s longstanding structural conditions caused the civil war in the 1980s. Such conditions include the country’s natural resource endowments, the legacy of Spanish colonialism, the evolution of the state and its historic construction, the ethnographic/demographic makeup of society, unpredictable changes in the international marketplace, and the actions of foreign governments, especially the United States. What defines each of these variables is that they reside mostly beyond Salvadorans’ control.

In contrast, other analysts emphasize the role of human agency, attributing the war and its causes to individuals or particular groups of people, whose actions and decisions were not determined by structural variables. Of these agency-oriented analysts, most lay blame for the war at the feet of El Salvador’s economic elites, its intransigent military officers and their collective alliance with Cold War hawks in the U.S. government. According to them, this unholy trinity of actors forestalled desperately needed reforms, employed terroristic violence against the masses, and refused to negotiate a nonviolent solution to the nation’s problems. Their actions forced people to take up arms in order to defend themselves.

A small portion of agency-oriented analysts offer a contrarian view. They instead find fault with the left, especially guerrilla leaders and their international allies, whom they accuse of voluntarily adopting a militant strategy that led to violent conflict.

Yet other analysts employ a hybrid approach that combines structure and agency. I subscribe to this latter approach. In the present chapter I contend that El Salvador had certain structural preconditions that made civil war likely because they constrained the range of options available to Salvadoran actors. But structure is not destiny, and ultimately Salvadorans had to decide how they were going to live their lives and organize their society within the parameters available to them. They were not destined to end up fighting one another in a civil war in the 1980s, but they would have had to make different and difficult decisions in the preceding years to avoid it. As for the competing versions of agency-oriented scholarship, I find more legitimate the side that assigns responsibility to the elites and their allies. Nevertheless, leftist militants were partisan actors in the drama, for better or worse, and there is plenty of blame to go around for El Salvador’s descent into war. The political scientist Bill Stanley shares this assessment, when he notes that “extremism on both sides helped start the war and moderation by both sides helped end it.”¹

The Problem

In the 1950s and 1960s El Salvador was standing on the edge of a precipice. Its economy was dependent on agriculture and most of the productive land was owned by a small handful of families. A 1961 agricultural census revealed that less than 1 percent of the landowners owned more than 50 percent of the arable land and that more than 80 percent of rural households owned less than four acres each. Notwithstanding some economic diversification in the form of industrialization in the 1960s, agriculture, mainly coffee, accounted for more than 90 percent of the nation’s extra-regional export earnings in 1970. Meanwhile, the population was growing quickly, with an estimated birthrate of 3 percent or more per year, and there was nowhere to put more people. El Salvador had no agricultural frontier, and so with few alternatives, except to join a growing rural proletariat, many people from rural areas migrated to the cities in hopes of finding one of the few industrial jobs, or they left the country. By 1969 as many as 300,000 of El Salvador’s roughly four million people were squatting across the border in Honduras, where land was more abundant.

Salvadorans faced a host of problems at home. Official statistics estimated the nation’s illiteracy rate in 1950 at 50 percent; it was higher in rural areas and probably much higher overall. Access to basic services, such as schools and health clinics was uneven at best. In 1951 less than one-half of all school-age children attended school, and only a small fraction of them went beyond the third grade; barely 5 percent of all children in school were at the secondary level, and they lived only in large urban areas. Rural workers faced stagnating pressures on their wages because of the overabundance of labor. Furthermore, El Salvador was heavily reliant on imported petroleum to satisfy its energy needs. So, in addition to being dependent upon fickle international markets for its agricultural commodities, El Salvador also had to endure the threat of rapidly rising oil prices. In short, El Salvador in the 1950s and 1960s was fraught with a series of fault lines that foretold major problems if nothing was done to alter the nation’s course.²

How did El Salvador end up in this situation? The short answer is coffee and the distinctly authoritarian manner in which Salvadorans built their coffee economy. Owing to a defining structural variable, its natural endowment of land, El Salvador boasts some of the best coffee-growing soils in the world. Despite its small size, El Salvador ended up as one of the world’s top five coffee producers, and its growers became some of the most efficient in the world, having had to get maximum product from minimally available land. Coffee is grown at elevation on the sides of El Salvador’s volcanic slopes. The country has three main coffee-growing highland areas. The main one is in the western part of the country, at the intersection of Sonsonate, Ahuachapán, and Santa Ana departments. The second one is in the center of the country, in and around the San Salvador volcano that serves as the backdrop to the nation’s capital city, San Salvador. The third region is on the opposite side of the country, at the intersection of Usulután and San Miguel departments.

When it became apparent to investors in the late nineteenth century that El Salvador possessed the potential to become a coffee producer, an intense competition for land ensued. Of the three areas suitable for coffee cultivation, only the eastern highlands in Usulután and San Miguel was akin to a frontier, meaning that it did not have large numbers of peasants already living there on communal landholdings. Getting that land into private hands was a relatively easy process of using government power to alienate the land and put it into the marketplace. The other two areas were more complicated. In those regions, large numbers of peasant communities resided on communal landholdings, some of which they had acquired from the Spanish crown in the 1500s. Moreover, a sizeable proportion of those peasant communities were comprised of indigenous peoples, which brought ethnic tension into play.

In what would end up as one of the most decisive periods in Salvadoran history, the government passed a series of land decrees in the early 1880s that effectively abolished all forms of communal landholding and ordered any and all such parcels of communal land to be divided into lots and transferred to private hands. This process of transference was not designed to cast all the peasant residents off the land and create a class of coffee barons on one side and landless laborers on the other. Rather, the law stipulated that the residents of the land were entitled to take ownership of the property they were utilizing, with the remaining fallow lands to be alienated and sold. Indeed, many thousands of peasant agriculturalists gained title to the lands they were farming at the time, and a new class of private smallholders came into existence.

Vestiges of this smallholding peasantry from the late nineteenth century can still be found in El Salvador today. But unfortunately for the long-term stability of El Salvador, the size of the parcels that each peasant household received was not large enough to sustain multiple generations of family members. Typically, the parcels were not more than ten acres in size, which is about the minimum amount of land necessary to sustain one family in subsistence agriculture. As families increased in size, and in the absence of available frontier land, younger generations of peasants had no choice but to leave their family land in search of work on the surrounding plantations. Either they had no access to land themselves because their fathers refused to divide the land among multiple heirs, or a young peasant received such a small portion of land as inheritance that he and his family had to leave the land in search of supplementary income. Invariably many of the peasant households sold their plots, usually to land speculators or members of the emergent coffee elite. Although it took longer than scholars had originally presumed, the privatization decrees of the 1880s ultimately resulted in land concentrating in the hands of a small number of elite families and a growing number of rural proletarians fulfilling their labor needs.³

Tiny El Salvador emerged as an important player in the global coffee trade, and it became more reliant upon a single commodity for economic survival than did most other Latin American countries. By the eve of the Great Depression, coffee accounted for 90 percent of El Salvador’s export earnings. The proceeds from coffee built family fortunes that would define Salvadoran society for decades to come. It was during the coffee boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the notorious Salvadoran oligarchy, the so-called “catorce” (fourteen families) was consolidated. Even though the number of families that qualified for membership in that select group actually numbered in the many dozens, the fact remains that the rewards from coffee went to a minute segment of the population whose members lived in an increasingly privileged and insular world.

The elites were distinguished from the masses not only by class, but also by ethnicity, especially in those regions of the country with high concentrations of Indians. In the face of racial and class distinctions, the emergent coffee elite relied increasingly upon coercive violence to maintain order and guide the system in its favor. Research by the historian Knut Walter reveals the scale of militarism in El Salvador in the early twentieth century. He shows that in the mid-1920s, in the important coffee-growing department of Ahuachapán in far western El Salvador, one out of every six adult men was involved in military service in one form or another, and much of their duties revolved around policing the local population rather than defending the nation from foreign attack.⁴ Therein, El Salvador was set on a path toward a highly unequal distribution of wealth and power, a system that I have dubbed “authoritarian El Salvador.”⁵

It was not all doom and gloom for those who envisioned a different El Salvador, one more egalitarian and democratic. For reasons too complex to delve into here, El Salvador experienced its first free and fair presidential election in 1931.⁶ It resulted in the victory of Arturo Araujo, a reform-minded landowner who admired the British Labour Party and who promised economic and social reforms. It is no surprise that a reformist movement occurred in El Salvador, because every country in Latin America experienced some form of reformist nationalism in the early twentieth century. What is distinct about El Salvador’s reformist moment is how long it took to emerge and how briefly it lasted once it arrived. Araujo was ousted by a military coup less than nine months after coming to office, and the man who became president after him, General Maximiliano Martínez, not only returned El Salvador to its authoritarian roots, but also presided over one of the most brutal episodes of state violence against a civilian population in modern Latin American history.

In late January 1932, peasants rose up in rebellion throughout western El Salvador. They attacked approximately one dozen municipalities, including the departmental capitals of Sonsonate and Ahuachapán. They targeted sites of local and state power, including military garrisons, government offices and the homes and businesses of local elites. In the process, they gained control over six towns, killed approximately one hundred people, and caused varying amounts of economic damage through looting and the destruction of buildings. The military was caught off guard by the rebellion, but it quickly regained control and ousted the rebels from the occupied towns after just two or three days. Over the next two weeks, once reinforcements arrived from San Salvador, the military embarked on a mass killing spree, murdering people indiscriminately throughout the western countryside. No one knows how many people died in what has come to be called “la Matanza” (the Massacre), but estimates range anywhere from many thousands to tens of thousands.⁷

There is still a lot that we do not know about the 1932 rebellion, such as who rebelled, how they organized themselves, and what, specifically, they hoped to accomplish. But we can make a few claims with some certainty. For many years, the emergent coffee economy had subjected the peasantry of western El Salvador to a steady degree of transformative pressures that undermined their material well-being and personal security. As the rural poor were enduring years of degradation, they suddenly confronted an acute crisis in the form of a global economic depression in 1929. Whatever else it may have been, the uprising of 1932 was a clarion call to the nation that the developmental paradigm being promoted by the coffee growers had negative consequences. And while it is far too teleological to trace the origins of the civil war in the 1980s back to the events of 1932, it is painfully obvious that the Salvadoran state’s willingness to kill thousands of its own people in defense of a hierarchical system set an ignoble precedent. Structural conditions may have preconditioned El Salvador to have social conflict in its western countryside in the early twentieth century, but ultimately human beings had to make the decision to murder thousands of their countrymen in two weeks’ time. The Salvadoran writer and political activist Roque Dalton captured the enduring legacy of the trauma of 1932 when he wrote, in his oft-cited poem “Todos” in the early 1970s, that “we were all born half dead in 1932. To be a Salvadoran is to be half dead.”⁸

The events of 1932 represent a transitional moment in Salvadoran history. They projected the authoritarianism of the past into the future, allowing the shaky Martínez reg...