El Salvador, Relations with

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EL SALVADOR, RELATIONS WITH

EL SALVADOR, RELATIONS WITH. The smallest nation in Central America, El Salvador was slow in gaining its independence from Spain (1821), Mexico (1823), and the United Provinces of Central America. When it achieved full independence in 1841, the political and economic elite guarded their virtual fiefdom from foreign interventions. Until 1979, Salvadoran leaders achieved stability and autonomy through military rule and sensitivity to U.S. interests. The parameters of local social structures and politics, however, were established by the United States and the international economic system.

Beginning in the 1880s, coffee replaced indigo as the main Salvadoran export. Laws promoting large-scale coffee production forced peasants from communal lands and consolidated vast estates into elite hands, eventually resulting in 2 percent of the population controlling 60 percent of the land. The so-called Fourteen Families entrusted the military with the power to preserve an orderly labor force and plantation economy and formed an aristocracy controlling commerce, banking, transportation, and infrastructure.

The international economic system's collapse in 1929 sparked the country's first modern peasant rebellion, fore-shadowing the 1980s civil war. The depression crushed coffee prices and market demand, leading to reduced wages, high unemployment, and labor unrest. On May Day 1930, eighty thousand people marched on the capital of San Salvador, demanding government action. The government responded by imprisoning hundreds of opposition leaders and suppressing civil liberties. Agustin Farabundo Marti and other radical leaders continued to organize, but Marti's arrest and execution in January 1932 ignited a peasant uprising. General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez led the brutal matanza (massacre) to eradicate suspected rebels, killing thirty thousand peasants and beginning forty-seven years of military rule.

The military provided stability and order, which, following World War II, helped fuel modest industrial gains, urbanization, and the development of a small middle class. Eager to enter politics, the middle class backed reformist parties, the most important being the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), founded in 1960. Most Salvadorans, however, did not benefit from the improved economy and remained among the most malnourished peoples in the world. El Salvador was reliant on U.S. trade for basic foodstuffs and goods, and through John F. Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress, its dependence increased when the United States became the leading foreign investor. Closer U.S. relations brought Peace Corps volunteers, military assistance, hundreds of new light industries, and one of the highest economic growth rates in the hemisphere. However, the maldistribution of wealth and power persisted. Some Salvadorans felt compelled to take up arms in the 1960s to break the status quo. Escalating government repression caused greater polarization. The number of radicals and desperate workers increased following the brief 1969 "Soccer War" with Honduras, when one hundred thousand repatriated Salvadorans fueled demands for land reform. Jose Napoleon Duarte, the PDC candidate in 1972, was about to reap the political benefits of widespread discontent when the army resorted to blatant electoral fraud. The army sent Duarte into exile and set about destroying the PDC and its sympathizers.

On 15 October 1979, moderate military officers staged a coup, hoping to forestall revolution. Despite U.S. support, the reformers were without domestic allies, the army having eliminated the political center—notably the middle class and the Roman Catholic Church. The remaining opposition consisted of revolutionary groups determined to overthrow the system, the most important being the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. Paramilitary death squads targeted labor leaders, teachers, priests, students, and other presumed subversives. The

military reformers, unable to deliver land reform or liberalization, could not stop right-wing death squads and leftist guerrillas from escalating the violence. Within five months, conservative officers toppled the government. Without any viable moderate elements, the United States grudgingly supported the status quo. U.S. aid continued, notwithstanding the 24 March 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero by individuals associated with the government and the brutal murder of three North American nuns and a lay worker later that year. The Jimmy Carter administration quietly sent the Salvadoran army military advisers. Between 1979 and 1985, more than fifty thousand civilians were killed or "disappeared" in the conflict.

In 1981, the Ronald Reagan administration attempted to curtail "outside interference" and prevent another enemy beachhead in Central America by escalating U.S. aid. Although most informed observers recognized the conflict's indigenous origins, the Reagan administration maintained that the Soviet Union, along with local proxies Cuba and Nicaragua, was responsible. Military aid mushroomed from $82 million in 1982 to $196 million in 1984—with total U.S. aid reaching $2 million per day—while Reagan officials assured Americans of limited involvement. In 1982 and 1984, the Central Intelligence Agency channeled funds to "moderate" presidential candidate Duarte in hopes of finding the middle ground. The left boycotted the 1982 contest, and Roberto D'Aubuisson, the far-right candidate, prevailed in fraudulent elections supervised by the military. Two years later, the CIA succeeded in electing Duarte, but as president he could not control the military or implement necessary reforms. At decade's end, despite almost total U.S. subsidization, Salvadoran exports and per capita income were nearly half the 1979 levels, and maldistribution of land prevailed. The murders continued; particularly shocking was the November 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter by Salvadoran soldiers. In 1992, locked in a stalemated war, Salvadoran military and rebel leaders agreed to a settlement brokered by the United Nations, restoring order, but not justice, to the troubled land.