Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN)

The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional—FMLN) was the insurgent alliance in El Salvador during the civil war of the 1980s. It took its name from Agustín Farabundo Martí (1893–1932), an early leader of the Salvadoran Communist Party.

The FMLN was a unified command structure created in October 1980 to coordinate the military and political activities of five separate leftist guerrilla organizations. Its leaders were Marxist-Leninists seeking to make the front a vanguard revolutionary party governed by the principle of democratic centralism. However, the armed groups that made up the FMLN continued to maintain ties with their own political parties and mass movements, and doctrinal disputes were common, especially over revolutionary strategy and tactics.

The oldest and largest of the FMLN member movements, the Farabundo Martí Popular Liberation Forces (Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí—FPL), founded in 1970, advocated "prolonged popular warfare" inspired by the Vietnamese example, while the other groups favored insurrectionist tactics. The member groups also disagreed on the relative importance of political organizational activity. For example, the People's Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo—ERP), organized in 1972, emphasized the military struggle, while the National Resistance Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas de Resistencia Nacional—FARN), which had split from the ERP in 1975, stressed the cultivation of popular mass movements and attempts to penetrate the government's armed forces by appealing to disaffected offices. Such internal quarrels occasionally resulted in violence. In April 1983, for example, a debate within the FPL over strategy led to the brutal murder of Commander Mélida Anaya Montes (Ana María) and to the apparent suicide of the group's founder and leader, Salvador Cayetano Carpio (Marcial).

In spite of the failure of its final offensive, launched on 10 January 1981, the FMLN was able to survive as a fighting force, and in 1985 may have had some 8,000 combatants in the field, compared with the government's 50,000. Although never much larger than this and not always unified, the FMLN maintained a strong base of occupied territory in the northern provinces, especially Chalatenango and Morazán, from which it repeatedly struck at military and economic targets.

Although Cuban president Fidel Castro may have taken a personal role in bringing about the front's formation in 1980, Soviet and Cuban material support appears never to have been as significant as claimed by the United States. Support by the Sandinista regime in nearby Nicaragua was probably more important, but that government's electoral defeat in February 1990, along with the declining prestige of revolutionary socialist movements worldwide, left the FMLN increasingly isolated.

In May 1990, the FMLN entered into a series of United Nations-sponsored direct talks with the Salvadoran government aimed at achieving a cease-fire and reintegrating the insurgents into national political life. From the beginning, however, these discussions bogged down over guerrilla insistence on the reform of the government's armed forces. Demobilization began after the 1991 peace accord, and the FMLN began to move warily into the political arena.

Entry into electoral politics caused numerous splits and divisions within the FMLN. In 1995, five different offshoots came together under the FMLN banner. However, the party split between the Renovadores (Renovators) and the Coriente Revolucionario y Socialista (Revolutionary Socialist Current, CRS). The CRS, the more leftist faction, won the internal power struggle. Again in 2004, five FMLN representatives broke off and formed a new party called Frente Democratico Revolucionario (Democratic Revolutionary Front, FDR). Despite these divisions, the FMLN is one the largest political parties in El Salvador and won 39.7 percent of the popular vote in the 2006 legislative elections.

See alsoMartí, Agustín Farabundo .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Tommie Sue Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador: Origins and Evolution (1982).

James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Alegría, Claribel, and Darwin J. Flakoll. No me agarran viva: La mujer salvadoreña en lucha. México, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1983.

Alegría, Claribel, and Darwin J. Flakoll. On the Front Line: Guerrilla Poems of El Salvador. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1989.

McClintock, Cynthia. Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador's FMLN and Peru's Shining Path. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998.

Wood, Elisabeth Jean. Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Zamora, Rubén. La izquierda partidaria salvadoreña: Entre la identidad y el poder. San Salvador, El Salvador: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, 2003.

                                      Stephen Webre