El Salvador

The State of El Salvador developed around its capital, San Salvador. About fifty miles wide and less than two hundred miles in length along a volcanic chain paralleling the Pacific coast, it is the only state in Central America without a Caribbean shoreline. It is bounded on the south by the Pacific Ocean, on the west and northwest by Guatemala, on the north and east by Honduras, and on the southeast by the Gulf of Fonseca, which it shares with Honduras and Nicaragua. Much of the population lives in valleys at altitudes of between 2,000 and 3,000 feet above sea level. El Salvador's fertile valleys and coastal plain have determined much of its modern history, as agricultural exports have been responsible for both the enrichment of a small landed oligarchy and the impoverishment of the rural masses.

The smallest of the Central American states in area (8,124 square miles), its population of 6.82 million (2006 estimate) makes it the most densely populated country in Latin America (839.8 per square mile) and second only to neighboring Guatemala in total population among the states that formerly comprised the Kingdom of Guatemala. Its population grew especially during the twentieth century, when after rising at a rate of about 1.5 percent in the nineteenth century its annual growth rate increased to more than 3 percent in the twentieth century before moderating to 1.72 percent by 2006 (see Table 1).

THE COLONIAL PERIOD

Although Mayans inhabited El Salvador before its conquest by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524, Nahuatl peoples from Mexico were also important, and the aggressive and industrious Pipil have, at least in the country's mythology, been given credit for Salvadorans' greater tendency toward those traits than other Central Americans.

Throughout most of the colonial period San Salvador was part of the province of Guatemala, within the Kingdom of Guatemala in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. It was subdivided into alcaldías mayores centered on the towns of San Salvador, San Miguel, San Vicente, Santa Ana, and Sonsonate.

In the eighteenth century the rise of indigo production under the impetus of Bourbon economic policy brought changes to El Salvador that would lead to its emergence as a separate political unit. The establishment of the intendancy of San Salvador in 1786, although it remained within the Kingdom of Guatemala, marked the beginning of Salvadoran nationalism, a sentiment encouraged by several of its intendants, who defended and promoted Salvadoran economic interests. Smaller indigo planters chafed under the economic dominance of Guatemalan merchant capitalists, who financed the export trade, whereas the Salvadoran clergy objected both to the anticlericalism of the Bourbons and to the conservative ecclesiastical hierarchy in Guatemala City. They demanded a separate diocese for San Salvador, which remained under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Guatemala.

In Guatemala, earthquakes in 1773 had destroyed the capital city, Antigua Guatemala, resulting in a decision to move to a new site, present-day Guatemala City. Disruption of the kingdom's capital coincided with the rise of Salvadoran indigo as the leading agricultural export of the kingdom and caused many Salvadoran Creoles to favor, unsuccessfully, moving the capital to San Salvador, heightening their rivalry with Guatemala City.

These issues became more acute at the close of the colonial period when severe economic decline troubled the kingdom. Regional separatism and resentment toward conservative Guatemala made San Salvador a hotbed of liberalism in the nineteenth century. An abortive independence attempt in 1811, led by Father José Matías Delgado, reflected that sentiment but was crushed by military force from Guatemala under the command of a new intendant, José de Aycinena, scion of the most powerful Guatemalan merchant family. This defeat intensified Salvadoran resentment toward Guatemala.

INDEPENDENCE TO 1900

Independence from Spain came fairly suddenly on September 15, 1821, when a meeting of notables in Guatemala City endorsed Mexican Agustín de Iturbide's Plan of Iguala. Officials in San Salvador accepted and proclaimed the act on September 21, and on September 29, Salvadoran Creoles met and issued their own declaration of independence from Spain, but they resisted incorporation into Iturbide's Mexican Empire and sought to end El Salvador's subordination to Guatemala. In the resulting military conflict, San Salvador surrendered in 1823 after a long siege by a Mexican-Guatemalan force led by Vicente Filísola, but in the meantime the Mexican Empire itself collapsed. Salvadorans successfully led the movement to declare Central America independent of Mexico, and on July 1, 1823, El Salvador became an autonomous state in the United Provinces of the Center of America.

The deep animosities that developed during the independence process and the strong differences between the liberal and conservative approaches to national development plagued the administration of the new federal president, a Salvadoran military officer named Manuel José Arce, elected under the constitution of 1824. The takeover of the federal government by Guatemalan conservatives led to civil war from 1826 to 1829, principally between El Salvador and Guatemala, although Hondurans and Nicaraguans were also involved. Liberal victory, under the leadership of a Honduran general, Francisco Morazán, restored Salvadoran importance in the Central American federation, and San Salvador became its capital in 1835, after having first moved from Guatemala to Sonsonate in 1834.

The Pipil people of El Salvador, however, resisted development efforts, taxes, and reforms that threatened their lands and customs. Under the leadership of Anastasio Aquino, a violent Indian uprising threatened the stability of the government in 1833. Although Morazán's forces were able to suppress this uprising, it weakened the liberals considerably. On the heels of that revolt came a similar but successful peasant uprising in Guatemala that toppled the liberal government of that state and led to the collapse of the federation when the Guatemalan caudillo Rafael Carrera defeated Morazán decisively at Guatemala City in March 1840. Conservative strength in Nicaragua and Costa Rica sealed the fate of the federation as each of the individual states began to go its separate way. Carrera's iron rule in Guatemala from 1839 to 1865 influenced El Salvador through much of the mid-nineteenth century, curtailing the liberal and unionist strength there. El Salvador was the last of the Central American states to declare itself formally a separate, sovereign republic, in 1856.

The rise of General Gerardo Barrios Espinosa after 1858 marked liberal resurgence in El Salvador. Barrios had commanded the Salvadoran forces in the united Central American effort to drive the U.S. freebooter William Walker from Nicaragua (1856–1857). Upon his return to El Salvador from that campaign, Barrios failed in an 1857 attempt to unseat president Rafael Campo, but the following year he regained influence during the administration of Miguel Santín Castillo. He became acting chief of state in 1858 and again from 1859 to 1860 and president from 1861 to 1863. As president of El Salvador in 1861 he consolidated his political and military strength and began to initiate liberal economic and anticlerical reforms. The immediate result was an invasion by Rafael Carrera in 1863, which Barrios repulsed at Coatepeque on February 24 of that year, but Carrera returned later in the year to defeat Barrios and place the more conservative Francisco Dueñas in power (1863–1871). Nevertheless, many of the economic reforms begun by Barrios continued, and the process of liberalization once more accelerated under the rule of Santiago González (1871–1876) and Rafael Zaldívar (1876–1885).

Liberal Party dominance from 1871 to 1944 brought remarkable changes to El Salvador. Independence from Guatemalan intervention was achieved with the defeat of the invading army and the death of the Guatemalan liberal caudillo Justo Rufino Barrios at Chalchuapa in 1885. Barrios was trying to restore the Central American union under his military leadership, and although El Salvador had traditionally favored union, its antipathy toward Guatemala outweighed unionist sentiment.

The Salvadoran governments that followed concentrated on economic development as they facilitated the expansion of coffee exports by the planter elite at the expense of peasant land and labor. Indigo exports had continued to be important for El Salvador, but the development of aniline coal-tar dyes diminished their importance after 1860. The loose, volcanic soil in the tropical highlands of the country produced high-quality coffee and enabled a few planters to become dominant in economic and political affairs. Under their leadership, El Salvador became highly dependent on international markets for coffee. They modernized the transportation system and capital city, and gained control over more rural land for coffee production. In the early twentieth century this "coffee prosperity" gained El Salvador a reputation as the most progressive of the Central American states. It became the first nation in Central America to have paved highways. With new ports and railways, the city of San Salvador grew impressively in size and economic activity. A stronger military force maintained the liberal oligarchy, often referred to as the "fourteen families," although there were always more than that. Between 1913 and 1927 members of these families, notably the Meléndez and Quiñónez dynasty, presided over governments that were generally more stable than those in the neighboring states.

THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Spanish colonialism had left a heritage of a small elite ruling a servile mass, and feudal traditions persisted well into the twentieth century. The principal features of the Salvadoran social structure, however, are especially related to the rise of coffee cultivation and the emergence of a dominant oligarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Expansion into other agricultural exports, the rise of manufacturing, and the growth of the military officer corps, especially since 1950, expanded and diversified this elite to more than 250 families. Moreover, the modernization of the economy contributed to the growth in San Salvador of a significant middle class, which played a growing role in the intellectual, political, and cultural development of the country. The vast majority of the population, however, remained poor, uneducated, and lacking in economic opportunity. The widening gulf between urban modernization and rural backwardness, and between rich and poor, is perhaps nowhere so obvious in Latin America as in El Salvador. These serious social and economic inequities worsened in the late twentieth century as rapid population growth exceeded economic growth. Modernization sometimes obscured the growing social inequities that were aggravated by rapid population growth. While San Salvador became a modern urban center, rural poverty and malnutrition soared.

Challenges to the liberal oligarchy began to appear in the 1920s, especially as articulated by the Salvadoran intellectual leader Alberto Masferrer, whose ideas influenced the founding of the Labor Party in 1930. The Communist Party of El Salvador, organized in 1925, reflected more radical opposition, whose most outspoken representative was Agustín Farabundo Martí. The economic hardships occasioned by the international depression following 1929 intensified the problems and encouraged labor organization and agitation. Yet the 1930 victory of the Labor Party candidate, Arturo Araujo, a progressive member of the planter elite, came as a surprise to the oligarchy, who were unprepared to make concessions to social democracy, land reform, and improved health and education along the lines Masferrer had advocated. Following nearly a year of chaotic government and massive labor demonstrations, the army intervened and ousted Araújo in favor of his vice president, General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez of the Liberal Party, on December 2, 1931. Martí and the Communists led a rural revolt in January 1932, but in a struggle that essentially pitted peasant machetes against army machine guns, the result was the massacre of between 10,000 to 30,000 peasants, followed by repression and establishment of a military dictatorship that would last until 1944.

The 1932 massacre, known as La Matanza, was a watershed in Salvadoran history, for it marked the end of a period of relatively tolerant civilian oligarchic rule and the growth of labor organizations. The elite, frightened by the 1932 peasant uprising, became reactionary and relied on a repressive military to defend it from the masses, whose economic situation steadily deteriorated. Even after the end of Hernández Martínez's fascist-style dictatorship in 1944, the military continued to rule the country. The 1932 revolt also marked the end of identifiable indigenous communities and culture in most of El Salvador, for the massacre had especially concentrated on indigenous people. Culturally, the remaining Indians quickly adopted mestizo dress and lifestyles.

Whereas coffee continued to be the primary export of the country, after World War II there was considerable expansion of other agricultural exports, especially cotton, sugar, rice, and beef, as the planter class expanded its holdings along the Pacific coastal plain. This expansion of agricultural exports enriched the elite, but in a period when the population was expanding rapidly it also caused poverty among rural peasants who were forced off their land and into unemployment or jobs paying very low wages. Production of corn, beans, and other staples, forced onto the poorest land, could not keep pace with the expanding population, and in the latter half of the twentieth century, El Salvador became one of the most poorly nourished countries in the world.

Profits from agricultural exports and a growing awareness of the limitations of El Salvador's small area combined with its rapid population growth encouraged investment in manufacturing and service industries in San Salvador from the 1950s forward. The establishment of the Central American Common Market (CACM) in 1960 contributed notably to industrial expansion as trade among the Central American states rose through the following two decades and was especially beneficial to Salvadoran industry. While much of this development came from the same families who had developed agricultural exports, foreign investment and multinational corporations also became important to the Salvadoran economy for the first time.

THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY

Following the relatively peaceful overthrow of Hernández Martínez in 1944 by a combination of students, workers, and progressive military officers, a more open political climate returned to El Salvador. Although military men continued to head the government, there was greater tolerance for political parties and labor unions, and the urban middle class became politically active. New parties replaced the long monopoly of the Liberal Party, which now disappeared, having been discredited by its association with the Hernández Martínez dictatorship (1931–1944). The military-dominated Party of Democratic Revolutionary Unification (PRUD), with the support of the coffee elite, maintained power until 1961. Then the new but similar Party of National Conciliation (PCN), dominated by General Julio Rivera, replaced it and ruled until 1979.

Notable during this period, however, was the growth of broader-based popular parties, especially the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) and the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR). Under the dynamic leadership of a U.S.-trained civil engineer, José Napoleón Duarte, the PDC was effective in the 1960s in organizing students and workers and in gaining support from Catholic clergy and laypeople. Duarte won election as mayor of San Salvador in 1964, but the 1969 war with Honduras interrupted the Christian Democratic surge.

The Soccer War, so called because rioting between rival Honduran and Salvadoran fans at a June 1969 World Cup playoff match touched it off, had much more fundamental causes. Border disputes had occurred between the two states since colonial times, but more serious were the trade imbalances in their common market relations. Honduran imports exceeded exports and Salvadoran manufactured goods damaged Honduran infant industries. Most serious, however, was the basic social inequity and overpopulation in El Salvador, causing massive immigration into Honduras. The Salvadoran immigrants threatened Honduran jobs, wages, land, and businesses. Large Honduran landholders led a campaign against Salvadoran immigrants that gained widespread popular support among the Honduran working class, who felt threatened by the Salvadorans. A Honduran agrarian reform law of April 1968 displaced thousands of Salvadoran squatters and increased tensions that led up to the riots.

The war itself, which began on July 14, 1969, when Salvadoran troops invaded Honduras, was brief but costly. The Honduran air force inflicted serious damage to Salvadoran port installations at Acajutla and elsewhere. The Organization of American States (OAS) arranged a cease-fire on July 18 and Salvadoran troops withdrew on August 3, but a peace treaty was not finally agreed upon until 1980. The war was a setback to the Central American economic integration movement. In El Salvador it led to a resurgence of the military, which placed patriotism in support of the war effort ahead of the grim socioeconomic realities of the country.

Returning refugees from Honduras put an even greater strain on El Salvador's land-poor population, and there was widespread opposition to the government by 1972. An opposition coalition, the National Union of Opposition (UNO), with Duarte at the head of the ticket and Guillermo Ungo of the MNR as the vice presidential candidate, appeared to win a majority in the election of that year. Yet the government declared the PCN candidate, Arturo Molina, victorious and drove Duarte and Ungo into exile. Repressive, reactionary rule followed. El Salvador became notorious for human rights violations as the tide of civil disorder and dissent continued to rise.

CIVIL WAR IN THE 1980S

The Sandinista success in ending the Somoza dynasty in neighboring Nicaragua in July 1979 and rising popular opposition to the PCN government of Carlos Humberto Romero (1977–1979) prompted a military coup in October 1979 that sought conciliation with the opposition but was primarily concerned with preserving the power and prestige of the military. Continued military repression led to the resignation of nearly all the civilians on the junta, including Guillermo Ungo, precipitating a new crisis in January 1980. The PDC collaborated with the military to form a new junta, and Duarte became its chief later in the year. Under Duarte's leadership, and with strong U.S. backing, the government tried to restrain military repression and to begin socioeconomic reform, including an agrarian reform plan. But Duarte appeared to be ineffectual and the real power remained with the military chiefs. Political assassinations by the right, including those of outspoken Catholic archbishop Óscar Romero, several PDC leaders, and four U.S. Catholic churchwomen, were common in 1980 and 1981. On the left, guerrilla organizations, headed by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), launched a civil war against the government. A new political party, the National Republican Alliance (ARENA), consolidated right-wing opposition behind the leadership of the charismatic Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, who had been linked to death squad assassinations, including that of Archbishop Romero.

U.S. military aid to the government became an element of rising importance in the escalating civil war. With U.S. assistance, the junta held a free election for a constituent assembly in 1982. Leftist parties did not participate and the PDC won a plurality, but a coalition of the rightist ARENA and PCN held a commanding majority. The constituent assembly elected D'Aubuisson as its head, but U.S. pressure prevented his selection as provisional president of the country, and under the constitution that was drafted in 1983, Duarte won a decisive victory in the presidential election of 1984. During his five-year term, Duarte could not revive the sagging economy. As a signatory to the Central American Peace Accord of 1987 (the Arias Plan), he agreed to seek peace with the guerrilla forces but made little progress toward that end, and his country continued to be torn by violence and civil war. In June 1988 he entered a hospital in the United States for treatment of stomach cancer (he died in 1990).

The failure of the Christian Democrats to bring peace or economic recovery and widespread charges of corruption among Christian Democratic bureaucrats allowed the consolidated, neoliberal ARENA to win a decisive victory in 1989. An earthquake that destroyed much of San Salvador in 1986 had further eroded PDC strength. Under D'Aubuisson's leadership, ARENA skillfully organized rural and urban voters into a powerful political force, capitalizing on national exhaustion with the violence and fear of the extreme left. The inherent conservatism of a portion of the peasant class was successfully exploited, as D'Aubuisson's 1982 victory in congressional elections had reflected. Moreover, the close association of ARENA leaders with the military gave that party a significant advantage that helps to explain its success in rural areas. ARENA's 1989 presidential candidate—an affable sportsman named Alfredo Cristiani, who was much more acceptable to the U.S. Congress than the tainted D'Aubuisson—thus swept to victory. After tortuous negotiations, the government achieved a peace accord with the FMLN at the end of 1991, signed at Chapultepec, Mexico, on January 16, 1992. Demobilization of armed forces proceeded slowly and was marked by mutual distrust. Outside economic aid brought only limited recovery as the country gradually fell out of the limelight of international attention by the mid-1990s.

Christianity has long played an important role in El Salvador, the Land of the Savior. The strong anticlericalism that characterized the liberal period in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century El Salvador, however greatly weakened the Roman Catholic Church, removing it from its close relationship with the government and reducing the number of clergy in the country, thereby reducing its influence, especially in rural areas. In the mid-to-late twentieth century, though, a rejuvenated Catholic clergy once more became important in mobilizing the Salvadoran people for political change. They were a force in the Christian Democratic Party, but El Salvador was also a place where the theology of liberation was important in the radicalizing of political opinion. From parish priests through the hierarchy, the Catholic Church has played an important part in the struggle to curb the terrible violations of human rights that have afflicted El Salvador, and as a result has often been a victim, as in the murder of six prominent Jesuits at the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador on November 16, 1989. At the same time, as in Guatemala, there has been an astonishing increase in converts to Pentecostal Protestant sects in the country, as these groups gained among those who sought religion outside the framework of political controversy. In fact, Protestants have been important in building the more conservative, or apolitical, constituency that is reflected in ARENA's rise to power.

NEOLIBERALISM SINCE 1989

Since 1989 ARENA, committed to a strongly neoliberal agenda of free market reforms and expanded industry and agricultural exports, has dominated El Salvador. Under the Chapultepec Peace Accords of 1992, Cristiani reduced the Salvadoran army to half its former size, created a new civilian peace force, the National Civilian Police (PNC), and established an office to defend human rights in the country. The FMLN thereafter participated politically in elections as the leading opposition party to the ruling ARENA party. Peace came only slowly, however, as continued political violence characterized the decade of the 1990s.

A United Nations Truth Commission in 1993 reported that more than 96 percent of the human rights atrocities committed during the twelve-year civil war were carried out by the Salvadoran military or its paramilitary death squads. Especially notorious was the slaughter of more than a thousand peasants around the village of Mozote in 1981. The Truth Commission report recommended reforms in the military and judiciary and that those guilty of human rights violations be removed from office. The Salvadoran government resisted full implementation of these recommendations and the Assembly gave amnesty from criminal prosecution to most of those implicated in the report. The government did, however, remove many officials from office and in 1994 the Assembly completely replaced the Supreme Court of Justice with new justices. Officers implicated in the murder of six Jesuits at the University of Central America in 1989 went free, but they were discharged from active duty along with hundreds of others.

Armando Calderón Sol continued ARENA's rule of El Salvador from 1994 to 1999 as he presided over El Salvador's difficult recovery from the civil war. With considerable U.S. economic assistance the country had remarkable economic vitality by the end of the century, with substantial expansion of agricultural exports as well as light manufacturing, especially of clothing. By 1995 agriculture accounted for only 14 percent of El Salvador's gross domestic product (GDP), and it was down to 10.3 percent by 2005. Although coffee remained the country's largest export, it occupied a declining percentage of total exports in a more diversified economy. The government privatized banking and other government enterprises, including the pension system, as it pursued the neoliberal agenda. Yet despite considerable economic growth, the standard of living for most Salvadorans remained low as real wages declined amid serious inflation. Moreover, El Salvador continued to have a serious balance of payments deficit, which was only in part made up by remittances from the rising number of Salvadorans living in the United States to their relatives in El Salvador. Illicit drug traffic was another important source of revenue for the country, although its extent cannot be accurately calculated.

The unequal distribution of wealth and widespread poverty stimulated an alarming increase in violent crime in El Salvador. Gangs, such as Los Benedictos, and later Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13), were notorious for assassinations, kidnappings, and car thefts and were also involved in arms and drug trafficking with organized crime in Central America. Deportation of some of the gang members from the United States back to El Salvador contributed to the increased violence in the country. A United Nations report in 2001 ranked El Salvador 95th among 162 countries for human development on the basis of its poverty, low rate of tax collection, and meager spending on social programs. In the same year a series of devastating earthquakes added to the misery and dislocation in the country. Charges of corruption and misappropriation of funds clouded the massive international relief effort that followed.

In the early twenty-first century, ARENA presidents Francisco Flores Pérez (1999–2004) and Elías Antonio (Tony) Saca González (2004–) continued to promote diversification and pro-business, free market policies, although massive popular protests and strikes forced Flores to abandon plans to privatize the health-care system in 2000. Flores and Saca both cultivated close relations with the United States, where Salvadoran immigrants numbered more than 2.5 million. El Salvador was one of only four Latin American nations to join the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq and by 2006 it was the only one of them that continued to maintain troops there. Saca took the lead in organizing the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), together with the United States and the other Central American states and the Dominican Republic. Despite widespread popular protest against CAFTA, Saca and ARENA believed that it would significantly increase Salvadoran exports. El Salvador also signed separate free trade agreements with Chile, Mexico, and Panama, with negotiations underway for similar agreements with Canada and other American nations. El Salvador adopted the U.S. dollar as its national currency in 2001.

Crime remained a problem for El Salvador as Saca's government faced alarming increases in crime and gang violence, with the murder rate rising from 37 per 100,000 people in 2002 to 45 per 100,000 by 2005. The gangs Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha became especially deadly as unemployment and the U.S. deportation of Salvadoran gang members provided a steady increase in new recruits for these gangs. Saca's hard-line police methods, with U.S. assistance, brought criticism from human rights advocates, as the PNC reportedly ignored paramilitary death squads that targeted gang leaders.

See alsoAlvarado y Mesía, Pedro de; Araujo, Arturo; Arce, Manuel José; Carrera, José Rafael; Central America; Central American Common Market (CACM); Coffee Industry; Cristiani, Alfredo; d'Aubuisson, Roberto; Delgado, José Matías; Duarte Fuentes, José Napoleón; Filísola, Vicente; Gangs; Hernández Martínez, Maximiliano; Income Distribution; Martí, Agustín Farabundo; Masferrer, Alberto; Maya, The; Morazán, Francisco; Nahuatl; North American Free Trade Agreement; Pipiles; Romero, Carlos Humberto; Truth Commissions; Ungo, Guillermo Manuel; United States-Latin American Relations.

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                             Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.