El Salvador in Crisis: Indigenous Conflict and Foreign Intervention

Tommie Sue Montgomery. Revolution in El Salvador: Origins and Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westvicw Press, 1982). p, 35.

Ibid, p. 38.

David Browning , El Salvador : Landscape and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 145.

Coffee increased from I per cent of tota ! exports in 1859 to 33 per cent in 1875. James Dunkerley , The Long War: Dictatorship and Revolution in El Salvador (London: Junction Books , 1982), p. 11.

Enrique Baloyra , El Salvador in Transition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 5.

Rafael Menjivar , 'El Salvador: The Smallest Link', in Revolutionary Strategy in El Salvador, 2nd ed. (London : Tricontinental Society. 1983). p. 4.

Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk. El Salvador: The Face of Revolution ( London: Pluto Press. 1982), p. 22. The price of coffee fell from $15.75 per 100 kilograms in 1928 to $5.97 by 1932.

David Browning, op. cit., p. 222.

Stephen Webre , José Napoleón Duarte and the Christian Democratic Party in Salvadoran Politics 1960-72 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. 11.

Harald Jung , 'Class Struggles in El Salvador, New Left Review (No. 122, July/August 1980), p. 5. The labour force was reduced from 310,097 in 1961 to 267,179 in 1975.

Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk , op. cit, p. 47. According to the Liisa North, manufactures as a percentage of total exports increased from 5.6 per cent in 1960 to 28.7 per cent in 1970. See Liisa North , Bitter Grounds: Roots of Revolt in El Salvador (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1981), p. 52.

These figures are taken from Liisa North, op. cit., p. 48. According to Philip Wheaton , Salvadoran peasants can still be categorised into three sectors by the nature of their labour, as 'colonatos', 'mini-tenant farmers', and 'squatter peasants' . Philip Wheaton , 'Agrarian Reform in El Salvador: A Program of Rural Pacification', in SCAAN, Revolution in Central America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983). p. 250.

Amongst all workers the manufacturing sector actually declined as a percentage of total labour, from 13 per cent in 1961 to around 10-1 per cent in 1975, partly due to capital intensive technology.

Harald Jung, op. cit., pp. 8-9.

Liisa North, op. cit., p. 55.

Enrique Baloyra, op. cit.. p. 10; and Liisa North, op. cit., p. 44.

For this analysis of the oligarchy 1 am indebted to that of Enrique Baloyra, op. cil.

Italo Lopez Vallecillos , 'Fuerzas Sociales y Cambio Social en El Salvador', Estudios Centros Americanos (Vol. 34, Nos. 369/370, July/August 1979), pp. 557-590, cited in Enrique Baloyra, op. cit.

A May Day demonstration attended by 80,000 people in San Salvador prompted the daily, La Patria, to remark that 'the shoemakers, railway workers, store employees, managers of the fincas, small landowners, everyone in short, except the aristocracy of the capital, is in the streets'. James Dunkerley, op. cit., p. 22.

Enrique Baloyra, op. cit., p. 9. In third place, with 32,788 votes, was the Republican Party of National Evolution (PREN) representing smaller landowners hard hit by the depression. PREN later endorsed Araujo's victory.

According to Thomas Anderson, the underlying causes of this insurrection were fairly obvious. 'When one combines all the reason for peasant discontent - the breakdown of the ejidos, the miserable treatment of colonos and hired hands, the social problems and dislocation caused by the coffee economy, the cultural hostility between campesino and landholder-and then when one adds to this the economic disaster of the depression, it is not hard to see the basis of the revolt of 1932'. Ejidos are a form of peasant communal lands: colonos are tied workers who exchange labour rent for use of a farming plot. Thomas Anderson , Matanza: El Salvador's Communist Revolt of 1932 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), p. 21.

Tommie Sue Montgomery, op. cit., p. 62. The significance of this is that the constitution of 1886 set up the 'coffee republic' and enshrined the dominance of the agrarian oligarchy and the partition of the countryside.

In the 1950 elections Osorio became President and PRUD won control of the new Constituent Assembly, thereafter promulgating the new constitution. In Harald Jung's view, PRUD 'aimed to establish a second pillar for the system alongside the bourgeois-military alliance, by reinforcing divisions between workers, peasants, and the marginalised population'. Harald Jung, op, cit., p. 12.

The PDC's Acción Comunitaria programmes, created while it held some 80 mayoral positions, had helped make it the largest, and a truly popular, opposition party.

Two parties representing the agrarian oligarchy, the PPS and FUDI jointly took 100,000 votes.

The rebel units were based in the San Carlos and El Zapote barracks in the capital and were defeated by the Air Force, the National Guard and other security forces.

Stephen Webre, op. cit., pp. 180-181.

But under the leadership of Joaquin Villalobos after 1977, it has organised the peasantry in Morazan province along lines similar to the FPL in Chaletenango, both areas of acute poverty.

Robert S. Leiken , 'The Salvadoran Left', in Robert S. Leiken (ed.). Central America: Anatomy of Conflict (New York; Pergamon Press, 1984), p. 12

For a fuller discussion of the 15 October 1979 coup see the article by Dermot Keogh in this issue.

Enrique Baloyra, op. cit., p. 176.

El Salvador Report (No. 6, May/June 1982), p. 1.

Robert Armstrong , 'El Salvador - Beyond Elections'. NACLA Report on the Americas (Vol. 16, No.2, March/April 1982), p. 18.

El Salvador News Bulletin (No. 19, March/April 1983), p. 2.

The Guardian. 29 March 1984, p. 5.

The International Herald Tribune, 30 March 1984, p. 3.

The International Herald Tribune, 17 May 1984 , p. 2.

The Guardian. 14 May 1984, p. 6.

The International Herald Tribune, 23 May 1984 , p. 5. By early 1983, El Salvador was already the third largest per capita recipient of US economic and military assistance, after Israel and Egypt. El Salvador News Bulletin, (No. 20, May/June 1983), p. 5.

The main proponent of negotiations in the FPL, Melida Montes ('Ana Maria'), was murdered three months later by comrades of Cayetano Carpio. Carpio chose suicide rather than have to admit publically his role in the assassination; his followers left the FPL and formed a terrorist sect, the Revolutionary Workers' Movement - Salvador Cayetano Carpio (MOR-SCC).

The Guardian. 9 May 1984, p. 8.

The Guardian, 8 May 1984, p. 5.

The New Internationalist (No. 130, December 1983), p. 11.