El Salvador Civil War

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The El Salvador Civil War was predominantly fought between the Salvadoran military dictatorship and a unified leftist opposition guerrilla movement known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) between 1980 and 1992. The United States supported the right-wing government.^[1]

1 Prelude
2 1979 Coup
3 United States role
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Prelude

Origins of the war lie in the early 1970s. Salvadoran industry and economy was devastated by the Football War with Honduras in 1969. In such an impoverished climate, opposition parties and guerrilla armies formed to challenge the military regime of the time. The government stayed in power throughout the 1970s only through fraudulent elections, leading in 1977 to mass riots and suppression that left 7,000 people dead. In this unstable environment the United States government supported a coup d'état in 1979 that installed another right-wing military junta. However, criticism and unrest continued.

[edit] 1979 Coup

On October 15, 1979, the Revolutionary Government Junta (JRG), a group of military officers and civilian leaders, ousted the right-wing government of the President, General Carlos Humberto Romero (1977-79). The leader of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), José Napoleón Duarte, joined the junta in March 1980, leading the provisional government until the elections of March 1982. In an effort to project a more moderate image, the JRG initiated a land reform program and nationalized the banks and the marketing of coffee and sugar. PDC leaders including Duarte also pledged to end human rights abuses from the military and affiliated death squads.

However, the JRG was torn by internal divisions, institutional pressure from the military, and a continuing insurgency from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The extreme Right viewed moderates in the new government as Marxist sympathizers, and death squads linked to the junta continued to orchestrate a campaign of terror against armed and civilian opponents alike, targeting not only suspected FMLN sympathizers but local PDC leaders as well.

One of the most infamous death squad assassinations occurred when the Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, was murdered in 1980 after having publicly urged the U.S. government not to provide military support to the El Salvadoran government. Romero, the most high-profile critic of the military dictatorship was shot dead by agents of the government while officiating mass on March 24, and his funeral was the scene of a massacre by government snipers and bombers. Forty-two mourners were killed.

Post-war investigations found that Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, head of Military Intelligence at the time, had ordered Romero's assassination. Romero's death was a spark for a full scale civil war. The country's opposition united and in October of 1980, five anti-government organizations formed a major military resistance known as the FMLN.

The civil war quickly became very bloody and destructive. Infrastructure collapsed as the FMLN seized portions of the country and launched major unsuccessful offensives in January 1981 and again in April 1982.

The FMLN's first major military offensive was launched on January 10, 1981. During this offensive, the FMLN established operational control over large sections of the departments of Morazán and Chalatenango, which remained largely under guerrilla control throughout the rest of the civil war. Revolutionaries ranged from children to the elderly, both male and female, and most were trained in FMLN camps in the mountains and jungles of El Salvador to learn military techniques.

Government bombing and repression in the countryside killed thousands. Priests and nuns were among those targeted. In 1981 Mexico and France recognised the FMLN and called for settlement. However the United States under the Reagan administration opposed any left-wing influence in Latin America and massively increased its aid to the Salvadoran Army.

During the war several attempts were made at elections, but these were marred by paramilitary violence and/or FMLN boycott. In 1986 the aftermath of a strong earthquake brought three years of relative peace and negotiations. But in November 1989, the FMLN launched a new offensive, capturing parts of San Salvador. In response government forces bombed heavily populated areas of the capital.

By 1991, however, a new willingness towards co-operation was emerging. A truce was declared in April and negotiations concluded in January 1992. A new constitution was enacted, the Armed Forces regulated, a civilian police force established. The FMLN became a legal political party.

In total the civil war killed 75,000 people, left 8,000 more missing and a million homeless with another million exiled.

[edit] United States role

The role of the U.S. in shoring up the right-wing governments before and during the Civil War became tremendously controversial after the rape and murder of four American churchwomen by a National Guard death squad on December 2, 1980. Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel were American nuns, and Jean Donovan was a young laywoman doing a Catholic relief mission to provide food, shelter, transportation, medical care and burial to the poor. As such, like Archbishop Romero eight months earlier, they were targeted for assassination.

At that time, there were officially only 19 American soldiers in El Salvador, sent there in January of 1980 by President Jimmy Carter to "train" El Salvador's military.^[1] They would be joined in the early days of the Reagan Administration by 26 additional U.S. military "trainers." In addition, Salvadoran military were trained by the U.S. at the notorious School of the Americas.

The U.S. sponsored the Salvadoran government with a $7 billion (U.S.) ten-year aid package which began in the Carter years and continued through the admnistrations of Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush. After the murder of the churchwomen, Carter suspended the program for a time; but funding was soon resumed. Reagan's foreign policy favored the regime even more strongly, and the supply of money, men, and materiel increased.

The slaughter of the four women, all American citizens, brought U.S. aid to the repressive regime into the public eye, and much controversy ensued. A second mass murder of clergy on November 16, 1989, nine years after the assassination of Bishop Oscar Romero and the four American churchwomen, re-ignited the controversy in the U.S. over the American women's deaths and fueled public demands regarding U.S. support of the Salvadoran regime. The 1989 victims were six Jesuit priests — Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno, and Amado Lopez — their housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her daughter, Celia Marisela Ramos.

Long after the war, the families of the four churchwomen brought civil suit against two Salvadoran generals who had moved to Miami, Florida in the United States federal court there. The case was styled Ford v. Garcia. The jury did not find the generals, Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, former head of the National Guard and later Minister of Defense in the Duarte cabinet, and José Guillermo Garcia, responsible. The families lost again at the appellate level, and in 2003, the United States Supreme Court refused to take their final appeal.

A second case against the same two men in the same court was successful. The three plaintiffs in Ramagozo v. Garcia won a judgment over $54 million (U.S.) for the torture inflicted on them by the Salvadoran military during the civil war.