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The Popular Revolutionary Block (BPR) brought together the following organizations:
The Christian Federation of Salvadoran Peasants (FECCAS)
The Union of Rural Workers (UTC)
ANDES 21 de Junio
Two student organizations, and one of the shantytown inhabitants.
Their leadership came from the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL).
The Popular Unified Action Front (FAPU)
Salvadoran National Workers Federation (FENASTRAS)
The February 28th Popular League (LP-28)
The Movement of Popular Liberation (MLP)
People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP)
The Nationalist Democratic Union (UDN) influenced by the Communist Party.
The Central American Revolutionary Workers Party (PRTC)
The Committee of Mothers and Families of the Disappeared and Political Prisoners of El Salvador (COMADRES)
El Salvador Timeline
Linea de Tiempo de El Salvador
Andrés Ignacio Menéndez 1944
Osmin Aguirre y Salinas 1944-1945
Salvador Castaneda Castro 1945-1948
Revolutionary Council of Government 1948-1950
Oscar Osorio 1950-1956
José María Lemus 1956-1960
Junta of Government 1960-1961
Civic-Military Directory 1961-1962
Rodolfo Cordón 1962
Julio Adalberto Rivera 1962-1967
Fidel Sánchez Hernández 1967-1972
Arturo Armando Molina 1972-1977
Carlos Humberto Romero 1977-1979
First Revolutionary Government Junta 1979-1980
Second Revolutionary Government Junta 1980
Third Revolutionary Government Junta 1980-1982
Álvaro Magaña 1982-1984
José Napoleón Duarte 1984-1989
Alfredo Cristiani 1989-1994
Armando Calderón Sol 1994-1999
Francisco Flores 1999-2004
Elías Antonio Saca 2004-2009
Mauricio Funes 2009-2014
Full name: Republica de El Salvador
Population: 6.2 million (UN, 2011)
Capital: San Salvador
14 Departmentos
Area: 21,041 sq km (8,124 sq miles)
Major language: Spanish
Major religion: Christianity
Life expectancy: 68 years (men), 77 years (women) (UN)
Monetary unit: US dollar & Salvadoran colon
Main exports: Offshore assembly exports, coffee, sugar, shrimp, textiles, chemicals, electricity
GNI per capita: US $3,480 (World Bank, 2011)
1800´s Independence from Spain / Independencia de España
In the Intendancy of San Salvador, many Creoles and other settlers wanted to separate control of the colony from the Guatemalan Captaincy General. This was largely due to economic and political reasons.
1859-63 - President Gerardo Barrios introduces coffee growing.
1870s and 1880s The concentration of land ownership was initiated with Liberal Reforms.
Ronald Reagan became fully involved in the civil war. The size and fire power of the Salvadoran Army grew enormously.
Araujo was the sole ruler of the country killed in the exercise of their functions.
Manuel E. Araujo, president of El Salvador from 1911 to 1913, tried to legislate in favor of the working class.
He decreed dispensation for work accidents, abolished imprisonment for debts and attempted to reform taxation. He was also in favor of the organization of artisans and workers.
September 15, 1821
After many years of internal fights, the Act of Independence of Central America was signed in Guatemala.
In January of 1981 the FMLN launched a military offensive with the objective of overthrowing the Governmental Junta. The FMLN did not achieve its goal but took military and political control of various zones in the northern part of the country: Chalatenango, Cabañas, San Vicente and Morazán.
The civil war had begun.
Young military officers, encouraged by one sector of the oligarchy, carried out a revolt on April 2, 1944. The dictator put down the revolt and executed the leaders.
Nevertheless, university students declared a strike on April 19, and many sectors followed their example. The country was practically paralyzed by this “strike of fallen arms”.
The assassination of a United States immigrant’s son accelerated the crisis. Martínez was obligated to renounce the Presidency.
US Congressman John Joseph Moakley was chosen to lead a congressional investigation into the 1989 murders of the Jesuit priests and the two women at the University.
During this time, the United States, fearing a leftist takeover, had been pouring funds into Salvadoran military operations, but when Moakley’s probe revealed that the murders had been directed from the upper levels of the Salvadoran armed forces, Congress cut off military funding.
About 200,000 people marched through the streets of San Salvador on January 22. Many access were blocked. Insecticide was sprayed on demonstrators. Sharpshooters dissolved what it was the largest political concentration of people in history. From that point on repression against people worsened.
Martinez was in power for 13 years. He proclaimed a law for long term debt payment and another for the liquidation of debts.
He also created the Central Reserve Bank and the Mortgage Bank, which attempted to make credits more accessible.
In short, Martinez sealed the alliance between the landowning oligarchy and the military.
Using a “scorched earth” strategy they carried out many massacres.
Some of the more known are the Sumpul River massacre in Chalatenango (May 1980) and the El Mozote massacre in Morazán (December 1981).
It started on November 11, 1989. The government decreed a state of siege and a curfew. The war even reached exclusive residential zones. The more radical right-wing sectors made repeated calls through a national emergency radio broadcast to assassinate those they considered to be at the “head” of the rebellion: the Jesuit priests.
The Air Force began to bomb populous working class neighborhoods on the periphery of the city.
The Honduran bourgeoisie was harmed by the Central American Common Market (MERCOMUN).
Guatemala and El Salvador were the most favored.
Salvadoran industries inundated the Honduran market with products.
There were old unresolved border disputes and an increase in Salvadoran immigration to Honduras were peasants demanded agrarian reform.
The Military Governments / El Gobierno Militar
There were 34 years of military dictatorship and repression, mixed with a few reform attempts and a certain degree of development, most of all in agriculture and industry, which in no way altered the economic power of the oligarchy
Thousands of women, children and old people came to the capital fleeing the horrors of persecution in the countryside. The Catholic Church opened its doors to assist them. Other people fled the country to Mesa Grande and Colomoncagua refugee camps in Honduras. In October of 1981 the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, UNHCR, reported that there were almost a million refugees and displaced people within and outside of the country.
On November 27, FDR’s leaders were assassinated while holding a meeting in the Externado San José religious high school.
While Latin America’s church committed itself to the “preferential option for the poor” in Columbia, 1968, the oligarchy felt secure with the new Archbishop of San Salvador.
Nevertheless, Monseñor Romero radically changed, becoming a defender of the poor and the oppresed.
In the 1970s president Molina started off his term by eliminating the autonomy of the National University. In July of 1972 security forces occupied the campus alleging that the National University had fallen into the hands of “communist mobs”. Many members of the University community were captured and sent into exile. This radicalized the student movement even more.
The uprising was smashed. Farabundo Martí and many other leaders were executed by a firing squad. Miguel Mármol survived a firing squad and escaped.
Thousand of peasants, including women and children, were massacred. The exact number of dead was never known, although some consider that it was 30,000.
The majority were victims of repressions since deaths caused by the rebels didn’t even reach 100.
The material authors were immediately executed but the intellectual authors were never taken to trail.
After a series of political maneuvers the Meléndez-Quiñónez family took over the government. The brothers Carlos and Jorge Meléndez and their brother-in-law Alfonso Quiñónez held the presidency between 1917 and 1927
On March 23, Romero made a call to the army to disobey when ordered to fire on defenseless people. The next day he was shot down with a bullet to his heart during mass. According to the Truth Commission Report, Roberto D’Aubuisson planned the assassination.
The Army and the security forces massacred part of the multitude that attended his burial.
Coffee prices plummeted. Coffee-growing families, accustomed to high profits, preferred not to harvest their coffee crop. This increased rural unemployment and provoked violent protests that took place mostly in the western part of the country.
Arturo Araujo obtained a great deal of popular support during the 1931 elections as a result of his promises of land expropriations. But, in order to win over the rich who had labeled him as a communist, he named General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez as both Vice-President and Minister of War.
Araujo could not manage the country’s critical situation and was overthrown by a coup d’état on December 2, 1931.
Hernández Martínez was named President.
By the end of 1931, some candidates of the Communist Party won during municipal and legislative elections but they were not allowed to take office and repression increased. The organized masses decided to take action, although some party leaders had doubts about supporting such a decision.
It was decided to carry out an uprising on January 22, 1932. The government found out about these plans ahead of time.
Farabundo Martí and other leaders were captured and the project fell apart. In spite of that there were uprisings in Santa Tecla, Colón, Armenia, Nahuizalco, Juayúa, Tacuba and Ahuachapán.
Many villages were taken over by rebels, but they were poorly armed and isolated from their companions in the cities. Nevertheless, the rebels, led by local leaders such as Feliciano Ama and Francisco Sánchez, were able to maintain control of some places for up to 3 days. However, when Martínez counterattacked with the whole force of his army, they were torn apart.
Father Rutilio Grande
Father Alonso Navarro
Father Ernesto Barrera
Father Octavio Ortíz,
Father Rafael Palacios
Father Cosme Spessotto
Father Alirio Napoleón Macías
Father Ernesto Abrego
Father Reyes Mónico
Father Marcial Serrano
Four North American Chuchwomen and hundreds of men and women catechists.
On June 19, 1985 there was an attack conducted by gunmen dressed as Salvadoran soldiers in the Zona Rosa nightclub area. In total twelve people were killed: four United States Marines, two United States businessmen, a Guatemalan, a Chilean, and four Salvadorans. A left-wing guerrilla group, the Central American Revolutionary Workers' Party (PRTC), and its terrorist arm the Mardoqueo Cruz Urban Commando (CMC) claimed responsibility for the attack.
In July, as part of the Combat Terrorism Act, the United States offered a reward of $100,000 U.S. dollars for information leading to the conviction of the attackers. By September the Salvadoran government had arrested four men, one of them was Americo Mauro Araujo, a high ranking Salvadoran Communist Party official. Another seven men who were involved in the attack were never found.
On November 16, a unit of the Atlacatl Battalion assassinated 6 Jesuit priests and their 2 employees in the Central America University: Father Ignacio Ellacuría, Father Segundo Montes, Father Ignacio Martín-Baró, Fahter Amando López, Father Joaquín López, Father Juan Ramón Moreno, Julia Elba Ramos and Celina Ramos.
1992 Peace Accords / Acuerdos de Paz
There was a strong international pressure to put an end to the war through negotiation.
New dialogue meetings with the mediation of the United Nations led to the signing of the Peace Accords in the city of Chapultepec, México on January 16, 1992.
As critics have noted, a legacy of colonization was a blocking of moves toward industrialization, which would have represented little gain for colonial powers. Independence from Spain
1823 Jul 1, The United Provinces of Central America or Federal Republic of Central América (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and San Salvador) gained independence from Mexico. The union dissolved by 1840 after a civil war in many regions.
1840 - El Salvador becomes fully independent following the dissolution of the United Provinces of Central America.
1700-1800
Cultivation of indigo followed and produced tremendous profits during the eighteenth century. Largely as a result of the importance of the indigo trade, the colonial capital of San Salvador eventually came to be considered the second city of the Captaincy General of Guatemala.
The Indigenous people kept working the lands for their “owners” and were submitted to abuse, servitude and diseases.
The 1970 World Cup play-offs between El Salvador and Honduras was a pretext for the so-called “hundred hour war” that began on June 4, 1969.
This conflict put an end to regional economic integration. In El Salvador the war created an exacerbated nationalism among the population, which was taken full advantage of by the military and the PCN.
The oligarchy distanced itself from Martínez when he intervened in economic matters and especially when the dictator wanted to perpetuate himself in power by abolishing the Constitution in 1939.
By 1941 the opposition’s discontent took force.
After that, a transitory government called for elections. Facing the eventual victory of Arturo Romero, the military, supported by the United States, carried out a coup d’état on October 20, 1944.
A close ally of Martínez, Colonel Osmín Aguirre was declared provisional President. He destroyed the National Workers’ Union (UNT), persecuted and expelled opposition political leaders and unleashed a new wave of repression.
He mediated innumerable conflicts, created an organism for the defense of human rights and, more than anything, in his innumerable visits to towns and villages in the Archdiocese, he sought out the poor.
His words became “the voice of the voiceless”
One month after the student massacre, in August of 1975 a paramilitary organization called the Liberation Armed Forces of Anti-communist Extermination War (FALANGE), published a series of menacing communiqués. The Death Squads became instruments of the State and the oligarchy in order to repress and eliminate political opposition. These groups functioned out of the army and security forces’ structures and were responsible for innumerable assassinations, disappearances and cases of torture.
This process intensified during the first 3 decades of the 20th century when many small landowners lost their land.
The coffe-growing oligarchy concentrated the land and power. They were known as the 14 families.
Since the coup d’etat that overthrew Carlos Humberto Romero in 1979, the PCN no longer served the interests the oligarchy. They turned to the services of a strongman in the shadows of the Death Squad structures: Roberto D’Aubuisson.
On September 29, 1981, the creation of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) political party was announced.
One month later the political military organizations announced the creation of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
1500-1700 Spanish Conquest / Conquista Española
1524 : Pedro de Alvarado, a lieutenant of Hernan Cortes entered El Salvador--or Cuscatlan, as it was known by the Pipil--in June 1524. The Spaniards were defeated in a major engagement shortly thereafter and were forced to withdraw to Guatemala.
Two subsequent expeditions were required--in 1525 and 1528--to bring the Pipil under Spanish control. The name of the supposed leader of the Indian resistance, Atlacatl, has been perpetuated and honored among the Salvadorans.
1540: Indigenous population was crushed by Spain and El
Salvador became a Spanish colony. El Salvador became
under control of the Captaincy General of Guatemala
The indigenous people were forced to abandon their believes
And lifestyle to adopt the “civilized” manners of the Spaniard
and become slaves/ workers of the land.
The National Guard used repressive tactics on University protests in Santa Ana in 1975. Students in San Salvador organized a protest march in solidarity with the students in Santa Ana on July 30th.
When the march of more than 2000 students started out towards the Plaza Libertad, it was brutally repressed on the bridge near the Social Security Institute. There were 27 students killed and many “disappeared”.
Meanwhile, the government tried to project a democratic image of the country by hosting the 1975 Miss Universe contest with the slogan: “El Salvador, the country of the smile”.
The Revolutionary Mass Coordinator (CRM) was integrated by many popular organizations. In April, CRM and opposition political parties like the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) and the Popular Christian Social Movement (MPSC) came together in the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR)
At that time, although unions did not exist, there were mutual assistance groups formed by small enterprise salaried workers and their bosses.
Araujo established obligatory military service (in practice it only applied to poor people) and founded the National Guard (1912) that later became an instrument of the Presidents of the republic for controlling political opposition.
1808 Greater administrative autonomy or outright independence for San Salvador would reduce the high level of taxes paid to Spain and Guatemala and would raise finances for the colony.
Napoleón Bonaparte's invasion of Spain in 1808 and the removal of Ferdinand VII from the Spanish throne created an atmosphere of unrest in San Salvador.
1550-1600
Gold was not as lucrative in El Salvador, however the land was very rich and therefore they instituted the system of widespread cultivation of a single lucrative export commodity. The first of these commodities was cacao, which flourished during the latter half of the sixteenth century.
1900
1500
1800
1700
1600
Pre-1500