El Salvador: Tormented for a Century by U.S. Capitalism‑Imperialism

1904–1944: The “Coffee Republic,” the “American Cure,” la Matanza (the Massacre)

In 1904, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declared to the world that the U.S. had a “right” to exercise “international police power” in Latin America.¹ This brazen declaration was a warning to rival powers to keep their military presence out of what the U.S. considered its “backyard” and a “justification” for the U.S. military to “extend its ‘sphere of influence’ in the Caribbean, Central America, and smaller countries of South America....” It immediately led U.S. financiers to “believe that increased intervention and policing by the U.S. in Central America would provide greater peace and financial stability in the region.”²

El Salvador soon became one of the world’s largest producers of coffee—known as the “Coffee Republic.” A handful of wealthy plantation owners secured financing that enabled them to enrich themselves while millions of Salvadorans lived in poverty. This process was called the “American Cure ... a three-part formula of debt, discipline, and exports.” Thousands of peasants were displaced from their farms and forced to work on coffee plantations, where they were paid with a small amount of scrip that could only be used at company stores and two bean tacos daily.³

Protest and unrest grew in El Salvador throughout the 1920s as coffee prices fell internationally and large plantation owners, backed by the government, slashed wages, and confiscated even more land from the peasants. In 1932, an uprising, primarily of indigenous peasants in El Salvador’s western coffee regions, began after the government prevented Communist Party members elected to the national legislature from taking their seats.

The government responded to a peasant strike by “massacring an estimated 30,000 people, or 4% of the population, in one week”⁴—what was called la Matanza. The U.S. and Canada sent warships to aid the Salvadoran government.⁵ The warships weren’t used because the Salvadoran military was able to crush the uprising by themselves. Ferocious repression throughout the country followed the massacre—and continued for the next 12 years under the regime of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, a U.S. puppet and open fascist sympathizer.⁶

1944–1979: U.S.-Backed Coups, Massacres, Repression

A series of protests and strikes in the spring of 1944 forced the government from power and Hernández Martínez into exile. A few months later, Osmín Aguirre y Salinas, an army colonel and former chief of police, led a military-backed coup that unleashed bloody repression of students, labor organizations, and civilian political parties.⁷ Aguirre y Salinas’s regime was “legitimized by immediate recognition from the United States.”⁸

Internationally, the decades beginning in the 1950s were increasingly shaped by “Cold War” contention between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.⁹ Virulent, violent anti-communism became the cornerstone of U.S. global policy. In El Salvador, these decades were marked by a series of governments dominated by the military, and an economy dominated by wealthy plantation owners, both of them linked to the U.S.¹⁰ In 1954, the U.S., under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, orchestrated support for a coup it was preparing against the leftist president of Guatemala. The Salvadoran government faithfully assisted the U.S. by putting an anti-communist resolution before the Organization of Central American States, isolating Guatemala and forcing it to withdraw from the organization, thus paving the way for a U.S.-backed coup.¹¹

In 1960, the U.S. withheld recognition from a Salvadoran junta (ruling group composed of military and civilian leaders) that had promised elections. Months later, a right-wing countercoup toppled the junta before the scheduled elections and seized power. The countercoup was facilitated by the U.S., which soon announced its support for the illegitimate government.¹²

Protests mounted throughout the 1970s, and the government responded with ferocious repression. Among the government massacres: In 1975, police fired on students protesting a Miss Universe contest—dozens were killed and “disappeared.” In 1977, more than 200 protesters were killed and hundreds more wounded by government troops when tens of thousands of people gathered peacefully in the central plaza of San Salvador to protest election fraud.¹³ Right-wing death squads—which had been built up, trained, organized, and even provided target lists by the U.S. military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents—began to target and “disappear” hundreds of left-wing opponents.¹⁴

In October 1979, a U.S.-backed coup brought another junta to power. It was immediately recognized by the U.S. government under President Jimmy Carter. Deadly repression was unleashed against protesters in San Salvador and other cities. Massive U.S. funding and support for the regime began pouring into the country.¹⁵

1980-1992: Civil War, Death Squads and Genocide, Depopulation

In March 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero, who had called on Carter to end U.S. aid to El Salvador’s military, was gunned down as he was saying Mass at a hospital chapel. Targeted killings of oppositional leaders and slaughter of protesters intensified. The government began genocidal campaigns in rural areas, calling it “agrarian reform.” Several guerrilla groups, backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, joined to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which became the main force fighting the U.S.-backed government. Civil war erupted.

From 1980 to the early 1990s, the U.S. provided an estimated $6 billion in military aid to the Salvadoran regime. The Salvadoran military grew from an estimated 7,000 in 1979 to about 53,000 by 1986. There were at least 11,000 additional civilian counter-revolutionary forces, many of them active in death squads such as the Maximiliano Hernández Martínez Anti-Communist Brigade.¹⁶ The U.S. also routed significant funds and training to the Salvadoran military through allies such as Argentina, Chile, and Israel¹⁷ and funneled $2.2 million to fascist political parties to help tighten their grip on power.¹⁸

Genocidal repression against poor farmers in El Salvador’s rural areas was a major focus of the U.S.-directed war. In December 1981, the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran military, carried out a horrific massacre in the village of El Mozote. “The residents were rounded up overnight and the next day, December 11, were killed. The Atlacatl Battalion maimed, shot, raped, and dismembered hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children. Nearly half of the victims are believed to have been under 10 years old. Estimates of the total murdered on that day range from 200 to over 1,000.”¹⁹ The battalion “decapitated men in a church and bayoneted a child to death and slaughtered entire families.”²⁰

The Atlacatl Battalion was specially trained by the U.S. military at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was considered the “pride of the United States military team in San Salvador.”²¹

Rural farming areas of El Salvador, a small country about the size of the state of Massachusetts, were “pummeled by the most intensive and prolonged aerial bombardment in the history of the Western hemisphere. The air force dropped phosphorous bombs and napalm on forested hillsides and farmlands, poisoning the earth for many seasons. The army swept through the countryside, torching whole farming communities and slaughtering livestock.”^22,23

By the time a treaty ending the war was signed in 1992, about a million Salvadorans had been driven from their homes²⁴—“a third of the population either fled the country as refugees or [was] displaced internally.”²⁵ Much of the country lay in ruins. And over 75,000 civilians had died at the hands of government forces supported, trained, and funded by the U.S.²⁶

1992–the Present: A Cascade of Environmental, Social, and Economic Catastrophes

Decades of intense coffee production and massive government onslaughts during the civil war have depleted once fertile agricultural land and poisoned much of El Salvador’s remaining water and soil. Since the 1960s, about 85 percent of the country’s forests have disappeared, and over 50 percent of El Salvador is no longer suitable for food cultivation. The entire country is “perilously close to facing large-scale desert formation.”²⁷ El Salvador is experiencing a “multilayered crisis of water scarcity, contamination, and unequal access that affects a quarter of the country’s population of 6.4 million,” and “more than 90 percent of surface water sources in the country are contaminated.” At least 600,000 people in rural areas have no access to water, and hundreds of thousands more have limited or intermittent access.²⁸

As in Central America overall, environmental devastation has made the country more vulnerable to extensive damage from severe natural events such as volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and landslides set off by torrential rain. Two hurricanes that hit the country in late 2020 destroyed entire villages. The anti-poverty organization Oxfam estimates that as of late December 2020, 800,000 people were still homeless in El Salvador and other Central American countries because of these hurricanes.²⁹

In 2006, El Salvador entered the U.S.-dominated Dominican Republic—Central America Free Trade Agreement” (CAFTA-DR). It required and has accelerated “restructuring” the economies of the countries who joined it.³⁰ And this has opened the floodgates to a massive influx of American agricultural and industrial goods that have weakened domestic economic activity, especially farming. A report by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs concluded that in El Salvador and other countries, CAFTA-DR has contributed to the elimination of many small farms and greater “food insecurity”³¹ (translation: hunger and starvation), driving more people into El Salvador’s cities. And many of these people try to migrate to the U.S. to find a means of survival. Environmental deregulation CAFTA-DR mandated also has enabled mining companies based in the U.S. and other imperialist countries to “strike gold”³²—and their mining has further poisoned mountain zones.

Horrific violence plagues the masses of people of El Salvador, carried out by gangs and police/military forces, sometimes acting together. The country has one of the highest homicide rates in the world,³³ and this violence is a major factor driving people out of the country. But seldom mentioned is that the roots of El Salvador’s violent gangs are in the U.S. During the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans who fled U.S.-sponsored terror during the civil war settled in barrios of Los Angeles, where groups of youths formed gangs, including for self-protection. In the 1990s, many of these youths were deported to El Salvador. A law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 made it far easier for the government to quickly deport people, including lawful permanent residents, who had been convicted of certain minor crimes.³⁴ Some of the deported youths took their gang allegiances and culture with them, as they returned to the crushing poverty and police/military violence of El Salvador’s cities.