Summary of Event
Social relations in El Salvador in the first decades of the twentieth century were characterized by a wide division in power. The peasant masses, who had once enjoyed communal property rights as part of an ancient landholding system, had seen these rights taken away in the late 1800’s by a powerful clique of coffee planters. Behind a shield of “liberal” legislation, these growers had succeeded in expanding their holdings to encompass nearly all of the country’s arable land. They modernized the economy by tying their fortunes to the exclusive cultivation of coffee, for which a large international market existed. Such modernization carried with it a high cost in human terms. The peasants, most of whom were Pipil Indians, had an almost mystical reverence for their cornfields. The disestablishment of their communal system had a psychological, as well as a material, effect on their lives. Without access to land, they had no options other than to work on the coffee plantations as colonos, receiving in exchange tiny plots for their own subsistence along with a miserable wage, often issued in kind. Once-independent peasants were thus reduced to debt peons.
For their part, the coffee growers, or oligarchs, took advantage of a seemingly limitless world demand for their product. The coffee boom, which lasted throughout the 1920’s, stimulated urbanization, brought railways and telegraph lines to the interior, and widened the economic gap between the coffee growers and the peasantry. The wealthy lived in regal splendor while the poor seethed in their poverty.
The rural environment of El Salvador had little in it of philanthropy. The planters kept wages low and they paid almost no taxes that might support social services. Discontent among the poor was widespread in consequence, and isolated uprisings occurred frequently. The rural constabulary and the National Guard smashed all of these movements. As time went by, the oligarchs came to rely more and more on coercion to maintain the status quo in the countryside.
The Great Depression of 1929 provided the catalyst for a social explosion. The demand for coffee on the world markets collapsed. With prices falling, the colonos lost the opportunity to find work. Wages fell 60 percent. In the cities, the Depression gave rise to a period of intense political discussion, with younger members of the oligarchy expressing some doubts as to whether the traditional order could contain the social crisis. A few individuals looked to reformist solutions.
Among their number was Arturo Araújo, an admirer of Britain’s Fabian Socialists. Araújo was something of a wild card in Salvadoran politics, and the Partido Laborista he founded reflected an eclectic blend of mysticism, anti-imperialism, and what was termed vitalismo mínimo—the idea that every citizen deserved a “vital minimum” of goods and services necessary to a happy life. Such sentiments appealed to many, especially in the cities, where trade unionists and middle-class professionals lent avid support to Araújo.
The Communist Party of El Salvador also favored this wayward son of the oligarchy. In this instance, however, their support was conditional, since the communists, led by veteran activist Agustín Farabundo Martí, feared that Araújo’s popularity might overshadow their own plans to carve a measure of power from the country’s difficulties. As it turned out, they needed to fear something far more sinister.
Despite the misgivings of most oligarchs, the government held free elections in January, 1931. Five presidential candidates, most of whom represented conservative coffee interests, entered the field against Araújo. The latter went on to win anyway and took office at the beginning of March. Problems plagued Araújo from the beginning. The Depression hit the country people very hard. Although he had made vague promises as to land reform, the new president simply could not deliver on these while simultaneously safeguarding the privileges of the elite.
The lack of direction displayed by Araújo was evident from the beginning. The oligarchs, who had previously thought Araújo merely risky, now saw him as positively dangerous and looked to anyone who might deliver them from his influences. The peasants and the trade unionists also became disillusioned. Seeing that their support had brought them repression and not reform, they began to consider more radical solutions, particularly those espoused by Farabundo Martí and the communists. Several strikes by colonos in April and May were brutally crushed by forces under War Minister (and Vice President) Maximiliáno Hernandez Martinez. Widespread rebellion now seemed likely.
Of all the groups opposed to Araújo, clearly the most willing to act upon its grievances was the military. The president had tried to reduce the army’s budget by 25 percent and tried to retire a number of senior officers. Most crucial, however, was his inability to pay his soldiers. In normal times, export duties paid the greater part of government expenses, but with coffee exports at rock bottom, Araújo’s admin istration was delinquent in its payments to all officials.
The end came swiftly. On December 2, 1931, army units loyal to General Martinez seized control of San Salvador and other major cities. Only Araujo loyalists initially condemned the attack. Most political parties, including the communists, gave their tacit approval. They felt reassured when Martinez announced that municipal elections scheduled for January, 1932, would go forward. The Left then organized meetings and street demonstrations, distributed leaflets, and prepared for the elections. Few doubted that Martìnez would keep his word.
The general, however, had his own ambitions. A man of a mystical frame of mind who would later conduct seances in the presidential palace, Martínez felt certain that he acted with divine aid. Having identified all opposition organizers, he cancelled the elections and began a massive repression. Realizing that they were moving in the eleventh hour, the communists launched an urban revolt on January 22, supposedly set to coincide with a rural insurrection in the western departments of Santa Ana, Ahuachapán, and Sonsonate. The Indian leaders of those areas had tenuous ties to Farabundo Martí, even though they had no use for communists generally. They nevertheless decided that a revolt offered them their last chance of deliverance.
They were wrong, tragically so. The army quelled the urban uprising in a matter of hours, police agents having already penetrated the revolutionary cells. They had previously detained Farabundo Martí. A policy of summary execution began that included even suspected members of opposition groups. Martí received unusual treatment: He was given a brief trial before he faced the firing squad.
The rural districts experienced the full fury of the repression. The peasant rebels, armed with machetes, managed to hold out for forty-eight hours. They killed some fifty policemen. The army and the irregular forces set up by the landowners exacted an awesome revenge in what Salvadorans still refer to simply as la matanza, the massacre. The army regarded anyone with Indian features as being automatically guilty and liable for the ultimate penalty. Whole villages were razed. Hospitals were checked and the wounded dragged out and killed. Women, children, and dogs were shot along with men. The corpses soon became so numerous that they could not be buried and were simply left in ditches along the roads. As one witness later observed, only the vultures ate well that year. Before the violence had run its course in February, as many as thirty thousand people had died. The massacre left a legacy of violence in Salvadoran politics that sixty years later had yet to be overcome.
Significance
La matanza left a deep scar in Salvadoran society. Virtually every family in the western part of the country lost someone to the army terror. The effects of the repression went even further, however, than the loss of life.
There were cultural losses. Because Martinez and the army chose to identify the Pipil Indians as part of a wide communist conspiracy, most Indian survivors rushed to deny their Indian identity. They abandoned the use of native garb, which they saw as a provocative symbol of resistance likely to bring down the wrath of the police. Indians encouraged their children to avoid speaking Pipil except at home, and then only in hushed tones.
There were social losses. With the members of many families serving in the army or among the rebels, the repression could not help but have a divisive impact. It became impossible to trust anyone. All of the traditional foci of rural authority and trust—the church, and more importantly, the socioreligious brotherhoods (cofradías)—lost the popular support they had once enjoyed. Fear dominated the peasant landscape. Only the oligarchs could claim that la matanza had increased the level of solidarity in their ranks. It also taught them the false lesson that class solidarity outweighed national reconciliation and that their survival depended on the subordination of the peasants.
Finally, the repression brought political losses. General Martinez followed la matanza with a twelve-year dictatorship that brooked little opposition, even from the oligarchs. Although civilian vigilantes conducted much of the 1932 slaughter, its political outcome confirmed the army’s claim on power. Martinez was only one of many military presidents who were to rule El Salvador during the twentieth century. As an institution, the Salvadoran armed forces consistently resisted pressures to make room for civilian participation in politics. When open application of force has been inadvisable, the military has acted in collusion with the oligarchs to create death squads, which, by the 1990’s, essentially had become institutionalized.
For their part, the peasant masses in the El Salvador of the 1990’s became caught between two polar extremes. They could either join the ranks of the army and the elites, who perceived the struggle as an anticommunist crusade, or they could join with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation guerrillas, the ideological descendants of Martí, and fight to establish the kind of Leninist regime that had been repudiated throughout the Eastern Bloc. In either direction, death threatened the average citizen. The greatest and most frightening legacies of la matanza are the effects that it left in the popular mind and the knowledge that it can happen again.