El Salvador Civil War

oh ok..

Prelude

The FMLN insurgency originated in the 1960s, when reformers challenged the alliance of the right-wing military and the landed oligarchy. Because of the fraudulent presidential elections in 1972 and 1977, leftist political groups organized huge demonstrations demanding fair elections and improved social conditions. The government fought back violently to maintain power. Most El Salvadorans were campesinos, peasants living at subsistence level without running water or electricity, while a tiny privileged minority lived in wealth and opulence. In 1976, the régime’s token land reform did little to alleviate the economic inequity. The government replied to the consequent political unrest with state-of-siege declarations, the suspension of constitutional rights, and paramilitary death squads. These actions further alienated the population and prompted many in the Catholic church to denounce the government violence. [4]

[edit] 1979 coup d’état and civil unrest

On 15 October 1979, the civil-military Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno (Revolutionary Government Junta) — JRG — deposed right-wing President General Carlos Humberto Romero. Inspired by left-wing politics, and wishing to project a moderately-civilised Salvadoran world image, the JRG — Col. Adolfo Arnaldo Majano Ramo, Col. Jaime Abdul Gutiérrez Avendaño, Guillermo Ungo, Mario Antonio Andino, Román Mayorga Quirós — governed El Salvador from 1979 to 1982, effecting some land reform (Decree No. 43, 6-XII-1979) restricting landholdings to a hundred-hectare maximum, nationalised the banking, coffee, and sugar industries, and disbanded the paramilitary private death squad ORDEN (Order).

In 1980, José Napoleón Duarte, the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) leader, joined the JRG as provisional-head-of-government until the March 1982 elections, yet, the JRG were internally divided, vacillating about how strongly to manage the FMLN’s armed insurrection and the military’s institutional pressure against the JRG’s moderates, seen as Marxist sympathizers; U.S. ambassador Robert E. White summarises contemporary Salvadoran society:

The major, immediate threat to the existence of this government is the right-wing violence. In the city of San Salvador, the hired thugs of the extreme-right, some of them well-trained Cuban and Nicaraguan terrorists, kill moderate-left leaders and blow up government buildings. In the countryside, elements of the security forces torture and kill the campesinos, shoot up their houses and burn their crops. At least two hundred refugees, from the countryside, arrive daily in the capital city. This campaign of terror is radicalizing the rural areas, just as surely as Somoza's National Guard did in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, the command structure of the army and the security forces either tolerates or encourages this activity. These senior officers believe, or pretend to believe, that they are eliminating the guerillas. [5]

The death squads’ most infamous assassination was of a Catholic priest: on 24 March 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero was shot during mass — a month after publicly asking the U.S. Government to stop military aid to the Salvadoran Government. At his funeral, bombers and snipers massacred forty-two mourners.

On 7 May 1980, former Army Major Roberto D’Aubuisson was arrested with a group of civilians and soldiers at a farm. The raiders found documents connecting him and the civilians as organizers and financiers of the death squad who killed Archbishop Romero, and of plotting a coup d’état against the JRG. Their arrest provoked right-wing terrorist threats and institutional pressures forcing the JRG to release Maj. D’Aubuisson. In 1993, a U.N. investigation confirmed that Maj. D’Aubuisson ordered Archbishop Romero assassinated, thus starting the Salvadoran Civil War.[6]

[edit] Escalation

The civil war escalated to terminal destruction when the Salvadoran Government fought its people; the infrastructure collapsed when the FMLN captured much countryside, despite failed attacks in January 1981 and in April 1982.

In May 1980, the Salvadoran guerrillas had met in Havana, forming the consolidated politico-military command, the DRU — Dirección Revolucionaria Unificada (Unified Revolutionary Directorate) — a Cuban condition for military aid. In October, they founded the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (comprising the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional [FMLN] and the Frente Democrático Revolucionario [FDR]) honouring insurgent hero Farabundo Martí, whom the Salvadoran National Guard killed in 1932.

In preparing for a mass insurrection against the U.S.-sponsored military government of El Salvador, the FMLN’s feasible military victory was a two-pronged strategy of economic sabotage and a prolonged guerrilla war-of-attrition (per the principles of Ché Guevara, Mao Zedong, and the Vietnamese) fought with rural guerrillas and urban civil political support; thus, in the 1980–1982 period political violence increased when alienated political groups metamorphosed, first into terrorists, then into guerrillas. [4] On 10 January 1981, the FMLN’s first, major attack established their control of most of Morazán and Chalatenango departments for the war’s duration.

Elections occurred during the civil war, but were interrupted with right-wing paramilitary attacks and the FMLN-ordered boycott. In 1986, an earthquake calmed the warriors, for three years of relative peace and negotiation, and the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador (CDHES) published a 165-page report documenting the routine use of forty types of torture applied to political prisoners in the Mariona men’s prison, and that U.S. military advisors often supervised said interrogations.[citation needed]

Meanwhile, the JRG re-allowed political activity; on 28 March 1982, Salvadorans elected a new Constituent Assembly that, in turn, elected Álvaro Alfredo Magaña Borja as interim-president. In 1983, the Assembly drafted a new, national, political Constitution ostensibly strengthening civil rights, limiting “provisional detention” and unreasonable search-and-seizure, establishing a pluralistic, republican government, strengthening the legislature, guaranteeing judicial independence, and codifying labour rights — especially of agricultural workers; the FMLN thought them too little.

Despite the nominal reforms, El Salvador’s human rights record registered only death squad terrorism. In 1984, Christian Democrat José Napoleón Duarte won the presidency (with 54% of votes) against Army Major Roberto d’Aubuisson, of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), becoming the first, freely-elected President of El Salvador in more than fifty years; fearful of a D’Aubuisson presidency, the CIA financed Duarte’s campaign with some two million dollars, because, per U.S. ambassador Robert White, the “pathological killer” D’Aubuisson and his ARENA party were the death squads. In 1989, ARENA’s Alfredo Cristiani became president with 54 per cent of the votes; his inauguration was the first, peaceful Salvadoran presidential succession.

On 26 October 1987, Herbert Ernesto Anaya, head of the CDHES, was assassinated. His killing provoked four days’ of political protest — during which his cadaver was displayed before the U.S. embassy and then before the Salvadoran armed forces headquarters. The National Union of Salvadoran Workers said: Those who bear sole responsibility for this crime are José Napoleón Duarte, the U.S. embassy . . . and the high command of the armed forces.

Moreover, the FMLN and the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) also protested Mr Anaya’s assassination by suspending negotiations with the Duarte Government on 29 October 1987. The same day, Reni Roldán resigned from the Commission of National Reconciliation, saying: The murder of Anaya, the disappearance of university labour leader Salvador Ubau, and other events do not seem to be isolated incidents. They are all part of an institutionalised pattern of conduct. Mr Anaya’s assassination evoked international indignation: the West German Government, the West German Social Democratic Party, and the French Government asked President Duarte to clarify the circumstances of the crime. United Nations Secretary General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Americas Watch, Amnesty International, and other organisations protested against the assassination of the leader of the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador. [7]

In November 1989, the FMLN captured parts of San Salvador city, though they failed to take power. Eventually, by April 1991, negotiations resumed, resulting in a truce that successfully concluded in January 1992, bringing about the war’s end. A new Constitution was promulgated, the Armed Forces regulated, a civilian police force established, the FMLN metamorphosed from a guerrilla army to a political party, and an amnesty law was legislated in 1993. [8]

yeah so copy pasted it for you.

Uh…teacher won’t let us use wikipedia.

Okay. Wikipedia is NOT legit. Whether you copy paste it to as many websites as you want to. It still is the same information.

And I was kinda just looking for the answers to my questions. Like…in a super condense form.

But thank you anyway.