Much of El Salvador’s problems come from a long time ago, mostly beginning in the 1930’s. From the 1930’s until about the 1960’s and 1970’s much of the problem in El Salvador was about the land and the economy. From the 1960’s and 1970’s through 1992 most of the problems consisted of battles between government and opposition groups and basic denial of human rights. It’s through this time that religion begins to play a role in the problem of El Salvador. It’s during much of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that many people of El Salvador lost their lives.
In the following text I will discuss more thoroughly in detail the problems of land, economy, government, and human rights in El Salvador. It was in 1932 popular unrest from peasants and land workers made a collapse in the coffee market sending us them into a worldwide depression. At this time General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez was in power and he responded to this depression with fire and bloodshed. This slaughter cost thirty thousand peasants their lives. “La Matanza”, Spanish for massacre, is one of the biggest massacres in El Salvador.
The uprising was blamed on a party known as the Communists Party and was started because of low wages. The leader, Agustin Farabunduo Marti, was arrested and executed for supposedly setting it up. A historian from the massacre describes the event as follows: Almost of the rebels, except the leaders, were difficult to identify, arbitrary classifications were set up. All those who were found carrying machetes were guilty. All those of a strong Indian cast of features, or who dressed in a scruffy, campesino costume, were considered guilty.
To facilitate the roundup, all those who had not taken part in the uprising were invited to present themselves at the comandancia to receive clearance papers. When they arrived they were examined and those with the above mentioned attributes seized. Tie by the thumbs to those before and behind then, in the customary Salvadoran manner, groups of fifty were led to the back wall of the church of Asuncion in Izalco and against that massive wall were cut down by firing squads.
In the plaza in front of the comandancia, other selected victims were made to dig a massive grace and then shot, according to one account, from machine guns mounted on trucks. In some cases, women and children reused to leave their menfolk and shared their fate. Today’s Guerillas fight under the banner of the Farabundo Marti Front of National Liberation, also known as the FMLN, which officially started in 1979. Still today the FMLN exists, but I’ll get to them a little later. General Martinez set a pattern for a military-oligarchical control of the country that lasted for the next fifty years.
This meant that only presidents came from military ranks. After WWII, the economy of El Salvador improved slowly. Industrialization and an urban class working class took shape. Most of this occurred because of the Alliance for Progress, which developed in the 1960’s. Also after WWII, the constitution of El Salvador, which was started in 1886, was reinstated in amended form. An organization called ORDEN was created. This was a Salvadoran security squad, which quickly grew to more than eighty thousand members. They were basically used as an elaborate system of internal espionage.
The election of 1972 led to the death of about one hundred people. Napolean Durante, a Christina Democrat, and Guillermo Manuel Ungo, ran together basically expecting to be president and vice-president. They fought for human rights and social justice and an end to forty years of military dictatorship. But fraud by the military mad them lose the election. It was in March that protesting about the fraud of the election led to the deaths of the hundred people. After this happened Durante and many other political leaders were captured and tortured.
In the years to come many other guerilla groups began to form. The FPL formed in 1970 from a group of university students that came from the PCS. Next the ERP and then the FARN formed. The FARN formed from an ERP splinter group in 1975. These groups differed in military and political strategy, for instance the ERP used sabotage and acts of terrorism while other groups were more into building popular support. In 1974 the FAPU formed which consisted of urban workers. The next year the BPR developed and was combined of peasants.
And finally in 1978 the LP-28 was set up with the basis of this organization being from the slums of San Salvador. Soon after the development of these organizations they decided to join forces. This left us with the FAPU and the FARN, the BPR and the FPL, and the LP-28 with the ERP. After all this growth the government of Colonel Arturo Armando Molina, under the pressure from the U. S. attempted to counter this growth by enacting a limited agrarian reform, supported by a government favored peasant organization.
It was called the UCS and claimed 100,000 members and received much support from the U. S. In 1977 there was another stage of fraud that put Carlos Humberto Romero in office, but he wasn’t to stay in office lone. Two years later a group of young military officials removed Romero from presidency. Sometime during all this Oscar Romero was brought in to be the Archbishop. This is when religion actually comes into play. Romero was basically brought into office because other government officials didn’t think that he would be a person to make many changes, so basically they felt that they would be able to run all over him and do whatever they felt.
You see, the government sees Romero as a quite person and they don’t feel that he will take any actions towards the things that are going on. But this is when they find out differently. Romero was a very religious person. He is a priest of the Catholic tradition. This is what most of the population of El Salvador is, although nearly ninety-seven percent of Salvadorans are of Cristina faiths. Protestant groups have grown to be about twenty percent of the population. The night of his election he had communion and there were lots of supports and suddenly the National Guard came in and started yelling orders.
They told people who wanted to leave, to leave. Then they opened fire. Once the onslaught had ceased, there was a calculation of about sixty people killed. Not long after this night his best friend, who was also a priest with him, would be killed. From this point on, Romero decides that he is going to stop all these acts of violence and terrorism. There are many times when Romero put his life on the line. Finally the repression groups have had enough with Romero disobedience that he is assassinated. Oscar Romero was killed on the 24 of March while saying mass.
I’m not sure which group the killer came from, but he entered the back of the church and took his shot and killed Romero. Before the assassination occurred, the people involved drew straws to determine who would be the “lucky person”. After the shot was fired the man fled in an awaiting car and was never apprehended. At Romero’s funeral security forces opened fire on all the people who attended the funeral. On November sixth the junta was supposed to formally dissolve the organization ORDEN. This was based on all the many cases of human rights abuse.
But no effective measures where taken to disband the squad and continued to operate. Since they weren’t disbanded ORDEN continued to go on with many of the tortures and killings as they did before. Another massacre known as the massacre of Monte Carlo involved the assistance of ORDEN. Amnesty International gives this account on the night: On the night of 7 April 1981 when more than 20 people, including several youths ewer taken from their homes in San Nicolas de Soyapango, a suburb to the east of San Salvador, by a group of men, some of them in uniform, and were later found dead.
On 9 April, Amnesty International called on the government of El Salvador to open an investigation in to this incident. Initially, Salvadoran authorities claimed that the victims had dies in an armed confrontation with the police, but residents of the are insisted that some of those who did had been shot on the spot, while others were taken from their homes by the Treasury Police, and their bodies were found later. Some of the bodies found elsewhere had their hand bound, an act totally inconsistent with the official explanation that the victims had died in a shoot-out with the police.
Later, however, both Salvadoran and U. S. officials said that “individual units” of this security force had apparently been involved, and U. S. officials stated that Salvadoran and U. S. officials were cooperating to investigate the incident. Throughout the eighties there were still many tortures and deaths that took place. One that made many headlines in 1980 was the death of four US churchwomen. Basically the women were picked up, sexually abused, and beaten to death after leaving the airport.
This was done by members of the National Guardsmen. After the bodies of the women were found, U. S. litary and economic aids were shortly suspended. In 1984 on May 25, five men former of the National Guard were convicted. This was the first time for members of security forces had been convicted of a crime. In 1981 there was, what seems to be, the most popular massacre at El Mozote. El Mozote is in the country of Morazan. This was a battle in which American trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote and murdered hundred of men women and mostly children. Their most infamous way of death was by decapitation. Commander Domingo Monterrosa commanded the soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion.
Domingo was known for his skills for survival and pure soldier abilities, and being a natural leader. His group of soldiers were the nastiest group people had heard of. In some reports, people said that these soldiers would shoot at anything that moved. Whether it be animal or human. They would take the blood of animals and smear it all over their faces. They would cut open the bellies of animal and drink their blood. To celebrate their graduation they collected dead animals from the sides of the roads, boiled them together into a bloody soup and chugged it all down.
Then they stood at full attention and sang, full throated, the unit’s theme song: Slowly they make their way through the northern part of Morazan. They basically just kill everyone. This whole area was infected with guerillas so the only way to get rid of them all was to clear out the whole damn place. Five years after the massacre, many people come in to clean the place up and to sift their way through all the rubbage to see what they can find. There were approximately one thousand lives lost. Up until about 1992, there were many deaths and what not that took place.
In 1992 the FMLN and government signed an agreement to cease unnecessary deaths. As of today, I’m not sure what is going on with the country. I take it that there is not much terrorism anymore. I think that there needs to be more intervention from the U. S. in order for El Salvador to get where it needs to be in terms of government and economy. There should be some kind of deal that businessmen can make. There are many products that we can use from them, so I think that there could be some kind of arrangement made. Other than that I don’t really know what to say. Now I’m going to present a dialogue between myself and Professor Rafael Carias.
Me: Hello Rafael, thank you for meeting with me today. How you doing? Him: Well I’m glad to be here, and actually I’m doing quite well, thank you for asking. Me: Well the purpose of my inviting you here is to find out a little about you life and what things were like in El Salvador during the 1970’s and 1980’s. So I’ll guess I’ll start out by asking when you were born how you were brought up and anything else you’d like to share? Him: I was born in 1957 in a small town outside of San Marcos. My family and I grew up in very poor living conditions. We had to work very hard just to get enough money for food.
Much of the time we went without shoes or most items that I now take for granted. It was a very hard life for anyone to live. Me: So how, if they did, did things change once you got a little older and went out on your own? Him: Well when I was in my late 20’s, I was able to take over the fields that my father had grown many crops in. So I took over on the farm. Soon after that I went to school and then to college and finally I ended up being a professor at the University. This enabled me to make more money than I had ever had in my life, but there were actually some very hard times.
They didn’t really have anything to do with money or anything like that. It was more of the problems with the government. Me: So what exactly was going on with the government at that time? Him: Well everyone feared for his or her life at every second. There were many groups of people that would just go around killing people or kidnapping and torturing people. Him: Well yes, but I have a story that deals with my family and I one night. It’s something that I wish upon no one. Me: If you’re comfortable I’d certainly like to hear what happened, but only if you’re okay with it.
Him: .. Ok. Well it starts at around “11:00 p. m. on Saturday February 21, 1981, around six henchmen in civilian dress and five in uniform entered the area where I Lived. They remained in the street, but when they banged on the door, all that I could think of was the life of my two-year-old son who was in his crib. When I opened the door the first thing they did was to hit me, throw me face down and tie my hands behind my back. They continued to kick me in the back and on the head. When my home was searched they removed my companion and the child.
They blindfolded her and me and put us in a vehicle, along with certain articles such as the television set. We were taken to the office of the mayor of San Marcos. There I was not mistreated. Two hours later we were taken to the el zapote headquarters. There, at 7:00a. m, I was taken away to a room used for torture. When they removed the blindfold, there were four executioners facing me. They beat me over my entire body. When they had finished, they lay me face down on a wooden bench, handcuffed my wrists together underneath it and then bound up my entire body. They attached a wire to the toe of each foot.
When the electricity was turned on and executioner put a towel over my face so that I could not breathe; if I said something they would disconnect it. When that got them nowhere, the questions were accompanied by a blow to the stomach. This went on for more that two hours. They untied me and took me to a sink with my and hands tied. They forcibly put me under water so that I would lose oxygen. For a few moments, I thought I was going to die, but I held fast to my convictions. This lasted another two hours. They removed me from the sink, put me face down, spread my legs apart and inserted a stick in my rectum.
They laughed sarcastically during all of this. I was returned to the room used for torture and handcuffed to the same bench, the inserted tooth brush in my rectum and turned it around. Since they didn’t get what they wanted form me, they left me alone for some five minutes. This gave me time to meditate and to hold to my promise to suffer stoically. When they returned, they had a bottle of acid and they told me that they would pour it ton me, which they demonstrated with a piece of clothe. They executioners insisted that I was a high-ranking member of the organization.
When they found that I could mot be made to talk, they pouted acid on my back for the first time. The pain was incredible. They continued to question me and when I did not reply, they used a ballpoint pen to mark my body and continued to put acid on me. Then they told me that they would pout acid in my eyes; one of them opened my left eye and when I saw that they were going to spill a small amount of liquid o me, I turned over to one side and struggled with them. They stopped pouting acid on me. Then lieutenant came to interrogate me, but decided to take me to a cell. There in the cell I heard my small child cry and talk from time to time.
That gave me strength because my young son, too, was experiencing the bestialities of the dictatorship, together with his mother. At 6:00 p. m. they took me from the cell to the National Guard. There, the treatment I received was even more bestial, because upon learning that I was a professor, they tied me up like an object and kicked me in the chest, head, and back. The electric shocks I received here were as follows: The first was done by applying electric shocks to the feet intermittently and for as long as five minutes, and then to the head, with the same frequency.
Electric shocks on a metal bed, where I was tied and handcuffed to the bed; first they removed all my clothing and wet my entire body. This made the pain worse. All of these torture were accompanied by questions from a certain female commander, as to whether I knew the places where we met, who was my chief, where did I keep the propaganda, etc. the day the International Red Cross arrived they hid me. But the International Red Cross did not arrive in the morning, as the National Guard had expected, but in the afternoon instead, so it was that they found me”.
