The Writing on the Wall
Tiny El Salvador caught the world's attention in 1977, when two priests were assassinated and the entire Jesuit order was threatened with extinction by right-wing death squads. The Carter...
...A split in the Communist Party led to the formation of the Popular Liberation Forces- Farabundo Marti (FPL), named after the leader of the 1932 rebellion...
...Political education was an integral part of the experience...
...Similar forms of work began in the cities- among students, slumdwellers and factory workers...
...A link had fallen out of the chain...
...And in the fall of 1979, FAPU won control of one of the largest federations, including unions controlling electrical power, water supplies and railroads...
...The average wage in the Salvadoreans could not afford to buy the pro- manufacturing and service sectors, in 1973,NACLA Report was $1.64 per day...
...See political map, p. 34...
...Between 1975 and 1977, three new organizations emerged, linked to the underground groups but carrying out open, mass work among all the oppressed sectors of the society...
...New unions were being formed by the BPR...
...The Carter Administration, a few weeks in office, saw in El Salvador the opportunity to demonstrate its alleged commitment to human rights...
...By 1979, the popular organizations had eclipsed the electoral opposition...
...Part I).NACLA Report Through kidnappings and bank expropriations, the revolutionary forces were able to finance the revolution without involving outside interests...
...Serious questions were raised about the viability of an electoral strategy...
...And more radical sectors sought to forge a mass party of the left in alliance with the industrial working class...
...An obvious answer was arms...
...It proposed a timid "Agrarian Transformation" that was supported by a small, more visionary sector of the ruling class, and applauded by the United States...
...Farmworker unions were prohibited by law, but the rural proletariat was growing into a latent social force...
...Demonstrators were machinegunned by the Molina and Romero regimes, while para-military squads, the largest being ORDEN, roamed the countryside...
...Central America-the backyard-was no longer a place to grandstand about human rights...
...But organizers never hid their ultimate goal-socialism-and never ceased to draw the connections between poverty and dependent capitalism...
...But nothing would be done Central American Common Market and, to affect the basic distribution of resources after its collapse, by seducing foreign capital and wealth: 60% of the land would stay in the with tax incentives, free-trade zones and hands of 2% of the population...
...The crisis should have come as no surprise...
...By 1973, they would be earning only $1.10 per day...
...foreign policy in the region would be to avoid "another Nicaragua...
...Most observers agree that the UNO candidate for president, Napoleon Duarte, won the 1972 elections by a clear margin...
...Economic expansion, and the growth of a state bureaucracy, created its own contradictions...
...Now they were pushing for industrialization, but recognized that certain structural changes had to occur...
...El Salvador posed no threat to vital security interests...
...If cheap labor...
...Still, the ruling class refused to acknowledge its own vulnerability...
...As early as 1932, Salvadorean peasants, artisans and workers, armed only with machetes and stones, rebelled against their misery and joined an uprising led by the Communist Party...
...These groups took a two-sided approach to their work-focused primarily on the country-side where 60% of the people reside...
...4. Open mass work--vulnerable to extreme repression--was combined with military actions that served to demonstrate the vulnerability of the oppressors themselves, to deter potential collaborators with the regime, and to prepare for the larger battle ahead...
...By 1975, they would be organized into militant, extra-legal unions and mass The United States could afford to be selfrighteous until July, 1979-the victory of the Sandinista Liberation Front in Nicaragua...
...A compromise was found abroad...
...The urban working class, growing in size and organization, tasted the repression that guaranteed stability to investors...
...government and and 70s, first within the framework of the foreign investors...
...Within a month of the rebellion, 30,000 had been killed...
...i ne popular organizations focused on demands that were rooted in the daily lives of the people...
...What would ensure a different outcome the next time around, if votes were not enough...
...Each action was analyzed: why it won or lost, why victory did not solve the basic problem, and why revolutionary to De a necessity...
...It was considered a safe place to push for overdue reforms...
...So it began a slow process of building roots among peasants and farmworkers--slow because the rural population was still traumatized by the massacre of 1932...
...A small schism developed within the ruling class...
...A dissident group within the Christian Democrats, joined by other leftists, formed the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP...
...Today, three inter-agency task forces exist within the Carter Administration to monitor crisis situations 24 hours a day...
...They did so by achieving a set of goals that had proved elusive to the Latin American left since the 1960s: 1. The insularity of each oppressed sector was broken down to achieve a basic alliance between peasants and workers, and a broader alliance with marginal and middle class sectors...
...The more "enlightened," modernizing elements managed to gain control of the state (behind a military curtain, of course), but were powerless to carry out reforms that 2would affect even minimally the interests of ducts of their own labor, markets would be more traditional sectors...
...El Salvador--ignored by the media, unknown to the public-is now the third...
...And a new middle class, caught between the poles of poverty and wealth, was demanding a political voice and economic reforms...
...Iran and Afghanistan are the obvious two...
...6. The building of large, popular organizations, that permeated every sector of the oppressed and encouraged their active participation in decisions, planted the political and organizational seeds for a system of popular democracy--before and after the victory...
...Organizers helped peasants build wells and roads to inaccessible villages...
...From that time on, the primary goal of U.S...
...struck: industrialization would proceed, with El Salvador did industrialize in the 1960s support from the U.S...
...2. The isolation of the left was dissolved by developing a firm base within the working class and peasantry, through long years of steady organizing and political education...
...5. While maintaining different analyses and conceptions of the strugggle, the popular organizations were able to complement each other's efforts and move consistently toward greater unity...
...one of the political- military organizations, was formed after a split in the ERP in 1975 (See El Salvador...
...They would be demanding more than higher wages...
...The old agrarian interests immediately cried treasonn" and mobilized to halt the reform and take control of the state...
...The ballot-box was intended to legitimize military rule, not to end it...
...Government troops accelerated the education process...
...After the massacre, El Salvador's "Fourteen Families" returned to their ledgers, leaving generals and colonels to rule on their behalf for the next 50 years...
...Intellectuals and middle sectors formed a social democratic party, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR...
...In 1977, General Carlos Romero, representing the most retrograde sectors of the bourgeoisie, became president by fraud and ruled by terror alone...
...So the ballot-box was stuffed overnight, and by morning the victory had vanished...
...END OF THE ELECTORAL ROAD After 1972, the electoral opposition, with many of its leaders in exile, began to disintegrate...
...The Conference of Latin American Bishops, held in Medellin, Colombia in 1968, urged the Catholic Church actively to take up the struggle of the poor against the social and political systems which oppress them...
...Very soon, existing locals were in the hands of BPR and FAPU workers...
...They said to hell with the procedures and organized defacto strikes and sit-ins...
...The National Resistance (RN...
...In the cities, trade unions were dominated by the government, aided by the AFL-CIO, or the Communist Party...
...At the beginning of 1980, they were thought to have a war chest of $70 million...
...3. Immediate economic demands, relevant to the daily lives of the masses, were pressed, within the context of struggling for fundamental change in the political and economic spheres...
...In the early 1960s, professionals, bureaucrats and small businessmen formed the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), supporting a platform of moderate reforms...
...organizations...
...had mobilized tens of thousands of people, including new sectors such as market vendors, public employees and white collar workers...
...Migrants from the countryside swelled the slum communities, or tugurios, that circled the capital city...
...The popular organizations urged militant disregard of the elaborate web of laws designed to stifle the workers' movement...
...The new Molina government tried to add a small dose of reform to the standard formula of heavy repression...
...Their work concided with the efforts of progressive clergy-imbued with the message of Medellin*--to organize rural cooperatives and teach that injustice was sin...
...By 1972, this electoral opposition was ready to challenge 40 years of military rule...
...Taxes had to be levied to finance the required infrastructure...
...One side was military: small scattered actions against the security forces, retaliation against government spys and torturers, and kidnappings for ransom...
...But the FPL in particular sought to avoid the fate of guerrilla groups in Latin America in the 1960s--their isolation from the masses and ultimate destruction...
...So the United States attacked the Romero regime for its abuse of human rights and encouraged an alliance between "enlightened" business sectors and the Christian Democratic Party, to prepare for a changing of the guard...
...Christian Democrats, social democrats and the Nationalist Democratic Union (UDN), the legal arm of the outlawed Communist Party, formed a united front, the National Opposition Union (UNO, meaning one...
...4factories ana starvation wages...
...had brought the brutality of the Romero regime to international attention...
...Political unrest had to be quelled by superficial reforms...
...By the 1950s, a sector of the ruling class had branched out from agriculture into marketing and finance...
...Each represented a broad spectrum of constituencies, united in a nonelectoral coalition...
...But El Salvador's elite, like its counterparts throughout Latin America, refused to accept the people's verdict...
...More and more peasants were pushed off the land to make room for coffee, cane and cotton...
...Wealth, generated and concentrated in the agrarian sector, had to be more evenly distributed to create a market for industrial goods...
...In rural areas, peasant and farmworker unions were organized despite the official ban...
...But the political-military organizations of the left - FPL, ERP and the RN* - struck back, eliminating an ORDEN member, kidnapping a factory owner who used goons against striking workers, harassing the National Guard...
...These were the People's Revolutionary Bloc (BPR), the Front for United Popular Action (FAPU) and the People's Leagues (LP-28...
Vol. 14 • July 1980 • No. 4
