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El Salvador Labor and Campesino Groups
Although labor confederations have existed for decades in El
Salvador, their political input has been limited by their small
membership--officially, only nonagricultural workers have been
allowed to organize--and by the exclusionary nature of the
political system. Under military rule, the only unions with
influence were those with ties to the armed forces or its
associated ruling party. The political ferment that began to make
itself felt in the late 1970s, however, was reflected in the
labor movement. The real and pressing grievances of workers and
peasants, who began to organize into unsanctioned interest groups
of their own, led them to enlist in the growing number of unions
affiliated with the so-called mass organizations or popular
organizations. These organizations took a much more militant,
antigovernment line than did the old, established labor unions.
Ultimately, the leaders of the mass organizations, supportive of
the revolutionary goals of the FMLN, were more concerned with the
promotion of their political agenda than with the attainment of
better wages and working conditions for the rank and file. By the
early 1980s, strikes, demonstrations, and protests by these
groups had contributed to an atmosphere of uncertainty,
instability, and political polarization in El Salvador. In the
violent right-wing backlash that followed, members of moderate,
prodemocratic, nonconfrontational unions were murdered along with
the militant supporters of the mass organizations. This
repression--both official and unofficial--temporarily removed
labor groups as participants in the political arena. The
situation began to change as democratic institutions evolved in
the wake of the 1982 Constituent Assembly elections.
Duarte won the presidency with the support of a number of
groups in Salvadoran society who felt that their interests could
best be served by the extension of economic reform. Most of these
groups--middle-class professionals, small business people, labor
unions, and peasants--also believed that a just resolution to the
civil conflict was a necessary prerequisite to economic
reactivation. In terms of numbers, the most important of these
sectors were the labor and peasant organizations. In February
1984, Duarte signed a "social pact" with the major centrist
grouping, the Popular Democratic Unity (Unidad Popular
Democratica--UPD). This agreement called for the full
implementation of agrarian reform, government support for union
rights, incorporation of union and peasant leaders into the
government, and continued efforts to curtail human rights
violations and to end the civil conflict.
From the point of view of labor and peasant groups, the
Duarte government failed to follow through on the pledges made
under the social pact, and, as a result, the UPD began to
unravel. In early 1984, the UPD had been the leading labor and
peasant grouping in both numbers and influence. It was an
umbrella group made up of the country's leading labor federation-
-the Federation of Unions of the Construction Industry and
Kindred Activities, Transportation, and Other Activities
(Federacion de Sindicatos de la Industria de la Construccion,
Similares, Transporte y de Otras Actividades--Fesinconstrans);
its largest peasant group, the Salvadoran Communal Union (Union
Comunal Salvadorena--UCS); and three smaller groups. In August
1984, some three months after Duarte's election, the leadership
of the three smallest UPD affiliates called a press conference to
denounce Duarte for his lack of compliance with the social pact.
Leaders of Fesinconstrans and the UCS, who were not consulted
before or included in the press conference, publicly dissociated
themselves from the statements made there. This incident
precipitated a political and ideological split within the labor
movement that showed little sign of abating by the late 1980s.
Documents seized by government forces after a shootout with a
rebel group in April 1985 shed some light on the leadership
crisis within the UPD. According to the documents, three union
leaders (although not named, they were presumed by most analysts
to be the leaders who called the 1984 press conference) were
collaborating clandestinely with the FMLN and were receiving
bribes to assume a confrontational stance with the government.
The coordination of actions among the FMLN, leftist unions, and
certain militant human rights and refugee groups seemed to be
confirmed by another cache of rebel documents seized in April
1987. Whatever the motivation, the split in the UPD leadership
prompted the more moderate leadership of Fesinconstrans and the
UCS to explore the possibility of establishing a new labor
confederation. This organization, christened the Democratic
Workers' Confederation (Confederacion de Trabajadores
Democraticos--CTD), was founded in December 1984. In March 1986,
the CTD and the UCS joined with a number of other labor and
peasant groups to form the National Union of Workers and Peasants
(Union Nacional de Obreros y Campesinos--UNOC). UNOC
characterized itself as a labor organization supportive of the
moderate political left; it advocated the continuation of the
democratic process in El Salvador as well as the political
incorporation of workers and the making of improvements in their
quality of life.
The leaders of the more militant and radical labor and
peasant groups almost simultaneously established a parallel
umbrella group to UNOC, dubbing it the National Union of
Salvadoran Workers (Union Nacional de Trabajadores Salvadorenos--
UNTS). It included the remaining members of the UPD, several
established leftist labor groups, some of which maintained ties
to the World Federation of Trade Unions, a front group of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union; a peasant organization known
as the National Association of Peasants (Asociacion Nacional de
Campesinos--ANC); and a leftist student group, the General
Association of Salvadoran University Students (Asociacion General
de Estudiantes Universitarios Salvadorenos--AGEUS). Although it
claimed that its membership rivaled that of the 350,000-strong
UNOC, most observers agreed that the UNTS represented only 40,000
to 50,000 members at most.
President Duarte, the armed forces, and representatives of
the United States maintained that the UNTS was penetrated and
controlled by the FMLN. This allegation was not universally
accepted, however. Whether coordinated with FMLN strategy or not,
the actions of the UNTS appeared calculated to undermine the
legitimacy of the Duarte government and to promote unrest and
instability in urban areas, particularly San Salvador. UNTS
affiliates staged numerous strikes, mainly in the capital, most
of which were declared illegal by the government because the
demands of the union leadership were judged to be more political
than economic in nature. Some unions demanded the president's
resignation as a condition of settlement. Many of the strikes
were endorsed by the FMLN over the clandestine radio station
Radio Venceremos operated by the guerrilla group known as the
People's Revolutionary Army (Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo--
ERP). The largest mass antigovernment demonstration organized by
the UNTS took place in February 1986; estimates of the number of
participants ranged from 7,000 to 12,000. A generally
progovernment rally organized by UNOC the following month drew a
considerably larger turnout, estimated at up to 65,000.
Although it opposed the militant strategy of the UNTS and
supported the reforms decreed by the junta governments and
maintained under the PDC, UNOC also displayed disillusionment
with Duarte and his seeming inability to improve workers'
standard of living or to wind down the insurgency. UNOC's
influence, however, began to wane by 1985. This development was
attributable mainly to internal leadership struggles within
Fesinconstrans and the UCS. Ironically, the catalyst for these
conflicts was found not in the failure of the social pact with
the PDC but in its partial fulfillment. Labor and peasant leaders
who had been appointed to government posts, mainly in the
institutions administering agrarian reform and credit facilities,
were exploiting the patronage potential of their positions to
expand their personal following among the rank and file.
Resentment over this tactic prompted challenges from union
leaders and members who either felt excluded from the patronage
process or who objected to the practice on ethical grounds.
UNOC's lack of concerted involvement in the PDC legislative
victory of 1985 lessened its influence with the government and
perhaps made it easier for Duarte to follow the course of
economic austerity that eventually drew fire from both the
private sector and labor groups from across the political
spectrum.
Just as the UNTS represented the militant leftist position
among Salvadoran labor and peasant groups and UNOC affected a
more moderate, center-left stance, there were also conservative
labor groups still functioning in the late 1980s. The two leading
organizations in this category were the General Confederation of
Unions (Confederacion General de Sindicatos--CGS) and the
National Confederation of Workers (Confederacion Nacional de
Trabajadores--CNT). Their numbers were small--CGS membership was
estimated at 7,000 in 1986--and their political influence
correspondingly low. By 1988, however, as Arena took control of
the legislative branch and seemed poised to win the presidency,
the position of these conservative labor groups may well have
been enhanced, if only because moderate organizations such as
UNOC were all but certain to see their leverage with the
government diminish considerably. The radical UNTS, which was
condemned as a rebel front group even by the Duarte
administration (although it seemed clear that the majority of
rank-and-file UNTS members were not FMLN sympathizers), could
look forward to little or no sympathy from an Arena government.
Data as of November 1988
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