El Salvador Historical Setting
Pedro de Alvarado, Spanish conqueror of El Salvador
THE HISTORY OF EL SALVADOR revolves around one central issue--
land. In this, the smallest country in Central America, land
always has been a scarce commodity whose importance has been
amplified by the comparative absence of precious metals or
lucrative mineral deposits. Agriculture defined the economic life
of the country well before the arrival of the Spanish
conquistadors in the early 1500s, and, despite some modest
advances in industrial capacity, agriculture has continued to
dominate the nation's wealth, social structure, and political
dynamics.
The unequal distribution of land in El Salvador can be traced
directly to the Spanish colonial system, under which land title
was vested in the crown. Those select individuals granted control
of specified areas acted, at least in theory, only as stewards
over the lands and peoples under their control. Although private
property rights eventually were established, the functional
structure put in place by the Spanish was perpetuated well into
the twentieth century by the landed oligarchy, with the
assistance of the military.
Although the indigenous, or Indian, population gradually was
diminished through disease and abuse and eventually subsumed into
a growing mestizo (mixed Caucasian and Indian) population, its
position at the base of society was assumed by the rural lower
class. Until the mid-twentieth century, the patterns of
landownership and income distribution ran unrelentingly against
this segment of the population. As elsewhere in Latin America,
those with more got more, those with less got less. Under the
model of monoculture export that came to prevail in El Salvador,
the concentration of land into large units, or haciendas, made
for greater overall efficiency of production. The other side of
the economic coin, however, was engraved with images of worsening
poverty, deprivation, illiteracy, and disease as the singleminded pursuit of wealth by a minuscule percentage of the
population denied the vast majority of Salvadorans access to more
than a subsistence level of income.
Although slow to develop, the political ramifications of this
process of skewed distribution were inevitable. Unfortunately for
the marginalized campesinos (farmers or farm laborers), however,
the landowners were prepared to protect their gains by force
against any effort to improve the lot of the lower class. A rural
uprising in 1833, led by Indian leader Anastasio Aquino, was put
down by forces hired by the landowners. A century later, another
insurrection, this time led by the Marxist Agustin Farabundo
Marti, provoked a now-legendary reprisal known as la
matanza (the massacre). The troops that carried out this
action, in which by some estimates as many as 30,000 Salvadorans
were killed, belonged to the Salvadoran armed forces.
Institutionalized and nominally independent from the landed
oligarchy, the armed forces proceeded from that point to assume
control of the political process in El Salvador.
The Salvadoran officer corps was not altogether unsympathetic
to popular sentiment for reform of the oligarchic system. In the
Salvadoran political equation, however, the economic elite's
resistance to change remained a given. Therefore, efforts by the
military to institute gradual, guided reforms--land reform chief
among them--repeatedly ran into the brick wall of elite
opposition and influence. It was not until 1980, when the officer
corps allied itself publicly with the middle-class Christian
Democratic Party, that substantive reform appeared achievable. By
that time, however, El Salvador stood on the threshold of a major
civil conflict between government forces backed by the United
States and guerrillas supported by Nicaragua, Cuba, and the
Soviet Union. This conflict catapulted the country's internal
conflicts onto the world stage. The future course of reform in El
Salvador was thus uncertain, as the nation entered the 1980s
burdened with the legacies of economic and social inequality and
political exclusion of the middle and lower classes by the elite.
Data as of November 1988
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