El Salvador Civil War — US-Backed Junta vs. FMLN
El Salvador fought a civil war from 1979 to 1992 in which some 75,000 people died, most of them killed by their own government. The country's land had been concentrated for a century in very few hands, coffee had displaced communal holdings in the 1880s, and a peasant rising in 1932 had been suppressed with the killing of perhaps 25,000 people — an event called the matanza, after which the military governed almost continuously. A stolen election in 1972 removed the last argument for peaceful change. A reformist junta of young officers took power in October 1979 and was pushed aside within months by the right, and five guerrilla organisations merged into the FMLN in 1980. The war was fought largely against civilians. Death squads linked to the security forces killed teachers, unionists, catechists and students; Archbishop Óscar Romero was shot saying mass in March 1980, the day after appealing to soldiers to stop obeying orders to kill; four American churchwomen were murdered in December. At El Mozote that month a battalion trained in the United States killed some 1,000 villagers, most of them children, and the reports were denied by both governments for a decade. Washington supplied some six billion dollars over twelve years on the argument that the alternative was another Nicaragua. The end came through negotiation after the Cold War removed the stakes: accords signed in Mexico City in January 1992, the army halved, the FMLN made a political party, and a truth commission that attributed 85 per cent of the violations to the state. Romero was canonised in 2018 and the amnesty law was struck down by El Salvador's constitutional court in 2016, which reopened cases that had been closed for a quarter of a century. Almost nobody has been convicted.
- Year: 1979 CE
- Category: Military
