History of El Salvador

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The history of El Salvador encompasses the developments in the area of ​​the Central American Republic of El Salvador from prehistory to the present. El Salvador has existed as an independent state since 1838; between 1823 and 1838 it was a member of the Central American Confederation . It had been a Spanish colony for 300 years. Before the European conquest, several Indian cultures existed on today's territory, which were completely wiped out in the course of the conquest.

El Salvador coat of arms

Native American cultures before the 16th century

Mayan ruins of San Andres

Before the Spanish colonization, El Salvador belonged to the southern fringes of the Maya culture. Three kingdoms of indigenous peoples existed on its territory : the rule of Cuzcatlan , an empire of the Pipil , a tribe of the Nahua who immigrated from Mexico , in the east the domain of the Lenca and in the north along the Río Lempa the empire of the Ch'orti ' , a people the Maya. Remnants of the Pipil culture are still visible in some places in El Salvador, for example Tazumal , San Andrés , and Joya de Cerén .

Spanish colonial times

In 1524, the first attempt at conquest by Spanish conquistadors failed. The troops under the command of Pedro de Alvarado were forced to retreat by warriors of the Pipil. A year later (1525) the Spaniards invaded again, this time subjugating the local population. Alvarado named the area El Salvador ("the Savior"). The entire area was incorporated into the viceroyalty of New Spain . El Salvador was part of the General Capitanate of Guatemala , where most of the armed forces were stationed, as was the seat of the supreme jurisdiction ( Real Audiencia ). El Salvador remained part of the Spanish colonial empire until 1821.

independence

Expansion of the Central American Confederation
Flag of the Central American Confederation from November 22, 1824

At the beginning of the 19th century, the discontent among Creole intellectuals and merchants about the still strict control by the colonial power Spain , especially about the prohibition of independent trade relations with other countries, especially with Great Britain and the United States, increased . At the same time, the rural population ( mestizos ) increasingly rebelled against the oppression by the Spaniards. Supporters of the independence movement managed to unite these two groups for their goals. This gave the movement the support of both the Creole middle class and the mestizo. In 1811 a first regional uprising failed after troops were sent from Guatemala to suppress it.

In 1821 El Salvador, along with all other Central American provinces, declared independence from Spain. When these provinces were to be united with the Empire of Mexico in 1822 , El Salvador was the only country to oppose and insisted on the independence of the Central American countries. Troops from Guatemala, who were supposed to enforce the union, were driven out of El Salvador by insurgents under the command of Manuel José Arce y Fagoaga in June 1822 . As a result, Arce traveled to Washington to negotiate an annexation of El Salvador as a state to the USA. After a revolution in Mexico against Emperor Agustín I in 1823, the new Mexican government agreed to the independence of the Central American states, and in the same year the five Central American states united to form the Central American Confederation .

The Central American Confederation broke up between 1838 and 1841, with El Salvador remaining the official legal successor. Later attempts to revive the Confederation failed.

oligarchy

In large parts of the country, the central government was unable to assert its power. Local large landowners , called the fourteen families (although there were actually about 30 family clans), controlled the hinterland in the manner of feudal lords . They were helped by the fact that the road network was still very poorly developed and bridges over most of the rivers were missing, which isolated their areas. In the constitution of 1824, 42 seats out of 70 were reserved for them in the only chamber of parliament. The President they elected was given wide powers and the governors of the 14 provinces were appointed by him. Despite several constitutional changes (1859, 1864, 1871, 1872, 1880, 1883, 1886), the large landowners were always able to maintain their power; the main purpose of the changes was to extend presidential terms.

In 1832, under the leadership of Anastasio Aquino , the indigenous population revolted against the Creole and Mestizo inhabitants of the city of Santiago Nonualco in the province of San Vicente . The insurgents demanded higher shares in the land allocation.

The dye obtained from the indigo plant , pressed and bound to a commercial "cake"

The agricultural production of El Salvador depended on a single export product: indigo . In order to increase the yields, the big landowners tried to acquire the most productive lands and to leave the poorer areas, especially around extinct volcanoes, to the poorer population (mestizos and indigenous peoples), who mostly practiced subsistence farming there. Since indigo was increasingly being replaced by chemical dyes in the middle of the 19th century, the cultivation was gradually switched to coffee , the demand for which was currently increasing sharply. Since it was also possible to grow coffee on less fertile soil, the areas unsuitable for indigo cultivation were of interest to the large landowners. The Landowner-controlled Legislative Assembly passed laws expropriating the poor rural populations, allowing the coffee plantations to expand. In 1882 the government of El Salvador abolished the last remaining indigenous common land by law. By 1900, 90% of the country's goods were in the hands of 0.01% of the population. Most of the peasants were landless and lived in extreme poverty. The De Sola family developed a particularly large amount of power.

Military dictatorship, matanza and early resistance

Farabundo Martí

In 1907 the El Salvador government sent troops to Honduras to assist Honduras in a war against Nicaragua. Nicaragua was victorious in the Battle of Nacaome (March 18-23, 1907). In 1930 General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez , the country's former defense minister, took power in a coup . In 1932 Martínez had an uprising by indigenous peasants, mostly members of the Pipil , led by the chairman of the newly founded Communist Party of El Salvador, Agustín Farabundo Martí , bloodily suppressed in the west of the country. In addition to Farabundo, around 30,000 people were killed. La Matanza - "the massacre" is considered to be the end of the physical and cultural existence of the indigenous peoples of El Salvador. In the 1930s around 20% of the population belonged to indigenous peoples, today it is around 1%. In the aftermath of the 1932 matanza, public use of indigenous languages ​​and wearing traditional clothing became a survival risk. It is said that people were killed simply because of the distinguishing feature that they spoke Nahuatl (Pipil) or wore "Indian" clothing.

In 1939 the active right to vote for women over 25 years (if married) or over 30 years (if single) was introduced. The ballot was voluntary for women, but compulsory for men. From 1959, all Salvadorans over the age of 18 had the right to vote, regardless of gender.

Martínez was deposed in 1944, until 1980 all other presidents with one exception were army officers, and the presidential elections that were held regularly were mostly rigged.

In the 1960s, the Partido de Conciliación Nacional (PCN) (German: Party of National Reconciliation) came to power and held it until 1979. Under President Fidel Sánchez Hernández (in office from 1967 to 1972) there was a war with Honduras in 1969 , the so-called "Hundred Hour War"; this went down in history as the " football war ". The reason was tensions over agricultural workers from El Salvador, who had long been held responsible for the economic problems by the government of Honduras. The war lasted four days from July 14, 1969 to July 18, 1969 (100 hours) and killed 3,000 people; 6,000 were injured. The conflict was settled through a peace agreement with the mediation of the Organization of American States .

At the beginning of the 1970s, the political situation in El Salvador became increasingly unstable. Several communist guerrilla groups formed, such as the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí (FLP) under Salvador Cayetano Carpio , the former leader of the Partido Comunista de El Salvador (PC), and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP). In the presidential elections on February 20, 1972, the two candidates of the opposition alliance José Napoleón Duarte , Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC) and Guillermo Manuel Ungo from the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) were obviously cheated of their majority. The elections were organized by the Organización Democrática Nacionalista (ORDEN), a paramilitary organization subordinate to the Salvadoran armed forces . The post-election protests were put down.

On March 2, 1972, members of the ERP shot dead two soldiers of the National Guard in San Salvador. The PDC was then accused of having connections to the ERP. In a climate of general suspicion, the suspicion that ORDEN was involved in the incident could not be dispelled. On March 25, 1972, Duarte was arrested and tortured, losing three fingers, accused of high treason and sentenced to death. In response to international pressure, President Arturo Armando Molina converted the sentence into exile and deported him to Venezuela .

On March 14, 1978 there was an election for the legislative assembly of El Salvador ; all opposition parties boycotted them. The PCN received all 52 seats. Another election took place on March 12, 1978; all but one of the opposition parties boycotted this election. The PCN got 50 seats, the 'Salvadoran Popular Party' 4 seats.

Civil war

prehistory

In October 1979, the Salvadoran military feared a similar fate after the overthrow of Nicaragua's president and dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle . Therefore, the President Carlos Humberto Romero ( military party PCN ) was removed from office on a trip to the USA and a politically very broad junta was formed, which was headed by the former opposition leader José Napoleón Duarte and initially also belonged to the MNR. Despite high economic growth rates, the economic problems worsened for large parts of the population, among other things. from the mechanization of agriculture through the Green Revolution and land evictions due to extensive hydropower reservoirs. These phenomena should be mitigated by a land transfer authority (ISTA) or at least given a quasi-legal framework. In 1983 a constitution was enacted which, in Article 105, restricted land ownership to 245 hectares. The surplus land should be transferred to cooperatives with compensation. Parts of the 14 owner families of El Salvador tried to stop the land reform with terror by death squads . The murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero , one of the most prominent critics of the military regime, who was striving for social equilibrium and peace , on March 24, 1980, became publicized around the world. In this " dirty war " many church, political or unionized people fell victim to death squads.

Escalation to civil war and role of the USA

Solidarity event in the GDR for the "just liberation struggle of the Salvadoran patriots" , 1982

The brutal repression of the military regime drove the opposition into armed resistance. From 1980 to 1991 there was a civil war in El Salvador, which in the end caused over 70,000 deaths (out of a population of around 4.5 million at the time), thousands of disabled and disappeared people and destruction amounting to billions. Over a million people fled the country during this time. The armed forces of the guerrilla consisted of individual associations of communists, Christians and trade unionists who joined together to form the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). The US government supported the military dictatorship in El Salvador . In addition to military advisers was from the United States military equipment delivered to the junta in a big way, even after the formed by US soldiers and trained anti-guerrilla unit battalion Atlacatl with the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians in December 1981 one of the worst war crimes in the Latin American history had committed. The then US Secretary of State Alexander Haig explicitly named the country in 1981 as the “test field of the Cold War”. The Reagan government consciously accepted the Salvadoran government strategy of the systematic murder of around forty thousand opposition members by death squads in the early 1980s in order to prevent the left resistance groups from taking power. The relative domestic calm in El Salvador, which followed the political mass murder of the opposition, which was officially denied by the US government , the Reagan administration explained to the US public with the white lie that the successful land reform of the local government led to general pacification have led.

Resistance of the churches in El Salvador and the USA

Protest against US support for the Salvadoran government, Chicago , 1989

The blatant human rights violations of the US-backed regime quickly led to considerable opposition within the USA, above all from circles of the Catholic and other churches, who opposed this foreign policy massively, but ultimately largely unsuccessfully. Some of them also campaigned for priests and church officials who were close to liberation theology , but this hardly reduced their endangerment by the military. The church's political commitment was described as the strongest since the resistance against the Vietnam War . It was particularly compounded by atrocities committed by Salvadoran military, such as the 1980 murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the El Mozote massacre, the murder of six Jesuit fathers in 1989, and the rape and murder of three American nuns and a missionary by Salvadoran Army soldiers.

Peace of Chapultepec

The Monumento a la memoria y la verdad in San Salvador commemorates the victims of human rights violations from the 1970s to the 1990s

In early 1992, the peace talks brokered by the Catholic Church and the United Nations between the FMLN and the government of El Salvador were concluded. On January 16, 1992, the Chapultepec Peace Treaty was signed in Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City. On February 1, 1992, a nine-month ceasefire entered into force. The transition to democratic conditions was regulated in several points in the Chapultepec Agreement:

  • The Salvadoran army was halved from 63,000 to 32,000 men. A constitutional amendment prohibited the army from interfering in internal state affairs. An internal commission examined the past of each individual officer for human rights violations or cases of corruption . These were released from service in the army.
  • Several security services involved in the civil war, such as the National Guard , were disbanded. A new national police force was set up to replace it as a civil, democratic, human rights institution. The first newly trained officers began their service as early as 1993.
  • A truth commission was set up to deal with the greatest atrocities during the twelve-year civil war under the aegis of the United Nations . The final report of the commission recommended that people who could be proven to have serious human rights violations should be removed from all political and military offices. On March 20, 1993, five days after the Truth Commission's final report was published, the Parliament of El Salvador issued an internationally controversial general amnesty for all violent war crimes committed before 1992.
  • The FMLN rebel army was demobilized and converted into a regular party.
  • Former guerrilla fighters as well as former government soldiers were compensated as part of a land redistribution.

The fulfillment of the peace agreement was monitored internationally and nationally. Decisive for the successful implementation was the fact that the peace agreement had neither winners nor vanquished and the favorable foreign policy framework ( collapse of the Soviet Union , end of the East-West conflict ) existed.

The Supreme Court of El Salvador lifted the general amnesty of 1993 as unconstitutional in July 2016.

democracy

Since the end of the civil war, the political landscape has developed from an authoritarian system to a democratic state. Until 2009, presidents and governments were always provided by the right-wing conservative party ARENA ( Nationalist Republican Alliance ), but the FMLN was able to gain considerable influence in local elections and finally won the parliamentary elections in 2009 and later the presidential elections with 51% of the vote. The social contrast between the small part of the population, which owned most of the resources, and the impoverished majority of the population has ultimately hardly changed even after the end of the civil war.

With 104 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, El Salvador was the most dangerous country in the world outside of war zones. In the spring of 2016, the government set up a special unit against dangerous youth gangs. According to the government, the number of murders per day fell from 20 at the beginning of the year to around 10 in the summer of 2016.

See also

literature

  • Thomas P. Anderson: Matanza: El Salvador's communist revolt of 1932. Univ. of Nebraska Pr., Lincoln 1971, ISBN 0-8032-0794-8 .
  • Hugh Byrne: El Salvador's Civil War. A Study of Revolution. Boulder, COLO / London 1996, ISBN 1-55587-606-4 .
  • James S. Corum: The Civil War in El Salvador 1980–1992. In: Bernd Greiner / Christian Th. Müller / Dierk Walter (eds.): Hot wars in the cold war. Hamburger Ed., Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-936096-61-9 , pp. 315–338.
  • Greg Grandin : Empire's workshop. Latin America, the United States, and the rise of the new imperialism . New York, NY (Holt) 2007, ISBN 978-0-8050-8323-1 .
  • Yvon Grenier: The Emergence of Insurgency in El Salvador: Ideology and Political Will. University of Pittsburgh Pr., Pittsburgh [u. a.] 1999, ISBN 0-8229-4094-9 .
  • John L. Hammond: Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador. Rutgers University Pr., New Brunswick, NJ [u. a.] 1998, ISBN 0-8135-2526-8 .
  • Aldo Lauria-Santiago & Leigh Binford (Eds.): Landscapes of Struggle: Politics, Society, and Community in El Salvador. University of Pittsburgh Pr., Pittsburgh 2004, ISBN 0-8229-5838-4 .
  • Michael Krämer: El Salvador. From war to low intensity peace. 2nd edition, ISP, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-929008-09-2 .
  • Julie D. Shayne: The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba . Rutgers University Press 2004.
  • William Stanley: The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador . Philadelphia (Temple University Press) 1996, ISBN 1-56639-391-4 .
  • Jan Suter: prosperity and crisis in a coffee republic. Modernization, social change and political upheaval in El Salvador, 1910–1945 , Vervuert 1996.
  • Virginia Q. Tilley: Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation, and Power in El Salvador , University of New Mexico Press 2005.
  • Elisabeth J. Wood (Ed.), Peter Lange (Ed.), Robert H. Bates (Ed.): Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador . Cambridge University Press 2003.
  • Heidrun Zinecker: El Salvador after the civil war. Ambivalences of a difficult peace. Campus, Frankfurt / M. 2004, ISBN 3-593-37459-5 .

Web links

Commons : History of El Salvador  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Alain Rouquié: Amérique latine - Introduction à l'Extrême-Occident . In: Points Essais . 2nd Edition. No. 373 . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1998, ISBN 978-2-02-020624-2 , pp. 122, 129 (nouvelle édition revue et augmentée; there cited from: Enrique Baloyra: El Salvador in Transition . Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p. 24; and from: Eduardo Colindres: Fundamentos económicos de la burguesía salvadoreña . Universidad Centroamericana, San Salvador 1977).
  2. ^ Richard A. Haggarty, ed. El Salvador: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1988. Online as of 10/03/08 at http://countrystudies.us/el-salvador/
  3. ↑ M. Ward, Thesis, http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~mward/mthesis/chapter5.pdf
  4. ↑ Paige, JM. "Coffee and Power in El Salvador." Latin American Research Review, v. 28 issue 3, 1993, p. 7th
  5. ↑ Byrne, H., 1996. El Salvador's Civil War. Colorado: Lynne Reiner.
  6. ↑ : Michael Krennerich: El Salvador. In: Dieter Nohlen (Hrsg.): Handbook of the election data of Latin America and the Caribbean (= political organization and representation in America. Volume 1). Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1993, ISBN 3-8100-1028-6 , pp. 321-347, p. 325.
  7. ↑ Stephen Webre (1979): José Napoleón Duarte and the Christian Democratic Party in Salvadoran Politics: 1960-1972 . Louisiana State University Press, p. 194, ISBN 978-0807104620
  8. ^ Constitución Política de 1983 con reformas hasta 2000
  9. ^ The belated canonization of Óscar Romero , NZZ , October 13, 2018, title of the print edition
  10. ↑ a b c Benjamin Schwarz: Dirty Hands. The success of US policy in El Salvador - preventing a guerrilla victory - was based on 40,000 political murders. Book review on William M. LeoGrande: Our own Backyard. The United States in Central America 1977-1992. 1998, December 1998.
  11. ↑ Anthony Lewis: Abroad at Home; Fear Of the Truth. The New York Times, April 2, 1993
  12. ^ Activist Church Leaders Oppose US Policy in El Salvador. Reading Eagle, April 19, 1981
  13. ^ Jon Sobrino: Jesuit Martyrs of el salvador: a research guide. Saint Peter's College , archived from the original on June 10, 2012 ; accessed on March 9, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Americas El Salvador murdered nuns case stays shut. BBC online, June 5, 1998
  15. ^ " Background Note: El Salvador ," US Department of State (accessed February 3, 2010).
  16. ^ Amnesty Act in El Salvador - End of Impunity , TAZ, July 14, 2016
  17. ↑ Presidential election: Left shift in El Salvador. In: Spiegel Online . March 16, 2009. Retrieved June 9, 2018 .
  18. ↑ Murder rate in El Salvador is falling significantly , NZZ, August 12, 2016