AHR Roundtable
How Did the Civil War in El Salvador End?
JOAQUÍN M. CHÁVEZ
A Faculty Fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago between
September 2014 and May 2015 allowed me to complete this article. Many thanks to Susan Levine and
Linda Vavra, the Director and Associate Director of that institution, respectively, for their support of my
research on the history of the peace process in El Salvador. I am also grateful to the 2014–2015 fellows at
that same institution for their contributions to my research: Salome Aguilera Skvirsky, Malgorzata Fidelis,
Rachel Havrelock, Rosilie Hernández, Melissa Hibbard, Priscilla McCutcheon, Timothy Murphy, and
Sanye Vatansever. Many thanks to Chris Boyer and Laura Hostetler, and to all my colleagues in the
Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago for their institutional support of my research. Special thanks to Robert A. Schneider for the invitation to reflect on this crucial facet in the history of El Salvador’s civil war and for his multiple editorial contributions to this article. I am grateful to
the anonymous reviewers for their insightful contributions to this piece. Thanks to Alex Lichtenstein for
his incisive editorial contributions. Thanks to Jane Lyle for her editorial insights. Many thanks to Carlos
Henrı́quez Consalvi, the director of the Museo de la Palabra y la Imágen in San Salvador, for facilitating
the images featured in this article.
1 “About one in 56 Salvadorans” lost their lives as a result of the conflict. Elisabeth Jean Wood,
Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge, 2003), 8. For an insightful study on
the origins of the oligarchic military regime formed in 1932, see Erik Ching, Authoritarian El Salvador:
Politics and the Origins of the Military Regime, 1880–1940 (Notre Dame, Ind., 2014).
2 James Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America: Political Change in the Isthmus, 1987–1993
(London, 1994), 47.
3 The government of Colombia and insurgent groups also held peace talks in the 1980s. For instance,
President Virgilio Barco and the M-19 guerrillas conducted peace negotiations in 1988. However, this
negotiation was aimed solely at facilitating the electoral participation and the demobilization of the
M-19. It did not settle the armed conflict in Colombia. Jenny Pearce, Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth
(London, 1990), 284–286.
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THE CIVIL WAR IN EL SALVADOR WAS ONE OF the most devastating conflicts in modern
Latin American history. Pitting forces advocating democracy and revolution against
those who were attempting to preserve the oligarchic military regime formed in 1932
(or variants of it), the war between the insurgent Farabundo Martı́ National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the government of El Salvador claimed the lives of 75,000 civilians and thousands of soldiers and insurgents during the 1980s in a country with a
total population of 5 million. 1 Nearly 1 million people were forcefully displaced
within El Salvador or became refugees in Central America, Mexico, the United
States, and elsewhere as a result of the conflict.2 A UN-mediated negotiation between the government of President Alfredo Cristiani and the FMLN put an end to
the conflict in 1992 and paved the way for the only sustained democratic period in
Salvadoran history. This process constituted a new experience in the trajectory of left
insurgencies in Latin America.3 In contrast to the combination of political mobilizations and armed struggle that put the July 26 Movement in Cuba and the Sandinista
How Did the Civil War in El Salvador End?
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4 The civil war in El Salvador was clearly an uneven conflict. At the end of the war, the FMLN
demobilized 12,362 guerrillas, which represented less than 10 percent of the state forces. Tommie Sue
Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador: From Civil Strife to Civil Peace (Boulder, Colo., 1995), 228, 229.
The U.S. funded the massive expansion of the armed forces of El Salvador during the civil war. Made up
of roughly 7,000 men in 1979, by 1983 “the army comprised 22,400 men, backed by the 11,000 men” who
made up the militarized public security forces, and some 50,000 paramilitaries. Michael McClintock, The
American Connection, vol. 1: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador (London, 1985), 337. At
the end of the war, 60,000 men made up the armed forces of El Salvador (i.e., army and security forces;
this number excludes the paramilitary forces under army command); Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 228.
5 Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 213–226; Hugh Byrne, El Salvador’s Civil War: A Study of
Revolution (Boulder, Colo., 1996), 169–176.
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National Liberation Front in Nicaragua in power, it was a stalemate between the
FMLN and the U.S.-supported Salvadoran regime that led to the political settlement
of El Salvador’s civil war.
During the 1980s, the FMLN insurgency effectively contested state sovereignty
and neutralized efforts to defeat it. Its combative guerrilla army, vast political networks, war fronts covering nearly a third of the country’s territory, and intricate political, diplomatic, and military initiatives made it a tenacious opponent. Those same
qualities enabled it to fight the vastly superior U.S.-backed state forces to a virtual
standstill in 1989, which opened the door for the start of definitive negotiations to
end the war.4 A close examination of the fundamental trade-off and the main results
achieved by the peace negotiations, particularly the FMLN’s transformation from
one of the most powerful insurgencies in recent Latin American history into a legal
political party, can elucidate the peculiar conjunction of war, politics, and diplomacy
that settled the conflict. In exchange for the demobilization of the insurgency and its
integration into the political system, the Cristiani government proved willing to demilitarize the state and implement thorough political reform. The revolutionary war
led by the FMLN thus dismantled the oligarchic military regime and laid the foundation for liberal democracy in El Salvador.
The convergence of various domestic and international dynamics enabled the successful completion and implementation of a peace agreement in 1992. Those dynamics included the strategic parity reached between the FMLN and the Salvadoran
regime in 1989, the political and ideological transformations experienced by the insurgency, and the international consensus in favor of the peace negotiations that
emerged at the end of the Cold War. The governing party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), also experienced important political changes in the late
1980s that contributed to the start of peace negotiations. But in the end, the U.S. decision to support the peace talks in 1990 forced the Salvadoran military and elites to
accept the process.5 A major military offensive carried out by FMLN forces in November 1989 became the catalyst for the initiation of serious peace negotiations. It
convinced both internal and international stakeholders of the futility of promoting a
further escalation of the conflict and the urgent need to terminate it through a political settlement.
The pragmatism the FMLN showed during the peace talks opened a path for unprecedented political reforms, which paradoxically also enabled the implementation
of the neoliberal restructuring advocated by the Cristiani government and international financial institutions in the early 1990s. A succinct overview of the ideological
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6 Five organizations made up the insurgent FMLN: the Popular Liberation Forces, the People’s Revolutionary Army, the National Resistance, the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers, and
the Communist Party of El Salvador. The PCS incarnated the Old Left, historically closer to Moscow.
The rest of the groups were part of the “New Left” or “revolutionary Latin American left,” closer to the
Cuban Revolution and Third World revolutionary movements.
7 For an overview of the origins of New Left movements in Latin America, see Latin America in the
Global Sixties, Special Issue, The Americas 70, no. 3 (2014).
8 For a comprehensive study of the 1932 uprising in western El Salvador and the subsequent mass
killings conducted by state forces, see Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920–1932 (Durham, N.C., 2008).
9 The Christian Democratic Party, the social democratic National Revolutionary Movement, and the
Nationalist Democratic Union created the National Opposition Union.
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and political trajectory of the insurgency partly explains this outcome. The organizations that made up the FMLN self-identified as Marxist-Leninists, but the insurgent
leadership also included social democrats, radicalized Catholics, and eclectic intellectuals and activists. Broadly speaking, the FMLN was a merger between the New Left
insurgencies (i.e., the revolutionary left), formed in the early 1970s, and the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), founded in 1930.6 The insurgencies emerged in the
context of the Global Sixties in Latin America.7 They began waging war on the state
and the elites in 1970. The PCS was a clandestine political organization for most of
its history. In 1932 it was nearly exterminated by state forces.8 In the subsequent four
decades, the party actively participated in electoral, university, and trade union politics.
Broad-front and electoral politics was nothing new for the Salvadoran left. In the
early 1970s, the Nationalist Democratic Union, a party sponsored by the PCS, joined
the National Opposition Union, a widely popular electoral coalition.9 The alliance’s
candidates, José Napoleón Duarte, a Christian democrat leader, and Ernesto Claramount Roseville, an army colonel, respectively won the 1972 and 1977 presidential
elections. However, the Party of National Conciliation (the official party) and highranking military officers rigged both contests. On February 28, 1977, state forces
massacred opposition activists who were protesting the electoral fraud in downtown
San Salvador. These episodes further polarized Salvadoran society and politics. The
PCS disengaged from electoral politics after these events. It joined the insurgency
two years later. The revolutionary left also formed extensive alliances during that decade. Some guerrilla groups developed close ties with progressive Catholics, middleclass professionals, businessmen, and even sectors of the army.
The founding of the FMLN in 1980 constituted a defining moment in the history
of El Salvador. It signified a powerful merger between the Old and the New Left, articulating the historical grievances and demands of vast urban and rural sectors. The
FMLN was a highly eclectic movement. Its social, ideological, and political diversity
was both its greatest strength and its greatest challenge. It was endowed with a critical mass of urban and rural intellectuals, a multiplicity of human resources, political
and military expertise, national and international relations, and above all a keen
pragmatism. On the other hand, its leaders struggled to reach consensus on a number of political and strategic issues, and ultimately to forge revolutionary unity during
the civil war.
An unprecedented alliance between the FMLN and a variety of democratic and
revolutionary forces also emerged in 1980. The Democratic Revolutionary Front
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Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 215–216.
In 1984, the FMLN-FDR advocated the formation of a “provisional broad-based government”
(gobierno provisional de amplia participación) as a solution to the conflict. Partido Revolucionario de los
Trabajadores Centroamericanos, “Sobre el gobierno provisional de amplia participación y otras cuestiones del proceso salvadoreño,” Periódico Anastasio Aquino, no. 14 (May–June 1984), http://www.
cedema.org/ver.php?id¼5030; Óscar Martı́nez Peñate, El Salvador: Del conflicto armado a la negociación,
1979–1989 (San Salvador, 1997), 102–107.
12 Cate Buchanan and Joaquı́n Chávez, Guns and Violence in the El Salvador Peace Negotiations (Geneva, 2008), 16; Martı́nez Peñate, El Salvador, 106.
13 Guillermo Manuel Ungo, the president of the FDR and vice president of the Socialist International in the 1980s, and Héctor Oquelı́ Colindres, a leader of the social democratic National Revolutionary Movement, played key roles in the rapprochement between FMLN-FDR leaders and European and
Latin American social democratic figures. Roberto Turcios, Guillermo Manuel Ungo: Una vida por la
democracia y la paz (San Salvador, 2012), chap. 5. European and Canadian social democratic leaders and
FMLN-FDR representatives met frequently in the early 1980s. Martı́nez Peñate, El Salvador, 44–49.
14 Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 41; Teresa Whitfield, Friends Indeed? The United
Nations, Groups of Friends, and the Resolution of Conflict (Washington, D.C., 2007), 57.
15 Whitfield, Friends Indeed?, 76.
10
11
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(FDR), made up of opposition parties, revolutionary social movements, academic institutions, professionals, and other sectors, allied with the FMLN that year. The
FMLN-FDR became the standard-bearers for democracy and revolution in El Salvador during that decade. The movement did not reject elections as a matter of principle or advocate the elimination of private property, much less the formation of a
one-party state.10 The top FMLN leaders were, for the most part, pragmatic politicians who fought a revolutionary war with changing objectives. They reshaped the
movement’s ideology and politics according to circumstances. In the 1980s, they held
peace talks with the military–Christian Democratic government led by President
Duarte, at which time they demanded power-sharing as a means to end the conflict
and facilitate a transition to democratic rule.11 The Ronald Reagan administration,
Duarte, and the Salvadoran elites flatly rejected this stance. They demanded the unconditional disarmament and demobilization of the FMLN and its integration into
the existing political system as the only option for ending the civil war.12 Toward the
end of that decade, however, a major policy shift on the part of FMLN leaders made
it possible for the peace negotiations to unfold.
The FMLN reshaped its negotiation policy as a result of its political and diplomatic activism and the evolution of its strategy on the ground. More to the point, the
interactions between FMLN-FDR leaders and European, Canadian, and Latin
American social democratic figures centrally informed the ideological and political
mutations experienced by the FMLN in the 1980s.13 The insurgency deployed an intense political and diplomatic campaign in Europe, the United States, Canada, Latin
America, and elsewhere to advocate a negotiated settlement of the conflict. The competent FMLN-FDR diplomats relied on the backing of European and Latin American social democratic governments that opposed U.S. policy in Central America and
supported negotiations in El Salvador.14 They orchestrated major diplomatic initiatives to solve the conflict, including the 1981 French-Mexican declaration that recognized the FMLN-FDR as legitimate representatives of the Salvadoran people.
They also promoted the founding of the Group of Friends of the UN Secretary General, a novel form of activist diplomacy that played an important role in the Salvadoran and subsequent peace negotiations. 15 As an extension of this process, the
FMLN leadership gradually relinquished the movement’s Marxist-Leninist ideology
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Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 215–216.
Ignacio Ellacurı́a cited in Manuel Montobbio, La metamorfosis de pulgarcito: Transición polı́tica y
proceso de paz en El Salvador (Barcelona, 1999), 270.
18 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), chap. 17.
16
17
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and embraced democratic socialism between 1988 and 1991.16 Ignacio Ellacurı́a, a Jesuit philosopher and a trenchant observer of the civil war, regarded this metamorphosis as the FMLN’s aggiornamento, its own Vatican II.17
Paradoxically, the rapprochement between the FMLN-FDR and the Socialist
International took place at a time when socialist parties in Europe were abandoning
the welfare state paradigm and embracing neoliberalism at the height of
Thatcherism.18 In this period, FMLN leaders also altered their initial strategic objectives, the outright defeat of the authoritarian regime and the instauration of a
democratic-revolutionary government. They now demanded a comprehensive demilitarization of the state and society and major political reforms as the way to end the
conflict. This ideological and programmatic shift explains the consistency of the
FMLN’s negotiation policy between 1990 and 1992. The policy had two neatly defined objectives: to undo militarism and to promote a transition to democracy in El
Salvador. The rebel leadership did not demand structural socioeconomic reforms as
a precondition for ending the conflict. The achievement of those objectives enabled
the transformation of the FMLN into a legal political party. Not surprisingly, this
was a fraught process, with serious debates and conflicts within the ranks of the insurgency, but it ultimately resulted in the abandonment of the movement’s foundational ideology. As the Cold War ended, FMLN leaders had few viable political
alternatives. They could stick to their original ideology and strategic objectives, an
option that likely had led the country into an endemic civil war, or they could promote a negotiated settlement of the conflict that would lay the foundation for liberal
democracy. They chose the latter alternative, betting, as it were, that the FMLN
would emerge as a major political actor in the postwar era. They sought to build a reformist alternative to the existing oligarchic hegemony.
In the late 1980s, ARENA also experienced important political transformations
that facilitated the start of the peace talks. The election of Alfredo Cristiani, a U.S.educated businessman, as president of El Salvador in March 1989 marked a turning
point in this process. Cristiani promised to conduct direct talks with the FMLN to
end the civil war, challenging ARENA’s traditional rejection of this policy. The Salvadoran military’s inability to defeat the FMLN arguably convinced Cristiani and
other conservative leaders to take that step. The indefinite prolongation of the war
had made it harder for Cristiani to effectively implement the economic restructuring
mandated by the Washington Consensus, which was to include the privatization of
state assets, particularly the banking system, a cutback in social services, a drastic reduction of the state apparatus, and other austerity policies. This situation was further
reinforced in the aftermath of the 1989 FMLN offensive, which showed beyond a
reasonable doubt that the potency and persistency of the insurgency gave it de facto
veto power over the neoliberal restructuring. In this context, Cristiani sidelined the
right-wing extremists in ARENA who were calling for the extermination of the left
opposition, a lethal policy that had already been implemented by U.S.-sponsored
How Did the Civil War in El Salvador End?
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governments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and promoted negotiations with the
insurgency.19
Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 70.
Joaquı́n Chávez, “Revolutionary Power, Divided State,” in Jordana Dym and Karl Offen, eds.,
Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago, 2011), 250–253.
21 Salvador Samayoa, El Salvador: La reforma pactada (San Salvador, 2002), 211–212.
22 On January 23, 1989, the FMLN offered to participate in the 1989 elections if the Duarte government agreed to postpone them for six months and created certain basic conditions for its participation.
Ibid., 128.
23 Ibid., 212.
24 A powerful bomb exploded at FENASTRAS headquarters in San Salvador at noon, killing its secretary general, Febe Elizabeth Velásquez, and nine other activists. Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 216.
25 Ibid., 216–217.
19
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A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION of the Salvadoran conflict is beyond
the scope of this roundtable. In order to explicate the origins of the peace talks, however, it is necessary to briefly discuss the impact of the 1989 FMLN offensive. This
event radically altered the dynamics of the conflict, sparked the UN-mediated peace
negotiations, and ultimately expedited the trade-off that effectively ended the war. In
retrospect, this episode opened the door to liberal democracy in El Salvador.
By 1989, the civil war had devastated the country for nearly a decade, and the
sovereignty of the state was virtually divided between the government and the FMLN
insurgency.20 At the start of that year, neither side had made a definite decision to
bring the conflict to an end “through political means,” and both still considered the
possibility of a military victory feasible.21 However, Cristiani’s election in March, following the FMLN’s offer earlier in the year to participate in electoral politics, created a new opportunity for negotiations. 22 In this setting, FMLN and Cristiani
government representatives met in Mexico City in September to consider the initiation of direct negotiations.23 But in early November the FMLN withdrew from the
peace talks to protest a deadly attack against the Federación Nacional Sindical de
Trabajadores Salvadoreños (FENASTRAS), the largest trade union federation in
the country, which had been carried out by a death squad on October 31.24 After this
episode, the FMLN deemed Cristiani’s negotiation stance a ruse and launched a major military offensive, preparations for which had been underway for several years.25
The FMLN offensive was hardly a surprise for the Salvadoran military. In hindsight, however, they grossly underestimated the firepower, discipline, and audacity
that would be displayed by the insurgent forces. On the night of November 11,
FMLN fighters launched simultaneous attacks on government forces in San Salvador
and other cities. They routed military and security forces stationed in heavily populated areas of the greater metropolitan area of San Salvador. While the rebel forces
were unable to organize a popular uprising, they received extensive material and organizational support from residents of barrios and marginal communities in San Salvador. In turn, the Salvadoran military bombed and shelled Soyapango and the
northern periphery of San Salvador in an attempt to regain control over the rebeloccupied areas. But despite the state counteroffensive, in most cases FMLN fighters
held their positions for nearly a week. After they had apparently retreated from
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Samayoa, El Salvador, 221.
Ibid., 223–226.
28 Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 28–29.
29 Samayoa, El Salvador, 218.
30 U.S. senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy introduced a bill “to cut military aid” to El Salvador in the aftermath of this episode. In August 1990, U.S. senators Christopher Dodd and Patrick Leahy
introduced a new bill to condition U.S. military aid to El Salvador “upon an improvement in the [Salvadoran] government’s human rights record and tangible progress in the negotiations with the FMLN.”
Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 28.
31 Samayoa, El Salvador, 213.
32 Ibid., 237.
26
27
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northern San Salvador, FMLN forces occupied Escalón and San Benito, two residential neighborhoods inhabited by prominent businessmen, top government officials,
and foreign ambassadors and journalists.26 In a dramatic episode, rebel commandos
laid siege to the Sheraton Hotel in Escalón, which housed a group of U.S. Special
Forces, Israeli and Guatemalan military advisers, and the secretary general of the
Organization of American States, João Baena Soares. This sensitive incident was resolved through direct communications between rebel leaders based in Mexico City
and U.S. State Department officials, which ensured the safe evacuation of the foreign
military personnel and Baena Soares.27 Despite having received massive military aid
and extensive training and advice from the U.S. for nearly a decade, state forces
failed to rout the insurgents who entered San Salvador and other urban areas. In the
end, the guerrillas retreated to their strongholds, and the state forces retook control
of the cities. To many observers, however, the 1989 FMLN offensive revealed the
Salvadoran military’s inability to win the war. If nothing else, it showed their extreme
strategic vulnerability in facing the rebel forces.
The 1989 FMLN offensive indeed changed the trajectory of the civil war. It shook
the Cristiani government to its core and undermined the bipartisan support in the
U.S. Congress that had enabled the military escalation of the conflict promoted by
the Reagan administration.28 It convinced domestic and international actors to engage in negotiations to end the conflict and created a scenario that allowed the start
of UN-brokered negotiations.29 In particular, the assassination of six prominent Jesuit scholars, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, carried out by an army
unit at the Central American University at the height of the FMLN offensive, induced Congress to make U.S. military aid to El Salvador contingent upon verifiable
progress in the peace negotiations. 30 In the aftermath of this event, the insurgent
leadership overcame its initial “distrust of the UN” and asked UN Secretary General
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to mediate a negotiated solution to the conflict.31 Cristiani
accepted the secretary general’s participation in the negotiations but attempted to
limit his mediating role.32 Pérez de Cuéllar also intensified his efforts to promote negotiations between the FMLN and the Salvadoran government in the aftermath of
the 1989 FMLN offensive. To this end, he drew on UN Security Council Resolution
637, sanctioned unanimously in July of that same year, which mandated the secretary
general to assume an active role in the Central American peace process.
The closing stages of the Cold War expedited the negotiations between Cristiani
and the FMLN, as the United States no longer framed the civil war in El Salvador as
part of the global conflict. President George H. W. Bush did not continue Reagan’s
militaristic approach to the Salvadoran war and instead supported the UN-brokered
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Ibid., 234.
Ibid., 243.
35 In the 1989 San Isidro Coronado Declaration, Esquipulas II called for the unconditional demobilization of the Contras, a creation of the CIA, and the FMLN, a movement deeply rooted in Salvadoran
history, politics, and society. This false symmetry omitted the substantially different origins, legitimacy,
and demands of those forces. “Annex: Declaration of San Isidro Coronado,” in “Letter dated 12 December 1989 from the Permanent Representative of El Salvador to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General,” United Nations, General Assembly—Security Council, A/44/872, S/21019, December
12, 1989, 2–3, http://dag.un.org/handle/11176/58956.
36 Samayoa, El Salvador, 243.
37 Byrne, El Salvador’s Civil War, 185; Whitfield, Friends Indeed?, 58.
38 Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 217.
39 Whitfield, Friends Indeed?, 58.
40 Roberto Regalado, a Cuban analyst, reported that the Soviets threatened to cut military aid to the
Sandinistas if they failed to complete unconditional negotiations with the Contras, a policy that “halted
the advancement of revolutionary forces in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia.” Regalado, “>Por
qué publicar un libro sobre insurgencias, diálogos y negociaciones?,” Rebelión, May 23, 2013, http://
www3.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id¼168467.
33
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peace talks. In December 1989, Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met in
Malta, where they agreed to support a political settlement to the Central American
crisis and the UN secretary general’s mediation in the Salvadoran negotiations. 33
Ambassador Thomas Pickering, the United States’ permanent representative to the
UN, also voiced support for the Salvadoran peace talks.34 In his statement, Pickering
omitted any allusion to the bogus symmetry between the Contras—the irregular
army created by the CIA to fight the Sandinistas—and the FMLN implicit in Esquipulas II, a regional peace initiative sponsored by the Central American presidents.35
FMLN negotiators deemed Pickering’s gesture crucial for the success of the peace
talks as they rejected any parallels between the Contras and the FMLN.36 In all, the
U.S.-Soviet declaration in Malta decisively strengthened the international consensus
in favor of the peace negotiations and isolated the right-wing extremists in the Salvadoran military and ARENA who opposed this process.
The Soviet-U.S. rapprochement regarding the Central American conflicts, the
eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and the defeat of the Sandinistas in the elections of February 1990 had both direct and indirect impacts on the Salvadoran peace
negotiations. Soviet support for the FMLN apparently dwindled in 1989, which likely
led to some “significant soul searching” among the rebel leadership.37 However, it is
less plausible that the Soviet Union (and Cuba) straightforwardly compelled the
FMLN to negotiate with Cristiani. 38 Tensions between senior FMLN leaders and
Gorbachev were high in 1989, and Soviet influence over the FMLN was insignificant
at that time.39 Nevertheless, Soviet pressure on the Sandinistas to engage in unconditional negotiations with the Contras had an indirect effect on the FMLN. It likely
motivated the president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, a close FMLN ally, to endorse
the alleged symmetry between the Contras and the FMLN as a means to expedite
regional negotiations.40 On the other hand, the Sandinistas’ defeat in the February
1990 elections had nothing to do with the start of negotiations between Cristiani and
the FMLN, which were already underway at that time, but it likely emboldened the
Salvadoran military and Cristiani during the negotiations. They flatly rejected the
FMLN’s initial demands for military reform. The insurgent leaders had originally
called for the demobilization of both the rebel and official armies and the creation of
a demilitarized state, or alternatively for the integration of FMLN fighters into the
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IN TECHNICAL TERMS, THE TRADE -OFF THAT brought the civil war to an end was the
Cristiani government’s agreement to implement security sector reform in exchange
for the demobilization and disarmament of the insurgents and their reintegration
into civilian life and the transformation of the FMLN into a legal political party.43 Or
as Salvador Samayoa, a senior FMLN negotiator, succinctly put it, “the FMLN was
willing to engage in politics without arms and to accept that the official armed forces
kept arms without engaging in politics.”44 During the negotiations, the FMLN abandoned its initial demands regarding military reform. It ultimately accepted the
“downsizing and purging of government forces” and the creation of the National
Civilian Police as key components of the security sector reform.45 The compromise
reached between Cristiani and the FMLN on these matters led to a substantial demilitarization of the Salvadoran state and society.46
In addition to the security sector reform, the FMLN demanded the end of impunity. It called for the formation of a Truth Commission to assess the human rights violations committed during the civil war and an Ad Hoc Commission to examine the
professional records of the officer corps.47 The Truth Commission attributed 85 perByrne, El Salvador’s Civil War, 183–185.
Buchanan and Chávez, Guns and Violence in the El Salvador Negotiations, 21.
43 For an analysis and chronology of the peace negotiations between the Cristiani government and
the FMLN, see ibid., 16–25. “Broadly speaking, DDR [demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration]
is a set of procedures introduced after a violent conflict to transition fighting forces to civilian status or
integration into state security forces. These transitions entail the decommissioning of armed groups, their
collective disarmament, and efforts designed to ‘reintegrate’ former fighters into new occupations” (20);
“SSR [security sector reform] is a set of procedures designed to bring the security organs (the police, military, intelligence services and private security forces) into conformity with internationally accepted
norms” (27).
44 Ibid., 27.
45 Ibid.
46 It enabled the reduction of the Salvadoran army from roughly 60,000 to 30,000 troops and the demobilization of three militarized police forces (the National Guard, the National Police, and the Treasury Police) and the massive paramilitary forces that operated under army control. It also included the
dismantling of the military intelligence services as well as the reform of the armed forces’ military doctrine, education, and training. Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 25; Byrne, El Salvador’s
Civil War, 192; Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 228.
47 Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 56.
41
42
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official army. In general, the FMLN negotiated from a position of strength, backed
by the outcome of its 1989 offensive and the lesser-known and yet more potent insurgent offensives in 1990 and 1991. During the latter battles, insurgent forces launched
surface-to-air missiles, which neutralized the combat role of the Salvadoran air force,
and they routed major army units.41 FMLN leaders did not rush the negotiations
with Cristiani due to the collapse of the Soviet Union or the outcome of the Nicaraguan elections, but they obviously had to consider the multiple impacts of both
events on the peace process. The FMLN’s negotiation strategy was part of the political and ideological shift implemented by the rebel leadership, which transformed the
FMLN from a Marxist-Leninist insurgency into a democratic socialist movement. In
tune with this policy, during the peace talks, the FMLN leadership demanded comprehensive security sector reform, the ending of impunity, and major political reforms as preconditions for a cease-fire and the demobilization of its forces.42
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THE FMLN EXPERIENCED PROFOUND IDEOLOGICAL, political, and organic changes in
the course of demobilizing, disarming, and reintegrating its forces and then becoming
a legal political party. As a result of these processes, one of the most potent insurgencies in the recent history of Latin America was transformed into a major actor in
the neoliberal democracy that emerged in El Salvador after the peace accords. The
transition from insurgency to political party occurred during the early stages of the
peace process. At that time, right-wing extremists were still willing and able to assassinate former insurgents-turned-politicians, social activists, and public intellectuals
and to derail the peace accords. The incremental demobilization of FMLN forces coincided with the execution of peace agreements by the Cristiani government, particularly the reduction in the size of the army and the demobilization of public security
and paramilitary forces. This was a process marked by mutual suspicions and failures
on the part of both parties to effectively implement the peace accords. Right-wing
extremists and state agents murdered several FMLN leaders and activists between
1992 and 1993. Cristiani downplayed the significance of those assassinations, which
he attributed to common criminals despite their obvious political connotations.53
48 Ibid., 75; United Nations, Commission on the Truth, De la locura a la esperanza: La guerra de 12
años en El Salvador (San Salvador, 1992–1993), 41, 185–198.
49 Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 75.
50 Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 241–242.
51 Buchanan and Chávez, Guns and Violence in the El Salvador Negotiations, 28.
52 Gobierno de El Salvador, Acuerdos de Chapultepec (San Salvador, 1992).
53 Ellen Moodie, El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to
Democracy (Philadelphia, 2010), 52.
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cent of the reported human rights violations committed during the conflict to state
agents and 5 percent to FMLN insurgents. It also offered a set of recommendations
to end state impunity.48 However, the ARENA-dominated National Assembly passed
an amnesty law in 1993, which blocked the prosecution of war criminals.49 The Ad
Hoc Commission recommended the purging of nearly one hundred top military officers accused of committing systematic human rights violations during the conflict.50
The Cristiani government eventually complied with this recommendation.51 However,
state agents, right-wing civilians, and insurgents who were accused by the Truth
Commission of carrying out war crimes were never prosecuted. The persistent inability of the Salvadoran judicial system to indict war criminals is still debated among
Salvadorans.
On January 16, 1992, President Cristiani and FMLN leaders signed a comprehensive peace accord at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City.52 In addition to the security
sector reform, it included electoral and judicial reforms, the creation of a new state
institution for the protection of human rights, minor socioeconomic reforms, and a
national reconstruction program. But the agreements concerning the security sector
reform were clearly the most significant component of the peace negotiations. The
creation of the National Civilian Police, in particular, constituted a departure from
the grossly repressive security forces of the past, which along with the judicial and
electoral reforms instituted under the 1992 peace accords crucially contributed to the
pacification and democratization of El Salvador.
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He attempted to circumvent key agreements such as the purging of high-ranking military officers included in the Ad Hoc Commission report and the demobilization of
“paramilitary forces by means of simply changing their names.”54 These episodes exacerbated the tensions between the former adversaries during the peace process.
The FMLN, on the other hand, kept arsenals after the formal demobilization and
disarmament of its military forces. The explosion of an FMLN “clandestine arms
cache” in Managua, Nicaragua, in May 1993 seriously damaged the movement’s
credibility. It also embarrassed UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who
had publicly accepted the FMLN’s assurances about its complete disarmament. This
was a precondition for the inscription of the FMLN as a legal political party, which
had already occurred in December 1992.55 After this incident, the FMLN surrendered arsenals in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to the UN. It also turned in
a number of surface-to-air missiles.56 Despite these setbacks, the Cristiani government ultimately complied with the agreements on demilitarization. The FMLN also
demobilized its guerrilla army, surrendered and destroyed its arsenals, and engaged
in electoral politics in exchange for the security sector reform, the democratization of
the state, and minor socioeconomic reforms.57 It increasingly focused on the creation
Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 74–75, quotation from 74.
Ibid., 75; Buchanan and Chávez, Guns and Violence in the El Salvador Negotiations, 14.
56 Buchanan and Chávez, Guns and Violence in the El Salvador Negotiations, 22.
57 Between June and December 1992, 12,362 guerrillas were demobilized. By August 17, 1993, the
FMLN had turned in and destroyed its massive arsenals. Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador,
228, 229.
54
55
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FIGURE 1: Demobilization of FMLN troops in Perquı́n, Morazán, 1992. Courtesy of the Museo de la Palabra y la
Imágen.
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of an electoral apparatus to participate in the 1994 presidential, municipal, and parliamentary elections.
The peace accords included a set of specific agreements to facilitate the transformation of the FMLN into a legal political party.58 In this context, the organization expanded its political structure and trained its members in activities related to electoral
politics. 59 These processes took place in tandem with the reintegration of former
fighters into civilian life through a series of programs derived from the peace accords.60
The FMLN experienced major realignments during its re-founding as a legal political party. The five individual organizations under the insurgent group’s umbrella were
formally dissolved, and their members then formed a single party, chiefly made up of
communists, socialists, and social democrats. Members of the National Resistance and
the People’s Revolutionary Army, two of the founding organizations of the insurgent
FMLN, left the newly formed party in 1994 to create the Democratic Party, a minor
social democratic organization.61 Several historical leaders of the insurgent FMLN
58 It included legal guarantees for FMLN activism, the liberation of political prisoners, the return of
exiles, and special security measures for the protection of FMLN leaders. Gobierno de El Salvador,
Acuerdos de Chapultepec, 38–39.
59 It also acquired houses, buildings, and other infrastructure to conduct electoral activism. The
FMLN’s clandestine radio stations obtained legal frequencies and eventually became commercial stations.
60 Buchanan and Chávez, Guns and Violence in the El Salvador Negotiations, 20–25.
61 Former communists founded a small political group called La Tendencia Revolucionaria. FMLN
dissidents also formed the now-extinct Democratic Revolutionary Front. This movement should not be
confused with the historic Democratic Revolutionary Front of the 1980s.
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FIGURE 2: Members of the the Police Division of the UN Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) and FMLN officers
visit Radio Venceremos, Perquı́n, Morazán, 1992. Courtesy of the Museo de la Palabra y la Imágen.
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HOW DID EL SALVADOR’S CIVIL WAR END? It ended through a process of political negotiation between two contenders that reached virtual strategic parity between 1989
62 Marcela Cruz, “Veteranos inconformes con primer año de gestión,” Contrapunto, June 1, 2015,
http://www.contrapunto.com.sv/sociedad/sociedad-civil/veteranos-inconformes-con-primer-año-de-ges
tion.
63 Efrén Lemus, “La millonaria revolución de Alba,” January 19, 2014, El Faro, http://www.elfaro.
net/es/201401/noticias/14423/.
64 “El peligro del partido-empresa,” editorial, YSUCA, January 28, 2013, http://www.ysuca.org.sv/
detalleeditorial.php?ideditorial¼490.
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were expelled from the party or relinquished their affiliation with it in the midst of disputes over the meaning of democracy, revolution, and political accountability.
Rank-and-file FMLN veterans also took a critical stance vis-à-vis the party leadership. They founded veterans’ associations, which often include former army soldiers. Since the early 1990s, insurgent and army veterans have repeatedly denounced
the alleged inability of the ARENA and FMLN governments to address their basic
needs, chiefly pensions and access to specialized healthcare to treat their war-related
injuries and illnesses. To this day, FMLN and army veterans’ associations jointly continue to demand state benefits.62
In spite of the internal conflicts and fragmentation it experienced in the 1990s
and 2000s, the FMLN became a major actor in the postwar political system. It has
steadily improved its electoral results over the past two decades. Since 1994 it has
governed, with various degrees of success, hundreds of municipalities, including San
Salvador and other major cities. It has also consistently maintained a substantial parliamentary representation. In 2009 it became the governing party of El Salvador after
the election of President Mauricio Funes, a former journalist. In 2014, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a teacher and a top FMLN commander during the civil war, was elected
president by a small margin. He is now the commander in chief of El Salvador’s
armed forces. If nothing else, this indicates the prevalence of democratic rule in the
country some two decades after the end of the civil war. The Sánchez Cerén government is now confronting the grave public and national security threat posed by the
armed gangs that emerged in El Salvador in the postwar period. The electoral success of the FMLN and its multiple contributions to the pacification and democratic
governance of El Salvador are considerable. It has also promoted modest improvements in the country’s education and health care systems. But not surprisingly, as a
political party it lost its revolutionary edge. It became a formidable electoral organization, but it feebly opposed the neoliberal restructuring sponsored by the ARENA
governments between 1989 and 2009. More recently, through their association with
the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), a regional body created by the
late president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, sectors of the FMLN founded ALBA
Petróleos de El Salvador, a corporation that operates gas stations and has substantial
investments in food production, urban development, energy, and other sectors. 63
According to its critics, the FMLN has mutated into a “party-enterprise,” a combination political organization and corporation with major investments in various sectors
of the Salvadoran economy. Some FMLN leaders might be on the way to forming a
new economic elite that is drifting away from the movement’s “original ideals.”64
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Joaquı́n M. Chávez received his Ph.D. from New York University. He is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he has
taught since 2012. He is the author of Poets and Prophets of the Resistance: Intellectuals and the Origins of El Salvador’s Civil War (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). He has written extensively on the history of the peace process that
put an end to the civil war in El Salvador. He has also served as an expert on
peace negotiations in Nepal and other hot spots.
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and 1991. The FMLN’s power and pragmatism sparked the peace negotiations,
which resulted in the dismantling of the oligarchic military regime and the creation
of a liberal democracy in the country. The ideological and political transformations
experienced by the FMLN, and to a certain extent by some leaders of ARENA at the
end of the Cold War, enabled the conclusion of successful domestic negotiations
with broad international support. The fundamental trade-off of the negotiations
between Cristiani and the FMLN settled the armed conflict unequivocally. It also
facilitated the implementation of the neoliberal restructuring envisioned by Cristiani,
ARENA, and multilateral financial institutions in the 1990s, which generated further
social, economic, and environmental devastation in the war-torn Salvadoran society.
Additionally, the pact enabled the FMLN insurgency to metamorphose into a political party that became a major player in the neoliberal democracy that emerged in El
Salvador after the war. In sum, the 1992 peace accords brought the civil war to a
definitive end, but they were less effective in creating the basis for a more peaceful
and just society in El Salvador.