The history of El Salvador

El Salvador, the smallest and most densely populated country of mainland Central America, lies on a chain of volcanoes whose eruptions have repeatedly buried and preserved its past. Maya towns flourished in the west from the first millennium BCE, and from around the eighth century CE Nahua-speaking Pipil migrants from Mexico built the confederation of Cuzcatlan, which fought off the first Spanish invasion in 1524. Spanish rule made the colony a producer of cacao and indigo, and independence in 1821 was followed by the rise of a coffee oligarchy that took the land of Indigenous and peasant communities. The massacre of 1932, half a century of military rule and a civil war that killed more than 75,000 people shaped the twentieth century, and the peace of 1992 opened a democratic era that has, under President Nayib Bukele, turned towards concentrated power.

Stone spear points found in the west show that hunters reached the region in the Paleoindian period, when giant ground sloths and other extinct animals still lived there. Archaeology is difficult in El Salvador: the population is dense and many sites lie under thick volcanic ash. Settled villages grew in the west during the Preclassic period. Tazumal, in Chalchuapa, was first settled around 1200 BCE and became a large town on the southern edge of the Maya civilisation, trading in obsidian, cacao, pottery and hematite. A huge volcanic eruption around 430 CE devastated the region, and Tazumal never fully recovered its earlier importance.

The most famous site is Joya de Cerén, a Maya farming village in the Zapotitán valley that was buried by ash from the Loma Caldera around 600 CE. Its people seem to have fled in time, perhaps warned by an earthquake, and the ash preserved their houses, storehouses, tools and fields of maize, beans, agave and cassava in extraordinary detail. Often called the Pompeii of the Americas, it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. Other centres such as Cara Sucia in the far west, which peaked between 600 and 900, and Quelepa in the east, a centre of the Lenca people with links to the Maya city of Copán in Honduras, show a land connected to trade routes across Mesoamerica.

From around the eighth century CE, according to Indigenous accounts recorded by the Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, groups of Nahua-speaking migrants travelled south from central Mexico and settled in the west and centre of the country, in a broader Nahua dispersal across Central America between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Related to the peoples of the later Aztec Empire, they spoke Nawat, a language close to Nahuatl, and came to be called Pipil. They called their land Kuskatan, "place of precious jewels", known in Spanish as Cuzcatlan, and the name is still used for Salvadorans.

Cuzcatlan was organised as a confederation of at least two major city-states, subdivided into smaller lordships, rather than a single empire. The Pipil farmed maize, beans and cacao, traded cacao and balsam from the Pacific coast, and built towns that grew into later cities such as Sonsonate and Ahuachapán. They shared the country with other peoples: the Lenca in the east beyond the Lempa River, the Maya-speaking Ch'orti' and Poqomam in the north and west, and the Xinca. Their religion and calendar belonged to the wider Mesoamerican world.

In 1524 Pedro de Alvarado, one of Hernán Cortés's lieutenants in the conquest of Mexico, marched south from Guatemala with Spanish soldiers and Indigenous allies from Mexico. The Pipil met him near Acajutla with warriors protected by thick quilted cotton armour and armed with long spears. Alvarado was wounded and, after further fighting near the capital, withdrew to Guatemala. Salvadoran tradition honours the Pipil leaders Atlácatl and Atonal, and the name of Atlácatl, the supposed leader of the resistance, is remembered far more warmly than that of Alvarado. Further Spanish expeditions in 1525 and 1528, helped by a smallpox epidemic carried in the Columbian exchange, brought the Pipil under control, and the town of San Salvador was founded in 1525. In the east the Lenca destroyed the Spanish garrison at San Miguel and resisted for about a decade; Lenca forces under the leader Lempira fought on in the mountains until he was killed, and San Miguel was refounded in 1537.

The conquerors found little gold, and El Salvador became a backwater of the Spanish Empire, governed within the Captaincy General of Guatemala, itself part of New Spain. Spaniards were granted Indigenous communities in encomienda, entitling them to tribute and labour, and the abuses that followed were barely restrained by later reforms. Cacao was the first great export in the sixteenth century, and indigo dye became the main source of wealth in the eighteenth, when San Salvador was the second city of the captaincy. Work in the indigo mills was dangerous, and forced labour drafts, disease and the loss of communal land caused Indigenous communities in the centre and east to dwindle and merge into a mixed Ladino population. In the west, where cacao and balsam were grown, Pipil communities kept their land, language and identity far longer.

Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 set off the Spanish American wars of independence, and in November 1811 the priest José Matías Delgado rang the bells of La Merced church in San Salvador to call an early, unsuccessful rising. On 15 September 1821 the provinces of Central America declared independence from Spain. They were briefly annexed to the Mexican Empire of Agustín de Iturbide, which El Salvador resisted, and in 1823 joined the Federal Republic of Central America. El Salvador was a liberal stronghold and the last bastion of the federal president Francisco Morazán before conservative forces from Guatemala defeated him in 1840. In 1832 the Indigenous leader Anastasio Aquino led a revolt in Santiago Nonualco against forced army service, tribute and the loss of land; it was crushed and Aquino executed. After the federation collapsed, El Salvador became a separate republic in 1841.

When synthetic dyes ended the indigo trade in the later nineteenth century, the landowning elite turned to coffee, which grew well on the volcanic slopes that had been left to Indigenous and peasant communities. Governments of the later nineteenth century, liberal and conservative alike, backed the seizure of smallholdings and abolished communal landholdings, and passed vagrancy laws that forced the dispossessed to work on the coffee estates. A small group of families, popularly called the "Fourteen Families", came to control most of the land, banks and trade, and by the early twentieth century coffee earned as much as 90 percent of export income. Rural revolts against the land seizures were repeatedly suppressed.

The Great Depression halved the price of coffee and threw thousands of plantation workers into hunger. In December 1931 General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez took power in a coup, and the results of local elections in early 1932 were annulled. On 22 January 1932 Pipil peasants led by Feliciano Ama and the Communist Party of Farabundo Martí rose in the western coffee districts, seizing several towns and killing civilians and soldiers. The army retook them within days and then turned on the population. In what became known as La Matanza, "the slaughter", soldiers killed between about 10,000 and 40,000 people, most of them Pipil peasants who had taken no part in the fighting; Indigenous dress and language were used to pick out victims. Martí and Ama were executed. Many scholars describe the killings as an ethnocide: in the decades that followed, Indigenous Salvadorans abandoned their traditional dress and the Nawat language for fear of further reprisals, and today only a handful of fluent speakers remain.

Martínez ruled until a general strike forced him to resign in May 1944, and for the next four decades a succession of military governments, allied with the coffee elite, held power behind the forms of elections. Population pressure drove some 300,000 Salvadorans to settle in Honduras, and when Honduras began expelling thousands of them in 1969, El Salvador invaded on 14 July. The war, nicknamed the Football War because rioting at World Cup qualifying matches between the two countries coincided with the crisis, lasted about 100 hours before the Organization of American States arranged a ceasefire. In 1972 the reformist Christian Democrat José Napoleón Duarte was denied victory in a fraudulent presidential election and exiled, and the 1977 election was rigged again. Many concluded that change could come only by force. Guerrilla groups grew, peasant organisations inspired by liberation theology spread, and death squads tied to the security forces murdered activists, teachers and priests.

On 15 October 1979 reformist officers overthrew President Carlos Humberto Romero, but the new junta could not control the security forces, and killings of protesters marked the start of a civil war. Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador, who had become the leading voice against the repression, asked the United States to stop military aid and called on soldiers to refuse orders to kill; on 24 March 1980 he was shot dead while celebrating Mass. In 1980 the guerrilla groups united as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), backed by Cuba and Nicaragua, while the United States, seeing the war through the lens of the Cold War, funded, trained and advised the Salvadoran army.

Counterinsurgency fell heavily on civilians. In December 1981 the US-trained Atlácatl Battalion killed more than 800 people, many of them children, in and around the village of El Mozote in Morazán, the largest massacre in the modern Americas; the government officially apologised only in 2011. In November 1989 the FMLN launched a major offensive in San Salvador, and during it soldiers of the same battalion murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the Central American University. The killing of the Jesuits and the military stalemate increased international pressure for peace. Negotiations under United Nations mediation produced the Chapultepec Peace Accords, signed in Mexico City on 16 January 1992. The war killed more than 75,000 people, and some 8,000 more disappeared; a UN Truth Commission attributed about 85 percent of the abuses it documented to state forces and death squads and about 5 percent to the guerrillas. A 1993 amnesty blocked prosecutions until the Supreme Court struck it down in 2016. Romero was canonised as a saint in 2018.

Under the accords the army was cut by half and removed from internal security, the old police forces were abolished, and the FMLN became a political party. The right-wing ARENA party won four presidential elections from 1989 to 2004, adopting the US dollar as currency in 2001, before the FMLN's Mauricio Funes and the former guerrilla commander Salvador Sánchez Cerén governed from 2009 to 2019. Remittances from more than two million Salvadorans abroad became the largest source of foreign income. Gangs such as MS-13 and Barrio 18, which had formed among Salvadoran migrants in the United States and spread after mass deportations, gave the country one of the world's highest murder rates, and several post-war presidents were later convicted or charged with corruption.

Nayib Bukele, a former mayor of San Salvador from outside the two main parties, won the presidency in 2019. After gangs killed 87 people over a weekend in March 2022, the assembly declared a state of exception suspending several constitutional rights, renewed 56 times by October 2026. More than 90,000 people have been arrested, El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the official murder rate has fallen to among the lowest in the Americas. The crackdown is very popular at home, while human rights groups report hundreds of deaths in custody and thousands of wrongful arrests. Bukele's party won a supermajority in 2021 and replaced the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, which then allowed him to stand again despite a constitutional ban; he was re-elected with about 85 percent of the vote in 2024. In 2021 El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender, a status reversed in January 2025 under an agreement with the IMF. On 31 July 2025 the assembly allowed indefinite presidential re-election, lengthened the term to six years and brought the next election forward to 2027, and in July 2026 Bukele's party nominated him for a third term. Critics, including opposition parties and exiled human rights organisations, describe a slide into authoritarian rule; his supporters credit him with ending the gangs' grip on daily life.