Salvadoran Civil War

For twelve years, from the coup of October 1979 to the peace accords of January 1992, the government of El Salvador, heavily supported by the United States, fought the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), an alliance of leftist guerrilla groups aided by Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua and the Soviet Union. According to United Nations figures, more than 75,000 people died and some 8,000 disappeared. The UN-sponsored truth commission attributed most of the violence against civilians to the army, security forces and allied death squads.

Salvadoran society had long been sharply divided between a coffee-growing elite and a poor rural majority. A peasant rising in 1932 was crushed in La Matanza, "the slaughter", in which about 30,000 civilians are thought to have been killed; the FMLN later took its name from Farabundo Martí, one of the rising's leaders. Military-backed governments held power for decades afterwards. In the 1970s rigged presidential elections, failed land reform and economic hardship fed protest, while Marxist guerrilla groups such as the FPL and ERP began operating. Security forces fired on demonstrators against electoral fraud in February 1977, and rural death squads, later absorbed into military intelligence, spread terror.

On 15 October 1979 a civilian-military junta deposed President Carlos Humberto Romero. The administration of Jimmy Carter backed it, fearing a repeat of the revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua. Repression continued. On 24 March 1980 Archbishop Óscar Romero, who had urged the United States to halt military aid and called on soldiers to stop killing civilians, was shot dead while saying Mass; snipers fired on the crowd at his funeral a week later, hitting 42 mourners. In December 1980 four American churchwomen were raped and murdered, with National Guard members suspected.

In 1981 the army swept rural areas suspected of supporting the guerrillas. Fleeing civilians were attacked at the Lempa River on the Honduran border in March. On 11 December 1981 the US-trained Atlácatl Battalion killed at least 733, and possibly about 1,000, unarmed villagers at El Mozote in Morazán, including many children. Under the Reagan administration, American economic and military aid rose sharply.

In 1984 the presidency went to the Christian Democrat José Napoleón Duarte, who defeated Roberto D'Aubuisson of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), in elections held amid violence and from which the left was excluded. The war settled into a stalemate. A major FMLN offensive in November 1989 carried the fighting into San Salvador. During it, on 16 November, soldiers of the Atlácatl Battalion murdered six Jesuit priests at the Central American University, together with their housekeeper and her daughter.

United Nations-brokered negotiations led to a human rights agreement in 1990 and, after further fighting, a ceasefire. On 16 January 1992 the two sides signed the Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico City. The armed forces were brought under new rules, a civilian police force was created, and the FMLN became a political party. A UN mission monitored the settlement until 1997.

The Commission on the Truth for El Salvador gathered more than 22,000 complaints covering 1980 to 1991. It attributed about 85 per cent of the violence to the army, security forces, civil defence units and death squads, and about 5 per cent to the FMLN, and put the number of dead at over 70,000. By the war's end over a million people had been displaced. A 1993 amnesty law hindered prosecutions until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 2016. The conflict ran in parallel with the Guatemalan Civil War as part of the wider Cold War in Central America.

Our 1985 map shows El Salvador at the height of the war, and the 1994 map shows the country two years after the peace accords.