El Salvador: Roots of the Crisis

WP060784 El Salvador: Roots of The Crisis by Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr. Professor of History Tulane University New Orleans, Louisiana 70018 • 1=-I l/.8t, 3 t ),j{p (o I el/- • ' .. The views presented here are not necessarily those of The Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs or of Clemson University . The violence and civil war that has devastated the • Republic of El Salvador since 1979 is presented by our govern 0 ment and by a large part of the press as a struggle between Marxism and Democracy. They have promoted the image of a peaceful, mountain country victimized by Moscow-inspired Communists intent on knocking down another domino on the road from Havana to Managua to San Salvador and ultimately to Mexico, Dallas and Washington. Such interpretations have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies if we can learn anything from the experience of Cuba and Nicaragua. The bitter political and economic realities of contemporary Central America are deeply rooted in the past and have little to do with the international forces that are now exploiting the crises on the Isthmus. The present conflicts are neither recent in origin nor conducive to short-term military, eco nomic or political solutions. To be sure, the Soviets exploit these conflicts, but they did not initiate them and their ' withdrawal would not terminate them. The present crises in the Central American states all represent the inevitable collapse of political, economic and cultural structures erected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to serve the interests of the elites who commanded the Liberal Reforms or Revolutions of that era ,but which now fail to 1 • meet the needs of the societies they created. At the root of the present crise s is an historic process by which the traditional society of lords and peasants e v ol ved CLEMSON UNIVERSITY LIBRAR~ 2 into a more modern society, with small but significant middle sectors demanding a share of the oligarchies' political and economic preserves. Conflict between a privileged elite on the one hand and an oppressed peasantry on the other dates from the Spanish Conquest. Calculated terror has been an established method of control of the rural population for five centuries. Resentful peasants have often responded violently, and sometimes touched off widespread revolution and civil war. This first took place in Guatemala and Nicaragua between 1525 and 1550, but these confrontations became more frequent as greater demands were made upon the peasantry and their lands, and as they developed some awareness of the possibility of improving their condition, or at the very least of preserving what little they had. In broad historic terms, El Salvador and the rest of Central America are still involved in a classic struggle to replace the vestiges of Spanish feudalism with capitalism. The failure to mitigate some of the harsher eco nomic and social consequences of this shift have encouraged the rise of Marxist and other modern anti-capitalist forces. Unified under Spain for nearly 300 years as the "Kingdom of Guatemala," Central America achieved its independence in 1821 and, after 18 months as part of a Mexican Empire, es tablished a republican federation optimistically called the ''United Provinces of the Center of America." That tragic experiment need not delay us here. By 1840 the federation • had disintegrated and the five present-day city states were going their separate ways. The two political parties, • 3 however, that formed around the ideological issues of the first decades of independence provided the structure for the political activities of the socio-economic elites in each of the Central American states and underscored a degree of continuity among members of the elites in all five states. These parties--Conservative and Liberal--were factions of a landholding and bureaucratic elite, but they reflected funda mentally different perceptions on how best to develop their country. 2 Conservatives looked toward maintenance of the two class society that had so long characterized both Spain and Central America. They favored policies that would preserve the aristocratic landholding elites in their traditional, dominant roles, but also, in noblesse oblige fashion, assured the peasants of a degree of protection, especially against exploitation by the Liberal modernizers. Overcoming initial Liberal gains at the outset of independence, these Conserva tives and their caudillos controlled most of Central America in the mid-nineteenth century. They emphasized traditional Hispanic values and institutions, especially the Roman Catholic Church, and rewarded loyal I ndian and mestizo peasants with paternalism and respect for their communal lands. Their demands on the peasants were real, but limited, and subsistence agriculture continued to be the principal ac tivity of most. They relied on the Church and local caudillos and landowners--in feudal sty le--for social control and to guarantee peace and security . They thus defended states' 4 rights against national unity and were xenophobic toward foreigners who threatened the traditional society with Protes tantism, democracy and modernization. While they welcomed some expansion of agricultural exports, which allowed them a few luxury imports, they were sensitive to the danger of upsetting native labor and land tenure patterns, and they were essentially opposed to granting the nation's land and resources to foreign capitalists who generally did not share their re ligion, language or social and cultural values, or who might threaten the preeminent place that they held in the social . 3 structure o f t h e provinces. Peasant insurgency in the 1830s, sometimes instigated by small hacendados, in Guatemala, Hon duras and El Salvador, against Liberal innovators, had been 4 instrumental in the Conservative accession to power. Liberals, on the other hand, represented that segment of the landholding elite and an incipient bourgeoisie that wished to modernize Central America through emulation of the economic and political success of western Europe and the United States from the late eighteenth century forward. These "modernizers'' rejected traditional Hispanic values and institutions, especially the Church, and espoused classical economic liberalism, opposing monopolies while encouraging private foreign trade, immigration and investment. They emphasized exports, and treated the rural masses and their lands as the principal resources to be exploited in this effort. Although republican and democratic in political theory, they became much influenced by positivist materialism 5 later in the century, and were contemptuous, even embarrassed, by the Indian heritage of their countries. Once in power • they resorted to dictatorship to accomplish their economic goals and to defend their gains. Thus the professionalization of the military, which became their power base, was a constant trend in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Liberals wished to modernize their countries in imitation of the United States and western Europe, but the absence of stronger middle sectors in the traditional two-class Central American society and the persistence of elitist attitudes toward the masses meant that in practice that development proceeded very differently than in the industrialized nations. What emerged were elite oligarchies 9f planters and capitalists who cynically and without the noblesse oblige of their Con- servative predecessors, continued to live off the labor of an oppressed rural population which shared little if any of the benefits of the expanded export production. On the contrary, they found their own subsistence threatened by 5 encroachment on their lands for the production of export crops. El Salvador was at the heart of many of the frequent clashes between Conservatives and Liberals in the early independent years. A part of the province of Guatemala throughout most of the colonial period, El Salvador began to emerge as a separate jurisdiction in the eighteenth century when it became the principal idigo-producing region of the Kingdom, responsible for the majority of Guatemalan exports. Its separate political status was recognized with the 6 establishment of an intendency at San Salvador in 1786 and the economic growth of the region made it rival the new capital of Guatemala, established after the destruction of Antigua Guatemala by a devastating earthquake in 1773. Even then, Salvadorans had the reputation for being economically the most aggressive of all Central Americans. In the early days of independence they struggled against Guatemalan dominance for their independence, a struggle symbolized by their demand for an establishement of a separate doicese with their own bishop, in order to escape the ecclesiastical control 0f the ultra-conservative hierarchy in Guatemala. Thus San Salvador became the center of liberalism against the Conservative citadel of Guatemala during the first half-century of inde • pendence. Liberal triumph in every state after 1870 was accompanied by a boom in coffee exports, with urbanization, railway construction and significant economic growth under Liberal guidance. The "coffee prosperity'' assured not only Liberal political dominance (enforced by a strong military establish ment), but the emergence of a new ''coffee elite" and an allied urban national bourgeoisie in these ''liberal states," especially in Guatemala, El Salvador and Costa Rica. 6 Liberal dominance was absolute in Guatemala and El Salvador

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