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Matanza: El Salvador's Communist Revolt of 1932
History of the 1932 slaughter in El Salvador.
- GenresHistory
175 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1971
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February 8, 2024
I’m from where they massacre people and try to keep it quiet
And spend the next 25 years tryin' to deny it - Immortal Technique
Between January and February 1932, decades after Little Bighorn, indigeneity in Kuskatan (the country now called El Salvador) would be dealt a near fatal blow. A history not taught in Salvadoran classrooms, but it is a story well known by anyone over the age of 40 or 50 … a sort of dark oral history passed on amongst the peasantry. The government purged most state and local records of the event. But the story lives on. I will also pass the story on to the next generation. Just last month I spoke to an elder who was born just years after the event, who grew up hearing stories from his father who survived it.
What they survived was an event known to history as La Matanza (the massacre). Two weeks of absolute hell in the western provinces of El Salvador. This went further than government repression. It was state sanctioned genocide against the Nahua people. And what prompted this response? A two or three day insurrection, when indigenous peoples revolted and took control of a few towns and killed some landowners (we’ll get to the stats later). What followed that indigenous uprising is suppressed history.
“The elite has “fostered a legend of bloodthirsty mobs butchering thousands of middle-class citizens, and of a heroic arm that barely managed to turn back the barbarian wave. Little has been written on the revolt except propaganda. The National Library has been purged even of the newspapers that cover the period of revolt. Government files have been conveniently “lost”” (pg. 205).
Anderson writes, “before the revolt was ended, the entire personality of the nation of El Salvador would be changed” (pg. 13). But what truly separated this event from previous indigenous uprisings and subsequent state-sponsored repression, is that this uprising could be called the very first Latin American Marxist revolutionary movement, demarcating “a new phase in the history of the region” (pg. 13).
In the years after he published his book, Thomas Anderson has faced some criticism regarding how he framed the uprising… specifically referring to it as a Communist Revolt. I’ll discuss that further later on in this review. I think it’s true that most peasants weren’t communists…the uprising was in keeping with a long tradition of indigenous revolts against the settler colonial state. Anderson even agrees, noting “still, it is estimated that the work of the radicals did not touch the lives of most people in El Salvador. At the height of Marti’s activity, 75 percent of the population were completely apathetic politically.” (pg. 92). [side note: I wonder where he got that estimated statistic?]. But after reading this book, I think it is clear that the Communist party in El Salvador played a crucial role leading up to these events.
One final note before I get into the meat of this review. I couldn’t quite be sure of the author’s political leanings. I don’t know if he’s pro-communist or against it, or where on the spectrum he fits. I have a feeling he’s more right-leaning, but the very fact that I’m not sure is a good sign of an impartial journalist, at least in my book.
Short History of El Salvador’s Development of Capitalism
To learn why the indigenous revolt happened, you have to learn what capitalism looked like in El Salvador in the years leading up to the revolt. But we can even take a step back further than that. “El Salvador’s foundation was the result of the exploits of that barbarous conquistador Pedro de Alvarado” in 1524 (pg. 15). Settler colonialism begins. Anderson then quickly lays out a short history of the country leading up to the massacre.
From 1530 to 1800, El Salvador was a colonial backwater of Spain. Indigenous communities survived in the remote regions of the country. There would be periodic uprisings. In 1811, a revolt against Spanish rule was quelled, but by 1822, once Mexico gained its independence, Spanish rule began crumbling all over Central America. Much of the damage was done. The encomienda and repartimiento labor systems left peasants in horrible conditions. Debt slavery followed. Their numbers dwindled (pg. 16).
El Salvador went from being part of the Kingdom of Guatemala under Spanish rule, to being a province of the newly formed Federal Republic of Central America in 1823, to finally achieving independence as its own country in 1839. But this independence was not the freedom struggle you may think it was. In 1839, Rafael Carrera, the dictator of Guatemala, installed his own appointee as the president of the newly formed republic El Salvador, a man named Francisco Malespin, “an extremely conservative militarist” (pg. 17-18).
We learn about Anastasia Aquino, who, in 1833, almost exactly a hundred years prior to la matanza, led a revolt against white rule in Nonualco and the surrounding areas. Once again, the indigenous revolt was crushed by the state (pg. 31). I can’t help but put his life in the context of indigenous struggles in other parts of Turtle Island at that time. It’s a trip to think that Aquino was Kushkatan’s version of Crazy Horse. Aquino was alive when Tecumseh was killed and was himself killed shortly before Crazy Horse was born. But they’re all part of that same indigenous struggle against settler colonialism.
After Aquino’s death, the ‘Indians’ were at the mercy of the ‘Creole aristocracy’. By the 1850s, the aristocracy were guided by principles of private enterprise. The communal farming system of the native peoples had to be destroyed for agri-business interests ... export crops. The displaced ‘Indian’ populations are now forced to become coffee pickers (farmhands), dependent on part-time work (pg. 33). And let’s remember, coffee picking is backbreaking work for meager pay…even today. The ‘Liberals’ gained power and didn’t let go. ‘Liberals’ is used loosely here. They were basically dictators imposing state sponsored capitalism on the masses. I read a lot of people equating capitalism with democracy, and communism with authoritarianism. They clearly don’t know their history, because no one voted for capitalism in El Salvador. Coffee was the passport to the world markets, and steered the country from the colonial multi-crop economy that existed to a one-crop cash economy. This allowed an oligarchy to rise between the 1870s and 1880s which amassed massive amounts of wealth (pg. 19).
Anderson then explains that the coffee plant literally built the state (roads, railways, towns, infrastructure). It also created a class of superwealth. “Behind the change of presidents, there grew an unseen government of the coffee growers”. Was this a good thing? Absolutely not for the mass of peasants. Coffee was accused of creating social chaos and the impoverishment of the indigenous people. Just one example of why this worked against the people (other than the obvious blatant land theft and forced labor), the family structure of indigenous communities was broken due to the seasonal mobility labor requirements for the rural poor. Fathers would leave for months at a time to work on the plantations. Ultimately, about a hundred wealthy families owned about 80 percent of the land in the country (pg. 22-27). As a side note, by the 1960s, these stats improved. In 1961, .01% of landowners held 16% of the land (2,500 acres each), but still the majority of independent farmers owned little land (pg. 200).
The ‘Indians’ didn’t take all this lying down. By 1872, there was a large indigenous uprising in Izalco… one in a long line of uprisings ever since the Conquest (pg. 33). Another book I read (‘Seeing Indians’, by Virginia Tilley) helpfully includes a chart which lists out each of these uprisings.
Between 1900 and 1903, there would be a series of military coups. These dictators would rule with an iron fist on behalf of a conservative aristocracy and the military. In 1912, President Manuel Enrique Araujo was assassinated. Between 1912 and 1927, a series of military strongmen seized power and created political dynasties of their own. The political repression of the campesinos throughout the 1920s only worsened. Between 1927 and 1931 the only ‘good’ president in El Salvador’s history to that point, Don Pio Romero Bosque, ruled and called for actual free elections for the first time in the country’s history. This is why he is remembered as the “Good King” (pg. 20-21). But those free elections in 1931 would lead to another military coup, setting the stage for the events that follow.
A Look at El Salvador’s Nascent Communist Party in the late 1920s
This was one of the most fascinating aspects of this book for me. Learning about the communist party in El Salvador back in the 1920s and 1930s. I read bits and pieces about this in the past, but the general thinking was that the communist influence in El Salvador was very small, and I always had the impression that the ‘communists’ of the 1930s were a small, rag tag group. Anderson explains that the first genuine labor movements arrived in the late 1920s. Between 1925 and 1930, the first communist party was formed in El Salvador, with the help from organizers in Guatemala and Mexico. We get a good look at the internal workings of the communist party. There was a Central Executive Committee in San Salvador, then a Departmental Executive Committee and the ‘Comités Ejecutivos Locales Regionales’. But Anderson is quick to explain that most of this was self funded…small amounts paid by each member. No one was rich (pg. 41-42).
It was really interesting to learn about the split that occurred between anarcho-syndicalists and communists. “The original leaders of the federacion had been more attracted to anarcho-syndicalism than to communism, but before long the communists were making determined efforts to seize the movement and give it a new and more realistic direction. In January 1930, a definite break occurred between the syndicalists and the communists, with the latter gaining control of the greater number of local chapters. To the communists it was quite clear that only through the organization of the farm workers could socialism expect to triumph in a country which was still mostly rural” (pg. 45).
The Great Depression was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In May 1930, there was a massive 80,000 worker and peasant protest in the streets of the capital. The situation was ripe for revolution. Anderson lists out some early communist militants (more on them later). He notes how “these men, who received little aid from the international Marxist movement and who labored in great poverty and often in danger, had disseminated the ideology of the left to the peasants and workers of El Salvador” (pg. 46-47).
Later we learn of their socialist demands (pg. 93)
Nationalization of the means of transport and communication
Equal opportunities for women
A thirty-six hour work week
Unionization and the right of the peasants to strike
Security against unemployment for ill health, maternity, and old age, plus minimum wages
Free, universal education
Cultivation of all available lands
Progressive taxation
An end to the Indian caste system
On the topic of foreign interference, Anderson writes “This attitude had given rise to the curious belief that vast numbers of foreign infiltrators had worked their way into the country to spread communism. Such men were, presumably, paid in Moscow; the journalist Alfredo Schlesinger went so far as to say that the revolt in El Salvador was directed “by orders from Moscow””. He then goes on to list the available evidence and then concludes “It is doubtful that Marti and his friends received much foreign aid. The revolt was largely a home-grown product.” (pg. 94). To hammer the point home he writes, “Marti and his immediate aides, Rafael Bondanza, Ismael Hernandez, and Miguel Marmol, appear to have acted largely on their own with a minimum of direction and aid from the international communist movement. Propaganda by the ton they did receive from New York, and some money in small amounts, but the revolt was essentially home-grown. Russia served chiefly as an inspiration to the revolutionaries” (pg. 115).
We then learn about the importance of the racial appeal within their communist message. “The communist promise to humble the Ladino and elevate the Indian must have had an appeal not unlike that of “black power” in the United States in the 1960s” (pg. 97). Some native leaders (caciques) were even promised political offices should the revolt be successful. I enjoyed learning about a student leader named Mario Zapata. “Being from a very wealthy family, Zapata had little chance for first-hand observation of the true lot of the poor. When he first learned of the injustices in the country, from such men as Jose Luis Barreintos and Farabundo Marti, he resisted believing them. Little by little he began to learn for himself. During dinners at his friends’ houses, he would hear their parents, wealthy landowners, exclaim that La Guardia is “our salvation, without the guardia we could not operate”” (pg. 97). La Guardia is widely known as one of the worst perpetrators of crimes against indigenous people in El Salvador…the forerunners of the Atlacatl Battalion and O.R.D.E.N., the death squads of the 1970s and 80s. And the landowners view La Guardia as their “salvation”. That was a trip to read.
Salvadoran Communists
There was Juan Pablo Wainwright. Born in Honduras to an English father and Honduran mother. He left home at a young age. Traveled throughout the U.S. and Canada. He was a fisherman in Alaska, and spent time washing dishes in San Francisco and later joined the Canadian army, eventually fighting in the Great War. He then returns to Honduras (pg. 49). “His views were too radical, however, for him to be able to live very long in that country. He fled to El Salvador in the twenties. After a time he was expelled for his subversive activities but took up residence in Guatemala. From Guatemala, he coordinated plans for a great Central American revolt, working with Marti in El Salvador” (pg. 48).
Is this book uncovering unknown indigenous heroes of the same ilk as Crazy Horse and Cochise? Like Crazy Horse, he would see a tragic end…but he would go out like a G. “Imprisoned and put to the torture, Wainwright volunteered to give a “sensational revelation,” but only to the dictator Jorge Ubico in person. Ubico came to the prison and demanded the news. “The news is that you are a dirty, murderous human beast.” said Juan Pablo Wainwright, and he spat in the dictator’s face. Thereupon he was beaten to death by Ubico’s torturers” (pg. 49).
We learn of Modesto Ramirez, an indigenous coffee picker turned revolutionary from Soyapango! Before his execution, this was his testimony: “I had been an honorable laborer living on the haciendas that surrounded Lake Ilopango as a colono of various senores. There came a time when we were not given land or work, or if there was land, it was of the worst quality.” If the men were lucky enough to find a position they were forced to give more than half their produce to the patron. Those who objected were expelled. “I had to abandon my wife and children. I did not get enough work to be able to give them food, still less clothing, or to educate them. I do not know where they are. Misery has separated us forever…for this I became a communist.”” (pg. 49).
We can’t forget about Miguel Marmol , another key indigenous militant in the movement, a shoemaker by trade and especially effective in organizing. He would be one of the few revolutionary survivors (surviving four shots from a firing squad!). And also Manuel Mojica, a native protest leader from the Izalco region. And peep this! In 1930, both Modesto Ramirez and Miguel Marmol took a trip to Russia. Two indigenous Nahua peasants in Moscow (get the fuck outta here!). “There we were received by an English comrade who spoke perfect Spanish and who put us on a train for Leningrad where we joined our comrades Antonio Sanchez Obando and Juan Luis Chiguichon of Guatemala and the Honduran delegate, Hernan Anaya” (pg. 49).
Anderson notes that “the Salvadorans most responsible for the creation of a proletarian consciousness among the poor were Luis Felipe Recinos and Jose Luis Barrientos, neither of whom was a communist. As a university student of just seventeen, Recinos was expelled from El Salvador in 1920 because of his advanced views. He settled in Mexico where the reform movement of Alvaro Obregon was just getting under way. Perhaps at the time of Obregon’s assassination, Recinos crossed into the United States, where his travels opened his eyes to the possibilities of an organized labor movement. Although still attracted to Marxist ideas, he became a reformer rather than a radical” (pg. 50).
But there was one man above them all in the struggle… not in terms of any hierarchical command… but in revolutionary fervor. El Negro, Augustin Farabundo Marti, a dark skinned indigenous man.
Now I should preface by saying most Cuzcatleros know the name Farabundo Marti, mostly because his name was used, decades after his death, to help consolidate all opposition groups into one political militant force called the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front), who would go on to fight a revolutionary war against the quasi-democratic military junta backed by the United States. The FMLN would eventually become a political party after the Civil War, and finally came to power in the 2000s…but by then had become stagnant and no longer a party of the people.
So I knew a bit about this story, but I relegated Marti as just the leader of a student group that riled up the masses and triggered a revolt. I always viewed it as an indigenous revolt more than a communist one. But I certainly didn’t know the extent of Marti’s contributions. While of course it was an indigenous revolt (with most of the action occurring in the still-indigenous western part of the country), after reading this book I really do appreciate how involved Marti was… he wasn’t just an obscure figurehead of the revolt… he was truly loved by the peasantry for his public defiance of Salvadoran authorities for years.
(Continued in Comments Section...)
And spend the next 25 years tryin' to deny it - Immortal Technique
Between January and February 1932, decades after Little Bighorn, indigeneity in Kuskatan (the country now called El Salvador) would be dealt a near fatal blow. A history not taught in Salvadoran classrooms, but it is a story well known by anyone over the age of 40 or 50 … a sort of dark oral history passed on amongst the peasantry. The government purged most state and local records of the event. But the story lives on. I will also pass the story on to the next generation. Just last month I spoke to an elder who was born just years after the event, who grew up hearing stories from his father who survived it.
What they survived was an event known to history as La Matanza (the massacre). Two weeks of absolute hell in the western provinces of El Salvador. This went further than government repression. It was state sanctioned genocide against the Nahua people. And what prompted this response? A two or three day insurrection, when indigenous peoples revolted and took control of a few towns and killed some landowners (we’ll get to the stats later). What followed that indigenous uprising is suppressed history.
“The elite has “fostered a legend of bloodthirsty mobs butchering thousands of middle-class citizens, and of a heroic arm that barely managed to turn back the barbarian wave. Little has been written on the revolt except propaganda. The National Library has been purged even of the newspapers that cover the period of revolt. Government files have been conveniently “lost”” (pg. 205).
Anderson writes, “before the revolt was ended, the entire personality of the nation of El Salvador would be changed” (pg. 13). But what truly separated this event from previous indigenous uprisings and subsequent state-sponsored repression, is that this uprising could be called the very first Latin American Marxist revolutionary movement, demarcating “a new phase in the history of the region” (pg. 13).
In the years after he published his book, Thomas Anderson has faced some criticism regarding how he framed the uprising… specifically referring to it as a Communist Revolt. I’ll discuss that further later on in this review. I think it’s true that most peasants weren’t communists…the uprising was in keeping with a long tradition of indigenous revolts against the settler colonial state. Anderson even agrees, noting “still, it is estimated that the work of the radicals did not touch the lives of most people in El Salvador. At the height of Marti’s activity, 75 percent of the population were completely apathetic politically.” (pg. 92). [side note: I wonder where he got that estimated statistic?]. But after reading this book, I think it is clear that the Communist party in El Salvador played a crucial role leading up to these events.
One final note before I get into the meat of this review. I couldn’t quite be sure of the author’s political leanings. I don’t know if he’s pro-communist or against it, or where on the spectrum he fits. I have a feeling he’s more right-leaning, but the very fact that I’m not sure is a good sign of an impartial journalist, at least in my book.
Short History of El Salvador’s Development of Capitalism
To learn why the indigenous revolt happened, you have to learn what capitalism looked like in El Salvador in the years leading up to the revolt. But we can even take a step back further than that. “El Salvador’s foundation was the result of the exploits of that barbarous conquistador Pedro de Alvarado” in 1524 (pg. 15). Settler colonialism begins. Anderson then quickly lays out a short history of the country leading up to the massacre.
From 1530 to 1800, El Salvador was a colonial backwater of Spain. Indigenous communities survived in the remote regions of the country. There would be periodic uprisings. In 1811, a revolt against Spanish rule was quelled, but by 1822, once Mexico gained its independence, Spanish rule began crumbling all over Central America. Much of the damage was done. The encomienda and repartimiento labor systems left peasants in horrible conditions. Debt slavery followed. Their numbers dwindled (pg. 16).
El Salvador went from being part of the Kingdom of Guatemala under Spanish rule, to being a province of the newly formed Federal Republic of Central America in 1823, to finally achieving independence as its own country in 1839. But this independence was not the freedom struggle you may think it was. In 1839, Rafael Carrera, the dictator of Guatemala, installed his own appointee as the president of the newly formed republic El Salvador, a man named Francisco Malespin, “an extremely conservative militarist” (pg. 17-18).
We learn about Anastasia Aquino, who, in 1833, almost exactly a hundred years prior to la matanza, led a revolt against white rule in Nonualco and the surrounding areas. Once again, the indigenous revolt was crushed by the state (pg. 31). I can’t help but put his life in the context of indigenous struggles in other parts of Turtle Island at that time. It’s a trip to think that Aquino was Kushkatan’s version of Crazy Horse. Aquino was alive when Tecumseh was killed and was himself killed shortly before Crazy Horse was born. But they’re all part of that same indigenous struggle against settler colonialism.
After Aquino’s death, the ‘Indians’ were at the mercy of the ‘Creole aristocracy’. By the 1850s, the aristocracy were guided by principles of private enterprise. The communal farming system of the native peoples had to be destroyed for agri-business interests ... export crops. The displaced ‘Indian’ populations are now forced to become coffee pickers (farmhands), dependent on part-time work (pg. 33). And let’s remember, coffee picking is backbreaking work for meager pay…even today. The ‘Liberals’ gained power and didn’t let go. ‘Liberals’ is used loosely here. They were basically dictators imposing state sponsored capitalism on the masses. I read a lot of people equating capitalism with democracy, and communism with authoritarianism. They clearly don’t know their history, because no one voted for capitalism in El Salvador. Coffee was the passport to the world markets, and steered the country from the colonial multi-crop economy that existed to a one-crop cash economy. This allowed an oligarchy to rise between the 1870s and 1880s which amassed massive amounts of wealth (pg. 19).
Anderson then explains that the coffee plant literally built the state (roads, railways, towns, infrastructure). It also created a class of superwealth. “Behind the change of presidents, there grew an unseen government of the coffee growers”. Was this a good thing? Absolutely not for the mass of peasants. Coffee was accused of creating social chaos and the impoverishment of the indigenous people. Just one example of why this worked against the people (other than the obvious blatant land theft and forced labor), the family structure of indigenous communities was broken due to the seasonal mobility labor requirements for the rural poor. Fathers would leave for months at a time to work on the plantations. Ultimately, about a hundred wealthy families owned about 80 percent of the land in the country (pg. 22-27). As a side note, by the 1960s, these stats improved. In 1961, .01% of landowners held 16% of the land (2,500 acres each), but still the majority of independent farmers owned little land (pg. 200).
The ‘Indians’ didn’t take all this lying down. By 1872, there was a large indigenous uprising in Izalco… one in a long line of uprisings ever since the Conquest (pg. 33). Another book I read (‘Seeing Indians’, by Virginia Tilley) helpfully includes a chart which lists out each of these uprisings.
Between 1900 and 1903, there would be a series of military coups. These dictators would rule with an iron fist on behalf of a conservative aristocracy and the military. In 1912, President Manuel Enrique Araujo was assassinated. Between 1912 and 1927, a series of military strongmen seized power and created political dynasties of their own. The political repression of the campesinos throughout the 1920s only worsened. Between 1927 and 1931 the only ‘good’ president in El Salvador’s history to that point, Don Pio Romero Bosque, ruled and called for actual free elections for the first time in the country’s history. This is why he is remembered as the “Good King” (pg. 20-21). But those free elections in 1931 would lead to another military coup, setting the stage for the events that follow.
A Look at El Salvador’s Nascent Communist Party in the late 1920s
This was one of the most fascinating aspects of this book for me. Learning about the communist party in El Salvador back in the 1920s and 1930s. I read bits and pieces about this in the past, but the general thinking was that the communist influence in El Salvador was very small, and I always had the impression that the ‘communists’ of the 1930s were a small, rag tag group. Anderson explains that the first genuine labor movements arrived in the late 1920s. Between 1925 and 1930, the first communist party was formed in El Salvador, with the help from organizers in Guatemala and Mexico. We get a good look at the internal workings of the communist party. There was a Central Executive Committee in San Salvador, then a Departmental Executive Committee and the ‘Comités Ejecutivos Locales Regionales’. But Anderson is quick to explain that most of this was self funded…small amounts paid by each member. No one was rich (pg. 41-42).
It was really interesting to learn about the split that occurred between anarcho-syndicalists and communists. “The original leaders of the federacion had been more attracted to anarcho-syndicalism than to communism, but before long the communists were making determined efforts to seize the movement and give it a new and more realistic direction. In January 1930, a definite break occurred between the syndicalists and the communists, with the latter gaining control of the greater number of local chapters. To the communists it was quite clear that only through the organization of the farm workers could socialism expect to triumph in a country which was still mostly rural” (pg. 45).
The Great Depression was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In May 1930, there was a massive 80,000 worker and peasant protest in the streets of the capital. The situation was ripe for revolution. Anderson lists out some early communist militants (more on them later). He notes how “these men, who received little aid from the international Marxist movement and who labored in great poverty and often in danger, had disseminated the ideology of the left to the peasants and workers of El Salvador” (pg. 46-47).
Later we learn of their socialist demands (pg. 93)
Nationalization of the means of transport and communication
Equal opportunities for women
A thirty-six hour work week
Unionization and the right of the peasants to strike
Security against unemployment for ill health, maternity, and old age, plus minimum wages
Free, universal education
Cultivation of all available lands
Progressive taxation
An end to the Indian caste system
On the topic of foreign interference, Anderson writes “This attitude had given rise to the curious belief that vast numbers of foreign infiltrators had worked their way into the country to spread communism. Such men were, presumably, paid in Moscow; the journalist Alfredo Schlesinger went so far as to say that the revolt in El Salvador was directed “by orders from Moscow””. He then goes on to list the available evidence and then concludes “It is doubtful that Marti and his friends received much foreign aid. The revolt was largely a home-grown product.” (pg. 94). To hammer the point home he writes, “Marti and his immediate aides, Rafael Bondanza, Ismael Hernandez, and Miguel Marmol, appear to have acted largely on their own with a minimum of direction and aid from the international communist movement. Propaganda by the ton they did receive from New York, and some money in small amounts, but the revolt was essentially home-grown. Russia served chiefly as an inspiration to the revolutionaries” (pg. 115).
We then learn about the importance of the racial appeal within their communist message. “The communist promise to humble the Ladino and elevate the Indian must have had an appeal not unlike that of “black power” in the United States in the 1960s” (pg. 97). Some native leaders (caciques) were even promised political offices should the revolt be successful. I enjoyed learning about a student leader named Mario Zapata. “Being from a very wealthy family, Zapata had little chance for first-hand observation of the true lot of the poor. When he first learned of the injustices in the country, from such men as Jose Luis Barreintos and Farabundo Marti, he resisted believing them. Little by little he began to learn for himself. During dinners at his friends’ houses, he would hear their parents, wealthy landowners, exclaim that La Guardia is “our salvation, without the guardia we could not operate”” (pg. 97). La Guardia is widely known as one of the worst perpetrators of crimes against indigenous people in El Salvador…the forerunners of the Atlacatl Battalion and O.R.D.E.N., the death squads of the 1970s and 80s. And the landowners view La Guardia as their “salvation”. That was a trip to read.
Salvadoran Communists
There was Juan Pablo Wainwright. Born in Honduras to an English father and Honduran mother. He left home at a young age. Traveled throughout the U.S. and Canada. He was a fisherman in Alaska, and spent time washing dishes in San Francisco and later joined the Canadian army, eventually fighting in the Great War. He then returns to Honduras (pg. 49). “His views were too radical, however, for him to be able to live very long in that country. He fled to El Salvador in the twenties. After a time he was expelled for his subversive activities but took up residence in Guatemala. From Guatemala, he coordinated plans for a great Central American revolt, working with Marti in El Salvador” (pg. 48).
Is this book uncovering unknown indigenous heroes of the same ilk as Crazy Horse and Cochise? Like Crazy Horse, he would see a tragic end…but he would go out like a G. “Imprisoned and put to the torture, Wainwright volunteered to give a “sensational revelation,” but only to the dictator Jorge Ubico in person. Ubico came to the prison and demanded the news. “The news is that you are a dirty, murderous human beast.” said Juan Pablo Wainwright, and he spat in the dictator’s face. Thereupon he was beaten to death by Ubico’s torturers” (pg. 49).
We learn of Modesto Ramirez, an indigenous coffee picker turned revolutionary from Soyapango! Before his execution, this was his testimony: “I had been an honorable laborer living on the haciendas that surrounded Lake Ilopango as a colono of various senores. There came a time when we were not given land or work, or if there was land, it was of the worst quality.” If the men were lucky enough to find a position they were forced to give more than half their produce to the patron. Those who objected were expelled. “I had to abandon my wife and children. I did not get enough work to be able to give them food, still less clothing, or to educate them. I do not know where they are. Misery has separated us forever…for this I became a communist.”” (pg. 49).
We can’t forget about Miguel Marmol , another key indigenous militant in the movement, a shoemaker by trade and especially effective in organizing. He would be one of the few revolutionary survivors (surviving four shots from a firing squad!). And also Manuel Mojica, a native protest leader from the Izalco region. And peep this! In 1930, both Modesto Ramirez and Miguel Marmol took a trip to Russia. Two indigenous Nahua peasants in Moscow (get the fuck outta here!). “There we were received by an English comrade who spoke perfect Spanish and who put us on a train for Leningrad where we joined our comrades Antonio Sanchez Obando and Juan Luis Chiguichon of Guatemala and the Honduran delegate, Hernan Anaya” (pg. 49).
Anderson notes that “the Salvadorans most responsible for the creation of a proletarian consciousness among the poor were Luis Felipe Recinos and Jose Luis Barrientos, neither of whom was a communist. As a university student of just seventeen, Recinos was expelled from El Salvador in 1920 because of his advanced views. He settled in Mexico where the reform movement of Alvaro Obregon was just getting under way. Perhaps at the time of Obregon’s assassination, Recinos crossed into the United States, where his travels opened his eyes to the possibilities of an organized labor movement. Although still attracted to Marxist ideas, he became a reformer rather than a radical” (pg. 50).
But there was one man above them all in the struggle… not in terms of any hierarchical command… but in revolutionary fervor. El Negro, Augustin Farabundo Marti, a dark skinned indigenous man.
Now I should preface by saying most Cuzcatleros know the name Farabundo Marti, mostly because his name was used, decades after his death, to help consolidate all opposition groups into one political militant force called the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front), who would go on to fight a revolutionary war against the quasi-democratic military junta backed by the United States. The FMLN would eventually become a political party after the Civil War, and finally came to power in the 2000s…but by then had become stagnant and no longer a party of the people.
So I knew a bit about this story, but I relegated Marti as just the leader of a student group that riled up the masses and triggered a revolt. I always viewed it as an indigenous revolt more than a communist one. But I certainly didn’t know the extent of Marti’s contributions. While of course it was an indigenous revolt (with most of the action occurring in the still-indigenous western part of the country), after reading this book I really do appreciate how involved Marti was… he wasn’t just an obscure figurehead of the revolt… he was truly loved by the peasantry for his public defiance of Salvadoran authorities for years.
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October 21, 2014Matanza 10192007 by Thomas P. Anderson Curbstone Eastern CSU professor
(El Salvador in the Eighties: Counterinsurgency and Revolutionby by Mario Lungo Uclés, Arthur Schmidt, Amelia F. Shogan; Temple University Press, 1996. 240 pgs. )
(El Salvador in the Eighties: Counterinsurgency and Revolutionby by Mario Lungo Uclés, Arthur Schmidt, Amelia F. Shogan; Temple University Press, 1996. 240 pgs. )
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