Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0124/01243.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 27KB | 435 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01243}
$Pretitle{350}
$Title{El Salvador
Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Richard A. Haggerty}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{salvador
el
central
coffee
america
spanish
liberal
century
states
political}
$Date{1988}
$Log{Pedro de Alvardo*0124301.scf
Figure 2.*0124303.scf
}
Country:     El Salvador
Book:        El Salvador, A Country Study
Author:      Richard A. Haggerty
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1988

Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting

[See Pedro de Alvardo: Pedro de Alvardo, Spanish conqueror of El Salvador.]

     Historical Setting The history of El Salvador revolves around one central
issue-- land. In this, the smallest country in Central America, land always
has been a scarce commodity whose importance has been amplified by the
comparative absence of precious metals or lucrative mineral deposits.
Agriculture defined the economic life of the country well before the arrival
of the Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s, and, despite some modest
advances in industrial capacity, agriculture has continued to dominate the
nation's wealth, social structure, and political dynamics.

     The unequal distribution of land in El Salvador can be traced directly to
the Spanish colonial system, under which land title was vested in the crown.
Those select individuals granted control of specified areas acted, at least in
theory, only as stewards over the lands and peoples under their control.
Although private property rights eventually were established, the functional
structure put in place by the Spanish was perpetuated well into the twentieth
century by the landed oligarchy, with the assistance of the military.

     Although the indigenous, or Indian, population gradually was diminished
through disease and abuse and eventually subsumed into a growing mestizo
(mixed Caucasian and Indian) population, its position at the base of society
was assumed by the rural lower class. Until the mid-twentieth century, the
patterns of landownership and income distribution ran unrelentingly against
this segment of the population. As elsewhere in Latin America, those with more
got more, those with less got less. Under the model of monoculture export that
came to prevail in El Salvador, the concentration of land into large units, or
haciendas, made for greater overall efficiency of production. The other side
of the economic coin, however, was engraved with images of worsening poverty,
deprivation, illiteracy, and disease as the single- minded pursuit of wealth
by a minuscule percentage of the population denied the vast majority of
Salvadorans access to more than a subsistence level of income.

     Although slow to develop, the political ramifications of this process of
skewed distribution were inevitable. Unfortunately for the marginalized
campesinos (farmers or farm laborers), however, the landowners were prepared
to protect their gains by force against any effort to improve the lot of the
lower class. A rural uprising in 1833, led by Indian leader Anastasio Aquino,
was put down by forces hired by the landowners. A century later, another
insurrection, this time led by the Marxist Agustin Farabundo Marti, provoked a
now-legendary reprisal known as la matanza (the massacre). The troops that
carried out this action, in which by some estimates as many as 30,000
Salvadorans were killed, belonged to the Salvadoran armed forces.
Institutionalized and nominally independent from the landed oligarchy, the
armed forces proceeded from that point to assume control of the political
process in El Salvador.

     The Salvadoran officer corps was not altogether unsympathetic to popular
sentiment for reform of the oligarchic system. In the Salvadoran political
equation, however, the economic elite's resistance to change remained a given.
Therefore, efforts by the military to institute gradual, guided reforms--land
reform chief among them--repeatedly ran into the brick wall of elite
opposition and influence. It was not until 1980, when the officer corps allied
itself publicly with the middle-class Christian Democratic Party, that
substantive reform appeared achievable. By that time, however, El Salvador
stood on the threshold of a major civil conflict between government forces
backed by the United States and guerrillas supported by Nicaragua, Cuba, and
the Soviet Union. This conflict catapulted the country's internal conflicts
onto the world stage. The future course of reform in El Salvador was thus
uncertain, as the nation entered the 1980s burdened with the legacies of
economic and social inequality and political exclusion of the middle and lower
classes by the elite.

Spanish Conquest and Colonization

     When the Spanish first ventured into Central America from the colony of
New Spain (Mexico) in the early sixteenth century, the area that would become
El Salvador was populated primarily by Indians of the Pipil tribe. The Pipil
were a subgroup of a nomadic people known as the Nahua, who had migrated into
Central America about 3000 B.C. The Nahua eventually fell under the sway of
the Maya Empire, which dominated the Mesoamerican region until its decline in
the ninth century A.D. Pipil culture did not reach the advanced level achieved
by the Maya; it has been compared, albeit on a smaller scale, to that of the
Aztecs in Mexico. The Pipil nation, believed to have been founded in the
eleventh century, was organized into two major federated states subdivided
into smaller principalities. Although primarily an agricultural people, the
Pipil built a number of large urban centers, some of which developed into
present-day cities, such as Sonsonate and Ahuachapan (see fig. 1).

     The Pipil were a determined people who stoutly resisted Spanish efforts
to extend their dominion southward. The first such effort by Spanish forces
was led by Pedro de Alvarado, a lieutenant of Hernan Cortes in the conquest of
Mexico. It met with stiff resistance from the indigenous population.
Alvarado's expeditionary force entered El Salvador--or Cuscatlan, as it was
known by the Pipil--in June 1524. The Spaniards were defeated in a major
engagement shortly thereafter and were forced to withdraw to Guatemala. Two
subsequent expeditions were required--in 1525 and 1528--to bring the Pipil
under Spanish control. It is noteworthy that the name of the supposed leader
of the Indian resistance, Atlacatl, has been perpetuated and honored among the
Salvadorans to the relative exclusion of that of Alvarado. In this sense, the
Salvadoran ambivalence toward the conquest bears a resemblance to the
prevailing opinion in Mexico, where Cortes is more reviled than celebrated.

     The Spanish had come to Central America seeking, at least in part, to add
to the store of precious metals that constituted the most immediate spoils of
the Mexican conquest. In the small colony that they dubbed El Salvador ("the
savior"), they were severely disappointed in this regard. What little gold was
available was accessible only through the laborious and time- consuming method
of panning, a process that consumed the effort of numerous impressed Indian
laborers for a number of years. Denied the opportunity for quick riches, the
conquistadors and later the Spanish settlers eventually came to realize that
the sole exploitable resource of El Salvador was the land.

     El Salvador thus was relegated to the status of a backwater of the
Spanish Empire. In this state of neglect and isolation, the seeds of the
country's politico-economic structure were planted. Large tracts of land were
granted by the crown, initially under the terms of the encomienda (see
Glossary) system, whereby the grantee was invested with the right to collect
tribute from the native inhabitants of a designated area. The manifest abuse
of the Indian population that resulted from the encomienda system contributed
to its replacement in the mid-sixteenth century by the repartimiento (see
Glossary) system. Under repartimiento, representatives of the crown wer