A Quiet End to El Salvador’s Revolution

This post can also be seen on FPA’s Latin America Blog.

This month marked a historic change for El Salvador and popular movements in Latin America as a whole. Central America in the late 70’s and early 1980’s was one of the warfronts of the Cold War between the US and the USSR. Countries such as Cuba and even Mexico became entrenched in the problems in El Salvador where the rebel group FMLN fought in bloody conflict with the government at the time in order to bring some measures of equality and eliminate violence against the populace by the ruling elite that traditionally ruled El Salvador through political and economic oppression. After the death of nearly 75,000 people and the almost complete destruction of El Salvador’s infrastructure, the 1992 peace agreements allowed for a reduction in armed conflict between political rivals in El Salvador, and lead to relative quiet in the region since that time.

While relative peace took hold after 1992 in El Salvador, increased levels of poverty and inequality lead to years of street violence and emigration from the country. Many young Salvadorans found themselves growing up outside of Central America in the 1990s and growing up as refugees from violence due to the conflict, and later on as refugees from poverty post 1992. While the war ended in the early 1990s, the generation which grew up during the war often could not escape the after-effect of violence and a society which at the time was at the pinnacle of absolute chaos. Many young Salvadorans post-1992 grew as expats in often low income parts of the US, Canada and Mexico. With the influence of poverty in El Salvador and their new adopted homelands, small parts of the Salvadoran community fell into gang violence and culture, often moving between sections of large US cities like Los Angeles and El Salvador, re-importing gang violence into El Salvador from abroad. While many others have taken to improving the life of Salvadorans in el Salvador and abroad, the effect of the past still holds many traumatized from the war in the 1980s.

Professor Valle writing for openDemocracy.net explains that this past month might have brought an official end to the political conflict in El Salvador. While post-1992 brought in political and electoral gains for the right wing parties of El Salvador, last week the election of a left leaning leader, Mauricio Funes of the FMLN allowed for a quiet revolution to take place in El Salvador with a 51% victory for the Presidency of the country. While not a major lead, the importance of the victory through electoral means allows for the President and the Opposition to lead with an obligation to cooperate with other groups in Salvadoran society for the first time in that nation’s modern history. Placing violence in the past, and exchanging it for political compromise may not be the end of problems in El Salvador, but it can be agreed upon that it is likely the beginning of compromise in a society that has slowly rebuilt itself after a bloody and unresolved revolution.