Page 21 - Marlie Burton Roche : Landscape and Bread

As early as the mid-1970s, The National Association of Private Enterprize ANEP and the
unprecedented numbers of
Salvadorans were creating and
joining unregistered unions
and forming their own mass
fronts. These were people
who had never been granted
political rights: peasants, slum
dwellers, the unemployed,
farm workers, street peddlers,
and marginalized peoples, a
vast percentage of who were
women. Many of the sectors
that were already organized,
especially teachers, students,
and industrial workers, also
started joining these newly
created formations. The
masses, the most cogent
and volatile political force
of any country, were being
mobilized in El Salvador.
They demanded betterment
of working conditions, higher
wages, and radical changes
to the intractable state. The
government, led by Molina,
answered with repression.
ORDEN was reactivated and
the reactionary landowners
established new political
organizations of their own,
like the Growers Front of the
Eastern Region FARO, an
organization that became, in
1981, the Nationalist Republic
Alliance party ARENA.
Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce, which had previously been
strictly economic institutions, took on a decidedly political role
and began financing and openly coordinating the formation of
the paramilitary death-squad entities: White Warriors Union
UGB and the Anti-Communist Armed Forces of Liberation-
War of Elimination FALANGE. The Romero administration
came to power with a policy of mass arrests, massacres, and
widespread tortures of both the rural and urban populations but
the unconscionable overkill of the repression did not succeed
in incapacitating the popular movement. In fact, the excessive
repression led to an increase in membership of the mass popular
fronts and made armed struggle inevitable.
The electoral route was pursued by the political opposition when
the Christian Democrats, social democrats, and a legal branch of
the outlawed Communist party, created a coalition, the National
Opposition Union UNO and ran in both the 1972 and 1977
presidential elections. But blatant election fraud in both elections
and the repression that followed, driving leaders of the coalition
into exile, ended all possibility of peaceful change. However,
the electoral process of organizing, campaigning, and running
in those elections experientially advanced the radicalization of
broad sectors of the population. Thousands of peasants, workers,
and increasing numbers of the middle class, especially the youth,
turned to revolutionary alternatives as they saw their expectations
for peaceful change terminated by the state. By impeding all
peaceful means of democratization and by outrageous persecution
of the opposition, the government and state military of El
Salvador adduced the armed revolution of the 1980s.
A military coup in 1979 brought an end to Romero’s repressive
regime and the U.S. government policy makers took advantage
of the turmoil to advance their own interventionist agenda of
converting El Salvador into a counterinsurgency-militarized state
to defeat the pending revolution. Their procedure was to install a
centralist-reformist model of government in El Salvador. The U.S.
LANDSCAPE & BREAD MARLIE BURTON-ROCHE 17