Let's see why the war emerged. Perhaps – the majority say so
anyway – because the Catholic Church gave a certain orientation. Perhaps
the words of the Bible connected with a very deep injustice – they treated
us like animals, it was slavery. In the Word of God, there was something that
would touch you. In truth, we had been living as though the Word was in the air,
when it was something to live within ourselves. I am grateful that there were
such people – many of them now dead.
–Leader, Cooperativa El Carrizal 1992
In response to intensifying political mobilization by campesinos and coffee
mill workers for access to land and higher wages in Santiago de María in the late
1970s, Héctor Antonio Regalado, a local landlord and dentist, began to recruit
young men to what appeared to be a Boy Scout troop. Members, who on one account
may have numbered as many as a hundred, wore uniforms in marches through town.
Rather than the usual scouting activities, however, members of Regalado’s troop
killed dozens of activists and suspected activists, including teachers, unionists,
cooperativists, and students, not only in Santiago de María but in the cities
of Usulután, Berlín, Alegría, Jucuapa, Villa El Triunfo, and Chinameca. In interviews
at the end of the war, townspeople told stories of cadavers appearing at the edge
of town, of a decapitated head found in a ditch, and other public displays of
extreme violence. Like others that soon emerged throughout El Salvador, Regalado’s
death squad operated with the cooperation of elements of the Salvadoran military.
The scouts were occasionally ferried around eastern El Salvador in Army helicopters.
According to two participants who worked with him in Santiago de María, Regalado
was in close touch with Roberto d'Aubuisson, the director of death squad operations
in San Salvador. [1] After d'Aubuisson's
arrest for plotting an aborted coup in May 1980, Regalado fled to Guatemala and
subsequently ordered the killing of his scouts, apparently fearing they knew too
much. On December 27, 1980, ten were killed in Santiago.
[2]
In response to the death squad’s assassinations, local activists either left
the area or abandoned their political activities. Throughout the 1980s, the town
of Santiago was less contested than other towns in the case-study areas. The FMLN
usually targeted Santiago and nearby coffee mills only during major offensives.
Fighting impinged on the town only occasionally, as on October 18, 1988, when
the FMLN occupied the town for several hours and destroyed three coffee mills,
killing three policemen and wounding several soldiers in the process, and on March
9 and 10, 1990, when FMLN forces attacked the city, destroying one mill and causing
several civilian and government casualties (Gruson 1988; El Rescate Human Rights
Chronology). Nonetheless, the landlords of Santiago, including the powerful Llach
and Homberger families, continued to grow coffee on nearby estates. During the
harvest (when coffee wealth was at its most vulnerable to sabotage and theft)
and when necessary during the rest of the year, Sixth Brigade troops occupied
the town. Perhaps because of the earlier violence, there was apparently little
effort to organize the workers of the coffee mills in Santiago even when the union
of coffee-mill workers renewed their activities elsewhere in El Salvador in the
mid-1980s.
Nonetheless, the processes of the civil war were at work in the municipality.
According to interviews in the area, many landlords came under strong guerrilla
pressure despite the brigade's frequent presence. Many paid war taxes to the FMLN
and a few reduced their employees’ hours of work in response to FMLN efforts to
regulate working conditions. The FMLN prohibited some from selling their land,
claiming it as “land of the people.” The presence of reform cooperatives just
east and south of the town was a constant reminder of the government’s 1980 expropriations.
The wealthy families of Santiago de María spent much less time in their residences
there than before the war, preferring their San Salvador residences to the difficulties
of travel on often-insecure roads. And just over the El Tigre ridge from Santiago,
the Las Marías area became a center of military activity; landlords there abandoned
their farms entirely.
Repression in Santiago had the intended consequence of suppressing political mobilization
in the town’s mills and streets. A similar degree of state violence occurred throughout
the case-study areas. Elsewhere in the case-study areas, however, repression had
more complicated consequences. While repression everywhere ended political mobilization
in the form of strikes and demonstrations for many years, many activists joined
the armed insurgency. By 1983, their numbers throughout El Salvador were sufficient
that FMLN forces controlled approximately a quarter of national territory, a “revolutionary
situation” (Tilly 1993: 10) of contested or even dual sovereignty in El Salvador.
Despite subsequent strategic and tactical innovations on the part of both the
Salvadoran military and the FMLN, the military stalemate continued until the end
of the civil war. In this chapter, I document the course of the civil war in the
case-study areas, from the its origins in prewar political mobilization to the
emergence of the military stalemate.
Continued
[1] This history of Regalado and
his death squad relies on interviews with townspeople in 1992, two investigative
articles by Doug Farah (1988a and 1988b), an unpublished manuscript by Tom Gibb
and Farah (1989), and an unpublished book manuscript by Gibb (2000).
[2] Regalado resurfaced in 1982
after d'Aubuisson's election to the Constituent Assembly. As head of security
for the subsequent Legislative Assembly, Regalado directed death squads in San
Salvador until a group of businessmen complained to d'Aubuisson that he might
be killing too many people. Regalado briefly appeared on the U.S. Embassy payroll
as a shooting instructor for the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1987. Gibb and Farah
(1989) began their investigation after rumors that d'Aubuisson and Regalado were
rebuilding the death squads after ARENA's legislative victories in 1988. See also
Americas Watch (1991: 24) and the report of the Truth Commission (1993: 359 and
408, notes 412 and 413). |
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