By the end of the civil war, a vibrant rural civil society of militant campesino organizations claimed extensive areas of land in Usulután and other contested areas. Their gradual emergence during the years of the military stalemate reflected the changing terrain of the civil war, as the two armed parties concentrated increasingly on building political loyalties among civilians rather than only on overt military competition. This development posed a profound contrast both to the historical absence of opposition organizations in rural El Salvador (until the mobilization of the 1970s) and to the decimation of overt political organizations in the extreme repression of the early 1980s.

In contrast to the insurgents' success in building a dense network of political organizations, government efforts to quell insurgency through agrarian reform, ongoing repression, and the incorporation of campesinos into organizations aligned with the Christian Democratic Party failed. While activists and their organizations in some areas were demobilized by government policies, the reforms did not reach two-thirds of the landless campesinos, a subset of whom in contested areas continued to mobilize. And even some beneficiaries of the reforms continued covertly to support the insurgents. Campesinos headed most of the organizations that comprised this dense network of associations, an unprecedented representation of the interests of the rural poor.