Before the civil war in El Salvador, almost everyone in Tierra Blanca worked on the Hacienda California, a giant farm stretching from the edge of town across the fertile coastal plain to the Bay of Jiquilisco ten kilometers to the south. From their small houses in town or their shacks along the railway and roadways, every morning the workers walked past the hacienda's security post, past the gun ports of the fortified bunker, and through the gated entrance. They continued past the hacienda compound and the soldiers' quarters, past the barracks that housed the migrant workers during the harvest, and on toward the vast cotton fields, pastures, and salt flats beyond.

Before the war, the children of this town in southwestern Usulután had little reason to doubt that when they grew up, they would join their parents tending cotton and cattle and processing salt on the Palomo family's vast and well-guarded estate.

But in the mid- and late 1970s, some residents of Tierra Blanca joined in local protests and strikes, a few marched in the capital, San Salvador, and a very few collaborated with guerrilla organizations that would become the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation, or FMLN).