Lessons of History

Dylan:

Tuesday is class day in San Vicente. We have a class on diversity, a class on febrile disease, a class on Salvadoran history andeconomics, and a class on the environment. And so I'm going to give a little history lesson. Keep in mind that this is my attempt to piece together a consistent narrative from one lecture and bits and pieces picked up here and there. It's by no means reliable or definitive. It's just how I am beginning to understand society and history here.

And it is all about land. The Spanish colonized ES in the 1500's. By1580 the indigenous people - the "Pipil" - were "wiped out." Quite what this means is unclear, because the population of El Salvador is clearly descended largely from indigenous Americans. My hypothesis is that the imprecise term "wiped out" is employed to signify that Spanish colonization permanently disrupted the indigenous culture and society by that date, and that the surviving Pipil were forcibly integrated into a Spanish-designed feudal society. Make no mistake, many, many Pipil were massacred by violence and disease and starvation; but I do not believe that "wiped out"means a successful and deliberate genocide. This hypothesis is supported by the existence of a local "caliche."Something more than a slang but less than a language, it is seamlessly integrated into the more classical Spanish spoken here. Words like"chevere" (nice), and "guisquil" (a kind of vegetable) employ phonemes not found naturally is Spanish. These words are imported from theindigenous language, Nahuat.

The most dramatic and still largely felt effect of colonization was theconsolidation of all of the land into the hands of a small oligarchy. There are a mythical 14 families, which symbolize the truth that all ofthe land is owned by a small oligarchy of people living in San Salvador. The reality is that the number of owners and the form of ownership haschanged over the centuries. For centuries this oligarchy and themilitary worked hand-in-hand to repress the population and to force them into working conditions that would make Tom Joad and Joe Hill feel lucky.

In 1932 the people attempted an armed insurrection; it was brutally suppressed by the military. The general consensus is that 30,000 people were killed, though some claim this number must be inflated, since the"military could not have had more than 10,000 bullets". Many considerthis date to be the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War. For the next two decades the military remained extremely aggressive in its repression.People here still remember those days, and to this day it makes people uneasy about "organizing" and about unions and other leftist tactics. This nervousness about organizing, protesting and other forms of civicaction began to wane in the '50's and '60's. The Cuban Revolution, Liberation Theology, and Soviet dollars all combined to strengthen thepopulist and leftist movements in El Salvador. By the late '70's there was an active reform movement again. War broke out in 1979 between armedleft-wing guerilla groups and the military protecting the interests ofthe oligarchy. The guerillas hid among the civilian population, striking atinfrastructure in an attempt to destabilize the economy that supportedthe oligarchs and to cripple the mobility of the army. The army responded by striking civilian targets because the guerillas were hiding among them. The destruction was devastating to the civilians. The U.S.loaned millions of cold-war dollars to the government to support themilitary and fighting "communism." It is clear that both sides employed tactics and strategies that were immensely destructive to the country and the people. To this day thereis no historical or social consensus in El Salvador regarding who was"right." In the late '80's the U.S. used its considerable economic leverage topush through "Neoliberal" reform and open up El Salvador to foreign investment. One effect of this was to force the oligarchy to restructure its power; no longer able to hold a political monopoly, the land andassets were transferred to corporate holdings in privately ownedcorporations. While the government was de jure democratized, the oligarchy maintained (and still maintains) an economic monopoly in El Salvador.