84.2gould

“They Call Us Thieves and Steal Our Wage”: Toward a Reinterpretationof the Salvadoran Rural Mobilization, 1929–1931

Lauria-Santiago, Aldo.Gould, Jeffrey L.

Hispanic American Historical Review, 84:2, May 2004, pp. 191-237 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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We would like to thank the director and staff of the Archivo General Nacional. We wouldlike to recognize the invaluable assistance and comradeship of Carlos Henríquez Consalvi,director of the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagin. Patricia Alvarenga performed much usefulresearch in 1998 for the NEH Collaborative Research Project, “Memories of Mestizaje,”which also provided funds for Gould’s research. His research was also supported by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship (2001). Gould would also like to thank Reynaldo Patriz for thiscrucial contribution to this project as a research assistant; he is a remarkably intelligent anddecent human being, who in a different society would have received a quality education andwould be duly recognized for his outstanding qualities. Gould would also like to thank theinformants who in recent years have finally acquired the right to speak about 1932 withoutfear of reprisal. We would finally like to thank Peter Guardino, Daniel James, BarbaraWeinstein, and the anonymous HAHR reviewers for their comments, criticisms, and suggestions.

1. Throughout this article we will use the term “western” to refer to the departmentsof Ahuachapán, Santa Ana, Sonsonate, La Libertad, and San Salvador.

Hispanic American Historical Review 84:2Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press

“They Call Us Thieves and Steal Our Wage”:

Toward a Reinterpretation of the Salvadoran

Rural Mobilization, 1929–1931

Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo Lauria-Santiago

¡Quien mandará aquí será el cambio!

—Campesino saying, 1931

Introduction

The basic facts of the January 1932 uprising in El Salvador are well known andlargely undisputed. Thousands of workers and peasants in central and westernEl Salvador rose up on the night of January 22 and occupied various towns inthe departments of Sonsonate and Ahuachapán.1 The Salvadoran CommunistParty (PCS) had planned the insurrection two weeks earlier, but its key sup-porters in the army and many of its leaders were already either dead or in jailwhen the revolt began. The response of regional elites and the central govern-ment was swift and brutal. The army reoccupied all of the towns within a few

days, and throughout the next month government forces and civilian militiaskilled thousands of peasants and workers, especially in the heavily indigenousareas of the west.2

During the past 70 years, four themes have dominated interpretations ofthe movement and the massacre. The first focuses on the structural causes ofthe revolt. In 1927, following six years of dramatic expansion, coffee prices andexport volumes began to decline. This slump accelerated over the next fewyears, a devastating blow to an economy dependent on coffee exports. The west-ern part of the country, which was hardest hit, became the principal site of therebellion.3 The second focuses on the major political crisis that began when

192 HAHR / May / Gould and Lauria-Santiago

2. The most important contributions to the analysis of the revolt and its origins areMario Salazar Valiente, David Alejandro Luna, and Jorge Arias Gómez, El proceso políticocentroamericano: Ponencias de Mario Salazar Valiente, David Alejandro Luna y Jorge AriasGómez (San Salvador: Ed. Universitaria, 1964); Alejandro Marroquín, “Estudio sobre lacrisis de los años treinta en El Salvador,” in America Latina en los años treinta, ed. PabloGonzález Casanova (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1970); Michael McClintock, The AmericanConnection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador (London: Verso, 1985); ThomasAnderson, Matanza: The Communist Revolt of 1932 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1971);Jorge Arias Gómez, Farabundo Martí (San José, 1972); Rafael Menjivar, Formación y lucha delproletariado industrial salvadoreño (San José: Ed. Universitaria Centroamericana, 1982);Rodolfo Cerdas Cruz, La hoz y el machete: La Internacional Comunista: America Latina y larevolución en Centroamérica (San José: EUNED, 1986); Rafael Guidos Vejar, El ascenso delmilitarismo en El Salvador (San Salvador: UCA, 1980); Leon Zamosc, “The Definition of aSocio-Economic Formation: El Salvador on the Eve of the Great World EconomicDepression” (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Manchester, 1977); Alan Everett Wilson, “The Crisis ofNational Integration in El Salvador, 1919–1935” (Ph.D. diss, Stanford Univ., 1969); HéctorPérez Brignoli, “Indians, Communists, and Peasants: The 1932 Rebellion in El Salvador,”in Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America, ed. William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson,and Mario Samper Kutschbach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995); LeonZamosc, “Class Conflict in an Export Economy: The Social Roots of the SalvadoranInsurrection of 1932,” in Sociology of “Developing Societies”: Central America, ed. EdelbertoTorres Rivas (New York: Monthly Review, 1988); James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: APolitical History of Modern Central America (London: Verso, 1988); and Andrew JonesOgilvie, “The Communist Revolt of El Salvador, 1932” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard College, 1970).

3. David Luna, Manual de historia económica de El Salvador (San Salvador, 1971); VictorBulmer-Thomas, The Political Economy of Central America Since 1920 (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987); Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus; Edelberto Torres Rivas,Interpretación del desarrollo social centroamericano: Procesos y estructuras de una sociedaddependiente (San José: Ed. Universitaria Centroamericana, 1981); Gerardo Iraheta Rosales,Vilma Dolores López Alas, and María del Carmen Escobar Cornejo, “La crisis de 1929 ysus consecuencias en los años posteriores,” La Universidad 6 (1971): 22–74; Zamosc, “ClassConflict”; and Zamosc, “The Definition”; Bradford Burns, “The Modernization ofUnderdevelopment: El Salvador, 1858–1931,” Journal of Developing Areas 18, no. 3 (Apr.1984): 293–316.

President Romero Bosque (1927–31) broke with official continuismo and per-mitted relatively free and democratic local and presidential elections. As aresult of this political opening, reformist candidate Arturo Araujo was electedand held office from March until December 1931, presiding over the deepen-ing economic crisis and increasing social and political unrest in the country-side. Elites and their military allies moved to depose him, principally due to hisinability to stem the growing leftist-dominated movement in the countrysidebut also because of the administrative chaos that plagued his government.4 Thethird line of analysis focuses on the role of the PCS.5 Within the Left, manyhave questioned the PCS’s political line, and more recently, scholars have ques-tioned the degree of PCS influence over the movement.6 The fourth theme,concerning the ethnic content of the revolt, relates to the third in that somescholars stress the remoteness of the PCS from the concerns and culture of theindigenous supporters who participated in the movement.7 The western region

Salvadoran Rural Mobilization, 1929–1931 193

4. For an in-depth discussion of the Araujo regime and its failures, see Guidos Vejar,El ascenso del militarismo.

5. For discussions of the revolt that emphasize peasant participation, see Italo LópezVallecillos, “La insurección popular campesina de 1932,” ABRA 2, no. 13 ( June 1976);Segundo Montes, “Levantamientos campesinos en El Salvador,” Realidad Económico-Social 1,no. 1 (1988) (although Segundo Montes, El compadrazgo: Una estructura de poder en ElSalvador [San Salvador: UCA, 1979], emphasizes ethnic relations); Segundo Montes, “Elcampesinado salvadoreño,” Revista Española de Antropología Americana 11 (1981): 273–84;Mario Lungo, La lucha de las masas en El Salvador (San Salvador: UCA, 1987); Mario FloresMacal, Origen, desarrollo y crisis de las formas de dominación en El Salvador (San José:SECASA, 1983); Douglas A. Kincaid, “Peasants into Rebels: Community and Class inRural El Salvador,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 3 ( July 1987): 466–94.Most recently, Jeffrey M. Paige, in Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy inCentral America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), emphasizes themobilization of what he terms the “pobretariado.”

6. See Cerdas Cruz, La hoz y el machete; Rodolfo Cerdas Cruz, Farabundo Martí, lainternacional comunista y la insurrección salvadoreña de 1932 (San José: Centro deInvestigación y Adiestramiento Político Administrativo, 1982); Benedicto Juárez,“Debilidades del movimiento revolucionario de 1932 en El Salvador,” ABRA 2, no. 13(1976); Aldo Lauria-Santiago, “Una contribución biográfica a la historia del PartidoComunista Salvadoreño,” Revista de Historia 33 ( Jan.–June 1996): 157–83; Erik Ching, “InSearch of the Party: The Communist Party, the Comintern, and the Peasant Rebellion of1932 in El Salvador,” The Americas 55, no. 2 (Oct. 1998): 204–39.

7. The most recent historiography has emphasized the participation of indigenouspeople; Erik Ching and Virginia Tilley, “Indians, the Military, and the Rebellion of 1932 inEl Salvador,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30 (1998): 121–56; Erik Ching, “FromClientelism to Militarism: The State, Politics, and Authoritarianism in El Salvador,1840–1940” (Ph.D. diss, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, 1997); Patricia Alvarenga,Cultura y ética de la violencia: El Salvador 1880–1932 (San José: EDUCA, 1996). Pérez

boasted the greatest concentration of indigenous population and communities,and long-standing conflicts over land and local political control contributed totheir mobilization.8 This history of ethnic tension also shaped the undeniablyracist dimension of the repression.9 Scholars have argued that the indigenousleadership of cofradías played a critical role, but did so with all the tensions,ambiguity, and social distance implied by such an alliance with the movement’surban, ladino leadership.

The exploration of these themes has helped to elucidate the causes of theinsurrection and its repression. Notwithstanding the great value of the existingliterature, however, we feel it has privileged certain lines of inquiry and, withnotable exceptions, failed to exhaust research possibilities. In particular, the lit-erature has failed to offer adequate insight into the experiences, motivations,and origins of campesinos’ resistance and mobilization.

William Roseberry’s understanding of hegemony is useful in trying tograsp the ideological and cultural relations between elite and subaltern groups.He argues, “What hegemony constructs then, is not a shared ideology but acommon material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about,and acting upon social orders characterized by domination.”10 This article willattempt to explain why the Salvadoran elite, and its religious and political allies,had such an extraordinarily difficult time establishing such a discursive frame-work. We probe, in the words of Sidney Mintz, the moment when “popula-tions come to the recognition that their felt oppression is not merely a matter


Brignoli, in “Indians, Communists, and Peasants,” characterizes the rebellion as a“traditional” colonial Indian jacquerie. Older accounts that stress the indigenous roleinclude Anderson, Matanza; and McClintock, The American Connection.

8. In official statistics for the period, Sonsonate has the highest percentage of itspopulation classified as “Indians” (35%). Ahuachapán—another department involved in theuprising—had 26%. In 1920 the national average was 20%. Anderson, in his classicaccount of the revolt, stresses ethnically rooted conflicts over land and local politics;Anderson, Matanza.

9. Recent students of Salvadoran history have provided new arguments and materialson this period. Eric Ching and Virginia Tilley discuss ethnicity, politics, and the stateduring the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that Indian ethnicity was not as decimated after therepression as some commentators claim; “Indians, the Military, and the Rebellion of 1932.”For useful evidence on the repression, see Harvey Levenstein, “Canada and theSuppression of the Salvadoran Revolution of 1932,” Canadian Historical Review 62, no. 4(1981): 451–69; and McClintock, The American Connection.

10. William Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in EverydayForms of State Fomation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. GilbertJoseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 361.

of poor times, but of evil times—when, in short, they question the legitimacy ofan existing allocation of power, rather than the terms of that allocation.”11

Combining oral and archival research allows us to approximate the areasof consciousness and ethnic relations during the period of mobilization, themesthat have usually been studied from a remote vantage point. We link our argu-ment about weak elite hegemony—that is, a poorly developed framework ofmeaningful communication with subaltern groups—to four important consid-erations that contributed to the success of rural mobilization. First, we arguethat the structural transformations of the 1920s created two relatively newsocial groups: colonos (resident laborers) and semiproletarianized villagers, bothof which played key roles in the mobilization. These new “precipitates of cap-italism” had historical roots in the zone, but the capitalistic nature of ruralenterprises did not generate the sort of paternalistic ties between landownersand laborers that existed elsewhere in Latin America.12

Second, emerging political and social ideologies favored the particularalliances and rifts that characterized the mobilization. The agrarian elite, andthe small oligarchy of merchants and financiers that backed it, was on the defen-sive throughout the latter part of the 1920s. This was due, in part, to the emer-gence of a middle-class politics of reform. Middle-class reformism was coupledwith a discourse of mestizaje, a nationalist ideology of race mixture to be nur-tured through cultural processes of de-Indianization. Whereas the discourse ofmestizaje formed a cornerstone of nationalism in Mexico and Nicaragua, in ElSalvador the same discourse and practices had contradictory effects that, in dif-ferent ways, fomented the autonomous mobilization of indigenous people.Although ethnic relations did play an important role in the mobilization, theydid so in complex and contradictory ways. Any attempt to view the mobiliza-tion and revolt as ethnic conflict tout court misses far more than it captures.Although ethnicity as an analytical tool is essential to understanding the move-ment, ethnic ideologies were not the sole, or even principal, motivation ofmost actors. Third, we argue that rural traditions of patriarchy and everydayviolence also contributed to the mobilization. In other times and places, patri-archy has formed a vital component of elite or nationalist hegemony. In west-


11. “The Rural Proletariat and the Problem of Rural Proletarian Consciousness,” inPeasants and Proletarians, ed. Robin Cohen, Peter Gutkind, and Phyllis Brazier (New York:Monthly Review, 1979), 191.

12. William Roseberry, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, andPolitical Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1989). Unlike many cases ofnew groups that emerge with the development of agrarian capitalism, these combined anew class position with geographical rootedness.

ern El Salvador, however, we find that indigenous patriarchy confronted theproblem of growing ladino landowner contact with, and at times coercion against,indigenous women. Moreover, violence was a hard fact of campesino life thatpredisposed rural residents toward violent responses to threats or affronts.Finally, we should not exaggerate the distance between the worlds of the Com-munist militants and indigenous peasants. Indigenous and ladino rural poordecisively influenced the strategy, tactics, and organizational forms of the rad-ical movement that rocked the foundations of Salvadoran society before beingcrushed in a nightmare of bloodshed.13

Class, Land, and Labor in Western El Salvador in the 1920s

Most contemporary descriptions of El Salvador’s countryside around 1920emphasize the symbiotic coexistence of smallholding peasants with larger com-


13. Our research confirms Wickham-Crowley’s insistence that a “plurality of socialconditions . . . can produce revolutionary peasantries” rather than simply a specificconfiguration of structural conditions. The experience of El Salvador confirms thatpeasants rebel when damaging economic transformation and the decline of patronagenetworks are combined with “physical dislocation from land itself”; Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents andRegimes Since 1956 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), 93. Our findings partiallyprove, disprove, and also move beyond current thinking about the causes of radicalagrarian mobilization: they confirm Jeffrey Paige’s suggestion that labor-providing tenants(“serfs”) are the most likely to participate in agrarian revolts, while contradicting the ideathat smallholders tend to be reformist. Jeffery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution, SocialMovements, and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975),chap. 1. Also, the notion that sharecroppers and migratory estate laborers are associatedwith revolutionary movements is also confirmed, although our work does not confirm thedistinction he makes between their differential disposition toward socialist or nationalistrevolution. This work emphasizes the complex coexistence and interaction of social formswithin one same peasantry. In particular, Wickham-Crowley’s claim that Cuban squattersframed the situation in Cuba as a zero-sum game, and that this contributed to theirsupport of Castro’s revolution, seems particularly relevant to understanding El Salvador inthe late 1920s. If there was one perception shared by most of the different kinds ofparticipants in the revolt, it was that all matters relating to wealth (land, labor, etc.) were,or had become, a zero-sum game. Pérez-Brignoli also refers to post-1929 landowner-worker relations as a zero-sum game; Héctor Pérez Brignoli, A Brief History of CentralAmerica (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press), 100–101. This notion is echoed by Mintz’sobservation about “evil times.” Jeffery M. Paige, “Coffee and Politics in Central America,”in Crisis in the Caribbean Basin, ed. Richard Tardanico (Newburry Park, Calif.: Sage,1987), 141–90; Jeffrey M. Paige, “Social Theory and Peasant Revolution in Vietnam andGuatemala,” Theory and Society 12, no. 6 (1983): 699–737.

mercial farms. While noting that El Salvador was not a land of latifundias, trav-elers mentioned the commercial connections between smallholders and largerlandowners, who were united by the “energy and driving force that are nation-ally characteristic.”14 One commented, “Most of the work . . . is done by itsindependent farmers in their time off,”15 and “the much more equitable divi-sion of property results in there being few people without their own land,” pro-ducing the “many individual properties” of El Salvador’s “coffee country.”16

These smallholders and their families provided “[t]he bulk of the labor of thepicking season,” and they would “finish their own picking first, and then go,with their wives and children, to work on one of the big fincas near at hand. . . .There they join the volunteers who have come out from the town, and also,another class like themselves, small farmers who raise other crops than cof-fee.”17 Another noted the “plot after plot of coffee ground as large as villagesquares, each owned and worked by some peasant proprietor” and argued thatthe peasants and workers “had never suffered from the rapacity of large land-holders.”18 And another author, crystallizing this perspective, explained, “Thecountry is one big farm, with all its people at work, and no land wasted. Prac-tically every man owns a little piece of property, or else has a good home uponone of the many large plantations. Even the poorest have something to lose incase of a revolution, and hence all are peacefully inclined.”19

Observers also viewed Indians as a near-privileged caste of smallholders. Areformist governor of Sonsonate wrote, “[T]he economy of the Izalcos con-tains a surprise for him who looks into its organization a bit . . . large proper-ties, the criollo latifundio, is almost unknown [in this region],” which is insteadcharacterized by “an infinity of small snippets,” each small farm having “pas-turage, fruit, grains, wood” and marketing products in Sonsonate City. Simi-larly, in Nahuizalco, “every home is like a little factory and each wife an excel-lent manufacturer,” producing “sleeping mats, stools, and jugs, etc.”20


14. Wallace Thompson, Rainbow Countries of Central America (New York: E. P. Dutton& Co., 1924), 96.

15. Thompson, Rainbow Countries, 98–99.16. “Impresiones de un sabio aleman sobre El Salvador: Notas de viaje del doctor

Sapper,” Pareceres 1 (1 Dec. 1926): 3; cited in Wilson, “The Crisis,” 30.17. Thompson, Rainbow Countries, 94, 96, 99.18. Frederick Palmer, Central America and Its Problems; an Account of a Journey from the

Rio Grande to Panama (New York: Moffat, Yard & Company, 1910), 110.19. Frank G. Carpenter, Lands of the Caribbean (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, Page &

Co., 1925), 114.20. Alfonso Rochac, “Conferencia de Alfonso Rochac en San Pedro Sula,” Patria, 9

Oct. 1929, 3.

These descriptions may not have been entirely inaccurate for the early1920s; however, they would look absurd by the end of the 1920s for most ruralSalvadorans. They failed to grasp, however, the historical transformations thatwere already underway in the countryside, particularly in the west, where thedramatic growth of the coffee industry increased friction between large com-mercial producers and the rural poor. They also failed to envision the layerednature of the agrarian landscape of the region. Colonial-era haciendas that hadstepped up production during the early twentieth century made up one layer.Even after some subdivision, these formidable and diversified properties oftencombined coffee, sugar, and grain production with cattle herding and logging.A significant smallholder and peasant sector, which had its origins in the pro-cess of privatization of community and municipal lands in the late nineteenthcentury, formed the second layer. Finally, the third layer encompassed richpeasants and entrepreneur-settlers who carved medium-sized commercial farmsfrom municipal lands or previously uncultivated state-owned land. By the early


Figure 1. Sites of Rebellion.

1900s, these three layers so blanketed the western countryside that no agrarianfrontier remained.21

Coffee was the engine that transformed western El Salvador during the1910s and 1920s. After a period of slow expansion between the 1880s and 1910s,coffee acreage increased 60 percent between 1916 and 1933, while production,prices, and export volume increased at still faster rates. The long-standing andvigorous capitalist sector in the department of Santa Ana nearly tripled its pro-duction of coffee, while La Libertad, a department that entered into coffeeproduction in the early twentieth century, doubled its production. Most coffeefarms were not huge latifundia; in 1920, of the 3,400 commercial coffee farms,the 350 largest possessed between 75 and 300 manzanas (125–500 acres) andaccounted for 45 percent of national production.22 The greatest expansion inproduction came from midsized commercial producers with 10–50 manzanasof coffee, who produced about one-third of the country’s crop. These midlevelproducers consolidated smaller farms and increased productivity, resulting inan increased concentration of land ownership.

Population growth also contributed to land concentration and landless-ness. Between the 1880s and 1930 the country’s population nearly doubled,contributing significantly—in the absence of any significant urbanization orindustrialization—to a growing layer of landless peasants during the 1920s.23

Furthermore, inheritance partitioning of privatized communal plots increasedthe number of smallholders dependent on wage labor, and many gradually fellinto the ranks of tenants and rural wage laborers. Indeed, by 1930 about half ofthe adult male population of rural western El Salvador did not own sufficientland and had to work as semiproletarians or colonos.24 Rapidly increasing land


21. Lauria-Santiago, An Agrarian Republic.22. Lopez Harrison, Patria, 10 Aug. 1931; Revista de Agricultura Tropical, 1930, cited in

Wilson, “The Crisis,” 40.23. For the northern and eastern regions of El Salvador, Honduras served as a sort of

release valve for agrarian pressures. By the mid-1920s there were thousands of Salvadoransworking in Honduras, although western El Salvador continued to receive significantseasonal migrant workers from eastern Guatemala to pick coffee (Thompson, RainbowCountries, 183). Wilson claims that there were 12–60,000 Salvadorans in Honduras, withsome Honduran towns composed of 50–100% Salvadoran immigrants. Wilson, “TheCrisis,” 118.

24. This stands in contrast with eastern El Salvador, where the commercialization was not as intense or concentrated and landlords’ ability to accumulate was mediated bycontinued peasant control over production. In northern Morazán, a region whereinvestment by the wealthiest elite was not important, traditional peasant crafts, commercialproduction of food crops, and cattle benefited from a period of increased activity and price

values, caused by higher coffee prices and skyrocketing profits, fueled thisprocess of land concentration. The U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service estimatedthat land values ranged from one hundred dollars per manzana in remote dis-tricts to five hundred dollars in better locations. Prices were higher still forplots adjacent to large plantations, with some paying up to $2,500 for smalltracts.25

In the west, intense land use, high land values, and the lack of an agricul-tural frontier encouraged many larger landowners and investors to pressuresmallholders into selling or mortgaging their small plots. Mario Zapata, one ofthe student leaders executed after the 1932 revolt, recounted a dialogue with a smallholder sometime during 1930 that illustrates this process. A wealthylandowner was pressuring the smallholder to sell his land and remain on it as acolono. Zapata convinced the smallholder that it was not in his best interest tosell. But when his wife became ill, the peasant had to mortgage his property tothe entrepreneur at 5 percent interest per month. A few months later, he wasunable to repay the loan, and the property was foreclosed. “[T]he man who hadbeen born free and who remained so until a few months ago, was reduced tothe status of colono: he no longer could own pigs or oxen, nor keep his cart orhis chickens, because the new owner planted coffee trees right up to the patioof his homestead.”26 Zapata’s story was repeated throughout the region, as theranks of colonos swelled.

A 1938 coffee census underscores the significance of colonos as a socialgroup (allowing for some changes between 1932 and 1938): about 18 percent ofthe entire rural population of western El Salvador lived on commercial coffeefarms as either resident workers or administrators—a total of about 55,000people living on about 3,000 farms, with the largest estates having a few hun-


without endangering or lowering the standard of living of most campesinos. Indeed, thisregional difference has been cited as an explanation for the relative quiet of the peasantryin eastern El Salvador in the years leading to the 1932 revolt. A newspaper article from1932 claimed that peasants’ greater access to cheaper lands, including surviving commonlands, and lower living costs were the reasons for the “lack of communism” in this region.“Por qué no existe el comunismo en el Oriente de la República,” Diario del Salvador, 16 Apr.1932, 2; cited in Carlos Gregorio López, “Tradiciones inventadas y discursos nacionalistas:El imaginario nacional de la época liberal en El Salvador, 1876–1932” (ms., San Salvador,2002), chap. 4.

25. S. L. Wilkinson, 25 Apr. 1929, U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service (USFAS),USNA.

26. As reported by Rodrigo Buezo, Sangre de hermanos (Havana: Ed. Universal, 1936),29–33.

dred colonos each.27 “Colonato” generally involved the incorporation of peas-ants into a farm or estate in exchange for access to land and/or wages. But whilein eastern El Salvador the institution usually involved the payment of a fixedrent in kind, in the west landlords used it to secure low-wage or free labor,rather than rent income or crops.28 In 1929 a U.S. Agricultural Service officerreported

Every finca operator makes an effort to have as many permanent laborersas possible. These workers known as “colonos” (resident laborers) arereally one of the most important factors in the industry; they may bedepended upon to work all-year-round and are trained in all the differentoperations, while the day or “piece” worker is employed only during thepicking season and his living conditions are, of course, not as satisfactoryas the permanent worker who is provided with a small house, food andother necessities. . . . There is nearly always some work to be done on thelarger fincas as these operate all twelve months of the year and are nothandicapped by financial problems and may, therefore, employ and retainworkers indefinitely. Many of the larger plantations operate small com-missaries, have their own chapels and are really small communities ratherthan farms.29

When falling coffee prices in 1927 compelled owners to cut back on cashexpenditures, colonos took on much of the work formerly carried out by wagelaborers, but without any of the customary benefits in terms of steady wages.30

Landowners also reacted to the market crisis by increasing fees: by 1931 manyfarmers, including the wealthiest, were charging their workers and colonos foraccess to water.31 A 1930 labor union internal document repeated a report fromthe local press: “[W]hoever has spent even one day in one of these so-called


27. This data is based on preliminary calculations derived from the printed version ofthe 1938 census and a more detailed but incomplete manuscript version of the same data.Asociación Cafetalera de El Salvador, Primer Censo Nacional del Café (San Salvador: TalleresGráficos Cisneros, 1940). See also Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, Recuerdos de Sonsonate: Crónicadel 32 (San Salvador, 2001), 274, 280.

28. Benjamin Muse, Narrative Reports. El Salvador, 19 Sept. 1924, USFAS, USNA.29. S. L. Wilkinson, 25 Apr. 1929, USFAS, USNA.30. One of the effects of the crisis was that banks withheld loans to farmers in 1931,

forcing them to minimize their outlay of cash funds. Most commercial farmers came out ofthe 1931 season without cash reserves. A. E. Carleton, U.S. Consul, Excerpt, Commerceand Industries Review, 27 Jan. 1931, USFAS, USNA.

31. Ogilvie, “The Communist Revolt.”

great haciendas will have noticed how the ‘patrons’ treat their colonos: for amanzana of land that they rent to cultivate maize, they have to pay 15 or 20[colones] or else two fanegas of corn, which leaves the poor colono obligated towork for the hacienda for six or eight weeks earning a miserable wage (one,two, or three reales daily; that is, 12, 25, 35, or 36 cents a day). The wretchedcolono only works for the patron. . . . There are patrones that, for whatevermotive, even deny the worker, in part or in whole, his miserable wage.”32

Harsh contractual and labor conditions and the lack of paternalistic rela-tions reinforced the colonos’ sense that the elite’s ownership of land was ille-gitimate, or in Mintz’s phrase, that “evil times” reigned on the plantation. Thissentiment was even more intense on midsized farms that had emerged fromonce indigenous-controlled lands. The message of land reform, first raised bysupporters of Arturo Araujo during his 1930 presidential campaign, stronglyappealed to colonos. Unlike their counterparts in most Latin American coun-tries, colonos—especially after the Araujo government failed to implementany meaningful land reform—became actively involved in the revolutionarymovement and were perhaps its most important protagonists, as suggested inthe testimony of the daughter of colonos: “Both my parents were very active inthe union, always going to meetings at night. They really believed that we wereall going to get land and they would break up (hacienda) San Isidro.”33

Semiproletarianized indigenous smallholders, dependent on wage labor tosupplement their inadequate landholdings, formed the other key social groupthat emerged in western El Salvador during the1920s. Smallholders thus joinedthe ranks of seasonal laborers, who usually outnumbered permanent workerson the coffee plantations by at least three to one. During the boom years of the1920s, the increased availability of wage labor and small increases in wages par-tially compensated for the increased landlessness. However, starting in 1928the demand for wage labor declined, and wages would plummet dramaticallyduring 1931 as landowners became intent on keeping cash costs down.34 In


32. Tesis sobre la situación internacional, nacional y de la federación regional detrabajadores de El Salvador, Comintern Archive, Moscow, Fond 495 Opis 119 Delo 10(numbering refers to file and not to document; hereafter cited as Comintern, 495/119/10),pp. 27–28.

33. Interview with Margarita Turcios, El Guayabo, Armenia, 2001.34. One notable from the region recalls an agreement among employers to lower

wages during 1931; Galindo Pohl, Recuerdos de Sonsonate, 297. Between 1929 and 1931, ruraland urban unemployment also increased. Government officials were ordered to keep listsof the unemployed workers in the major cities and to encourage employers to hire workersand rent unused lands, with the lists including hundreds of workers in Sonsonate City

August 1931, the U.S. consul noted the effect of this steep decline in wages:“One large agriculturist is said to have reduced wages from the rate of 6 or 7colones a week prevailing a year ago to 1.25. . . . It is evident that the purchas-ing power of the laboring classes, especially in the rural districts, has been dis-tinctly curtailed. The ragged appearance of the workers is notable.”35

The world of these semiproletarians took shape in cantones such asCuyagualo and Cuntan on the outskirts of densely populated Izalco and in therural cantones of Nahuizalco. Ladino encroachment on privatized communallands pushed most indigenous families toward seasonal employment. Many vil-lagers worked during the planting, pruning, and harvest seasons on the largerhaciendas in eastern Izalco, typically leaving home for two weeks and returningevery other Sunday. By 1930, those Sunday trips home were occupied withlocal union and leftist meetings.36

The weak ideological and cultural presence of the elite favored the mobi-lization of colonos and semiproletarians. Hacendados and finqueros in westernEl Salvador had a strong sense of identity, power, and wealth, but they remainedsocially distant from their laborers. The 1920s saw the breakdown of the fewpaternalistic and clientelistic ties that connected the rural poor to the region’swealthiest landowners. The massive scale of modern plantations, with tens ofthousands of workers mobilized each year to pick coffee and cut sugarcane, didnot lend itself to personal contact between landowners and workers.37 Further-more, the wealthiest owners lived in the departmental capitals and rarely ontheir properties.


alone. Ministerio del Trabajo al Gobernador de Sonsonate, Legajo de Cartas alGobernador de Sonsonate, 8 Apr. 1931, Archivo General de La Nación, El Salvador—Fondo Gobernaciones—Sonsonate (hereafter AGN-FG-SO). In the relatively small townof Juayua, four hundred unemployed workers petitioned President Araujo for relief(Ogilvie, “The Communist Revolt,” 53). When Araujo offered plots for rent ongovernment-owned haciendas, the requests came at the rate of one hundred for eachavailable plot; Galindo Pohl, Recuerdos de Sonsonate, 273. See also Solicitudes de Lotes,1931, AGN-Fondo Ministerios—Ministerio de Gobernación (Hereafter AGN-FM-MG).

35. A. E. Carleton, Commerce and Industries Quarterly Report, 1931, 15 Aug. 1931,USFAS, USNA. Even lower wages reported in more Indian localities. Hector B. Llanes, “AHistory of Protestantism in El Salvador, 1896–1992” (Ph.D. diss, New Orleans BaptistTheological Seminary, 1995), 127.

36. Interviews with Raimundo Aguilar, Cusamuluco, Nahuizalco, 1999; Pedro LueSábana, San Juan Arriba, Nahuizalco, 1999; Esteban Tepas, Pushtan, Nahuizalco, 1998;Alberto Shul, Nahuizalco, 2001; Juan Aguilar, Ceiba del Charco, Izalco, 2001; SoteroLinares, Las Higueras, Izalco, 2001.

37. Approximately 25% of the country’s adult labor force had to participate in theharvesting of coffee in 1929. This is a projection based on the country’s demographics, the

Even before the crisis, observers alluded to this potentially dangerous dis-tance between owners and workers. One report stated: “[T]he conditions towhich its labor is subjected to (in order to keep down that one phase of pro-duction cost) are none too conducive to the nocturnal rest of a conscientiousplantation owner.”38 Their low level of hegemony was apparent to the agrarianelite well before the advent of serious rural labor organizing. Consider thestatement of one of El Salvador’s best known and most “modern” coffee grow-ers, John Hill, who commented sometime during mid-1927 on the growingrevolutionary current among workers: “Bolshevism? Oh yes. . . . It’s drifting in.The work people hold meetings on Sundays and get very excited. . . . Yes,there’ll be trouble one of these days. . . . They say: ‘We dig the holes for thetrees! We clean off the weeds! We prune the trees! We pick the coffee! Whoearns the coffee then? . . . We do!’ . . . Why, they’ve even picked out parcelsthat please them most, because they like the climate or think that the trees arein better condition and will produce more. Yes, there’ll be trouble one of thesedays.”39

Planter arrogance and opulence ensured that their miserable wages didnot appear to rural laborers to be the work of market forces. Although the highprofit margins were not public knowledge, they must have appeared obscene tothe workers. On one plantation, annual coffee sales were estimated at nearlyhalf a million dollars, while the wage bill amounted to a mere ten thousand.40

Substandard housing, schooling, and food abounded, and landowners increasedrents while charging for water and firewood and raising prices in their stores.41


size of the crop, and the productivity/labor indices provided in CEPAL et al., Tenencia de latierra y desarollo rural en Centroamérica (San José: EDUCA, 1980), 172.

38. Thompson, Rainbow Countries, 178.39. Arthur Brown Ruhl, The Central Americans: Adventures and Impressions between

Mexico and Panama (New York: C. Scribner’s and Sons, 1928), 204.40. General Resume of Proceedings of H.M.C. Ships whilst at Acajutla, Republic of

San Salvador, 23–31 Jan. 1932, Foreign Office 371/15814. 41. One farm owner acknowledged that he made more money from his store than

from his farm. Working and living conditions are noted in Informe Sobre las Condicionesde Vida de los Jornaleros del Departamento, 1932, AGN-FG-SO. In the midst of theunemployment and wage crisis of December 1931, the Asociación Cafetalera, whileacknowledging that “there is no work,” still sought to recruit workers from Guatemala andHonduras in order to reduce wages and demobilize local workers. During late December1931, the governor noted that for the largest coffee growers, “there is a lack of workers topick coffee, since the available people are few because workers have not come, as inprevious years, from neighboring countries or even from other departments that usuallysend laborers at harvest time”; Lisandro Larín J., Gobernador de Sonsonate, Carta alAlcalde de Sonsonate, 23 Dec. 1931, AGN-FG-SO.

This dramatic increase in exploitation broke the already weak ties of paternal-ism that had connected wealthy landowners to their labor force.

Reactionary opposition to land reform by the country’s wealthiest land-owners also fueled the organization of a leftist opposition. The U.S. militaryattaché reported, “Their arguments usually come down to this; ‘If we sell ourland to these mozos we will have nobody to pick our coffee for us. The bestthing for everybody is to keep things as they are. As a matter of fact we paid ourmozos very high wages three years ago. What happened? Did they improvetheir living conditions? No. They simply stayed drunk two days a week longerthan they do now. These mozos are not unhappy and as long as they do not knowany better, why go out of our way to change matters.’”42

The elite and middling producers’ intransigence on labor and land issuesfurther undermined their ability to establish elementary forms of hegemony.There were, of course, rural sectors in western Salvador who were deferentialto the elite and their claims. In particular, in towns and villages in which Indi-ans were involved in the labor and Left movements, ladino smallholders andworkers were much less likely to join. Similarly, in some towns, some small-holders (especially ladinos) survived without falling into the laboring ranks, inpart due to their paternalistic ties to more prosperous farmers. Notwithstand-ing, our research has also led to a paradoxical finding: despite the significantvariations in municipal histories of land and labor and their differentiated andheterogeneous class relations, an important convergence of campesino experi-ences took place during the late 1920s, lending the popular movement an ele-ment of strength despite the continued economic power of the agrarian elite.

The memory and myth of land availability during the nineteenth centuryand the state-sanctioned practice of guaranteeing communities sufficient landfor their needs persisted among the rural poor and contributed to their view oflarge-scale private landownership as illegitimate.43 These memories mergedwith a regional tradition of collective struggle in defense of communal rights,shaping a widespread ideological acceptance of radical agrarian reform andarmed struggle. Western El Salvador’s workers and peasants were deeply rootedin the region and were not likely to “vacate” it (as might happen in other plan-


42. Major G. S. A. R. Harris, Salvador Economic, No. 4000-b Degree of EconomicDevelopment, Report No. 14, San José, 22 Dec. 1931, Records of the Foreign Service Post,San Salvador, El Salvador, United States Department of State, USNA, RG84. The reportalso revealed how the elite used land concentration to reduce the cost of labor.

43. It wasn’t just peasants who held this memory. Patria editor Masferrer wrote in1928 that “[a]bout forty-five years ago the land in the country was distributed among themajority of the Salvadorans, but now it is falling into the hands of a few owners.” Patria, 29Dec. 1928, p. 1.

tations zones in times of crisis), but instead stood their ground and voiced theirgrievances to the state and elites.44

Reformist political currents helped to create a more democratic politicalclimate, which curtailed the elite’s ability to resist those demands locally. Amove toward local political autonomy pushed municipal politics outside ofofficial networks and channels. By 1927, elites’ ability to use local politics andpatronage networks as a system of social control had weakened greatly, con-tributing to the political opening of this period.45 By 1929, the agrarian elitecould rely only on the national state and its repressive institutions to controllabor organizing, as evidenced in a letter from one thousand “leading citizens”to President Romero Bosque criticizing his “lack of energy” in quelling strikesand labor organizing.46

Middle Sector Reformism and

the Radicalization of the 1920s

Growing reformist and anti-imperialist sentiment curtailed the state’s ability torespond to urban and rural working-class mobilizations during the late 1920s.Indeed, during that decade, a significant critique of El Salvador’s political andeconomic structures emerged from the country’s growing urban middle class.47

These political and ideological trends, combined with growing worker andcampesino unrest, forced the elites on the defensive. The reformist critiques of


44. This was the case in Usulutan’s coffee regions, for example, where most workerscame from other regions of the country. See Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, “La historia regionaldel café en El Salvador,” Revista de Historia (San José) 38 (1998).

45. For a discussion of local politics during the 1920s, see Patricia Alvarenga,“Auxiliary Forces in the Shaping of the Repressive System: El Salvador, 1880–1930,” inIdentity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central Americaand the Hispanic Caribbean, ed. Aviva Chomsky and Aldo Lauria-Santiago (Durham: DukeUniv. Press, 1998); Erik Ching, “Patronage and Politics under Martínez, 1931–1939: TheLocal Roots of Military Authoritarianism,” in Landscapes of Struggle: Politics, Society, andCommunity in El Salvador, ed. Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Leigh Binford (Pittsburgh:University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004); and Erik Ching, “From Clientelism to Militarism,”for an analysis of the relationship between local politics and national state formation.

46. W. D. Robbins to Secretary of State, no. 103, 31 July 1929, Records of theForeign Service Post, San Salvador, El Salvador, Department of State, USNA, RG84.

47. Different aspects of these trends have been noted in Paige, Coffee and Power; Luna,Manual; Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus; Guidos Vejar, El Ascenso; Marroquín, “Estudiosobre la crisis”; Wilson, “The Crisis”; Burns, “The Modernization,” 293–316; andAlvarenga, Cultura y ética, chap. 7.

urban artisans, students, and intellectuals were nationalist, unionist (CentralAmericanist), anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist in tone. Artisans and skilledworkers formed a significant part of the urban population of El Salvador andsince at least the 1880s had played a critical role in both local and national pol-itics, often articulating demands for social and political reforms.48 Skilledworkers and students also played an important role in linking nationalism andanti-imperialism to struggles over wages, rents, electric rates, foreign loans, andrailroad fees.49

U.S. political, military, and economic intervention in the region contributedsignificantly to the emergence of these reformist discourses. Even beforeSandino’s armed struggle against U.S. forces in Nicaragua, El Salvador had dis-tinguished itself for opposing U.S. intervention in the isthmus.50 The Sandin-ista resistance galvanized support in El Salvador: peasant and artisan commit-tees raised funds for Sandino and protested U.S. actions; some even joined hisforces (most notably Farabundo Martí).51 Anti-imperialist fervor spread beyondthe capital; as Reynaldo Galindo Pohl wrote in his memoirs, “In all of Son-sonate, it would have been difficult to find a single person who did not expressanti-imperialist ideas.”52 Thousands of Salvadorans from diverse sectors attendedanti-imperialist rallies. The connections between anti-imperialism and the


48. An example of obrerista radical liberalism can be gleaned from a 1913 protest: “In democratic countries like El Salvador where equality erases the civil frontier betweencitizens . . . it is unfair that certain duties are done only by one social class. . . . [T]heworkers, those who work the land have always served . . . even some European residentshere go to Europe to serve in their military.” The “obreros” went on to demand that thegovernment create a military draft “without social or economic distinctions.” El serviciomilitar obligatorio, 1913, AGN–Fondo Impresos. For a discussion of the participation ofintellectuals in pro-union, anti-imperialist, and reformist movements, see Teresa GarcíaGiráldez, “El unionismo y el antiimperialismo en la decada de 1920” (paper presented atthe 6th Congreso Centroamericano de Historia, Panama, 2002). For a substantialdiscussion of obrerismo, see López, “Tradiciones inventadas.”

49. On obrerismo in Nicaragua, see Jeffrey L. Gould, To Lead As Equals: Rural Protestand Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of NorthCarolina Press, 1990), chaps. 1–3.

50. El Salvador’s export-oriented economy and financial institutions were almostentirely nationally owned. This facilitated the development of reformism andnationalism—workers, artisans, petit bourgeois, and even sectors of the agro-industrialbourgeoisie coincided, if briefly, in a discourse of reform made possible by the relativeabsence of a strong foreign influence.

51. Galindo Pohl, Recuerdos de Sonsonate, 329; Diario de Ahuachapán, 10 July 1928;Arias Gómez, Farabundo Martí.

52. Galindo Pohl, Recuerdos de Sonsonate, 329.

emerging Left were clear: in 1929, state repression against an anti-imperialistdemonstration in Santa Tecla contributed directly to the formation of a Sal-vadoran branch of the Socorro Rojo Internacional, a leftist organization thataided victims of political repression.

During the 1920s, visible and persistent public critiques of the increasinglyunequal distribution of wealth further challenged elite dominance. Nationalnewspapers like Patria and the Diario Latino routinely editorialized about theneed for reforms in favor of peasants, rural workers, and indigenous people.Similarly, provincial newspapers like the Heraldo de Sonsonate also protestedagainst the economic system. One article, for example, decried how the “exploita-tive companies form a menacing plague that strangles justice and increases thepercentage of the impoverished.” Exposés of rural labor condemned largelandowners: “Life on the estates . . . is heavy, due to the monotony of the dailywork and the pitiful rations, which have been reduced to two large tortillas andbeans mixed with chicken droppings, cooked without salt or onions; they sleepunder the coffee trees.”53 Journalists also attacked the concentration of land inthe hands of large-scale producers and supported measures in favor of the dwin-dling number of small-scale coffee producers.54 These critiques of agrariancapitalism coincided with attacks on the foreign-owned railroad monopoly (theInternational Railways of Central America) and foreign loans.55

The “Minimum Vital” (which sought ways to “guarantee the basic neces-sities of life” for the lower classes) and student movements also formed part ofthe reformist current. Alberto Masferrer’s Minimum Vital program promoteda harmonious balance between capital and labor and moderate land reform.56


53. El Heraldo de Sonsonate, 9 Jan. 1931, signed Sandokao.54. Choussy, cited in Wilson, “The Crisis,” 120–21.55. La Epoca, 17 June 1931.56. See Karen Racine, “Alberto Masferrer and the Vital Minimum: The Life and

Thought of a Salvadoran Journalist, 1868–1932,” The Americas 54, no. 2 (1997): 225.Vitalismo “captured the imagination of reform-minded humanitarians across the isthmus”(225). Masferer also linked the social reformism of these years with its anti-imperialism. Inone text he wrote, “If you were to look for two words, precise but harsh, to characterizethe mental and material attitude of the Central American peoples in contrast with theUnited States, you would have to choose these two: imbecility and servility. . . . In thesetimes, so deep and wide is the breech of our understanding, that the vast majority ofCentral Americans do not notice, nor even suspect, that their region is threatened withdefinitive and total absorption”; Alberto Masferrer, “En la hora de crujir de dientes,” LaPrensa, 3 Feb. 1927, p. 1; cited in Jaime Barba, “Masferrer, vitalismo y luchas sociales en losaños veinte,” Región: Centro de Investigaciones (1997). For discussions of Masferrer and Patriaand their relationship to broader reformist movements, see Barba, “Masferrer”; García

Reformist university students also organized the “Movimiento Renovación”and the National Association of Students (AGEUS), extending their effortsbeyond the campus gates to include protests against foreign loans, high rents,trolley fees, electric rates, foreign monopolies, and militarism.57 Out of thisreformist climate emerged the Federación Regional de Trabajadores Sal-vadoreños (FRTS), which became a key part of this current. The economic cri-sis in the late 1920s pushed artisans into the ranks of wage laborers, creating anew fertile field upon which to sow the seeds of labor organizing. In one demon-stration alone, the FRTS mobilized ten thousand people in San Salvador, withspeakers from the middle-class Liga Antiimperialista alternating with urbanworkers. The speakers made broad ideological connections between U.S. inter-vention in Nicaragua and Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles’s confronta-tion with U.S. interests.58 A 1926 FRTS manifesto listed its goals: Puerto Ricanand Filipino independence, internationalization of the Panama Canal, andnationalization of the railroads and other public services.59

These trends of the 1920s, propelled by the economic crisis, coalesced intomassive support for the presidential campaign of reformist Arturo Araujo. Theinvolvement of thousands of peasants who voted en masse for Araujo in the1931 elections (despite PCS opposition) led to the creation of a relatively auton-omous movement among artisan, worker, and peasant supporters. Perhaps thebest image of the strength of Araujo’s base was the massive parade of peasantswho followed him into the city of Sonsonate as part of the presidential cam-paign of 1931: “Don Arturo, who was at the head of the parade, mounted apurebred mare, imported from England, and marched at a tight pace, with hishat in his hand, and saluted the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalks,doorways, and balconies. . . . Some three thousand men on horseback followeddon Arturo, four abreast, with their hats pulled down tight and their mountsreined in. . . . Behind this impressive parade of riders and horses came animmense mass of people on foot, made up of peasants.”60


Giráldez, “El unionismo”; Casáus, “Las influencias de las redes intelectuales teosóficas enla opinión pública centroamericana (1870–1930)” (paper presented at the 6th CongresoCentroamericano de Historia, Panama, 2002); López, “Tradiciones inventadas”; andespecially Racine’s “Alberto Masferrer.”

57. See Ricardo Antonio Argueta Hernández, “Los estudiantes universitarios y lasluchas sociales en El Salvador (1920–1931)” (paper presented at the 6th CongresoCentroamericano de Historia, Panama, 2002).

58. López, “Tradiciones inventadas,” chap. 3.59. Ibid.60. Galindo Pohl, Recuerdos de Sonsonate, 149.

Araujismo grew as a reformist movement between 1930 and early 1931,with significant connections to labor.61 Araujismo shared, and at times vied,with the Left for the support of workers and campesinos. Even during the 1932insurrection, many activists maintained sympathies with both Araujismo and thePCS. At the local level, Araujo’s multiclass alliance represented a challenge tothe old patronage networks controlled by local elites, while on the national levelit led to a vast political movement unique in Salvadoran history. He also bene-fited directly from the reformist intellectual currents that influenced diversegroups, including intellectuals, provincial lawyers, landowners, departmentalgovernors, and military officers. The alliance between professionals and work-ers had roots in the decades-old political culture of urban reformism.62

Araujo’s laborism, inspired by the British Labor Party and the diverse ide-ological currents of Central American reformism, raised hopes of land reformamong the rural poor and of political and economic reform among urbanworkers and artisans. But its failure to meet those expectations provoked further discontent. One U.S. embassy observer commented that Araujo made“all kinds of election promises which led many farmers and laborers to thinkthat the millennium was likely once Araujo was elected. There was rumored . . .that the big coffee estates would be divided and every family given its acre ofground. . . . [T]he unrest of the last few days may be laid partially to the ruralpopulation’s somewhat hastily drawn conclusion that the president has turnedhis back on them.”63 By the end of 1931, after nearly four years of deterioratingeconomic conditions, there was little space for significant reform without, inalliance with the PCS, a dramatic assault on oligarchic power, which, in anycase, would have been rejected for sectarian reasons.


61. The Partido del Proletariado Salvadoreño played a critical role in linking Araujoto labor. The PPS was formed by the reformist leaders of the FRTS, who were expelledwhen the Left gained control of the organization. Araujo’s links to the labor and popularreform movements went back to the 1910s, having organized an attempt to overthrow theMeléndez regime in 1922.

62. Provincial cities, especially Sonsonate and San Vicente, provide good examples ofthe reformist alliance between provincial elites and artisans. In Sonsonate, Araujismo hadsupport not only among the popular sectors but also among some of the region’scommercial farmers and entrepreneurs. In San Vicente, a coalition of artisans and laborleaders had held municipal power for years with the support of the city’s bourgeoisie.

63. Sectors initially supportive of Araujismo, like the PPS, sought land reform andincreased government spending in public works and education. In the weeks right after hiselectoral victory, peasants reportedly occupied lands in haciendas in western El Salvador.Ogilvie, “The Communist Revolt,” 44; Alvarenga, Cultura y ética, 305; Casáus, “Lasinfluencias”; García Giráldez, “El unionismo.”

President Araujo’s failure to carry out any significant reforms forced himto reimpose repressive policies toward protest and labor organizing. As a result,many of his ardent supporters drifted to the left. In May 1931, the Laboristagovernor of Sonsonate had to suggest to Araujo that they meet with their localleaders in order to “make them understand that they must in no way take partin these protests of a subversive nature.”64 In July, Araujo organized a demon-stration in support of his government. The government brought in some fiveto ten thousand rural workers by train; they marched to the Casa Presidencial,only to join a second demonstration afterward that called for the resignation ofall his ministers due to their lack of action on land reform.65 At the same time,Araujo appeared to be uninterested in reforming the increasingly paralyzedstate.66 Although at the municipal level Araujismo often had mutually benefi-cial relations with the growing labor movement, at the national level it had lit-tle success in crafting coalitions (due, in large part, to the sectarianism of thePCS, a reflection of Comintern influences). The failure of Araujismo, culmi-nating in his overthrow, sin pena ni gloria, on December 2, 1931, contributed tothe further radicalization of indigenous and ladino campesinos and workers.

Despite its ultimate failure, we should not discount the ideological andpolitical force of social-democratic reformism. From the 1920s on, the coun-try’s elite had to compete with other ideological currents, and classical liberalracism was largely absent from national-level discourse. In particular, Salvador-an discourse on social reform went further than other Latin American variantsin promoting the rights of Indians.67 Indeed, middle-class reformism, includ-


64. Gobernador de Sonsonate, Carta al Presidente de la Republica, 30 May 1931,AGN-FG-SO.

65. Harold Finley to Secretary of State, 8 July 1931, no. 537, strictly confidential,Department of State, Records of the Foreign Service Post, San Salvador, El Salvador,Department of State, USNA, RG84; Iraheta Rosales, López Alas, and Escobar Cornejo,“La crisis de 1929.”

66. For a discussion of the administrative near-collapse of the state during this period,see Guidos Vejar, El Ascenso; and Wilson, “The Crisis.”

67. See, for example, Román Mayorga Rivas, “Los indios de Izalco, terruñosalvadoreño,” Revista del Ateneo del Salvador 11 (1913): 372–74. One reformist governornoted the “pro-Indian movement” throughout “our America” and complained that“Central America, parts of which have a considerable residual indigenous element, hasforgotten and completely neglected the situation of its Indians.” He thought that “theIndian of certain parts of our country is not a problem but instead signifies an advancementof civilization”; Rochac, “Conferencia de Alfonso Rochac.” See also López, “Tradicionesinventadas,” for a discussion of María de Baratta’s ethnographic work and other evidence ofthis revaluation of indigenous culture.

ing Araujismo, was closely tied to the ideology of mestizaje. Throughout LatinAmerica, ideologies of mestizaje allowed progressive intellectuals during the1920s to take an active role in nation building by forging anti-imperial imagesand allowing for a greater inclusion of subaltern groups in a version of liberal-ism shorn of its most egregious racism and elitism.68

The Salvadoran version of mestizaje strongly valorized an abstract andidealized version of the indigenous contribution to the country’s history andculture. Writer Miguel Angel Espino expressed his understanding of the rootsof Salvadoran nationalism in the following terms: “[T]he dehispanicization ofthe continent . . . is one of those problems that in a hidden and latent way hasbeen modifying the life of the continent. Because, it is proven, that we are Indi-ans. Of the five liters we have, one cup of Spanish blood sings within us; therest is American fiber. From the crossing of the Spaniard and the American anew race resulted; to believe this race was Hispanicized was the error.”69 Reformistintellectuals cited Marxist and progressive thinkers like José Carlos Mariáteguias part of their campaign in favor of respect for Indians. Rochac, the governorof Sonsonate, wrote, “Central America, which has, in part, a considerable indige-nous foundation, has forgotten, has completely neglected, the situation of itsIndians.” Although they tended to idealize a “pure” Indian culture, their viewsclashed sharply with traditional white and mestizo racism. “Everything that isadmirable in the Indian is his own; it is not owing to anyone, neither the priest,nor the teacher, nor the minister, nor the legislator, nor the magistrate. . . . TheIndian is nothing less than a tender and sensitive man—no less than the whiteor the mestizo.”70

These declarations, however paternalistic, stand in sharp contrast to eliteracist discourse that consistently portrayed Indians as inferior, backward beingswho would squander any pay raise on alcohol and would retreat into indolentbarbarism if given any land. Moreover, the ideologues of mestizaje, by valoriz-ing the indigenous contribution to society and by offering solidarity for Indi-ans, helped to create the discursive conditions and political space for the cross-ethnic movement that emerged between 1929 and 1931.

Indians and Ladinos in the Mobilization

The mobilization of 1930 and 1931 involved rural workers and peasants who,despite their variegated ethnic identities, responded positively to the class ide-


68. See Jeffrey L. Gould, To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth ofMestizaje, 1880-1965 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998).

69. Miguel Angel Espino, Prosas Escogidas, 6th ed. (San Salvador: UCA Ed., 1995), 20. 70. Rochac, “Conferencia de Alfonso Rochac.”

ology promoted by leftist activists. Those class-based messages and activities,promulgated initially by urban artisans, appealed to those who looked on Indi-ans as a somewhat backward “other,” to those who identified strongly withindigenous political authority and culture, and to those who simply did notcare. Part of that positive response to the radical movement involved differen-tial social and political reactions to the discourse and practice of mestizaje,defined here as a nation-building myth of racial mixture and as a culturalprocess of de-Indianization.

In Nicaragua and Honduras, an emerging discourse of ethnic homogene-ity aided the efforts of ladino elites to take over land and political power fromindigenous minorities. The processes of cultural mestizaje that accompaniedagrarian capitalism tended to divide indigenous communities in ways that helpedladinos take land and political power from the indigenous minority. Likewise,in El Salvador, indigenous people “looked” like they were dropping theirIndian identities. As one observer stated, “The Indians have all been absorbed,and nearly everyone wears shoes and stockings.”71 In Nicaragua and Honduras,national elites used the putative disappearance of “real” Indians to undermineindigenous claims. This process was replicated, in some respects, in El Sal-vador, but with certain fundamental differences that provide a key to under-standing the mobilization, rebellion, and repression. While mestizaje formedpart of the hegemonic project in Nicaragua and Honduras, the very intenseand contradictory response of El Salvador’s subalterns promoted indigenousresistance.

Salvadoran indigenous responses were unique primarily because of therelative economic importance, communal cohesion, and geographic contigu-ity of indigenous groups. Thus, in El Salvador, unlike in Nicaragua and Hon-duras, some Indians responded to the ideology and practice of mestizaje witha discourse of ethnic militancy and revitalization. Ironically, we find one of theclearest statements of the discourse of ethnic revitalization in the words of aninebriated Nahuizalqueño at a wedding attended by an Italian journalist: “We,the real Indians, the Indian kings! The purebloods . . . we know something thewhites don’t know. We are waiting for our hour. We are the owners of themountains, the valleys, the coffee fields, the houses—all that can be seen.”72

Evidence of this language of indigenous militancy is scattered and some-what elusive, and we must recognize that it was submerged. Furthermore, the


71. Lillian Elwyn Elliott, Central America: New Paths in Ancient Lands (London:Metheun and Co., 1924), 118

72. Mario Appelius, Le terre che tremano, Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua,Costa Rica, Panama (Verona: A. Mondadori, 1933), 113–14. During the insurrection,Nahuizalco residents reported that the rebels shouted “Viva los indios de Nahuizalco!”

lines between assimilationists and traditionalists were extremely fluid, particu-larly in the cantones, and it is impossible to deduce participation in the ruralmobilization from a commitment to ethnic symbols favored by the traditional-ists (dress and language). Indeed, in Santo Domingo de Guzmán (arguably themost traditional community in the country), Indians participated neither in themobilization nor in the insurrection. The community’s economic marginalityresulted in a weak ladino presence and a low level of ethnic conflict. In Nahui-zalco and in the town of Izalco, however, evidence points toward an importantrole for traditionalists in the mobilization. Consider the testimony of AndrésPérez about his father and grandfather, all indigenous residents of the cantonof Pushtan: “My grandfather had belonged to an organization commonly called‘Los Abuelos’ in Nahuizalco, dedicated to protecting indigenous culture, polit-ical autonomy, and land. My father, Juan Pérez, was one of the few literate people in Pushtan. He worked as a colono on a cattle hacienda, on land thatearlier had belonged to the community. When the Socorro Rojo started orga-nizing in the area, my father became the organizational secretary. It was forhim no different than ‘Los Abuelos.’”73 Although leftist militants did not sup-port specifically pro-Indian demands, their appeal lay in their nonracist formsof daily interaction and their egalitarian and emancipatory language, whichIndians interpreted as support for their political, economic, and cultural rights.In Pérez’s testimony, we see that the mobilization of the late 1920s was a directcontinuation of the struggles of Los Abuelos (presumably a council of elders)against encroachments on land and restrictions on religious and culturalexpression. According to Pérez, ladino landowners, shop owners, and priestsattempted to prohibit or restrict the use of Nahuatl on the one hand and usurpthe power of cofradías on the other. There is no documentary evidence to sub-stantiate the charge about the prohibition of Nahuatl. Indeed, in 1924, thenational government financed a study of Nahuatl in Nahuizalco. However, thedevelopment of primary school education for children in town undoubtedlyhad a negative impact on language use and could easily have provoked opposi-tion from traditional sectors of the indigenous population. Similarly, other oraltestimony suggests that the church strongly discouraged Nahuatl before1932.74 There is clearer documentary evidence to substantiate the notion ofcultural conflict during the early 1930s, both in Nahuizalco and in Izalco. TheHeraldo de Sonsonate reported the following incident in Nahuizalco in April1931: “The inditos also have their bitter moments, yesterday one told of the


73. Interview with Andrés Pérez, Pushtan, Nahuizalco, 2001.74. Interview with Marcos Bran, Cusamuluco, Nahuizalco, 2001.

atrocity that four ambitious individuals want to carry out, for the Cofradía delSanto Entierro, they have agreed to take away the Lord and the other imagesfrom the mayordomo . . . and since the priest was surprised by the sacristan andthe four schemers [he] is in agreement with the removal of the image of OurLord.”75 The mayor of Nahuizalco also supported the attempt to remove theimage, alleging Communist infiltration of the cofradías.76 The alliance between“the four ambitious individuals” and the priest in order to appropriate the imagewas consistent with church-Indian conflicts in the rest of Central America.77

The intervention of the mayor, however, was a clear signal of increased blurringbetween religious and political conflict.

This transformation of Los Abuelos into a leftist organization did havepolitical costs, most notably in municipal politics. As other historians havenoted, municipal politics were an important site of ethnic conflict during the1920s and 1930s.78 In particular, Nahuizalco’s bitter political conflict spilledover into the mobilization. The former indigenous political elite, made up pri-marily of artisans, merchants, and smallholders, had clashed (and occasionallyallied) for decades with local ladinos (generally business owners and smallfarmers of a slightly higher standing but also some artisans). During the 1920s,ladinos could count on some indigenous support for their political and eco-nomic goals. Thus, for example, a dispute over the privatization of some remain-ing communal land divided the indigenous political elite between “progres-sives” who allied themselves with wealthy ladinos and traditionalists who beganto look left for allies.79

The leftward tilt of Los Abuelos further split the indigenous political elite.Thus, a former municipal leader, Cupertino Galicia, rejected the repeatedentreaties of his former political allies to join the movement. Galicia’s opposi-tion stemmed, in part, from his position as a middle farmer whose own farm-hands had joined the mobilization. Political and ethnic ties notwithstanding,Galicia and others like him saw the expansion of the Socorro Rojo with appre-hension, and in 1932 they feared for their lives.

Similarly, in ethnically divided Izalco, the indigenous cofradías played a


75. El Heraldo de Sonsonate, 22 Apr. 1931.76. Patricia Alvarenga, “Los indígenas y el estado: Alianzas y estrategias políticas en la

construcción del poder local (1920–1944),” in Memorias del mestizaje, ed. Darío Euraque,Jeffrey L. Gould, and Charles R. Hale (Guatemala City: CIRMA, 2004).

77. Gould, To Die in This Way, 182–83.78. Alvarenga, Cultura y ética, chap. 6; Alvarenga, “Los indígenas”; Ching, “From

Clientelism to Militarism,” chap. 5.79. Alvarenga, “Los indígenas.”

significant role in the mobilization, and control over the cofradías was likewisea flash point for cultural conflict. Here also, local politics and the struggle forcontrol over the municipal government became very intense during 1929–32.80

Notwithstanding its sharp ethnic polarization, ladino artisans and workers inIzalco also participated actively in the mobilization. In the critical January 1932elections, left-wing mayoral candidate Eusebio Chávez, himself a ladino car-penter, enjoyed the support of Izalco’s Indians. When the rebellion broke outafter the elections were nullified, the predominantly indigenous rebels pro-claimed Chávez mayor.81

Thus far, we have focused on the traditionalist response to the varied polit-ical, economic, and cultural pressures on the indigenous communities rooted inthe towns of Izalco and Nahuizalco. However, even there, the lines betweenassimilationists and traditionalists were fluid. Throughout the rest of westernSalvador, ethnic relations were even more intricate, revealing other facets ofthe subaltern response to the processes of cultural mestizaje and ethnic con-flict. In the cantones of Izalco, for example, many people considered “Indians”distanced themselves considerably from residents of the urban barrio of Asun-ción, who were closely identified with indigenous markers of dress and lan-guage.82 Informants who were children in 1930 recall how their parents woulduse indigenous work clothes but then changed into ladino clothing when theyapproached the town limits. Notwithstanding what appears to have been anaccelerated pace of cultural mestizaje in the cantones (including more languageloss than in the indigenous barrio of Izalco), there were still sharp distinctionsbetween indigenous families in the villages and poor ladinos who had migratedto the area during the preceding decades. We should not conflate this distinc-tion with class: Indians and ladinos alike occupied the ranks of laborers, colonos,and smallholders, in roughly similar proportions. Despite their shared class


80. See, for example, El Heraldo de Sonsonate, 10 Dec. 1929. The indigenous caciqueJosé Feliciano Ama (hung by the military in January 1932) filed a petition to nullify theelections, arguing that people from outside Izalco had voted. That fraud, in his words,“opens the way for the imposition of capitalism, which would be fatal for the people, whenthe yolk of capital, imposed by public officials, would squeeze office workers, laborers, andpeasants.” The class language and date of this note suggest that the rural labor movementfrom its inception in 1929 had a very receptive audience.

81. Report on Communist Activities in El Salvador, British Consul, D. Rogers toGrant Wilson, 16 Feb. 1932, UK Foreign Office 813/23 no. 24 238/13a.

82. Some of the complexities of ethnic conflict and the decline of Indian identities inIzalco during an earlier period are discussed in Aldo Lauria-Santiago, “Land, Community,and Revolt in Indian Izalco, El Salvador, 1855–1905,” Hispanic American Historical Review79, no. 3 (September 1998): 495–534.

status, however, relations between Indians and ladinos were tense. In the wordsof an indigenous resident of Ceiba del Charco, an ethnically mixed canton nearIzalco, “Ladinos didn’t want to be with the inditos.”

In general, in these bi-ethnic areas, Indians were the primary participantsin labor and leftist organizations. In the words of Sotero Linares, a ladino farmworker from the canton of Cuntan (Izalco), “This was entirely the work of the‘naturales,’ of the most Indian [de los más inditos]. And those of us who werehalf-bloods didn’t know anything.” Linares’s testimony about the insurrection isalso revealing. Captured by the Communist rebels, he was brought to the six-manzana coffee finca of Anastacio Ishio, an indigenous landowner and leader ofthe Socorro Rojo. Linares was tied to a tree, where he argued with Ishio’s sonFrancisco, exclaiming that he and his ladino friends had never been “invited” toattend the Socorro Rojo meetings. According to Linares, Francisco responded, “Idon’t owe you anything. We are worth something, but you are just worthless.”83

This phrase suggests the weight of respect and disrespect in ethnic relations—it was a long-standing belief among Indians that ladinos did not respect them.At the moment of revolt, then, the rebels turned the language of respect insideout: the Indians owed nothing to those who did not want to be with them.

In Los Arenales, a predominately ladino canton that borders the coffee-producing zone of Nahuizalco, the rebellion and the repression took the formof a civil war rooted in ethnic differences. In the eyes of the ladino campesinos,the mobilization had a distinctly ethnic character that excluded them. Despitethe class rhetoric of the mobilization, Indian rebels were capable of killingtheir class brethren. Jesús Velázquez, a child in Los Arenales in 1932, recallsthe fear and hatred of his family (ladino smallholders) toward the indigenousrebels. He witnessed (and his grandfather participated in) the massacre of hun-dreds of Indians in El Canelo. He re-created the words uttered by his grandfa-ther: “Otherwise they would have killed us.”84

Yet, despite these deep ethnic antagonisms, indigenous militants were per-fectly capable of transcending ethnic boundaries when they organized ruralworkers on plantations or in neighboring ladino villages. As Fabián Mojica, aladino carpenter and labor organizer, underscored in referring to his organiza-tional work in Cuyagualo and in Cuntan (Izalco) in 1930, “The Indians werequite understanding. Juan Hernández and other compañeros of Cuyagualothemselves went to San Julián in order to organize the workers.”85 In other words,


83. Interview with Sotero Linares, Las Higueras, Izalco, 2001.84. Interview with Jesús Velásquez, San Luis, Izalco, 2001.85. Interview with Fabián Mojica, Sonzacate, 1999.

indigenous militants who experienced sharp conflict with their own ladino neigh-bors had no difficulty working politically with ladinos elsewhere, such as thosewho labored on the coffee plantations of San Julián.

British and U.S. embassy officials (and presumably their informants in theSalvadoran elite) did not usually make distinctions between Indians and therest of the rural poor in western El Salvador. Notwithstanding their view thatall of the rural poor were “Indians,” such analytical distinctions are important ifwe wish to understand the broad appeal of leftist organizations during the early1930s.

If we have to cast aside the notion of an indigenous mobilization andrebellion tout court, what difference did these ethnic ideologies and conflictsmake in the mobilization? In some places and at some times, they mattered agreat deal. In particular, in those areas where Indians and ladinos lived side byside, the mobilization often appeared to be an indigenous movement, whilepoor ladinos, after the insurrection, became willing recruits for the forces ofrepression. In other areas, such as in large areas of the departments of Ahua-chapán and La Libertad, evidence suggests that the historical processes of landconcentration, capitalist labor relations fostered by the coffee boom, and thepeculiar forms of consciousness of former members of indigenous communi-ties created an openness toward alliances with leftist militants. Most signifi-cantly, as we have seen, local histories did not favor the legitimacy of elite landclaims.

Finally, the ethnic dimension in the movement is fundamental in the waysthat indigenous survivors of the 1932 massacre reconstruct the event. Considerthe testimony of Andrés Pérez, based on his father’s account. His father, anartisan and colono, had become a key figure in the Socorro Rojo in Nahui-zalco: “By 1931, the organization was very solid. They had big meetings underthe ceiba [in the center of town] every Sunday. Then, the mulattoes becameinvolved. Then one day the mulattoes broke the doors and busted into the big-ger stores in Nahuizalco . . . you can still see the machete marks there. . . .Then the military said that the Communists and Indians had done the looting.And then they killed the Indians.”86 Similarly, according to Alberto Shul, atown resident, “Mulattoes from Turín and Atiquizaya took over the Alcaldía ofNahuizalco and did some looting.”87 In another version, local ladino elites per-petrated the robberies (or at least broke the locks on the store doors) in orderto set up the Indians for their execution.88


86. Interview with Andrés Pérez, Pushtan, Nahuizalco, 2001. 87. Interview with Alberto Shul, Nahuizalco, 1999. 88. Interview with Dominga Sánchez, Pushtan, Nahuizalco, 2001.

These recollections are significant in at least two respects. First, the col-lective memory of survivors reworked the participation of nonindigenous peo-ple from Atiquizaya and Turín in a way that allowed for the suppression of theindigenous subject in the insurrection (as opposed to the earlier mobilization).In other words, by blaming ladinos retrospectively, Indians become innocentvictims of the machinations of ladino elites, ladino Communists, and the ladinomilitary. As we have discussed elsewhere, the “forgetting” of indigenous par-ticipation contributed to the fragmentation of collective memories, with pro-nounced consequences for the development of local political culture.89 Second,since the colonial era, Indians throughout Central America used the term“mulatto” as an epithet that substituted for the more neutral term “ladino,”underscoring both the darker than “white” color of their adversaries and theircontempt for people of African origin. The use of “mulatto” in oral testimonytoday suggests the bitterness of ethnic antagonism in the twentieth century; italso suggests the achievement of those Indians and ladinos on the Left whowere able to bridge that river of mistrust and resentment for a brief momentbefore the machine-gun bursts and firing squads destroyed that bridge and anymemory of its existence.

Patriarchy and Violence

Strong patriarchal norms and relations characterized Salvadoran indigenouscommunities and contributed, albeit indirectly, to the mobilization and rebel-lion. Indigenous patriarchy was by no means unique to El Salvador.90 In To Diein This Way, we note that in Central America, as elsewhere, strict patriarchallimits on female sexuality enforced indigenous endogamy and, at the sametime, “structures of indigenous patriarchy presented an extraordinarily power-ful symbol to even sympathetic outsiders.”91

In the Nicaraguan case, we emphasized how the ladino view of indigenouspatriarchy weakened the possibilities for cross-ethnic alliances. In El Salvador,we can glimpse some of the impact of indigenous patriarchy on ladinos in the


89. Jeffrey L. Gould, “Revolutionary Nationalism and Local Memories in ElSalvador,” in Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: The View from the North, ed.Gilbert Joseph (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001).

90. We are making the distinction between communities or municipalities withtraditional forms of indigenous authorities, such as Nahuizalco, Izalco, Cuisnahuat, andSanto Domingo (all in Sonsonate) and other communities made up of people varyingidentities but who were not subject to specifically indigenous forms of government.

91. Gould, To Die in This Way, 164.

following statement about Cuisnahuat, a relatively isolated and traditional com-munity in the department of Sonsonate:

Many years ago a considerable numbers of us ladinos from Cuisnahuatput up with, at the cost of the humiliation of our dignity as free citizens,the dictatorial attitude of the Indians, at the time when they functionedas local authorities. The hatred of this race for any element foreign totheir primitive customs and their lazy and demoralized habits, andtoward any change that signifies progress, is visible to all. Aside fromthe repugnant spectacles of the Indians, such as the beating of children carried out by their own parents, apart from their habits of pillage and little or no respect for the property of those who do not belong to theircommunity . . . the arbitrary abuses of the Indians are countless.92

The document suggests that the ladino population of Cuisnahuat relatedabuses by indigenous municipal authorities to indigenous patriarchy, Indianhatred for “modern” customs and culture, and public corporal punishment inchild rearing.93

Endogamous marriage practices, similar to those of other Central Ameri-can Indians, were essential to indigenous patriarchy. Arranged marriages andpatrilocal residence patterns, in particular, were customary among both Sal-vadoran and Nicaraguan Indians during this period.94 Arranged marriagesboth reinforced the power of patriarchs within the community and guaranteedethnic endogamy. As in other societies, endogamy and male control over womenwere central to the preservation of indigenous identity and community, or atleast so it appeared to the village elders.95

Although it is debatable whether indigenous patriarchy was more oppres-sive in El Salvador than in other parts of the Americas, it was surely more cod-


92. Nulidad de Elecciones en Cuisnahuat, 5 May 1901, AGN-FG-SO.93. Hamilton Fyfe further substantiated the uniqueness of indigenous patriarchy: “In

the Indian homes the patriarchal system prevails, the authority of parents and grandparentsis acknowledged and respected. Many attribute the good qualities of the native to thediscipline which this system entails”; Fyfe, “Salvador: A Vigorous Race in a Volcanic Land,”Peoples of All Nations, vol. 6, ed. J. A. Hammerton (London: Fleetway House, 1929).

94. María de Baratta and Jeremías Mendoza, Cuzcatlán típico: Ensayo sobre etnofonía deEl Salvador, folklore, folkwisa y folkway (San Salvador: Ministerio de Cultura, 1951).

95. Carol A. Smith has argued persuasively that there are significantly different valuesattached to female sexuality within and outside of Guatemalan indigenous communities;Carol A. Smith, “Race-Class-Gender Ideologies: Modern and Anti-Modern Forms,”Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 4 (1995).

ified. Consider the report of the Italian journalist at a 1928 marriage ceremonyin Nahuizalco. His report reveals a sense of the intrusive, gendered communalpresence in the lives of its members. That the taxtule (a key figure in cofradíaswho combined different roles, including historian), and not the local priest,was the master of ceremonies provides evidence of another dimension of weakhegemonic control. After going over the responsibilities of the husband, whichincluded replacing the roof annually, providing enough corn for the family, andproducing a child within a year, they turned to the bride and listed a series ofher obligations. These included waking up before the husband to prepare cof-fee and food, eating and drinking after he was done, and wiping his brow at thefront of the house when he returned from work. She responded to each ofthese obligations with the words, “I swear it.” The following excerpts providea sense of the threats that backed up the obligations: “If you fail him, he willstraighten you out [corregiré ]. . . . If you betray him, he will squash you. . . . Ifyou don’t bear him a child, he will get another wife.”96 Although this level ofcodification is striking, we should recall that women in the United States in themid–nineteenth century were legally obligated to provide sex and domesticservice to their husbands.97 It is noteworthy, however, that in El Salvador thesestrictures were laid out in an intimate community ceremony rather than inabstract legal code. Other sources substantiate this view of strict patriarchalcontrol over indigenous women. For example, oral interviews suggest that ifthe tortillas were not ready before dawn, the wife was subject to corporal pun-ishment administered by the communal authorities.98

Similarly, in Panchimalco (an indigenous community south of San Salva-dor), the elderly informants of anthropologist Alejandro Marroquín recountedthat in the early twentieth century, the community shared a belief that the 11thday following the start of a new moon was propitious for procreating healthy,strong bodies and that an earlier date in the lunar cycle would produce “cow-ardly men.” Thus, according to Marroquín’s informants, on “once luna,” aroundnine o’clock, municipal authorities would walk the streets beating a drum andat intervals shouting: “Now is the time to conceive, gentlemen.” From housespeople would then responded, “We’re working on it.” For the next eight days,sexual relations were encouraged. After the eighth night, municipal authorities


96. Apellius, Le terre che tremano, 109–10.97. Sarah Ziegler, “Wifely Duties: Marriage, Labor, and the Common Law in

Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Science History 20, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 79–83.98. Personal communication with Patricia Alvarenga, who conducted interviews with

elderly women in Nahuizalco in 1998.

prohibited relations (an enforceable regulation since the thatched roofs shookduring the act).99

Under such extreme patriarchal rule, it is not surprising that relationsbetween indigenous men and women were often conflictual, and real or imag-ined female relations with ladino men provoked the sharpest tensions.100 Onecontributing factor may have been women’s desires to “whiten” the race. Areport from the 1880s that El Salvador’s indigenous women sought offspringwith white males echoes a similar report of mid-nineteenth-century Indianfamilies in Nicaragua who “rented” their daughters to white males (specificallynot those of African descent) on condition that the offspring would be returnedto the family.101 Although there is scant evidence, it seems likely that women’sresistance to patriarchy—including liaisons with ladinos—may have con-tributed to the transformation of some indigenous communities into non-indigenous ones in western Salvador.

During the 1920s, the growing number of indigenous women obliged to work on plantations and haciendas loosened the bonds of patriarchy byincreasing contact between indígenas and ladino men. Ruhl’s comments aboutJames Hill’s coffee plantation are relevant (even though they probably refer toboth indigenous and ladina women). Ruhl relates the owner’s words, writing,“ ‘They used to do nothing, just take care of their babies, cook for their hus-bands, and potter ’round their places. But I kept urging them to work and nowI have plenty. . . . Why, lots of these women go round now with silk stockingson, while they’re carrying armfuls of brush and dirt. Naturally, they tear ’em topieces.’”102 Part of Hill’s argument was that the women, however ignorant,engaged in everyday resistance that resulted in wage increases that allowedthem to purchase luxury items such as silk stockings. We can speculate thatwomen workers, after such experience and presumably after acquiring newconsumer tastes, would become active in the labor movement.

The increase in indigenous women plantation workers resulted in morevoluntary and involuntary relations with ladinos of different classes.103 Forexample, the FRTS denounced the patron’s abuse of the daughters of colonos:


99. Alejandro Dagoberto Marroquín, Panchimalco (San Salvador: Ministerio deEducación, 1959), 194–95.

100. Smith, “Race-Class-Gender Ideologies.”101. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Central America (San Francisco: The History

Company, 1887) 3:604.102. Ruhl, The Central Americans, 203; On the Nicaraguan case, see Gould, To Die in

This Way, 164–65. 103. Although we do not have evidence for a causal connection, there is also no doubt

that rates of illegitimacy were quite high.

“In some fincas and haciendas the patrones or their sons exercise the privilegeof the “pernada” and the young daughters of the colonos only can develop rela-tionships with laborers after the boss or their sons abandon them. The girlsthen often become mothers of a patrón’s child.”104 However, the combinationof indigenous patriarchy and elite ladino coercion against women probably ledto greater policing of ethnic boundaries and communal resistance against theladino elite. That policing, however, was not always successful. For example, a1913 report on Nahuizalco relates the complaints of indigenous men against“the prostituting” of indígenas.105 Although the meanings of this protest arenot clear, they certainly allude to sexual relations between ladinos and indige-nous women. Many informants today put the onus of guilt on landowners andtheir sons. While the increase in elite power and decrease in the pool of indige-nous men after 1932 may have colored informants’ memories of the previousperiod, there is little doubt that the rape of indigenous women by ladino land-owners formed a salient image in indigenous eyes. Moreover, at least some ofthe movement activists and sympathizers were the product of such unions.Typically, the bastard child would not be recognized by the father, and he har-bored a great deal of resentment. Francisco Tobar, a local leader in SocorroRojo, was the product of such a union. He grew up in Salcoatitán despising hisfather and survived the repression to pass on his story to his grandchildren.Four other very similar stories offer anecdotal support of the notion that ladinosexual aggression toward indigenous women tended to foment indigenousresistance and rebellion.106

Patriarchal ideology, not surprisingly, reigned in all sectors of Salvadoransociety and certainly heightened class tensions. Consider the testimony of aplantation foreman in Sonsonate in late 1931: “We farmers will not allow ourassets [nuestros intereses] to be touched . . . it is unacceptable that our assets betouched, and we will not stand for this under any reason or circumstance orunder any pretext. Here I am preparing to defend myself, my property, and mywoman.”107 The sexual tensions and fears of ladino men and women reachednightmarish proportions during the January insurrection, as revealed by the


104. Informe del Sexto Congreso Regional Obrero y Campesino Constituyente de laFederación Regional de Trabajadores, May 1930, Comintern 495/119/10, p. 92.

105. Informe de la Visita Oficial a los Pueblos del Departamento, Gobernador deSonsonate, AGN-FG-SO, 20 Sept. 1913.

106. Interviews with Alberto Shul (Nahuizalco), Ernesto Shul (Nahuizalco), RamónEsquina (Tajcuillah, Nahuizalco), and Ramón Aguilar (Cusamuluco, Nahuizalco). Allprovide anecdotal evidence of the connection between an illegitimate origin and movementparticipation

107. Galindo Pohl, Recuerdos de Sonsonate, 318.

memoir of a Sonsonate resident: “Certain ladies were particularly seized byhysteria. When the noise from the entrance of the rebels had dissipated, youcould hear terrified, penetrating cries that revealed the terror raised to the nthdegree. ‘My daughters . . . my daughters . . . my daughters!’ The ladies couldalready see their daughters being raped, as it had been announced.”108

The manifestation of patriarchy in violence toward children may well havealso contributed toward the rebellion. Indeed, as we saw above, ladinos claimedIndians engaged in extreme forms of corporal punishment. Whether or notindigenous discipline was more draconian than ladino practices, there is littledoubt that poor, rural children grew up in an atmosphere colored by violenceand machismo. Moreover, there is substantial oral evidence that many childrenlived in families relatively devoid of affection. Indeed, one indigenous infor-mant commented that “most children weren’t close to their fathers.”109 Con-sider the following testimony by Salomé Torres, who grew up in the highlandsof Jayaque during the 1920s. His mother died of illness when he was still achild, and the pain of that loss was still great when his father became ill. “As myfather lay dying on his bedroll, he suddenly arose and hobbled over to a cornerof a hut and reached down to pick up a stick. ‘Salomé, come over here!’ he saidto me. I was scared, but I walked over to my father. He started striking me onmy back and rear end with the stick. ‘This way you will remember me so thatyou will always behave.’ Then he died. With my brothers and sisters we movedin with my grandmother, una arrimada [an invited squatter] in the coffeehacienda of Angel García. This patron liked to beat up his workers just becausehe felt like it.” One day, Salomé recalls, the patron saw his little brother in amango tree eating a ripe fruit. He shouted at the little boy to come down andthen beat the boy so hard he died. Salomé, then 15, flew into an impotent rageand left the hacienda.110

The theme of violence and the family begs for further investigation.111

There is, however, no doubt that rural Salvadoran society was (and still is) vio-lent. Journalistic accounts emphasized how Indians resorted to their machetesat the slightest provocation. A Canadian ship captain, for example, relied uponcommon elite and middle-class knowledge when he reported how on Saturdaynights, drinking often led to bloodshed in rural cantinas: “In the course of the


108. Ibid., 356.109. Interview with Andrés Pérez, Pushtan, Nahuizalco, 2001. 110. Interview with Salomé Torres, El Cacao, 2001.111. Patricia Alvarenga, in Cultura y ética and “Auxiliary Forces,” examines the

multiple levels of state coercion in peasant society.

evening it is quite common for a quarrel to break out, and often the partici-pants . . . ‘have it out’ with their machetes. They stand up to one another withthe utmost bravery, quite often until one of them is killed, and showing theutmost indifference to the most appalling wounds.”112 Similarly, a newspapereditorial following the insurrection called for the “demachetization” of the Sal-vadoran campesinos. After citing the common refrain “Machete caído, indiomuerto [the Indian only drops his machete after he is dead],” it alleged, “Anycampesino with a machete in his hand is a potential criminal; that is to say, he isone step away from hacking at his coworker, his neighbor, or his patron.”113

Regardless of the degree of hyperbole provoked by the insurrection, the edito-rial and other writings do evoke an intensely machista rural culture.

In summary, we can elaborate the following hypotheses. First, strongforms of patriarchy provided a bulwark for indigenous endogamy and helpedto perpetuate the communal authority of a group of elderly males in Nahui-zalco, Cuisnahuat, and Izalco. Second, indigenous women engaged in eithervoluntary or coerced relations with ladinos, with whom they were in greatercontact due to economic changes. Some of these contacts produced offspringwho may not have identified themselves strongly as Indians but certainly har-bored resentment against their elite fathers. Third, perceived or real rape ofindígenas by ladinos further angered indigenous communities, and probablyled men to reinforce all forms of ethnic boundaries.114 Fourth, the generalizedviolence and machismo that characterized the lives of subaltern Salvadoranscreated a lower level of tolerance for state repression.

The Revolutionary Wave, 1929–1931

Rural Salvadorans’ experiences with everyday and state-sponsored violenceconditioned their willingness to engage in violent resistance to repression. Theincreasingly repressive state response to the movement further galvanized,rather than intimidated, their acceptance of an insurrectionary strategy. Therapid development of a revolutionary movement and the decisive role of ruralsubaltern groups in transforming the leftist agenda make 1929–31 El Salvador,along with 1933 Cuba, stand out in the history of the Latin American Left. In


112. General Resume of Proceedings of H.M.C. Ships. 113. La Prensa, 29 Jan. 1932.114. Rape fantasies certainly played a role in the massacre, as ladino townsfolk were

convinced that the rebels were going to rape their women and were planning a masswedding. In fact, rebels in Juayúa put ladino women to work making tortillas for theirtroops.

order to understand this unique history, we must first elucidate the conditionsthat allowed the movement to prosper in the first place; even before the crisis,labor organizers worked upon a propitious field, indeed.

In 1927, urban artisans from the nascent labor movement in Ahuachapánand Sonsonate turned their attention to the countryside. Three conditionsfavored their organizational efforts. First, the administration of president PíoRomero Bosque was relatively tolerant toward urban union activity. Second, atleast according to some accounts, the coffee haciendas and plantations werepermeable to activists, and the state repressive apparatus was quite weak. JorgeFernández Anaya, a Mexican organizer who helped to found the PCS in 1930,compared the favorable circumstances in El Salvador with the adverse ones inGuatemala: “It was undoubtedly very easy to get access to a hacienda [in ElSalvador] and to get them to listen to you.”115 Similarly, the social distancebetween the urban artisans and rural workers was not insurmountable, andthere were numerous points of contact. Campesinos sold their goods in urbanmarkets, and many urban workers put in stints on haciendas as either seasonalworkers or skilled tradesmen.116 As Anaya stated,

It was easier in El Salvador. The peons were Indians only in some places.Not all of the Indians spoke Spanish, but there were people who wouldtranslate, and in any case, it was easier to talk to the Indians in El Salvador than with those in Guatemala. They had consciousness and thiswas much more important, because the people, when we spoke to themabout the interests of the working class, of the laborers, they could sensethe problems. . . . There was a difference between the peon and theurban worker. What happened is that when you spoke with the peons,you could make yourself understood easily, you could explain, you couldsay anything you needed to.117

Favored by these conditions, the labor movement expanded into the coun-tryside between 1929 and 1931 at an impressive rate. Indeed, many unions wereorganized “spontaneously”: labor organizers would often show up in a canton


115. Carlos Figueroa Ibarra, “El ‘Bolchevique Mexicano’ de la Centroamérica de losveinte” (an interview with Fernández Anaya), Memoria 4, no. 31 (Sept.–Oct. 1990): 218

116. Interview with Fabián Mojica, Sonzacate, 1999.117. Figueroa Ibarra, “El ‘Bolchevique Mexicano,’” 217–18. In an interview with

Mojica (2000), he stated that the same campesinos from the cantones of Izalco went toorganize the plantation workers in the San Julián area. Many of the village residentsworked on the plantations and returned home every fortnight, especially during the coffeeharvest.

only to find it already organized. A FRTS document reported “continual pleasfrom the haciendas and villages to the Federation asking that they send orga-nizers, and in many cases when they arrive, they find organizations already inplace, with noticeable tendencies toward action, which all the campesinosexpress that ‘here it will be change itself that will rule.’”118

We cannot measure this growth with any absolute certainty. By the middleof 1930, however, the FRTS probably had at least 15,000 members, and activistswere awed by the growth of their movement.119 Curiously, it did not follow atypical progression—initial union organization, strikes, some success, and thenmore growth, reaching some level of strength before encountering repression.Rather, despite the growing control of the movement by the Left and a highlevel of rhetoric of class struggle, there were fewer than ten strikes in the citiesor countryside during the first period of rapid growth (November 1929 toAugust 1931).120 Although strike activity was low, rural workers and colonosengaged extensively in other forms of resistance at the point of production thatthreatened elite political and economic domination. A report about labor orga-nizing on the San Isidro hacienda (near Armenia) notes: “They passed outpamphlets with Communist doctrines and they agitate people so that theyattack all those who are against their principles. Information we have receivedfrom other places makes it known that the mayordomos and capataces findthemselves in tough straits because they feel they are constantly being threat-ened when they try to carry out their bosses’ orders.”121


118. La Situación del El Salvador, 10 June 1930, Comintern 495/119/3. Interview withFabian Mojica (Sonzacate, 1999, 2000), a carpenter from Sonzacate, who was a rural unionorganizer in 1929 and 1930.

119. Informe del Sexto Congreso Regional Obrero y Campesino, 4 May 1930, p. 106,laments the lack of membership statistics. “La situación actual de El Salvador,” an internaldocument of the PCS dated 10 June 1930, gives a partial account of rural labor organizing:400 union members in Santiago de Texacuango, 2,500 in Armenia, 1,000 in Ahuachapán,1,703 in Nahuizalco (including 544 women), and 600 in Juayúa. Comintern 495/119/3.

120. Various reports in the Comintern documents purport to list all strike activity.Several reports and references from the FRTS congress of May 1930 discuss two urbanstrikes: one in a textile mill and one at a water company; Comintern 495/119/10, p. 60. Atone point during the 1930 coffee-picking season, rural workers in Jayaque were prepared tostrike, but the FRTS persuaded them against such a move due to their lack of organizationand resources. In 1931 there were two strikes in San Salvador, one involving bus workersand the other shoe workers, but there were no reported rural strikes that got off theground or lasted more than a day. See report by “Comrade Hernández” (probably by MaxCuenca) during the latter part of 1932 to the Comintern 495/119/4, p. 27.

121. “Actividad Comunista desarróllase ahora en San Isidro, Izalco,” Diario Latino, 23Jan. 1931.

Although it is difficult to re-create the atmosphere of the union meetings,there is no doubt that the often clandestine meetings were emotionally chargedand uplifting. According to informants, men and women often would gather inthe heavily wooded creek or river basins at night to discuss issues ranging fromwages and working conditions to land reform to life in the USSR. Townspeo-ple often disguised meetings as fiestas; like the rural ones, these gatheringsoften resembled subdued versions of religious revival meetings.122

There was, indeed, a religious dimension to rural mobilization. Peasantsin western Ahuachapán, mostly ladinos, participated in a millenarian-style move-ment based across the border in eastern Guatemala. In the town of El Ade-lanto, a young “virgin” woman, Petrona Corado, claimed to have returnedfrom the dead and to perform miracles. During the late 1920s, the cult of the“Virgin del Adelanto” attracted hundreds of Guatemalan and Salvadoran peas-ants to the town, becoming associated with the idea of a radical social transfor-mation. At least some grassroots leftist militants participated in pilgrimages,and several informants in the west strongly associated the cult with the radicalmovement. Authorities in both countries repressed the cult—Salvadoran offi-cials claiming that Socorro Rojo used it as a cover for its activities.123

Not surprisingly, landowners and local authorities found peasants’ andworkers’ passion for union meetings and for the Virgin of Adelanto very threat-ening.124 Thus, although there were few strikes, the state nevertheless crackeddown on rural organizing and targeted union leaders on plantations. On “LaPresa,” a large plantation in Coatepeque, the National Guard evicted 345 fam-


122. Interviews with Ramón Vargas, Turin, 1999; Salomé Torres, El Cacao,Sonsonate, 2001; Manuel Linares, El Cacao, 2001; Miguel Lino, El Tortuguero,Atiquizaya, 2001.

123. Interviews with Miguel Lino, El Tortuguero, Atiquizaya, 2002; Miguel Jiménez,Santa Rita, Ahuachapán, 2001; and Leonora Escalante, Santa Rita, Ahuachapán. TheGuatemalan government arrested Corado twice and sent her to an asylum, the second timeat the peak of the mobilizations of January 1932; “Una virgen roja hacia milagros,” Excelsior(Mexico) 1, no. 3 (15 Feb. 1932): 1; “Ingreso al asilo de alienados el Santo Angel,” ElImparcial (Guatemala), 6 Feb. 1932, p. 1; Telegram from Jorge Ubico to Jefe Político deJutiapa, 5 Feb. 1932, Jefaturas Departamentales, Archivo General de Centroamerica.

124. The reports by mayors and police on nighttime meetings are extensive. See, forexample, R. C. Valdez, Alcalde de Izalco, Telegramas al Gobernador de Sonsonate, 13 Dec.1931, AGN-FG-SO; Alcalde de Cuisnahuat, Telegrama al Gobernador de Sonsonate, 22Mar. 1931, AGN-FG-SO; Partes de policia, Departamento de Sonsonate, July–Sept. 1931,Archivo de la Gobernación de Sonsonate (hereafter AGS); Telegramas sobre elecciones yprecios, 1930, AGN-FG-SO; Alberto Engelhard, Alcalde de San Julian, Telegramas alGobernador de Sonsonate, 13 Dec. 1931, AGN-FG-SO.

ilies in the middle of a storm, in retribution (they claimed) for the union’s sup-posed call for expropriation and redistribution of the land to the colonos. Inreality, the union had demanded higher wages and an end to payments forwater. Eventually, many of the families were allowed to return, but the fourleaders were thrown in jail and the union fell apart.125 Socorro Rojo organizedwell-attended demonstrations against this act of repression.

In August 1930, the National Guard attacked labor demonstrations in tentowns and cities in western Salvador, carting hundreds of participants off tojail.126 Many rank and filers were eventually released, but again, the act ofrepression prompted further demonstrations demanding freedom for theunion leaders. By late 1930, rural union members were so angry at the staterepression that murmurs of insurrection began to circulate freely.127 Shortlybefore his return to Mexico in September 1930, Fernández Anaya, with a tragicprescience, wrote, “Revolution in El Salvador will inevitably be bloody. All theaccumulated hatred, which keeps on piling up, will inevitably have to give it . . .a bloody nature.”128

The national leadership (despite a small pro-insurrectionary current in thePCS) was able to check any local initiatives toward armed rebellion. However,the cycle of repression followed by local protest and organizing continued. Forexample, in September 1931 troops attacked a union meeting on a hacienda inZaragoza, La Libertad, killing 14 and wounding 24. In response, interest in thelocal chapter of the SRI swelled, with organizers recruiting five hundred newmembers in the Zaragosa area by November.129 The radicalizing effect of


125. Cuenca report, 495/119/4, p. 17; Informe del Sexto Congreso Regional Obrero yCampesino, 4 May 1930, p. 61. The Unión Sindical de Proletarios de Ahuachapánprotested the repression of workers who had mobilized “because they did not accept all theinjustices inflicted by the abovementioned lady . . . making them work 18 and even 20hours, making them pay for the water they drank”; report by Anaya, 8 Sept. 1930,Guatemala, Comintern 495/119/12; report by Anaya, 12 Oct. 1930, Comintern 495/119/12.

126. Ibid., p. 6. Also see arrest lists in for Nahuizalco and Izalco in August 1930 inEladio Campos, Director de Policía, Informes al Gobernador de Sonsonate, Aug. 1930,AGS.

127. See for example, Acta 9 del Comité Central de PCS, 21 Nov. 1930, Comintern495/119/3, which refers to discussions of insurrection among militants in Sonsonate; Lasituación actual de El Salvador, Partido Comunista Salvadoreño, dated 10 June 1930,mentions the campesinos’ “desire to go to the demonstrations with their machetes inhand.”

128. Informe Sobre el Salvador, Jorge Fernández Anaya to Alberto Moreau, SecretaryGeneral, of CPUSA, Colonial Department, 8 Sept. 1930, Comintern 495/119/4, p. 10

129. Letter of Ismael Hernández, Comité Ejecutivo SRI del Salvador al Secretariadodel Caribe SRI, 29 Nov. 1931, Comintern 539/3/1060, p. 8.

repressive rifle butts and bullets conditioned the peculiarly strong ideologicalrole of the rank and file within Communist-led organizations. We can ascertainthis role by examining two phenomena. First, the involvement of peasants andrural workers transformed the SRI from a leftist organization rallied againststate repression into a radical social movement with a life of its own. A letterfrom an SRI leader to the international headquarters in New York demon-strates this clearly: “You should understand that every comrade who partici-pates in the SRI does not do it simply to help those who fall nor to help the victims, or their families. They understand their cards as signifying their enlist-ment in the Red Army. This is what they think and there is absolutely nothingwe can to do disabuse them of this notion.”130

Although it is unclear exactly why the SRI became the principal massorganization in western El Salvador, certainly the relative lack of concrete unionsuccess, rank-and-file enthusiasm for fighting repression, and vocal support foragrarian reform strongly conditioned this transformation. Some informantssuggest that the name itself appealed to campesinos, combining the symbolicpotency of “red,” the Christian-like notion of “aid” (socorro), and the promise of“external” redemption (international). It is quite likely that “red” harkenedback to the state-supported “Ligas Rojas” of 1918–22, which had empoweredindigenous people in local politics and legitimized the use of force in defense of corporate political interests.131 Similarly, the term camarada also caught on


130. Letter of Ismael Hernández to the Secretariado del Caribe SRI, 29 Nov. 1931,Comintern 539/3/11060, p. 9.

131. The Ligas Rojas (1918–ca. 1924) were a loosely structured mass organizationcreated and controlled by supporters of the presidencies of the Meléndez-Quiñónez family(1913–27), and in many localities they offered a means for negotiating with local factions(especially indigenous leaders) and building patronage networks. They represented anattempt by Quiñónez Molina, whose campaign rhetoric underscored “the social question,”to preempt and incorporate reformist organizing among workers and peasants. Theyapparently got out of hand and had to be dissolved after a few years. One Guatemalanobserver in 1932 noted how the “masses” had been mobilized for reform since theQuiñónez campaign against Palomo in 1918, which saw great unrest and violence in thecountryside; see “En El Salvador: Origen del comunismo,” El Liberal Progresista, 9 Feb.1932. One author traces attempts by president Carlos Meléndez to incorporate masssupport to 1915 (Castro Morán, Función politica). The solidity and stability of the theMeléndez Quiñónez oligarchy between 1913 and 1927 has probably been exaggerated.Their control of the presidency experienced serious challenges in 1918 and 1922, and theircontrol at the bottom was even shakier. The decline of their official political party in 1924reflected the early unraveling of their patronage-based system. See Juan Ramón Uriarte, Laesfinge de Cuscatlan, El Presidente Quiñonez (Mexico: Impr. Manuel Sanchez León, 1929); andArias Gómez, Farabundo Martí. See Alvarenga, Cultura y ética, for a well-documenteddiscussion and reinterpretation of the role of the Ligas Rojas. Erik Ching challenges the

among the rural poor. Finally, the FRTS, perhaps due to an ideological con-ception of the role of unions, refused to lead the struggle for land reform. TheSRI took up the popular battle cry of agrarian reform, an objective of particu-lar interest to colonos. Many informants repeated the same words: “Theywanted to take the estates from the wealthy.”132 As José Antonio Chachagua, apeasant from Ahuachapán, stated, “The motto of the rebels was that thecolonos were going to be the owners.”133 In short, the growth and transforma-tion of the SRI also coincided with the radicalization of the program of theleftist movement. The campesinos of western El Salvador were recreating theSRI in their own image.

More significantly, rank-and-file campesinos pushed the movement towardarmed resistance. Over the course of the first year of intense mobilization(from early 1930 through mid-1931), government forces probably arrested overa thousand campesinos and urban workers in demonstrations. Yet the 20–30fatalities during this period do not represent an extraordinarily high level of repression by Latin American standards. The newly mobilized peasants re-sponded to repression with impressive militancy. One regional leader bemoanedthis response: “Our organized campesinos do not come down to demonstra-tions after their painful experiences if they are not carrying machetes, and youbetter believe it. Any attempt on our part to persuade them to back off will notwork. We know them well.”134 Similarly, in June 1931, one indigenous womanfrom Izalco expressed to a leftist militant: “Look, compañero. They killed mypartner [compañero], but here are my sons and they will see the revolution.”135

An October 1931 report of the PCS stated, “[T]he next time they call them up,they will not answer without taking along their arms (corvos [long knives] ormachetes), because it is an injustice that unarmed persons are massacred.”136


classic perception of the Ligas as a populist institution, finding instead—at least in somelocalities—wealthy landowners in control of local chapters; Ching, “From Clientelism toMilitarism.”

132. The following informants either stated “they wanted to take away the estatesfrom the wealthy” or used a very similar phrase: José Antonio Chachagua, Achapuco,Ahuachapán, 2001; Isabel Miranda, Sacacoyo, 2001; Margarita Turcios, El Guayabo,Armenia, 2001; Cecilio Martínez, Ateos, 2001; Salomé Torres, El Cacao, 2001; ManuelLinares, El Cacao, 2001; Manuel Ascencio, Carrizal, 1998; María Hortensia García,Ahuachapán, 2001.

133. José Antonio Chachagua, Achupaco, Ahuachapán, 2001.134. Letter from Ismael Hernández to SRI Secretariado del Caribe, 29 Nov. 1931,

Comintern 539/3/1060.135. SRI, Comité Ejecutivo, Comintern 539/3/1060, p. 6. 136. La Situación Política, PCS document, 8 Oct. 1931, Comintern 495/119/7, p. 11.

Marxist terms, especially “bourgeois,” “proletarian,” and “class struggle,”entered the language of the mobilization via the Comintern and the PCS. Yet,it was clearly the rank and file who first placed armed rebellion on the leftistagenda as early as 1930, against most of its leaders’ better judgment. Indeed,despite the revolutionary rhetoric of class struggle prevalent during the Com-intern’s “Third Phase” (1928–35), there is no evidence to suggest that theinternational movement favored or in any way supported an insurrectionarystrategy in El Salvador.

An incident in Ahuachapán in November 1931 illustrates the growingacceptance of an insurrectionary solution among the popular sectors. In responseto Communist Party efforts to register their candidates for the upcoming con-gressional and municipal elections, the government arrested leftist leaders inSonsonate, Ahuachapán, and Santa Ana. According to an internal SRI report:“The day they captured [Hernández], more than 600 comrades mobilizedspontaneously, and they camped out around the outskirts of the city, but whenthey found out that it wasn’t a matter of attacking the town, they backed offwith some displeasure.”137 Miguel Mármol, who was sent to stop the threat-ened violent attempt to free political prisoners, corroborated this report,underscoring the militancy of the Ahuachapaneco rank and file. “Our candi-date for Mayor of Ahuachapán . . . told us that the barracks were under siege bya contingent of 900 peasants who had decided to settle accounts for the arbi-trary acts by the authorities. . . . He said that the urgent pleas of the comman-der of the regiment, Colonel Escobar, hadn’t done a thing and that the localleaders of the Communist Party requested a delegate from the Central Com-mittee to come and quiet down the peasants and get them to go back to theirhomes before it turned into a slaughter.” Mármol relates how the followingweek he was similarly sent to Ahuachapán to counsel militant campesinosagainst an armed confrontation with the National Guard. He reported that oneof the Ahuachapanecos threatened him, saying that the next time he wouldhave to “face our machetes even before the class enemy.”138

We could use this incident as proof of the distance between the ruralmovement and Communist Party leadership in the capital. Yet that interpreta-tion would miss a crucial point. Many campesinos lived in or near the city of


137. Letter of Ismael Hernández to the Secretariado del Caribe SRI, 29 Nov. 31,Comintern 539/3/1060, p. 8

138. Roque Dalton, Miguel Marmol y los sucesos de 1932 en El Salvador (San Jose: Ed.Universitaria Centroamericana, 1982), 229.

Ahuachapán.139 Moreover, they were prepared to assault the barracks in orderto free local Communist leaders, many of whom were urban artisans. Thismoment also reveals how the regional mass movements continued to push thenational leadership into increasingly militant postures. Following the Decem-ber 2 coup against the Araujo government, the political situation seemed up forgrabs. A brief lull in state repression, under the rule of General HernándezMartínez, followed, and the military regime even freed some 210 political pris-oners and ended the state of siege.140 In mid-December (at the peak of the cof-fee harvest), rural workers in western Salvador took advantage of this reprieveand launched the first concentrated wave of strikes in Salvadoran history. FromDecember 9–19, strikes broke out in three departments, demanding higherwages and better working conditions. On December 20, workers on eightmore plantations joined them.141 The new Martínez government, briefly thrownon the defensive, seemed eager to negotiate (or even ally with) strike leaders.142

Mármol recognized the increasingly militant nature of the movement inthe west and the need to address it. Indeed, he broke with Communist Partydiscipline in December by organizing to prepare for a general strike, instead offor the upcoming elections. He recognized the political significance of thenumerous rural strikes, he foresaw that the state probably would not permitPCS electoral victories, and he understood that the “masses” were so commit-ted to taking local power that they would resort to violence if defrauded. Localleaders and the rank and file, however, took the elections very seriously. Wecan glean locals’ hopes for free elections and their confidence in victory fromthe following letter from the Communist Party mayoral candidate in Ahua-chapán, carpenter Marcial Contreras, to the departmental governor: “TheCommunist Party has the honest desire to act with decorum and demonstrateto the whole world that it has discipline and isn’t just a band of robbers. . . . TheParty will present itself properly and has prohibited any shouting of ‘vivas’ or‘mueras,’ and we only hope that the authorities will prevent other parties from


139. Urban and suburban nucleation of campesinos was the result of mid-nineteenth-century state policies as well as the forms of settlement encouraged by the collectiveownership and administration of land. See Lauria-Santiago, An Agrarian Republic, chap. 4.

140. Report by Comrade “Hernández” (most probably PCS leader Max Cuenca),Comintern 495/119/4, p. 36.

141. Ibid., p. 39. Two days later, the management on the six plantations owned by thewealthy Dueñas family accepted a piece-rate increase from 20 to 30 centavos for a sack ofcoffee.

142. According to the Cuenca report (p. 38), Martínez sent invitations to “to all thosehe considered to be the leaders of the CP in the Occident.”

addressing inflammatory and hurtful words at our guys, which we know per-fectly well they seek to do . . . to be able to, in case we win, nullify the electiondue to violence.”143 These words were prescient, indeed. Three days later,troops blocked Communist voters from voting in Ahuachapán and elsewhere.PCS internal estimates, substantiated by foreign observers, suggested that theywould have won in San Salvador and all major western cities.144 Four days later,sparked by the electoral fraud and manipulation and fueled by economicdemands, strikes broke out throughout western El Salvador, provoking a newcycle of state repression and rebellion. In a desperate attempt to channel whatthey considered an inevitable armed rebellion, the PCS decided on January 10to organize an insurrection for the 22nd. The National Guard, the Army, and“civic patrols” brutally crushed the rebellion over the course of the next fewdays and then massacred thousands of Indians in the Nahuizalco-Izalco area, aswell as thousands of suspected Indian and ladino “Communists” throughoutthe west. Yet, it was the “Communists” who would be remembered in the westas the “band of robbers.”

Conclusion

In this article, we have attempted to explain the remarkable success of the Sal-vadoran Left between 1929 and 1931. First, we argue that weak elite and statehegemony directly conditioned the movement’s success and the state’s inabil-ity to find a reformist solution to the crisis. Ladino and indigenous campesinosretained memories of a more prosperous past, before rapid capitalist expansionand the 1920s coffee boom transformed many smallholders into either village-based semiproletarians or colonos. Neither of these groups viewed the agrarianelite’s land ownership and labor practices as legitimate. For colonos, harsh anddeteriorating contractual terms further eroded any sense of legitimacy. Thus,the relationship between large landowners and their tenants, which in someother Latin American countries formed a pillar of the rural social order, in ElSalvador became a site of discontent and organized resistance.

The elite had a weak ideological hold over the urban and rural popular


143. Carta de Marcial Contreras al Gobernador Político de Ahuachapán, 1 Jan. 1931,Archivo de la Gobernacion de Ahuchapán. Although dated 1931, the context of the lettermakes abundantly clear that it was written on New Year’s Day, 1932.

144. The PCS probably incorrectly also assumed that they would have won 40– 45%nationwide. Cuenca report, 50. There were at least three other parties participating in themunicipal (and then Jan. 10 congressional) elections. Lt. Timoteo Flores, quoted ininterview in Diario de Hoy, 12 Feb. 1967.

classes. Peasants, especially indigenous ones, expressed little loyalty to elites,the state, or the nation—a condition that had deep roots in El Salvador’s pro-cess of state formation during the nineteenth century.145 During the 1920s,middle-class currents of social democratic–style reformist nationalism success-fully vied with elite political discourse and further eroded agrarian elite claimsto legitimacy. This reformism was, in turn, tied to a discourse of mestizaje that,unlike in other Central American countries, tended to stimulate ideologies ofindigenous revitalization. At the same time, the “de-Indianization” of some com-munities in La Libertad and Ahuachapán, coupled with their loss of land, facil-itated their communication with outsiders, especially leftist organizers.

Its weak presence in the countryside meant that the church offered littlesupport for the Salvadoran elite (in contrast with other Latin American coun-tries); in indigenous areas, it battled local religious practices. As we saw inAhuachapán, a millenarian current among ladino peasants struck an even greaterblow against elite ideological domination. Similarly, indigenous forms of patri-archy combined with growing ladino access to Indian women to exacerbateethnic tensions. Finally, the machista ethos of the countryside predisposedcampesinos toward violent resistance against repression.

We will conclude by discussing two documents that offer insight into thedrama of January 1932 and speak to larger historiographical issues about thenature of the rebellion. Two years after the insurrection and subsequent mas-sacres, an internal Communist Party document summarized the events follow-ing the elections: “The strikes in the western zone have been counteracted bymilitary forces, and the general strike was not carried out; the organization’sleadership sent a commission to meet with President Martínez with the objectof negotiation, but those who met [the delegation] said the governmentclaimed the peasants only had machetes: and since they had machine guns theywouldn’t accept any agreement—realizing this, the occidentales [westerners]launched a disorganized attack; this is what provoked the insurrection.”146 Thissummary, substantiated in other documents, suggests that the strike wave fol-lowing the elections (a continuation of the December strikes) formed part of ade facto PCS strategy to wrest concessions from the government. The docu-ment also echoes other leftist accounts in arguing that, whether or not it was a


145. Lauria-Santiago, An Agrarian Republic, chap. 5; and Patricia Alvarenga, “Valiososaliados, peligrosos enemigos: Las comunidades indígenas en la formación del estado, ElSalvador, 1870–1932,” ms.

146. Legajo de Correspondencia a Julio Sánchez, 20 Aug. 1934, p. 320, Archive of theMuseo de la Palabra y la Imagen, San Salvador.

conscious strategy, the intransigence of the Martínez government directly provoked the insurrection and left the movement with no other acceptableoptions. Most significantly, the author creates a category of “los occidentales”to refer to the western movement in toto—rank-and-file ladino and indige-nous workers, colonos, and peasants and the local leadership—a social subjectthat had emerged and grown over the previous two years. In January 1932,these “occidentales” took the historical stage briefly before the military and itselite allies smashed them into oblivion. To reduce these events to a narrativeabout an Indian movement and its remote and ineffective leadership, or toreduce the January 22 insurrection to a jacquerie, is to render meaningless theterm “occidentales” and the movement it represented.

A PCS manifesto that circulated on January 20, two days before the insur-rection, also points to the causal relation between the elections and the armedresistance to repression. Moreover, it offers a glimpse of the mentality of theCommunist leaders:

“We the workers, they call us thieves . . . and steal our wage, paying us a miserable wage and condemning us to live in filthy tenements or instinking barracks, or working day and night in the fields under rain andsun. We are labeled thieves for demanding the wages that they owe us, areduction in the workday, and a reduction in the rents that we pay to therich who take almost all our harvest, stealing our work from us. To theinsults are added killings, beatings, jailings . . . we have seen the massacres of workers, men and women and even children and elderly,workers from Santa Tecla, Sonsonate, Zaragoza, and right now inAhuachapán. According to the wealthy, we do not have a right to anything, and we shouldn’t open our mouths. . . . In Ahuachapán, afterthe Nacional Guard didn’t let our comrades vote by order of the richfolks, they beat them. . . . Our compañeros from Ahuachapán arevaliantly defending themselves with their weapons in their hands.147

This manifesto reveals something of the social and cultural elasticity of theCommunist-led movement and the openness of communication between itsconstituent parts. Although the document was authored by the PCS leader-ship, it is stunningly devoid of jargon and clearly related to the ordinary expe-


147. Manifiesto del Comité Central del Partido Comunista a Las Clases Trabajadorasde la República, 20 Jan. 1932, app., in Mayor Otto Romero Orellano, “Génesis de laamenaza comunista en El Salvador,” Centro de Estudios Estratégicos de las FuerzasArmadas (San Salvador, 1994), 97.

riences of its intended audience. The themes of honor and calumny—“theycall us thieves . . . and steal our wage”—resonate with and sharply recall thePCS mayoral candidate’s protestations. They similarly hark back to the state-ment of the Nahuizalqueño—“The Indians know what the whites do not know”—and to the testimony from rural Izalco that shows how local forms of ethnicconflict played out in the realm of respect: “You are worthless!”

At the end of the long night of repression, as we peer back across decadesof traumatized memory, we can glimpse the emergence of a common languageof outrage—a scorned people devising new ways to think and act. The futileinsurrection and the catastrophe that ensued should not blind us to the impor-tance of the preceding mobilization as a brief moment full of courageousefforts to achieve human emancipation.


Documents

84.2gould