Disgusted with their dismal human rights record and sickened by the murder of four American nuns, President Carter cut off all U.S. foreign and military aid to El Salvador.  Reagan preferred his issues simple and unadorned:  to him it was our duty to fight Godless Communists.  And so a government which existed to protect the “Fourteen Families” from those not born into this hereditary elite found itself the beneficiary of American training and materiel, all to protect Freedom and Democracy in Central America. 

To be fair to Reagan, the situation in Central America looked particularly unstable at that time.  In Nicaragua the Marxist Sandinistas had just come to power, while Marxist movements were springing up in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to challenge the status quo which kept a majority of Central Americans poor to support a wealthy few.  The Frente Martí Liberación Nacional was one of many such groups; taking its name from Salvadorean socialist Augustín Farabundo Martí, FMLN gained popular support after the 1980 assassination of Salvadorean bishop Oscar Romero.  FMLN guerrillas began blowing up bridges and attacking the coffee plantations which brought in 95% of El Salvador’s foreign trade; before long, they controlled parts of northern and eastern El Salvador and set up their own countergovernment in their “controlled zones.” 

Martí’s 1932 uprising ended with the Salvadorean military massacring some 30,000 Indians; the 1980 response was equally brutal.  Right-wing death squads killed some 75,000 Salvadoreans, wounded or maimed another 75,000, and forced approximately 1 million citizens into exile.  The leadership of El Salvador’s Catholic Church regularly spoke out against these government excesses: in response, death squads targeted priests, nuns and church workers.  This only served to strengthen the growing commitment to “Liberation Theology,” a hybrid of Catholicism and Marxism.  Under President D’Aubisson (a man who once told a group of German reporters: “You Germans are very intelligent.  You realized the Jews were responsible for spreading Communism, and so you killed them”), and later under President Duarte, the blood kept flowing, as did the American dollars.  For twelve years the stalemate continued: American military money, and military “advisors” encouraged the bloodshed but could not provide the Salvadorean government with the big win it needed to crush the guerrillas.  And so, in 1992, the FMLN signed a peace agreement with the Salvadorean government and went from being the “rebel opposition” to being a political party: by 2000 the FMLN was the most powerful political force in the country. 

Some self-proclaimed Maoists chide the FMLN for agreeing to negotiate and for “selling out” to the Powers That Be instead of continuing the struggle.  They miss the most important lesson: simply put, no amount of money or repression can suppress a popular grass-roots rebellion forever.  They also miss a textbook example of American “anti-communism” post-Vietnam.  In the 1950s, we might very well have staged an armed intervention to rid Central America of the Commie menace.  After our Southeast Asian drubbing, we instead chose to play “the great game” – arming our friends, with little or no concern about how they would use those arms.  This allows us to avoid unpopular American casualties and gives us “plausible deniability” when Amnesty International comes calling.  It is an M.O. which continues to this day, as we support unpopular dictators in countries like Egypt and Uzbekistan in the name of “stability in the Middle East” and “American security.”