The population of El Salvador at the time of the national census in
1971 was 3,549,000. According to estimates, population growth averaged
3.4 percent annually in the 1970s and 2.4 percent in the 1980s. One
United States government estimate claimed a 1988 population figure of
5,389,000 (estimates vary). Although El Salvador's high rate of
population growth was similar to that of other Central American
countries, the social and political effects of this population increase
were aggravated by the very limited national territory available for the
population.
Consequently, El Salvador also consistently had very high population
density. From a figure of 170 persons per square kilometer in 1970,
density has been projected to rise to about 230 persons per square
kilometer in 1980 and to an extremely high 420 persons by 2000. El
Salvador is the most crowded country of Central America (indeed, of all
Latin America), and that condition will continue into the foreseeable
future. This demographic situation has further exacerbated the problems
associated with the inequality of national resource distribution. But
the consequences of these demographic pressures have not been limited to
El Salvador. Historically, high Salvadoran population density has
contributed to tensions with neighboring Honduras, as land-poor
Salvadorans emigrated to less densely populated Honduras and established
themselves as squatters on unused or underused land. This phenomenon was
a major cause of the 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras.
The distribution of population in El Salvador also remained uneven.
The least densely populated areas were the northern departments of
Chalatenango, Morazan, and Cabanas, encompassing the marginal land and
rugged terrain of the descending slopes of mountain ranges that peak in
Honduras. In contrast, the areas of greatest settlement
were in the fertile central zone, where there was a large rural
population, and in the major urban areas, including the San Salvador
metropolitan area (which had 828 persons per square kilometer in 1971),
Santa Ana, and San Miguel.
The department of San Salvador was the most populous of El Salvador's
fourteen departments, with a population density in the mid-1970s of 825
persons per square kilometer. The second most densely populated
department at that time was neighboring Cuscatlan, with 206 persons per
square kilometer. All other departments had less than 200 persons per
square kilometer.
Observers believed that significant population growth would continue
in the capital, San Salvador, where the net increase in population for
the decade of the 1960s (202,000 persons) and of the 1970s (327,000)
almost equaled and exceeded, respectively, the city's total population
in 1950 (213,000). The population of San Salvador in 1980 was estimated
to be 858,000, a figure that represented 30 percent of the total
national population. The capital accounted for approximately 60 percent
of the total urban population during 1950-80; its growth rates ranged
between 4.4 percent and 5 percent during that period. Projections placed
the population of the capital at approximately 1 million by 1990 and 1.5
million by the end of the century.
The number of small urban centers under 50,000 inhabitants in El
Salvador increased from five in 1950 to eighteen by 1980. Inhabitants of
these centers comprised 24 percent of the total urban population in
1980. San Miguel and Santa Ana, the two secondary cities of the country,
accounted for an estimated 15 percent of the total urban population in
1980 and had an estimated annual growth rate of 3 percent (Santa Ana)
and 4 percent (San Miguel) for the decades between 1950 and 1980.
Nevertheless, these two cities were unable to compete with San Salvador
in growth and prosperity. San Salvador's urbanized area was 5.7 times as
large as that of Santa Ana, the next largest city, by the mid-1970s.
The urban population has grown approximately 50 percent in each
decade from 1950 to 1980 and was projected to increase 3.9 percent
annually from 1971 to 2000, as compared with an approximate rural
population increase of only 30 percent per decade and a projected annual
rate of increase of 2.8 percent from 1971 to 2000. But the rural
population has been and will continue to be significantly larger than
the urban in absolute numbers. The net rural population in 1971 was over
2.6 million, but it was projected to reach an estimated 6 million
persons by the end of the century.
This high rural population growth rate accounted for the relatively
low share, only 30 percent, of the total national population found in
the capital in 1980. In addition, relatively few "new cities,"
towns increasing from under to over 10,000 inhabitants, appeared in the
three decades prior to 1980. Urban growth therefore was limited
primarily to increases in existing cities. During the 1950-80 period,
urban areas accounted for 35 to 40 percent of the national population
increase; analysts projected, however, that between 1980 and 2000 the
urban sector as a whole would probably have to absorb 48 to 57 percent
of that increase. San Salvador was expected to receive the bulk of urban
population growth, perhaps as much as 65 to 69 percent from 1980 to
2000, while the two secondary cities and the smaller urban centers would
decline somewhat in percentage of total urban population.
El Salvador.
The population of El Salvador increased from 1.9 million inhabitants
in 1950 to 4.1 million in 1975 and 4.7 million in 1984. It was projected
to increase to 8.8 million by the year 2000. In other words, the
population would have doubled in each quarter-century since 1950. This
high growth rate was a result of three main factors characteristic not
only of El Salvador but also of Central America as a whole: a rapidly
falling death rate, a continued high birth rate, and a very young
population, i.e., a high proportion of the national population under age
twenty.
Although there was some variance in figures between El Salvador's
census reports and estimates by the United Nations Latin American Center
for Demography (Centro Latinoamericano de Demografia--CELADE), there was
agreement on basic birth and death statistics. The annual death rate
per 1,000 inhabitants, however, declined by approximately one-third
during the same period, falling from 21.3 to 13, and this decline
contributed to the high rate of national population increase.
From 1970 to 2000, a continuing decline in both birth rates and death
rates was anticipated. Studies projected a gradual fall in the crude
birth rate from 42.2 in 1970-75 to 33.5 in 1995-2000 and in the crude
death rate from 11.1 in 1970-75 to 7.2 in 1985- 90 and 5.6 in 1995-2000. These two trends would operate more or less in tandem,
however, so that the rate of natural increase, though declining, would
still hover at around 3 percent. The overall population was very young;
the median age in the country declined from nineteen in 1950 to
seventeen in 1975, and 41.3 percent were projected to be under age
fifteen by the year 2000. It is noteworthy here that life expectancy at
birth improved from approximately forty-six years in the 1950s to
fifty-nine years in 1977 and to sixty-five years in 1984 (sixty-three
years for males and sixty-six for females), largely as a result of mass
immunization schemes and control of disease-bearing insects. Life
expectancy was expected to reach sixty-nine to seventy years in
1995-2000.
Birth rates showed that total fertility rates (the number of children
a woman would bear in her lifetime if she experienced average fertility)
ranged from approximately 6.1 to 6.3 in the mid-1970s, down from 6.7 in
1961. Analysts projected that this rate would drop to 4.4 in 1995-2000.
The decrease in the level of fertility since 1961 was seen in the
twenty-to thirty-nine-year- old age-group.
Family planning programs of both the privately organized Salvadoran
Demographic Association, which was founded in 1962 and began operations
in 1967, and (after 1971) government agencies under the Ministry of
Public Health and Social Services probably contributed to this decline
in fertility rates. The groups lobbied for family planning programs,
provided family planning clinics, and dispensed birth control
information and devices. Female sterilization was the most common birth
control method because it is final and does not require frequent
checkups or visits to clinics for additional supplies. The need for
clinic visits has associated use of oral contraceptives in the popular
mind with illness. In addition, there were fewer religious objections to
sterilization. At the same time, abortions also were widely practiced.
Abortion was illegal in El Salvador, and improperly performed abortions
were common. They were the third leading cause of hospital admissions in
1975, constituting 24 of every 1,000 admissions, according to a sample
survey.
Fertility rates showed significant contrasts between urban and rural
settings. In 1975 the birth rate per 1,000 women in rural areas was
estimated at 46 to 47, whereas in urban areas it stood at approximately
34 to 35 (31 to 33 for the San Salvador metropolitan area). On average,
by age thirty-five, rural women had seven children while urban women had
only five. By the end of their childbearing years, rural women, on
average, had eight children, and urban women had six. Given the markedly
inferior health conditions of the countryside, however, of the two
additional children born to rural women, only one would survive. The
number of children under age one per 1,000 women between ages fifteen
and forty-four declined by 16.5 percent in urban areas from 1961 to
1971, while it remained essentially unchanged over that same time period
in rural areas.
Disparate fertility rates underscored the point that El Salvador
continued to be a rural country in the late 1980s, "rural" in
this context including all population in towns of less than 20,000. In
fact, El Salvador showed the highest rural population increase--82
percent from 1961 to 1980--in Latin America.
El Salvador.
In the late 1980s, El Salvador was experiencing severe internal
stress as a result of an ongoing insurgency, a severely debilitated
economy, and persistent socioeconomic inequalities. Despite reform
efforts begun under the post-1979 civilianmilitary junta governments,
the country's longstanding division between rich and poor still
represented a challenge to Salvadoran leaders and to the society as a
whole.
The sharp contrast between those with great wealth and those living
in extreme poverty had characterized Salvadoran society for more than a
century and had roots in its colonial past. When El Salvador became an
independent republic in the early nineteenth century, this pattern did
not change. Wealthy landowners, members of only a very few families,
organized the national government to secure their positions and
continued to dominate Salvadoran national life. Rural peasants and
workers provided for their own subsistence needs and labored for the
elite. Indeed, as the century progressed, this pattern was sharpened by
the successful introduction of coffee as an export cash crop. As the
landed elite, along with more recently arrived European banking and
financial families interested in coffee, began to realize the wealth
potential of this crop, they increased the size of their estates.
They did so by absorbing into their private holdings public lands
(forests) and the communal lands of municipios (the Salvadoran
equivalent of counties) and Indian communities, lands formerly
cultivated in small subsistence plots by mestizo and Indian peasants.
The government officially decreed these common lands out of existence in
favor of private property ownership in 1881. Those dispossessed of their
subsistence lands became permanent or seasonal laborers working for
extremely low wages on coffee estates, which were labor-intensive
enterprises. To protect their lands and their prosperity, the coffee
elite formed a strong economic and political oligarchy. The army and the
National Guard (Guardia Nacional--GN) were employed to control the
unrest and occasional open rebellions among the many now landless and
poorly paid laborers.
When coffee prices fell during the Great Depression of the 1930s,
laborers' wages were reduced still further, and since much subsistence
land had been converted to private coffee cultivation and the production
of staple crops had declined accordingly, living conditions worsened.
Unemployment rose too, as many coffee growers decided not to harvest
their crops. In addition, many small landowners, unable to survive the
low coffee prices, lost their lands to those who were wealthier, and
landownership became even more concentrated.
In the decades following the depression, export agriculture became
somewhat diversified as cotton and, to a lesser extent, sugar also
became important plantation cash crops, and some of the elite began to
argue for industrial development. The upper class in general, however,
strongly resisted any significant changes in the basic social, economic,
and political order. After a rural uprising in 1932 and the brutal
reprisals later referred to as la matanza (the massacre), in
which about 30,000 were killed by troops, the dominance of the elite was
preserved and defended by the Salvadoran military.
<>The Upper
Sector
In relation to the total population, the Salvadoran elite was very
small; by the early 1980s it constituted approximately 2 percent of the
population. This social sector, however, owned 60 percent of the
nation's productive land, exercised direct or indirect control over all
key productive sectors of the economy, and accounted for one-third of
the national income.
The economic interests of the elite fell into three general
categories: export-oriented agribusiness, including coffee, cotton,
sugar, and cattle; commercial and financial enterprises, including
insurance, financial investment, real estate, utilities, and banks; and
relatively newer retail and industrial interests, including
distributorships and manufacturing. Given the continued dominance of
export agriculture and of financial interests in the 1980s, this third
category remained less significant overall.
Among the elite, there were divisions based on relative social status
and prestige as determined by ancestry. The oldest and most prestigious
families were those associated with the colonial "founding
fathers" who had developed export agriculture. Next in the pecking
order were the families, mainly involved in banking and finance, whose
European ancestors had immigrated to El Salvador in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries with a useful knowledge of foreign
markets. The newest elite families, on the lowest social rung of the
upper echelon, included Lebanese, Palestinians, and Jews and were
pejoratively referred to as "Turcos" by the "older"
elites. These most recent immigrants constituted the bulk of the
Salvadoran merchant class; they tended to socialize primarily within
their own group.
Despite these social distinctions, the Salvadoran elite as a whole
was interconnected through bonds of shared economic interest, direct
business dealings, particularly between the agribusiness and financial
sectors, and frequent intermarriage. The families of the oligarchy
generally intermarried. Daughters anticipated lives as pampered mothers
and wives, while sons expected a place in one of the family businesses.
Generally, members of elite families tended to live in San Salvador,
whence they traveled periodically to their plantations, which were
usually directed on site by resident administrators, or to Western
Europe or the United States for business or recreation. The elite
educated their children in private schools and in United States
universities, entertained at fashionable clubs, and enjoyed extravagant
conspicuous consumption.
To reconcile their differences and represent their interests, the
elite organized into associations. Most notable among these associations
was the National Association of Private Enterprise (Asociacion Nacional
de la Empresa Privada--ANEP), which has expressed oligarchy views
through various declarations in the media and before the government.
The economic oligarchy, although traditionally the most influential
sector of Salvadoran society, was not the most powerful in and of
itself. The Salvadoran upper sector also included the officer ranks of
the military. Active or retired military personnel headed the government
from 1932 to 1982, and, as a result, ambitious individual military
officers and officer factions also emerged as interest groups in their
own right. Members of the military gradually became involved in the
elite economic structure--managing and directing banks, the social
security institute, the national airline, and the census bureau, as well
as owning large estates and becoming involved in export agriculture.
This combination of the officer corps and the elite families constituted
the most powerful political and economic force in the country.
Although their interests became closely interwoven, the economic
oligarchy and the military remained separate entities. A few select
military personnel were adopted into the oligarchy after their
retirement, but few in the military were welcomed into the more
exclusive San Salvador clubs frequented by the elite. For its own part,
the officer corps was a closed and cliquish group; 90 percent of its
members were graduates of the Captain General Gerardo Barrios Military
Academy (Escuela Militar Capitan General Gerardo Barrios) and organized
in mutually supportive networks based on graduating class membership.
Each graduating class formed a group known as a tanda, whose
members assisted each other and entered alliances with other tandas
to broker the allocation of command and staff positions within the armed
forces. The military served as one of the few mechanisms of upward
mobility in Salvadoran society. The expectation of power and prestige
was a considerable motivator for cadets, most of whom typically came
from a Salvadoran middle-class background.
El Salvador - SOCIETY - The Lower Sector
The vast majority of Salvadorans were members of the lower sector of
the population, which was composed of full- or parttime laborers,
peasant smallholders, and the unemployed. Although there was
considerable diversity within this large social sector, most of its
members shared the common denominators of dependence on the cash economy
and insufficient earning power for even a minimally adequate standard of
living. The variation within this population reflected degrees of
landlessness, types of employment, residence locations, and relationship
with economic and military power holders.
In 1981 approximately 58 percent of Salvadorans lived in rural areas,
some as full-time estate workers (colonos), others owning or
more likely renting (arrendatarios) small plots of marginal
land, and many, both those with small plots of land and the vast number
who were landless, as seasonal wage laborers or unemployed. During the
1980s, the number of workers depending on agriculture for jobs
increased, as a result of both population growth in the rural areas and
the civil conflict, which eliminated more nonagricultural than
agricultural jobs.
The extent of access to marginal subsistence plots varied according
to the degree of plantation development in the various regions of El
Salvador. The hilly northern departments of Chalatenango, Cabanas, and
Morazan, adjacent to the Honduran border, contained relatively few large
estates. Consequently, subsistence farms continued to exist there. But
such farms, being small and with marginal soil quality, generally did
not provide full self-sufficiency or year-round employment. Nor was much
cash available from the sale of produce, for the government, concerned
with providing affordable food for city dwellers, kept food prices low.
Consequently, members of these peasant families migrated seasonally to
cash crop (coffee) estates at harvest time, when they obtained temporary
jobs at very low wages, or moved to San Salvador.
Peasants living in areas where coffee, cotton, and sugarcane were
grown extensively were less likely to have access to subsistence plots,
although valiant attempts were made to cultivate the rocky, marginal
land on the steep hillsides of the volcanic ranges of central El
Salvador, where coffee estates absorbed all good land in the central
valleys and on the cultivable slopes. The development of cotton estates
on the lowlying coastal plain and of sugarcane, grown between the
coastal cotton and hilly coffee regions, also dislocated many peasants.
In addition, large-scale mechanization in the 1970s eliminated the need
for sizable labor forces on these estates. For example, one
6,000-hectare cotton estate employed a total regular work force of only
thirty-five people. The development of grazing lands for export cattle
on the coastal plain and in some interior valleys again reduced
available subsistence land while requiring very few laborers. In the
1970s, more of El Salvador's land resources were used for cattle grazing
than for production of food crops.
In addition, as social unrest grew among rural laborers, large estate
owners preferred wherever possible to increase the use of seasonal
rather than permanent workers. In the cottongrowing areas, for example,
the number of colonos decreased by 60 to 95 percent during the
1960s. Overall, the number of landholdings with colono
arrangements dropped from a high of 55,000 in 1961 to 17,000 in 1971.
Permanent agricultural workers were thought to be more susceptible than
temporary workers to political organization and therefore were believed
to constitute more of a potential threat to elite land rights. This
attitude further increased the number of underemployed and unemployed
landless laborers in the countryside. A few statistics illustrate the
situation in general. In 1961, about 12 percent of the rural population
was landless; by 1971 the figure had reached 29 percent; in 1975 the
number of landless was estimated at 41 percent. Similarly, from 1950 to
1970 rural unemployment stood at 45 to 50 percent. By 1975 only 37
percent of rural workers worked full time, 14 percent worked an average
of nine months, 19 percent worked an average of six months, and a full
30 percent worked for only two to three months annually. By 1980 an
estimated 65 percent of the rural population was landless and dependent
on wage employment.
The small percentage of the labor force employed in industry was
somewhat better off than agricultural workers, but only about 12.8
percent of the labor force was employed in industry in 1961, and by 1971
that number had dropped to 9.8 percent. Their low numbers in part
reflected the use of capitalintensive technology, which made it
unnecessary to hire a large work force. Jobs also were few because
industry in general, and manufacturing in particular, remained limited
as a result of capital flight caused by political instability, the
unsettled economy, and damaging guerrilla attacks.
Enlisted military personnel, another component of the lower sector,
were young peasant conscripts or volunteers who had joined the armed
forces to enjoy three meals a day and a warm place to sleep; some of the
conscripts had been impressed into service in response to manpower
shortages. After discharge from active duty, some ex-servicemen signed
on for further service and benefits as military reservists in the GN or
in civil defense groups.
El Salvador - SOCIETY - The Middle Sector
In contrast to most other Central American countries, El Salvador in
the late 1980s did not contain an ethnically distinct Indian population.
Native communities of Pipil and also Lenca, located mainly in the
western departments, constituted perhaps 60 percent of the population
throughout the colonial era and into the early decades of independence.
But the development of coffee estates saw the dissolution of the
communal lands of native villages and the slow but continual
incorporation of Indians into the general cash economy, where they
became peasants and wage laborers. By the late nineteenth century, this
assimilation process was essentially complete. The 1930 census, the last
census containing the category of "Indian," designated only
5.6 percent of the population, or some 80,000 persons, as Indian,
although it is not clear what criteria were used in this determination.
Other, possibly more accurate, independent estimates, however, placed
the mid-twentieth-century Indian population at 20 percent, or close to
400,000 persons. The criteria used in these estimates to identify
individuals as Indian included religious activities, distinctive women's
dress, language, and involvement in various handicrafts. Still, the
life-style of the majority of these people was no longer completely
Indian. Most were ladinoized, Hispanic acculturated, monolingual Spanish
speakers who did not wear distinctive Indian dress. The remaining Indian
population was found primarily in southwestern El Salvador.
The abandonment of Indian language and customs was hastened by
political repression after an abortive peasant/Indian uprising in 1932.
The revolt centered in the western part of the country, around the
former Indian towns of Ahuachapan, Santa Ana, and Sonsonate, where the
growth of coffee estates since the late nineteenth century had absorbed
subsistence lands of Indians and mestizos alike. The revolt was
supported by a number of Indian community leaders (caciques).
Even though most Indian communal lands had been lost, traditional
community-centered religious-political organizations (cofradias)
and their leaders remained sufficiently influential to organize and
direct popular unrest. The harsh and bloody reprisal (la matanza)
by government forces that ensued fell on the entire population of the
region whether they had been combatants or not, and most had not.
Perhaps as many as 30,000 were killed, including many who were
culturally designated as Indian or who were deemed by government forces
to have an Indian-like physical appearance. In the face of such racially
motivated repression, most natives stopped wearing traditional dress,
abandoned the Pipil language, and adopted ladino customs. In 1975 it was
estimated that no more than 1 percent of the population wore distinctive
Indian clothing or followed Indian customs.
Even though visible signs of ethnic identity were all but lost, many
persons retained an interest in Salvadoran Indian heritage and worked to
preserve it as best they could. During the 1970s, the Central American
University Jose Simeon Canas (Universidad Centroamericana Jose Simeon
Canas--UCA) in San Salvador began a systematic study of the surviving
elements of the Pipil language; researchers found that about one-tenth
of households in Sonsonate, Ahuachapan, and La Libertad contained at
least one Pipil speaker. Various aspects of Indian tradition, including
dance ceremonies that had been held in private for thirty years, were
also rediscovered. As political tensions grew in the 1980s, however,
access to Indian households became more difficult, and the Pipil
language study was stopped.
In short, although observers have estimated that much of the
Salvadoran population in the 1980s could be said to possess an Indian
racial background, culturally there was no significant Indian ethnic
sector in the country. Nonetheless, the concept of Indian ethnicity was
still a rallying point. In the mid-1980s, thousands of persons
nationwide supported a popular organization known as the National
Association of Salvadoran Indians (Asociacion Nacional Indigena
Salvadorena--ANIS) headquartered in Sonsonate.
El Salvador - RURAL LIFE
As indicated, El Salvador remained a largely rural country despite
the growth of San Salvador and its environs. For the vast majority of
rural residents, however, land shortages, unemployment and
underemployment, and extremely low wages combined to keep the standard
of living low and the quality of life barely tolerable.
Standard of Living
In this largely agrarian society, land distribution continued to lie
at the heart of the many problems afflicting the poor. In 1971, which as
of 1988 was the date of the latest census, 92 percent of farms, some
250,500 in number, covered less than ten hectares each and together
constituted only 27 percent of total farm area. These farms were the
holdings of peasant laborers who planted basic foodstuffs such as corn,
beans, rice, and sorghum on 95 percent of their holdings. They used
rotational methods of agriculture in which individual plots were
cultivated for about two years, then left fallow while another plot was
tilled.
The 8 percent of the farms with an area greater than ten hectares
occupied the remaining 73 percent of farm area. Within this category,
1,941 farms between 100 and 500 hectares in size, representing 0.8
percent of the total number of farms, accounted for 38.7 percent of all
land under cultivation. Less than 20 percent of this land produced basic
grains. Farms of more than 500 hectares accounted for more than 15
percent of the cultivated land. These farms included the agricultural
estates of the elite. The data actually understated the extent of land
concentration within the upper sector, however, since some elite
individuals owned more than one farm and some large farms were
registered in the names of various family members in an effort to
conceal family holdings.
At the other end of the scale, there was a considerable increase
during the 1970s in the number of farms composed of less than one
hectare of land. These farms were on very poor soil, often on steep
hillsides prone to erosion, and frequently were rented rather than
owned. Such small rental farms were particularly common in the hilly
northern departments of Chalatenango, Cuscatlan, Morazan, and Cabanas.
In 1950 there were 70,400 such farms; in 1961 there were 107,000; in
1971 there were 132,000; and in 1975 there were 138,800. Stated somewhat
differently, in 1975 an estimated 96.3 percent of the rural population
had access to five hectares or less of generally marginal quality land
per family; approximately seven hectares were judged necessary for a
"typical" family of six people to produce enough food and
income for its needs.
Wage labor was the alternative to agricultural selfsufficiency for
the majority of rural Salvadorans. In fact, by 1980 approximately 65
percent of the rural work force was landless and dependent on temporary
or full-time wage labor; more than half the rural families depended on
wage work for over half their income. Given the lack of permanent jobs
in the agricultural sector, the low wage scale, and the number of
laborers seeking work, however, cash income was insufficient for many
peasant laborers in the countryside. In 1975, for example, a typical
family of six was estimated to need US$533 in annual income to buy the
basic food needed to survive, yet 60 percent earned US$120 or less.
The effect of a declining national economy in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, as evidenced by a decline in agricultural production of 7.4
percent in 1982 and 8.7 percent in 1983, restricted the number of
available jobs. Unemployment and underemployment increased
markedly during the late 1970s and early 1980s and reached such serious
proportions that by 1986, according to Salvadoran government statistics,
30 percent of the work force was unemployed and another 20 percent was
underemployed (unofficial sources claimed even higher figures). Of those
working, a reported 80 percent worked only part time, often at jobs
lasting only a few days, or received less than the minimum wage. Regular
day labor on a cotton or sugar estate sometimes provided the equivalent
of US$1.75 per day or less; seasonal jobs at harvest sometimes paid as
little as US$0.60 a day.
In addition, even as the number of workers receiving less than the
minimum wage increased, the buying power of that wage declined by 65
percent from 1979 to 1983, further aggravating the already serious
economic problems of the poor. The minimum diet was very sparse,
consisting of maize, beans, rice, sorghum, and, for a family of six,
less than one kilogram of meat per month and a per capita caloric intake
that was the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. Consumption levels in
general fell by 27 percent between 1979 and 1981 and by a further 20
percent by 1984; the overall cost of living rose 98 percent during the
1979-84 period. Clothing and foodstuffs--items on which some 63 percent
of all Salvadoran families spent 62 to 65 percent of their income--rose
by 153 and 122 percent, respectively.
Poverty encouraged the additional hardship of broken families, a
particularly acute problem among landless laborers who often had to move
to find work. By 1980 about 25 percent of households were headed by
women, partially as a result of men leaving the family unit in search of
work. That over 60 percent of children were born out of wedlock was
another indication of familial instability.
<>Health and
Welfare
Insufficient income had a serious adverse effect on the general
health and vitality of the rural population. In the mid1980s , El
Salvador was among the countries of the Western Hemisphere most
seriously affected by malnutrition. During the 1970s, the poorer 50
percent of the population consumed, on average, only 63 percent of
required calories and 56 percent of required protein according to
accepted international guidelines for adequate nutrition; the overall
population averaged 77.2 percent of the minimum standard for caloric
consumption and 83.6 percent of the standard for protein consumption.
Anemia, riboflavin deficiencies, and vitamin A and other vitamin
deficiencies were widespread among the population.
Malnutrition was particularly prevalent among young children. Even
before the upset caused by civil conflict during the 1980s,
approximately 48.5 percent of children under five years of age suffered
from mild malnutrition, 22.9 percent from moderate malnutrition
requiring medical attention to cure, and 3.1 percent from severe
malnutrition requiring hospitalization for adequate recovery. Stated
differently, 80 percent of children suffered from at least first-degree
malnutrition--10 to 24 percent underweight--and 5 percent suffered from
third-degree malnutrition--over 40 percent underweight. Because pregnant
women usually lacked proper nutrition as well, many children were born
underweight and undernourished.
The poverty responsible for inadequate nourishment among campesinos
was also reflected in substandard homes and living conditions. In some
regions, land for housing and domestic life was limited to an absolute
minimum by the expansion of private estates. Some closely crowded groups
of huts were strung along the remaining narrow strips of public lands
bordering highways and rivers or erected on narrow peripheries between
the fenced boundaries of estates closed to resident laborers and the
nearest public road, in an arrangement called "fence housing."
Rural homes typically sheltered four or more persons. They usually
had one, sometimes two, rooms, dirt floors, walls of adobe brick or bahareque
(wood frame with a mud or rubble fill) or of poles and straw, and
thatched or tiled roofs. The kitchen commonly was in a separate shelter
or located under an extension of the main roof. Even in the 1980s,
almost none of the rural population had access to sewage systems. Some
12 percent had latrines or septic tanks, but 80 percent had no
sanitation facilities. Surface water was seriously polluted by
agriculture and industry, yet 60 percent of the rural population
depended on rivers and streams and/or rainwater and 22 percent on wells
for their water needs. Some 93 percent were without electricity and used
kerosene lamps or candles for light and wood or charcoal for cooking and
heat.
Conditions such as these, combined with malnutrition, produced high
rates of chronic illness and high mortality, especially in infants and
young children. Although families of three to four children were
considered the most desirable size, rural women actually had an average
of six to eight children and, given the high infant death rate (about
120 to 125 per 1,000 live births) often had twice as many pregnancies.
In general, about 30 percent of all deaths per year were of children
under the age of one, and with another 14 percent occurred in the
age-group from one to four.
Several diseases posed particularly serious problems. Malaria was of
major concern in rural departments, with morbidity ranges between 4,100
and 1,800 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 1980s. Water-borne diseases
were also particularly common and one of the major factors affecting
mortality. In the 1970s and 1980s, the leading causes of death included
enteritis and other diarrheal diseases, as well as pneumonia and other
respiratory diseases, such as bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma.
Nutritional insufficiencies, perinatal complications, infections, and
parasitic diseases also took a high toll, especially among children. As of 1987, El Salvador had reported sixteen cases of
acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), the lowest total of any
Central American country except Belize. Of the sixteen, six victims had
died.
High mortality rates reflected the fact that health care itself was
limited and medical facilities for the general population inadequate.
This condition was aggravated by the civil disturbances of the 1980s.
The 1971 census indicated that there were three doctors and seventeen
hospital beds for every 10,000 persons. In 1984 ten general hospitals
and twelve health centers, in addition to several hundred other
community posts and dispensaries, provided between 0.5 and 1.5 beds per
1,000 inhabitants outside the San Salvador metropolitan area. Some rural
regions did not have any hospital facilities. Where rural hospitals
existed, health care personnel frequently were hampered in their work by
limited equipment and supplies and unsanitary conditions. These
conditions made it difficult to meet even the ordinary medical needs of
the rural population. For example, most births took place at home,
sometimes with the assistance of relatives or neighbors, but often
unassisted.
Rural areas were deprived of sufficient government-financed social
programs in part because of a longstanding governmental preference to
keep taxes low and to concentrate the provision of services in San
Salvador. The situation was exacerbated by increased military spending
during the 1980s, as the budget allocations for the Ministry of Public
Health and Social Services declined in real terms. Similarly, the number
of medical personnel available to work in rural areas declined
drastically after the Medical School of the National University was
closed in 1980, ending the flow of interns, who had provided much of the
medical care in the countryside. In addition, many doctors and other
health workers in rural areas either relocated or abandoned their
efforts as a result of the intensifying civil conflict in the 1980s.
The government, particularly through the Ministry of Public Health
and Social Services, recognized as national priorities the need for
improvement of health services, control of malaria, improved sanitation
and drinking water quality, and increased child survival. It pledged to
follow various lines of action toward these ends.
Social security was another government benefit to which rural
Salvadorans had far less access than urban dwellers. The social security
system was administered by the Salvadoran Social Security Institute, an
autonomous institution first established in 1949. Its medical benefits
and pension system, implemented in 1969, covered employees in industry
and commerce but excluded agricultural workers, domestics, casual
employees, and civil servants. The latter were covered by a different
system. The institute also administered a number of hospitals throughout
the country. Individuals (and their spouses) covered by the system were
entitled to sickness and maternity benefits, care for workrelated
injuries, and pensions on the basis of old age or disability. The system
was funded by payroll deductions from the insured, as well as by
employer and government contributions.
El Salvador - Education
Public education was a higher priority than health care for
government spending, and statistics reflected this disparity. School
attendance and literacy in general increased notably in El Salvador as a
whole during the twentieth century, particularly during the 1960s, when
an ambitious program of school construction was carried out. Officially,
literacy increased from 26.2 percent of the adult population in 1930 to
59.7 percent in 1971. By 1980 only 31 percent of the population aged ten
years or older was considered illiterate.
The Salvadoran education system included one year of preschool, nine
years of basic education, three years of secondary education, and higher
education at two universities and several specialized postsecondary
institutions. The curriculum at the basic and secondary levels,
developed by the Ministry of Education, was uniform throughout the
country. The provision of education, however, suffered from a
rural-urban dichotomy. Countrywide statistics displayed the weakness of
the school system on the secondary level; in a 1976 study, only 34
percent of students reached grade nine, and 15 percent reached grade
twelve.
In the 1970s, primary-school enrollment increased by 90 percent. The
benefit of such schooling, however, disproportionately favored urban
areas, especially San Salvador, even though the majority of the
illiterate population lived in rural areas. Stated differently, in 1980
about 40 percent of the rural population over age ten was illiterate, as
compared with 25 percent of the urban dwellers. In the 1970s, fewer than
twothirds of school-age rural children attended primary schools, as
compared with more than 90 percent of their urban counterparts. About 8
percent of the country's total enrollment in middle secondary education,
grades seven through nine, were rural children; at the upper secondary
level, grades ten through twelve, about 1 percent were rural children.
In addition, illiteracy was twice as prevalent among women as among men;
only about 30 percent of higher education students were female.
The high degree of rural illiteracy reflected several factors. At the
most basic level, the number of teachers and schools provided for rural
areas was seriously inadequate. In the 1970s, only 15 percent of the
nation's schoolteachers served in rural areas; although 64 percent of
primary schools were in rural areas, only 2 percent of secondary schools
were. Existing rural schools were able to accommodate only 43 percent of
the rural school-age population. Furthermore, of the primary schools
available for rural children, approximately 70 percent offered education
only below grade five. By contrast, 90 percent of urban primary schools
offered grade five or above. In rural areas, the 1976 student-to-teacher
ratio was sixty to one, as compared with forty to one in urban areas.
In addition, there was a high attrition rate in school attendance in
rural areas as students left school to earn incomes or work at home. It
is significant that although school attendance generally began at about
the age of eight or nine, about 70 percent of all male workers began
work before the age of fifteen, many by age ten or earlier, thus
permitting only one or two years of schooling. Many girls also dropped
out of school at an early age to assume domestic responsibilities, such
as caring for younger siblings, working in the fields, or tending
animals. Therefore, in 1976 only about 20 percent of rural school-age
children reached grade six, and only 5.7 percent reached grade nine.
Efforts to improve this situation in the rural agricultural areas
were somewhat discouraging, in part because of the political tensions of
the 1980s. In some situations, teachers, mainly women, faced threats if
they were thought to be supporters of political change. Furthermore,
many rural landowners seemed to prefer an uneducated rural population,
on the grounds that better educated workers would expect better wages
and be more likely to organize and lobby the government for reform,
particularly land reform. A number of national education plans developed
by the Ministry of Education had recognized the disparity between rural
and urban education, but none had succeeded in bringing rural education
up to the urban level.
El Salvador - MIGRATION
Salvadoran migratory patterns have been shaped by socioeconomic
problems such as insufficient land, limited job opportunities, low
wages, and persistent poverty. Some Salvadorans emigrated permanently
from the country, some moved within the rural area itself, and some
moved to urban areas in search of a better life. Internal and external
migration levels were augmented by the civil conflict of the 1980s,
although family and community fragmentation and dislocation were
longstanding characteristics of life for the lower class. These patterns
can be traced to the latter half of the nineteenth century, when
communal landholdings were dissolved to facilitate the expansion of
private holdings. This action created a dispossessed labor force whose
movements came to be dictated by the cycles of coffee production.
Seasonal migrations from home communities to cash crop estates at
times of harvest have been a way of life for many rural dwellers ever
since coffee production came to dominate the Salvadoran economy. This type of migration was
particularly important for landpoor peasants from the relatively
infertile northern departments, hundreds of thousands of whom sought
seasonal work in the central coffee regions. Similarly, as cotton
farming developed in the coastal zone, both permanent laborers and
thousands of seasonal harvest workers followed, particularly to land
east of the Rio Lempa and within the Sonsonate coastal plain in the
southwest.
Between 1945 and 1969, population increase and land loss,
particularly to cotton estates, led as many as 300,000 workers and
dispossessed peasants--about 7 percent of the Salvadoran population--to
migrate to neighboring Honduras. There, as farm laborers, squatters,
tenants, or small farmers, they joined the land-poor rural population or
moved to provincial towns where they were subsumed into the Honduran
labor force. By the late 1960s, these Salvadorans constituted 12 percent
or more of the Honduran population, and they had established contacts
among that population, which was involved in its own agrarian reform
efforts. The Honduran government targeted Salvadoran immigrants as the
principal impediment to land redistribution efforts, encouraging
anti-Salvadoran sentiments in an attempt to diffuse tensions among
Honduran peasants and agricultural workers. In the wake of the ensuing
Honduran agrarian reform, in which only native Hondurans were allowed to
own land, as many as 130,000 Salvadorans were forced, or chose, to give
up whatever jobs or land they had acquired and return to El Salvador.
The exodus of Salvadorans from Honduras contributed to the so-called
"Football War" of 1969 between the two countries, and the
large number of returning Salvadorans worsened social and economic
tensions within El Salvador itself.
In spite of ongoing tension with Honduras, Salvadorans continued to
emigrate to that country, not only as landless laborers seeking work
but, in the early 1980s, as refugees fleeing the civil conflict in El
Salvador. Honduras seemed a logical refuge for many, given its proximity
to the bordering Salvadoran departments of Morazan, Cabanas, and
Chalatenango, all areas suffering under the civil conflict during the
early 1980s. In 1981 some 60,000 refugees were in Honduras, many,
particularly women and children, in refugee camps near the border, camps
administered under the auspices of the office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees.
Life was somewhat uncertain in the camps because of the unsettled
circumstances stemming from the Salvadoran conflict. These pressures, as
well as the monotony of life in the camps, induced thousands of
Salvadorans to return home in spite of the dangers posed by ongoing
warfare. In 1987 a reported 19,000 to 20,000 refugees still resided in
camps in Honduras, the majority of whom were children and the rest
mainly women and the elderly.
Some 20,000 Salvadoran refugees also sought sanctuary in Nicaragua,
and an estimated 80,000 to 110,000 more relocated to Guatemala and
thence to Mexico, many ultimately hoping to reach the United States.
Indeed, between 1979 and 1988 as many as 500,000 Salvadorans were
estimated to have reached the United States, the majority via Mexico. In
overall terms, the extent of Salvadoran emigration to foreign countries
was such that the United Nations (UN) in 1982 estimated that one-third
of the work force had left the country. The number of refugees and
displaced persons in general was estimated at 1 million, or 20 percent
of the population, roughly half of whom had left the country.
Displaced persons remaining in El Salvador, internal refugees
uprooted by the civil conflict, followed several migratory patterns.
Some moved from one rural area to another; for example, some migrants
from the war zones of the east moved to the far western provinces, where
guerrilla groups were less active. Some fled from smaller cities and
towns to the countryside, where the number of internally displaced
persons was estimated at close to 250,000 in the early 1980s. The
highest concentration of refugees, however, was found in the war-torn
departments of Chalatenango, Morazan, and Cabanas.
In the early 1980s, many dislocated rural persons traveled to San
Salvador seeking help largely through the auspices of the Roman Catholic
Church. Conditions for these refugees were less than ideal, as many
faced severe overcrowding, continued malnutrition and illness, and
harassment from security forces in the camps where they sought shelter.
Others faced extreme poverty in makeshift slum settlements, trying to
earn a living as street vendors.
El Salvador - URBAN LIFE
Well before the civil conflict of the 1980s, rural-urban migration
was an economic fact of life in El Salvador. Most rural migrants were
attracted to the capital, San Salvador. Yet prospects for a better life
were limited in the cities too, and El Salvador did not experience a
rush to urban migration on the same scale as most other Latin American
countries.
Urbanization
In general, urbanization in El Salvador was stimulated by the success
of coffee as an export crop and the growth and transformation of the
wealthy coffee elite from a nineteenthcentury rural gentry into a
twentieth-century national elite. The political and economic dominance
of the coffee oligarchy was particularly responsible for the growth of
the San Salvador metropolitan area and, to a lesser extent, that of El
Salvador's second city, Santa Ana. During the nineteenth century, in
fact, Santa Ana, situated in the heart of the coffee region, was the
largest city in El Salvador. Both Santa Ana in the west and San Miguel
in the east started as agricultural towns and regional centers; over
time, both developed small industrial bases and commercial and service
establishments.
Both these cities, however, were overshadowed by the growth of San
Salvador. Over the years, especially during export agriculture
"boom" periods, a portion of the earnings made by the elite
was used to develop and support San Salvador as a modern urban center,
using European and then North American models as a guide. Municipal
services, communications, and transportation infrastructures were
established to support the agricultural export trade. Small
manufacturing and food-processing establishments developed, along with
fledgling construction, commercial, and transport activities. A small
middle class of civilian and military public employees, commercial
middlemen, and small businessmen emerged. Educational, health, and
welfare services were instituted, and urban workers, students, and
artisans were allowed, within limits, to organize mutual aid
associations, such as cooperatives, savings associations, and clubs, and
to present grievances before the government.
Urban migration appealed to some members of the rural sector more
than others. Persons leaving the northern departments were drawn to
urban areas in large numbers. In addition, the capital, which attracted
more than 90 percent of urban migrants, generally offered greater
employment opportunities and better pay to women than to men,
encouraging a relatively high percentage of women to trade rural for
urban life. In the countryside, government regulations either restricted
labor opportunities for women or compensated them at a lower rate.
Similarly, income derivable from rural women's traditional handicraft
production declined in the face of competition from urban manufactured
goods; as a result, these traditional handicraft items were devalued
both literally and figuratively. Partially as a result of such
pressures, 44 percent of the urban labor force was female by 1975,
compared with only 14 percent of the rural labor force. In fact,
however, the participation of women in the rural work force probably was
larger because many women effectively worked without pay during coffee
or cotton harvests. Only men or heads of household officially contracted
to provide labor, although women and children might work in men's crews.
Thus, only men had a right to weekly payment, and only men had the legal
right to a daily food allowance. When women were paid, their wages
generally were one-third less than men's.
Stated differently, two-thirds of female workers in 1975 were
employed in urban areas, predominantly in San Salvador; they worked at a
wide variety of low-skill jobs characterized by low pay, long hours, and
a lack of benefits or legal protections. The most common of these
occupations was work as domestics in upperand middle-class households
and as street vendors, even though vending was against the law and
vendors faced police harassment. Some women also found jobs in factories
in the free-zone area of the capital, where North American-owned
pharmaceutical and textile factories preferred to hire women because
they were thought to be more reliable workers than men. Many women,
especially the least educated, engaged in prostitution.
<>Quality of Life
Given the nature of available work, urban centers offered relatively
little improvement in job opportunities for rural migrants. Although a
small percentage of the work force was organized into labor unions,
wages generally were kept low in the urban as well as in the rural
sector. During the 1970s, an estimated 90 percent of urban workers
received less than the legal minimum wage. In 1977 the average daily
wage in urban manufacturing and service sectors was the equivalent of
US$2.80. In 1983 observers estimated that a family needed 3.7 wage
earners to buy a basic basket of goods. According to government figures,
only 53,467 workers earned enough to buy the basic basket, while
1,283,058 did not. Of those who did not, approximately 800,000 could buy
no more than 25 percent of the basic basket. In terms of purchasing
power, poor urban workers earned about the same income as landless rural
workers, so there was not a strong economic incentive for urban
migration. In fact, like landless rural laborers, underemployed or
unemployed city dwellers sometimes sought seasonal work as harvesters on
agricultural estates.
The urban job market reflected the state of industrialization and
manufacturing in El Salvador. During the decade of the 1960s,
manufacturing growth was strong as the Central American Common Market
enhanced export opportunities. During this period, the total number of persons employed in
industry, including coffee, sugar, and cotton processing, increased
markedly, mainly in San Salvador. The increase in manufacturing jobs,
however, was not as great; this was attributable in part to the
generally capital-intensive nature of manufacturing in El Salvador.
Although the total number of industrial jobs grew, these jobs
actually declined as a proportion of the total labor market during the
1960s, dropping from about 13 percent in 1961 to about 10 percent in
1971. Consequently, many urban workers displaced by manufacturing
technology and newcomers from rural areas were forced into the informal
job sector or into petty thievery and similar activities.
Because the cities, and especially San Salvador, were also the home,
indeed the stronghold, of the elite, by the early twentieth century San
Salvador displayed a sharp dichotomy between great wealth and extreme
poverty, between those who owned expensive automobiles and those who
walked barefoot beside ox carts. These differences became more
pronounced during the course of the twentieth century. The families of
the oligarchy and the high ranks of the military lived in material
comfort and in a rather insulated fashion, avoiding contact with the
poor, who were ridiculed, deprecated, and despised but also feared by
the urban wealthy. The elite emulated West European and North American
values and life-styles, emphasizing material goods, conspicuous
consumption, and the "good life."
The city gave clear evidence of the social tensions and crises
existing between the rich and the poor. Nowhere was this better
illustrated than in the area of housing, which evidenced a severe
shortage for the majority of poor and a kind of fortress mentality among
the elite. Housing problems were dramatically increased in October 1986
by an earthquake centered on San Salvador, which left more than 200,000
homeless.
Of the 858,000 persons living in San Salvador in 1980, an estimated
643,000 lived in slum settlements either in the center of the city or on
the periphery. Squatter communities included those newly arrived from
the countryside as well as the long-term urban poor who, given the
extensive unemployment and lack of opportunity in general, had not
managed to improve their standard of living. In the approximately 100 tugurios
(shantytowns), single-room dwellings were constructed of tin, cardboard,
and cloth, sometimes with bahareque walls and tiled roofs. The
majority had dirt floors, no electricity, and no access to any kind of
water and sewage services. These hovels typically were crowded onto
nationally or municipally owned land, such as riverbeds or
rights-of-way.
Dozens of similar settlements also appeared on privately owned land
held for speculation and rented at exorbitant rates. Often shanties were
erected on such land before the owner was aware of the fact, and rent
was a matter subsequently worked out between the squatters and the
landowner. Just as municipal or national authorities did not guarantee
permanent settlement on tugurio sites, so private landowners
were not reconciled to permanent settlement by the tenants on their land
and attempted to evict them if a more lucrative use for the land
emerged.
Slums of a different sort, called mesones, were located in
the central city. They were privately owned single- story compounds
composed of a connected series of five, ten, or twenty or more rooms,
each roughly four meters square, surrounding a common courtyard. Mesones
typically lacked washing or cooking facilities; some included access to
a common latrine. Each room was rented to a separate tenant, either an
individual or a small family. Residents of mesones contrasted
with those of tugurios in household size, as the latter tended
to live in larger and more heterogeneous households, partly because of
the general lack of landlord or government control over their living
conditions.
Legally constructed private housing equipped with modern facilities
and appliances was available only for middle- and upper-class
Salvadorans. The homes of the elite, many of them located on the clean
streets of San Benito, the wealthiest neighborhood in San Salvador,
typically were surrounded by walls two to three meters high or more,
topped with barbed wire and sometimes electrified. Watchtowers, gun
ports, and closed-circuit television systems to monitor the grounds were
not uncommon.
In urban slums, as in rural areas, poor housing, inadequate and
unsafe water, poor sanitation, and overcrowding created medical
problems, particularly infectious diseases, that compounded the ill
effects of such poor living conditions. The urban infant mortality rate
was, however, lower than the rural infant mortality rate (85 and 120 per
1,000 live births, respectively, in the mid-1970s).
Well-to-do Salvadorans had far better access than lower-class
Salvadorans to medical facilities and social security benefits,
especially in urban areas. Health service delivery, though planned on a
nationwide scale, clearly favored urban dwellers.
Better education also was available in the city, and more people were
able to take advantage of it. In 1976 about 61.7 percent of urban
students reached the ninth grade, as compared with 5.7 percent of rural
students. Some 90 percent of urban children attended primary school, and
over 90 percent of all national enrollment in grades seven through
twelve was urban. Nonetheless, the urban poor had the least likelihood
of pursuing education beyond one or two years of primary classes, since
school attendance required cash outlays for materials, special
activities, or uniforms. Primary-school-age children, especially boys,
also were able to earn a few centavos (100 centavos equals 1 Salvadoran
colon) on the streets with odd jobs, such as selling newspapers,
shining shoes, running errands, or watching cars, to supplement the
family income.
University training was an important part of the urban education
program in San Salvador, where university enrollment reached 35,000 in
the 1970s. The main campus of the National University, or University of
El Salvador, was located in the capital, but branch campuses were also
found in the secondary cities, such as Santa Ana.
Traditionally, the National University enjoyed a high degree of
institutional autonomy in its activities in spite of a long tradition of
politically active students. As the political and economic problems of
the nation deepened during the 1970s, however, the university came to
function not only as a lively and protected forum for political dialogue
but also as a haven for political activists, a center for communication
and coordination of activities among politically active opposition
groups, and a recruiting source for radical leftist guerrilla groups.
All the mass organizations associated with the Farabundo Marti National
Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberacion Nacional-- FMLN)
and the Revolutionary Democratic Front (Frente Democratico
Revolucionario--FDR) came to have offices there, and the university was
used as a press and a public forum by their representatives.
This situation changed abruptly in 1980 when the army closed the San
Salvador campus based on evidence that it was being used as an armory
and refuge by members of guerrilla groups. The university staff
continued to operate on a greatly reduced, makeshift basis from rented
space scattered throughout the city, enabling some 10,000 university
students to continue their studies. In the violent atmosphere that
prevailed at that time, some staff members were targeted for attack by
right-wing groups, some were arrested, and the university rector was
assassinated. With the closing of the university campus, some
twenty-five private universities, with a combined enrollment of 25,000
persons, sprang up. These schools were both far more expensive to attend
than the National University, which had charged only the equivalent of
US$36 for annual tuition, and more conservative in attitude.
The Jesuit-operated Central American University Jose Simeon Canas
(Universidad Centroamericana Jose Simeon Canas--UCA), originally
established in 1966 by the elite to provide a conservative Catholic
education for their children, continued to operate. The staff developed
more liberal leanings than its oligarchical supporters originally
intended, however. Members of the faculty and administration strongly
supported political and economic reforms and published political,
social, and economic studies on national and regional affairs. Although
the university remained open during the 1980s, it was not immune from
rightist attacks on its faculty and facilities.
El Salvador - SOCIAL DYNAMICS
During the 1970s, as Salvadoran emigrants returned from Honduras,
increased pressure for available land pushed the issue of agrarian
reform to the forefront of national life. Various peasant and trade
union organizations, with the tacit support of many others, including
middle-sector business people, professionals, and public-sector
employees, as well as certain church groups, increased their activities
and demonstrations in support of reform. The response from the
military-controlled government stressed the maintenance of public order,
through repression if necessary, over political change. The polarizing
effect of this attitude prompted concerned pro-reform military officers
to take power in 1979. One of the priorities of the junta governments
that followed was agrarian reform.
Peasant organizations were disorganized, mainly as a result of
violent actions directed against their members by right-wing groups, and
were unable to exert much influence on the junta government at the time
of the original agrarian reform decree in 1980. For its part, the
government also failed to consult with these groups regarding the best
ways to proceed in such an undertaking. Having the most to lose in this
process, the majority of the economic elite, particularly the agrarian
and financial interests, bitterly opposed such measures on principle.
These interests had opposed--and successfully defeated in the planning
stage--several earlier agrarian reform measures suggested by previous
governments.
The overall agrarian reform program was to be implemented in three
phases, only the first of which achieved any effective results. Phase I
called for the expropriation of all landholdings over 500 hectares, with
owners allowed to keep as "reserve" 100 to 150 hectares,
depending on land quality, in order to continue farming. The government,
aided by the army, expropriated over 230 estates, comprising 15 percent
of El Salvador's farmland (or 10 percent, if reserve lands are
excluded). This included 14 percent of total coffee land, 31 percent of
cotton land, and 24 percent of sugarcane land; over 60 percent of the
expropriated holdings, however, were pasture or fallow land, including
forests and mountains not well suited to cultivation.
The expropriated estates were not subdivided, but were turned into
cooperatives run by a hierarchy of skilled managers and unskilled
laborers. Under this arrangement, little changed in terms of day-to-day
operations. In spite of the communal implications of the cooperative
concept, the traditional social hierarchy of managers and unskilled
labor remained. In many cases, the same administrators, who still had
strong ties with previous landlords and their interests, gave the same
orders to the same workers, who saw little evidence of change in their
dayto -day situation. The former landowners initially continued to
derive income from production on the cooperatives, as part of the
cooperatives' profits went to an agrarian reform fund from which the
former owners were to be compensated. In addition, because the former
landowners could retain 100 hectares, they were often able to keep
control of the best land or of processing facilities, which, if
necessary, could be reclassified as urban properties. Some landowners
also had sufficient time to begin to decapitalize their farms. Some had
removed livestock and machinery; others had slaughtered cattle rather
than transfer them to the newly created cooperatives. These actions
significantly reduced the value of the cooperatives, especially
considering that the majority of land affected by Phase I was pasture
land.
Since the members of the cooperatives included only the few full-time
workers on estates at the time of expropriation, which took place during
an off-season period of low labor needs, Phase I did not affect the
majority of the population in these regions. Similarly, because the
expropriated estates were located in the coastal plain and central
valleys, they did not benefit landless peasants in the north and east.
Of an original 317 cooperatives, 22 had been abandoned by 1987 as a
result of inadequate technical and credit assistance from the
government, as well as the adverse economic effects of the civil
conflict.
As of 1987, Phase II of the agrarian reform program had not been
implemented. The official explanation for the prolonged inaction cited
shortcomings in administrative expertise and financial resources;
unofficially, political pressures appeared to be equally influential.
Phase II originally called for expropriation of all estates between 100
and 500 hectares in size. Many larger landowners, sensing that land
reform was imminent, had previously divided their larger estates among
family members, and their holdings, including many coffee estates, now
fell within this range.
The junta governments' failure to implement Phase II allowed the
Constituent Assembly to redefine the provisions of land reform that
eventually were incorporated into the Constitution of 1983. The assembly, dominated by
representatives of conservative political parties, raised the ceiling on
maximum allowable landholdings from 100 to 245 hectares. This had the
effect of reducing the amount of land available for redistribution from
about 72,400 hectares, or 5 percent of Salvadoran farmland, to about
54,300 hectares, or 3.7 percent of farmland. Owners of medium-sized
farms had been prohibited by the original 1980 reform decree from
selling their holdings; the assembly now granted these owners up to
three years to sell their excess holdings to peasants or peasant
associations. This provision shifted the onus of reallocation of land
from the government to the landowners, thus ameliorating somewhat the
problem of inadequate government resources for this purpose.
Phase III, also known as the Land to the Tiller program, mandated
that ownership of land that was leased, rented, or sharecropped would be
transferred to the tiller. Implementation of this phase was slow and
difficult. If fully realized, Phase III was projected to involve some
13.6 percent of farmland and some 117,000 peasant families. Each
beneficiary was allowed to seek title to no more than seven hectares; in
practice, given the small size of existing rental plots, many were
granted title to plots well below that size; as of 1987, the average
Phase III beneficiary had been granted title to a plot of less than two
hectares.
By mid-1987 only 56,188 potential beneficiaries had applied for title
to 79,142 parcels of land. The granting of definitive titles was
hampered by bureaucratic inefficiency and chronic budget shortfalls, so
that the overwhelming majority of claimants were forced to continue
working the land under provisional title. The failure to grant even
provisional titles to the remaining 60,000 or so potential beneficiaries
was attributed in part to the inability of the government to contact all
of these small farmers. Furthermore, the seven-hectare limit, also
referred to as the retention rule, excluded some 12,000 beneficiaries
who did not farm their land directly but were landlords of
smallholdings. In its early stages, implementation of Phase III was also
complicated by the illegal eviction of peasants by landowners.
Moreover, the involvement of army personnel in the implementation of
agrarian reform led to an upsurge in combat between government and
guerrilla forces in the countryside. This was the case particularly in
the northern departments of Chalatenango, Morazan, and Cuscatlan, where
there were few privately owned estates but where rural mass
organizations were influential. The heightened army presence, combined
with population dislocation, reportedly contributed to increased civil
unrest in these areas.
El Salvador - Revolutionary Groups
During the 1960s and 1970s, some of the population sought expression
and perhaps eventual redress for their problems by becoming involved in
a wide variety of "mass organizations" (also known as popular
organizations), such as those included in the Revolutionary Coordinator
of the Masses (Coordinadora Revolucionaria de las Masas--CRM). These groups, once tens of
thousands strong, were heavily urban oriented and included a range of
trade unionists, teachers, clergy, professionals, students, and other
middle-class and urban lower-class workers interested in social and
economic reform. The tactics of the mass organizations included strikes,
street demonstrations, mass rallies, and occupation of public buildings
(churches, government buildings, and embassies), factories, and farms.
In the countryside, the mass organizations found some support among
landless campesinos mainly in the hills around the central valleys and
in the northern mountains (the departments of Chalatenango, San
Salvador, Cuscatlan, Cabanas, and San Vicente). Laborers on the coastal
plain, where estate owners and administrators exercised greater
influence, showed less enthusiasm for the mass organizations.
Whereas some of the rural poor hoped to exert pressure for change
through participation in the popular organizations, others joined the
ranks of more conservative, officially sanctioned organizations. One of
these, the Salvadoran Communal Union (Union Comunal Salvadorena--UCS),
begun in 1966, sought to address the needs of small farmers through
limited programs of technical assistance and credit facilities. By 1980
the UCS claimed 100,000 members.
Another peasant organization, the Nationalist Democratic Organization
(Organizacion Democratica Nacionalista--Orden), claimed as many as
100,000 members in the late 1970s. Established in the 1960s under
military rule, Orden had close ties to the GN. In return for cooperation with the GN in
areas such as intelligence and civil defense, members of Orden were
eligible for benefits such as favorable credit terms on government
agricultural loans, priority consideration for permanent estate jobs,
and employment on public works project. Orden was disbanded officially
by a decree of the first 1979 junta government, but some observers
believed that it continued to function unofficially after that date.
In the 1970s, activists from mass organizations joined the ranks of
various guerrilla organizations. Guerrilla membership was diverse and included
trade unionists, students, teachers, other disaffected members of the
middle class, urban workers, and peasants.
In early 1981, Salvadoran guerrilla groups who were united under the
banner of the FMLN estimated that they controlled 10 percent of
Salvadoran territory. By 1983 the FMLN's claims had risen to 30 percent.
Although guerrilla forces exerted influence over certain areas, they had
not achieved control in the sense of being able to secure territory
against concerted efforts, usually "sweeps" by at least
battalion-sized units, by government forces to reestablish access. Generally, the guerrilla movement was most
active to the north and to the east of the Rio Lempa, in the departments
of Chalatenango, Cabanas, Morazan, Cuscatlan, San Vicente, and Usulutan.
Guerrilla activities were less frequent in the more affluent western
half of the country, roughly to the west of the Rio Lempa.
From the guerrilla perspective, El Salvador was seen as divided into
three different "fields of struggle" depending on the nature
of their activities there. The "liberated areas" or
"zones of control," in the north and east, were areas where
communications with the rest of the country had been cut off, where the
government and the military had not established a permanent presence,
and where strings of guerrilla camps exerted influence over the local
population. The so-called "disputed" areas in the central part
of the country were contested by guerrilla forces living among the rural
population and by government forces stationed in towns. The third area,
the cities, experienced comparatively little open antigovernment
violence, although sporadic terrorist actions by both rightist and
leftist groups persisted after the mid-1970s.
In the isolated "zones of control," as in other rural
areas, amenities were few: no electricity, water taken from streams and
springs, and no sanitation facilities. Agricultural production on family
plots and collective farms provided food for guerrilla combatants as
well as for local residents. According to sympathetic foreign observers,
the guerrillas provided some social services, including at least
rudimentary medical care, using both modern and traditional herbal
methods, and education programs. Although supplies were either limited
or nonexistent, literacy programs for all ages, using sticks to scratch
in the earth in lieu of pens and paper, and education in first aid and
basic sanitation measures were conducted. These courses served to
provide basic education to a largely illiterate population and to
prepare them to provide medical and logistical support to FMLN
combatants. Town meetings were held to discuss issues of local concern
and to elect councils with representatives responsible for agriculture,
health, education, and information. Religious activities compatible with
the tenets of liberation
theology were encouraged. Security and early warning
of armed forces operations in the area were provided by local militia
drawn from the pool of younger residents.
Another aspect of the guerrillas' ideology stressed equality for
women as comrades in the political-military struggle. This, in many
cases, represented a considerable and sometimes difficult adjustment for
people from a culture that placed an exceptionally strong value on
machismo, where women traditionally were regarded as inferior.
Discrimination against women was further reinforced in Salvadoran rural
life, particularly in the area of labor. Government wage scales either
excluded women from permanent labor positions; set a lower minimum wage
for women, along with boys under sixteen and the handicapped; or did not
pay women at all if they worked in a men's crew. Educational
opportunities for girls were also more limited because of the need for
their assistance at home at an early age. In territory influenced by the
guerrillas, however, some observers reported that wife-beating was
discouraged, an effort was made to assign tasks more equitably, and men
were taught to view women as companeras (comrades). Thus, men
might cook and wash clothes, while women fought, or directed development
projects, or did construction work. In fact, 40 percent of leadership
and 30 percent of combatant roles were filled by women in guerrilla
zones. Yet even in these communities, there were limits to change;
tortillamaking , for example, remained a female task.
El Salvador - Religion
As a Hispanic country, El Salvador has always had a strong Roman
Catholic identity. The majority of Salvadorans in the late 1980s were at
least nominal Roman Catholics, and church rituals permeated the nation's
culture and society. Church attendance, especially for women, remained
important, church sacraments and ceremonies such as baptism and
confirmation were observed, and fiestas were held to celebrate patron
saints of villages, towns, and cities. Nevertheless, El Salvador tended
to be somewhat more secular than its Central American neighbors. Birth
control programs introduced in the late 1960s met with less opposition
than elsewhere in Latin America. Marriage--in a religious or civil
ceremony--was not as prevalent in El Salvador as in many other Latin
American countries (this situation also reflected the strain exerted on
social institutions by persistent poverty); many Salvadoran couples,
especially in rural areas, lived together in common-law or free unions,
many families were headed by women, and many children were born out of
wedlock. Lastly, the ritual kinship practice of compadrazgo
(selecting godparents for children) was becoming less widespread and
less important in El Salvador.
Although the Roman Catholic Church, as typified by its hierarchy, was
conservative in its approach to doctrine, a strain of reformist
Catholicism called "social Christianity" emerged in El
Salvador, as elsewhere in Latin America, in the 1930s in response to the
hardships, uprisings, and repressions of that period. Social
Christianity, which continued to have some appeal until the early 1960s,
stressed the duty of lay persons to remedy social ills without waiting
for the religious hierarchy, represented by its priests, to act.
Although this movement did not advocate change in the basic social and
political structure of the country, it called for improvements by
working within the existing political order.
At least one influential individual at the top of the social and
religious pyramid recognized and encouraged the need for improvements in
the lives of those in the lower sector--the archbishop of San Salvador,
Luis Chavez y Gonzalez, who held this position from 1939 to 1977.
Archbishop Chavez encouraged the priesthood as a vocation; built a
seminary in San Salvador; established the Pius XII Institute, organized
particularly to teach the Roman Catholic Church's social doctrine; and
sent priests to study in Europe. It is also noteworthy that these
Salvadoran priests came mainly from rural families, albeit fairly
well-to-do ones, rather than from the urban middle class, and hence had
closer ties to the peasantry. It is significant too that even in the
early 1950s Chavez encouraged cooperatives as alternatives for peasants'
losing land to agribusiness expansion and that he sent priests to Canada
to study cooperatives. In this sense, he presaged the communitarianism
later advocated by the Salvadoran Christian Democratic Party (Partido
Democrata Cristiano--PDC).
In the late 1960s, the social attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church
in El Salvador, as elsewhere, were deeply influenced by Vatican Council
II (in 1965) and the social encyclicals of Pope John XXIII, as well as
by the Second Latin American Bishops' Conference held in Medellin,
Colombia, in 1968, which addressed the issues of Vatican II from a
distinctly Latin American perspective. These gatherings, particularly
the Medellin conference, emphasized the need for a more worldly
involvement by the Roman Catholic clergy with the lives and problems of
parishioners and advocated activist programs to improve the living
conditions of the lower class. This "preferential option for the
poor" was the germ of what later came to be known as
"liberation theology." The church increased and encouraged
involvement in programs for change after the Medellin conference, even
if this involvement entailed secular political advocacy.
Toward this end, activist clergy and laity created grass- roots
Christian Base Communities (Comunidades Eclesiasticas de Base--CEBs) to
work toward their conception of social justice; these groups encouraged
church members to take the initiative in seeking social and political
change and to act more independently of the church hierarchy, if
necessary, to achieve their goals. In short, in contrast to the earlier
social Christianity, where change was to be effected within the existing
social and political order, liberation theology called for changes in
social and political structures and encouraged the laity to take an
active role in bringing them about. In El Salvador, the social concerns
of Archbishop Chavez helped pave the way for later advocates of
liberation theology and, in a way, linked this broad Latin American
movement of the 1970s with the social Christian movements of the prior
decades.
A number of rural communities were receptive to the teachings and
methods of the base communities. Generally, the organization of the CEBs
involved a priest or a trained religious worker who met with twenty to
thirty local parishioners for a few weeks. As this group met to study
and discuss selected passages from the Bible and plan community
activities, lay leaders were encouraged to emerge, and the group was
taught to appreciate and emphasize the role of laypersons like
themselves in social change. They discussed the earthly social,
economic, and political reasons for their plight as poor peasants and
laborers and were taught by priests and lay workers that the poor were
equal before God with the rich landowners. During the 1970s, some 15,000
local lay leaders, catechists or delegates, underwent further training
at seven centers set up throughout the country, studying the Bible,
liturgy, agriculture, cooperativism, leadership, and health, all in
preparation for their roles as religious, social, and political leaders
in community development efforts. The role of local lay preachers and
leaders also reflected the high ratio of laity to priests in El
Salvador, which at that time was approximately 10,000 to one.
The CEBs soon encountered harassment and hostility, apparently
emanating from the economic and political elite. By the late 1970s,
violence by right-wing groups was directed against members of the
priesthood and other church workers known to be sympathetic to the CEBs
on the grounds that assisting the poor constituted subversive activity.
As civil unrest in general increased in the late 1970s, the church as a
whole became increasingly polarized. The majority of the bishops
supported the traditional role of the church, the traditional authority
of the hierarchy, and the overriding authority of the government. Allied
against this view was a faction of parish priests who favored the
development of the CEBs and advocated expanded aid for the poor.
Once again, the position of the archbishop became crucial. In 1977
Archbishop Chavez resigned and was replaced by Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo
Romero y Galdamez. Like his predecessor, Archbishop Romero spoke out
publicly in favor of social justice for the general populace. He
increasingly assumed the role of the leading advocate on behalf of the
poor; his primary vehicles for expressing these views were his weekly
Sunday morning homilies, broadcast throughout the nation and eagerly
listened to on portable radios or the ubiquitous village loudspeakers in
the plazas. As political tensions rose, the influential position and
strong impact of the outspoken archbishop became intolerable to the
Salvadoran right, and Romero was assassinated one Monday in March 1980
while saying mass.
Violence against grass-roots church activities continued during the
early 1980s, with telling effect. The number of active priests declined,
so that 40 percent of rural parishes lacked priests, and many CEBs were
dismantled or forced underground. Of the 15,000 lay leaders active in
CEBs, some joined the guerrillas, while others withdrew from church
activities altogether. Monsignor Arturo Rivera y Damas, appointed
archbishop after Romero's murder, found it appropriate to take a more
distant or ambivalent position with respect to the question of the
proper role of the church in Salvadoran national life, a position that
also accorded more closely with the conservative attitude of the Vatican
under Pope John Paul II. Meanwhile, although the church proper now
lowered its public profile, a small, quasi-independent "people's
church" emerged from the remnants of the CEB movement. Some
priests, mainly Jesuits, continued to work in guerrilla-controlled
areas, where the social and political importance of organized
communities among the poor continued to be emphasized.
Protestant missionaries were quite active in El Salvador, the
majority representing the evangelical branch of North American
Protestantism. Evangelical activity was a multinational,
multimillion-dollar enterprise developed and packaged in the United
States, translated into Spanish, and exported not only to El Salvador
but also to the other countries of Central America. Missionaries working
for scores of organizations used crusades, door-to-door proselytizing,
radio programs, food aid, and health care to advance their
fundamentalist message of personal salvation through belief in Jesus, a
salvation not to be gained in this world but in the afterlife. To these
theologically conservative evangelicals, Roman Catholics were not
Christians; only the "born-again" were God's chosen people,
and efforts to achieve social gains by working for change in this life
were inappropriate. Although "mainline" Protestant
denominations encouraged expressions of concern over social problems,
the brand of evangelical Protestantism that swept Central America in the
1970s and 1980s sought to remove its adherents from social action, to
place the onus on God rather than on humans to act, and to inculcate
passive, apathetic, and submissive resignation while waiting for the
second coming of Christ. Put more bluntly, the thought of future
salvation would cushion the impact of current suffering.
Protestantism was by no means new to Central America or to El
Salvador. In the late nineteenth century, the majority of British and
German immigrants, including coffee traders and financiers, were
Protestants. In 1896 the aggressive Central American Mission (CAM),
headquartered in North America and financed by North Americans, was
established in El Salvador and Guatemala. The primary message of the CAM
was that the sad state of the world was a necessary and predestined
situation heralding the imminence of the second coming. In later years,
the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Assemblies of God, and others joined the
growing missionary movement in Central America.
Protestantism continued to grow steadily in El Salvador, particularly
during the economic depression and political repression of the 1930s.
The annual growth rate of the Protestant community in the country stood
at 9 percent between 1930 and 1945 but dropped to 7 percent between 1945
and 1960. A dramatic resurgence appeared in the 1970s with an average
annual rate of Protestant conversion of 11 percent. Some observers have
attributed this impressive growth to a rejection of politicized social
activism as exemplified by liberation theology. Others have interpreted
the high rate of Protestant conversion as a withdrawal from the violence
and instability of Salvadoran life in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Furthermore, the popularity of evangelical Protestantism seems to
have correlated with the intensity and nature of population
displacement. As the number of land-poor laborers grew and migrant labor
increased, and as the bonds of community, extended family, and tradition
were broken for many, traditional Catholicism was unable to fill the
personal sense of emotional loss and lack of direction. This was
particularly true because the number of priests and clerics was small.
Protestantism, however, offered a personalistic message of Jesus'
acceptance of the individual, emphasized each individual's direct
relationship to God unmediated by a hierarchical clergy, and held out
hope that sustained even desperately poor people with a sense of self-
worth in the face of violence, displacement, and misery.
The elite found an ideological ally in this brand of Protestantism,
not only for its apolitical approach but also for its laissez-faire,
entrepreneurial, work-oriented values and its willingness to minimize
the responsibility of the existing system for the nation's ills. Elites
thus gladly supported evangelizing efforts on their landed estates, and
significant numbers of upper-class Salvadorans converted to
Protestantism.
