La Matanza
La Matanza refers to a communist-indigenous rebellion that took place in El Salvador between 22 and 25 January 1932. After the revolt was suppressed, it was followed by large-scale government killings in western El Salvador, which resulted in the deaths of 10,000 to 40,000 people. Another 100 soldiers were killed during the suppression of the revolt.
On 22 January 1932, members of the Communist Party of El Salvador and Pipil peasants launched a rebellion against the Salvadoran military government due to widespread social unrest and the suppression of democratic political freedoms, especially after the cancellation of the results of the 1932 legislative election.
During the rebellion, the communist and indigenous rebels, led by Farabundo Martí and Feliciano Ama, respectively, captured several towns and cities across western El Salvador, killing an estimated 2,000 people and causing over US$100,000 in property damage. The Salvadoran government, led by General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who had assumed power following the 1931 Salvadoran coup d'état, declared martial law, and ordered the suppression of the revolt.
Most of the people who were killed during La Matanza, which has been described as an ethnocide, were Pipil peasants and non-combatants, causing the extermination of the majority of the Pipil-speaking population, which led to a near total loss of the spoken language in El Salvador. Many of the rebellion's leaders, including Martí and Ama, were executed by the military. The government's repression also forced several communist leaders to flee the country and go into exile.
Background
Social unrest
in El Salvador began to grow in the 1920s. El Salvador had three distinct social classes: the upper class, made up of wealthy landowners; the middle class, composed of politicians and soldiers; and the lower class, which was composed of mostly peasants and workers.In 1920, a group of communist and socialist students, teachers, and artisans, established the Regional Federation of Salvadoran Workers, El Salvador's first trade union to organize rural and urban workers. One of the rural leaders of the FRTS was Farabundo Martí, who, together with Miguel Mármol, founded the Communist Party of El Salvador in 1930. Between 1928 and 1932, Martí fought alongside Augusto César Sandino in Nicaragua against the United States' occupation of the country.
Economic problems
In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the Salvadoran economy was heavily dependent on exporting coffee and coffee beans, which accounted for 75 to 95 percent of all of El Salvador's exports by 1929. Most of the coffee plantations, and the profits made by the plantations, were owned by the so-called "Fourteen Families".Due to the collapse of coffee prices worldwide as a result of the Great Depression in 1929, coffee producers were unable to cover the cost of producing coffee or pay their workers, leading to various coffee plantations failing and many workers to go unemployed. As a result of the reduced exports, national income fell 50 percent from the year prior, decreasing from US40–50¢ per day to only US20¢ per day.
Political situation
Meléndez–Quiñónez dynasty and the 1931 election
On 9 February 1913, Salvadoran president Manuel Enrique Araujo died to his wounds after being attacked by three farmers with machetes in San Salvador during an assassination attempt. After Araujo's death, he was succeeded by a political dynasty; Araujo's vice president, Carlos Meléndez, his younger brother, Jorge Meléndez, and their brother-in-law, Alfonso Quiñónez Molina, held the presidency of El Salvador from 1913 until 1927 in the Meléndez–Quiñónez dynasty. The political dynasty ended when Quiñónez chose Pío Romero Bosque as his successor, as there were no other family members who were willing to assume the presidency.During his term, Romero lifted restrictions on the existence of political parties in opposition to the ruling National Democratic Party. In 1931, a presidential election was held in the country, which is considered by historians to be the first free and fair election in Salvadoran history. The three primary candidates in the election were Alberto Gómez Zárate, the minister of national defense during Romero's presidency, Arturo Araujo, an engineer and coffee planter who was a distant relative of Manuel Enrique Araujo, and Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, a military officer. Araujo and Martínez eventually ran together on a joint ticket and defeated Zárate, although they did not attain a majority of the vote. Despite the military's support for Zárate and belief that they would reject the results of the election, the armed forces upheld them. The Communist Party of El Salvador won several municipal elections.
Military coup and the canceled 1932 election
During Araujo's administration, El Salvador was still struggling economically as a result of the Great Depression leading to social unrest across the country. In an attempt to improve the economy, Araujo reduced the military's budget and ordered some military officials to retire. His efforts were strongly opposed by the military, which staged a coup on 2 December 1931, deposing Araujo and establishing the Civic Directory. The military government was dissolved two days later when Martínez was declared as the country's acting president, however, his government was not recognized by the United States. The December 1931 coup began a period of forty-eight years of military rule in the country.In the few days after the coup, the Communist Party of El Salvador was "cautiously optimistic" about the coup, writing an open letter to Martínez's government through its Estrella Roja newspaper, stating that the coup was "heroic and necessary" while also believing that his government would reimpose an exploitative capitalist system. Before Araujo was deposed, municipal and legislative elections were scheduled for 15 December 1931, but after his government was overthrown, the military rescheduled the municipal elections for 3–5 January 1932 and the legislative elections for 10–12 January 1932.
When the communist party began to win several municipal elections in western El Salvador, the government canceled the results of all of the municipal elections. The legislative elections proceeded on 10 January, and despite early polling returns indicating a communist victory in San Salvador, a delayed official result announced that three non-communists won the three seats of the San Salvador department. Violence occurred throughout the electoral process, and at least thirty communists were killed in Ahuachapán.
Preparations for revolt
Planning and attempt for compromise
Due to the result of the elections, communist party leaders believed that they could no longer come to power through legal means, as Martínez's government effectively canceled the elections. The Communist Party of El Salvador was led by Martí and Mármol. Other communist leaders included Mario Zapata, Alfonso Luna, Rafael Bondanza, and Ismael Hernández. Hernández, who was a member of the International Red Aid, believed that the United States would support the rebels and mistake it as a pro-Araujo counterrevolution. The communists' primary inspiration for revolution was the Bolsheviks' 1917 October Revolution.According to Abel Cuenca, a Salvadoran communist and participant in the rebellion, the rebellion was not planned until after the municipal election results were canceled, with actual planning beginning on 9 or 10 January 1932. In contrast, according to Jorge Schlesinger, a Salvadoran writer, Martí began planning the rebellion in mid-December 1931 while in Puerto Cortés, Honduras. His claim, however, has been essentially discredited as his piece of evidence for his claim, a letter allegedly written by Martí discussing the rebellion, was dated to 16 December 1932, rather than 1931.
In a final attempt to avoid a violent rebellion, the communist party sent a political commission consisting of Zapata, Luna, Clemente Abel Estrada, Rubén Darío Fernández, and Joaquín Rivas to the National Palace to enter into negotiations with the government. The commission was not allowed to meet directly with Martínez, instead being directed to Colonel Joaquín Valdés, the minister of national defense, where the commission demanded "substantial contributions to the welfare of the peasants" in exchange for a cessation of illegal activities, threatening to revolt if the demands were not met. Reportedly, Luna told Valdés, "the peasants will win with their machetes the rights you are denying them", to which Valdés responded, "you have machetes; we have machine guns". The meeting ended with no compromise being met.
Government knowledge of the rebellion
Just before the rebellion, Juan Pablo Wainwright was arrested in Guatemala. Wainwright was a communist party member who was rallying support from communists in Guatemala to invade El Salvador to overthrow Martínez's government, and his arrest ended the possibility of a foreign invasion force from aiding rebels in El Salvador. On 18 January, Martí, Luna, and Zapata were arrested by the Salvadoran government, but the arrests were not made public until 20 January, and plans to attack the barracks in San Salvador were captured by the army. On 21 January, the government instructed newspapers in the country to report that a rebellion was planned to occur the following day.Cuenca theorized that Martínez intentionally allowed the revolt to happen by preventing the opportunity for social and political reform to occur. The theory asserts that the intention of letting revolution occur was to crush it forcibly, as he believed the movement was doomed to fail, and that the suppression of the communist uprising would help him gain support and recognition from the United States.
Dr. Alejandro D. Marroquín argued that Martínez actually feared a potential attack from Araujo's Salvadoran Laborist Party from Guatemala, rather than the communist rebellion itself. He argued that Martínez allowed the rebellion to occur and crushed it by force to deprive Araujo of an armed movement to help bring him back to power.