Since the defeat of the American-backed dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979, the American ruling class has been concerned that the testing-ground for the “domino” theory would shift from Southeast Asia to its own backyard, Central America. Would Guatemala and El Salvador be the next countries to instal new rulers who were less well-disposed towards the US? In El Salvador, in particular, massive American military aid is being used to maintain in power a ferociously repressive junta.
Since the late nineteenth century, El Salvador has been a leading coffee grower and exporter. In the 1880s, with the help of conveniently passed laws, Indian communities were uprooted from their land and large coffee plantations were formed. Many former peasants became seasonal workers on the coffee estates, able to find employment only between November and March. Since 1930, there has been much urban industrial development, largely in the form of capital-intensive export industries owned by US corporations such as Exxon, Texaco and Westinghouse Electric. But El Salvador remains a predominantly agricultural country.
It is also a land of great poverty and inequality. The entire economy — agriculture, finance, industry — is dominated by a tiny elite of fourteen families. Two per cent of the population controls over sixty per cent of the cultivable land. At the other extreme, only one peasant family in twenty owns enough land to support themselves, while on 1974 figures over forty per cent of urban wage-workers were earning less than the legal minimum of around five pounds a week. About half of El Salvador’s infants die of malnutrition or related ailments before their first birthday. Such is the status quo the American government is defending, to the tune of ten million dollars in 1980-1.
For half a century El Salvador has been ruled by one military dictatorship after another. In 1930, in the midst of the world depression, the candidate of the reformist Labour Party was elected President, only to be overthrown by the army in the following year. In 1932, after the so-called Communist Party had won some local elections, the generals refused to recognise the result and a large-scale peasant uprising took place. It was put down brutally: between twenty and thirty thousand people were killed (equal to between one and two per cent of the total population!). Since then, the government has been in the possession of a series of different factions of the army and the fourteen families, with some mock elections but no political democracy. Since 1960, many peasants have been won to support of the the regime in power by means of a rural paramilitary body known as the National Democratic Organisation, or ORDEN. Its members were helped to avoid the worst poverty by means of such “favours” as special credit terms, preference in employment, or extra health care. ORDEN members acted as informers against suspected subversives in the villages. Thus many potential opponents were recruited as bulwarks of the government.
The Christian Democrat Party was founded in I960. In 1972 their presidential candidate was deprived of electoral victory by yet another army coup. By this time, guerrilla organisations were being formed in the countryside, aimed at resisting ORDEN and, in the long run, at taking over the government themselves. Besides ORDEN, there are other pro-regime terrorist groups ranged against the guerrillas. In addition, there is a veritable plethora of “left-wing” opposition groupings of various kinds, religious, political, trade-union, student. Since April 1980, these have come together in the Revolutinary Democratic Front (FDR).
The current Salvadoran government came to power in a coup in October 1979, when the Christian Democrats and a section of the army overthrew the existing military regime. The new junta promised “radical reforms”, and set up a cabinet involving civilian ministers. However, it immediately proclaimed a state of emergency and banned meetings of more than three people. Clearly the junta was not even superficially different from—let alone better than—the outright military dictatorships that preceded it. By the end of 1979, the junta w.as openly backing its own terrorist organisations. In 1980 El Salvador entered a period of civil war. On the one side were the army and the other state-run terrorists (supported and trained by the Americans) and on the other the guerrillas, backed by opposition movements and, supposedly, supplied with arms by Cuba. In the first nine months of 1980 alone, five thousand Salvadorans were killed in the fighting.
What are the two sides fighting for? The government and the army are defending the existing order and the interests of the present ruling élite, the Salvadoran capitalist class, and the American companies who own much of Salvadoran industry. The American military aid is designed to protect the massive profits of these US companies, and to defend America’s strategic interests in Central America. The guerrillas are a nationalist movement, fighting against United States control of the Salvadoran economy and government, and aiming to establish Salvadoran state capitalism. This is apparent from an examination of the “Programmatic Platform of the Revolutionary Democratic Government”, issued in February 1980 by the Revolutionary Coordinating Committee of the Masses, the umbrella grouping of guerrilla organisations.
The platform calls for widespread nationalisation of the banking and finance system, of foreign trade, of electricity distribution, of petroleum refining. It is stated, though, that “None of this will affect small or medium-sized private businesses, which will be given all kinds of stimulus and support in the various branches of the national economy”. There will be an agrarian reform, and the tax system will supposedly be transformed “so that tax payments no longer fall upon the workers”. (As taxes are a burden only on the capitalist class anyway, this transformation is difficult to envisage.) There will be wage regulation, price controls, increased social services, no unemployment . . . It all sounds quite impressive, till you realise that you’ve heard it all before from politicians elsewhere, and that the supposed benefits of nationalisation never quite permeate to the workers. State-run enterprises will still be concerned with making a profit and the platform admits as much: “the state will receive substantial income from the activity of the nationalised sector of the economy”. They will still be subject to the ups and downs of the world markets, in coffee for instance. As elsewhere, nationalised industries will be concerned to keep profits up by keeping wages down, and to discharge workers when what they produce cannot be sold profitably.
The workers and peasants of HI Salvador have nothing to gain by supporting the opposition groups or guerrillas, who will simply become their new rulers and exploiters. The platform we have discussed aims at no radical transformation of society: it envisages the continuation and further development of capitalism in El Salvador, a society of haves and have-nots. The change will be in the personnel of the ruling class, and a change from private to predominantly state capitalism. And that makes no difference to anyone but the capitalists themselves.
Paul Bennett
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