Oligarchs and Officers: The Crisis in El Salvador

William M. LeoGrande and Carla Anne Robbins

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1980

Article preview: first 500 of 7,762 words total.

Summary:  Not since Vietnam has the domino theory enjoyed such currency in Washington. Less than a year after Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza was driven from Managua by the first Latin American revolution in two decades, neighboring El Salvador teeters on the brink of full-scale insurrection. In truth, El Salvador has hardly had a government over the past 12 months. The nation_s nominal rulers have long since lost control of their own security forces and today stand isolated amidst a rising tide of political violence from both Right and Left.

William M. LeoGrande is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the School of Government and Public Administration, the American University, and the author of numerous articles on Latin American politics. Carla Anne Robbins is a Fellow of the Institute for the Study of World Politics in New York.

Not since Vietnam has the domino theory enjoyed such currency in Washington. Less than a year after Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza was driven from Managua by the first Latin American revolution in two decades, neighboring El Salvador teeters on the brink of full-scale insurrection. In truth, El Salvador has hardly had a government over the past 12 months. The nation's nominal rulers have long since lost control of their own security forces and today stand isolated amidst a rising tide of political violence from both Right and Left.

In Washington, policymakers are searching desperately for a solution to El Salvador's complex political equation, but the answer remains as elusive as the opening to a Chinese box. The current crisis may have no exit short of civil war-a bloody denouement that would not only shred the social fabric of El Salvador but would also pose grave risks to regional peace. Current U.S. policy, while designed to avoid such a conflict, is not working. While the United States has successfully thwarted two rightist attempts to overthrow centrist governments, the Salvadorean junta today is no closer to finding a permanent solution to its political crisis than it was when it came into power six months ago. The junta's impotence stems from its isolation; it has yet to create for itself any significant base of political support. Such isolation has been a chronic problem for Salvadorean governments, and it is only by overcoming this historical dilemma that the current crisis can be permanently resolved.

II

El Salvador is burdened with the most rigid class structure and worst income inequality in all of Latin America. For over a century, the social and economic life of the nation has been dominated by a small landed elite known popularly as "the 14 families" (Los catorce), though their actual number is well over 14. The family clans comprising the oligarchy include only a few thousand people in this nation of nearly five million, but until recently they owned 60 percent of the farmland, the entire banking system, and most of the nation's industry. Among them, they received 50 percent of national income.

The tensions inherent in such a social structure are exacerbated in El Salvador by severe population pressure on the land. With over 400 people per square mile, population density is the highest in Latin America. Over 200,000 peasants are landless-a more severe imbalance of land and labor than in Mexico. Unlike most of its neighbors, El Salvador has no undeveloped territory for surplus agricultural labor to colonize; cultivation already extends up the slopes of even active volcanoes. Illegal emigration (to less populous Honduras) acted as a safety valve for the potentially explosive situation in the countryside until the 1969 "soccer war" closed the border. An expanding manufacturing sector offered another alternative to rural laborers in the decades after World War II, but the war with Honduras also pushed the economy into a recession from which it has never fully recovered.

The dominance of the oligarchy ...

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