In 1932, security forces commanded by General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez killed roughly twenty-five thousand peasants and workers in two rural provinces and a few towns in the western part of El Salvador. Five decades later, between 1978 and 1991, agents and allies of the Salvadoran government killed an additional fifty thousand civilians, from a population of roughly five million.¹ Victims included labor organizers, members of opposition political parties, priests and Catholic lay activists, teachers, and members of nascent guerrilla cells. Most of the victims were either poor people or people who worked with the poor.

Some were killed openly by...

Far more people have died at the hands of their own governments in the twentieth century than in war. Rudolph Rummel estimates the death toll from governmental mass murder of civilians at 169,202,000—more than four times the battle dead for this century’s international and civil wars up to 1987 (1994a, 2).¹ Rummel’s painstaking and conservative estimates are intended to call attention to the magnitude of domestic killing by governments. While we are generally aware that the regimes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek, Pol Pot, the Young Turks, and others have committed mass murder against their own citizens,...

Late on the night of 22/23 January 1932, several thousand indigenous and mestizo peasants in the western part of El Salvador attacked towns, police posts, and military barracks. Armed primarily with machetes but in some areas having a significant number of rifles, the insurgents took over several towns, overwhelmed isolated police posts, and indulged in looting, arson, and, in a few places, rape and murder. Most of the violence was directed against symbols of local oppression—the wealthy and their homes, mayors, and municipal offices (Ching 1995, 31). The rebels killed about 35 civilians and local police. Five Customs Police...

With the Revolution of 1948, the Salvadoran military put itself forward as the one institution capable of distinguishing the national interest from the particular interests defended by the liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In order to carry out its national development project, the military set itself apart both from strict accountability to the population (though elections would be held and popular policies enacted) and from the upper classes (though they would be allowed representation in areas of the state that regulated economic activity). The military, as the institutional heart of the state, intended to balance the conflicting...

The protection racket seemed alive and well when Carlos Romero was elected to the Salvadoran presidency. Conservative civilians expected him to make quick work of the leftist opposition and put a permanent halt to reformist challenges. Carlos Romero’s campaign had received “massive financial support” from conservative business organizations, including the National Association of Private Enterprise and the Agriculturalists’ Front of the Eastern Region, which had led the fight against land reform (NSA 1989a, 12). The private sector had literally paid for Romero’s presidency and expected him to act in accordance with their wishes. Most historical accounts claim that Romero fulfilled...

On 15 October 1979, President Carlos Romero was overthrown in an almost bloodless coup carried out by a movement of junior officers. It was, as one of the participants said, “the most widely advertised coup in Latin American history.”¹ Indeed, by September 1979 it was a foregone conclusion among informed people in San Salvador that Romero would be ousted: the only questions were when and by whom. It was in fact who did it, and their intention, that caught most people by surprise. Hardliners from Romero’s clique, the generational movement of the Equipo Molina, and reformist junior officers closely advised...

The year 1980 was probably the most tragic one in Salvadoran history. Some of the nation’s finest leaders, individuals who sought to avoid a civil war through political compromise and negotiation, were assassinated. With each killing, prospects for reconciliation dimmed. In February, Attorney General Mario Zamora Rivas was shot in his home the day before a convention of the Christian Democratic Party at which he was expected to call on the party to resign from the government in protest over military violence. An outspoken critic of government violence, Zamora had been engaged in dialogue with the Popular Forces of Liberation—...

From January 1981 until February 1992, El Salvador witnessed a brutal civil war fought mainly in rural areas. After an unsuccessful “final” offensive in January 1981, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) retreated to strongholds in the north and east of the country, rebuilt its forces, then attacked the government army in what became virtually a conventional war. After seriously threatening to defeat the FAES in late 1983, the FMLN took heavy losses from government air power and was forced to retrench. Thereafter, it shifted to a highly successful guerrilla strategy, extending its military and sabotage operations to all...

The details of El Salvador’s protection racket state are no doubt unique, but many of its features are found elsewhere. Certainly other state elites have justified their power by protecting social elites from their class enemies. As discussed in the Introduction, the Brazilian, Argentine, and Uruguayan militaries have at times used violence in ways that seemed calculated to create an image of greater opposition than actually existed, or to polarize politics in order to create an ongoing need for powerful coercive institutions. The Salvadoran case teaches us that we cannot assume, as domestic realist theories do, that state violence is...