Notes on El Salvador

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Notes on El Salvador

• By Summer Henning

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Official Name República de El Salvador
(Republic of El Salvador) Independence 15
September 1821 (from Spain) Capital San
Salvador Form of Government Republic Official
Language Spanish Land Area 8,124 sq miles
(smaller than Maricopa Co. 9,224 sq
miles) Population 7,066,403 (July 2008 est.
CIA) Persons per sq mile 847 (compared to
Maricopa Co. at 334)
President Elias Antonio Saca
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Money of El Salvador
Official Currency of El Salvador
Colones Conversion Rate 1 US Dollar to 8.75
Colones Gross National Income (US) 2540.00
per capita Industry Food processing, Beverages,
Petroleum, Chemicals.Agriculture Coffee, Sugar,
Corn, Rice, Shrimp, Beef.Exports Offshore
assembly exports, Coffee, Sugar, Shrimp,
Textiles, Chemicals, Electricity
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Thesis Due to the unsettling similarities
between the overwhelming U.S. involvement with
both Israel and El Salvadors government and
military groups as seen through aid money,
intelligence and tactical training, and death
squad atrocities, hundreds of thousands of
guerrilla youth and noncombatant civilian lives
have either been tragically lost or irreparably
damaged causing an insurmountable obstacle for
all future generations to come.
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El Salvador Support for Thesis
- The FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation
Front) was a rebel insurrection group formed
specifically to overthrow the Salvadorian
government because of the stark division between
social classes. The small minority of wealthy
landowners, essentially, had control over the
economy and main food crops, therefore the
lower class was largely unemployed and starving.
- Orphaned peasant children as young as ten
and eleven years old were joining the FMLN The
civil war in El Salvador-like many wars
throughout the world- is fought largely by
teenagers. Their lives are violent- and often
tragically short (Larmer 1).
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Continued El Salvador Support . . .

• The U.S., fearing a Central American surge in
  communism after Castro took over Cuba in 1959,
  fed El Salvador more than 3.2 billion dollars
  over an eight year period. Over 1 billion went
  directly to military equipment and training for
  the Salvadorian army to fight against the FMLN/
  guerrilla groups.
• The Salvadorian military, alone, could not
  stand against the guerrilla attacks, therefore
  U.S. believed that it was imperative that they
  step in with aid and made it their duty to
  squash any possible communist uprising.
• ORDEN (The National Democratic Republican
  Order) was form by President John F. Kennedy
  under the guise of the Alliance for Progress
  during the 60s. ORDEN, originally

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Continued El Salvador Support . . .

• formed as security assistance, had American
  counterinsurgency specialists working with
  Salvadorian military officers to identify and
  control potential subversives.
• Led by Major Roberto DAubuisson, ORDEN became
  militant and was an integral part of the
  formation of death squads ORDEN provided the
  intelligence and occasionally the labor to
  identify campesinos peasants who would be
  captured, tortured, and killed before their
  bodies were dumped in highly trafficked areas
  (Chamberlain 4).
• American human rights groups noted that
  thousands of noncombatants in E.S. were either
  being killed or

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Continued El Salvador Support . . .

• wounded deliberately by the U.S.- trained
  Salvadorian military.
• The Salvadorian military estimates well over
  2,300 insurgent deaths (eleven out of twelve
  insurgents usually under the age of twenty) in a
  single year of the insurrection alone.
• Combined during the first decade of E.S.s
  civil war, over 70,000 lives had been lost. Along
  with this loss of human life, there is the
  possible loss of future generations to come.

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Israel support for Thesis

• Possibly, the most obvious similarity between
  U.S./ El Salvador relations and U.S./ Israeli
  relations is that of combined financial U.S. aid
  reaching well into the hundreds of billions of
  dollars.
• U.S. aid to Israel numbers 3 billion a year
  in grants and billions more in loan guarantees.
  In grants alone, it averages out to whopping
  500-a-year per-capita subsidy to Israel (Wolf
  2).
• Israels attitude toward the Palestinian people
  in the West Bank and Gaza Strip could be compared
  to that of the Salvadorian governments death
  squads the Nakbah refers to the catastrophe
  of 1948 when ten thousand Palestinians

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Continued Israel support . . .

• were killed and 700,000 were forced to leave
  their country (Berger 64).
• Young, uneducated Palestinian boys are quite
  often gunned down, made to be martyrs, for simply
  throwing stones at Israeli military.
• The future generations of the Palestinian
  people have been severely cut back, both
  population wise as well as the quality of life.
  The Palestinians are forced to live only for
  now because there is no guarantee of anything
  else.