The Beginning and the End: 1932
In 1932, the oligarchs delegated the management of their political future to the armed forces, a caste of social climbers, sons of failed small landowners, artisans, and professionals. That year, the people of El Salvador rebelled against the oligarchs’ tyranny. Hundreds of peasants grabbed their pitchforks, machetes, and a number of primitive rifles to take over their country. They were crushed in only a few hours. The president of El Salvador, General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, ordered the massacre of everyone who participated or could have participated in the uprising, or who simply did not fight back. The death count’s echo has resounded for decades: 30,000.
One of the revolt’s organizers, Miguel Mármol, a shoemaker who survived a firing squad, wrote: “I believe that the drama of 1932 is to El Salvador as Nazi barbarity was to Europe and what North-American barbarity was to Vietnam: a phenomenon which completely scarred the face of a nation...After that fateful year, we became another people, and thus, I believe El Salvador became another country. Above all, El Salvador is now the fruit of barbarity.”
Some call this the first Communist uprising of the western hemisphere. For all Salvadorans—oligarchs, workers, or peasants—it is a haunting specter. After the uprising, nothing was the same; all that existed before had vanished from beginning to end. The year 1932 serves to delimit history in the same way as B.C. and A.D. 1932 is A.M.: Anno Militari—in the year of the military.
Armstrong and Shen, 1983, p. 25.
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