ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, in the wake of the social and political ferment spawned by the Cuban revolution, a second and potentially even more powerful current for change began to rock Latin America. One of the proponents of social activism on the part of Christians was a young Peruvian adviser to the Medellin bishops, Gustavo Gutierrez. Liberation Christianity played a significant role in fueling the revolutionary upheavals in Nicaragua and Guatemala. El Salvador in mid-1970s was, even by Latin American standards, a nation of stark inequity. A small enclave of light-skinned elites, numbering only a few hundred families, owned and managed a crowded country of some five million people. The civil war in El Salvador is profoundly significant because it became a laboratory for testing modern counterinsurgency techniques. US-sponsored plans to relegitimize the government were repeatedly hampered by the independent spirit of the Salvadoran elites, who balked at working with Duarte and favored their own political organization, the National Republican Alliance.
