ABSTRACT
The vast majority of the killings in El Salvador were committed by the Salvadoran army and the right-wing death squads. In 1979, a revolutionary group, the Sandinistas, took power in that country; they derived their name from the early twentieth century insurgent leader, Augusto Cesar Sandino, who fought a long, bloody war against United States intervention in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Sandinistas’ overall fortunes changed in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States. Once in office, Reagan became obsessed with defeating the Sandinistas, and the United States began channeling—first with the consent of Congress, and later illegally—funds to the contras, or counterrevolutionary fighters who worked to overthrow the government. By 1990, after ten years of war and tens of thousands of deaths, the Sandinista government called elections and lost to Violeta Chamorro, the widow of slain journalist Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, killed by Somoza forces in January 1978.
