ABSTRACT
President Reagan states that the warfare in El Salvador is due to a concerted communist threat aimed at taking over Central America. Congressmen and others counter with the assertion that the warfare in El Salvador grows out of a long history of abuses of the civilian population by a brutal military, plus underlying social inequalities. Historians and political scientists try to discern what the true forces are at work in El Salvador. In the 1920s El Salvador, in common with many other Latin American nations, began to undergo an awakening of democratic spirit that threatened to wash away the last bulwarks of the oligarchical rule that the country had experienced since 1871. The tragedy of El Salvador is very real to many people. Some ascribe the problems there to the machinations of an international communist conspiracy which has seized upon that little country as its next target in its drive to conquer the world.
