ABSTRACT
Military involvement in politics was commonplace in El Salvador throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century El Salvador's economic and political system was characterized by concentration of wealth and power in the hands of few elite families supported by a strong military. By the late 1920s, the great depression had undermined the export basis of the economy and induced economic and political crisis for the regime. By the early 1930s the elites and the military moved to brutally put down an uprising by rural peasants led by Agustín Farabundo Martí. The peasant revolt was crushed by security forces, which in a few weeks killed between 10,000 and 40,000 people. This event, referred to as La Matanza, strongly shaped El Salvador's politics throughout the twentieth century. Beginning with General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez in 1932 an almost unbroken succession of military governments ruled for five decades. From the suppression of the peasant rebellion in 1932 until the civil war (with brief exceptions), military officers ruled, usually through a facade of tightly controlled elections won by the official party, the Partido de Conciliación Nacional (PCN), while the economic elites controlled economic policy. 1
