Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

La Matanza — El Salvador, 1932

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

La Matanza — El Salvador, January 1932

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. Every event below is named, dated, and sourced in line with author/institution and year. Where death figures vary between sources, the range is given and the disagreement is named; no figure is silently rounded up, and no single dramatic number is presented as settled when it is not. Primary witnesses are labelled as witnesses. The regime's own words, where quoted, are quoted as the perpetrators' record and labelled as such; they are never adopted as this file's own words for the people killed.

1. The ground: coffee, communal land, and the western departments

The killing of January–February 1932 fell on the western departments of El Salvador — Sonsonate, Ahuachapán, and parts of La Libertad and Santa Ana — where the country's coffee economy and its largest surviving Indigenous population occupied the same land. The people at the centre of this record are the Pipil, also called Nahua: Nahuat-speaking (in the modern revival spelling, Nawat-speaking) communities centred on towns including Izalco, Nahuizalco, Juayúa, Salcoatitán, and Tacuba, whose communal lands, municipal organisations, and religious brotherhoods (cofradías) had carried a distinct public Indigenous life into the twentieth century.

The documented preconditions, as the scholarship states them (Thomas P. Anderson, Matanza, 1971; Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, To Rise in Darkness, 2008; Virginia Q. Tilley, Seeing Indians, 2005):

• Through the late nineteenth century, Salvadoran governments abolished communal landholding and privatised the land, transferring much of the western highlands to coffee estates and leaving Indigenous and other rural labourers landless or nearly so, dependent on seasonal estate work.
• The collapse of coffee prices after 1929 cut wages and employment sharply; hunger and unemployment in the western departments were severe by 1931.
• Organising followed: unions, the Salvadoran Communist Party (founded 1930, with Agustín Farabundo Martí among its leaders), and Indigenous leadership rooted in the cofradías — among them Feliciano Ama of Izalco — overlapped in the same towns. Gould and Lauria-Santiago (2008) document, against an older separation of the two, that many Communist militants in the west were themselves rural Indigenous people, and that the movement that rose in January 1932 emerged out of that overlap.

2. Coup, elections, and the rising of 22–23 January 1932

On 2 December 1931 a military coup removed President Arturo Araujo; his vice-president, General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, took power at the head of the regime that would carry out the repression. In the municipal and legislative elections of early January 1932, Communist and allied candidates won or placed strongly in a number of western towns and were then barred from taking the offices they had won — a closure of the electoral road that Anderson (1971) and Gould and Lauria-Santiago (2008) both record among the rising's immediate causes. Martí and other organisers were arrested days before the rising, on 18–19 January 1932.

On the night of 22–23 January 1932, poorly armed insurgents — most with machetes and farm tools, few with firearms — attacked or seized municipal buildings and estates in a string of western towns, among them Izalco, Nahuizalco, Juayúa, Sonzacate, Salcoatitán, and Tacuba. The rising's own violence was real and is part of this record: local officials, landowners, and others were killed by insurgents, in numbers the scholarship puts far below the repression that followed. The armed rising was also brief. The army, with modern rifles, machine guns, and artillery the insurgents did not have, retook the towns within days; organised resistance was broken by about 25 January 1932 (Anderson, 1971; Gould and Lauria-Santiago, 2008).

Two leaders' deaths fix the sequence. Francisco Sánchez was executed on 25 January 1932. Feliciano Ama, the Indigenous leader from Izalco, was hanged in Izalco's plaza on 28 January 1932, in public, after his capture — an execution Gould and Lauria-Santiago (2008) document as a deliberate spectacle before the town's people. Martí, Alfonso Luna, and Mario Zapata were executed by firing squad in San Salvador on 1 February 1932, after a trial.

3. The repression — what La Matanza names

La Matanza — "the slaughter" — names not the rising but what the Martínez regime did after it. From 25 January 1932, army units, the National Guard, the National Police, and the Guardia Cívica, a civilian militia drawn substantially from the propertied classes, conducted reprisals across the western departments that continued for roughly two weeks, into February 1932 (Anderson, 1971; Gould and Lauria-Santiago, 2008). The documented pattern:

• In several towns, men were assembled in the central plaza or before the church and killed by machine-gun and rifle fire; mass graves were dug, in places by the condemned themselves, according to survivor testimony collected by Gould (more than two hundred interviews with survivors and descendants underlie To Rise in Darkness, 2008).
• [PRIMARY WITNESS] Miguel Mármol, a Communist organiser who survived his own firing squad and lived in exile, gave his testimony to Roque Dalton, published as Miguel Mármol (1972). His account is evidence of what he saw and survived; it is carried here as witness testimony, not as a count.
• People attempting to flee toward Guatemala were turned back: the Guatemalan government of Jorge Ubico closed the border and returned fugitives to the Salvadoran army (Anderson, 1971).

On 11 July 1932 the Legislative Assembly closed the legal account from the regime's side: Directive 121 declared the rebellion ended and granted, in its own words, "unconditional amnesty" (incondicional amnistía) to anyone — rebel, military, or otherwise — who had committed crimes of any nature in order to "restore order, repress, persecute, punish, and capture those accused of the crime of rebellion." No member of the forces that carried out the repression was tried for it.

4. The death toll — a range, printed as a range

The scholarly range carried by this record is 10,000 to 30,000 people killed (Anderson, 1971; Gould and Lauria-Santiago, 2008). The great majority of the dead were Indigenous Pipil (Nahua) of the western departments.

Three precisions are mandatory, and this file states them in terms:

• "30,000" is not a settled count, and this record does not carry it as one. It is the upper end of a range. No count was made; no nominal roll of the dead exists; mass graves were not enumerated by any commission. Any presentation of La Matanza that prints 30,000 as the established death toll exceeds what the sources support.
• The range itself is the scholarly disagreement, printed rather than resolved. Gould and Lauria-Santiago (2008), working from local documentation and survivor testimony, place the figure that can be safely documented toward the lower half of the range. Anderson's own later encyclopaedia summary (Anderson, in Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture) gives the spread of estimates in the literature as running from about 3,000 to 30,000, with about 10,000 as a reasonable estimate — a wider spread at its low end than the 10,000–30,000 range this record carries. The conflict between these scholarly presentations is printed here, not silently settled.
• The regime's figures are perpetrator-side figures and are labelled as such. Salvadoran officials of the period claimed far fewer dead; the chief of the National Police, Osmín Aguirre y Salinas, stated that no more than 6,000 to 7,000 people were "executed." Those minimising figures come from the apparatus that did the killing and are not averaged into the scholarly range.

Scale, for proportion only: El Salvador's total population at the time was roughly a million and a half, so even the range's lower end represents a mass killing concentrated, within weeks, in one region and falling overwhelmingly on one people.

5. Intent — stated as the sources state it

This record states the intent question exactly at the level the scholarship states it, and no further.

The repression was ordered and justified by the Martínez regime as an anti-communist operation: the destruction of a Communist-led rebellion and of the movement behind it. That is the intent the regime declared, and the scholarship records it as such (Anderson, 1971; Gould and Lauria-Santiago, 2008).

What the scholarship also documents is whom the repression in fact struck, and how the striking was done. The killing did not stop at identified insurgents or party members. In the western departments, Indigenous appearance itself functioned as a mark for killing: men were seized and shot for wearing Indigenous dress, for speaking Nahuat, for looking, in the forces' own practice, like the people of the rebellious towns — and whole towns' male populations were assembled and killed without any individual determination of participation (Anderson, 1971; Gould and Lauria-Santiago, 2008; Tilley, 2005). The dead were therefore, in their great majority, Indigenous peasants, most of whom had taken no part in the rising. An anti-communist repression in its declared purpose fell, in fact and in its targeting of appearance, on an Indigenous population as such. Whether the legal term for that conjunction is applied to 1932 is a question scholars and Salvadoran Indigenous organisations continue to argue; this record presents the documented facts and the sources' own statements, and applies no label beyond what the cited authorities apply.

6. The aftermath — a public identity abandoned under terror

The longest documented consequence of La Matanza is not in the death figures. Gould and Lauria-Santiago (2008) document, from survivors and their descendants, what the terror did to Indigenous life in the west across the following generations:

• Public Indigenous identity was abandoned as a condition of survival. Families stopped wearing Indigenous dress in public, stopped speaking Nahuat where it could be heard by outsiders, and ceased presenting themselves publicly as Indigenous — because in January 1932 those exact markers had been treated as grounds for killing.
• The cofradías and other public forms of Indigenous organisation were suppressed or driven from view; communal life contracted into the household.
• The demographic and cultural statistics of the following decades register the result: Salvadoran censuses and public life recorded a country in which the Indigenous population appeared to have nearly vanished — an appearance produced, as Tilley (2005) documents, substantially by this terror-driven concealment and by state classification, not by the physical disappearance of the people themselves.

The Nahuat language's near-loss in El Salvador — and its present-day revival work by the last generations of speakers' descendants — begins, on this documented record, in 1932.

7. No truth commission for 1932 — what carries the record instead

No truth commission exists for 1932, and this record says so plainly. El Salvador's one truth commission, the United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, was created under the Chapultepec Peace Accords, worked from July 1992 to March 1993, and published its report, From Madness to Hope, on 15 March 1993. Its mandate reached only "serious acts of violence that have occurred since 1980"; its scope was the civil war of 1980–1992. The events of 1932 lay six decades outside its mandate and were not investigated by it or by any successor body. No court has adjudicated La Matanza; the 1932 amnesty (Directive 121, §3 above) was the regime's own closure of the matter.

What carries the record of 1932 is therefore two things, and this file rests on both:

• The scholarly record — Anderson (1971), built on contemporary documents and press; Gould and Lauria-Santiago (2008), built on archives in five countries and more than two hundred survivor and descendant interviews; Tilley (2005) on race, classification, and the aftermath — supplemented by labelled primary testimony, above all Mármol's (Dalton, 1972).
• The Salvadoran state's own later commemorations. Izalco commemorates the rising and the dead annually on 22 January, with municipal support, at sites including El Llanito, a documented mass-grave site. On 12 October 2010, President Mauricio Funes, speaking at the inauguration of the First Congress of Indigenous Peoples, made the state's first apology of this kind, in his own words: his government wished to be "the first government to, on behalf of the State of El Salvador, of the people of El Salvador, and of the families of El Salvador, make an act of contrition and apologize to the indigenous communities for the persecution and extermination of which they were victims during so many years." The apology is a commemoration and an acknowledgment; it is not an investigation, and no investigation has followed it.

Sources for this file

Thomas P. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador's Communist Revolt of 1932 (1971), and Anderson's "Matanza" entry in the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (estimate spread and the Aguirre regime figure) • Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920–1932 (Duke University Press, 2008) • Virginia Q. Tilley, Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation, and Power in El Salvador (2005) • Roque Dalton, Miguel Mármol (1972) — primary witness testimony, labelled • Legislative Assembly of El Salvador, Directive 121 (11 July 1932) — the amnesty text, quoted as the regime's own record • United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, From Madness to Hope (15 March 1993) — mandate and scope (1980–1992) • President Mauricio Funes, address at the First Congress of Indigenous Peoples (12 October 2010) — the state apology, quoted • Izalco annual commemoration record (22 January; El Llanito).

Back to the Grades 10–13 · College · University classes All History Classes