On May 5, 1893, the birth anniversary of Karl Marx, a boy was born in La Libertad department of El Salvador: he was Farabundo Martí, leader of the Communist Party of El Salvador and the first Communist-led armed struggle in the Americas. While Martí is relatively unknown in the United States, he is a model servant of the people, a proletarian internationalist, and an overall important figure in the rich history of people’s struggle throughout the continent.
Farabundo Martí was born into a wealthy landowning family in El Salvador. From childhood, however, he questioned the stark inequality he saw between himself and the children of poor peasants living on his parents property. In 1920, as a college student, he was arrested by the US-backed Melendez dictatorship for protesting and deported to Guatemala after refusing to betray fellow activists. There, he lived and worked among laborers and indigenous communities, gaining firsthand experience of their struggles and deepening his political outlook.
By 1925, Martí returned to El Salvador after again being expelled from Guatemala, where he became a leading labor organizer, known for his powerful speeches and role in strikes during the country’s early labor movement. Because of his revolutionary activities, he was repeatedly imprisoned by the dictatorship and spent most of his time in prison. Despite this, Martí never gave up his deep commitment to the working class and revolution. Martí was respectfully referred to by his comrades as “El Negro” (“the black one” in Spanish), a nickname attributed to his dark complexion, which resulted from his work as a proletarian and his extensive travels throughout the country in support of revolutionary organizing.
In 1928, Martí traveled to New York at the invitation of the Communist International and became an important activist in the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas, working alongside Communists from different countries of the Americas – from the US to Haiti and Colombia – and would again be arrested by the New York police. Subsequently, he would join in the guerrilla war of General Augusto Sandino against the US invasion and occupation of Nicaragua, eventually becoming his secretary and linking up the revolutionary democratic struggle in Nicaragua with the International Communist Movement.
A year later, on March 30, 1930, Martí, alongside other advanced elements that emerged out of the people’s struggles, established the Communist Party of El Salvador, section of the Communist International, on the basis of five years of untiring work to unite the working class. Martí was elected the General Secretary of the Party.
By the early 20th century, El Salvador was a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country, with the majority land controlled by a small group of feudal landlords (including the so-called “14 families”) and the majority of the population, being peasants, bounded to land through coercive labor agreements and usurious debt. The integration of El Salvador into the world market as a coffee exporter also made it vulnerable to the Great Depression, which ravaged the nation: the sharp increase in unemployment, poverty, and hunger; the collapse of small and medium-sized merchants and workshop owners; the loss of small properties to big landlords and big comprador-bureaucratic capitalists in both rural and urban areas; together with repression and electoral fraud in the face of the people’s hardships, led to a growing political activity among the masses, culminating in the insurrection of 1932.
On January 22, 1932, tens of thousands of Salvadoran workers and peasants rose up in arms under the leadership of the Communist Party. In its manifesto to the Salvadoran people, the Party declared powerfully:
The arming of all workers and peasants and the establishment of the General Headquarters of the Red Army of El Salvador.The general insurrection of workers and working women until a government of workers, peasants, and soldiers is established.
Comrade workers: arm yourselves and defend the Proletarian Revolution! Railway workers: take the railways and put them at the service of the revolution!
Comrade peasants: take the lands of the large estates and farms, protect those who currently have a piece of land, and defend your revolutionary gains with weapons, without mercy for the rich!
Comrade soldiers: do not fire a single shot against revolutionary workers and peasants! Kill the chiefs and officers! Place yourselves under the command of the comrades who have been named Red Commanders by this Central Committee!
Comrades: let us form councils of workers, peasants, and soldiers!
All power to the councils of workers, peasants, and soldiers!
Farabundo Martí was the recognized leader of the revolution and its chief planner. Due to the inexperience of the Communists and lack of understanding of the protracted nature of the revolution, Martí was arrested in the nation’s capital alongside a majority of the Central Committee. Lacking a leadership, the insurrection was quickly suppressed by the Old State after 10 days. An estimated 30,000 Salvadoran civilians (4% of the population) were killed in the white terror that followed, which called for the killing of not only suspected participants of the uprising, but of those who were thought to have “not protested” against it. Most of the murdered were poor peasants and the indigenous Pipil people. Martí, along with other leaders of the Party was executed on February 1, 1932.
While the revolution only lasted 10 days, it remained a monumental event for both El Salvador and the entire Americas: it was the first attempt, although immature, for the working class to seize State power under the leadership of the Communist Party. At its heights, the revolutionaries captured multiple towns in the western parts of the country, establishing organs of political power, destroying big properties owned by US imperialism and big landlords, as well as liquidating hated class enemies.
Farabundo Martí gave his life for the cause of the Salvadoran people and the people of the world. In El Salvador itself, he would be remembered as a great leader and a source of inspiration for all revolutionaries. In 1970, the People’s Liberation Forces –Farabundo Martí (FPL) was established by Salvador Cayetano Carpio, raising the flag of revolution and Protracted People’s War in the name of Farabundo Martí. The People’s War in El Salvador would mobilize tens of thousands of Salvadoran people and control large swaths of the Salvadoran countryside. However, the revisionists within the FPL later assassinated Cayetano Carpio and murdered many Communists who refused to capitulate, ultimately surrendering to the Old State in 1992.
Today, El Salvador remains a semi-colony of the US imperialism with extreme inequality. The US continues to almost completely control the Salvadoran economy, enforced by unequal treaties such as the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement and the US-El Salvador Agreement on Reciprocal Trade. The US continues to be the biggest trading partner of El Salvador, flooding the country with surplus goods and capital. In the countryside, 73% of the land is held by the big landlords and multinational corporations according to official statistics.
Furthermore, the fascist dictatorship of Nayib Bukele has turned El Salvador into a state of siege under the pretense of combating crime, suppressing worker and peasant movements while opening up the country more to US imperialism. In April, Bukele eliminated income taxes for non-resident foreign investors in the Salvadoran securities market, which effectively gives US investors a more favorable position than national capitalists by removing the 3% withholding tax previously in place. In the US, many Salvadorans – who left the country due to reactionary violence during the People’s War and the subsequent poverty and instability – have become targets of the offensive on the immigrant masses.
As the revisionists in El Salvador (under the falsely named “Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front”, formerly representatives of the bureaucratic faction of the big capitalists) remain powerless in the face of fascism and US imperialism, genuine revolutionaries in El Salvador are again retaking Farabundo Martí’s revolutionary road, forging themselves in the struggle of the workers and peasants. Today, the teachings and example of Farabundo Martí remain vital and timely for all revolutionaries-in-formation: to live with, work with, and struggle with the masses, always loyal to the cause of revolution despite hardship and defeats, and never forgetting we are part of the same struggle of workers and oppressed people across the world.
