Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeffrey L. Gould is James H. Rudy Professor of History and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Indiana. His books include To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965, also published by Duke University Press. He is a co-producer and co-director of the documentary film Scars of Memory: El Salvador, 1932.

Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of An Agrarian Republic: Commercial Agriculture and the Politics of Peasant Communities in El Salvador, 1823-1914 and a coeditor of Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, also published by Duke University Press.

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""To Rise in Darkness "tells the story of the 1932 Communist-led uprising in El Salvador and the violent repression that followed, one of the most consequential events in Latin American history. As a prelude to the widespread terror that would sweep throughout Central America during the Cold War, this killing is beginning to receive scholarly attention, yet "To Rise in Darkness "will be the touchstone for future discussion of the 1932 revolt and massacre. Based on painstaking research and exhibiting a sharp conceptual focus, this book will influence scholarship on the relationship between political mobilization, ideology, and violence for years to come."--Greg Grandin, author of "The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation"

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TO RISE IN DARKNESS

Duke University Press

Contents

Preface.................................................................................................................................ixOne Garden of Despair: the Political Economy of Class, Land, and Labor, 1920-1929....................................................1Two A Bittersweet Transition: Politics and Labor in the 1920s........................................................................32Three Fiestas of the Oppressed: The Social Geography and Culture of Mobilization.......................................................63Four "Ese Trabajo Era Enteramente de los Naturales": Ethnic Conflict and Mestizaje in Western Salvador, 1914-1931.....................99Five "To the Face of the Entire World": Repression and Radicalization, September 1931-January 1932....................................132Six Red Ribbons and Machetes: The Insurrection of January 1932.......................................................................170Seven "They Killed the Just for the Sinners": The Counterrevolutionary Massacres.......................................................209Eight Memories of La Matanza: The Political and Cultural Consequences of 1932..........................................................240Epilogue................................................................................................................................275Afterword...............................................................................................................................281Notes...................................................................................................................................291Bibliography............................................................................................................................343Index...................................................................................................................................355

Chapter One

Outside the car windows ... the wonderful panorama unfolds. Over and over again we exclaim that all this is a perfect tropical garden. In places every inch of land has yielded to human hands ... It is a country worthy of a great people ...

Peering out of a railroad car during the mid-1920s, Wallace Thompson marveled at the Salvadoran countryside, and like others before him eagerly compared it to England and the United States. Foreign observers were thrilled with the image of tropical progress that they discovered in Salvador. Commenting on a trip from San Salvador to Santa Ana, Arthur Ruhl wrote, "The country was rich and carefully cultivated all the way, with cornfields that would make a Kansan gasp." Similarly, an observer found the paved streets, handsome buildings, and cafs of the capital radiant and "dazzling."

Agnes Rothery, a travel writer with an analytical bent, placed the smallholding peasant at the center of this portrait of peace and growing prosperity: "And as we continued our drive, up the seacoast to the capital, there is presented to us a complete picture of that agricultural structure on which the prosperity of this tiny republic so solidly rests. For about twenty years ago, the communal lands were distributed to the small landowners. At the same time all laws providing means of collecting money loaned or advanced to laborers were repealed. And every legal basis of peonage was wiped out. Thus was established a system of free labor-the foundation of any national prosperity. About seventy-five percent of the coffee is raised on property held by small landowners of the poor and the lower middle classes, and eighty-five percent of the national commerce is in their hands. So engrossed are these industrious and simple folk in their crops, on which their happiness and living depend, that they have no inclination for political agitation."

Rothery and others underscored how the development of the Salvadoran peasantry coincided with the development of "free labor" and how the peasantry itself supplied the bulk of harvest labor for the coffee plantations. This depiction of a harmonious process, whereby a reasonably prosperous smallholding class emerged from the privatization of communal and ejidal lands, is substantiated to some degree by the historical record. Certainly the process that derived from the state privatization of ejidal and communal lands in 1881 did not directly lead to massive subaltern resistance, in large part because indigenous and ladino peasants were the immediate beneficiaries of much of the newly privatized land.

In this chapter we explore the contrast between this widely diffused image of progress and social harmony in the second and third decades of the century and the intense levels of social and political strife during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Did societal fault lines exist that had been invisible to the observers? What factors upset this social equilibrium? Scholars usually cite the impact of the world crisis on the coffee industry as the direct cause of the dramatic heightening of social conflict in Salvadoran society. However, other Latin American societies experienced similar economic collapses without such severe social and political effects.

Between 1900 and 1929 El Salvador experienced three intense cycles of rapid economic growth, each based on a doubling or tripling of the price of coffee followed by a period of decline. These booms helped to develop a dynamic economy, much of it oriented toward the commercial production of maize, sugar, and silver in addition to coffee. To observers during the teens and early 1920s, El Salvador seemed like a "progressive" republic on the verge of becoming modern, with a large and prosperous smallholding class and formidable wealth accumulated by an agro-financial oligarchy and a rural bourgeoisie.

Structurally the equilibrium between smallholders and the larger coffee planters did not hold, as the peasantry suffered an agonizing decomposition during the 1920s. One direct result of this new stage of primitive accumulation was that two new classes emerged. Peasant laborers, "semi-proletarians" with inadequate land to support their families, gradually increased their commitment to hacienda and plantation labor beyond seasonal coffee picking. The second group was formed by colonos, or resident laborers, whom landlords provided with plots of land in return for labor service and a portion of their crops. Not only did the number of colonos increase during the 1920s but they also found their relation to the landowners transformed substantively. At the same time that the socioeconomic equilibrium became unstable, the Salvadoran agro-export lite was unable to establish elementary forms of hegemonic domination over these new groups, in part because of its own recent formation.

Hegemony, despite the multitude of meanings ascribed to it, is still a useful analytical concept. We start with the most commonly accepted meaning, "the active consent" of dominated groups to forms of governance which they do not control. To achieve active consent, dominant groups must obtain legitimacy as economic and political leaders. That legitimacy can only be developed through the construction of institutions and practices, a process that usually takes generations.

As several...