Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Irregular Warfare 101
- Part One The American Revolution to Chasing Sandino, 1776–1930s
- Part Two The Cold War, 1940s–1989
- Part Three Latin America and the Cold War, 1950s–1980s
- 20 From Guatemala, 1954, to Cuba and the Bayof Pigs, 1961
- 21 Guatemala, Post-1963
- 22 Cuba, Post-1963
- 23 Intermezzo
- 24 Carter, Reagan, and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, 1979–1990
- 25 El Salvador, 1979–1992
- Part Four Post–Cold War, 1990s–2000s
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
25 - El Salvador, 1979–1992
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Irregular Warfare 101
- Part One The American Revolution to Chasing Sandino, 1776–1930s
- Part Two The Cold War, 1940s–1989
- Part Three Latin America and the Cold War, 1950s–1980s
- 20 From Guatemala, 1954, to Cuba and the Bayof Pigs, 1961
- 21 Guatemala, Post-1963
- 22 Cuba, Post-1963
- 23 Intermezzo
- 24 Carter, Reagan, and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, 1979–1990
- 25 El Salvador, 1979–1992
- Part Four Post–Cold War, 1990s–2000s
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Let’s not delude ourselves, the Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on. If they weren’t engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn’t be any hot spots in the world.
– President Ronald Reagan, 1983We know very little about who exactly is out there in the hills. . . . We know that they receive arms through Nicaragua. But beyond that I don’t know very much.
– U.S. diplomatic official, San Salvador, 1982The insurgency was a many-headed thing – as most of these [Marxist insurgencies] were. You had the hard core real communists and you had the other guys who were land reformers and maybe naïve to go along with the really tough guys but who wanted change and who felt that the only way to change that system was to do it through violence.
– Reagan administration official Roger FontaineOn January 10, 1981, Marxist guerrillas operating in El Salvador’s rugged mountain ranges along the Honduran border announced the launch of their “final offensive” to overthrow the central government in San Salvador. A year earlier, disparate insurgent groups across the small Central American country had united to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), supposedly at the insistence of Fidel Castro, who demanded revolutionary unity before he would send support. Over 2,500 poorly trained Salvadoran guerrillas and a few hundred Cubans assaulted more than 80 Salvadoran armed forces’ Fuerza Armada de El Salvador (ESAF) positions. This was roughly the same number of insurgents that the Sandinistas next door in Nicaragua had when they unleashed the operation that ousted the widely hated Somoza regime. Given the Sandinistas’ success in 1979, many Salvadoran leftists and guerrillas assumed that the insurrection would quickly triumph. In fact, the FMLN scheduled the offensive for early January so that they would be able to seize power before the hawkish Reagan administration took office a few weeks later.
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- Information
- America's Dirty WarsIrregular Warfare from 1776 to the War on Terror, pp. 304 - 336Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014