A Brief History Of Crime
Loyola University of ChicagoOne of the first major atrocities of the Salvadoran civil war was the rape and murder of three American nuns and one American missionary in December 1980.
None of this is new for El Salvador. In fact, the present all-out drug war can almost be considered a continuation of the country’s generalized political violence over the last four centuries.
From the time of its conquest by the Spanish in the 1500s, to its independence in 1821, El Salvador’s entire ruling class was European-born Spaniards. Even the full-blooded Spanish Creoles who were born in the country were kept out of its most important jobs.
When independence came, the Spaniards left, and the place fell to just 14 native families who divvied up the arable land between them and ruled with a rod of iron for 195 years (and counting).
From 1979 to 1992, the country collapsed into a civil war between this oligarchical, military-led government and a leftist guerrilla coalition saw at least 75,000 people killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced.
Unlike the U.S. Civil War, which was fought with huge armies waging set-piece battles, followed by a formal end, El Salvador’s conflict was the kind of thing that wrecks countries for generations with underground murders and state terrorism used to keep the outlying population in line.
The infamous 14 families owned virtually everything in El Salvador when the war started, with a vast population of campesinos (peasant farmers) beneath them to work the land as serfs.
By the time a horrified outside world noticed the slaughter and brokered a peace, El Salvador’s politics and economy (such as they were) had been utterly shattered, without completely dislodging the oligarchs.
Today, a few largely cosmetic reforms have left Salvadoran society stacked with its ruling class on top, a landed middle class underneath with just enough money to make them fodder for the country’s major kidnapping industry, and the rest of the 90 or so percent of the people, numbering around 6 million, remaining a landless underclass with a birthrate that only just dropped from a whopping seven children per woman in the 1960s to the present 2.21 (still above average).
