A look at El Salvador

          The events leading up to El Salvador’s civil war are the results of a socially stratified country.  There was distrust toward the military-led government from the impoverished peasant class whose land had been taken.  Peasant uprising or other forms of protest resulted in brutal military force displays and massacres, for example, the infamous 1932 “La Matanza” in which up to 40,000 peasants were killed.  Tensions escalated with the oil crisis of 1973 which led to an increase in food prices and a decrease in the country’s agricultural output.  Cecilia Menjivar is a Professor whose studies focus on the effects of social and economic exclusion of U.S. bound migrants from Latina America.  In Menjivar’s opinion, the events that took place in El Salvador in the 1980s were due to a history of an imbalanced social structure and the demand for social justice that was further aggravated by external forces (2000).  The impoverished class had no food and no possibility of work through which to acquire food, consequently, the socioeconomic divide grew wider.  In the examined work, this pattern was perceived repeatedly in the repression of the Indian, peasant, or minority and their struggles to break from control of a dictatorial government ruled by oligarchy.

Menjivar, Cecilia. 2000. “Background to Migration.” Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America.