background with facts about civil war in El Salvador?

Answer 1

Check a local library, or an online search for the background, with facts, on the Civil War in El Salvador - begin with the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion National (FMLN).

Answer 2

On October 15, 1979, the Revolutionary Government Junta (JRG), a group of military officers and civilian leaders, ousted the right-wing government of the President, General Carlos Humberto Romero (1977–79). The leader of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), José Napoleón Duarte, joined the junta in March 1980, leading the provisional government until the elections of March 1982. In an effort to project a more moderate image, the JRG initiated a land reform program and nationalized the banks and the marketing of coffee and sugar. PDC leaders including Duarte also pledged to end human rights abuses from the military and affiliated death squads.

However, the JRG was torn by internal divisions, institutional pressure from the military, and a continuing insurgency from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The extreme Right viewed moderates in the new government as Marxist sympathizers, and death squads linked to the junta continued to orchestrate a campaign of terror against armed and civilian opponents alike, targeting not only suspected FMLN sympathizers but local PDC leaders as well.

One of the most infamous death squad assassinations occurred when the Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, was murdered in 1980 after having publicly urged the U.S. government not to provide military support to the Salvadoran government. Romero, the most high-profile critic of the military dictatorship, was shot dead by agents of the government while officiating mass on March 24, and his funeral was the scene of a massacre by government snipers and bombers. Forty-two mourners were killed. Carlos Mauricio, a professor of biology at the University of El Salvador, was also kidnapped by death squads in June of 1983.

Post-war investigations found that Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, head of Military Intelligence at the time, had ordered Romero's assassination. Romero's death was a spark for a full scale civil war. The country's opposition united and in October of 1980, five anti-government organizations formed a major military resistance known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), named after national hero Farabundo Martí, executed in 1932 by National Guard.