Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front

The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) began as an alliance of five leftist guerrilla groups that fought a 12-year civil war against El Salvador's military junta. By the twenty-first century, however, the FMLN had transformed itself into a major political party.

A military dictatorship had risen to power in El Salvador in 1929, and in January 1932 the junta put down a peasant rebellion led by Farabundo Martí, executing him and massacring between 10,000 and 30,000 of his followers. In the late 1960s, resistance to the regime began to coalesce, and by 1972 the middle-class, centrist Christian Democratic Party was poised to win that year's presidential election. The military regime engaged in electoral fraud, however, and sent Jose Duarte, the leader of the Christian Democrats, into exile. Following the election, many began to seek other methods of opposing the dictatorship.

The election scandal fostered the creation of many leftist political groups, some of which advocated open rebellion. As the decade progressed, protests, demonstrations, and terrorist attacks against the ruling elite—particularly in the form of kidnappings for ransom—escalated. The government responded with increasing repression, and by 1979 roving government death squads were killing hundreds of people each month.

At the peak of civil unrest in 1979, leftist guerrillas formed an alliance, calling the new group the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. Five guerrilla groups were involved in the organization, and each group's leader sat on the equivalent of an executive committee. Joint operations were discussed among these leaders, and subjects of contention were voted on. The five groups collectively had an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 fighters.

In 1981 the FMLN launched a “Final Offensive,” an assault on the capital and security forces. The guerrillas anticipated that citizens would rise en masse; when they did not, FMLN fighters retreated to their strongholds in the countryside. The 1981 offensive proved that although the FMLN lacked the popular support to defeat the government, it could remain a long-term disruptive force. During the mid-1980s, helped by billions of dollars of U.S. military and economic aid, the Salvadoran government made some tentative moves toward democratization. The FMLN began to press for political recognition rather than military victory, and it put forward its peace conditions. In 1989, another large-scale FMLN offensive finally pushed the government into negotiations. A UN-brokered peace agreement was signed in January 1992. Out of a population of 5 million, 80,000 people had been killed during the 12 years of fighting.

The immediate post-war period was a difficult time of transition for the FMLN. The five organizations had retained much of their original character and diverse political ideologies, and the FMLN's attempts to re-create itself as a political party were adversely affected by a report issued by a UN Truth Commission, which called for some of its top leaders to be banned from political office. By 1997, however, the FMLN regrouped and doubled its representation in the nation's Legislative Assembly in that year's elections, becoming a major national party. In January 2009 the FMLN won the most seats of any political party in the Legislative Assembly; two months later, the FMLN candidate, Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena, was elected president.

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