Timeline of the History of El Salvador
Our love for pupusas led us on a search to understand why so many people from El Salvador are coming to America. The timeline below takes us from artifacts found in Joya de Ceren, “El Salvador’s Pompeii”, a native village buried by ashes from a volcano eruption, where food and utensils were found as they were being cooked almost 2000 years ago, to present day.
Researching the history of El Salvador brought us to the unsettling reality that the smallest but most densely populated country in Central America has been struggling for a very long time, and many of those struggles can be tied directly to U.S. involvement over the past 50 years.
The nature of visual timelines is inherently reductive, but we hope the information below gives you a starting point for better understanding the history of a place that has given us the humble pupusa. If we have missed a point, or need to clarify any of the data provided, please let us know.
El Salvador
Timeline of history and food
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The Paleo-Indian peoples inhabited El Salvador as far back as 10,000 years ago. Their cave paintings can still be viewed in two towns in Morazán, Corinto and Cacaopera.
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The nomadic Pipils migrated from Mexico to El Salvador where they began an agrarian lifestyle that resembled the Mayans. They named their new home "Custacatlan" translating to "Land of the Jewels." They farmed the land cooperatively, growing chiles, papayas, beans, indigo, pumpkins, corn, avocados, guavas, tobacoo, elderberries, cotton, maguey, and henequen.
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Pedro de Alvarado and his brother, Diego invaded Cuzcatlan sparking the Spanish invasion. The Spainish massacred the Pipils and seized their land, destroying their temples and gods in the process. The remaining Pipil population was forced into slavery, and many women were sexually assulted and forced to bear children for the invaders.
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The Pipils quickly changed tactics from welcoming the mysterious and malintentioned Spaniards to actively working towards driving them away. Though they lacked weapons that rivaled the Spanish artillery, the Pipils managed to resist the conquistadors for fifteen years.
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Pedro de Alvarado, the first governor of El Salvador died. He was responsible for naming the country after Jesus Christ, "The Savior."
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When most of Central America was placed under a new Audencia of Guatemala, the area of El Salvador became controlled by the Audiencia of Panama for five years.
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Agriculture thrived in the 1700s, with indigo leading as the number-one export. The colony's agriculture and wealth was controlled by 'The fourteen families', a small group of landowning elite who enslaved indigenous people and Africans to work the land.
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The desire for independence was not lost on the Salvadoran people, and on September 15th they won independence from Spain, along with the rest of the Central American colonies. El Salvador initially joined Mexico after the win.
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El Salvador withdrew and formed the Federal Republic of Central America after withstanding Mexico's troops. A new constitution written by Father Jose Matias Delgado and Manuel Jose Arce was elected president.
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Even though Independence Day is still celebrated on September 15th, El Salvador left the federation, which collapsed with in a year of their departure.
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President Gerardo Barrios introduces coffee growing, after indigo was replaced by chemical dyes, marking an important beginning in El Salvador's agricultural history and also the continuation of oligarchical rule.
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General Tomás Regalado was elected president in 1895 and collected 6,000 hectares of coffee plantations. Following his term for the next 31 years, "coffee barons" served as presidents.
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The Salvadoran government severely repressed efforts made by the poor majority to remedy social and economic injustices by unionizing the coffee industry.
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Coffee prices collapsed as a result of the US stock market crash leading to even more difficult circumstances of the working class, especially the indigenous Salvadorans.
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Capitalizing on the discontent caused by the coffee price collapse, Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez lead a coup beginning his dictatorship, which lasted until 1944 and resulted in chronic political unrest.
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In January, founder of the Central American Socialist Party, Augustin Farabundo Martí, led an uprising of peasants and indigenous people. 30,000 people were killed as a result of the military's response of systematically killing anyone who had supported the revolt, or who looked or sounded indigenous. This horrific event became known as la Mantanza, or the Massacre. Martí was killed by a firing squad after being arrested.
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Before the 1960’s, Salvadoran farmers grew small amounts of sugarcane for personal consumption. The sugarcane economy grew in early 1960, as the amount of land dedicated to sugarcane grew 43%, resulting in a 114% increase in sugar products.
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The assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and election of Jose Napoleon Duarte as president sparked the civil war. It would last for 12 years.
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From December 11-13, 1981, members of the US-trained Atlaccatl Battalion massacred nearly 1,000 people –– 533 children, 220 men and 200 women –– trapped them in the local church and houses to shoot them en masse. The military still maintains that the masacre was a confrontation with the guerillas.
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The 12-year civil war ended. The death toll was 75,000 and 8,000 people went missing during that time.
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The nations agriculture industry was changed forever when the Salvadoran government signed the 'Free-Trade Agreement'. Foreign multi-national corporations tore into El Salvador, which was still recovering from civil war.
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Sugar cane became the most important crop, second to coffee, producing 5.5 million tons in 1999. Cane production grew 30% between 2001 to 2011 and the price per pound increased from $0.08 to $0.25.
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In January and February of 2001, two massive earthquakes struck El Salvador. January's earthquake was a 7.6 on the Richter scale and was the most powerful quake to hit Central America in 20 years.
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The Family Agriculture Program was created by the El Salvadoran Ministry Agriculture. This revitalized small-scale agriculture by granting the opportunity to plant corn and bean seeds across the country to 560,000 small farm families resulting in the highest ever production of corn seed supply.
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In 2015, the Alianza Cacao was formed to help create incomes for cacao growing families. They received $25 million in funding.
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The president of El Salvador announced its very first state of emergency due to severe drought caused by El Niño patterns, climate change. It has affected the majority population, especially farmers.
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El Salvadorans are among the thousands of people in the migration caravan fleeing their country from gang violence, sexual violence and poverty.
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If reading about the strife in El Salvador (or the plight of the migrants coming to the US) moves you, please consider donating to the International Rescue Committee, The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, or the National Immigration Law Center. And support your local pupuserias! Eat at Salvadoran-owned restaurants often and tip your servers well.
