SUMMARY
FPL (Fuerzas populares de liberación Farabundo Marti, or Farabundo Marti Popular Liberation Forces) was an armed group active in the Salvadoran intrastate conflict over government. Following El Salvador’s independence in 1856, land ownership and income were concentrated in a small economic elite, commonly referred to as the “los catorce” (“the Fourteen”) oligarchy. Likewise, political power was monopolized by a small authoritarian and exclusionary regime, which was more or less dominated by the Salvadoran military. El Salvador’s political leadership was also geared towards protecting the interests of the economic oligarchy, rather than those of the broader population. In 1932, Salvadoran peasants led by Agustín Farabundo Martí rose up against the government in protest against this system; despite being brutally crushed, the 1932 uprising came to serve as a role model for subsequent leftist movements in El Salvador. The enduring oligarchic control over El Salvador’s economic and political spheres made the country susceptible to revolutionary leftist currents, which led to the establishment of several armed groups during the 1970s; it was in this context that FPL emerged. Ideologically, the group was described as revolutionary Marxist-Leninist, and it claimed to represent El Salvador’s economically and politically marginalized rural and working class population. FPL’s primary goal was to overthrow the Government of El Salvador, particularly the “Revolutionary Government Junta” that seized power via a coup in October 1979.
FPL was created on 1 April 1970, following a split within the Partido Comunista de El Salvador (PCS, or Communist Party of El Salvador). The split occurred over PCS’ focus on maintaining a peaceful political strategy to achieve change in El Salvador; the faction – led by PCS Secretary General Salvador Cayetano Carpio - that would form the FPL favored a more militant strategy. A proximate cause for the growing militancy among the would-be FPL was also the Government of El Salvador’s brutal crackdown on a teachers’ union strike in 1968, and the subsequent assassination and incarceration of several Communist union members. Carpio and several other PCS members also deplored the PCS Central Committee’s decision to support the Salvadoran government’s war against Honduras in 1969. Following its split from PCS, FPL expanded through the Salvadoran society by associating itself with various social movements, many of which were based at universities; FPL also spread via grassroots organizations originally set up by the Catholic Church.
Like many other Latin American revolutionary movements, FPL maintained a popular (or “mass”) organization as complement to its “core” political-military organization (that is, the FPL itself) in order to bolster its social support and relevance. This popular organization, created in 1975, was called Bloque Popular Revolucionario (BPR, Popular Revolutionary Bloc). BRP had emerged following a split within another popular organization called FAPU (Frente de Actión Popular Unificada, United Popular Action Front) over strategic and organizational disagreements. For example, FPL/BPR favored focusing on building support for the movement along El Salvador’s peasantry; the FAPU core group – which aligned itself with another revolutionary group called Resistencia Nacional (RN) - favored a support base organized around important labor unions. In 1979, FPL had around 800 fighters; BPR had approximately 60 000 members, which filled various non-combat functions.
In 1980, FPL merged with several other Salvadoran revolutionary groups – ERP and RN – to create the FMLN umbrella organization. After this, FPL ceased to exist as a separate actor in the UCDP data.
