Farabundo Martí

Who is Farabundo Martí?

Agustín Farabundo Martí was a Salvadoran revolutionary and political organizer whose name became synonymous with the country's twentieth-century left-wing movements. Born to a landowning family, he studied law, joined student and labor movements, and traveled through Central America and Mexico organizing alongside figures such as Augusto César Sandino in Nicaragua before returning to El Salvador as a committed communist organizer. He helped found the Communist Party of Central America and later the Salvadoran Communist Party, working among indigenous and peasant communities suffering from falling coffee prices and land dispossession during the Great Depression. In January 1932 he was arrested while helping plan an uprising of peasants and indigenous communities in western El Salvador; the rebellion that followed was met with a brutal military crackdown remembered as La Matanza (the massacre), in which thousands were killed. Martí himself was tried by a military tribunal and executed by firing squad in February 1932. Decades later, the country's main leftist guerrilla coalition and later political party took his name, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN).

Sources: Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo Lauria-Santiago, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932 (2008) · Roque Dalton, Miguel Mármol (1972)