1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising

Map of the Salvadoran districts affected by the uprising.

Date	January 22, 1932 – July 11, 1932
Location	El Salvador
Result	Uprising suppressed by government

Belligerents

Salvadoran rebels

Government of El Salvador (Armed Forces of El Salvador)

Commanders and leaders

Feliciano Ama
Francisco Sánchez

Maximiliano Hernández Martínez
José Tomás Calderón
Osmín Aguirre y Salinas
Salvador Ochoa
Saturnino Cortez

Casualties and losses

between 10,000 and 40,000, 25,000 dead

Coordinates: 13°39′58″N 89°09′58″W / 13.666°N 89.166°W / 13.666; -89.166

The 1932 Salvadoran peasant massacre occurred on January 22 of that year, in the western departments of El Salvador when a brief peasant-led rebellion was suppressed by the government, then led by Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. The Salvadoran army, being vastly superior in terms of weapons and soldiers, executed those who stood against it. The rebellion was a mixture of protest and insurrection and ended in ethnocide, claiming the lives of anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 peasants and other civilians, many of them indigenous people.

Social unrest in El Salvador had begun to grow in the 1920s, primarily because of the perceived abuses of the political class, and the broad social inequality between the landowners and the peasants,. The policies of the latifundia had left 90 percent of the country's land in the hands of 14 families, 'los catorce', who used the land for the cultivation of the cash-crop coffee. The unrest was only strengthened by the tremendous drop in the price of the coffee bean during the Great Depression accompanied by growing unemployment rates.

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