Organización Democrática Nacionalista

ORDEN, or Organización Democrática Nacionalista (National Democratic Organization) was a Salvadoran paramilitary organization founded under the military rule of Julio Adalberto Rivera, headed by José Alberto Medrano. ORDEN helped control the 1972 elections, in which reform-minded José Napoleón Duarte lost to Arturo Armando Molina (of Rivera's party, the Party of National Conciliation (PCN)) due to fraud.

ORDEN was originally established in 1961 as a civil defense apparatus, composed of army reserve units and commandeered peasants. According to the Human Rights Institute of the Central American University, one of ORDEN's principal functions initially was to identify and eliminate purported communists among the rural population. Under Colonel Jose Alberto Medrano's command, ORDEN was transformed into a highly organized militia force, with military officers in command at the department level, non-commissioned officers coordinating actions from municipal centers, and many members drawn from army reservists and retired National Guard and Treasury Police officers. ORDEN functioned the intelligence-gathering instrument of the Salvadoran armed forces (FAES) while also acting in anti-insurgent operations and helping in military recruitment. Its structure was composed of senior military officers directly responsible to the president, and it functioned as the brain of a security network that spanned the entire country, providing information and coordinating the activities of death squads.

In 1965, all of El Salvador's military, paramilitary, and other forces were synchronized under one system: ANSESAL, or Agencia Nacional de Seguridad Salvadoreña (National Security Agency of El Salvador). A 1983 report said that one in five people in El Salvador were informers for ANSESAL.

After 1967, its existence and function was made public and it served to strengthen the base of support for the PCN, which won all the elections between 1962 and 1969. The importance of ORDEN lay in its being an organization composed of peasants and farmers responsible for repressing their own class. In 1967, the paramilitary organization mobilized over 100,000 people. After the election of Fidel Sánchez Hernández, also in 1967, the president took control of ORDEN.

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