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Adrian Esquino Lisco (died September 8, 2007) was an El Salvadoran activist and spiritual chief and advisor to El Salvador's indigenous community. [1] Lisco rose to international prominence during the Salvadoran Civil War when he called attention to human rights atrocities committed against El Salvador's indigenous peoples, who number about 1 percent [2] of the country's 7 million people. [1]
Adrian Esquino Lisco was born in Comarca San Ramon, in western Sonsonate Department, El Salvador. [1] He was of indigenous Nahua heritage. [1] Esquino Lisco's older brother had been killed during the suppression of the 1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising (also called La matanza) by the Salvadoran dictatorship. [1] Esquino Lisco was described as a short, soft-spoken man who was less than 5 feet tall. [1] He was a farmer and artisan by profession. [1]
Esquino Lisco's father founded the Asociación Nacional de Indigenas de El Salvador (ANIS) in 1954. [1] The main purpose of ANIS was to preserve the culture, customs and language of El Salvador's indigenous groups, including the Lenca, Maya and Nahua. [1] The organization generally worked behind the scenes to preserve El Salvador's indigenous heritage. Many indigenous Salvadorans considered it too dangerous to speak their native languages or even wear traditional clothing ever since the massacre that ended the 1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising. [1]
Adrian Esquino Lisco inherited the title of spiritual chief in 1976 [1] and became head of the Asociación Nacional de Indigenas de El Salvador. He attended a number of indigenous peoples conferences during the late 1970s throughout the world. [1]
Through Esquino Lisco's work, ANIS finally won legal recognition from the Salvadoran government of President José Napoleón Duarte in 1980. [1]
Adrian Esquino Lisco first appeared in international news coverage of the civil war when he began calling attention to the February 23, 1983 Salvadoran army-led attack on an indigenous farm cooperative in Las Hojas, El Salvador. [1] Salvadoran soldiers captured 74 male villagers, tied their thumbs behind their backs, and shot them. [1] A Salavadoran federal judge later reported just 18 dead. [1]
An El Salvadoran federal human rights commission, charged with investigating the Las Hojas massacre and other violations, did not accomplish much, reportedly because of pressure from the country's army. [1] The commanders of the Salavadoran troops at Las Hojas were given amnesty in the 1990s as part of a broader Central American peace plan. [1]
Esquino Lisco and others blamed wealthy Salvadoran landowners for the atrocity at Las Hojas. [1] Lisco accused influential landowners of using the army to destroy the Las Hojas cooperative. [1] Landowners often considered the farm cooperatives to be subversive, even Communist. Attempts at farm reforms were begun in the late 1970s, but were soon halted, leading to resentment from both peasants and wealthy landowners. [1]
Esquino Lisco once had an encounter with Colonel Elmer Gonzales Araujo, one of the leading commanders at Las Hojas. Gonzales Araujo reportedly told Lisco that his soldiers were defending themselves against "armed subversives." [1] Lisco later told The New York Times that, "I asked the army high command how guerrillas could die with their hands tied behind their backs." [1]
Esquino Lisco went to Washington D.C. at the height of the Salvadoran Civil War to draw attention to the war's atrocities. He soon found receptive supporters in the U.S. Congress, most notably Senator Ted Kennedy and U.S. Representative Joe Moakley. [1] His work in Washington put pressure on the Salvadoran government. According to Francisco Acosta, a Salvadoran activist based in Maryland, Lisco's lobbying of Congress led to the release of more than 100 political prisoners from government custody. [1]
Adrian Esquino Lisco died of complications from diabetes, including kidney failure, at a hospital in El Salvador's capital, San Salvador on September 8, 2007. [1] He was 68 years old.
El Salvador, officially the Republic of El Salvador, is a country in Central America. It is bordered on the northeast by Honduras, on the northwest by Guatemala, and on the south by the Pacific Ocean. El Salvador's capital and largest city is San Salvador. The country's population in 2023 was estimated to be 6.5 million.
The Armed Forces of El Salvador are the official governmental military forces of El Salvador. The Forces have three branches: the Salvadoran Army, the Salvadoran Air Force and the Navy of El Salvador.
The Pipil are an Indigenous group of Mesoamerican people inhabiting the western and central areas of present-day El Salvador. They are a subgroup of the larger Nahua ethnic group of Central America. They speak the Nawat language, which belongs to the Nahuan language branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. The Nawat language is distinct from the Nahuatl language, as Nawat is descended from the central Mexican Nahuatl, and spoken mainly in Central America. There are very few speakers of the language left, which is a reason for the current efforts being made to revitalize it.
The Nahuas are one of the Indigenous people of Mexico, with Nahua minorities also in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. They comprise the largest indigenous group in Mexico. They are a Mesoamerican ethnicity. The Mexica (Aztecs) are of Nahua ethnicity, as are their historical enemies, the Tlaxcallans (Tlaxcaltecs). The Toltecs which predated both groups are often thought to have been Nahua as well. However, in the pre-Columbian period Nahuas were subdivided into many groups that did not necessarily share a common identity.
Agustín Farabundo Martí Rodríguez was a Marxist-Leninist activist and a revolutionary leader in El Salvador during La Matanza.
Maximiliano Hernández Martínez was a Salvadoran military officer and politician who served as president of El Salvador from 4 December 1931 to 28 August 1934 in a provisional capacity and again in an official capacity from 1 March 1935 until his resignation on 9 May 1944. Martínez was the leader of El Salvador during most of World War II.
The culture of El Salvador is a Central American culture nation influenced by the clash of ancient Mesoamerica and medieval Iberian Peninsula. Salvadoran culture is influenced by Native American culture as well as Latin American culture. Mestizo culture, Afro-Latin culture and the Catholic Church dominates the country. Although the Romance language, Castilian Spanish, is the official and dominant language spoken in El Salvador, Salvadoran Spanish which is part of Central American Spanish has influences of Native American languages of El Salvador such as Lencan languages, Cacaopera language, Mayan languages and Pipil language, which are still spoken in some regions of El Salvador.
Doctor Manuel Enrique Araujo was a Salvadoran politician and physician who served as President of El Salvador from 1 March 1911 until his death on 9 February 1913 to his injuries sustained in an assassination attempt five days prior. Araujo is the only Salvadoran president to have been assassinated while in office.
Arturo Araujo Fajardo was a Salvadoran politician and engineer who served as the president of El Salvador from 1 March 1931 to 2 December 1931. He was overthrown in a military coup led by junior officers, and was forced to flee the country for Guatemala.
Osmín Aguirre y Salinas was a Salvadoran military officer and politician who served as the provisional president of El Salvador from 21 October 1944 until 1 March 1945. A Colonel in the Salvadoran Army, Aguirre y Salinas led two successful coups against the Salvadoran government: once in 1931 and once more in 1944. He left office in 1945, with the assurance that his successor in the next election would be Salvador Castaneda Castro. Aguirre y Salinas was later assassinated by left-wing guerrillas near his home in San Salvador at the age of 87.
La Matanza refers to a communist-indigenous rebellion that took place in El Salvador between 22 and 25 January 1932. After the revolt was suppressed, it was followed by large-scale government killings in western El Salvador, which resulted in the deaths of 10,000 to 40,000 people. Another 100 soldiers were killed during the suppression of the revolt.
The Salvadoran Civil War was a twelve-year period of civil war in El Salvador that was fought between the government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition or "umbrella organization" of left-wing groups backed by the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro as well as the Soviet Union. A coup on 15 October 1979 followed by government killings of anti-coup protesters is widely seen as the start of civil war. The war did not formally end until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when, on 16 January 1992 the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in Mexico City.
Nawat is a Nahuan language native to Central America. It is the southernmost extant member of the Uto-Aztecan family. Before Spanish colonization it was spoken in several parts of present-day Central America, most notably El Salvador and Nicaragua, but now is mostly confined to western El Salvador. It has been on the verge of extinction in El Salvador, and has already gone extinct elsewhere in Central America. In 2012, a large number of new Nawat speakers started to appear. As of today, the language is currently going through a revitalization.
The Lencan languages are a small linguistic family from Central America, whose speakers before the Spanish conquest spread throughout El Salvador and Honduras. But by the beginning of the 20th century, only two languages of the family survived, Salvadoran Lenca or Potón and Honduran Lenca, which were described and studied academically; Of them, only Salvadoran Lenca still has current speakers, despite the fact that indigenous people belonging to the Lenca ethnic group exceed between 37,000 and 100,000 people.
Salvadorans, also known as Salvadorians, are citizens of El Salvador, a country in Central America. Most Salvadorans live in El Salvador, although there is also a significant Salvadoran diaspora, particularly in the United States, with smaller communities in other countries around the world.
Vicente Alberto Mónico Masferrer was a Salvadoran essayist, philosopher, politician, and journalist best known for the development of the philosophy of 'Vital Minimum' or 'Vitalismo' in Spanish. He was born in Alegría, Usulután formerly Tecape, Usulután in El Salvador on 24 July 1868. He did not receive a formal education, instead claiming to have been educated by "the university of life," but he did travel widely, having lived in several Central American countries, as well as in Chile, New York, and several European nations. During his public career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of El Salvador, he served as an ambassador of El Salvador in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, and Belgium, and served as a professor in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Chile, and Argentina. Having served in the government of President Arturo Araujo, he was sent into exile in Honduras by the dictatorship of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez following the uprising of 1932 known as La Matanza, dying that same year on 8 September in the city of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Masferrer was well respected throughout his life, having earned the praise of such major Salvadoran figures as Arturo Ambrogi, Miguel Ángel Espino, Claudia Lars, and Salarrué.
The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, or the Silent Holocaust, was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the military regime. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians.
The Salvadoran military dictatorship was the period of time in Salvadoran history where the Salvadoran Armed Forces governed the country for almost 48 years from 2 December 1931 until 15 October 1979. The authoritarian military dictatorship limited political rights throughout the country and maintained its governance through rigged elections.
The 1931 Salvadoran coup d'état occurred on 2 December 1931. The coup overthrew President Arturo Araujo and led to the establishment of the Civic Directory. The coup began 48 years of military rule in El Salvador which lasted until the 1979 Salvadoran coup d'état.
Anarchism in El Salvador reached its peak during the labour movement of the 1920s, in which anarcho-syndicalists played a leading role. The movement was subsequently suppressed by the military dictatorship before experiencing a resurgence in the 21st century.