"The Perks and Costs of Being a Palm Tree": FMLN Internationalism and the Hemispheric Lefts during the Salvadoran Civil War

From 1981 through 1992, the Salvadoran State and Army fought against the leftist guerrilla organization, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), in a gruesome civil war that engulfed the Central American nation. Although rooted in national realities, the war in El Salvador quickly became an epicenter of the global Cold War, drawing attention and involvement from state and non-state actors who sought —by influencing El Salvador— to shape broader regional and international dynamics. In turn, Salvadoran insurgents capitalized on foreign involvement to further their own bids for political power. Since its birth in 1980, the FMLN sought out legitimacy and support from regional and global powers of differing ideological persuasions and managed to forge alliances with numerous revolutionary governments, European social democrats, United States activists and progressive congressmembers, the Mexican government, and the Non-Aligned Movement, to name only a few. This paper will examine the FMLN’s internationalism as it pertained to relations with four distinct groups in the hemisphere: the Castro regime in Cuba, the revolutionary FSLN government in Nicaragua, the liberal Mexican State of the 1980s, and U.S activists challenging the Reagan administration’s involvement in Central America. It explores how Salvadoran revolutionaries pursued the support of these distinct “lefts,” and in turn examines why these would-be FMLN allies each came to believe that supporting the Salvadoran revolutionary movement would help further their own national interests. Finally, this paper grapples with the limits of leftist internationalism by discussing how the FMLN’s ideological flexibility, necessary to foster solidarity with these distinct “lefts”, was highly contentious within the Salvadoran guerrilla leadership and disagreements over this strategy brought the organization to the brink of dissolution.