Hermanos Fi Al-Muqawama (Brothers in the Resistance): Schafik Handal and Forging Solidarity from Palestine to El Salvador in the 1980s

On March 24, 1981, Schafik Handal, the secretary general of El Salvador’s Communist Party and the international representative of the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front (FMLN), delivered a press conference in Beirut. Condemning “U.S. imperialism” and the role of “Israeli experts” in his country’s civil war, he spoke of the shared aspirations of the resistance in El Salvador and in Lebanon, Palestine, and the Middle East more broadly. As the son of Palestinian migrants to El Salvador, Handal emphasized the common circumstances that tied the two regions together and identified a shared common threat: the alliance of U.S. and Israeli arms, funds, and military training. This threat only increased as Ronald Reagan took office with an aggressively anti-communist platform and a commitment to upholding right-wing governance in Latin America and the Middle East. As such, the Reagan administration viewed Handal’s movements as particularly dangerous, interpreting further Middle East-Latin American revolutionary collaboration as a direct threat to U.S. policy. As the State Department surveilled Handal’s visit to Beirut with particular concern for his meetings with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), they emphasized Handal’s Palestinian heritage to incite fears of transnational “terrorism” in the twilight of the Cold War.

This presentation examines Shafik Handal’s visit to Beirut in 1981 and his role in building networks of resistance and solidarity between Central America and the Middle East. It also attends to the Reagan administration’s efforts to disrupt these connections and Handal’s insistence that the bond between him and his Middle Eastern counterparts was rooted in the shared experience of U.S.-Israeli violence. Drawing from primary sources and multimedia material in Spanish, Arabic, and English, I engage the growing subfield of Latin American-Middle East connections to assess the impact of Handal’s transnational organizing during the 1980s.