H-Diplo | ISSF

l Salvador’s civil war claimed 75,000 lives, lasted 12 years, and devastated the country in ways felt to this day. Even so, U.S. counterinsurgency scholars often point to El Salvador as a success story and source of lessons for wars to come. Through military and economic aid, and the deployment of 55 advisers to assist with the counterinsurgency effort, the United States helped the San Salvador regime survive the onslaught of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in the early 1980s, undergo a process of democratization, reform, and military professionalization, and navigate eventual peace talks, leading to a resolution of the conflict in 1992. To many, the fact that FMLN’s armed revolution failed, that the peace held, and that the regime survived, and better yet democratized, without the United States ever engaging directly in combat, provides a tantalizing illustration of what Washington could achieve, again with limited effort, in other insurgency-threatened parts of the world.