Civilian Unrest During the War

Civilians bore the brunt of the war. No place was safe, innocents were caught in the crosshairs of the dueling armies, their homes were destroyed and their businesses ransacked. In the following pages, we will take a deeper look into what life was like during the war.

The war was long with many failed efforts of obtaining peace. In 1987 the Central American peace accord was signed but the fighting and destruction did not cease. The air force bombed several villages which set back plans to resettle about 5,000 refugees displaced by the civil war.

Fighting would consume cities for hours, days or even weeks on end. In the city of Mejicanos, rebel and government forces battled for seven days straight, destryoing most of the city and killing anyone who had not fled. Citizens returned after the rebels had been pushed out of the city to find their homes reduced to rubble and corpses littered in the streets. It is cases like Mejicanos which revealed the true cost of the war, civilian blood.

Esther Cassidy produced a film about the civil war called Enemies of War in which he captured what life was like during the war for Salvadoran people. Margarita Acosta de Alas, whose husband was a FMLN fighter described what life was like for her family. They lived in a constant state of fear during the war. Margarita described how the people of her village were uprooted whenever Salvadoran soldiers invaded their homes. Margarita told the filmmakers that, “As many as 15,000 soldiers would invade. Every living thing would die...The most we ever had was eight or fifteen days without the army coming.”