The response was not small.
That quote—whether exact or embellished—became the national epitaph. By 1979, the country is a powder keg. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has risen in the mountains, carrying the ghosts of 1932 with them. The United States, terrified of another Nicaragua, pours $1 billion a year into the Salvadoran military. And the Fourteen? They face a choice: reform or burn. el salvador 14 families
They choose burn.
And they are correct: it is a myth. There are not fourteen families today. There are fewer. The concentration has only intensified. The response was not small
By the time the peace accords were signed in 1992, 75,000 Salvadorans were dead. And the Fourteen? They lost almost nothing. A weak land-transfer program redistributed a fraction of the old coffee estates, but the families kept their banks, their import monopolies, their media outlets. They simply moved their money into offshore accounts and waited. Today, El Salvador has a millennial president, Nayib Bukele, who wears jeans and tweets about bitcoin. He is popular, authoritarian, and has crushed the gangs. But look closely at his cabinet, his donors, his in-laws. The names keep appearing. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has
Take the Kriete family (descendants of the old Fourteen through marriage). They own Grupo Agrisal, which controls hotels, shopping malls, and the largest private bank. They endorsed Bukele. The Salaverría family (another oligarchic line) owns La Prensa Gráfica, the country’s largest newspaper. Bukele has attacked them as “the old regime”—but he has not broken their monopolies.