The Bay Area’s Central American Solidarity Movement.

THE BAY AREA'S CENTRAL AMERICAN SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT. During the 1980s, the movement to aid leftist forces in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and, to a lesser extent, Guatemala, known as the US-Central America Solidarity Movement, would grow to encompass communities across the United States. This movement had many sources, but San Francisco was one of the strongest. As participants in the Bay Area’s student strikes and anti-police struggles of the 1960s, Central Americans had long cultivated ties with the region’s multicultural left. Thus, as guerrilla movements inspired by the example of the Cuban Revolution began to gain momentum against right-wing governments across Central America, a leftist network had been prepared to cultivate support across San Francisco.

Latinx leftists, at the behest of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, formed El Comité Cívico Pro Liberación de Nicaragua in 1974 to gather support among San Francisco’s large Nicaraguan community for their home country’s insurgency. Similarly, in response to a state-led massacre of students on 30 July 30 1975 in the Salvadoran capital San Salvador, a group known as Friends of the Revolutionary Popular Bloc (BPR) formed in San Francisco to promote the efforts of the newly formed coalition of Salvadoran student, peasant, and teacher’s groups known as the Revolutionary Popular Bloc. These two solidarity groups held regular rallies and marches around San Francisco in support of Central America’s popular movements.

The political situation in Central America drastically changed in 1980, and the solidarity movement adapted to meet the needs of the moment. In July, 1979, Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle fled the country, leaving the Sandinistas triumphant and ready to build a new society. After the revolution, many Nicaraguan activists, formerly based in the Bay Area, travelled to Central America to assist in Nicaragua’s revolutionary process. At this time, other Bay Area activists formed new groups to assist in rebuilding the country from a distance, collecting material aid from San Francisco’s leftist communities for Nicaragua. In El Salvador, after a coalition of leftist guerrilla groups formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and a civil war began in 1980 to engulf the country. In response to these events, San Francisco’s Friends of the BPR asked its US citizen members to form their own solidarity group that could legally make political demands of the US government on behalf of the Salvadoran revolutionary movement. Those US citizens, many of them former FMLN members, would go on to form San Francisco’s Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) chapter, an organization with committees around the country. Reflecting the earlier iteration of the Bay Area’s Salvadoran solidarity group, CISPES maintained direct ties to the BPR, which in turn remained close to the Forces of Popular Liberation-Farabundo Martí (FPL), one of the guerrilla groups that made up the FMLN.

The presidential election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 also presented a new set of challenges to the solidarity movement. The United States provided millions to the Salvadoran government in aid, as well as military training, advisors, and weapons used to wage war against the FMLN. In 1981, the Reagan Administration began to fund counterrevolutionary guerrillas known as the Contras. The United States primarily covertly provided funding to the Contras through the CIA. Contra attacks forced the Sandinista government to institute a military draft and reallocate much of their budget towards defense, greatly undermining their attempts at social reform in the country.

Anticommunist attacks in each country remained different from the others, so too did the Bay Area’s attempts to combat them. Groups aimed to accomplish the difficult task of making Central America visible and important to Bay Area residents. In the case of Nicaragua, Contra attacks remained concentrated in the northern, Honduran border region, leaving a large proportion of the country comparatively safe. Thus the main tactic of the Sandinista solidarity movement was to send delegations of willing activists to the country to build infrastructure, harvest coffee and cotton, and build connections. Beginning in 1984, with help from the national organization the Nicaragua Network, the Bay Area Construction Brigade began organizing delegations to help build housing structures and schoolhouses on newly-established agricultural cooperatives. In 1985, Bay Area feminists and queers formed all-female and all-LGBT construction brigades. Throughout the decade, activists organized dozens of brigades that allowed Bay Area residents to witness the reforms of the Nicaraguan Revolution and the threat that the Contra War posed to their longevity. As brigade organizers hoped, activists’ direct experiences fostered an investment in the solidarity movement that moved residents to rally against Contra aid and talk with their friends and neighbors about the problems facing Nicaragua.

El Salvador’s civil war, meanwhile, had spread throughout the country. Salvadoran solidarity groups could not rely on delegations as a means of growing their movement. Area activists found other creative base-building tactics. In 1983, CISPES gathered enough signatures for a ballot measure demanding a halting of military aid to El Salvador to be a part San Francisco’s November election. Proposition N, while it passed overwhelmingly, did not end military aid. Yet, promoting the ballot measure gave activists a means to campaign on behalf of the FMLN, ultimately making El Salvador a local issue. The promotion of Proposition N caused local CISPES membership to grow exponentially. Activism occurred across the Bay in Berkeley as well. Also, in 1983, a local group known as New El Salvador Today (NEST) worked with Berkeley’s City Council to establish a sister city relationship with an autonomous, collectively-run village, with ties to the FMLN, known as San Antonio Los Ranchos. While this rebel community was eventually abandoned after repeated bombing attacks, Berkeley residents developed long-lasting ties to the village. In 1985, socialist Berkeley mayor Gus Newport, along with CISPES and NEST members, attempted to visit San Antonio Los Ranchos. Military bombing in a nearby community prevented them from doing so. But in 1987, NEST used the sister city relationship as a means of collecting the material aid necessary for village members to rebuild and resettle San Antonio Los Ranchos. Berkeley would inspire other cities to form sister cities with Salvadoran rebel communities for similar purposes.

In 1990, the Sandinistas were voted out of power, causing activists to support other causes. In El Salvador, after the civil war ended in 1992, some Bay Area activists assisted the FMLN as it began to participate in elections. While groups like CISPES continued into the twenty-first century, much of the Bay Area’s solidarity movement faded with the conclusion of region’s civil wars.

The story of the Chilean Solidarity Movement might be viewed as an adjunct to the Central American support organizations. The ousting of the elected Chilean president Salvador Allende by the CIA and Chilean rightists in 1973 forced thousands of Chilean Communists and their allies into exile. In New York and the Bay Area, many settled and took part in demonstrations that lasted a decade.

Cordova, Cary. The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Hobson, Emily. Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016.

Perla, Héctor, Jr. “Si Nicaragua Venció, El Salvador Vencerá: Central American Agency in the Creation of the U.S.-Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement.” Latin American Research Review 43:2 (2008):136–58.

Smith, Christian. Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

CIPES, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. Website. http://cispes.org/section/history-cispes