he customary Salvadoran manner, groups of fifty were led to the back wall of the church of Asuncion in Izalco and against that massive wall were cut down by firing squads. In the plaza in front of the comandancia, other selected victims were made to dig a massive grace and then shot, according to one account, from machine guns mounted on trucks. In some cases, women and children reused to leave their menfolk and shared their fate. Today's Guerillas fight under the banner of the Farabundo Marti Front of National Liberation, also known as the FMLN, which officially started in 1979. Still today the FMLN exists, but I'll get to them a little later. General Martinez set a pattern for a military-oligarchical control of the country that lasted for the next fifty years. This meant that only presidents came from military ranks. After WWII, the economy of El Salvador improved slowly. Industrialization and an urban class working class took shape. Most of this occurred because of the Alliance for Progress, which developed in the 1960's. Also after WWII, the constitution of El Salvador, which was started in 1886, was reinstated in amended form. An organization called ORDEN was created. This was a Salvadoran security squad, which quickly grew to more than eighty thousand members. They were basically used as an elaborate system of internal espionage. The election of 1972 led to the death of about one hundred people. Napolean Durante, a Christina Democrat, and Guillermo Manuel Ungo, ran together basically expecting to be president and vice-president. They fought for human rights and social justice and an end to forty years of military dictatorship. But fraud by the military mad them lose the election. It was in March that protesting about the fraud of the election led to the deaths of the hundred people. After this happened Durante and many other political leaders were captured and tortured. In the years to come many other guerilla groups...
