The history of El Salvador revolves around one central issue-- land. In this, the smallest nation in Central America, land always has been a scarce commodity whose importance has been amplified by the comparative absence of precious metals or lucrative mineral deposits. Agriculture defined the economic life of the nation well before the reached of the Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s, and, contempt some modest advances in industrial capacity, agriculture has continued to dominate the nation's wealth, social structure, and political dynamics.

The unequal distribution of land in El Salvador can be traced directly to the Spanish colonial system, under which land title was unconditional in the crown. Those select individuals granted control of specified areas acted, at least in theory, only as stewards over the lands and peoples under their control. Although private property rights eventually were accomplished, the functional structure put in place by the Spanish was perpetuated well into the twentieth century by the landed oligarchy, with the assistance of the military.

The Salvadoran officer corps was not altogether unsympathetic to popular sentiment for reform of the oligarchic system. In the Salvadoran political equation, the economic elite's resistance to change remained a given. Therefore, efforts by the military to institute gradual, guided reforms--land reform chief among them--repeatedly ran into the brick wall of elite opposition and determine. It was not until 1980, when the officer corps allied itself publicly with the middle-class Christian Democratic Party, that substantive reform appeared achievable. By that time, El Salvador stood on the threshold of a major civil conflict between government forces backed by the United States and guerrillas supported by Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. This conflict catapulted the nation's internal conflicts onto the world stage. The future course of reform in El Salvador was thus uncertain, as the nation entered the 1980s burdened with the legacies of economic and social inequality and political exclusion of the middle and lower classes by the elite.