Maximiliano Hernández Martínez

Who was Maximiliano Hernández Martínez?

Maximiliano Hernández Martínez was the President of El Salvador from 1931 to 1944. While he served as President Arturo Araujo's vice-president and defense minister, a directorate seized power during a palace coup and afterwards named General Hernández president of El Salvador.

Hernández Martínez was born in San Matías, La Libertad. In the 1931 presidential election, he was initially a candidate for his newly formed National Republican Party. He joined forces with Arturo Araujo of the Partido Laborista, running on a reformist platform. The ticket won the election, considered the first free multiparty election in Salvadoran history and the last for over half a century.

The reason for the coup was that the military personnel had not been paid their salary. This historical fact about the military not being paid is not always taught in Salvadoran schools; the causes of the coup d'état are often attributed to the fall in prices of coffee abroad. The reality is that officers were not paid and the Finance Minister had paid only the police, who remained loyal to the president. The army officers were angry and ousted president Araujo.

Hernández Martínez led a military government that actively suppressed opposition, most notably the Salvadoran peasant revolt of 1932 led by Farabundo Martí, where thousands of indigenous Salvadoran people were systematically murdered if they were suspected of collaboration with the communists. This massacre came to be known as La Matanza, and the specific number of victims is unknown but estimates range from 10,000 to 40,000 for the entire rebellion. However, there is a major American historian named Thomas Anderson, who says there were no more than 10,000 killed. He does accept that the military killed people without a judgement and that they were usually killed by a firing squad after being compelled to dig their own graves. Usually they only needed to be Indian, usually male, from the town, and listed as voters of the Communist party in that town. He censored the media, banned political opposition, abolished local elections, rigged national elections, and severely repressed dissidents. On the other hand, his regime expanded voting rights to women for the first time, enacted some social security programmes and attempted to intervene in the economy, in contradistinction to the economic policies of Liberal regimes that ruled El Salvador since the 1870s.