Black September

In May 1979, a small number of Salvadoran officers began to meet secretly to discuss pressing matters. They saw a growing internal leftist revolutionary movement that not only was raising large sums of money from kidnapping wealthy Salvadorans or foreign businessmen but also could put 200,000 demonstrators in the streets at one time via the allied mass organizations. They also looked at Nicaragua, where the Somoza dynasty was in its death throes, and saw the Carter administration was not rescuing the Nicaraguan National Guard, a rough equivalent to their own armed forces. They also believed that ruling strongman General Romero was fatally isolated from senior army officers as well as out of favor with the Carter administration because of what an American journalist called the “growing number of bodies turning up in trash cans and along the roads.” These officers soberly concluded that the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas and their supporting organizations could overthrow the Romero regime by the end of the year, so they decided to act before this “nightmare became a reality.”

Writing for the U.S. magazine Newsweek in late September 1979, journalists Steven Strasser and Stryker McGuire provided a sense of El Salvador's dire situation. The country had marked its independence day only a week before, but there “was little to celebrate” due to the widespread violence and fear. Leftist opponents of the General Romero dictatorship promised that the month would be “Black September,” during which the agitation against the regime would swell. This is some of what journalists reported: