cobbler and labor organizer named Miguel Mármol founded the Salvadoran Communist Party in 1930, a year after the global financial crash. He traveled the countryside to survey the damage, finding that peasants were “being treated like slaves, by slaveholders on plantations and estates,” and were forced to endure “starvation wages, arbitrary and inconsistent wage reductions, massive unjustified firings, evictions…and direct and fierce repression by the national guard in the form of imprisonment, expulsions from homes, burning of houses.”
