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José Feliciano de Jesús Ama Trampa (1881 – 28 January 1932) was an Indigenous peasant leader, a Pipil from Izalco in El Salvador, who participated and died during La Matanza. Ama had his lands taken by the wealthy coffee planting family, the Regalados, during which he was hung by his thumbs and beaten.
José Feliciano de Jesús Ama Trampa was an Indigenous peasant leader, a Pipil from Izalco in El Salvador, who participated and died during La Matanza. Ama had his lands taken by the wealthy coffee planting family, the Regalados, during which he was hung by his thumbs and beaten.
Feliciano de Jesús Ama Trampa (Izalco, El Salvador 1881-1932) fue un cacique indígena de la etnia náhua de El Salvador, uno de los líderes de la Insurrección Campesina de 1932. Ama en 1932 Representación de la muerte de Ama en el Monumento a la memoria y a la verdad. Ama era un campesino jornalero.
Mar 9, 2015 · On January 22, indigenous and non-indigenous peasants declared themselves the rightful owners of the land, and alongside leaders such as Julia Mojica and Feliciano Ama, occupied villages and military barracks in the western departments of El Salvador.
- Background
- Preparations For Revolt
- Rebellion
- Subsequent Government Killings
- Aftermath
- See Also
- External Links
Social unrest
Social unrest in El Salvador began to grow in the 1920s. El Salvador had three distinct social classes: the upper class, made up of wealthy landowners; the middle class, composed of politicians and soldiers; and the lower class, which was composed of mostly peasantsand workers. In 1920, a group of communist and socialist students, teachers, and artisans, established the Regional Federation of Salvadoran Workers (FRTS), El Salvador's first trade union to organize rural and urban workers. One o...
Economic problems
In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the Salvadoran economy was heavily dependent on exporting coffee and coffee beans, which accounted for 75 to 95 percent of all of El Salvador's exports by 1929. Most of the coffee plantations, and the profits made by the plantations, were owned by the so-called "Fourteen Families". Due to the collapse of coffee prices worldwide as a result of the Great Depression in 1929, coffee producers were unable to cover the cost of producing coffee or pay their...
Planning and attempt for compromise
Due to the result of the elections, communist party leaders believed that they could no longer come to power through legal means, as Hernández Martínez's government effectively canceled the elections. The Communist Party of El Salvador was led by Martí and Mármol. Other communist leaders included Mario Zapata, Alfonso Luna, Rafael Bondanza, and Ismael Hernández. Hernández, who was a member of the International Red Aid, believed that the United States would support the rebels and mistake it as...
Government knowledge of the rebellion
Just before the rebellion, Juan Pablo Wainwright was arrested in Guatemala. Wainwright was a communist party member who was rallying support from communists in Guatemala to invade El Salvador to overthrow Hernández Martínez's government, and his arrest ended the possibility of a foreign invasion force from aiding rebels in El Salvador. On 18 January, Martí, Luna, and Zapata were arrested by the Salvadoran government, but the arrests were not made public until 20 January, and plans to attack t...
In the late hours of 22 January 1932, thousands of peasants in the western part of the country, armed with sticks, machetes, and "poor-quality" shotguns, rose up in rebellion against Hernández Martínez's regime.According to General José Tomás Calderón, an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 rebels were involved in the uprising. Rebels led by Francisco Sánch...
On 25 January 1932, reinforcements under Calderón arrived in Sonsonate and began reprisals against peasants, especially against ethnic Pipils, in western El Salvador, indiscriminately killing thousands of civilians in the process.In several towns, the entire male population was gathered in the town's center and killed by machine gun fire. The killi...
Death toll
Estimates of the exact death toll of the rebellion and subsequent government killings vary greatly; the figures most commonly estimated are between 10,000 and 40,000 dead. According to a Sonsonate resident interviewed by journalist Joaquín Méndez, the rebels killed approximately 2,000 people. Colonel Osmín Aguirre y Salinas, the chief of the National Police, stated that no more than 6,000 to 7,000 people were "executed". According to John Beverly, around 30,000 people—four percent of the popu...
Political effects
Following the mass killings, Hernández Martínez solidified his rule when the legislature confirmed his presidency in 1932. He also sought to legitimize his rule via presidential elections in 1935, 1939, and 1944, in which he was the only candidate. He exercised control of the country through force via the army and through friendly relations with the country's landowners and elites. Hernández Martínez was the country's longest serving president, serving from 1931 to 1944 when he resigned follo...
Effect on indigenous communities
Some scholars label the mass killings of Pipil as an ethnocide, since the army used indigenous appearance, dress, and language to help designate who should be targeted. As a result, in the decades that followed, Salvadoran indigenous peoples increasingly abandoned their native dress and traditional languages for fear of further reprisals. The events brought about the extermination of the majority of the Pipil-speaking population, which led to a near total loss of the spoken language in El Sal...
"1932, La Negación Indígena (2007)" [1932, The Indigenous Denial (2007)]. YouTube (in Spanish). Central American University. 25 January 2011. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
Jan 28, 2020 · El Salvador campesino Jose Feliciano Ama was hanged in the town square of Izalco on this date in 1932 during a ferocious repression of the peasantry.
José Feliciano Ama was an indigenous peasant leader, a Pipil from Izalco in El Salvador, who participated and died in the 1932 Salvadoran peasant uprising.
