The meeting occurred in clandestine safety, likely in a church or a safe house in Havana. On October 10, 1980, representatives from five distinct Salvadoran revolutionary organizations—the Popular Liberation Forces, the Communist Party, the National Resistance, the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers, and the People's Revolutionary Army—signed a pact of unity. They named their new coalition after Farabundo Martí, a communist activist executed after a peasant uprising in 1932. This was not a political alliance but the creation of a single army, the FMLN. Its founding formalized a civil war that had been simmering for months.
The merger mattered because it consolidated diffuse rebel efforts into a credible conventional and irregular threat to the U.S.-backed military junta. Before the FMLN, actions were uncoordinated. Afterward, the Front could launch simultaneous nationwide offensives, most notably the "Final Offensive" of January 1981. The war that followed lasted twelve years, killed approximately 75,000 people, and saw horrific atrocities by government forces and death squads. The FMLN became a political mirror to the state, administering territory, running radio stations, and fielding thousands of troops.
A common misunderstanding is that the FMLN was a monolithic communist bloc directed from Moscow or Havana. In reality, it was a fractious coalition of ideologies, from Marxist-Leninists to social democrats, held together by a common enemy. Internal debates were fierce, and tactical disagreements were constant. Its lasting impact is found not on the battlefield but at the ballot box. The 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords ended the war and allowed the FMLN to transform into a legal political party. In 2009, it won the Salvadoran presidency, a former guerrilla commander, Mauricio Funes, assuming office. The army founded in secrecy became a pillar of a fragile democracy.