in honor of an assassinated union leader, it was the most brutal confrontation in the entire conflict, amounting for seventeen percent of the total casualties in ten years of warfare.

In February of that year, a far-right paramilitary organisation known as the "Maximiliano Hernández Martínez Anti-Communist Brigade" placed a bomb near the building of the Salvadoran Workers Union (Spanish: Unión de Trabajadores Salvadoreños).

In the same year, a series of demands from guerrilla towards the government were ignored shortly after the right-wing party ARENA's Alfredo Cristiani had been elected president of the country.

[5] In the midst of violent attacks coming from both involved parties with regional implications, presidents from Central American countries met in Tela, Honduras to discuss the armed conflict.

[2] On 31 October another attack was launched against FENASTRAS, resulting in ten dead and twenty wounded unionised workers, including Febe Elizabeth Velázquez, an important figure in the national labour movement.

Finally, on 9 November 1989, shortly after the FENASTRAS attacks, Villalobos announced an increase in warfare activities and a definite retreat from the dialogues to be held in Caracas at the end of the month.

The FMLN launched simultaneous assaults on important military posts in the major cities of San Miguel, Usulután and Zacatecoluca on 11 November 1989.

[1] At 7:00PM some 2,000-3,000 fighters from the guerrilla forces that made up the FMLN – the ERP, FPL, PCES, RN and PRTC – descended from the hills that for years had been their territories and into the cities for the first time since the beginning of the war.

The walls that divided the large and crowded apartment complexes were perforated by the guerrillas to make indoor tunnels and provide safe mobilisation.

[5] The FMLN rapidly penetrated into the densely populated urban centers in northern San Salvador: Soyapango, Apopa, Ayutuxtepeque, Cuscatancingo, Ciudad Delgado, Mejicanos and Zacamil.

[9] The fighting then spread as insurgent troops were mobilizing in Antiguo Cuscatlán, Huizúcar and Santa Tecla, also populous and economically important metropolitan areas to the west of San Salvador.

[5] The next day, the government issued a national curfew and media warfare started, as both parties knew the importance of having public opinion on their side.

[9] The UCA martyrs, as they became known, were considered by the Salvadoran right as the "brain of the guerilla" due to their affinity to Liberation Theology and their calls for peace and social justice.

Despite the situation, OAS secretary general João Clemente Baena Soares arrived in the country on 19 November to promote peace negotiations.

[10] Two days later, the insurgents assassinated Supreme Court president Francisco José Guerrero and ventured into the affluent neighborhoods Maquilishuat, Campestre, Lomas Verdes and Escalón.

[9] Arguably the most important event of the offensive was the murder of six Jesuit priests, and two others on the José Simeón Cañas Central American University campus on November 16, 1989.

[11][12] This event was universally recognised as a war crime and the international community, especially Spain, shifted its attention to El Salvador, because five of the six victims were Spanish citizens.