Jaime Abdul Gutiérrez Avendaño (5 April 1936 – 9 August 2012) was a Salvadoran military officer, statesman, and engineer.
Gutiérrez enrolled in the Captain General Gerardo Barrios Military School in 1954 and became an officer in the Salvadoran Army three years later.
Gutiérrez was one of the leaders of the 1979 Salvadoran coup d'état which overthrew President General Carlos Humberto Romero and ended 48 years of military dictatorship in El Salvador.
[2][3] After graduating, he entered the Salvadoran Army and was given the command of a section of the Fifth Infantry Regiment which was stationed in Santa Ana.
[9][10] The military officers who organized the coup promised to prevent "another Nicaragua" and sought to fix the country's economic problems.
The JRG consisted of three civilians—Mario Antonio Andino, the vice president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of El Salvador, Román Mayorga Quirós, a member of the Central American University, and Guillermo Ungo, a democratic socialist politician—and two military officers—Gutiérrez and Colonel Adolfo Arnoldo Majano, the latter of whom served as the JRG's chairman.
[15] Despite this, Gutiérrez and defense minister José Guillermo García sought to undermine Majano's influence in the JRG by denying his supporters important government positions and rank promotions; Gutiérrez and García believed that Majano was giving too many concessions to leftists.
[16] On 2 May 1980, Majano unilaterally ordered the arrest of Major Roberto D'Aubuisson for attempting to stage a coup d'état against the JRG.
[19] On 12 May 1980, the country's military officers met in San Salvador in order to "put an end to the duality in the leadership of the military institute command" ("poner fin a la dualidad en la conducción del mando del instituto castrense") between Gutiérrez and Majano.
[28] Although the final offensive ultimately ended in an FMLN failure,[29] but it did establish the group as a competent guerrilla opposition to the JRG.
At a rally celebrating the coup's anniversary, Gutiérrez denounced the bombing as a "criminal act [...] directed at the Salvadoran people" and claimed that it was conducted by "foreign saboteurs".
Despite his denouncement, Gutiérrez announced the end of the curfew implemented in January 1981 in order to influence the political climate prior to legislative elections scheduled to be held in March 1982.
[32] Magaña assumed office as president of El Salvador on 2 May 1982 and the JRG was dissolved in a peaceful transfer of power when all its members, including Gutiérrez, resigned.
He relinquished the position to Magaña as El Salvador's constitution mandated that the country's president would also be the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
[1] After the FMLN briefly captured and damaged the Cerrón Grande Dam in June 1984, Gutiérrez estimated that repairs would take around one month and that the government would have to spend up to US$80,000 per day to make up for lost energy production.
His participation in the 1979 coup is also debated: one view is he helped end the bloody dictatorship of Romero, another accuses him of removing a regime that had ensured stability since 1962.