The Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN) was officially established in El Salvador in October 1980 as a coalition of five left‐wing political factions – the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP), the National Resistance (RN), the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), the Popular Forces of Liberation (FPL), and the Central American Workers' Party (PRTC). Agustín Farabundo Martí was a communist organizer in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was executed along with other political leaders in January 1932 by the regime of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. Each of the five FMLN political forces maintained their own armed militias by late 1980. With this unification of the armed Left in El Salvador, the FMLN launched a general offensive against an unelected military–civilian junta in January 1981. The offensive failed to dislodge the prevailing regime after two weeks of heavy fighting on a national scale. However, the FMLN was able to secure rearguards in the eastern and northern provinces and garner enough civilian support to sustain an armed conflict against the government until a United Nations‐backed peace accord was signed and put into place in January 1992. The formation of the FMLN and its political existence since the peace accords demonstrate its indispensable relationship to social movement mobilization.