El Salvador, 1960 — military coup conspiracy
Event Summary
This entry is coded 17 November 1960, three weeks after the actual overthrow of President Jose Maria Lemus. On 26 October 1960 a bloodless coup deposed Lemus and installed a six person Junta of Government of three officers and three civilians, led by Colonel Cesar Yanes Urias, which drifted leftward and promised free elections. The 17 November coding sits inside the wider Central American wave of plotting that followed.
A U.S. State Department intelligence note dated 14 November 1960 recorded that the leftward turning junta in El Salvador had been followed by attempts against the Ydigoras government in Guatemala and the Somoza government in Nicaragua, with Guatemala and Nicaragua both blaming Castro.
The Salvadoran junta itself was overthrown on 25 January 1961 by a conservative countercoup that formed the Civic Military Directory under Colonel Julio Adalberto Rivera, so the November window belongs to the brief and unstable junta interregnum rather than to a discrete named plot.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Sources
Editorial Note
Cross-Reference
Only one dataset carries it. One of the three reference datasets we check against carries this event; the others do not list it. That is not a contradiction — the datasets cover different periods and use different thresholds — but it means the record has had less outside corroboration.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
- Cline Center id
09211171960
How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.
Outcome and Target
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: President Lemus was already deposed on 26 October 1960; the leftward junta then ruled until the January 1961 countercoup.
Baseline coding: Plot discovered and disrupted before execution. Recorded leader fate: remained in office; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Baseline Source-Document Entries
Los Angeles Times
New York Times
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →