Almost a hundred people congregated in the central plaza of Santiago Nonualco , between the municipality’s council building and the local market, to celebrate the leftwing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front’s (FMLN) victory in El Salvador’s presidential elections. It was the evening of 15 March 2009. The results had already been announced even before the local FMLN members had finished their electoral work at the polling station. Excitement among FMLN members had initially arisen when they saw their party leading in Santiago. Phone calls from cells by FMLN leaders in San Salvador and other neighboring municipalities, and from relatives watching TV, confirmed what would later be described in the national and international press as ‘an historic victory’ : with a tight 51.3 percent share of the electoral vote, the former guerrilla organization-turned leftwing party, headed by presidential candidate Mauricio Funes , an independent journalist, had triumphed over the rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). When the results had been officially released, Funes described this electoral victory as ‘a new peace accord ’.1 At the close of election day , once the counted votes had been placed under lock and key and were being guarded by local police officers, FMLN loyalists converged in Santiago’s central plaza despite the late hour. Since I had finished my duties as a volunteer international observer with the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsperson (PDDH) , I decided to join the celebrants to check out the municipality’s postelection atmosphere.
In the plaza, men and women of all ages shouted or wept for joy and embraced each other, still stunned by the election results, which concluded 20 years of ARENA rule and were unprecedented given the country’s long history of authoritarian, military, and conservative governments. They toasted the FMLN victory with sodas2 bought at the market’s lone open stall. Some FMLN loyalists danced the merengue, bachata, and cumbia to music drifting from speakers rented by the local FMLN leadership for the occasion. The dance music alternated with songs from the FMLN campaign whose choruses were familiar to all those congregated in the plaza: ‘nace la esperanza, viene el cambio’ (hope is born, change is coming), sung in euphoric unison by the merrymaking crowd. Children played and ran around, oblivious to the momentousness of the events, yet clearly sharing the contagious animation and joy of the adults. The plaza, which just two months earlier had been saturated with the blue and white colors of the country’s rightwing National Conciliation Party (PCN) to celebrate that party’s fourth successive victory in the municipal election , was now drenched in FMLN red. Red flags and T-shirts competed with the blue and white with which Santiago’s mayor had had the plaza painted as well as the tricolor ARENA flag that flew over the small FMLN-aligned crowd that night. After the municipal contest, the ARENA flag had symbolized the publicly undeclared support of the mayor, herself a PCN member, for ARENA in the presidential campaign.3
In the capital city of San Salvador , in contrast to Santiago, the event was celebrated on a massive scale, with a large, red-colored jubilant crowd pouring into the streets and converging in the city center in a gathering that recalled the post-Peace Accords celebrations in 1992. The celebration in Santiago was comparatively low key, even accounting for the municipality’s smaller size. Indeed, aside from the plaza, Santiago’s streets were deserted and the doors and windows of the municipality’s houses closed as on any other evening. The population from the cantones (rural areas of the municipality) had had to leave early via the transport that the FMLN, like other parties, had arranged to bring voters from the areas where the party enjoyed widespread support to Santiago’s polling station. Yet another important reason for the low turnout in Santiago’s celebration that night was fear—a fear that still suffused postwar political practices and relations at the time. This was especially so during the 2009 presidential election given the wartime polarities and imageries that had been resurrected by ARENA and the media, and the hostilities that had pervaded the country’s political life.
Throughout the electoral campaign , I had listened to the many conversations of the family that had embraced me as one of their own, as well as those of their neighbors, friends, and relatives, that spoke to the ongoing relevance of the wartime past. Friends would often advise members of the family not to express their political preference in public. On one occasion, sitting at the entrance of the family’s house, above which a large poster of Mauricio Funes hung prominently, an old friend of Marta,4 the family’s 70-year-old matriarch, lowered her voice to suggest that Marta not show such overt support for the FMLN: ‘If Ávila5 wins the election, you may regret it. You should be careful.’6 Although Marta seemed to disregard this kind of advice herself, she would repeatedly insist, in the intimacy of her home, that I should leave El Salvador if Rodrigo Ávila were to win, because atrocities had been perpetrated even against foreigners during the country’s war in the 1980s. ‘If this man wins, there is going to be matazón (a blood-bath)’, she would insist when I suggested that the situation seemed to have changed significantly since the war . In idle moments, she would sometimes recount stories of wartime atrocities perpetrated by the various police forces in Santiago so as to offer me evidence of the brutality of which the country’s rightwing was capable, given the precedent of the war.
Crucially, accounts of wartime violence often shifted abruptly to anecdotes of postwar violence . This may not come as a surprise given that homicides spiked in 2009—a 37 percent increase relative to the previous year.7 Yet, the abrupt shifts from wartime recollections to the postwar era and back were also symptomatic of the continuities that Salvadorans have traced between the two. Allusions to a possible connection between postwar homicides and the country’s political life, as had existed during the war, were never missing in conversations about present-day violence . As we watched news of daily homicides in the evenings, the adults in the family I lived with would often remark how unlikely it was that these homicides were all gang related, as the media consistently reported. Family members would suggest, as did many friends, relatives, and neighbors in the context of informal conversations, that something else must be going on, possibly a political link . Often they insinuated the persistence of ‘political violence ’ against leftwing Salvadorans, during but also beyond electoral seasons.
This book examines Salvadorans’ interpretations of postwar violence and offers an explanation for how these relate to their citizenship practices and political subjectivities . As an ethnographic project, it seeks to capture El Salvador’s ongoing problem of endemic violence at a particular point in time: the period surrounding the 2009 elections, about 17 years after the end of the country’s civil war . During the 2009 electoral season—when ‘change’ was revised, conjured, denied, or pursued—questions about what had changed and what had continued since the end of the war became relevant anew. It was also a point in time at which a tremendous sense of possibility emerged—one at which hopes for a different political project took shape. The expectations engendered by the FMLN’s electoral victory that year highlighted the pertinence of scrutinizing political life, especially at a juncture in which violence seemed to have become routine. Most importantly, ordinary Salvadorans often described the postwar moment as one of ‘neither war nor peace’ or one even ‘worse than the war’ (Montoya 2007; Moodie 2010: 84) . In invoking the war as a constant point of reference against which the present was assessed, such statements called into question the country’s transition to democracy . While hardly suggesting that the country’s ongoing violence implies a continuation of the war, ordinary Salvadorans across the political spectrum have shared the view that the end of the war has not brought peace and that democracy does not, by definition, imply an absence of violence. Their interpretations were confirmed by my observations of the country’s postwar political life.
Beyond the Gang Trope
Gangs have come to constitute the dominant and recurrent trope with which to explain postwar El Salvador’s problem of endemic violence, thereby justifying a spate of writing on them.8 Without clear future prospects or employment opportunities in a country wrecked by war, and with abundant war weapons available, many marginalized youth have turned to the...