This is what I think: what was the war for? For the solution to the land problem.
We feel something already, and we're sure that we will be free -- that is a point
of the war that we have won. Higher incomes? Who knows? But that we not be seen
as slaves, that we've won.
–Member, Land Defense Committee, Las Marías, 1992 [1]
Before the civil war in El Salvador, almost everyone in Tierra Blanca worked on
the Hacienda California, a giant farm stretching from the edge of town across
the fertile coastal plain to the Bay of Jiquilisco ten kilometers to the south.
From their small houses in town or their shacks along the railway and roadways,
every morning the workers walked past the hacienda’s security post, past the gun
ports of the fortified bunker, and through the gated entrance. They continued
past the hacienda compound and the soldiers' quarters, past the barracks that
housed the migrant workers during the harvest, and on toward the vast cotton fields,
pastures, and salt flats beyond.
Before the war, the children of this town in southwestern Usulután had little
reason to doubt that when they grew up, they would join their parents tending
cotton and cattle and processing salt on the Palomo family’s vast and well-guarded
estate.
But in the mid and late 1970s, some residents of Tierra Blanca joined in local
protests and strikes, a few marched in the capital San Salvador, and a very few
collaborated with guerrilla organizations that would become the Frente Farabundo
Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation,
or FMLN). Unrest and violence deepened after 1976 when a coalition of landlords
and military hardliners brutally derailed a reformist government’s attempt at
a limited agrarian reform along the coastal plain. In 1979, workers struck for
higher wages on the Hacienda California, their last attempt to better working
conditions through what in many other countries would be considered normal forms
of worker collective action. National Guard troops billeted on the farm responded
with growing violence. As the country lurched toward civil war at the end of the
1970s, brutalized corpses of activists, relatives of activists, and suspected
activists appeared overnight where the coastal highway meets the roads going north
to the towns of San Francisco Javier and San Agustín. Many residents fled the
area for the relative safety of the town of Jiquilisco, San Salvador, and the
United States. In 1980, the besieged government expropriated several farms in
the area as part of an agrarian reform intended to quell the insurgency. Like
many large holdings, the Hacienda California was not included as the Palomo family
had pre-emptively subdivided the legal ownership of the property into nine parcels
owned by different family members (although it was worked as a single enterprise).
But as violence deepened in the area, a few residents joined the FMLN. Many began
covertly supporting the insurgent organization. The Palomo family retreated to
San Salvador and no longer visited or actively worked the farm. "It was bad luck
for the Palomo family," one elderly resident of Tierra Blanca (1992) told me,
"in 1979, the people rose up against all this injustice -- the origins of the
war lie in the holding of land in the hands of a few."
What accounts for the emergence of a powerful insurgent movement in an area where
quiescence had long been the response of the rural poor to social injustice? Why
did many poor people run extraordinarily high risks to support the insurgency?
Why did others decline to do so? This book addresses the puzzle of insurgent collective
action in the high risk circumstances of severe repression and civil war. While
material grievances, principally inadequate access to land, played a role, I show
that emotional and moral motives were essential to the emergence and consolidation
of insurgent collective action in the areas I studied. Like the land defense committee
member I quote above, insurgent campesinos in interviews repeatedly stressed
the importance of motives such as "that we not be seen as slaves."
Largely as a result of campesino support, the FMLN expanded in the early
years of the war. For the next decade, both the FMLN and government troops maintained
a presence in the region, the FMLN in small encampments in the rough terrain both
north and south of Tierra Blanca and the government in bases in Tierra Blanca
and the nearby towns of Jiquilisco and San Marcos Lempa. Minor fire fights were
frequent. Occasionally, one side or the other would mount a major offensive beyond
their bases, leading to renewed flight from neighboring hamlets to Tierra Blanca
and the town of Jiquilisco.
In 1983 residents began to cultivate the Hacienda California and neighboring
properties, planting corn and some beans to sustain their families. At first they
did so surreptitiously. After government control of Tierra Blanca was stabilized
in the following years, representatives of the Palomo family were intermittently
present in the area and residents paid rent for use of the land. In 1987, a few
dozen tenants formed a cooperative to strengthen their tenancy; they continued
to pay rent to the Palomos. In 1990, militant activists were elected to lead the
cooperative. According to a cooperative member, "we felt that it was unjust: many
people had died, yet the Palomos still received their rent and a few people still
controlled the land. So we made some new rules" (inteview, Tierra Blanca, 1992).
The new leadership affiliated the cooperative with a national organization with
close ties to the FMLN.
On May 5, 1991, cooperative members took over the hacienda, claiming it as the
property of their organization, the Cooperativa California. The Palomo family
responded by leasing it to a powerful commercial farmer, Francisco Guirola, but
when he attempted to enter the property, cooperative members blocked the entrance.
He returned two days later accompanied by the National Guard, but cooperative
members again blocked the entrance as journalists called in by the national organization
documented the confrontation. Emboldened by their success, a few months later
the cooperative took over the Palomos’ lucrative salt flats along the coast. In
defense of these and other occupations in the area, members of the Cooperative
California and neighboring cooperatives blocked the coastal highway in September
1991, actions made less risky by the presence of journalists and observers from
the United Nations who had been alerted by federation leaders (see photographs
in Chapter 6).
After representatives of the Salvadoran government and the FMLN signed an interim
agreement on September 25, 1991, in Mexico City sketching the terms of the final
peace agreement that would end the civil war, members of the Cooperativa California
began fencing the boundaries of the estate in a renewed and explicit expression
of the de facto transfer of property rights. In anticipation of the settlement,
both parties to the civil war attempted to preemptively settle supporters as claimants
to the rich coastal area. On January 28, 1992 – twelve days after the signing
of the peace agreement and a few days before the beginning of the formal cease-fire
that would confine government forces to their barracks – the National Guard and
the army’s Sixth Brigade evicted those attempting to occupy the nearby Hacienda
Concordia, another property leased by Guirola. The eviction sent two people to
the hospital in San Salvador as a result of what U.N. observers judged excessive
force. On January 30, the president and vice president of the Cooperativa California
were also arrested. In response to the detentions, local FMLN commanders suspended
the movement of their forces to the designated cease-fire areas, an action that
briefly endangered the peace process, until the activists were released. Cooperative
members eventually won title to a portion of the Hacienda California under the
terms of the peace agreement.
The civil war thus transformed the political, economic, and social landscape of
the Jiquilisco coast. Rather than the large estates protected by state security
forces that dominated the area before the civil war, in its aftermath new organizations
played powerful roles. Cooperatives controlled land, federations of cooperatives
articulated their needs nationally as well as locally, and the FMLN -- now an
opposition political party in an unprecedently competitive political party system
-- sought to represent their interests politically. In 1997 and again in 2000,
the FMLN candidate won the municipal election in Jiquilisco.
Some of these changes of the Jiquilisco landscape are captured in Figures 1.1
and 1.2, maps drawn for me by members of the Cooperativa La Normandía over the
course of two days in 1992. Color versions of the two maps are available online
at www.cambridge.org/us/features/wood. Figure 1.1 shows the Hacienda La Normandía,
a very large property (1,500 hectares) similar to the Hacienda California that
lies along its eastern border, extending from the coastal highway to the Bay of
Jiquilisco. Before the war, the farm was owned by the Del'Pech family, a major
coffee-producing family. Cotton was the principal crop, as indicated by the lollipop
symbol. The cow figures along the lower edge, teasingly called cucarachas (cockroaches)
by kibbitzing members of the cooperative, indicate the raising of cattle near
the mangrove thickets along the bay. Toward the upper left hand corner of the
map, the barracks of the National Guard (three or four members were always billeted
on the farm) and the airstrip are indicated. The permanent workers lived in the
cantón La Cruzadilla just above the map’s center.
The farm was expropriated in 1980 as part of the agrarian reform and a cooperative
of former employees was named by the military officer present. But the counterinsurgency
intent of the reform was not realized: some members of the cooperative continued
to covertly assist the FMLN, and the cooperative later joined an opposition organization.
As shown in Figure 1.2, at the close of the war the approximately 175 cooperative
members cultivated individual plots of corn, sesame, and, near the old farmhouse,
chile; many cooperative members raised a few head of cattle as well. Notably,
the National Guard post was gone. (The grid of properties -- colored pink on the
webiste version of the map -- along the right hand edge of the map indicates property
lost in 1989 as a result of a conflict with the government.) For cooperative members,
this was a way of life far different from their lives before the war. Such profound
changes were not limited to the Jiquilisco coast, as we see below.
The campesinos who recounted to me the taking of the Hacienda California,
those who drew for me maps of the lands they occupied in Jiquilisco and elsewhere,
and others like them throughout El Salvador redrew the boundaries of class and
reshaped political culture as the civil war raged around them. [2]
Few of them had ever engaged in politics of any kind. Just a decade
earlier the idea that they would write a chapter in the history of their country
would have seemed a cruel joke.
Insurgent Collective Action in El Salvador
The campesinos in Usulután and throughout El Salvador who participated
in land occupations and marches and provided logistical support to the guerrillas
ran mortal risks in doing so. Many paid the ultimate price. Just before and during
much of the war, covert death squads and regular military forces carried out assassinations
and disappearances with impunity throughout the contested areas. In interview
after interview during and immediately after the civil war, my respondents described
the loss of family members, friends, and fellow participants. One young woman,
a resident of the hamlet of La Peña north of Jiquilisco, told me,
Some armed themselves, others fled. We [those who stayed in the area] were all
seen as guerrillas. Every time we went to the coast, we were searched at the intersection.
1982 was a year of desperation, almost everyone left. My brother disappeared in
1982, one of hundreds who disappeared in 1982 and 1983 -- every day there were
two or three bodies at the intersection. After all these years of war, the dead
weigh heavily. (1992)
While her count at the intersection is higher than other sources suggest, multiple
sources document the large numbers of Salvadorans who died during the civil war.
More than 75,000 civilians (in a country of five million people) were killed during
the war, about one in 56 Salvadorans (1.8 percent), a figure comparable to that
of the US during the American Civil War (1:55) and of Britain in World War I (1:57),
and somewhat less than the figure for the Guatemalan civil war (about 1:40).
[3]
The death rate of civilians in El Salvador was 28 times greater
than that of civilians under the military regimes of Argentina and Chile where
human rights activists were said to run high risks. [4]
According to the Truth Commission for El Salvador (1993), the UN-sponsored organization
authorized by the peace agreement to document human rights violations during the
civil war, the vast majority (more than 85 percent) of the serious acts of violence
analyzed by the commission were carried out by state agents or those acting under
the direction of state agents against alleged supporters of opposition organizations.
In contrast to much of the violence in Argentina and Brazil, the violence often
occurred in public or the results were displayed in public places. [5]
Activists did not have to be guerrillas
or to work with the guerrillas to run the risk of being "disappeared" or killed.
The Truth Commission found that "any organization in a position to promote opposing
ideas that questioned official policy was automatically labeled as working for
the guerrillas. To belong to such an organization meant being branded a subversive"
(Truth Commission 1993: 311). Campesinos were frequent victims of the violence:
the human rights agency of the Archdiocese of San Salvador recorded 12,501 political
murders in 1981; of the 6,718 whose profession was known, 76 percent were campesinos
(Americas Watch and the ACLU 1982: 278-9).
The degree of risk of course varied from place to place and month to month. Violence
against politically active or suspect campesinos was most extensive and
arbitrary before and in the early years of the war (from about 1979 to 1983),
after which it declined significantly (in part a response to the conditioning
of U.S. assistance to the government on its human rights record). This decline
is evident in Figure 1.3 which traces maximum and minimum estimates of war-related
deaths (both civilian and military, including disappearances) each year. Nonetheless,
campesino activists were killed throughout the war; leaders of land occupations
were particularly vulnerable. Extensive and egregious violence recurred when the
regime felt threatened, as during the FMLN’s November 1989 offensive, when the
government’s Atlacatl Battalion, on the order of the High Command, executed six
Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper, and her daughter and the Air Force bombed
civilian neighborhoods of San Salvador.
Figure 1.3 War-Related Deaths, 1980-1991. Source: Seligson and McElhinney 1996: Table 1
It appears that some participants in high risk activism weigh the likely costs
and benefits carefully. Participants in the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign in the
US South ran high risks of bodily harm in challenging the long-standing practices
of racial exclusion in Mississippi. After hearing reports of severe violence against
initial volunteers in the campaign, one young American, a white Northerner in
the course of deciding whether or not to join Freedom Summer wrote in his journal:
What are my personal chances? There are 200 COFO volunteers who have been working
in the state a week, and three of them have already been killed. I shall be working
in Forrest County, which is reputedly less violent than Nesoba County. But I shall
be working on voter registration, which is more dangerous than work in Freedom
Schools or Community Centers. There are other factors which must be considered
too – age, sex, experience, and common sense. All considered, I think my chances
of being killed are 2%, or one in fifty. (McAdam 1988: 70-71)
Whether or not many Salvadoran campesinos engaged in such grim reckoning,
the risks of participation in the insurgency were evident in the patterns of widespread
disappearances of purported activists and the subsequent reappearance of many
of their tortured bodies.
Despite the high risk of insurgent activism, support by many – but far from
all – poor rural residents was an essential element of the FMLN’s military
and political capacity throughout the war, according to a wide range of analyses,
including that of U.S. military officers. [6]
What explains insurgent participation in this context of high risk? The relevant
literatures on revolutions, collective action, and social movements provide some
guidance but not adequate answers to the puzzle of high-risk collective action
in the Salvadoran context. [7]
Some analysts of revolutions and peasant rebellions suggest that class conflict
forms the basis of revolutionary mobilization. Karl Marx, for example, argued
that the shared experience of exploitation on the part of the industrial proletariat
would lead to socialist mobilization and revolution. Marx was of course mistaken
in his identification of the likely bearer of revolutions: poor rural working
people played essential roles in most social revolutions, while the industrial
proletariat mobilized for revolution in only a few. Which particular type of poor
rural resident played the preponderant role in various revolutions is much debated
in the literature, whether it was the peasant strictly speaking, or landless rural
workers, and so forth. In an analysis of agrarian revolutions, Jeffrey Paige (1975)
analyzes which configurations of landlords and cultivators result in what kinds
of rural protests. He concludes that peasants participate in revolution (as opposed
to isolated agrarian revolts) where landlords largely depend on income from land
and thus can make few concessions, and peasants depend on wages and are thus less
dependent on particular landlords for access to land.
Paige’s emphasis on the underlying conflict between cultivators and landlords
and the latter’s willingness to compromise or not certainly illuminates the Salvadoran
case. The Salvadoran civil war was, at the macro-level, a struggle between classes.
The longstanding oligarchic alliance of the economic elite and the military led
to a highly unequal society in which the great majority of Salvadorans were excluded
from all but the most meager life opportunities. The response of this oligarchic
alliance to the social movements of the 1970s and their demands for economic reform
and political inclusion was repression, not compromise. Very few of those who
owned coffee estates, agro-export firms, or other elite enterprises supported
the insurgency. Few urban professionals did so; the dozen urban intellectuals
who led the FMLN were the rare exceptions. [8]
Support for the FMLN was much more likely on the part
of poor Salvadorans than of middle and upper class people. The vast majority of
insurgent combatants were from poor rural backgrounds (McClintock 1998: 266-7).
But rural class position -- neither in the narrow sense as defined by access (or
not) to land or other assets, nor in a wider sense of relative income -- does
not adequately explain participation in the Salvadoran insurgency. Before the
war, El Salvador’s rural poor were highly heterogeneous in terms of their livelihoods.
Class differences among the campesinos of the case-study areas do not explain
differences in their participation. The evidence presented here from the case-study
areas shows that participants in the insurgency came from a variety of poor rural
class backgrounds. The many campesinos who joined government networks and
civil patrols or served as government informants came from equally diverse economic
backgrounds.
The "high risk activism" underlying the Salvadoran insurgency is puzzling not
just because the likely costs were so great, but also because the apparent benefits
were so limited. As Mancur Olson (1965) pointed out in his critique of Marx’s
approach, collective action of the type studied here yields benefits (when successful)
which are public goods-- their enjoyment does not depend on one’s having contributed
to their provision. In these cases, Olson famously concluded, forms of collective
action that are costly to individuals will not be sustained except where participation
is coerced or motivated voluntarily through the provision of "selective incentives"
available only to those participating. Extending Olson’s approach, Samuel
Popkin in The Rational Peasant (1979) argued that revolutionaries offer
such individual incentives (for Popkin, exclusively material benefits) to peasants
contingent on their participation, thereby possibly overcoming the free-rider
problem.
This selective incentive argument does not appear to hold for the case-study areas,
however. Before the war, few material benefits were won; rather, the consequence
of mobilization was violence rather than material gains (Chapter 4). Early in
the civil war, the insurgents offered very few benefits to civilian supporters.
From about 1984 to the end of the war, it was possible for campesinos in
contested areas to remain in the vicinity and farm abandoned land whether or not
they participated in the insurgency (Chapter 5). During that period, the material
benefits that the insurgents offered in the case-study areas -- access to abandoned
land and a degree of autonomy from the daily authority of landlords and the security
forces -- were available to everyone (non-participants as well as participants)
who remained in these contested areas whenever they were available to participants,
and thus did not have the requisite selective structure required to overcome the
obstacles to collective action. In short, "free-riding" on the insurgency was
possible -- indeed, most peasants in the case-study areas (about two thirds of
them) took advantage of this possibility and did not actively support the insurgents.
In contrast to Popkin, some scholars note that guerrillas often offer peasants
collective, rather than selective, goods, much as a state might do (Skocpol 1982;
Goodwin and Skocpol 1989; Wickham Crowley 1987 and 1991). Doing so, they argue,
is an essential element of the consolidation of revolutionary movements: guerrillas
offer land and other subsistence goods in areas under their control as an incentive
to joining or supporting insurgent forces. But how the provision of collective
goods in itself motivates individual participation in insurgent collective action,
thereby squaring the Olsonian circle, is not evident. The FMLN did indeed become
an alternative governing authority to some extent in some of the case-study areas
and did provide some collective goods. But campesinos in the contested
areas could enjoy these few goods without directly supporting the FMLN.
Some scholars emphasize the provision of protection from government forces as
a material benefit extended by revolutionary forces. Protection, or the hope of
some degree of it, motivates participation in insurgency particularly when government
violence does not target insurgents but is indiscriminate: in that case, joining
the insurgents would at least not increase the chance of government violence against
the insurgent and his family (Mason and Krane 1989). In extreme form, state violence
leaves "no other way out" than joining the insurgency (Goodwin 2001). In the case
examined here, protection motivated some campesinos to flee advancing government
forces with guerrilla units during the early years of the worst and most arbitrary
government violence. While some subsequently joined the ranks of supporters, many
others made their way back to their homes when the situation was calmer or sought
refuge in urban areas without further supporting the insurgents. More important,
during most of the war, the FMLN offered little protection from government forces
in the case-study areas. Even in their strongholds of northern Morazán and Chalatenango,
the FMLN could not protect residents from aerial bombardment and many civilians
went to refugee camps until the late 1980s (Bourgois 1982 and 2001; Pearce 1986).
Thus, protection per se does not explain the ongoing participation of those who
continued to support the insurgency.
Another approach to the puzzle of collective action suggests that pre-existing
social networks and a shared collective identity might provide frequent and multi-faceted
contact based on shared norms. Some close-knit communities have a high capacity
for collective action due to their cultural homogeneity and the "generalized reciprocity"
among their members: in this context of repeated, ongoing interactions, participants
impose sufficiently high costs on non-participants to ensure widespread participation
(Taylor 1988). A classic example of social networks comprising strong communities
comes from the U.S. South where the activism on the part of local civil rights
protesters was supported by the strong social networks and significant resources
of the African American churches and colleges (Morris 1984). Peasant communities
with strong horizontal networks are necessary for revolutionary mobilization,
according to Barrington Moore (1966). In contrast, James Scott (1976) emphasized
the erosion of vertical relations: marginal community members rebel when reciprocal
relations with landlords (the "moral economy") are threatened by the expansion
of markets or increased demands for resources by the state.
But long before El Salvador’s descent into civil war, its traditional peasant
communities had been disrupted by migration and the concentration of land in the
hands of the wealthy landlords. The displacement of Indians from indigenous communities
occurred from the late nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth
as coffee cultivation expanded rapidly as a result of increasing restriction on
communal forms of property. Indigenous culture in El Salvador virtually disappeared
after the brutal repression of indigenous rebellions, including the uprising of
1932 after which tens of thousands of indigenous people were killed. Traditional
patron-client relationships on estates were gradually replaced by highly-coercive
wage-labor relationships as cattle-raising and the cultivation of cotton and sugar
expanded in the aftermath of World War II. Local social ties were increasingly
weakened as increasingly landpoor campesinos sought work in distant labor
markets. Thus the breakup of the traditional peasant communities occurred too
early to explain the mobilization beginning in the 1970s.
Moreover, there is little evidence that pre-existing social networks before the
mobilization of the 1970s in El Salvador were sufficiently strong, or that the
norms, political culture, and collective identity of rural communities, were sufficiently
robust to enforce participation in a context of such high risk. Based on a 1973
survey of campesinos, Jesuit sociologist Segundo Montes (1986: 144-5) characterized
the rural poor as fatally resigned to poverty and misery, as venerating both civil
and military authority, and with little potential for class consciousness. Religious
practices such as the veneration of particular saints by lay societies generally
reinforced this fatalism (Cabarrús 1983: 144). Compared with the communities Scott
studied in South East Asia, there was little social solidarity and little evidence
of a "moral economy" of close reciprocal ties immediately before the 1970s mobilization.
Competition for land and jobs rather than solidarity characterized relations between
peasants before the war.
That a widespread social movement and later an agrarian insurgency did emerge
in El Salvador suggests, nonetheless, that a "hidden transcript" of discontent
and resistance (Scott 1990), in contrast to the public performance of deference
and conformity, may have been available to be tapped, despite the absence of strong
communities or social networks. Many landlords were willing to pay for the billeting
of members of the National Guard on their estates, a more draconian solution to
ordinary problems of social order than most societies provide, which suggests
landlords did not discount the possibility of collective action on the part of
their work force. To some extent, songs and legends kept alive the memory of the
heroes of past rebellions (Boland 2000). In interviews, a few campesinos mentioned
smuggling small amounts of coffee beans from the coffee estates before the war,
but many more mentioned the severe punishment such forms of resistance to landlords
(termed "weapons of the weak" by James Scott; Scott 1985) incurred.
Social networks of radicalized catechists and members of guerrilla groups did
play a role in insurgent collective action, coordinating local protest into a
national movement in the 1970s. But these networks were not based on strong antecedent
communities but instead emerged in the mid 1970s as a result of the new pastoral
practices on the part of some Catholic priests and organizations, on the one hand,
and initial organizing efforts by the then-tiny guerrilla organizations, on the
other (Chapter 4). The latter were initially outsiders; only as the government’s
repression intensified in the late 1970s did local residents join. [9] That the values, beliefs, social norms,
and political identities of these new networks could outweigh the risk of disappearance,
torture, and death is of course at the heart of the puzzle of Salvadoran insurgency.
In another approach to political mobilization, a necessary condition for the emergence
of social movements is the widening of political opportunity (McAdam 1982, Kitschelt
1986). As political opportunity increases, as when elite alliances weaken or relevant
legal provisions change, the potential benefits of collective action increase
or the costs decrease, or both. More precisely, movement organizers may seize
such changes in political opportunity to reframe perceptions on the part of potential
participants to encourage their joining. The challenge for this perspective is
to specify changes in political opportunity non-tautologically; that is, the observation
of political mobilization cannot itself count as evidence of the widening of political
opportunity (Goodwin and Jasper 1999).
There is no question that on some occasions, political mobilization in El Salvador
responded to variation in political opportunity. Marches and demonstrations disappeared
in the early 1980s at the height of repression. A vibrant rural civil society
emerged during the military stalemate of the mid to late 1980s, spreading outward
from guerrilla strongholds as activists observed the success of neighboring cooperatives
in occupying land and acted on the perception of widened political opportunity
to form their own cooperatives (Chapter 6).
But other aspects of the insurgency are puzzling from this standpoint. Political
mobilization increased in El Salvador in the late 1970s despite the narrowing
of what would seem essential components of political opportunity. Election
results were increasingly controlled, efforts at land reform by a reformist president
were defeated by hardline military officers, and repression by state security
forces was rapidly intensifying. Severe repression did not quell political mobilization
but resulted in significant numbers of erstwhile protestors becoming guerrilla
members or supporters, thereby deepening the conflict. President Jimmy Carter’s
emphasis on human rights in U.S. foreign policy and the Sandinista revolution
in nearby Nicaragua may have comprised a widening of political opportunity for
international alliances in the late 1970s, but it is difficult to see how that
would outweigh in the eyes of ordinary people the immediate experience of rising
state violence. Equally puzzling from the political opportunity perspective is
the fact that the widening of political opportunity since the signing of the peace
accord and the democratization of the political regime has been associated with
a considerable reduction in political mobilization despite significant enduring
grievances.
In short, classic explanations of revolutionary mobilization -- class struggle,
widening political opportunity, solidary peasant communities, pre-existing social
networks, and selective benefits -- do not adequately account for patterns of
insurgent collective action in El Salvador. Even as extended with these classic
explanations, Olson’s canonical framework appears, at best, to account for the
majority of Salvadorans who did not participate in the insurgency. It provides
little illumination about those who did.
In addressing this puzzle, I focus on civilian supporters of the insurgency. By
support for the insurgency, I mean the provision to the insurgents of information
and supplies beyond the contribution necessary to remain in contested areas, and
the refusal to give information and supplies to government forces beyond the necessary
contribution (everyone in the case-study areas felt they had to supply food and
water to combatants of either side when asked to do so). Some civilian supporters
also participated in local insurgent militia. I distinguish civilian supporters,
whom I term insurgent campesinos from those who did not make such contributions
(whatever their sympathies), the non-insurgents or non-participants, and from
the full-time members of the guerrilla army, the insurgent combatants. (Some insurgent
campesinos at some point also served as combatants.) Roger Petersen (2001:
8-9) distinguishes between three levels of support for insurgent forces: a first
level (+1) of unarmed and unorganized opposition to the regime, a second level
of direct support of or participation in a local armed organization (+2), and
membership in a mobile armed organization (+3). My analysis focuses on insurgent
collective action at the second level while tracing the processes that moved supporters
between the first and second and between the second and third levels ( "triggering
mechanisms") and the processes that maintained collective action at the second
level (an instance of his "sustaining mechanisms"; ibid: 13-5).
A satisfactory explanation of insurgent participation in the war will have to
account for several patterns in the insurgent collective action I observed in
the case-study areas of the municipality of Tenancingo, in the department of Cuscatlán,
and several municipalities in Usulután (Chapters 4-6). First, on the basis of
my interviews and observations of meetings of campesino organizations,
I show that participation was voluntary (with a few exceptions). Second, participation
was also widespread: my necessarily rough estimate is that about a third of campesinos
who stayed in the case-study areas actively supported the guerrilla forces
by providing intelligence, moving ordnance, and serving in part-time militias.
Third, the form of insurgent collective action evolved over time, from Bible study
groups based on the teaching of liberation theology in some areas of Usulután
and from covert guerrilla cells in others, to strikes, marches, and demonstrations
typical of labor and social movements, to covert support for the guerrilla organizations,
to participation in opposition organizations overtly allied to the FMLN. Fourth,
individuals supported the insurgency in different ways, and many moved in and
out of various forms and degrees of participation for a variety of personal and
political reasons. While some campesinos participated throughout the insurgency
and in a variety of forms of collective action, others joined only during the
military stalemate of the mid and late 1980s. Fifth, the end of the civil war
did not return political culture in Usulután and Tenancingo to the status quo
ante. Its legacy included new values, norms, practices, beliefs, and memories
that comprised new political identities and culture, reflecting the fact that
once-quiescent campesinos had for over a decade contested the authoritarian
practices of landlords and the state and asserted unprecedented claims to citizenship.
Given that two-thirds of residents of the case-study areas chose not to support
the insurgency, what explains the insurgent collective action of the other third?
Why did people so similarly situated in terms of their economic circumstances
before the war act so differently? And why did people in quite different circumstances
sometimes act so similarly? What accounts for these patterns of participation
and non-participation?
I sought an answer in interviews with approximately two hundred campesinos,
participants as well as non-participants, which I carried out in militarily-contested
areas of El Salvador between 1987 and 1996. My insurgent informants made it clear
to me that moral commitments and emotional engagements were principal reasons
for their insurgent collective action during the civil war. Before the war, many
participated in a social movement calling for economic reform and political inclusion.
Many did so because they had become convinced that social justice was God’s will
and that to act righteously was to participate. As government violence deepened,
some campesinos supported the armed insurgency. They did so as an act of
defiance of long-resented authorities and a repudiation of perceived injustices
(particularly the brutal and arbitrary violence by security forces). Participation
per se expressed outrage and defiance; its force was not negated by the fact that
victory was unlikely and in any case was not contingent on one’s participation.
Through rebelling, insurgent campesinos asserted, and thereby constituted
in their own eyes, their dignity in the face of condescension, repression, and
indifference. As state terror decreased, insurgent collective action spread across
most of the case-study areas once more as campesinos occupied properties
and claimed land for insurgent cooperatives. They did so despite their already
having access to abandoned land because they took pride, indeed pleasure, in the
successful assertion of their interests and identity, what I term here the pleasure
of agency. To occupy and claim properties was to assert a new identity of
social equality, to claim rights to land and self-determination, and to refute
condescending elite perceptions of one's incapacities. In short, insurgent campesinos
were motivated in part by the value they put on being part of the making of
history. [10]
The reasons advanced here thus differ in two ways from those emphasized in conventional
accounts of collective action. First, participant motivations were not limited
to canonical self-regarding preferences, such as material benefits, defined over
the consequences of one’s actions. To be sure, the desire for land is part of
the story: landlessness initially motivated some campesinos; recalcitrant
opposition to land redistribution motivated state repression; access to abandoned
land provided the autonomy that made possible insurgent collective action for
many; and moral outrage at the injustice of landlessness and the brutal measures
taken to ensure it fueled mobilization. But during the war, insurgent campesinos
did not act because they believed they had a reasonable chance of getting land
as a result of their own participation. Rather, reasons for which participants
acted referred irreducibly to the well-being of others as well as oneself, and
to processes, not just outcomes. Second, political culture -- the values,
norms, practices, beliefs, and collective identity of insurgents -- was not fixed
but evolved in response to the experiences of the conflict itself, namely, previous
rebellious actions, repression, and the ongoing interpretation of events by the
participants themselves. [11]
I marshal various kinds of evidence to support my interpretation of insurgent
collective action. The primary evidence for my interpretation is interviews with
nearly 200 hundreds participants in the insurgency, the vast majority campesinos
but also including mid-level FMLN commanders (most from campesino families),
and with non-participants, including campesinos, military officers, and
landlords. Nearly all of these interviews were lengthy; I interviewed some of
the respondents on various occasions over several years. I also use maps drawn
for me by insurgent campesinos in the Usulután case-study areas. I evaluate
(and dispel) alternative interpretations by comparing the pattern of insurgent
participation across five case-study areas, and by comparing the life-histories,
values, and beliefs of participating and nonparticipating campesinos. In
addition to various published and unpublished documents, I analyze data-bases
of electoral results and of the evolution of agrarian property rights. Finally,
I illustrate the central argument of the book with a formal model (Appendix).
The argument presented here thus draws on literatures -- on peasant rebellion,
revolution, social movements, and collective action -- often treated in isolation
(but see McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). The origin of a revolutionary peasant
rebellion is traced to an antecedent social movement, and the resolution of the
puzzle of collective action depends on emotional processes, moral perceptions,
and shifting political culture as well as on the emergence of insurgent social
networks and widening political opportunity. The account centers on the local
political processes of insurgency, such as the path-dependent consequences of
political violence and the assertion of agency by long subordinate people, and
treats changes in political culture as not just consequences but causes of further
insurgency.
I now turn to the history of El Salvador and the civil war for those unfamiliar
with the country. A short chronology is included at the end of the book.
Overview of the Civil War in El
Salvador [continued]
[1] Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations
are from interviews carried out in Spanish by the author.
[2] In referring to the poor rural residents
of El Salvador as "campesinos" (literally, of the countryside, campo),
I follow their own usage. The word is not well translated by "peasants" as many,
indeed most, of those who refer to themselves as "campesinos" are not owners
of smallholdings but merely aspire to be. Throughout this book, campesino
refers to a person who engages in agricultural activities (except of course owners
of properties who hire significant numbers of wage laborers) or, as an adjective,
to refer to organizations in which campesinos participate. Thus a campesino
may be a landless day-laborer, a permanent wage employee, or a farmer working
a smallholding. When distinctions between these different types of agriculturalists
are necessary for the argument, I make them explicitly.
[3] Seligson and McElhinny 1996: Table
3. Seligson and McElhinny compared more than twenty sources of statistics on war-related
deaths in El Salvador, including those of the Salvadoran military, the U.S. Embassy,
and various human rights organizations. They argue that the best estimate of total
civilian and military related deaths in the Salvadoran civil war is between 80,000
and 94,000, of which 50,000 to 60,000 were civilians (ibid: 224). So the standard
estimate of 75,000 deaths is a conservative one. The World Handbook of Political
and Social Indicators, the standard cross-national source for statistics on
political violence, seriously underestimates the level of violence in Central
America (see Brockett 1992 for a critique)
[4] Calculated from Loveman 1998: Table A1.
[5] It was not always the case that deaths
were publicly displayed: clandestine cemeteries were occasionally discovered.
For example, a cemetery containing more than 150 bodies was uncovered on May 24,
1982 at the Puerta del Diablo near the indigenous community of Panchimalco, a
dozen kilometers south of San Salvador (Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos
1982-1983: 1151).
[6]
Bacevich, Hallums, White and Young (1988). See also the analyses by three
U.S. congressmen (Hatfield, Leach and Miller, 1987), RAND’s National Defense Research
Institute (Schwarz 1991).
[7] What accounts for revolutionary mobilization
should be distinguished from what accounts for regimes that succumb to such mobilization
(such that a "revolutionary situation" leads to a "revolutionary outcome," Tilly
1993:8-10; Tilly 1978). Scholar who address this second question argue that less-institutionalized
regimes, termed "personalistic," "sultanistic," or "neopatrimonial," are vulnerable
to revolutionary overflow (Goodwin and Skocpol 1989; Wickham-Crowley 1989; Foran
1993; Goodwin 1994a and 2001); agrarian bureaucratic states are also vulnerable
(Skocpol 1979) The Salvadoran regime was significantly institutionalized, reflecting
the long-standing convergence of interests of economic and military elites, and
thanks to U.S. assistance, had sufficient resources to stave off insurgent military
victory.
[8] With the exceptions of Salvador Cayetano
Carpio and Facundo Guardado of the FPL, the top leaders of all five FMLN factions
were university students or professionals who embraced revolutionary politics
in the early 1970s (Wickham-Crowley 1992: 337-8; McClintock 1998: 251-60). The
emergence of revolutionary leadership, while a necessary condition for sustained
insurgency, is hardly sufficient, however: in many Latin American countries such
revolutionary vanguard groups failed to foment rural rebellion.
[9] An alternative network, that of the
Christian Democratic Party, played a role in the 1970s mobilization nationally
but was weak in the case-study areas and supported the government after the party
joined the government in 1980.
[10] The exercise of insurgent agency
of course had its negative legacy as well, particularly for those who participated
in acts of violence in the context of civil war where the policing of internal
loyalty takes on paramount value. Philippe Bourgois (2001) argues that some FMLN
combatants came to the difficult postwar judgement that not all their acts of
violence were justified, particularly those against supposed informers. In contrast,
judging by my interviews, the positive aspects of collective action appeared to
have dominated the experience of insurgent campesinos, few of whom served
as full-time members of the guerrilla army.
[11] On the endogeneity of preferences
generally, see Bowles (1998); of class consciousness, see Przeworski (1985).
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