We feel a great patience. If we forget what we have suffered, it
will come again. We want to press for change, we can’t forget all we’ve
suffered.
–Campesina, Tenancingo, 1987
We have lived the deepest truth of the war.
–Cooperativist, Los Horcones, 1992
To explore why some campesinos rebelled in contested areas of El Salvador
before and during the civil war, my principal research strategy was to ask participants
in the insurgency why they supported it, and to ask others why they did not. For
revolutionary social movements, this is not usually done. The scholarly analysis
of peasant rebellions, revolutions, civil wars, and even some social movements
often relies on official or elite sources. In particular, as Nancy Bermeo (1986)
and Nora Kriger (1992) argue, the study of peasant insurgency often relies not
on the accounts of peasants themselves but on the memoirs of elite revolutionary
leaders who are usually from a different class or on macro-level data. One reason
of course is that peasant actors are often illiterate or semi-literate and leave
few written accounts of their actions, although oral sources in the form of stories
and songs may be very rich. Participant accounts, be they elite memoirs, the few
biographies of peasant participants available (which were often dictated to journalists
or other literate interlocutors), or other accounts based on oral histories, rarely
address social science concerns of how representative the narrator is or whether
alternative accounts better explain available evidence.
In the absence of participant accounts, one alternative in studying historical
instances is to infer the logic of insurgency from the “prose of counterinsurgency”
(Guha 1983b): the records of judicial, colonial, and other governmental authorities
are read for insight into subaltern motives and beliefs. Not all states engaged
in counterinsurgency produce the kind of records that facilitate such a rereading
of official sources, however. Before and during El Salvador’s civil war, those
suspected of subversion by government agents were only in extraordinary circumstances
processed by courts or other judicial bodies. Police and other security forces
left few records of detentions, torture, or disappearances. (Nor were records
of the Salvadoran military detailing particular operations available at the time
of the writing of this book.) Of the few such records that existed, many were
destroyed in order to render postwar investigation of human rights violations
and other abuses of power more difficult. While human rights organizations kept
records of violations as best they could, their records of rural events are very
incomplete. Given conditions in the countryside, records exist only for those
events that occurred where witnesses willing to report abuses resided. Such witnesses
(often local priests or nuns) would have to run the risk of reporting an abuse
by telephone and then meeting a human rights investigator locally, or of traveling
to human rights offices in San Salvador. As a result, most violent events in the
case-study areas went unrecorded. [1]
Nor does survey data provide much help in analyzing the course of the civil war.
While a few surveys of households in contested areas were done by government agencies
or other researchers for various reasons toward the end of the war, they usually
gathered data on the composition of households, whether homes had access to potable
water and schools, and the sources of income. In any case, residents’ willingness
to respond to questions concerning the history of the war in their own community
and their own participation or not in political violence depends on a relationship
with the researcher that is more personal than is possible in survey research.
The civil war in El Salvador offers the opportunity to analyze grass-roots accounts
of revolutionary participation using methods similar to those frequently used
in the study of ordinary social movements. This book draws principally on open-ended
interviews with rural residents, both participants and nonparticipants in the
insurgency, in the Tenancingo and Usulután case-study areas. (I defer detailed
discussion of the criteria for their selection to the following chapter.) In this
chapter I discuss the challenges of ethnographic research in areas of political
violence and the strategies I pursued to meet them as well as possible.
Social Processes of Memory Formation
Non tutto quello che si racconta in questo libra è vero; ma tutto è stato veramente
raccontato. [Not all that is recounted in this book is true, but everything
truly was so recounted.]
Alessandro Portelli, Biografia di una Città (1985: 18)
Continued
[1] While the report of
the Truth Commission contains much information on certain high-profile human rights
cases and lists thousands more in the annexes to the report, the coverage of Usulután
is strikingly poor, apparently because the ERP did little to encourage residents
to report violations to the Commission. |
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