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Chapter 6
Reemergence of Civil Society
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Here in El Salvador there is a new model of agrarian reform: agrarian
reform through armed struggle. The inclusion of land in the peace agreements is
exactly the result of the use of arms.
–insurgent campesino, Las Marías 1992
By the end of the civil war, a vibrant rural civil society of militant campesino
organizations cooperatives claimed extensive areas of land in Usulután
and other contested areas. Their gradual emergence during the years of the military
stalemate reflected the changing terrain of the civil war, as the two armed parties
concentrated increasingly on building political loyalties among civilians rather
than only on overt military competition. This development posed a profound contrast
both to the historical absence of opposition organizations in rural El Salvador
(until the mobilization of the 1970s) and to the decimation of overt political
organizations in the extreme repression of the early 1980s.
In contrast to the insurgents’ success in building a dense network of
political organizations, government efforts to quell insurgency through agrarian
reform, ongoing repression, and the incorporation of campesinos into organizations
aligned with the Christian Democratic Party failed. While activists and their
organizations in some areas were demobilized by government policies, the reforms
did not reach two thirds of the landless campesinos, a subset of whom in contested
areas continued to mobilize. And even some beneficiaries of the reforms continued
covertly to support the insurgents. Campesinos headed the organizations that comprised
this dense network of associations, an unprecedented representation of the interests
of the rural poor.
Civil society comprises the wide variety of groups that lie between the family
and the state. Scholars have valued civil society for a wide range of contributions
to human society, including its roles as a safe haven from the state (and in some
patriarchal settings, from the family), as an incubator of democratic values under
authoritarian regimes, and as a space for personal development. Some have underlined
the difficulties of building the organizations which constitute civil society
under conditions of political repression (much less civil war); others have stressed
the contribution sometimes made by supportive state institutions to the emergence
and growth of civil society organizations even under authoritarian regimes (Fox,
1996; Lam 1996; Wade 1988; Ostrom 1996; and Skocpol 1996).
But neither the political space provided by inclusive, democratic institutions
nor the synergistic assistance of complementary state activities was at work in
the emergence of civil society in Usulután. Rather, such organizations
emerged in the shadow of civil war through the efforts of insurgent campesinos,
with the encouragement of their armed FMLN allies. One finds analogies to this
surprising development of dense organizational networks under politically repressive
conditions in the emergence of trade unions and township organizations in South
Africa during the last few decades of apartheid and in the growth of oppositional
trade unions in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In this chapter I analyze the re-emergence of overt opposition organizations during
the military stalemate. I first discuss how some reform cooperatives broke with
the government to found an opposition organization, then analyze the emergence
of insurgent cooperatives in Usulután despite the ongoing targeting of
cooperativists by government forces. I then describe the relationships between
the various organizations and the ERP, and how during the final year of the war,
the prospect of a negotiated resolution to land claims impelled further occupations
by a much wider group of campesinos in Usulután.
Continued
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