We shed blood all these years in order to buy land at market prices?
–Campesino activist, Tierra Blanca, 1992
In the course of El Salvador’s civil war, insurgent campesinos redrew boundaries
of class, culture, and citizenship. By the end of the war, insurgent cooperatives
occupied about a third of Usulután’s farmland. While desperately
poor, insurgent campesinos in most of the case-study areas enjoyed an unprecedented
autonomy from landlords and traditional authorities. They participated in a dense
network of insurgent organizations that defended land occupations against the
return of the landlords. The settlement which ended the civil war between the
two parties was a democratic political bargain: in exchange for laying down their
arms and abandoning their socialist objectives, the insurgent organization joined
the polity, which was to be reformed along liberal democratic lines. Over the
next several years, the provisions of the agreement were generally carried out,
including the first inclusive, democratic elections in 1994, despite resistance
on the part of the government to the implementation of some aspects of the agreement.
That positive outcome required an extended process of negotiations and ongoing
pressure on government officials (and to a lesser extent on the FMLN) by the United
Nations in its role as observer and verifier of the peace agreement and donor
countries in their capacity as funders of reforms. Since 1994, elections have
been held regularly and the FMLN has garnered an increasing share of political
power, becoming the leading party in the national legislature in the 2000 elections.
The required reforms to military, police, judicial, and electoral institutions
have been carried out to a significant degree. And in some areas of the countryside,
an unprecedented civil society continues actively to pursues campesino interests.
In this brief epilogue, I discuss the legacy of the war for the rural poor
of El Salvador, with particular attention to the case-study areas. What are the
legacies of the war-time process of mobilization and organization for the post-war
period? Is there evidence that the new patterns of participation and citizenship
endure in postwar El Salvador?
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