| I became interested in El Salvador began in the
early 1980s when I worked as a volunteer para-legal and translator helping Salvadoran
refugees prepare applications for political asylum. I was disturbed by their accounts
of political violence and inspired by their resilience in the face of danger and
hardship. I was less impressed with U.S. accounts – both official and oppositional
– of the civil war. I eventually decided to resign my position teaching
physics in order to devote myself full time to social science research in general
and to research on the origins and resolution of civil wars in particular.
I first went to El Salvador in 1987 to study an unprecedented agreement negotiated
by officials of the Catholic Church with representatives of the Salvadoran military
and of the insurgent guerrilla forces. Under the terms of the agreement, the residents
of Tenancingo, who had fled the town when its history of intense conflict culminated
in its bombing in 1983, could return there regardless of their past political
involvement and that Tenancingo would be an "unarmed zone." The agreement
was sharply contested on the ground and in the pages of national newspapers, but
those who returned were able to plant corn fields, rebuild houses, and participate
in an experiment unlikely in the midst of a civil war, a representative town council.
In later years, I continued to visit Tenancingo to follow the evolution of a community
that had been bitterly divided during the war yet reunited to some extent around
the idea of a local peace.
In September 1991, I began eighteen months of field research on the origin
and consequences of rural collective action and civil war. I chose to concentrate
my work on the conflicted but wealthy province of Usulután as its history
promised to illustrate both the civil war and its aftermath. My interviews took
place in the fields and villages of southwestern, central, and eastern Usulután
and in the towns of Tierra Blanca, Jiquilisco, San Francisco Javier, and Santiago
de María. I traveled frequently to San Salvador, not only for respite from
the demands of research in a war-torn countryside still occupied by opposing armed
camps, but also to interview various other sources crucial for documenting the
roots of the civil war and its negotiated settlement. After returning to the United
States, I continued to visit El Salvador frequently.
This research resulted in two books. The first, Forging Democracy from Below:
Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (Cambridge University Press,
2000), is a study of democratization in societies where an oligarchic alliance
of privileged economic elites and powerful state elites long maintained exclusionary
political regimes and unequal distributions of wealth. I explain why in these
two unlikely cases, a transition to democracy and a durable resolution of civil
conflict occurred. I show that sustained insurgency by the less well-off disrupted
and eventually transformed the economic interests of key sectors of economic elites.
As a result, business elites pressed for negotiations with insurgent representatives,
changing the balance of power between regime hardliners and moderates.
Forging Democracy from Below addressed political change at the national level.
In contrast, this book is a local exploration of what Barrington Moore, Jr., calls
the "social bases of revolt" (1978). In exploring the trajectory of
insurrection in El Salvador, I focus on why, despite the extraordinary high risks
of doing so, many peasants supported opposition organizations, including the guerrilla
army waging war against the state. I trace the evolving form of peasant collective
action from the mid 1970s, when rural organizations worked closely with urban
organizations in a mass social movement, to the scattered but vital covert support
for the insurgent army in the early 1980s, to the construction of a vibrant civil
society under the shadow of the military stalemate that emerged in 1984. I compare
patterns of participation in the insurgency across five case-study areas, drawing
on interviews with campesinos who supported the insurgency and with those who
did not, as well as on interviews with guerrilla and military commanders, landlords,
and other sources. While material grievances, principally the unequal distribution
of land, played a role in motivating rebellion, I show that emotional and moral
reasons were essential to the emergence and consolidation of insurgent collective
action in the areas I studied.
I believe that what I found is relevant to other situations where poor people
are excluded from social and political participation, an emerging social movement
challenges that exclusion and makes claims on the state and the well-to-do, and
the response of the state is repression rather than accommodation.
Acknowledgments [continued]
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