 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador Elisabeth Jean Wood Widespread support among rural people for the leftist insurgency during the civil war in El Salvador challenges conventional interpretations of collective action. Those who supplied tortillas, information, and other aid to the guerillas took mortal risks and yet stood to gain no more than those who eschewed these risks, were the government forces to be defeated or a favorable peace secured. Peasants supported the FMLN, I argue, not for any material gain that was contingent on their participation, but rather for moral and emotional reasons. In supporting the insurgency, they defied state violence and affirmed their dignity after lifetimes of contempt by the landed elite. And as their successes mounted, others joined in to participate in writing a page in the history of their locality. Drawing on oral histories gathered from peasants who supported the insurgency and those who did not and interviews with military commanders of both sides, my explanation puts emotions and morals, as well as conventional interests, at the heart of insurgent collective action. I also rely on the maps drawn for this study by teams of insurgent campesinos (roughly, peasants) from across the province of Usulután. I asked representatives of a dozen cooperatives to draw on butcher paper with marker pens maps of their localities showing property boundaries and land use before and after the civil war. The maps document how campesino collective action literally redrew the boundaries of class relationships in the case study areas during the war. The maps reveal much about the history of the case-study areas, particularly the patterns of land occupation and use (Chapter 3), and also the perceptions and values of their makers (Chapter 7). Honoring an often-regretted but ethnographically-correct pledge, I returned the maps to the mapmakers out of respect for their insight, gratitude for their taking the time, and hope that they might prove useful. What appear here are color photographs of the original maps (tacks pinning the maps to the wall are visible on some maps), digitally restored by Carolyn Resnicke of the Santa Fe Institute to a quality close to the original maps. The Mapdrawing workshops The willingness of insurgent campesinos to draw the maps reflected their assertion of contested property rights at the end of the civil war. The accuracy of the claims by these cooperative leaders to occupy extensive areas of land in 1992 was confirmed by my own travel and observation in the case-study areas, and by examination of the archives of landholding and land claims data maintained by the FMLN, the government, and the United Nations after the war. Drawing the maps involved considerable sacrifice of work time on the part of individuals and foregone opportunities on the part of the campesino organizations: each pair of maps took two full days to draw, given the unfamiliarity of the task. Given this time commitment, teams of cooperative members participated with remarkable enthusiasm; only one of twelve pairs of maps was not completed in the three workshops I convened in 1992. Moreover, for all participants the process required a willingness to engage in an unfamiliar task of conceptualizing familiar terrain in entirely new terms. For the many semi-literate and illiterate participants, the map-making workshops were also the scene of difficult – and public – struggles with unfamiliar tools: one elderly mapmaker, the president of a cooperative in northeastern Usulután unaccustomed to holding a pencil, traced an elaborate tapestry of small and medium holdings with his forefinger; his grandson carefully drew a line in its wake. While I promised that the maps would be returned to the communities, which may have provided some incentive, my impression was that the mapmakers were motivated primarily by their commitment to recounting their history. |
| © Cambridge University Press 2003. Privacy policy | |