El Salvador drew my interest beginning in the early 1980s when I worked as a volunteer paralegal 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 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.