This chapter unpacks a critical moment in Salvadoran history: from the coup on October 15, 1979, to the start of the civil war and mass repression during the latter part of 1980. The coup installed a military–civilian junta (the Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno or JRG) that included moderate leftists who promised a reformist solution to the economic, social, and political crisis, a solution that would prevent a looming civil war. These reforms included land reform, union rights, and an end to political repression. However, disjunction between revolutionary rhetoric and grassroots struggles and necessities impeded an alliance between the JRG and popular organizations. The JRG itself dissolved and re-formed as rightists pushed out representatives of the Left. This chapter discusses the factors that led up to the coup then summarizes the three successive JRGs and how sectors of the military and civil society responded to their reforms, setting the stage for the twelve-year civil war.

First of two chapters on non-multilateral treaty based, transnational approaches to combatting grand corruption. This one explores international support for domestic prosecutors, focusing on the example of Guatemala’s Commission Against Impunity (CICIG)(2007–2019). It describes the extent of state capture and its origins in the country’s internal armed conflict, the mandate and activities of CICIG, and its achievements, activities and limitations. It briefly considers other such commissions.

Chapter 11 focuses on the new violence that has erupted in many Latin American countries in the early twenty-first century. It shows that Latin America is the most violent region in the world and that violence is perpetrated by drug cartels, gangs, common criminals, militias, and state agents. The chapter explores the causes of violence through case studies of Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) and draws several conclusions. International factors, such as the global drug trade and US policy toward Latin America, have played a largely negative role. The state has failed to guarantee citizen security, in part because it is absent, and in part because it colludes with criminal groups. Additionally, needed reforms of the state’s security forces are not enacted because the democratically elected politicians who have to propose such reforms are threatened or bought off by actors who benefit from violence. This chapter shows that problems of democracy – the poor quality of democracy – and problems for democracy – the failure of democracies to guarantee civil rights such as the right to life – are tightly interconnected.

The case of El Salvador illustrates how temporal variation in the strength of government–elite linkages played a role in explaining the difference between a failed attempt in Mauricio Funes’ administration and a successful one in Salvador Sánchez Cerén’s administration. Even in the context of one of the highest levels of violent crime in the world, the country’s first left-of-center administration failed to adopt elite taxes in order to increase public-safety expenditures. It wasn’t until the government formed a coalition with right-of-center parties and linkages with the business sectors improved, that an increased tax burden on the wealthy became possible.

Chapter 9 focuses on transitional justice, the challenge of tackling past human rights violations, in contemporary Latin America. It shows that the record of Latin American countries varies considerably, but that, in the aggregate, the record of Latin America is largely a success story. The frequency with which past human rights violations have been addressed, and the steps taken through truth commissions and human rights trials, puts Latin America at the center of the global transitional justice movement. It also demonstrates, through a comparative analysis of six countries (Brazil and Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, Chile and Argentina), that several factors determine the response to past human rights violations. Democracies that are strong and channel citizen preferences succeed in confronting the challenge of transitional justice. Additionally, a strong record of transitional justice is associated with strong civil society organizations, generational change and new legal thinking about human rights law in the judiciary, and progressive developments in international law.

Chapter 2 presents an overview of Latin America’s recent experience with elite-financed security taxes. It describes in detail the cases where security taxes on economic elites have been adopted, including in Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Mexico, as well as cases where these taxes were first defeated in the legislature but subsequently approved, as in El Salvador, and where these taxes have not been adopted, as in Guatemala. In discussing the different experiences, Chapter 2 documents the types of security taxes adopted in each country, their purpose, and impact for public-safety expenses and the government’s coffers more generally. By identifying the different types of security taxes and their destination, this chapter contributes to our understanding of the extent to which economic elites have participated in the strengthening of the state in the contemporary period.

This chapter analyzes cases of piecemeal vigilantism in El Salvador to show why victims resist extortion through ad hoc and sporadic acts of extralegal violence against criminals in coordination with individual police. I first situate criminal extortion within gang politics in El Salvador before turning to the cases of gang-led extortion of small-scale farmers in two rural localities. The small-scale farmers in these localities lacked preexisting organizations to advance collective resistance and had negligible ties to local governing authorities. But the local police were autonomous from the criminal gangs given the latter’s explicit strategy of targeting police as part of the broader state–criminal conflict. Victims in the two cases thus enlisted individual police as collaborators in occasional acts of piecemeal vigilantism. Over time victims faced pressure to scale up their coercive capacities, territorial reach, and extralegal violence amid their inability to end victimization outright. Efforts by victims to do so ultimately distorted their objectives and contributed to their dismantling by national-level judicial authorities.

This chapter traces the global NGO sector’s late twentieth-century turn to human rights to the brutal civil conflict in El Salvador in the 1980s. It examines the moral and political debates that accompanied the spread of rights-based activism in that decade and how they conditioned contemporaneous understandings of ‘aid’. This case study provides us with an important insight into the complex set of influences that shaped the concept of global compassion. NGOs adopted human rights language – and particularly the non-political politicking on which it was built – as a method for critiquing the existing world order. But the rise of rights-based humanitarianism was also conditioned from the Third World. Activists from El Salvador, for example, played a key role in influencing the intellectual and ideological frameworks through which NGOs understood the conflict. This was a striking reframing of ‘people-to-people’ action. Yet despite that disruption, the chapter concludes, the turn to human rights was ultimately built less on solidarity with the revolutionaries’ aims (though such sentiments were present, particularly among aid workers in the region) and more on an essentialising view of humanity that could appeal to a wide array of donors.

This chapter traces the global NGO sector’s late twentieth-century turn to human rights to the brutal civil conflict in El Salvador in the 1980s. It examines the moral and political debates that accompanied the spread of rights-based activism in that decade and how they conditioned contemporaneous understandings of ‘aid’. This case study provides us with an important insight into the complex set of influences that shaped the concept of global compassion. NGOs adopted human rights language – and particularly the non-political politicking on which it was built – as a method for critiquing the existing world order. But the rise of rights-based humanitarianism was also conditioned from the Third World. Activists from El Salvador, for example, played a key role in influencing the intellectual and ideological frameworks through which NGOs understood the conflict. This was a striking reframing of ‘people-to-people’ action. Yet despite that disruption, the chapter concludes, the turn to human rights was ultimately built less on solidarity with the revolutionaries’ aims (though such sentiments were present, particularly among aid workers in the region) and more on an essentialising view of humanity that could appeal to a wide array of donors.

This chapter evaluates the UN’s engagement in Guatemalan negotiations from 1989-1996. It asks how the Government of Guatemala (the GoG) and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), the coalition of rebel groups fighting and negotiating with the GoG, assessed the UN’s performance as the guarantor of agreements elsewhere, especially the concurrent peacekeeping success in neighboring El Salvador and the simultaneous failure in the Balkans, and how these assessments influenced the course of negotiations and the final agreement that emerged from their peace process. Drawing on archival material and oral histories, I find that participants looked nearly exclusively at El Salvador to assess the contours and possibilities of UN intervention—but they perceived the Salvadoran example as a negative one: both sides believed their Salvadoran counterparts had given too much away during their negotiations, and advocated for a smaller UN mission.This is surprising—influential credible commitment theories of peacekeeping predict that the UN’s success in El Salvador would enhance the Guatemalan parties’ confidence in the UN as guarantor. Instead, the UN’s banner success in El Salvador first prolonged the war in Guatemala and then produced a weaker agreement and a degraded capacity to enforce the peace.

This essay places the narrative of Salvadoran migration to the United States within the broader context of Reagan-era anti-Communism, US immigration and border restrictions, and civil society. It first assesses the varied reasons for Salvadoran migration to the United States during the 1980s and the Reagan administration’s response. It then examines responses by civil society, focusing on the role of social service and grassroots advocacy organizations in both challenging the US government’s Cold War narrative and aiding in the social, economic, and cultural integration of refugees. This essay draws upon case studies from the metropolitan Washington, DC, area, home to the third-largest Salvadoran population in the world. Ultimately, it argues that the Reagan administration’s refusal to grant asylum status to Salvadoran immigrants in the 1980s both galvanized civil society in the United States in support of the refugees and severely retarded the ability of Salvadorans to gain social acceptance and political legitimacy in their new country.

This chapter examines the historical and normative contribution of Latin American theologians and religious actors attentive to the neoliberal underside of the human rights breakthrough associated with the Carter administration and the Trilateral Commission. By tilting the axis to the global South, this chapter charts the emergence of an alternative liberationist discourse and praxis of human rights for the Catholic Church in Latin America centered on the concrete struggles of oppressed peoples and the preferential option for the poor. In contrast to the global human rights politics of the 1970s, the liberationist praxis of human rights critically analyzed socioeconomic inequalities as part of the Church’s effort to resist the overreaching powers of the national security state and the global market. The chapter turns to the case of El Salvador from the 1970s to the 1990s and the examples of Archbishop Óscar Romero and theologian Ignacio Ellacuría to illustrate this alternative liberationist praxis of human rights. Their life-giving opposition to structural violence embedded in old and new forms of colonialism injuring poor campesinos brought them into direct conflict with the moral doctrine of human rights from the global North linked to US interventionism supportive of national securitization and later neoliberal policies.