Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory

by Erik Ching

El Salvador's civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later. It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorizing and targeting of civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and the death and disappearance of more than 75,000 people. Examining El Salvador's vibrant life-story literature written in the aftermath of this terrible conflict--including memoirs and testimonials--Erik Ching seeks to understand how the war has come to be remembered and rebattled by Salvadorans and what that means for their society today.Ching identifies four memory communities that dominate national postwar civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders, and working class and poor testimonialists. Pushing distinct and divergent stories, these groups are today engaged in what Ching terms a "narrative battle" for control over the memory of the war. Their ongoing publications in the marketplace of ideas tend to direct Salvadorans' attempts to negotiate the war's meaning and legacy, and Ching suggests that a more open, coordinated reconciliation process is needed in this postconflict society. In the meantime, El Salvador, fractured by conflicting interpretations of its national trauma, is hindered in dealing with the immediate problems posed by the nexus of neoliberalism, gang violence, and outmigration.

Genres: History

356 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 26, 2016

Reviews

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a revolutionary popular war in El Salvador between 1980 and 1990. Erik Ching, a historian of Central America, read all the post-war memoirs written by the Salvadorans who fought the war and analysed the "battle of memories" that is still going on in the society.

He identified four main "memory communities": 1. The landlords who still believe that El Salvador was a paradise before the evil communists came in and provoked the peaceful peasants. 2. Members of the army, who did the dirty job for the landlords and the US. 3. Leaders of the revolutionary FMLN, who fought the war and then signed a "peace" agreement which gave them lucrative investment credits and national and international job opportunities.

But I am most interested in the final group: 4. The rank-and-file of the revolutionary FMLN, who fought the war as guerrillas, underground militants and urban connections and could have been killed at any moment by the paramilitary forces. They are living in abject poverty, they feel abandoned after the "peace" agreement and are very angry at the "guerrilla bosses" who have "their big  houses and savings accounts in banks."

Ching's findings about the grievances of the post-war Salvadoran society match with Moodie's El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy and Sprenkels' After Insurgency: Revolution and Electoral Politics in El Salvador. Either we have to find another term to describe these processes or we have to change our definition of peace and democracy, because societies like El Salvador, Colombia, South Africa do not have either.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

This historiography puts together fragments of oral histories, memoirs, and memories to patch together a nuanced dossier on the Salvadorean Civil War. For the uninitiated like myself, Ching offers an accessible and informative introduction to the social/political/economic forces animating Salvadorean society — although thankfully the author doesn't dwell on this 101 material for too long. The central focus of the book concerns four the 'memory communities' that emerge from the Civil War and are left to shape the post-conflict narrative: civilian elites, state military officers, guerilla comandantes, and the rank and file rebels from rural areas. Ching uses firsthand testimonies from these actors to spell out what happened during the war; more interesting to me was his examination of how these communities render the past to give meaning to their present. This got me thinking about remembrance as a practice, like that Susan Sontag quote, and how we can look back on things differently depending on what space and role we're currently occupying. It would have been great to read more about how the Salvadorean diaspora community remembers this conflict, given its fundamental role in creating an exodus from the country. Still, Ching's book is recommendable for any reader interested in memory studies and Central American history.

[Jess Saravia 🧚‍♀️✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has some interesting insight but there’s just too much of an outsider view on all of the inner workings of El Salvador for me. Not bad, has some important points, and will be used for research but isn’t as rounded as I’d like it to be.

[Mark Grim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was hoping there'd be more in depth coverage of testimony of the combatants of the war, especially ones that only exist in Spanish as of now, but nonetheless the author puts together a compelling historiography on popular recollections and narratives of the war.