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The cease fire of February 1, 1992, ended a hard-fought civil war in El Salvador that had lasted 12 years. The Peace Accords signed two weeks earlier by the insurgents of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and government representatives received strong international acclaim as “a new beginning for El Salvador” (Wade 2016, 2). “This is the closest that any process has ever come to a negotiated revolution,” the United Nations’ principal mediator, Alvaro de Soto, declared in the New York Times. De Soto’s appraisal became iconic. Many international observers viewed El Salvador’s peace process as a role model for ending armed conflict through negotiation of political reforms under the tutelage of the international community. Scores of articles and books extracted lessons learned from El Salvador to be applied in other post-conflict transition processes. Government officials as well as former comandantes traveled around the world, sometimes together, to share their experiences as a source of inspiration for other countries crippled by conflict.
The success of El Salvador’s 1992 Peace Accords hinged primarily on the fact that the elites from the former warring parties, though still politically divided, embraced electoral democracy (Wood 2000). In retrospect, Salvador Samayoa, FMLN negotiator and a leading Salvadoran intellectual, referred to the final round of peace negotiations and its aftermath as “the explosion of consensus” (2003, 585). Indeed, the Accords constituted the blueprint for an extensive institutional reform process, which included, besides relatively free and fair elections, a new civilian police force, a significant reduction of the armed forces, and an overhaul of the judicial apparatus. The insurgents laid down their arms, demobilized their troops and entered the electoral arena as a political party. Although scholars also endeavored, to a greater or lesser extent, to point out shortcomings, El Salvador’s peace process emerged as a textbook case of democratic transition, at the time that democratic transition was “the hottest theme of the moment” (Domínguez and Lindenberg 1997, 217), certainly in the study of Latin American politics, but arguably also in the study of international politics at large.
Paradoxically, as I myself witnessed up-close, for most former Salvadoran insurgents the transition was very difficult and often painful to process. What democratic transition theory generally tends to interpret as highly positive steps in the process, the demobilization of the guerrilla troops for example, raised for many of those directly involved complex and uncomfortable questions about the future of their movement. The insurgents’ desire for peace mixed with their growing anxieties about the value and worth of previous collective efforts and with concerns about their personal future (Peterson 2006). Many wondered whether the outcome had been worth the sacrifice.
This sentiment was particularly strong amongst the rank-and-file and mid-level cadres. In contrast, those holding important political positions within the FMLN generally defended the process. Some comandantes labeled the transition as the ‘democratic revolution’ they had fought for all along, while others framed it as the highest attainable result at the time given the national and international political circumstances.
In 2009 a new outburst of international enthusiasm over Salvadoran politics occurred. 17 years after the demobilization of its fighters, the FMLN became the first former Latin American guerrilla front that, having failed to take power through armed struggle, was nevertheless able win power through the ballot. It was also the first time the Left had won the presidency in El Salvador’s history. The pacific transfer of power to the FMLN, seen as as the Litmus Test of El Salvador’s postwar democracy, occurred in a context of left-wing parties rising to power across Latin America, catapulted in part by neo-liberalisms’ waning popularity. For international observers, FMLN president Mauricio Funes became the latest milestone in Latin America’s ‘pink tide.’ For the FMLN and its supporters, the historical symbolism was compelling, obtaining by popular vote the mandate they had been unable to garner through military means (L.A. González 2011). Some scholars interpreted the FMLN’s triumph as the proof that El Salvador’s transition process had finalized, others as a new, crucial step in “the maturation of El Salvador’s democracy” (Greene and Keogh 2009, 668). The first scholarly reviews of FMLN performance in government confirmed the idea of a democratic break-through, with the FMLN able to “increase inclusion” (Cannon and Hume 2012, 1050) and “making significant improvements in the daily lives of citizens” (Perla and Cruz-Feliciano 2013, 101).
Thus, after first developing into what Russell Crandall (2016,69) qualifies as “Latin America’s largest and most formidable Marxist insurgency,” the FMLN subsequently also transformed into a highly effective peacetime political party. For many of those previously dedicated to revolutionary armed struggle, the Funes election smacked of redemption. In subsequent months, the FMLN party offices throughout the country were flooded by guerrilla veterans and other former FMLN collaborators looking for work and offering their services. As the ‘Funes transition’ unfolded, however, a good part of the former rank-and-file and mid-level insurgents did not see their initial expectations fulfilled, and increasingly expressed criticism, doubts and anxieties about the FMLN’s performance in office. They did so not only on personal title, but also through organizations such as associations of FMLN veterans, NGOs and a range of social movement organizations.
This book is about how those that participated in the insurgency experienced and helped shape El Salvador’s democratic transition. In it, I examine how their historical collective project, what participants refer to as ‘the Revolution,’ became remolded in the context of neoliberal peace. I focus particularly on the multiple postwar accommodations in the internal relations of El Salvador’s revolutionary movement, and how these accommodations helped produce what I call ‘the lived experience of post-insurgency.’ I also document and analyze how the postwar remaking of the movement’s internal relations interlinks with the FMLN’s contemporary political performance. By this approach, I demonstrate that the reconversion of the FMLN from insurgent movement to an election-oriented party unfolded as a tense and contentious process, which led to the proliferation of internal conflicts. Its relative success notwithstanding, widespread disillusionment surfaced among participants.
The main argument of this book is that the revolutionary movement advanced its engagement in electoral politics mainly by building on insurgent networks, identities and imaginaries. I contend that the FMLN’s electoral success hinged to a large extent on this organization’s ability to reconvert a substantial part of its insurgent networks into predominantly clientelist factions. At the same time, factors like the intense political competition between the FMLN and the dominant right-wing party Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA), pervasive sectarian struggles in the realm of the FMLN, and the scarcity of state resources available for distribution, all rendered these postwar clientelist relations relatively unstable and precarious. Considering these political developments in the mirror of the aspirations and sacrifices of revolutionary armed struggle, many former Salvadoran insurgents lamented what they saw as the postwar scramble for public resources, but few could afford not to participate in it. Hence, the experience of post-insurgent politics developed as a peculiar mix of political ascendency and disenchantment.
(excerpted from chapter 1)
