El Salvador's civil war, which left at least 75,000 people dead
and displaced more than a million, ended in 1992. The accord
between the government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation
Front (FMLN) has been lauded as a model post-Cold War peace
agreement. But after the conflict stopped, crime rates shot up. The
number of murder victims surpassed wartime death tolls. Those who
once feared the police and the state became frustrated by their
lack of action. Peace was not what Salvadorans had hoped it would
be. Citizens began saying to each other, "It's worse than the
war."
El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and
the Transition to Democracy challenges the pronouncements of
policy analysts and politicians by examining Salvadoran daily life
as told by ordinary people who have limited influence or affluence.
Anthropologist Ellen Moodie spent much of the decade after the war
gathering crime stories from various neighborhoods in the capital
city of San Salvador. True accounts of theft, assaults, and murders
were shared across kitchen tables, on street corners, and in the
news media. This postconflict storytelling reframed violent acts,
rendering them as driven by common criminality rather than
political ideology. Moodie shows how public dangers narrated in
terms of private experience shaped a new interpretation of
individual risk. These narratives of postwar violence-occurring at
the intersection of self and other, citizen and state, the powerful
and the powerless-offered ways of coping with uncertainty during a
stunted transition to democracy.
eISBN: 978-0-8122-0597-8
Subjects: Anthropology
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