Making meaning of violence: Human rights and historical memory of the conflict in El Salvador

ABSTRACT

Human rights narratives about victimization run the risk of depoliticizing the acts of violence that created victims. In many communities in El Salvador, grassroots memory narratives have not suppressed victims' participation in the revolutionary movement before and during the country's civil war. Quite the contrary, one of the key reasons Salvadoran survivors identify for doing memory work is preserving revolutionary ideals — not to preserve the accounting of abuses, as is familiar in international human rights circles, but rather to relate the underlying reasons why so many risked so much. There is reason to believe this is different than other countries in postconflict Latin America. This may be the result of the relative weakness of postconflict accountability efforts and a reality that may give victims less perceived incentive to frame their life histories in ways that intersect with dominant human rights tropes. It may also pose a challenge as legal accountability efforts accelerate in the years ahead.

Notes

1. This is a pseudonym.

2. A less familiar, but not less accurate, way to frame this might be to suggest that the Salvadoran state's failure to adhere to its social and economic rights obligations was precisely what compelled Samuel to undertake activities that led to his detention and torture. But our frequent privileging of civil and political rights (over social and economic rights) leads us to naturalize the structural violence that drove the conflict and to perceive the taking up of arms as an act of violence rather than a response to violence.

3. Readers can familiarize themselves with our work at unfinishedsentences.org.

4. For a more detailed accounting and analysis, see Martínez Barahona, Gutierrez Salazar, and Rincon Fonseca (2012).

5. Limited reparations have been provided in specific cases where ordered by the Inter-American Court.

6. Readers are encouraged to learn more about MUPI's innovative memory work at museo.com.sv/blog.

7. The uniquely Salvadoran term “guinda” has no true equivalent in English. It refers to the mass displacement and flight of civilians under military attack, lasting from a few days to a few weeks or more.

8. This term denotes noncombatants.

9. I do not identify the interviewees mentioned here in order to protect their anonymity. Participants gave permission for specific extracts from their oral histories to be shared publicly in the online archive but asked that the recordings and transcripts of the entire interviews be made available only for research purposes without attribution to individual participants.

10. The term “organized” is frequently used but ambiguous. Many use it to describe their incorporation in popular organizations like peasants' rights groups or trade unions. Some, but not all, of these organizations had explicit alliances with specific armed groups; some, but not all, members progressed through involvement in such activities to participation in the armed struggle. And even among those who joined guerrilla groups, not all were combatants; other roles included cooks, medics, messengers, political liaisons, and recruiters.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angelina Snodgrass Godoy

Notes on contributor

Angelina Snodgrass Godoy is Helen H. Jackson Endowed Chair in Human Rights and founding Director of the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington in Seattle. A sociologist by training (PhD, UC Berkeley, 2001), at UW she holds faculty appointments in International Studies and in Law, Societies, and Justice. She is the author of Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Of Medicines and Markets: Intellectual Property and Human Rights in the Free Trade Era (Stanford University Press, 2013), as well as numerous articles on human rights in Latin America.