El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy (The Ethnography of Political Violence)

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El Salvador’s civil war, which left no less than 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 sufferers surpassed wartime death tolls. Those who once feared the police and the state became frustrated by their lack of action. Peace used to be not what Salvadorans had hoped it would be. Citizens began saying to one another, “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 day by day life as told by odd people who have limited influence or affluence. Anthropologist Ellen Moodie spent much of the decade after the war gathering crime stories from quite a lot of 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 quite than political ideology. Moodie shows how public dangers narrated with regards to 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 throughout a stunted transition to democracy.

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