Dr. Ellen Moodie (University of Illinois) and Dr. Arthur L. Binford (Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla) will undertake anthropological research on the effects of civil war on post-conflict societies. Anthropologists and other social scientists have documented the negative effects of civil war on post-conflict societies. In this project, the researchers will take a different approach to ask whether or not the ideologies, social relationships, skill development, and new forms of social organization developed during the war might contribute positively to postwar reconstruction and check social disintegration.
The research will be carried out in northern Morazán, El Salvador, where the church, refugees, revolutionaries, and their supporters actively promoted collective action during the duration of the Salvadoran conflict (1980-1992). This study proposes to find out what remains of these pro-social, collectivist sentiments and practices, and whether or not they aid reconstruction. The research will focus on three organizations: the Ecclesial Base Community of El Salvador, the January 16th Cooperative, and a for-profit tourism business, which engage former refugees, demobilized rebel combatants, civilians and lay catechists. The researchers will employ a combination of archival work, surveys, life history interviews, organization histories, and participant observation with active members of the three organizations in order to gather information on pre-war, wartime, and post-war beliefs, relationships, and experiences. The investigators hypothesize that post-insurgent individuality will vary with the period of mobilization (early vs. late), level of wartime responsibility, and relative success in postwar reinsertion into civilian life. The study of individual subjects will be complemented by research on the organizations to which they belong, as the researchers will seek to measure the degree to which the church, cooperatives, and tourism promoters continue to promote communitarian values, even as the region is increasingly affected by social fragmentation and individualization brought on by incorporation into international circuits of migration.
The research is significant because post-conflict situations are found throughout the world. The common assumption is that carryover from wartime is negative for individuals and communities. This project will test that assumption through systematic investigation of the possibility that pro-social values promoted during the war might contribute to post-war resilience, recovery, and reconstruction. Besides having practical implications, findings will contribute to social science theory of social change over time periods marked by extreme disruption. The research also provides social scientific training to two local field assistants; supports graduate student training; and promotes international research collaboration.
The field portion of the project was carried out over three summers (a total of 5.5 months) between May of 2010 and July of 2012 by a total of seven persons (the PI and CO-PI, one Mexican field assistant, one undergraduate student and three local field assistants). The goal of the project was to assess the long-term impact of participation in the Salvadoran civil war (1980-1992) among the membership of three organizations: (1) a regional tourism promoter, (2) an agricultural cooperative, (3) catechists and others involved in a Catholic parish led by a priest commited to Liberation Theology. All three organizations draw most of their membership from former guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) or people who collaborated with the FMLN in the war. Even before 1992, Salvadoran governments had begun opening the economy to more foreign investment and free trade, and encouraged domestic privatization of formerly public enterprises; thus a previously agrarian-based economy has become increasingly structured around finance, commerce and migrant remittances. We were interested in the objective and subjective implications of these post-war transformations for former leftist rebels and their supporters in northern Morazan, and whether those implications might vary on the basis of participation in one, as opposed to another, of the designated organizations. The project collected information using a variety of methods: surveys, organizational histories, life histories, participant observation and repeated contact with a small sample of households from each organization. The data corpus runs to thousands of pages of notes and transcribed interviews, and analysis remains at an early stage, although we can offer a few tentative conclusions: 1. Few post-war economic opportunities exist in northern Morazan. The pre-war agrarian economy is moribund (even subsistence-based corn cultivation is down around 40%) and no substitute source of income has developed in a region economically marginal even before the war. A significant percentage of households depend on remittances from mostly undocumented migrants in the United States. 2. Access to secondary and post-secondary education is more open than before the war, but high school and most college graduate have difficulties obtaining employment commensurate with their education and that provides a wage or salary sufficient for a minimally dignified life. Hence much of the most qualified human capital is being drawn into mostly international migratory circuits. 3. Most former FMLN guerrillas and their supporters have contradictory views of the post-peace process. They applaud the greater political openness but deplore the crisis conditions they experience daily. Many people engage in multiple activities (subsistence agriculture, production of artisan goods, part-time wage employment in construction, and so on) in order to put food on the table. A small number of ex-rebels who achieved respected ranks and assumed important responsibilities during the war have been able to use their skills and, especially, contacts in order to obtain employment in municipal governments and regional NGOs. 4. The progressive (Liberation Theology) wing of the Catholic Church has been more successful at maintaining social cohesion through the post-peace period than the tourism promoter or the agrarian cooperative. Yet the church has lost many former adherents to evangelical movements, which have grown rapidly over the last two decades. Also, the church has become concerned with the effects of alcohol consumption, un- and under-employment and international migration on family relationships, and has developed programs to promote family and community unity. 5. The progressive (Liberation Theology) wing of the Catholic Church has become heavily involved in the recuperation of local histories and the promotion of human rights, particularly in the case of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in which an army battalion killed more than a thousand men, women and children in and around the hamlet of El Mozote. 6. Both youth and adults have become attuned to recuperating both pre-war and wartime histories following a decade or more of apparent disinterest in the theme. 7. Some people in northern Morazan bank on attracting copious numbers of tourists to enjoy the region's luxuriant fauna and flora, yet the number of visitors remains small during most of the year, and the tourism infrastructure rudimentary. The tourism promoter has had little success in garnering the economic support of private operators in their publicity efforts and mixed success in efforts to convince them to invest in and "modernize" their facilities (hotels, restaurants, etc.). The above constitute a few preliminary conclusions. A full accounting of the results of this project will follow more careful analysis of the extensive data corpus.
