Some have talked of a ‘memory turn’ in the study of history, in which historians debate the challenge of ‘memory’ as a source of historical knowledge and often the only source in post-war contexts, where it remains infused with the trauma of violence and unreconciled partisanship. War disrupts and often threatens the work and lives of historians. In El Salvador there was no history department in the National University until after the war. Although Erik Ching's volume does not reflect directly on these broader challenges to the discipline of history, he has made an important contribution to the discussion of history and memory. El Salvador is a country recovering from 12 years of civil war, where there is no agreed historical narrative, but rather a growing body of memoirs by different groups of actors who participated in the war. These memoirs tell very distinct, often completely opposing stories. They give an extraordinary insight into the dangers facing a country so polarised after war that it cannot find a way to discuss how to validate the competing narratives of its recent history.
Ching does not attempt to find validating criteria either. At times this is somewhat frustrating. The book begs the question constantly: how can El Salvador build a shared historical narrative that would enable the country to come to terms with its past and debate its future in an inclusive, reliable and authoritative manner? Do historians not have the tools for this? Ching's aim is not to adjudicate nor provide such tools, which is both a strength and limitation of the book, but in no sense undermines its value and significance as an insight into the challenges facing the country. By retaining a disciplined distance, Ching reveals a great deal about El Salvador's past and present. He implicitly recognises that it is the task of Salvadoreans to reflect on how they might reconcile these conflicting articulations of their past. His volume highlights how deeply politically contentious and emotionally difficult this could be.
Ching's study grew out of his recognition of a publishing phenomenon in El Salvador. A large quantity of narratives has been published since the 1992 Peace Accord by different groups of actors. There are 50 book-length publications, and altogether at least 200 life story publications in different forms. If we counted each individual narrative, the number would be multiplied. This biographical and testimonial output is new for the country and is clearly an outcome of the space opened by the Peace Accord. Ching's methodology was to read all these in a haphazard fashion, acknowledging but attempting to minimise the preconceptions he himself had about the war. He succeeds admirably in offering a systematic account of these outpourings, which, on the whole, resists critical engagement in favour of allowing us to appreciate the origins and nature of the varied perspectives. It is, in the words of the author, an ‘objective study of the way Salvadorans are remembering their war’ (p. 9). He sees his role as part historian and part literary scholar, teasing out the patterns or genres in the narratives beyond the conscious intents of the authors.
Ching divides the accounts into four memory communities: civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders and rank and file actors or ‘testimonialists’. He analyses the output from each of these, to find the logic behind them, the differences and similarities. The outcome is a rich insight into how the varied actors of the war construct their participation, the impact on their lives and what they are prepared to acknowledge and/or conceal. Neither civilian nor military elites are able to embrace the evidence of mass human rights violations in the name of upholding the status quo. The civilian elites see themselves as representing the unjustly victimised national-wealth generating entrepreneurs. Their ultra-libertarianism makes them critical of both the military and the United States, for attempting reforms that might have re-balanced the economy and the social order. The military elites see themselves as defenders of their institutional integrity. None of the groups is homogenous: Ching teases out the division amongst the civilian elites between those who would violently conserve the existing order and those who bought into the neoliberal modernisation project which gestated during the war and emerged victorious after the Peace Accord. The military elites were divided between varied projects for economic adaptation and change, which in 1979 included a generation of officers prepared to ally with civilians from the reforming Left. This heterogeneity is nothing compared to that amongst the guerrilla commanders, whose factional infighting and ideological and personal animosities persist through their post-war narratives. These commanders, furthermore, exclude from their accounts evidence of atrocities carried out by their own combatants against civilians (although these were on a lesser scale than those perpetrated by the army with elite complicity – in this respect, the Truth Commission which reported in 1993 has at least produced an element of adjudication).
Ching emphasises the urban and middle-class origins of the guerrilla commanders and their moments of revelation when they turned to armed revolution. They mostly joined the revolution not out of objective deprivation but out of frustration with the impasse and obstacles to changing the militaristic and fraudulent political process. Leftist ideologies played their role. In contrast, the testimonialists had no moment of awakening: many came from poor rural areas, and joined or supported the guerrillas out of necessity, loss and victimisation by the army and right-wing death squads. They reveal themselves to be more willing to criticise the guerrilla commanders for their urban mentalities and weaknesses in combat and/or their behaviour towards the rank and file.
Ching's book is a gripping read, which sustains attention as we work our way through these varied voices, skilfully and lucidly organised by the author. However, those who write are clearly a self-selecting group. They undoubtedly reveal a great deal. Yet, the methodology of textual analysis can limit our horizons of what else could be said about the Salvadorean civil war from a wider range of sources. A great many claims that are left hanging in the air could and have been explored by other sources. The equivalences that emerge between these actors can be exaggerated. The differences between the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People's Revolutionary Army, ERP) and the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación (Popular Liberation Forces, FPL), for example, are emptied politically by seeing one as the more militarily effective and the other as the more ideological. The ‘prolonged popular war’ strategy of the FPL versus the ‘insurrection now’ of the ERP made a significant difference to the nature of the war. The former enabled the FPL to mobilise an extraordinary social coalition which gets lost when it is reduced to a Marxist slogan of the ‘peasant, worker, student’ alliance. It meant that for a time – admittedly a brief period during the first phase of the war – interesting processes of peasant organisation were possible. The 1983 leadership battle in the FPL was one of the turning points in the shift, but none of the guerrilla commanders wish to talk about this in a serious way. We are left, therefore, with a narrative pitting two leaders against each other, and a murder and a suicide that have never been fully explained. The role of the Cuban and Nicaraguan governments is also absent.
The main limitation of Ching's overall extremely informative and well-constructed methodology is that so many of the unanswered historical questions emerge as unanswerable. Substantive debates and important claims disappear amidst the competing, subjective, post-hoc justifications by actors. The pathway to a national discussion appears closed. Ching has brought together some very interesting and important voices, but many other voices are missing. The historian surely has a significant role to play in showing how Salvadorean society could begin the search for a shared narrative. I commend Ching for not assuming that role himself in this text. However, we now need a serious discussion on post-war historiography in El Salvador that would at least generate some agreed methods for constructing an authoritative account of the country's violent past.
