The year 1992 marks a watershed in the study of El Salvador's recent history. It was the year that a peace accord went into effect, drawing an end to the country's 12-year civil war and launching a new postwar era. Most scholars either begin or end their examinations in 1992, contributing to a hyper-focus on high-level figures in the Salvadoran government, the insurgent forces of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN), and international mediation teams.
This book—the most recent and, unfortunately, the last that this masterful scholar saw published in English—builds a much-needed bridge across 1992, underscoring important continuities between the conflict and post-conflict eras. More specifically, it examines how the men and women who participated in the insurgency experienced and helped to shape El Salvador's transition to democracy. Sprenkels argues that the collective project devised by the insurgent groups during the 1970s and 1980s continued to evolve after the conflict and adapted to a new context of neoliberal economics. Rather than focus on the high command of the politico-military forces of the FMLN, Sprenkels brings to the fore the rank-and-file cadres; he argues that the dynamic identities and relationships that they built during the war became a “constitutive element of postwar politics” (22-23). With this line of thinking, Sprenkels encourages us to rethink the legacies of revolutionary armed struggle in Latin America and, in particular, the renewed salience of clientelist networks (23).
The author grounds his arguments in stellar research, with methods and insights from history, anthropology, political science, and other disciplines. The book is particularly powerful, however, because it draws from the author's 15 years of living and working with Salvadoran revolutionaries and change-makers, first with the Fuerzas Populares de la Liberación (Popular Liberation Forces, FPL) in Mexico and El Salvador, and later with the Asociación Pro-Búsqueda.
The FPL was a leader in the FMLN coalition forces, and Pro-Búsqueda, co-founded by Sprenkels in the 1990s, is a nongovernmental organization that works to identify children forcibly disappeared during the conflict and reunite them with their biological families. Years of experience in the country understandably engendered dense kinship and professional networks, allowing Sprenkels access to documentation, voices, and insider knowledge that is simply unavailable to most other researchers. Such a background might prompt some authors to produce a memoir rather than a scholarly exploration and argument. That is not the case with this book: Sprenkels has intertwined his personal experience and scholarship in a way that strengthens his argument and provides critical texture to his evidence.
Sprenkels divides the text into two parts. The first section takes an organizational or institutional approach, with chapters tracing insurgent relations on a national scale during the conflict, on a local level in Chalatenango in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and again at a national level during the first part of postwar period. The second section of the book uses ethnographic case studies to draw out the nuances of transitions, reconversions, and postwar trajectories. More specifically, Sprenkels delves into the insurgent relations within the repopulated community of Ellacuría, Chalatenango, among former guerrilla fighters, and within and between veterans’ organizations. These case studies are remarkable for both their methodologies and discoveries. In one, for example, Sprenkels assists with the co-creation of an archive, leading to unprecedented access to FPL documentation, stories of individual veterans, and the inner workings of veterans’ NGOs. In another, he and his collaborators develop a photograph-based ethnographic project that not only identifies the former combatants pictured in the photos, but also reveals the varied paths they traveled in the years after demobilization.
Another key strength of the book is its broad relevance. Sprenkels has produced a text that helps us better understand not only how individuals and groups weathered and contributed to the transition from war to peacetime, but also how the past continues to be mobilized in present-day politics in El Salvador. In particular, Sprenkels highlights how revolutionary tenets, including egalitarian understandings, ideals of internal solidarity, and service to a collective purpose “crashed with the circumstances of neoliberal peace” (306). As their moral universe imploded, many former cadres detached themselves from the political sphere. Others continued to draw on their insurgent networks, seeking redress for historical debts and the increasing inequalities resulting from unevenly applied postwar reinsertion programs (land transfers, job training, and other benefits). The varied individual trajectories and the complex networks of interpersonal relationships help to explain the coexistence of multiple political imaginaries in El Salvador today.
A case in point: in June 2019, Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez donned El Salvador's presidential sash. To casual observers, his ascendancy reads like a telenovela. Bukele, running on FMLN coalition tickets, successfully ousted the right-wing ARENA (National Republican Alliance) party from two mayoral offices: Nuevo Cuscatlán in 2012 and San Salvador in 2015. Shortly thereafter, in 2017, the FMLN accused Bukele of “defamatory acts” and expelled him from the party. Subsequently blocked from formalizing his Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas) movement as a political party, Bukele ran for president as a candidate of GANA (Grand Alliance for National Unity), a center-right party formed by defectors from ARENA. His victory was decisive: according to official results, Bukele received just over 53 percent of the popular vote, surpassing ARENA's 31.72 percent, and the FMLN's abysmal 14.41 percent). Although some former combatants and life-long supporters of the FMLN have shifted their allegiance to Bukele, others disdain him and his supporters, perceiving them as selfish flip-floppers void of any real vision for the country.
Sprenkels makes sense of these shifting terrains and tangled loyalties at both national and local levels. A model of interdisciplinary research, the book will be of great value to scholars in all disciplines who are interested in the Latin American left, Central America's wars, the complexities of post-conflict transitions, and the deep connections between past and present.
Ralph Sprenkels died unexpectedly in August 2019. It is a tragedy that this master scholar, mentor, and human rights defender did not live to see and experience—and write about—the next phases of our postwar reality.
