10 - CONTENTION AND REPRESSION: EL SALVADOR

Summary

Few Latin American countries have witnessed a cycle of contention as lengthy and as intense as that of El Salvador in the late 1970s going into the early 1980s. Nor have many witnessed a sharper confrontation between a highly mobilized mass movement and a state willing to kill unarmed civilians as necessary in order to defeat its challengers. What is less well known is that within just a few years of the crushing of El Salvador's nonviolent contentious movement, a new protest cycle developed again in the mid-1980s in the capital. And, of course, throughout the 1980s a civil war raged that even after a decade of fighting found neither side able to defeat the other. This chapter will give close attention to the relationship between contention and repression in El Salvador, utilizing datasets for both sides of the relationship that, while not as complete as those used for Guatemala, are far better than those commonly utilized for such studies. The final section of this chapter then closes the study by analyzing the contention/repression relationship at the level of the individual.

Precursor Movements

This analysis of the relationship between cycles of contention and repression in El Salvador is organized by the same hypotheses utilized in the prior chapter on Guatemala. As with its larger neighbor, this analysis will show that there is a close fit between these hypotheses and the Salvadoran experience, as seen both with events data and with conventional accounts of the periods under examination.

1. Repression by authoritarian regimes – along with other means of limiting access to the political system – normally keeps nonviolent protest at a minimal level.