Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 THE PUZZLE OF INSURGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION
- 2 ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN THE SHADOW OF CIVIL WAR
- 3 REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF CLASS AND CITIZENSHIP
- 4 FROM POLITICAL MOBILIZATION TO ARMED INSURGENCY
- 5 THE POLITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF DUAL SOVEREIGNTY
- 6 THE REEMERGENCE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
- 7 CAMPESINO ACCOUNTS OF INSURGENT PARTICIPATION
- 8 EXPLAINING INSURGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION
- Epilogue: Legacies of an Agrarian Insurgency
- Appendix: A Model of High-Risk Collective Action by Subordinate Social Actors
- Chronology of El Salvador's Civil War
- References
- Index
- Other Books in the Series
4 - FROM POLITICAL MOBILIZATION TO ARMED INSURGENCY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 THE PUZZLE OF INSURGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION
- 2 ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN THE SHADOW OF CIVIL WAR
- 3 REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF CLASS AND CITIZENSHIP
- 4 FROM POLITICAL MOBILIZATION TO ARMED INSURGENCY
- 5 THE POLITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF DUAL SOVEREIGNTY
- 6 THE REEMERGENCE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
- 7 CAMPESINO ACCOUNTS OF INSURGENT PARTICIPATION
- 8 EXPLAINING INSURGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION
- Epilogue: Legacies of an Agrarian Insurgency
- Appendix: A Model of High-Risk Collective Action by Subordinate Social Actors
- Chronology of El Salvador's Civil War
- References
- Index
- Other Books in the Series
Summary
Let's see why the war emerged. Perhaps – the majority say so anyway – because the Catholic Church gave a certain orientation. Perhaps the words of the Bible connected with a very deep injustice – they treated us like animals, it was slavery. In the Word of God, there was something that would touch you. In truth, we had been living as though the Word was in the air, when it was something to live within ourselves. I am grateful that there were such people, many of them now dead.
Leader, Cooperativa El Carrizal, 1992In response to intensifying political mobilization by campesinos and coffee mill workers for access to land and higher wages in Santiago de María in the late 1970s, Héctor Antonio Regalado, a local landlord and dentist, began to recruit young men to what appeared to be a Boy Scout troop. Members, who on one account may have numbered as many as a hundred, wore uniforms in marches through town. Rather than the usual scouting activities, however, members of Regalado's troop killed dozens of activists and suspected activists, including teachers, unionists, cooperativists, and students, not only in Santiago de María but in the cities of Usulután, Berlín, Alegría, Jucuapa, Villa El Triunfo, and Chinameca. In interviews at the end of the war, townspeople told stories of cadavers appearing at the edge of town, of a decapitated head found in a ditch, and other public displays of extreme violence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador , pp. 87 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003