Ainhoa Montoya

The 2009 Shift

This final chapter explores how widespread feelings of fear, distrust, and disillusionment pervade and impact state-citizenry relations and popular visions of democracy. The chapter focuses on the 2009 rise to power of El Salvador’s leftwing party—formerly a guerrilla organization—in order to query the extent to which a regime shift within a violent democracy can impact political subjectivities and citizenship practices. While the postwar era has been characterized by a widespread disillusionment with democracy and an attendant circumvention of the state, I did observe postelection episodes in which ordinary Salvadorans suddenly began to engage state institutions and actors. I describe some of these episodes so as to enquire into the extent to which El Salvador’s 2009 party shift transformed the country’s political life.

The Fallacy of the Telos of Transition

This chapter shows that violence has been a feature of El Salvador’s postwar as well as wartime eras. It introduces the Salvadoran municipality from where most of this book’s research was drawn and describes the forms of violence and violent actors specific to this municipality’s wartime and postwar eras. It also addresses how, in a context where homicidal violence makes news on a daily basis, ordinary people struggle as much with the fear of potential violence as with the actual occurrence of violence. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the persistence of different forms of violence in postwar El Salvador provides a platform on which to problematize the alleged success of the country’s transition to democracy.

Memory Work in the Aftermath of War

This chapter explores the outcomes of a grassroots organization’s endeavor to transform El Salvador’s violent democracy via a reassessment of the wartime past and the invoking of a moral vocabulary of victimhood rooted in liberation theology. I build this chapter upon my participation in the activities of this grassroots organization, which is composed of war victims and relatives of war victims. Their work is oriented toward documenting the history of the war in their region, finding out about their assassinated and abducted relatives, and collectively mourning their dead. The chapter investigates the silence maintained by political parties and the Catholic Church during the postwar era on issues relating to restorative and retributive justice and shows how ordinary people have taken the lead in pursuing justice.

Neoliberalization and the Violence Within

This chapter contributes to discussions about the constitutive relationship between violence and capitalist political economies. It provides insights into how the gray zone conjured by Salvadorans across the political spectrum, and the alternative circuits of accumulation and political authority that are rumored to be part of it, are related to El Salvador’s liberal market democracy. The chapter does so by showing how wartime legacies and neoliberalization processes have yielded a significant degree of similarity between the nominally licit (security industry) and illicit (extortion). The chapter also traces the role of statecraft in this process, whereby the proliferation of securitization discourses and strategies coincides with the rollback of the state and a condition of rampant impunity.

The Postwar Gray Zone of Politics

This chapter addresses the opacity of democracies and the development of state backstage domains. In contrast to the clear-cut representations of El Salvador’s postwar violence put forth by the government and mass media—representations epitomized by the gang trope—this chapter explores why Salvadorans find postwar violence so unintelligible and teases out the connections they make between violent actors and political actors. In particular, the chapter describes how left-leaning war survivors and other disaffected Salvadorans allude to the existence of clandestine associations between criminal and political actors and to the ‘gray zone’ these actors populate, thereby calling into question the categorization of postwar violence as ‘social’.

War Reenactment Through Elections

In this chapter, I examine the unfolding of El Salvador’s 2009 municipal, legislative, and presidential elections in order to show how the archetypal democratic practice of participating in electoral campaigns and voting has been, to some degree, an expression of political cleavages, conflicts, and violence rooted in wartime. The chapter suggests that El Salvador’s 2009 presidential elections amounted to a reenactment of the country’s civil war, with the two main political parties equivalent to the opposing sides during wartime. The elections were won by the FMLN, the country’s guerrilla-turned-leftwing party, because its presidential candidate spoke to the socio-economic problems of ordinary Salvadorans. The chapter also elucidates the very different dynamics of El Salvador’s municipal elections, in which clientelism and factional disputes trumped political allegiance.

The Value of Open Access in Anthropology and Beyond

This commentary seeks to engage the issue of ‘impact’ in social anthropology by scrutinising the topic of open access. Drawing on the discussions that took place at the interna- tional conference ‘FAQs about Open Access: The Political Economy of Knowledge in Anthro- pology and Beyond’, held in October 2014 in Madrid, we suggest that addressing the topic of open access allows a two-fold goal. On one hand, it elucidates that public debates about open access rely on a rather minimalist notion of openness that does not yield an adequate under- standing of what is at stake in those debates. On the other, we argue that expanding the notion of openness does not only allow us to revisit the debate concerning what we do as academics, how we do it and what its value is, but also to do so going beyond current notions of ‘impact’ and ‘public value’ underpinned by the principle of economic efficiency in a context of increas- ingly reduced research funds.