Lisa Kowalchuk

THE DISCOURSE OF DEMOBILIZATION: Shifts in Activist Priorities and the Framing of Political Opportunities in a Peasant Land Struggle

This paper integrates the political opportunity and framing paradigms to analyze the discursive processes that were involved in the demobilization of a peasant land struggle in El Salvador. The framing paradigm provides a basis for analyzing how activist rhetoric shapes interpretations of opportunities and grievances among social movement participants to alter the goals and intensity of grassroots protest. As the land struggle demonstrates, leaders communicating with grassroots participants in a process of struggle may, over time, underemphasize shifts occurring in some dimensions of political opportunities, while framing more stable dimensions as having changed. They may also alter their framing of grievances.

Can Movement Tactics Influence Media Coverage?: Health-Care Struggle in the Salvadoran News

This article analyzes Salvadoran newspaper coverage of a social movement struggle that emerged in 2002 to prevent the privatization of the health-care system. Movement groups pursued their policy goals through both extrainstitutional protest and formal legislative channels. Through an analysis of news content, this article examines whether these different components of the movements claims-making repertoire influenced the portrayal of the movements goals, actors, and actions by one of the major Salvadoran news dailies. The analysis reveals that, compared to protest events, legislative processes that the movement set in motion generated coverage that was more sympathetic to the movement and that presented greater interrogation of government and elite plans for health-care reform.

Mobilizing Resistance to Privatization: Communication Strategies of Salvadoran Health-Care Activists

In September 2002, unions representing public health-care employees in El Salvador – doctors, nurses, blue-collar workers, and clerical staff – began a strike that would last for over 9 months, in protest of government plans to privatize medical services in the Salvadoran Social Security Institute. This paper focuses on the methods that the unions and their allies used to communicate their policy arguments and the motivations for the strike to the Salvadoran public. Specifically, I examine the endogenous factors that shaped their communication strategy and the movement traits that enabled them to carry this out successfully. Coverage of the lengthy conflict by the countrys two leading newspapers is examined in order to sketch a synopsis of counter-movement framing that the activists confronted. Interviews with movement leaders reveal that they relied primarily on direct, nonmediated communication channels to counteract the medias framing, and that the organizational diversity of the movement was an enormous advantage for these methods.

Nurses’ Labor Conditions, Gender, and the Value of Care Work in Post-Neoliberal El Salvador

Neoliberal cut-backs in health-care spending have had numerous negative impacts on nurses, but we know less about how they fare when governments move from neoliberal austerity to reinvestment in their health-care systems. El Salvador is an apt case to examine for how a post-neoliberal health-care reform, launched in 2010 by the newly elected FMLN government, addresses the deterioration in nurses’ work conditions caused by austerity policies. Based mainly on focus groups, interviews and participant observation conducted in the first three years of the reform’s implementation, the analysis finds important strides for nurses, especially in increased hiring in the expanded components of public health-care, and the reduction of labor precarity in formal employment. But several problems continue to imperil nurses’ well-being, reflecting, in part, a persistent devaluation of the care work that is performed mainly by women.

Obstacles to Nurses’ Labor Militancy in Central America: Toward a Framework for Cross-National Comparison of Nurses’ Collective Action:

This paper seeks to understand the low level of nurses’ labor militancy in El Salvador and Nicaragua compared with many other countries. Key to the analysis is the concept of oppositional consciousness, which was developed for the study of how oppressed groups convert anger over unjust treatment into vocal and even disruptive demands for change. I use data collected through interviews and focus groups to argue that while nurses in El Salvador and Nicaragua face many of the same hindrances to militancy seen elsewhere, they are more exposed to cultural and institutional forces that discourage a contestational stance. Chief among these are the influence of religion in nurses’ schooling and socialization, and nurses’ lack of experience with unions specific to their occupation. The latter owes, in turn, to particular historical and political factors in each country.