Mo Hume

Mano Dura: El Salvador responds to gangs

Although it is increasingly recognised that violence, crime, and associated fear are challenging democratic governance in Latin America, less attention has been paid to the ways in which state responses to crime contribute to the problem. By analysing El Salvador as a case study, this article addresses three key interconnected issues in the debate. First, it explores the dynamic of violence. It then locates youth gangs as violent actors within this context. Finally, it addresses the state response to the growing phenomenon of youth gangs. It is argued that current strategies, dubbed Mano Dura – Iron Fist, employed by the Salvadoran government serve to reveal the fragility of the democratic project, exposing the underside of authoritarianism that remains key to Salvadoran political life in the transitional process from civil war to peace.

“It’s as if you don’t know, because you don’t do anything about it”: gender and violence in El Salvador

This paper explores how gendered violence in El Salvador contin- ues to be minimized within public and private discourse. Through an examination of social understandings and reactions to violence, based on qualitative research, the paper argues that gendered violence remains an issue sidelined from mainstream social and political debates. In a society where the threshold for tolerating violence is very high, gendered violence stands out as an issue which, to a great degree, has become normalized as a central element of gender relations. This is borne out by the scant attention paid to issues of gender in both policy proposals and debates on violence.

Violence, fear, and development in Latin America: a critical overview

This introduction presents the core concepts that shape this special issue on the impact of violence and the processes of development in Central and South America. The understanding of development is considered in terms broader than the economic context alone, in order to assess wider social and political aspects. With a similarly expansive scope, forms of violence are addressed that range from direct physical harm and bodily attack to the often more subtle aggression of racialised abuse or the pressures on community-centred production from dominant market forces. In these contexts, violence, economic initiatives, and political allegiances form unintended and often dangerous networks of consequence for development matters. All the articles in this volume exemplify further the spatial environments of violence and diverse ‘landscapes of fear’ that shape our existence and help to define our actions, territories, and understanding of what happens around us.

Central America, civil society and the ‘pink tide’: democratization or de-democratization?

In the literature on the turn to the left in the wider Latin American region, Central America has generally been neglected. The aim of this article is to seek to fill that gap, while specifically assessing the left turns impact on prospects for democratization in the sub-region. Using three case studies – El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua – the article questions the usefulness of transition theory for analysis and instead offers a framework based on state/civil society interaction within the context of globalization. Four key conclusions are made: First, democratization is not a linear process, but can be subject to simultaneous processes of democratization and de-democratization. Second, continued deep structural inequalities remain central to the regions politics but these often provoke unproductive personalistic and partisan politics which can inhibit or curtail democratization. Third, interference from local and/or international economic actors can curtail or reverse democratization measures, underlining the influence of globalization. Fourth, Central America is particularly revelatory of these tendencies due to its acute exposure to extreme oligarchic power and outside influence. It hence can help shed light on wider questions on the blurring of boundaries between state, civil society and market and its impact on democratization, especially within the context of globalization. In this way the article contributes to the analysis of Central America in the current context of the ‘pink tide’, underlines the importance of continued analysis of Central America for democratization studies, and brings new insight to debates on transition theory.

El Salvador: The Limits of a Violent Peace

There has been a growing emphasis in conflict scholarship on critically assessing the long-term impacts of political conflict, the limitations of peace-building initiatives and the role of domestic and international actors in building civil society following sustained conflict (Debiel, 2002; Pearce, 1998; Richmond, 2006). In particular, empirical evidence from post-conflict situations increasingly demonstrates that the political economies of war spill onto and constrict the development of peace (Pugh, 2006). Matters of political economy in post-conflict contexts create particular points of ‘vulnerability’ and one area in which these vulnerabilities are most brutally manifest is in continuing and even rising rates of violence and crime after the cessation of hostilities (AVPI, 2004). This has led to broader interrogation on the relationship between transition and violence (Kooning and Kruijt, 1999; Pereira and Davis, 2000; Rotker, 2002). The nature of this relationship has sparked debates on the ‘newness’ of the violence to emerge in fledgling democratic and post-war contexts, particularly in Latin America where levels of interpersonal violence are among the highest in the world (Kooning and Kruijt, 2004). Violence in Latin America has certainly undergone a transformation, and moves towards democratic governance have been marked and undermined by the continued ‘ubiquity’ of violent actors (Torres-Rivas, 1999: 287).