Paul Almeida

Opportunity Organizations and Threat‐Induced Contention: Protest Waves in Authoritarian Settings1

The article combines two strands of political process theory (opportunity and threat) in a changing authoritarian context. Through the use of protest event, archival, and secondary sources on El Salvador between 1962 and 1981, the study examines the outbreak and forms of two protest waves that are generated by the temporal sequencing of political opportunity and threat environments. The specific opportunities of institutional access and competitive elections motivate regime challengers to form durable civic organizations. This newly available organizational infrastructure can be used to sustain reformist contention in the near term as well as be radicalized to launch more disruptive and violent protest campaigns when opportunities recede and the political environment transitions to one characterized by mounting threats (state‐attributed economic problems, erosion of rights, and state repression).

Defensive Mobilization: Popular Movements against Economic Adjustment Policies in Latin America

In the current wave of defensive collective action across Latin America in response to neoliberal globalization, working-class groups appear most frequently in the documented protest events. The new wave of popular movement activity emerged in the region in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century and is driven by the erosion of the economic and social benefits previously available to the popular classes during the period of state-led development.

Multi-Sectoral Coalitions and Popular Movement Participation

The article focuses on varying protest intensities of social movement activists in an authoritarian political environment. Drawing on a sample of participants in El Salvadors El movimiento popular, the paper examines how structural location in the resistance movements multi-sectoral organizational infrastructure shapes the level of participation. Those motivated by state repression and maintaining multiple or cross-sectoral organizational ties exhibited higher levels of protest participation. The findings suggest that more attention be given to how the multi-sectoral network structure of opposition coalitions induces micro-mobilization processes of individual participation in high-risk collective action.

EL SALVADOR: ELECCIONES Y MOVIMIENTOS SOCIALES

Esta investigacion se enfoca en las elecciones presidenciales e historicas en El Salvador en 2009. Hay un enfasis dado a la transformacion del partido politico FMLN en la era despues de la guerra civil y la alianza entre el partido y los movimientos sociales en la sociedad civil. La combinacion de los procesos de la democratizacion y las politicas de liberalizacion economica en los 1990 y 2000 aporto al reforzamiento de la coalicion entre el partido de la izquierda y los movimientos populares. Gradualmente el FMLN se podia canalizar la energia de las campanas de los movimientos sociales contra las politicas neoliberales y opinion publica en triunfos electorales al nivel local, parlamentario y Ejecutivo.

Gendered networks and health care privatization

Purpose – This study identifies the multiple contributions of the Salvadoran womens movement in sustaining mass mobilization under the threat of public health care privatization. Methodology/approach – A case study methodological approach shows how the emergence of an autonomous womens movement in El Salvador in the late 1980s and early 1990s “spilled over” (Meyer & Whittier, 1994) to assist in the maintenance of the health care campaigns in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Findings – We observed three arenas in which the womens movement played pivotal roles in the anti-health care privatization struggle: (1) women-based organizations; (2) leadership positions within larger coalitions brokering the participation of diverse social sectors; and (3) key advocacy roles inside the state. These three contributions of the womens movement increased the overall level of mobilization and success against health care privatization. Research limitations – The study centered on one major group of health care consumers. The role of other civic organizations should be examined in future research. Originality/value of chapter – The study demonstrates that in the era of globalization, womens movements form a critical part of the social movement sector facilitating the construction of large coalitions protecting consumers from neoliberal restructuring in areas such as public health care.

Organizational Expansion, Liberalization Reversals and Radicalized Collective Action

The paper addresses a core question in the literature on states and political challenges from excluded social classes: how is large-scale collective action possible against repressive governments in the global periphery? Using the case of El Salvador’s 1932 peasant-worker uprising, the paper contributes to theories of organizational expansion and radicalization in nondemocratic settings. The case study suggests that periods of regime liberalization deposit organizations in civil society that persist beyond the political opening in the system. Combining historical materials with logistic regression and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), it is found that the political threats constituting liberalization reversals provide negative incentives for surviving reform-minded organizations to attempt revolutionary forms of collective action in more hostile political environments. Politics and Globalization Research in Political Sociology, Volume 15, 57–97 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0895-9935/doi:10.1016/S0895-9935(06)15003-2

Social Movements, Political Parties, and Electoral Triumph in El Salvador

I n the early morning hours of sunday, March 15, 2009, about 500 volunteers for the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN) political party gathered in the parking lot of an Esso gas station in central San Salvador. FMLN leaders distributed uniforms and supplies to their campaign workers (vigilantes) to supervise the presidential elections that were to begin in a few hours. At about 4:30 a.m., the volunteers and election monitors, most of whom appeared to be under the age of 35, lined up and began marching down 29th Street to the country’s second-largest voting center a few blocks away in the General Francisco Menéndez National Institute (INFRAMEN), one of El Salvador’s oldest public high schools. As they marched, they sang and chanted protest songs from the height of the country’s popular movement in the 1970s—“La marcha de la unidad” and lyrics from the popular musical group Yolocamba I Ta. They looked more like a social movement than an institutionalized political party. Before the polls closed at 5 p.m., rumors swirled from exit polling data that the FMLN’s candidate, Mauricio Funes, had triumphed over the National Republican Alliance (ARENA) party’s candidate, Rodrigo Ávila Avilés (former director of the National Civilian Police). As the election monitors from both political parties tallied the ballots of the more than 200 electoral tables in the INFRAMEN voting center, shouts could be heard at the end of counting in each table. If ARENA won the most votes at the table, the party’s election monitors would yell, “Patria 16 Social Movements, Political Parties, and Electoral Triumph in El Salvador

Social Movements Across Latin America

The past 25 years in Latin America have witnessed a renewed upswing in popular mobilization. The ending of the violent conflicts and military governments in the 1980s gave way to new struggles and a relatively more democratic climate. From northern Mexico to southern Argentina, social movements in the 1990s, and especially in the 2000s, have reached new heights of popular participation. These claims are confirmed by the multitudinous street marches in Costa Rica against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2007, the white marches in El Salvador against health care privatization, and the black marches in Panama against pension system reform, along with the massive indigenous mobilizations in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. In addition, the southern cone countries of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay experienced widespread mobilization against economic liberalization policies throughout the early 2000s. New social actors and social organizations have entered the political scene such as social movements with environmental, feminist, gay/lesbian, and consumer identities. In addition, “traditional” social movements such as labor unions continue to play a major role in the social movement sector in campaigns against austerity, adjustment, privatization, and free trade. The rural sectors also persist by launching struggles over working conditions or past exploitation. Indigenous communities continue to be key players as well in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Peru. The mass mobilizations are also directly linked to the rise of several left-leaning governments in the region by converting street politics into successful electoral outcomes.