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This article analyzes the role played by Schafick Jorge Handal in the process of political conversion of the Frente Farabundo Martí into la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in the post-civil war period. We analyzed the main debates about the political and ideological redefinition of the FMLN, once the civil war was finished, the party leadership and internal democracy. This process was marked by bitter disputes between the leaders of the old political-military organizations that formed the FMLN. Handal was one of the main protagonists of these struggles, and gained power and internal recognition. But he died suddenly in 2006, when the process of "unification" was advanced, but not consolidated. Nevertheless, Handal has become the main identity reference in the official memory of the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 1992, the economic program sponsored by the International Monetary Fund in El Salvador sacrificed the government's ability to implement the UN-mediated peace agreement on the altar of budgetary discipline and placed the country at the brink of relapsing into war. This episode turned the spotlight on a major obstacle to peacebuilding: the UN and the Bretton Woods Institutions, which frequently work elbow-to-elbow where war-torn countries struggle to move to peace, are all too often at odds and even on a collision course. This article analyzes the UN record since then; assesses whether institutional changes have improved or hindered UN capacity to support countries in overcoming such obstacles; and makes proposals for moving forward in a more effective, coherent, and coordinated way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the causes of undocumented migration from Central America. Particular focus is given to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. According to the author, increases in undocumented migrants seeking refuge from violence can be traced to institutional failures which undermined the democratic reforms of the 1990s. According to the author, governments returned to authoritarian practices when faced with crime, poor economic performance, and social discontent.

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The current text, which was derived from research, introduces t he results of the prospective analysis for the agricultural development in the Colombian regions, with a view of a possible agreement, as a result of the current (2014) peace negotiations between the FARC-EP guerrilla forces and the Colombian government, an agreement which, in the event of its being signed, would let the Colombian society enter into what by now has been called post-conflict. In this text, some possible scenarios are projected to the year 2025; four possible scenarios, two alternate ones, which are identified as: Average Welfare and Surviving, a catastrophic scenario known as Absolute Poverty, and our bet stage: Peace and Prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judicial autonomy from societal actors is argued herein to be a critical aspect of the rule of law and to have been overlooked by the dominance within comparative judicial politics of the role of interbranch judicial independence. These distinct concepts are parsed and then interrelated to form a typology of four “judicial regime types”: liberal regimes, partisan control regimes, clandestine control regimes, and government control regimes. These regime types are then traced in five Central American countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite a growing literature on the left in Latin America, few studies have considered the fate of the right. This article examines a highly successful conservative party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which held power for close to two decades in El Salvador. The ARENA party used mano dura policies--defined by the introduction of discretionary crimes, diluted due process guarantees, and military participation in policing--to boost its support among constituencies plagued by crime. Two key factors prompted ARENA party strategists to emphasize security. First, a credible electoral threat existed from a leftist party hesitant to resort to harsh security measures. Second, factional divisions drove party strategy. Business elites who formed the core of the ARENA party refused to abandon unpopular economic reforms. Mano dura policies allowed the party to maintain support from traditional elites and their rural bases without reversals to its economic program. Party centralization facilitated the programmatic shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of unity can affect an armed opposition group at many stages of its existence-during the war, in peace negotiations, and in its transition to political party. This article assesses how internal divisions affected the performance of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. It finds that while the FMLN suffered significant internal divisions in the early years of the war, it remained remarkably unified from 1983 on. Significant divisions began to appear during the later war years but were not exacerbated until after the war's conclusion, when repeated fracturing occurred. The FMLN began to present itself as a programmatically coherent party only in 2005, and this ideological homogeneity allowed it to establish a series of partnerships with moderate, non-revolutionary sectors of Salvadoran society and to achieve victory in the 2009 presidential elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the social movement that resisted the privatization of health care in El Salvador in 2002-3, this article asks how the movement's multisectoral composition influenced news coverage of the health care policy debate. Specifically, it examines whether the diversity of perspectives in the alliance was reflected in the media's source selection and framing of the policy issues. A content analysis of Salvadoran newspapers' coverage shows that the media relied mainly on just two movement actors to represent the antiprivatization position: the striking doctors and the leftist opposition party. It also reveals that a period of elite dissensus on the policy issues opened a temporary opportunity to insert movement messages in the coverage. The study indicates that a multisectoral alliance does not enhance movement influence through the news media, though broad alliances confer strategic advantages for the movement's broader communication work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last several decades, numerous civil wars have ended as a consequence of negotiated settlements. Following many of these settlements, rebel groups have made the transition to political party and competed in democratic elections. In this paper, I assess the legacy of civil war on the performance of rebel groups as political parties. I argue that the ability of rebels to capture and control territory and their use of violence against the civilian population are two key factors explaining the performance of rebels as political parties. I test these hypotheses against the case of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador using one-way ANOVA and multivariate regression analyses. In analyzing the FMLN’s performance in the 1994 “elections of the century,” I find that, as a political party, the FMLN benefited both from the state’s violently disproportionate response and its ability to hold territory during the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Salvadoran state, in issuing the anti-gang law of 2003, demonstrates little comprehension around the problematic of the adolescence and youth, using stigmatization and repression to avoid any type of personal or group identification that is not in line with what is established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After decades of authoritarianism and a twelve-year civil war ended by a negotiated peace agreement in 1992, El Salvador is a markedly different country. Despite important changes, however, public institutions have remained largely unresponsive, acute social exclusion persists and violent crime has soared. Rather than the possibly inevitable by-products of a post-conflict situation, these and other developments are the consequences of a regression from an incipient electoral democracy to electoral authoritarianism. The elite-controlled Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) party had more to gain from the preservation of the status quo than from democratic changes and only accepted a politically inclusive system to restore the oligarchy's dominant position through electoral politics. Uncommitted to democratic consolidation, successive ARENA administrations maintained an institutional façade of democracy to reproduce authoritarian governance and defend elite interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines the US-Central American sanctuary movement of the 1980s. Our re-examination is motivated by two factors. First, with the passage of time it is possible to discern the movement's origins in ways that could not be fully articulated while it was ongoing. We are able to show how certain relationships between the movement's North and Central American activists were celebrated, while others were obscured due to fear for Salvadoran immigrant activists' safety and concern about inadvertently undermining the movement's legitimacy. Specifically, we draw attention to the movement's transnational nature, noting that what made it so powerful was its origin as part of a broader effort by Salvadoran revolutionaries to mobilize North American society to oppose US support for the Salvadoran government. Ironically, to achieve this objective Salvadoran immigrant activists had to stay quiet, become invisible, and abstain from taking certain leadership roles, while embracing identities that may have implied weakness or passivity, such as "refugee" or "victim." Second, the US-Central American sanctuary movement provides powerful insight into future understandings of sanctuary as a concept and practice. The movement's legacies extend beyond participants' stated goals, while the movement's transnational political and organizational focus differentiates it from current sanctuary practices. Thus, re-examining its origins and legacies suggests that apparent similarities in the form of sanctuary incidents may hide underlying differences and that current sanctuary practices may also eventually have unanticipated consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the signing and implementation of a peace accord in El Salvador in 1993, which brings to an end a 12-year civil war. The peaceful resolution consisted of three phases. In the first phase, the main problem was to get the actors to the negotiating table. The second phase covered the negotiations over the substance of the peace accord itself. The third dealt with the implementation of the final accord. A peaceful outcome to El Salvador's conflict was contingent on the U.S. government's abandoning its support for a military solution. The role of the United Nations was also central to the success of the peace process, as well as in maintaining the momentum of negotiations especially at certain points when matters became deadlocked.