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Profiles Joaquin Villalobos, former guerrilla leader in El Salvador. Marriage to a woman from a politically connected family; Conciliatory position with rightists; Divisiveness within the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN); Plan to run for president in 1999.

The article focuses on the social condition in El Salvador 25 years after the United Nation brokered negotiation between the insurgent Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the government during the civil war from 1980 to 1992. Overview of the history of the conflict and the ongoing public security crisis due to the lack of social policies is discussed. Suggestion on the need for the nation to implement political economy of peace to consolidate democratic governance is offered.

This article analyses political events thak took place in El Salvador between 2014 and 2015, when two electoral contests have been held and the FMLN won its second's presidential contest after the nomination of one of its historical leader, Salvador Sánchez Cerén. At the legislative level, despite the victory of ARENA, the bloc formed by GANA and FMLN managed to control enough seats to dominate the Chamber. In the context of consolidation of the FMLN as a governmental party and the fractionalization of the right wing opposition, the Supreme Court has thus become the principal opponent of the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the gang policies of the first years of the Funes administration in El Salvador, from June 2009 until July 2012. Using securitisation theory, it explains why the administration returned to an emphasis on extraordinary measures, most of them repressive, to deal with gangs. It argues that these measures were the product of an ongoing and dynamic process in which the government was but one of the players in a complex field constituted by numerous actors. The return to repressive measures as well as the support and facilitation of a ‘gang truce’ were not the result of a rational design or a predetermined agenda, but should be seen as a series of moves in a political conjuncture, in which the Salvadorean government needed to communicate to different audiences messages of being in control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Violence has not been effectively addressed in El Salvador since, at least, the 1992 Peace Accords. The annual rate of violence has steadily increased, and repressive policies to date have not worked. In 2013, the presidential electoral campaign has framed the topic of violence as the backdrop for a truce between gangs. In this article, we offer a description of key events such as the presidential elections and the gang truce, and suggest that political parties are missing an opportunity to grapple with the issue of violence. Instead, other organizations are leading this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discurre sobre los aspectos legales del aborto en El Salvador. La autora comenta sobre el movimiento feminista relacionada con la legalización del aborto y para los derechos femeninos en el país. Se describe el tratamiento legal del aborto en otros países latinoamericanos así como el estado de la salud femenino. También se considera el caso de una mujer nombrada Beatriz quien ha sido luchando por el derecho para el aborto en El Salvador.

In his widely discussed article "The Return of The Native" Adam Kuper criticises the concept of indigeneity and how it is used by indigenous activists and supporters. With the help of two case studies - the indigenous rebellion in Chiapas and international programs for strengthening the indigenous move-ment of El Salvador - I explore the relation of local indigenous groups, their spokespersons, and transnational discourses. Actor-Network-Theory is used to describe how indigenous movements use modern technologies and global discourses in order to sus-tain authentic identities. The article focuses on the successful or unsuccessful processes of identity formation and representation with the help of technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2003, the Government of El Salvador launched Plan Mano Dura to curb urban violence and homicides, most of which had been attributed to street gangs. Domestic non-governmental organisations (NGOs) criticised the measure for its repressive nature and the neglect of the wider policies for prevention and rehabilitation, and sought to promote the implementation of alternative gang control. Drawing on ethnographic research in Homies Unidos-El Salvador - founded and organised by pandilleros calmados (retired gang members) - the article considers how both the socio-political context and organisational characteristics shaped the agency's advocacy strategy and why its efforts remained largely ineffective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2010 and 2011 have been two convulsive years for El Salvador. In 2010 the institutional crisis and confrontation between the Legislative and Judicial Organs were the most salient political events. Four Judges from the Constitutional Court were considered in contempt with the Legislative, which is considered in El Salvador as the first Organ of the State. Had it not been for intense pressures from organized actors in the Civil Society, the deputies would have dismissed the judges, for having dared to decide in electoral matters, consider to be the sole responsibility of the legislators. 2011 ended with the president's decision to put the military in charge of public security. This decision triggered an avalanche of resignation from members of his security cabinet and harsh criticism of the local human rights organizations. In 2011 the experiment to promote a leftist and new concept to curb violence in El Salvador was aborted. During these two years clashes between the President, Mauricio Funes and its party Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) have kept attention of observers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study argues that individual parties and party competition in El Salvador and Cambodia today are still profoundly affected by the period of civil war that has long passed. The war-time origins of the main Salvadoran and Cambodian parties have left a deep imprint on their organizational structures and style of leadership, just as war-time political exclusion set the tone for unbalanced party competition after the war. Although El Salvador's party system is more institutionalized and pluralistic than Cambodia's, there have been clear cross-national patterns of unequal institutionalization and ruling party dominance that are a product of the war. International engagement ranging from election observation, election organization to party assistance has had some benefits, particularly for opposition parties. At the party system level, however, international support has only been of minor influence, with the possible exception of financial, economic and technical assistance to the government, which has served to accentuate the tendency towards dominance by the party in power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The victory of the FMLN in El Salvador's presidential elections of March 2009 has been considered remarkable, given the dominance of ARENA in four consecutive presidential races from 1989 to 2004. Using individual-level data, this article examines the determinants of electoral support for both parties over the past 15 years. Several statistical models illuminate some of the factors that led to ARENA's dominance and ultimate defeat. A combination of variables associated with different theoretical models of voting helps explain the choices made by Salvadoran voters over the years. The most consistent predictors of vote have been voters' self-reported ideology and their evaluation of the incumbent government's performance. The 2009 turnaround relates to fundamental changes in the national and international context, and also to the selection of candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roque Dalton (1935–1975), one of Latin America's most celebrated poets, was a radical political activist who participated in the early years of the armed struggle in El Salvador to overthrow an oppressive military regime, only to be executed by his revolutionary comrades. This paper focuses on Dalton's collage-novel Las historias prohibidas del pulgarcito (1974), which presents a radically counter-hegemonic perspective on Salvadoran identity in its reassessment of the nation's turbulent past. While it seeks to expose and denounce the violence meted out by the dominant classes against the Salvadoran people since the Conquest, the work also promotes an image of Salvadoran identity based on a hegemonic masculinity rooted in violent resistance. My analysis considers the context of the author's position within a guerrilla organization attempting to radicalize the masses in opposition to a violent military regime. In this light, Las historias can be seen both to reflect and perpetuate the image of the 'murderous hero', which, according to Connell (1989), is the admired form of masculinity used by governments and other agencies to mobilize support for war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on politics in El Salvador. The victory of Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN) party as the nation's president in the 2009 election is said to represent the first peaceful transfer of power to a political party of the left. In January 1992, the democratization process in the nation started with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords, which ended the 12 years of civil war.

The article discusses the impact of the Masculinities Programme of the Salvadoran non-governmental organization (NGO) Centro Bartolomé de las Casas towards the gender-based violence (GBV) in El Salvador. It states that the masculinities workshops have a significant impact on the attitudes and behaviour of individual men. Moreover, the most significant impact if the program come from the identification of non-violent masculine models and a cultural consensus to de-ideologize GBV.

This article analyzes the experiences of Neris Gonzalez, one of the three Salvadoran plaintiffs who brought a successful lawsuit against the former heads of the Salvadoran military for the torture she suffered in 1979. In analyzing the presentation of the case, I focus on the specific transformations that political and historical disputes undergo as they are subsumed into the formal rules of U.S. tort litigation. Further, I pay special attention to the ways legal narratives are designed specifically to appeal to a jury comprising 10 lay U.S. citizens, who have no familiarity with Salvadoran history. I demonstrate how torts litigation requires a depoliticization of the plaintiff and a personalization of history. I argue that, due to the form of the court fails in addressing the historical disputes in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many religious progressives use the word disappointing when evaluating Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas's leadership of the Archdiocese of San Salvador from 1980 to 1994. As the only Salvadoran bishop to support Archbishop Oscar Romero (1977-80) in the latter's attempt to be the "voice of the voiceless," Rivera was expected to follow in his charismatic predecessor's footsteps. This study attempts to demonstrate that although Romero's "prophetic" approach was a highly effective method of leadership during his three-year tenure of office, his assassination changed the climate dramatically, requiring a different approach from Rivera. Rejecting the "prophetic" method of Romero, he pursued a low-key, "pragmatic" path in his attempt to end the Salvadoran civil war and bring justice to the poor masses. Throughout the 1980s, Rivera labored to create peace negotiations between the Salvadoran power structure and the FMLN-FDR opposition. Previously, as an auxiliary bishop, he was the driving force behind the efforts of Archbishop Luis Chávez to incorporate the social justice concepts of Vatican II and the Latin American Bishops' Conference at Medellín into Salvadoran society. Thus, he alone among the Salvadoran prelates played an important role in the institutional church's fight for justice in El Salvador between the 1960s and the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]