Grassroots peacemaking : the paradox of “reconciliation” in El Salvador

Reconciliation would be if these combatants were friends before the war, and then became enemies during the war, and in the postwar period they became friends once again.--Diego, San Salvador, July 2010 (1) MY EXPLORATION OF POSTWAR "RECONCILIATION" IN EL SALVADOR STARTED thousands of miles away, in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2004. I had traveled to Brazil to visit Diego, a former guerrilla combatant of El Salvador's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). To my surprise, Diego was in Brazil to attend a course on nonviolent communication along with Roberto, a former captain in the Salvadoran Army's Atlacatl Battalion. My initial reaction to witnessing these former enemies attending the training together was one of unease. The Salvadoran armed forces and FMLN fought a civil war from 1980 to 1992, leaving over 75,000 people dead, 500,000 internally displaced, and over one million in exile (Thompson 1997,456; United Nations 1992, i). The army, and in particular the Atlacatl Battalion, was notorious for committing horrendous atrocities throughout the conflict, including the 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests, as well as their housekeeper and her daughter, and for the 1981 El Mozote massacre, in which over 1,000 peasants were killed. The war divided El Salvador--a country about the size of Massachusetts, and with a population of five million people--into two camps: those who supported the state and its armed forces and those who supported the guerrilla movement. This history made the amicable engagement between these two ex-combatants difficult for me to digest. In trying to come to terms with what I was witnessing, I asked Diego: "How did you become friends with a member of the army?" He responded, There are no saints in war. Most guerrillas fought because the army was bloodthirsty from the beginning to the end. How will a son forget that his mother was killed after being raped by a soldier? [But also,] how would the wife of a soldier forgive a guerrilla for killing her husband in front of her? (Author's notes. Brazil, July 2004) In 2010, still perplexed by my experience in Brazil six years earlier, I returned to my home country of El Salvador as a graduate student to research practices of reconciliation among ex-combatants. In the course of my investigation, I observed that certain sectors of society frequently condemn former enemy combatants ' efforts to coexist and forge common ground. Many victim-survivors view ex-combatants from both sides--particularly former soldiers--as war criminals. Many at the extremes of the political establishment view the coming together of ex- combatants as weakening the ideological purity of their parties. In the postwar context, the war experiences of ex-combatants position them at the intersection of complex social relations. Practices of coexistence raise the following question: How can we, as Salvadorans, address our recent history in a way that enables us to create a peaceful, democratic present? My exploration of this question is based upon six years of informal observations and on participant observation and 20 interviews that I conducted in the summer of 2010. The latter employed a structured format to gather information about the extent to which reconciliation has taken place in El Salvador, particularly among former enemy combatants. When individuals did not wish to be audiotaped, I followed an open-ended interview format (conversations). My research proceeded from the assumption that my subjects would recognize their coexistence practices as reconciliation. This supposition was challenged during an interview with a former guerrilla combatant. After the civil war ended, he explained, "Guerrilla and army combatants did not talk to one another, assuming the interactions would result in a confrontation.... Then, lack of healthcare for veterans pushed us beyond fears, and to work together to call on the state for help" (Author's notes, July 2010). …