Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War

Introduction: A People without History

3 Introduction A People without History In February 1982 a leading Honduran newspaper published an editorial cartoon depicting a Salvadoran refugee camp. In the center of the drawing, a male “refugee” kicks back in the shade of a palm tree. He sports a scruffy beard, a contented smile, and hefty boots. On the sand next to him rest a pistol, a rifle, and a bomb. A line of tents frames the sketch on one side; the flaps of one tent open slightly to reveal boxes of war matériel.1 When this cartoon appeared, Honduras hosted approximately 21,250 Salvadoran refugees in five official camps. An additional 12,750 Salvadorans lived in semiclandestinity, as unofficial refugees in many small villages tucked into the mountainous southern regions of Honduras.2 The vast majority of these Salvadorans hailed from similar rural towns just a few kilometers away on the other side of the international border. There they had been campesinos, rural dwellers who survived primarily by combining subsistence agriculture, petty animal husbandry and seasonal wage labor.3 They had begun fleeing El Salvador in the late 1970s as political violence became widespread and the country descended into civil war. When these Salvadorans crossed the border into Honduras, they became refugees under international law; they remained so until their return to El Salvador in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By early 1981 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), along with dozens of other national and international organizations , had arrived in Honduras to lend assistance to the new refugees. Although the Honduran government collaborated with UNHCR personnel throughout the decade and allowed the Salvadorans to remain in Honduras “on purely
humanitarian grounds,” Honduran officials never held their Salvadoran visitors in high esteem. As implied by the editorial cartoon described earlier, officials considered them not as true refugees but, rather, as soldiers and collaborators of the Salvadoran insurgent forces, the Frente Farabundo Martí para Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN). The refugee camps, from this perspective, were hotbeds of guerrilla activity. Humanitarian aid personnel painted an entirely different picture of the Salvadoran refugees. To them Salvadorans were humble, even ignorant, peasants unwittingly tossed about in an unstable political climate. Nongovernmental groups often focused on the horrific events that prompted or accompanied departure from El Salvador: harassment and disappearances by extralegal vigilantes and death squads, the razing of villages during the military’s scorched earth campaigns, and massacres. The UNHCR magazine Refugees presented similarly wrenching images of the Salvadoran refugees: caravans of barefoot women and children wending unpaved roads, solemnly trudging the dust toward an elusive safety; two young brothers peering through a chainlink fence, their small fingers gripping the metal as if to life itself; flatbed Fords, swarms of empty hands outstretched, waiting for the weight of a sack of maize, a family’s ration for a week. Blunt pronouncements further distilled such images; in the words of one UNHCR representative, “The refugees are victims.”4 At first glance, the humanitarian and government representations appear to exist on opposite ends of a spectrum. Upon closer examination, however, they reveal much in common. The humanitarian point of view presented Salvadorans who fled their war-torn homeland as all the same; they were refugees, ragged and poor, mute and dependent on the goodwill of others. Honduran and Salvadoran officials also presented the refugees as one undifferentiated mass, but where aid personnel saw passive victims, government representatives perceived rebel threats. In short, both essentialized the refugee populations, bypassed their roles as historical agents, and failed to place their experiences into historical context. As a result, millions of individuals and their communities remained suspended in time, disconnected from the larger national and international stories. Popular and scholarly representations follow similar trends. Many case studies within the field of refugee studies, for example, adopt a state-centric perspective. This perspective assumes a “national order of things”—a natural association between people and place along with an ordered relation between nations.5 Within this sedentarist order, movement often takes on negative connotations . This is particularly so in situations of conflict involving cross-border 4 I n t r o d u c t i o n migration; those who move become “displaced” and “uprooted.” Without a territorial connection to the nation, they are no longer considered citizens; they are “stateless.” The refugee aid regime, moreover...