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Imagine a typical CORDES training session funded through international development dollars. It is the dry season and thirty-five women are in a stiflingly hot room. No fan, no air circulation. Road repair noise—jackhammers, whistles, concrete cracking, shovels smacking—enters through two small windows and echoes inside, increasing the volume of women’s voices and the intermittent laughter, cries, and scampering of half a dozen children. Childcare is unavailable . Bathroom facilities are “closed” (though used) due to lack of water, which happens often. The heat and stench rise as the day continues. With late afternoon approaching, the poster paper taped against the wall documenting the day’s training comes undone. The women are anxious to leave, anxious to catch the last pickup truck from the capital of Chalatenango to their rural communities in time to get home, gather up children, make the tortillas, and attend to the day’s missed chores. The lessons, this time on how to become a literacy educator and empower women, are on hold until next time. Returning to El Rancho with Elsy that afternoon, too tired to engage her in conversation about the day’s work, the words of an NGO director echoed in my head. Adamant about remaining anonymous, he often indicted bottom-up development schemes with this statement: “Yo no creo en capacitaciones con carteles.” (I don’t believe in trainings with poster board.) For this director, skills-based and empowerment training were not enough. Training was a bandaid that did nothing to heal structural wounds. Trainings, workshops, and education were no match for the absence of a long-term development plan. As many analysts note, the peace process did not elaborate a development plan to underpin the transition to democracy. Years later, his comments foreshadow my arguments on the everyday practices of local or grassroots development that are intended to foster democracy 118 6 Cardboard Democracy The sleight of hand is at the heart of state power, concealing domination in the discourse of “democracy.” Beth Baker-Cristales, “Magical Pursuits: Legitimacy and Representation in a Transnational Political Field” in the context of neoliberalism. This development is the work of poster boards and flip-charts, of cardboard signs that beckon women’s activism as palliative. Countless times I helped write signs that said things such as “Con la mujer en la casa la democracia se atrasa.” (With women in the home, democracy is slowed.) This call is predicated on women’s activism of the past and taps into an international development discourse that attempts to mainstream gender. As the anonymous director walks by these signs, he sees empty words. As I look back upon the ubiquitous papelógrafo, the flip-charts he challenges, I see the work of NGO and grassroots activists in terms of a metaphor: “cardboard democracy.” This is a democracy that is fragile, shallow, that can be corroded, and yet not quite malleable—a Potemkin Village of sorts.1 Recall that in postwar Chalatenango NGOs and grassroots organizations worked diligently to bring development aid to repopulated communities. A key development strategy entailed providing educational workshops and training sessions. These ranged from organic farming technologies to women’s literacy groups and workshops on gender relations and women’s human rights. Indeed, the language and practices of talleres (workshops) and capacitaciones (trainings) have become increasingly popular avenues for rebuilding, as many women and men identify capacitaciones as a path toward national incorporation.2 In this way development and democracy are linked at the local level. This emphasis on education technologies has come to compete with and replace a discourse circulated across social fields that emphasizes projects. However, education often times masks development’s intervention that depoliticizes problems through a language and practice of technology. For education is a form of technology that invents problems that inadvertently replace underlying political, economic, and social realities. Thus, focusing on education, or rather on how residents supposedly lack particular kinds of education or knowledge, is similar to development analyses that argue for problems as being a lack of credit, of markets, of technology , and so on, which elide, for example, unemployment and continued marginalization by the nation-state (Ferguson 1994). This chapter expands my focus on the relationship between grassroots development practices and residents of repopulated communities. It does so by theorizing educational practices as a form of governmentality (Foucault 1991). For the postwar political landscape, both government and grassroots, is characterized by what Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (2002) and Gupta and Aradhana Sharma (2006...

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