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  • Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador
  • Michael E. Allison
Elisabeth Jean Wood , Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Photographs, illustrations, maps, figures, tables, appendix, bibliography, index, 328 pp.; hardcover $70, paperback $23.

During the 1980s, civil war plagued much of Central America. From 1979 until 1992, more than 75,000 people died as a result of the conflict [End Page 144] in El Salvador alone. In an earlier book, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (2000), Elisabeth Jean Wood introduced readers to a distinct type of democratic transition that emerged from years of sustained popular mobilization by the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). That mobilization succeeded in transforming the political and economic interests of the country's ruling oligarchy. After decades of political exclusion and repression of the left, many elites became convinced that the only way to end the war and rebuild the country's infrastructure to support an export economy would be to allow the left to participate in the formal political process. In return, the armed left had to surrender its vision of creating a revolutionary state in El Salvador. The FMLN agreed to disarm, demobilize, and accept electoral politics as the only legitimate means to attain state power. These simultaneous transformations on the left and the right, together with a number of favorable domestic and international conditions, led to the historic signing of the Peace Accords between the FMLN and the government of El Salvador in January 1992.

Before that point, El Salvador had been ruled through a mixture of state repression and electoral fraud. In the 1970s, many Salvadorans mobilized to demand justice. After two fraudulent presidential elections in 1972 and 1977, many turned to the belief that revolution was the only means to bring about a more socially, economically, and politically just society. In 1980, five guerrilla groups united to form the Marxist-Leninist insurgent group FMLN. For the next 12 years, the insurgents battled the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military to a stalemate, forcing the country's economic and political elite to accept a negotiated settlement.

Wood's new book explores the reasons that individuals participated in this rural insurgency. Several scholars, military analysts, and insurgent leaders credit the success of the FMLN (and similar armed insurgent groups) to the high level of support it received from campesinos, in the singular "a person who engages in agricultural activities" (p. 5). Campesinos provided the foundation of the rural insurgency at great risk to their lives, as well as the lives of family and friends. Given the extreme levels of violence in El Salvador and the disproportionate amount suffered by campesinos, Wood asks, "What accounts for the emergence of a powerful insurgent movement in an area where acquiescence had long been the response of the rural poor to social injustice? Why did so many poor people run extraordinarily high risks to support the insurgency? Why did others decline to do so?" (p. 2).

Wood argues that traditional explanations of revolutionary mobilization--class struggle, political opportunity structures, solidarity among peasant communities, the existence of social networks, relative deprivation, and purely rational self-interest--fail to account adequately [End Page 145] for the extent and timing of collective action on the part of the insurgents and their supporters. Instead, Wood develops an alternative explanation whereby the majority of the civilian supporters chose to contribute to the insurgency largely for the moral and affective benefits they received through participation.

Wood bases her explanation primarily on evidence collected from more than two hundred interviews conducted between 1987 and 1996. She purposefully oversamples campesinos who chose to support the insurgency. Typically, these insurgent campesinos did not participate in the war as combatants, but instead provided active guerrilla forces with food, water, shelter, and, more important, logistical support (moving ordnance, providing intelligence, reporting on government troop movements, and so on). Wood also conducted a modest number of interviews with campesinos who did not support the insurgents and with local landlords, mid-level FMLN commanders, military officers, members of the government, members of the United Nations mission in...

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