Solidarity under Siege: The Salvadoran Labor Movement, 1970–1990 by Jeffrey L. Gould (review)

Jeffrey Gould's portrayal of labor struggles over the course of several decades in El Salvador's important shrimp port—Puerto El Triunfo—gives readers a close-up view of labor activism in that industry and El Salvador more broadly during the Cold War and the ensuing entrenchment of neoliberalism. It's the story of surprisingly successful labor organizing in the 1970s, brutal repression against union leadership as civil war erupted in 1980, and frustrated attempts in the late 1980s to thwart new attacks on labor rights. Weaving together insights from interviews, local union archives, and court records, Gould brings to this study the nuanced analysis and compassion that mark his earlier works on Nicaragua and El Salvador. He has also created a companion documentary film on Puerto El Triunfo's labor movement (www.puertoeltriunfofilm.com).

El Salvador's shrimp industry boomed in the 1970s, becoming the country's third-largest export. Alongside the industry's expansion, workers' wages and working conditions improved, largely as a result of women's participation in a highly effective union, the Sindicato de la Industria Pesquera (SIP). With a focus on gender and the rise of SIP, Gould introduces readers to women who led the fight for rights for temporary workers in the processing plants, along with broad labor protections. Gains won by SIP meant that more and more women joined the union, eventually making up nearly 80 percent of affiliates. As Gould writes, the union's strength meant that "SIP had the potential to transform the lives of its members and to carve out a relatively autonomous space of freedom in an authoritarian society" (36).

But El Salvador's political and social context made labor solidarity difficult to build and maintain. An examination of alliances between local SIP leaders and the San Salvador–based Federación Nacional Sindical de Trabajadores Salvadoreños (FENASTRAS) reveals consequential ties to national labor organizing, but also tensions that these connections fostered locally. Reflecting a range of interests, some SIP members expressed solidarity with national strikes, while others sought a pragmatic, antipolitical stance for the union. To make local worker unity more elusive, SIP had to compete with the company-friendly, male-dominated fishermen's union, Sindicato Agua, a group that was often opposed to both FENASTRAS and labor solidarity. Sindicato Agua was motivated by its own interests, which it sometimes defined in opposition to those of workers—mostly women—in the plants.

Gould identifies a brief but pivotal moment in this history in a reformist junior officers' coup in October 1979, which he sees as a missed opportunity when El Salvador could have opted for a less destructive path than the one it took. The coup resulted in the first Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno, a military-civilian regime that technically subordinated security forces to the government for the first time since the 1930s. But El Salvador's radical opposition, Gould recounts, condemned the Junta even as it carried out reforms, labeling the regime fascist and counterrevolutionary. He suggests that massive labor mobilization at the time, especially in rural areas, blinded the Left to the fact that the countryside was not, in fact, poised for popular revolution. He points to a disconnect between grassroots struggles and the radical Left which precluded an alliance between the reformist government and popular sectors. "The failed encounter," he writes, "conditioned a subsequent explosion of rightist violence" (15).

Readers will likely have a range of opinions about whether a democratic "alternative historical outcome" was in fact viable at that moment in El Salvador (89). Related questions that linger for me have to do with relationships in the late 1970s and 1980s among various sectors of the labor movement (local and national) and the revolutionary Left. While Gould discusses connections between some SIP leaders and the revolutionary Left, the need for closer analysis of their significance leaves a compelling research agenda still open.

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