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221 Conclusion Campesinos, Collective Organization, and Social Change In March 2009, Salvadorans went to the polls to elect a new president. The winner: Mauricio Funes of the FMLN. Although FMLN candidates had consistently won local and departmental elections since its transformation into a political party with the end of the war in 1992, these elections were historic in that they marked the first time the FMLN had won the presidency. For seventeen years of peacetime, that office had been the exclusive domain of the Alianza Republicana Nacional (National Republican Alliance, ARENA), a conservative party with ties to the traditional elite as well as the wartime military and death squads. For many, the ouster of ARENA symbolized much more than simple electoral defeat. “I really can’t tell you what this is like,” exclaimed Roberto Lovato in the wake of the elections, “when you’re talking about ending not just the ARENA party’s rule, but you’re talking about 130 years of oligarchy and military dictatorship.”1 Funes promises change. “The time has come for the excluded,” he announced upon his victory. “The opportunity has arrived for genuine democrats , for men and women who believe in social justice and solidarity.”2 Many campesinos in El Salvador’s northern repopulated communities want to believe such promises; they want to believe that change is on the way. Yet they remain skeptical. They are unsure how “the Right” will respond in both the short and long terms. There simply is no precedent that allows them to believe that a smooth transfer of power to “the opposition” can or will occur or that  Funes will be allowed to remain in office for his full term. Indeed, just as Funes took office in El Salvador, the military in neighboring Honduras staged a coup d’état against its own constitutionally elected president, Manuel Zelaya. To many this appeared to be a cruel foreshadowing of what might come at home. Further explanation of campesino skepticism can be found in the popular saying la lucha sigue (the struggle continues). From this perspective, the January 1992 Peace Accords between the Salvadoran government and the FMLN insurgent forces simply marked the end of la guerra abierta (open war). As one phase of the war ended, another began. In this new phase, combatants on both sides demobilized, the FMLN competed in elections as a political party, and bombs no longer fell on rural communities. Yet conditions throughout the country remain in many ways as precarious as they were in 1950, 1960, and 1970; violence and corruption continue to top national headlines, and extreme poverty still reigns for the majority of the population. Old patterns combine with new forces—violence of street gangs, privatization of water and health care, foreign mining interests and the Central American Free Trade Agreement , to name just a few—to perpetuate insecurity. In light of the ongoing struggle, the “past” of the Salvadoran civil conflict may be too present yet to fully unpack. Nonetheless, that is precisely what I begin to do in this study. More specifically, I uncover one of the hidden versions of late-twentieth-century Salvadoran history—that of campesinos on the figurative and literal margins of the nation. As previously noted, studies of this period have emphasized the role of Salvadoran and Honduran officials, the FMLN opposition forces, and international actors, including the United States and the UN. Such studies approach campesinos as problems to solve, crises to resolve; either they are threats to established orders or they are victims of war in need of succor. In other words, governments, observers, and analysts have displaced campesinos from Salvadoran national history. This study seeks to re-place them in the story not as violent rebels or passive victims but as complex human agents and protagonists of history. My focus for re-placement is, perhaps ironically, the displaced—more speci fically, campesinos from El Salvador’s northern tierra olvidada who, due to combinations of force and choice, abandoned their homes for much or all of the country’s civil war. Rather than frame their experiences in terms of loss and detachment, however, I highlight their associations and engagements at the local, national, and international levels. Toward this end I examine what I call “mobile communities.” These two words carry multiple, relevant meanings. By “community,” I do not refer to simple assemblages of people—peasants in this case. Rather, community here entails a communal ethos. That is, people 222 C...

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