To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920–1932 (review)

The topic of this ambitious and important book, the uprising and subsequent massive reprisal that took place in El Salvador in 1932, is a crucial turning point in the history of that country. The government-sponsored massacre of thousands of peasants and Indians (la matanza) was one of the most egregious examples of state violence in Latin America and the beginning of the military regimes that dominated El Salvador for most of the rest of the twentieth century. The depth of research and strength of argumentation of this work by Gould and Lauria is at the level with the importance of the subject.

Prior work by the authors prepared them well for the task at hand. Their analysis of the internal politics of the communities that participated in the events is particularly good. The same can be said about the subtle analysis of the shifting terrain of ethnic relations. The heart of the book is a determined effort to reconstruct the planning and execution of the uprising and the ruthless government reaction. The blow-by-blow narrative of the matanza, a crime of epic proportions that remains unpunished to this day (it even came to be considered by the Salvadoran right as a particularly efficient way of dealing with threats to the state), is no mere historical narrative. In my mind it is equivalent to a late truth commission report. I hope (perhaps optimistically) that this section will quickly find its way into history textbooks in El Salvador.

This thorough and in many instances brilliant work could not, by the nature of the sources available today, be definitive. The authors tried hard; they not only hunted down every shred of documentary evidence that they could think of, but also conducted a significant number of interviews. Unfortunately, the few living survivors of the events were interviewed at an advanced age. Gould and Lauria are, by and large, sensitive about the downside of using stories remembered decades after the facts (pp. 153, 192).

Yet, the relative paucity of evidence takes its toll. The strong analysis of political discourse is sometimes applied to the wrong sources. For example, to illustrate the linguistic transformations that accompanied the reconceptualization of social relations in the 1930s they cite an interview made in 1976 by the Jesuit anthropologist Segundo Montes. The interviewee recalled a conversation with indigenous leader Feliciano Ama (who was murdered during the matanza). Based on the quotation from Montes the authors conduct textual analysis on specificities such as the ungrammatical use of the word “capitalisto” instead of “capitalista” and the use of the word “patrón” (p. 135). I would argue that analyzing the word choices of a historical actor based on a conversation recalled four decades later is a stretch. In another example they support their claim about a “discursive disjuncture of the left” (p. 40) in the 1920s by comparing an activist’s text published in 1931 and an account contained in Roque Dalton’s famous rendering of the testimonial by the matanza survivor Miguel Mármol. “The discursive disjuncture is significant in that it points to a broader problem of communication within the opposition movement,” the book argues (p. 40). The problem is that Dalton’s compelling testimonial of Mármol is not the ideal source to analyze political discourse in the early 1920s. Dalton’s notes of his interview with Mármol in 1966 are particularly sketchy regarding the incident under discussion and do not permit a conclusion about the state of divisions within the opposition movement. The frequent and unqualified citation of the memoirs of Reynaldo Galindo Pohl falls in a similar category. He is a sharp observer, but was 13 years old in 1932 and didn’t publish his memoirs until 2001.

Do not misunderstand me; this is an important book. It is unlikely that a...