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Books : History : Americas : Central America : El Salvador
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In December 1981 soldiers of the Salvadoran Army's select, American-trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote, where they murdered hundreds of men, women, and children, often by decapitation. Although reports of the massacre -- and photographs of its victims -- appeared in the United States, the Reagan administration quickly dismissed them as propaganda. In the end, El Mozote was forgotten. The war in El Salvador continued, with American funding.
When Mark Danner's reconstruction of these events first appeared in The New Yorker, it sent shock waves through the news media and the American foreign-policy establishment. Now Danner has expanded his report into a brilliant book, adding new material as well as the actual sources. He has produced a masterpiece of scrupulous investigative journalism that is also a testament to the forgotten victims of a neglected theater of the cold war.
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The "final offensive," an insurgent campaign fought after El Salvador's coup of 1979, clearly demonstrated the strengths, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, and behavior of the Salvadoran officer corps. During this crucial period, the military institution faced the double threat of internal politics and a rebel guerrilla army.Colonel Bosch served as the U.S. Embassy's Defense and Army Attach during the crisis. His intimate perspective brings to life the important political and military events before, during, and after the final offensive. His book gives an historical perspective as well, tracing the development of officer attitudes from 1931 to 1979. The Armed Forces political crisis of 1979 and 1980 is discussed, followed by a detailed recounting of the offensive itself. The results of the offensive are analyzed, including the short-lived cohesiveness shown by the officer corps, and the divisiveness that lasted through the war and into peace. The text is complemented by maps and photographs.
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First published in 1947, the second edition of The City of Women was published in 1994 with a new Introduction by anthropologist Sally Cole. That second edition is now available again after being out of print for several years.
"[The City of Women] works on many levels: it is a study of candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion of Bahia, of the role of women in candomblé, and of race relations in Brazil. . . . The City of Women has much to offer anyone interested in Brazilian history, comparative race and gender relations, the history of anthropology, and the relationships between researcher and subject in anthropology and oral history. . . .
"Because of the importance of women in traditional candomblé, this Afro-Brazilian religion was incompatible with patriarchy. Possession by the gods, the central component of the religious practice, was the domain of women: men supported the candomblé temples financially, but did not run them. . . .
"The City of Women ought to be on the 'must read' list of anyone preparing to do field research, especially in ethnography or oral history, in a culture different from his or her own."--H-Net, Mary Ann Mahony, Associate Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University.
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"An essential addition to the bookshelves of Mayanists and anyone interested in long-term processes of culture change."--Edward Schortman, Kenyon College
"Spans time, space, and disciplines to present well-rounded and actively contested views of the southeastern Guatemala and the northern frontier areas of Honduras and El Salvador. The diversity of the authors and their themes brings something for every reader, including the Ch'orti'."--Judith M. Maxwell, Tulane University
The Ch'orti' area--located in present-day Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador--was once the southernmost region of the ancient Maya world. Though thousands of years of tumultuous change have altered the face of the region drastically, many Ch'orti' have preserved their identity and maintained strong cultural ties to their past, and the region generally continues to practice traditions with Ch'orti' roots.
The Ch'orti's' connection with the Maya past and modern-day struggles with poverty and cultural encroachment have made the once little-studied Ch'orti' an important subject of anthropological research. The Ch'orti' Maya Area presents a holistic, multidisciplinary and long-term look at these people, their culture, and the region itself. Highlighting research from leading scholars around the globe, this collection is an impressive exploration of the history of human habitation in the area from approximately 3,000 years ago to the present.
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"In your country," Ignacio Martín-Baró remarked to a North American colleague, "it's publish or perish. In ours, it's publish and perish." In November 1989 a Salvadoran death squad extinguished his eloquent voice, raised so often and so passionately against oppression in his adopted country. A Spanish-born Jesuit priest trained in psychology at the University of Chicago, Martín-Baró devoted much of his career to making psychology speak to the community as well as to the individual. This collection of his writings, the first in English translation, clarifies Martín-Baró's importance in Latin American psychology and reveals a major force in the field of social theory.
Gathering essays from an array of professional journals, this volume introduces readers to the questions and concerns that shaped Martín-Baró's thinking over several decades: the psychological dimensions of political repression, the impact of violence and trauma on child development and mental health, the use of psychology for political ends, religion as a tool of ideology, and defining the "real" and the "normal" under conditions of state-sponsored violence and oppression, among others. Though grounded in the harsh realities of civil conflict in Central America, these essays have broad relevance in a world where political and social turmoil determines the conditions of daily life for so many. In them we encounter Martín-Baró's humane, impassioned voice, reaffirming the essential connections among mental health, human rights, and the struggle against injustice. His analysis of contemporary social problems, and of the failure of the social sciences to address those problems, permits us to understand not only the substance of his contribution to social thought but also his lifelong commitment to the campesinos of El Salvador.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, El Salvador's reigning military regime instituted a series of reforms that sought to modernize the country and undermine ideological radicalism, the most ambitious of which was an education initiative. It was multifaceted, but its most controversial component was the use of televisions in classrooms. Launched in 1968 and lasting until the eve of civil war in the late 1970s, the reform resulted in students receiving instruction through programs broadcast from the capital city of San Salvador. The Salvadoran teachers' union opposed the content and the method of the reform and launched two massive strikes. The military regime answered with repressive violence, further alienating educators and pushing many of them into guerrilla fronts.
In this thoughtful collaborative study, the authors examine the processes by which education reform became entwined in debates over theories of modernization and the politics of anticommunism. Further analysis examines how the movement pushed the country into the type of brutal infighting that was taking place throughout the third world as the U.S. and U.S.S.R. struggled to impose their political philosophies on developing countries.
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Discovered in 1976 by Sheets, and under continuous excavation and study since, the spectacular Ceren site provides us with an unusually clear window into the ancient past with which to view family activities on the frontier of the Mayan civilization. Since volcanic ash did not allow people to selectively remove artifacts, the site is well-preserved and it also largely stopped natural processes of decomposition offering this rare opportunity to study the Mayan past through household archaeology. Known as the New World Pompeii, this study provides a detailed portrait of the life, houses, artifacts, and activity areas of the people who supported the elites with labor, food and goods. As Sheets says, "With any civilization that's being studied, if the households of commoners aren't being investigated, you've eliminated the bulk of the population. How can you understand the society if you ignore most of the people? It's like an ethnography. Only we can't interview people, so their possessions have to speak for them." Art and images from the author's own collection help illuminate the discussions and bring them to life, while the author's discussion of his personal trials and triumphs add a more human dimension to working in the field.
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"Terror is the given of the place." The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror–its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy.As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
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The Muslim slave uprising in Bahia in 1835, though unsuccessful in winning freedom for the rebels, had national repercussions, making it the most important urban slave rebellion in the Americas and the only one in which Islam played a major role. Joao Jose Reis draws on hundreds of police and trial records in which Africans, despite obvious intimidation, spoke out about their cultural, social, economic, religious, and domestic lives in Salvador.
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With unprecedented use of local and national sources, Lauria-Santiago presents a more complex portrait of El Salvador than has ever been ventured before. Using thoroughly researched regional case studies, Lauria-Santiago challenges the accepted vision of Central America in the nineteenth century and critiques the "liberal oligarchic hegemony" model of El Salvador. He reveals the existence of a diverse, commercially active peasantry that was deeply involved with local and national networks of power.
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With more than 700 color paintings arranged by families for quick comparison of similar species, and with detailed information on range, habitat, size, and voice, this field guide describes and illustrates 1,038 species of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and El Salvador.
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An engrossing look at one of this century's most controversial clergymen--a man who played a prophetic and inspiring role in the violent vortex of Central America--Romero: A Life focuses on the final years of this outspoken Catholic archbishop.
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The life histories and testimonies of nine Salvadoran women from different generations shape this intimate portrayal of contemporary El Salvador. The authors interviewed a grandmother, mother, and granddaughter from three Salvadoran families: La Familia Nuñez, members of the upper class; La Familia Rivas, from El Salvador's growing middle class; and La Familia García, from the campo, the Salvadoran peasantry. The voices we hear convey a deep sense of the world of Salvadoran women and how life is lived in that Central American country today.
Each woman tells her own life story, and interspersed with recollections of childhood, marriage, and childrearing are revealing accounts of El Salvador's turbulent political past and present. Reflected in the stories are the vast changes in educational and occupational opportunities for women and the shifts in male-female relationships. Class differences are still a fundamental part of Salvadoran life, but changes are occurring in this area as well.
From Grandmother to Granddaughter is a vivid and authentic portrait of today's El Salvador that convincingly illustrates how individual lives can reflect the larger changes within a society.
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This journey through the Central American wars of the 1980s is seen through the eyes of a young American who worked on both sides of insurgency in the region: in El Salvador he supported efforts to defeat insurgents; with Nicaraguans he worked to keep an insurgency alive. Bill Meara started out as a teacher at a Catholic school in Guatemala, but went on to become one of the fifty-five U.S. military advisors assisting the Salvadorans in their fight against communism. By the end of the decade, he was in the U.S. Foreign Service working as a liaison officer to the Nicaraguan contras. One of very few Americans to see both sides up close, he takes readers into his world as an advisor struggling with cultural differences and human rights violations while trying to stay alive in murderous El Salvador. We join him on dangerous helicopter rides into contra base camps on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border and into a U.S. Embassy under attack. From Special Forces school at Ft. Bragg to Joan Baez’s back-stage party in Managua to a contra POW camp deep in the jungle, we get a taste of Meara’s world up close.But this book is more than a collection of war stories. Meara explores the difficult moral, philosophical, and ideological issues of the Central American wars. Meara’s experiences with insurgency and counterinsurgency allow him to provide critically important insights on why the United States has such difficulty dealing with ragtag armies of third-world rebels.
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Ensayos que detallan las vulnerabilidades de la dolarizacion en medio de crisis financieras cada vez mas frecuentes y mas volatiles.
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This volume resulted from a collaborative research project into responses of Protestant and Catholic religious communities in the Americas to the challenges of globalization. Contributors from the fields of religion, anthropology, political science, and sociology draw on fieldwork in Peru, El Salvador, and the United States to show the interplay of economic globalization, migration, and growing religious pluralism in Latin America.Organized around three central themes-family, youth, and community; democratization, citizenship, and political participation; and immigration and transnationalism-the book argues that, at the local level, religion helps people, especially women and youths, solidify their identities and confront the challenges of the modern world. Religious communities are seen as both peaceful venues for people to articulate their needs, and forums for building participatory democracies in the Americas. Finally, the contributors examine how religion enfranchises poor women, youths, and people displaced by war or economic change and, at the same time, drives social movements that seek to strengthen family and community bonds disrupted by migration and political violence.
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'...the single most authoritative text on peacekeeping in the post-cold war era...the cases are comprehensive and incisive...and the authors bring sharp analysis, clean prose, and much experience in recent peace-keeping operations. Anyone wanting help navigating the labyrinths of today's internal conflicts should read this book.' - Stephen John Steadman, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University '...crisply written, carefully researched, and insightfully analyzed case studies of the UN's varied attempts to bring peace to the civil wars of the 1990s...A worthy successor to their Evolution of UN Peacekeeping.' - Michael W. Doyle, Professor, Princeton Universzity and Senior Fellow of the International Peawce Academy In a stunning follow-up to his well-received The Evolution of UN Peacekeeping, William Durch looks at the peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations as they took shape during the present decade. El Salvador, Angola, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia all harboured explosive political situations that tested, and in some cases continue to test, the limits of the United Nations ability to keep peace in a world where the political situation is constantly changing. Anyone interested in international politics and peacekeeping will want to read Durch's newest.
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A love story and a journey across the continents of marriage.
When Beth Kephart met and fell in love with the artist who would become her husband, she had little knowledge of the place he came from—an exotic coffee farm high in the jungle hills of El Salvador, a place of terrifying myths and even more frightening realities, of civil war and devastating earthquakes. Yet, marriage, she finds, means taking in not only the stranger who is one's lover but also a stranger's history—in this case, a country, language, people, and culture utterly foreign to a young American woman. Kephart's transcendently lyrical prose (often compared to the work of Annie Dillard) has already made her a National Book Award finalist. In each of her memoirs she has written about love, using her own life to seek out universal truths. 19 b/w photographs
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To Rise in Darkness offers a new perspective on a defining moment in modern Central American history. In January 1932 thousands of indigenous and ladino (non-Indian) rural laborers, provoked by electoral fraud and the repression of strikes, rose up and took control of several municipalities in central and western El Salvador. Within days the military and civilian militias retook the towns and executed thousands of people, most of whom were indigenous. This event, known as la Matanza (the massacre), has received relatively little scholarly attention. In To Rise in Darkness, Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago investigate memories of the massacre and its long-term cultural and political consequences.Gould conducted more than two hundred interviews with survivors of la Matanza and their descendants. He and Lauria-Santiago combine individual accounts with documentary sources from archives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Washington, London, and Moscow. They describe the political, economic, and cultural landscape of El Salvador during the 1920s and early 1930s, and offer a detailed narrative of the uprising and massacre. The authors challenge the prevailing idea that the Communist organizers of the uprising and the rural Indians who participated in it were two distinct groups. Gould and Lauria-Santiago demonstrate that many Communist militants were
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