Old and New Peace in El Salvador: How Peace Strategies Emerge, Disappear and Transform
In the internationally supported Salvadoran peace process of the 1990s, high levels of consensus were reached about the road to peace and the type of legitimate order to make peace sustainable. While security arrangements based on liberal norms are widely
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Old and New Peace in El Salvador: How Peace Strategies Emerge, Disappear and Transform Chris van der Borgh
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Introduction
In 1992, a peace agreement was signed in El Salvador between the government and the guerrilla movement Frente Farabundo para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), making an end to a civil war that had lasted over a decade. The country was one of the first cases of the new multidimensional UN peacekeeping approach, which aimed to end the war through democratization and security sector reform. Initially, El Salvador
A draft of this chapter was presented at the UCSIA International Workshop on Peacebuilding, University of Antwerp, 5–7 December 2018. The author would like to thank the participants of the Conflict and Security research seminar at Utrecht University for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Jorg Kustermans, Barbara Segaert and Tom Sauer for their comments on the last draft of the chapter. I am particularly grateful to the input of the late Ralph Sprenkels. I dedicate this chapter to him. C. van der Borgh (B) Centre for Conflict Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Kustermans et al. (eds.), A Requiem for Peacebuilding?, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_6
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was considered a showcase of post-Cold War peacemaking and peacebuilding, but soon it became clear that although the war had come to an end, security sector reform had stalled, and homicide rates remained high. More than two decades after the civil war, many policymakers and scholars agree that new reforms are needed and even that new international involvement may be required to make these reforms work. A particular challenge in the post-war period in El Salvador is the presence and power of street gangs, as well as the failure of Salvadoran governments to deal with gangs. In addition, other forms of organized crime have penetrated and captured part of the state apparatus, which has hampered security sector reform over the past decades. In the post-settlement period, the Salvadoran government employed different terms for its attempts to contain violence, such as violence reduction, public security, war on gangs and the fight against terrorism. The term peace gradually disappeared from the Salvadoran policy jargon after the peace agreements of 1992, but in 2012, when street gangs signed a truce with each other—with support from the Salvadoran government— the term reappeared in public discourse. Not surprisingly, the use of the word peace in the case of the Salvadoran gang problem was heavily contested. By many it was seen as an inappropriate and even dangerous term, conferring legitimacy on criminal actors who use violence and terrorize citizens. Thus, the truce was dismissed in strong terms that named it ‘fake peace’ or Pax Mafioso. The Salvadoran peace process and its violent aftermath not only remind us of the fact that many violent conflicts are indeed ‘protracted’ and con
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