In the past decade an increasing amount of interdisciplinary scholarly attention has been placed on El Salvador. United Nations brokered peace accords in 1992 officially ended a twelve-year civil war. With this opening, a new generation of social scientists from North America and Europe began to investigate the social, political, and economic changes taking place across El Salvador as the nation shifted from war to peace. Examining the legacies of insurgent mobilizations, the challenges to rebuilding from a polarized, politicized past, and the nation’s transition to a neoliberal democracy have captured the attention of scholarly communities, policy analysts, and activists. In Waves of Protest, Paul D. Almeida speaks directly to the specificity of the Salvadoran case. In doing so, he builds from and contributes to a larger theoretical conversation on political environments and their relationship to particular modalities of political movements. This perspective pushes the temporality of his study beyond the period of the civil war. A key strength of the book is this breadth and scope as Almeida locates what he terms the waves of protest from the 1920s through the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Almeida’s study of collective action illuminates the contextually defined and shifting modalities, networks, and strategies of contentious politics. The role of civil society becomes a key aspect of this analysis. The book begins with a theoretical framing which is then employed to analyze the Salvadoran case. Through a focus on political contexts over time, Almeida argues that there are three political environments that propel different mobilizations. The book then looks specifically at these waves of collective action: mobilization by liberalization, mobilization by intimidation, and mobilization by globalization. Subsequent chapters build upon Almeida’s original archival research, interviews, and secondary sources to develop a detailed account of these different periods of collective action.
In all of these chapters, Almeida’s gaze emphasizes the political opportunities that emerge for civil society groups even under authoritarian, military regimes. Significantly, he exposes what he defines as moments of regime liberalization within these environments. Almeida seeks to map out these openings for specific groups over time as he charts out the concrete outcomes, the networks developed through collective organizing and that are carried across time, when for example openings recede. This dialectic between regime liberalization and de-liberalization is a critical contribution to the literature.
Almeida taps new resources to develop this perspective. Included as an appendix, he provides a methodology statement that is quite a useful resource and that could have been integrated into the text itself to highlight the richness of the material and the expansive database upon which Almeida weaves his theorizing.
For example, Almeida discusses his access to one of El Salvador’s oldest daily newspapers, La Prensa Gráfica, which was established in 1915. As he compares this newspaper with other national presses, he explores, collates, and creates an extraordinary data set of 4,151 “protest events” over 7,300 days. He defines a protest event as “a group of three or more people outside of the government making political or economic claims on the various branches of government, economic elites or other institutions” (p. 220). Almeida then creates a typology of action, delineating 25 different types of protest. These range from public statements, strikes, and land occupations, to kidnapping and armed attacks of government places and bodies. In analyzing these events he examines three different variables, the level and form of protest as well as the type of organization involved. He very clearly discusses the important question of positioned accounts or bias. Thus, Almeida indicates that as a pro-government periodical, La Prensa Gráfica has been shown to under-report violence committed by the Salvadoran state actors. As a result the author also relies on other documentations such as human rights reports and secondary sources. In doing so, Almeida also provides us with a concise review of the literature on the Salvadoran civil war.
Regarding additional sources, a significant contribution of the book is its use of scholarship and research produced within El Salvador. By highlighting this work, Almeida makes visible and accessible the ongoing research conducted by Salvadoran scholars. This is invaluable. Perhaps a question of disciplinary presentation, it would have been helpful to have these various sources more transparently indicated within the text. The extent of the data is most clearly illuminated in the multiple charts, tables, and graphs that quantify the kinds of mobilizations and the actors involved in different periods of Salvadoran history. It is only however, in the last page of the book, where Almeida positions himself within the text. This could have come earlier as it informs his project for the reader.
Returning to the book’s argument, after a theoretical introduction, the case study begins by exploring regime “openings and violent closings” from 1925–1962 but specifically hones in on the years 1927–1930 in order to analyze the 1932 massacre known as La Matanza. His overview of this period is thorough, careful, and quantitatively detailed. Almeida focuses on the development of union organizations, compiling primary and secondary sources to present a picture of the period across the fourteen departments. Much of this chapter explores the roots of the 1932 rebellion and specifically examines the FRT labor organization. It is a strong complement to recent monographs focusing specifically on La Matanza and questions of indigeneity.
Almeida’s third chapter offers solid coverage of an understudied period in Salvadoran history. Here he discusses the period between 1962 and 1972, which he identifies as a reform wave. While recounting the expansion of unions and the university sector, changes in the Catholic Church and electoral openings, Almeida provides evidence that historically clandestine, and repressed organizations were able to legally organize during this period. The chapter provides several institutional histories of salient labor and peasant organizations that grew during this period. Almeida highlights this time as a formative stage in collective action given that activists were able to push for a reformist agenda via the production of “cross-sectorial solidarity” (p. 97).
Chapter 4 is the lengthiest section and is an attempt to explain the shift from regime openings to reversals from 1972–1976. Almeida argues that it is indeed reversals in electoral politics and institutional access that radicalizes and creates mobilization by intimidation. Collective action in this period was strengthened by the multi-sectorial organizing of the previous period. The chapter is full of rich examples as Almeida provides a cogent review of the existing literature while adding new texture to the analysis. Given his methodology, Almeida tends to build upon the perspectives of leaders of movements. More could have been done to understand or point to the growing literature on the everyday motivations of radicalization. This could counter a tendency to see radicalization as an urban-led movement. It is also in this chapter that Almeida’s use of particular terms such as “threatening event”, and “protest action” can inadvertently desensitize the reader to the brutality of state-sponsored terror and war, despite the well-documented figures that illustrate the increasing violence and repression committed by the state.
This is an ambitious project that moves through waves of protest and ends by contextualizing a much changed political and economic landscape of postwar El Salvador. Chapter 5 complements new monographs on aftermaths in neo-liberal El Salvador and in the region. Through analyzing the mass mobilization against privatization of the public health system, Almeida suggests that El Salvador is experiencing what he terms a non-violent mobilization by globalization. In doing so, he offers a gleam of hope for a “new modality of oppositional struggle” (p. 176). As my own research makes clear, more often than not the discourses of the war have lost their saliency and new modes of organizing are being sought. This last case study is an apt example. One could ask, however, for a finer grained look at the everyday practices of multi-sectorial organizing, of the networks that operate in mobilization by globalization, of the “organizations of organizations”. This perspective yields insights not only on the transferred skills but also opens up a conversation on the challenges and contradictions inherited from past alliances gone awry, the struggle for diminishing funding, and so on that are the underbelly of these kinds of movements and their success.
Empirically rich, meticulously researched, Almeida provides students and scholars of social movements, revolutions, El Salvador, Central America, comparative politics, and labor studies more generally, with a comprehensive and compelling analysis of collective action through time. It is an important contribution to these interdisciplinary fields of study.
