El Salvador is a small developing country that has undergone important processes of agrarian change and suffered the consequences of a 12-year civil war which ended with a peace agreement in the 1990s. Economic reforms have given insufficient weight to history, institutions and politics. This book will show that to improve their efficiency, there is a need to consider how both economic and political variables have affected social structures and institutions. To be sustainable reforms should aim at an appropriate balance between growth and distribution. The outcomes of this research question some commonly accepted theses on agrarian transformation, state autonomy and the role of economic policy and foreign intervention in El Salvador and Central America in general.

Hearing to review El Salvador implementation of economic and social reform measures, and to examine U.S. policy toward El Salvador.

Under what conditions do the governments of developing countries manage to reform their way out of political and economic instability? When are they instead overwhelmed by the forces of social conflict? What role can great powers play in shaping one outcome or the other? This book is among the first to show in detail how the United States has used foreign economic policy, including foreign aid, as a tool for intervening in the developing world. Specifically, it traces how the United States promoted land reform as a vehicle for producing political stability. By showing where that policy proved stabilizing, and where it failed, a nuanced account is provided of how the local structure of the political economy plays a decisive role in shaping outcomes on the ground.

El Salvador's civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later. It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorizing and targeting of civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and the death and disappearance of more than 75,000 people. Examining El Salvador's vibrant life-story literature written in the aftermath of this terrible conflict--including memoirs and testimonials--Erik Ching seeks to understand how the war has come to be remembered and rebattled by Salvadorans and what that means for their society today. Ching identifies four memory communities that dominate national postwar views: civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders, and working class and poor testimonialists. Pushing distinct and divergent stories, these groups are today engaged in what Ching terms a "narrative battle" for control over the memory of the war. Their ongoing publications in the marketplace of ideas tend to direct Salvadorans' attempts to negotiate the war's meaning and legacy, and Ching suggests that a more open, coordinated reconciliation process is needed in this postconflict society. In the meantime, El Salvador, fractured by conflicting interpretations of its national trauma, is hindered in dealing with the immediate problems posed by the nexus of neoliberalism, gang violence, and outmigration.

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.

No Other Way Out provides a powerful explanation for the emergence of popular revolutionary movements, and the occurrence of actual revolutions, during the Cold War era. This sweeping study ranges from Southeast Asia in the 1940s and 1950s to Central America in the 1970s and 1980s and Eastern Europe in 1989. Following in the 'state-centered' tradition of Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions and Jack Goldstone's Revolutions and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, Goodwin demonstrates how the actions of specific types of authoritarian regimes unwittingly channeled popular resistance into radical and often violent directions. Revolution became the 'only way out', to use Trotsky's formulation, for the opponents of these intransigent regimes. By comparing the historical trajectories of more than a dozen countries, Goodwin also shows how revolutionaries were sometimes able to create, and not simply exploit, opportunities for seizing state power.