El Salvador A War By Proxy

The Central American nation of El Salvador was consumed by a bloody civil war between 1980 and 1992. The principal players in the conflict were the right-wing government of El Salvador, a coalition of rebel groups operating under the umbrella of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, and the Reagan administration in the United States. The U.S. supported the Salvadoran military at an estimated cost of $6 billion dollars. During the course of the war, in a nation whose population numbered slightly more than five million, an estimated 75,000 people were killed; 18,000 disappeared, and one million people were left homeless. Investigating the background and history of the war Keith Preston provides not only an in-depth analysis of the conflict, but fills in many of the knowledge gaps that have existed surrounding the relationship between the US administration and the Salvadorian army. His research clearly demolishes the US argument that the FMLN were motivated by a commitment to hard-line Marxist-Leninist ideology, but rather by a newer kind of radicalism with its roots in the progressive wing of the Catholic Church of Latin America. Without the role of the Catholic Church, the Salvadoran resistance would never have developed in the form that it did, and perhaps it would not have developed to nearly as significant a level as it did at all.

The most common image of world politics involves states negotiating, cooperating, or sometimes fighting with one another; billiard balls in motion on a global pool table. Yet working through local proxies or agents, through what Eli Berman and David A. Lake call a strategy of "indirect control," has always been a central tool of foreign policy. Understanding how countries motivate local allies to act in sometimes costly ways, and when and how that strategy succeeds, is essential to effective foreign policy in today's world. In this splendid collection, Berman and Lake apply a variant of principal-agent theory in which the alignment of interests or objectives between a powerful state and a local proxy is central. Through analysis of nine detailed cases, Proxy Wars finds that: when principals use rewards and punishments tailored to the agent's domestic politics, proxies typically comply with their wishes; when the threat to the principal or the costs to the agent increase, the principal responds with higher-powered incentives and the proxy responds with greater effort; if interests diverge too much, the principal must either take direct action or admit that indirect control is unworkable. Covering events from Denmark under the Nazis to the Korean War to contemporary Afghanistan, and much in between, the chapters in Proxy Wars engage many disciplines and will suit classes taught in political science, economics, international relations, security studies, and much more.

"Analytical narratives examine when and where major powers can work through local proxies rather than commit their own troops. Cases include Denmark under Nazi occupation, the Korean War, El Salvador, Colombia, and present-day Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Most focus on the United States, but Israel's relations with Lebanon and Gaza and the Palestinian Authority are also featured"--

During the 1980s war in El Salvador, Radio Venceremos was the main news outlet for the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), the guerrilla organization that challenged the government. The broadcast provided a vital link between combatants in the mountains and the outside world, as well as an alternative to mainstream media reporting. In this first-person account, "Santiago," the legend behind Radio Venceremos, tells the story of the early years of that conflict, a rebellion of poor peasants against the Salvadoran government and its benefactor, the United States. Originally published as La Terquedad del Izote, this memoir also addresses the broader story of a nationwide rebellion and its international context, particularly the intensifying Cold War and heavy U.S. involvement in it under President Reagan. By the war's end in 1992, more than 75,000 were dead and 350,000 wounded—in a country the size of Massachusetts. Although outnumbered and outfinanced, the rebels fought the Salvadoran Army to a draw and brought enough bargaining power to the negotiating table to achieve some of their key objectives, including democratic reforms and an overhaul of the security forces. Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador is a riveting account from the rebels' point of view that lends immediacy to the Salvadoran conflict. It should appeal to all who are interested in historic memory and human rights, U.S. policy toward Central America, and the role the media can play in wartime.

El Salvador's civil war, which left at least 75,000 people dead and displaced more than a million, ended in 1992. The accord between the government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been lauded as a model post-Cold War peace agreement. But after the conflict stopped, crime rates shot up. The number of murder victims surpassed wartime death tolls. Those who once feared the police and the state became frustrated by their lack of action. Peace was not what Salvadorans had hoped it would be. Citizens began saying to each other, "It's worse than the war." El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy challenges the pronouncements of policy analysts and politicians by examining Salvadoran daily life as told by ordinary people who have limited influence or affluence. Anthropologist Ellen Moodie spent much of the decade after the war gathering crime stories from various neighborhoods in the capital city of San Salvador. True accounts of theft, assaults, and murders were shared across kitchen tables, on street corners, and in the news media. This postconflict storytelling reframed violent acts, rendering them as driven by common criminality rather than political ideology. Moodie shows how public dangers narrated in terms of private experience shaped a new interpretation of individual risk. These narratives of postwar violence—occurring at the intersection of self and other, citizen and state, the powerful and the powerless—offered ways of coping with uncertainty during a stunted transition to democracy.

Traces the development of U.S. policy and the evolution of El Salvador's civil war.

While proxy relationships can be an effective means international actors use to transfer risk and lower their costs to compete, they also enable actors to circumvent international norms as well as create moral hazards that can make the practice self-defeating if not simply unethical. Applying the framework of the Just War Tradition, this book highlights some of these ethical gaps and addresses how proxy relationships introduce additional obligations for both sponsor and proxy. The author examines specific examples of how current precedents set a very high bar for accountability, and perversely incentivizes sponsors to employ proxies while discouraging any effort to moderate proxy behavior since that could imply effective control. In light of this, the book offers policy recommendations on how to best manage these relationships while maintaining certain moral commitments.