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.