The negotiated end of El Salvador's twelve-year civil war in 1992 created a novel set of conditions for academic researchers interested in the country's social and political history. A new generation of Salvadoran scholars could dedicate themselves to research in ways that was previously not possible, and access to people, places and archival material improved enormously for Salvadorans as well as foreign scholars. Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador is an important product of this research boom.
This book addresses dominant interpretations of the dramatic and violent events of 1932. In January of that year, peasants in the western, coffee-growing areas of the country mounted a rebellion that was quickly put down by the military, which then undertook the mass execution of peasants, killing ten thousand, or perhaps thirty thousand, in a matter of weeks. Known in El Salvador simply as la matanza, this is the massacre whose memory is at stake in this volume.
The magnitude of la matanza, both as actual event and as cornerstone of nationalist narratives for both the Left and Right, can scarcely be overstated. Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador addresses itself to the conditions that allowed a particular narrative framing of the events to achieve such hegemony as to constitute a metanarrative in whose terms competing interpretations would be framed, while those memories and interpretations that did not fit within the metanarrative would be silenced or marginalised. The lynchpin of this metanarrative is what the authors call ‘communist causality’, the notion that those who rebelled were motivated fundamentally by some vision of communism.
The first section of the book recounts the basic outlines of events and then, drawing on previously unavailable documents from the Comintern archive in Moscow, challenges the communist causality thesis. The evidence suggests that the Partido Comunista Salvadoreño and its sister organisation, the Socorro Rojo Internacional, had little success in their organising efforts in the western coffee lands. Party leaders became aware of the plans for insurrection in the region late in 1931, and found themselves aligning with the rebellion even as they wrote desperately to their superiors about its dangerously premature character. Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador presents the rebellion of 1932 as the product of local resentments and local organising rather than widespread commitment to communism.
Once the communist causality thesis is undermined, the question becomes how this explanation achieved such widespread acceptance. To answer this, the authors turn to Roque Dalton's 1972 Miguel Mármol, an early example of testimonio literature that presents the life story of Mármol, a founder of the PCS, who narrated his account to Dalton in 1966. The authors' claim that Miguel Mármol, published after four decades during which oral and written accounts circulated, was ‘the single most important contribution to collective memory of the events of 1932’ is questionable, although contemporary leftists have drawn heavily on Dalton's text. The authors of Remembering a Massacre were granted access by the Dalton family to Dalton's notebooks, and the discrepancies between the account in the notes and the published version is the basis for their analysis of what they call (on p. 153) ‘“narrative reconfiguration”, whereby Roque Dalton reshaped Mármol's story’.
The authors focus first, on the presentation of Mármol's testimony as a defence of the communist leadership's decision to rebel in 1932, and second, on the silencing of Mármol's reflections on the extent to which ethnic factors played a role in motivating the rebellion. Communist leaders' decision to push ahead with the rebellion, even as their own analysis indicated that the time was not right for insurrection, was fiercely criticised by many on the Salvadoran left and cited as the cause for the rebellion's failure. Yet for Dalton, who was dedicated to a revolutionary project that would find form in the armed conflict of the 1980s, the arguments against action were quietist. In order to present 1932 as a positive example for those involved in the contemporary communist project and to support his sense that immediate militant action was necessary, Dalton attributed to Mármol a firm defence of the decision to rebel in 1932 that is not supported by the account in the notebooks or by statements Mármol made in other contexts. Dalton also eliminated Mármol's references to ethnicity, most notably by characterising the motivations of the indigenous leader Feliciano Ama as being grounded in a sense of class exploitation as opposed to racial-ethnic divisions. The sharp distinction Dalton drew between class and race, as axes of inequality and modes of experience, reflected Marxist notions of the primacy of class in determining history as well as dominant ideologies of mestizaje, which erased difference in the name of a nationalist universalism.
Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador marshals its arguments clearly and grounds them in the evidence presented in Dalton's notebooks and other sources, many of which are reproduced in an extensive appendix. The book is well-suited for undergraduates and lends itself to discussions of methodology and theory as well as questions of the politics of memory. While the basic argument – that Dalton's own political priorities, as well as the broader discursive regime within which he lived and wrote, shaped his interpretation of events – is likely to seem uncontroversial to scholars of historical memory, the presentation of that process at work is fascinating and thorough.
Those familiar with recent controversies around the uses of testimonio may question the interests at stake in Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador. Although the authors nod to their own location within ‘memory groups’, and to the Menchú controversy, they present the book as a neutral academic project. But the history of 1932 is inescapably political in El Salvador today, as ruling rightists deploy an intense anticommunism against all opponents, the left fractures internally, and indigenous activists struggle to make their voices heard. By sidestepping the political stakes and leaving the past in the past, the authors miss an opportunity to consider why, at this moment, this work matters.
