This chapter looks at some of the experiments of international governance by the United Nations typically listed as cases of international administrations (West Irian, Namibia, Cambodia and Eastern Slavonia). These United Nations peace missions have been considered as international administrations by numerous scholars, in the same category with Kosovo and Timor-Leste and sometimes on par with these two experiments in terms of effective authority deployed by international officials. I will be arguing that contra this opinion generally based on the reading of the mandates, international officials have displayed only limited political authority over these territories. Through archival work conducted in the United Nations Archives, revealing in specific instances the hidden transcripts of the time, I will be analysing each of these cases in turn, and adding a few other cases as well including Cyprus, El Salvador, Mozambique, Western Sahara and Somalia.

Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele began his political career as a self-proclaimed “radical progressive leftist,” evolved into an ideologically ambiguous populist, and, finally, embraced far-right ideas during his first term as president. Chapter 4 draws on Bukele’s speeches, campaign materials, public interviews, and social media posts – including a sample of 16,030 tweets – to trace and explain this evolution. It argues that Bukele is, above all, a skilled populist who has strategically adapted his ideological appeals in response to evolving incentives, challenges, and opportunities. While his early leftist appeals helped Bukele rise quickly within the ranks of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), his “populist turn” enabled him to win the presidency by appealing to growing anti-establishment sentiments. Once in office, Bukele’s “right turn” helped him consolidate power and maximize his public support at home and abroad.

This chapter examines the role of international law and institutions in El Salvador’s UN Truth Commission (1992-1993). This was the first Truth Commission to be established by the UN after the Cold War. It argues that the Truth Commission drew on the identity and status of the UN as an international institution to authorize its account about the unlawfulness of the violence of the civil war. In turn, the UN-Truth Commission’s account displaced ‘other’ accounts (of peasant and Indigenous communities) which were seen to rival international law’s understanding of the violence. In particular, by excluding an account of the socio-economic circumstances of the civil war, which remained a source of conflict in the country, the UN was able to claim that it had contributed to making El Salvador a ‘model’ post-conflict state. To show this, the chapter juxtaposes the Truth Commission’s account with a rival account embroidered in a tapestry, hand-made by a Salvadoran woman living in a refugee camp in the 1980s, which represents the Sumpul River Massacre. The chapter shows how the tapestry exposes the socio-economic roots of the civil war – a truth that the Truth Commission displaces and renders irrelevant for post-conflict state-society relations.

Chapter 6 examines five of the nine modal cases of political instability in the region (the seventh chapter examines the other four). These are the ones where T is neither below nor above one standard deviation of its mean. My model anticipates 77 percent of the years with successful military coups in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, Panama, Brazil, and Venezuela. Unlike the highly unstable cases I analyze in Chapter 5, each of the modal cases stumbled into more liberalized political orders. Chapter 6 also explores why military coups ended democratic experiments or reformist interludes in Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, and Brazil.

While the international legal issues related to the search for disappeared persons have received considerable attention, limited research has been conducted on how participation in the search impacts victims’ lives. In particular, we argue that the importance of victim recognition needs to be inserted into these discussions, and our understanding improved about what types of institutional and social responses are needed to ensure effective and victim-oriented search processes. Our chapter utilises the concept of ‘recognition relationships’ with reference to two cases: Colombia and El Salvador. Our discussion illuminates the ways in which a focus on recognition relationships captures the dynamics of power, mobilisation, and participation which are central to any successful and just search process.

This chapter explores how, after signing United Nations-sponsored peace agreements to end protracted civil wars, post-authoritarian El Salvador and Guatemala followed different trajectories of peace and violence. It first traces the development of El Salvador’s counterinsurgent state under military rule and its transformation during the civil war. It analyzes how the civil war military establishment, special military forces, and clandestine death squads capitalized on their repressive power to fight guerrillas through brutal force and on de facto impunity to engage in multiple illicit economies. The peace agreement led to an influential truth commission, but an amnesty neutralized it, preserving impunity and the counterinsurgent state. Right- and left-wing governments used counterinsurgent forces to launch Wars on Gangs, and state-gang and inter-gang warfare turned El Salvador into the world’s murder capital. It then discusses the rise of the counterinsurgent state during Guatemala’s civil war and the institutional transformations that empowered the military, elite and paramilitary forces, and death squads to lead a genocidal campaign against the Mayan people while becoming intimately involved in criminal markets. Two truth commissions exposed war atrocities and subsequently a reformed Guatemalan law enforcement, assisted by the International Commission against Impunity, dismantled criminal structures linked to the military establishment, deflating criminal markets, and driving down the murder rate.

This chapter focuses on the collaborative and participatory methodologies of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador research initiative, an international, cross-sector partnership of survivors, scholars, artists, lawyers, museums, architects, community organisers, civil society organisations, and mental health professionals who are committed to documenting the history of the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992), accompanying bottom-up commemoration and healing processes, and preventing future violence. Using Experiences and Memories of Arcatao (2024) as a case study, this chapter explores the collaborative documentation of victim names and the co-creation of local community history books as an alternative form of justice that meets the recommendations of the United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador in a context of enduring impunity. The authors emphasise the long tradition of local community organizing and popular education in Chalatenango, as well as the role of international solidarity actors who contribute significant resources and technical support.

The epilogue explains West German engagement with Latin American politics from 1988 to 1992, restates the historiographical contributions of the book, and briefly examines the trajectory of market-friendly and market-critical human rights from the 1990s into the 2000s. Christian Democratic officials encouraged market-friendly democratization in Latin America by supporting the electoral ouster of the Sandinistas in 1990, and providing development aid packages to El Salvador despite continued abuses and rampant corruption. Alongside the collapse of state socialism in East Central Europe, democratization in Latin America helped enthrone market-friendly human rights into German reason of state. But the market-friendly conditionality principle instituted in 1991 has selectively targeted some states, such as Cuba, while ignoring abuses in countries important to German economic development. Market-critical human rights activism endured by establishing links with left-wing parties in Germany and with the transnational anti-globalization movement. But the propensity of some of its adherents to support authoritarian states makes it an easy target for market-friendly advocates. However, market-critical human rights can be a helpful corrective to an international human rights system that has largely eschewed criticism of inequality since the 1990s.

This chapter unpacks a critical moment in Salvadoran history: from the coup on October 15, 1979, to the start of the civil war and mass repression during the latter part of 1980. The coup installed a military–civilian junta (the Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno or JRG) that included moderate leftists who promised a reformist solution to the economic, social, and political crisis, a solution that would prevent a looming civil war. These reforms included land reform, union rights, and an end to political repression. However, disjunction between revolutionary rhetoric and grassroots struggles and necessities impeded an alliance between the JRG and popular organizations. The JRG itself dissolved and re-formed as rightists pushed out representatives of the Left. This chapter discusses the factors that led up to the coup then summarizes the three successive JRGs and how sectors of the military and civil society responded to their reforms, setting the stage for the twelve-year civil war.

First of two chapters on non-multilateral treaty based, transnational approaches to combatting grand corruption. This one explores international support for domestic prosecutors, focusing on the example of Guatemala’s Commission Against Impunity (CICIG)(2007–2019). It describes the extent of state capture and its origins in the country’s internal armed conflict, the mandate and activities of CICIG, and its achievements, activities and limitations. It briefly considers other such commissions.

The case of El Salvador illustrates how temporal variation in the strength of government–elite linkages played a role in explaining the difference between a failed attempt in Mauricio Funes’ administration and a successful one in Salvador Sánchez Cerén’s administration. Even in the context of one of the highest levels of violent crime in the world, the country’s first left-of-center administration failed to adopt elite taxes in order to increase public-safety expenditures. It wasn’t until the government formed a coalition with right-of-center parties and linkages with the business sectors improved, that an increased tax burden on the wealthy became possible.

Chapter 11 focuses on the new violence that has erupted in many Latin American countries in the early twenty-first century. It shows that Latin America is the most violent region in the world and that violence is perpetrated by drug cartels, gangs, common criminals, militias, and state agents. The chapter explores the causes of violence through case studies of Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) and draws several conclusions. International factors, such as the global drug trade and US policy toward Latin America, have played a largely negative role. The state has failed to guarantee citizen security, in part because it is absent, and in part because it colludes with criminal groups. Additionally, needed reforms of the state’s security forces are not enacted because the democratically elected politicians who have to propose such reforms are threatened or bought off by actors who benefit from violence. This chapter shows that problems of democracy – the poor quality of democracy – and problems for democracy – the failure of democracies to guarantee civil rights such as the right to life – are tightly interconnected.

Chapter 2 presents an overview of Latin America’s recent experience with elite-financed security taxes. It describes in detail the cases where security taxes on economic elites have been adopted, including in Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Mexico, as well as cases where these taxes were first defeated in the legislature but subsequently approved, as in El Salvador, and where these taxes have not been adopted, as in Guatemala. In discussing the different experiences, Chapter 2 documents the types of security taxes adopted in each country, their purpose, and impact for public-safety expenses and the government’s coffers more generally. By identifying the different types of security taxes and their destination, this chapter contributes to our understanding of the extent to which economic elites have participated in the strengthening of the state in the contemporary period.

Chapter 9 focuses on transitional justice, the challenge of tackling past human rights violations, in contemporary Latin America. It shows that the record of Latin American countries varies considerably, but that, in the aggregate, the record of Latin America is largely a success story. The frequency with which past human rights violations have been addressed, and the steps taken through truth commissions and human rights trials, puts Latin America at the center of the global transitional justice movement. It also demonstrates, through a comparative analysis of six countries (Brazil and Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, Chile and Argentina), that several factors determine the response to past human rights violations. Democracies that are strong and channel citizen preferences succeed in confronting the challenge of transitional justice. Additionally, a strong record of transitional justice is associated with strong civil society organizations, generational change and new legal thinking about human rights law in the judiciary, and progressive developments in international law.