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Paradoxes of Grassroots Peacemaking: Warrior Masculinity, Violence and Intergenerational Dialogues in Postwar El Salvador

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Paradoxes of Grassroots Peacemaking: Warrior Masculinity, Violence and Intergenerational Dialogues in Postwar El Salvador Copyright by R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada 2017 The Dissertation Committee for R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada Certifies that this is the approved version of the following: Paradoxes of Grassroots Peacemaking: Warrior Masculinity, Violence and Intergenerational Dialogues in Postwar El Salvador Committee: Charles R. Hale, Supervisor Shannon Speed, Co-Supervisor Edmund T. Gordon Kathleen C. Stewart Kamala Visweswaran Paradoxes of Grassroots Peacemaking: Warrior Masculinity, Violence and Intergenerational Dialogues in Postwar El Salvador by R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2017 Dedication To my mother, Rosa, for all that you did to raise my brother and me as a single parent in the midst of life challenges in times of war and peace. I would not have made it this far without your determination, support, and critical view of the world. To my US parents, Anne and John whose everyday commitment to fight for a better world has been an inspiration. To the women and men participants of this research who tirelessly continue to fight for social justice. Acknowledgements It is very difficult to do justice and thank in a few lines all the people who have helped me along the way, who made it possible for me to reach a successful completion of this research project. I want to thank Uzziel Peña and Jesús Reinaldo Barra for allowing me to document your life history, providing a diverse number of contacts, and for the many thought-provoking conversations for the past thirteen years. I was fortunate to have you both introducing me to a foreign world: the very tight and distrustful social networks of urban ex-guerrilla and ex-army members, with whom I have informally and formally conducted research on their grassroots peacemaking practices throughout the years. Uzziel, thank you for introducing me to the small network of civil war veterans with relatives in youth gangs and for the brokering of access and contacts with active gang members. I also want to thank my interlocutors, including Mama Rubia, Loli, Guadalupe Orellana, Victor Hugo Delgado, Esaú Garmendia, Jesús Ayala, among many other women and men whose life experiences made possible my research on intergenerational grassroots peacemaking that otherwise would have not come into existence. Many of the ideas of this research project emerged in collective discussion and efforts with all of you. There are also a number of people and institutions that provided me with support and understanding of particular aspects of the field during my stay of two years in El Salvador. I would like to thank Amparo Marroquín Parducci, professor at the José v v Simeon Cañas: Central American University. I benefited greatly from our dialogues about conducting research across the political spectrum and in the barrios. I wish to also thank Adrian Bergmann, former Director of the Politics for the Prevention of Youth Violence in a Culture of Peace masters program at Don Bosco University, for having me as an Associate Research in the program. Carlos Lara Martínez, Director of Anthropology at the University of El Salvador, thank you for the warm welcoming and support to my research. Hermes Barahona, Miguel Rivas, and Jordan Palma, thank you for your excellent research assistant work at different stages of my fieldwork. It was a please to work with you all. I also want to thank Tomás Andréu for brokering key interviews across the political spectrum. I appreciate having worked alongside Dra. Marta Dinora Ayala and Erika Torres during my time coordinating the Háblame de Respeto Gender Violence Prevention program at the Association of Salvadoran Women (AMS, in Spanish). My two principal advisors, Shannon Speed and Charles R. Hale: thank you for your guidance, solidarity and commitment to social justice. Shannon, thank you for believing in me, providing sharp feedback, and supporting my research project from the very first moment we met. Charlie, I am deeply grateful to you for always listening to my ideas no matter how crazy they sounded and encouraging me towards excellence. To my committee members, Edmund T. Gordon, thank you for your guidance and for the seminar discussions that encouraged me to analyze the practical implications of theory; my relationship to theory radically changed because of you. Kamala Visweswaran, you helped me to transform my research project, encouraging me to explore the uncharted vi vi territories of the highly-gendered data emerging in my research. Thank you for generously sharing your knowledge and piercing feminist analysis with me. Katie Stewart, there are not enough words to thank you for your insistence in slowing down the ethnographic writing and the paying attention to quotidian life. I also want to thank professors Eric Tang, Kamran Ali, Maria Franklin, Circe Sturm, Joao Vargas, Craig Campbell, and Cecilia Balli. Ellen Moodie, thank you for your apoyo to my work since we first met at the auditorium of la Universidad Nacional a few years ago. I want to thank my colleagues and friends who have accompanied me in the academic and social justice lucha: Tatagatan Ravindran, Chelsi West, Gwendolyn Kirk, Liz Lewis, Omer Ozan, Traci- Ann Went, Tane Ward, Daniel Perera, Shade Anderson, Melissa Burch, Alejandro Flores, Giovanni Batz, Luciane Rocha, Yoalli Rodriguez, William Gblerkpor, Saikat Maitra, Celeste Henery, Vivian Newdick, Fernanda Soto Joya, Maryam Kashani, Sandra Cañas, Jaime Alves, Raja Swamy, Hafeez Jamali, Ken MacLeish, and Can Aciksoz. A special thank you to Sarah Ihmoud, mi comadre. We have together experienced life changes, cried and laughed until our stomachs hurt, all of which has brought a beautiful sisterhood to life. The Feminist Activist Collective of the Austin School, a.k.a Gang of Five, a.k.a. Fugitive Collective, Sarah Ihmoud, Maya Berry, Shanya Cordis, Claudia Chávez Argüelles, working with you is one of the greatest gifts I take with me from graduate school. It is due to this collective that I can say sí se puede to creating alternative spaces where one can feel safe and find compassionate beings with whom to discuss life experiences with racialized and gendered forms of oppression. I look forward to years of vii vii plotting with you to construct a better world wherever we are. I also want to thank my companerxs from the Colectivx Centroamérica, Ana Braconnier, Adriana Linares, Marianela Muñoz Muñoz, Juan Tiney Chirix, Roni Castillo, and Julio Gutiérrez. I am looking forward to years of collaborations and working together for socially justice in Central America. In the Anthropology Department, Adriana Digman, thank you for all your support over the years. Thank you, Carla Lañas, Susanna Sharpe, and Carla Silva at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS). To the special relationships one creates outside of the academic life, I want to thank Melissa Smith, Amalia Smith-Hale and Sofia Smith-Hale for your loving support. To my family, Rosa, Rip, Armando, Sascha, Anne and John thank you for being by my side in every step of this long journey, encouraging me to fight for my dreams. You have been my rock and my oasis. Rip, I thank you immensely for the many hours you dedicated to editing my dissertation. You enabled my writing to flow and grow. At different stages this project received funding support from the Graduate Continuing Fellowship, University of Texas at Austin, Inter-American Foundation: Grassroots Development Fellowship Program, Social Science Research Council: Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship: Gender Justice in the Era of Human Rights, National Science Foundation: Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), Tinker Fellowship, LLILAS. viii viii Abstract Paradoxes of Grassroots Peacemaking: Warrior Masculinity, Violence, and Intergenerational Dialogues in Postwar El Salvador R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisor: Charles R. Hale Co-Supervisor: Shannon Speed This dissertation analyzes how the Salvadoran state, civil war veterans, and gang members share a common understanding of peace that enables them to occupy the paradoxical position of being both purveyors of violence and “peacemakers.” I conducted this work in a violent, distrustful and hyper-masculine context with the help of civil war veterans who were mentoring relatives in youth gangs to support their efforts to make peace with other gangs and the government. Throughout my 2011 - 2015 ethnographic research in San Salvador, I found that many women, relatives of civil war veterans and gang member interlocutors, characterized the 1992 Peace Accords as una paz masculinista (a masculinist peace). While la paz maculinista denotes the absence of violence between men in conflict, for women living with social and gender violence and ix ix struggling with poverty reinforced by neoliberal economic policies, life was anything but peaceful. I build on Johan Galtung’s concept of “negative” and “positive” peace by using an intersectional theory perspective. I argue that the postwar experience is shaped by a negative notion of peace that is highly gendered. I further complicate the state’s notion of postwar peacemaking through an analysis of the rise of gang and femicidal violence, and the state’s punitive responses to both as a measure to attain peace. I discovered that gangs use their own peacemaking efforts to question the state’s racialized violence and human rights violations against its members. However, neither top-down (state-led) nor bottom- up (gang-led) peacemaking efforts have seriously grappled with violence against women or with the harsh realities of living under neoliberalism. My dissertation contends that to build a lasting peace, peacemaking in El Salvador must address not just ending war, but transforming economic inequality, class-based political exclusion, and racialized and gendered violence.
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