Abstract
This final chapter explores how widespread feelings of fear, distrust, and disillusionment pervade and impact state-citizenry relations and popular visions of democracy. The chapter focuses on the 2009 rise to power of El Salvador’s leftwing party—formerly a guerrilla organization—in order to query the extent to which a regime shift within a violent democracy can impact political subjectivities and citizenship practices. While the postwar era has been characterized by a widespread disillusionment with democracy and an attendant circumvention of the state, I did observe postelection episodes in which ordinary Salvadorans suddenly began to engage state institutions and actors. I describe some of these episodes so as to enquire into the extent to which El Salvador’s 2009 party shift transformed the country’s political life.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Funes : “llegó el turno del ofendido,”’ Faro de Vigo, 16 March 2009.
- 2.
A full understanding of citizenship, however, should consider its multiscaled nature and explore the distribution of affect in loci other than the nation-state , such as El Salvador’s relations with the United States and transnational processes of various kinds. Indeed, critics of ‘methodological nationalism ’—the assumption, pervasive in social analysis, that the state is a natural entity—have underlined its rootedness in specific Western processes of state formation (see Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002).
- 3.
‘Santiagueños preocupados por excesivos cobros de agua potable’, Diario Colatino , 17 March 2010.
- 4.
‘Cobros excesivos por el agua potable’, La Prensa Gráfica, 31 May 2010.
- 5.
The Política Nacional de Descentralización (National Policy of Decentralization) was approved in 2007 by Saca’s ARENA government, although the decentralization of water services had already begun in 1998 with a loan contract between ANDA and the IDB (FUNDE 2009: 54). Claims citing the inefficiency and underfunding of ANDA water systems as well as the country’s low tariffs for water use were raised to legitimize the strategy of ‘decentralization’ of the management of the country’s water resources (see PNUD 2006: 14–15; Dimas 2007). Although technically water administration had been ‘delegated’, this was indeed a covert form of privatization (via outsourcing) where municipality councils could not administer it themselves. Meanwhile, El Salvador’s drinkable water coverage has been one of the lowest in Latin America, covering only 58 percent of the population in 2004 (PNUD 2006: 12).
- 6.
El Salvador’s official minimum wage is dependent on the economic sector. Someone working in the agricultural sector, the main source of employment in Santiago, would have earned US$3.24 per day in 2009 and 2010. See Decreto Ejecutivo No. 133, Diario Oficial, 19 December 2008.
- 7.
This was especially the case in the country’s rural areas after the collapse of the rural economy in the 1990s (Segovia 2002: 256).
- 8.
Indeed, Latin American governments who self-recognized as Center-Left or Left, the so-called Pink Tide governments, have shied away from structural transformations. Instead they were only able to expand their country’s poverty alleviation programs via massive revenues from extractive industries, at least until the slowdown of China’s economy from 2012 (Webber 2017).
- 9.
See ‘En el aire los motivos de la muerte de Christian Poveda ’, ContraPunto, 10 March 2011.
- 10.
This may be related to the Funes government’s increasing recognition of El Salvador’s state institutions ’ involvement in drug trafficking. An example of this was Funes’s explicit reference to the corruption within the PNC during the 64th UN General Assembly in September 2009 (Meléndez Reyes 2016: 82).
- 11.
Bourdieu (1999: 57) suggests that ‘the state is the culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital: capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic capital, cultural or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital’. However, I would suggest that in El Salvador, concentration of economic capital by the elite and securing its reproduction over time has historically motivated the concentration of other kinds of capital, notably a monopoly on the effective means of violence through an alliance with the military.
- 12.
The last three former presidents, Francisco Flores, Tony Saca, and Mauricio Funes , have been accused of corruption , illicit enrichment, and money laundering . Francisco Flores died before the end of his trial, Tony Saca was imprisoned, and Mauricio Funes sought asylum in Nicaragua. See ‘Muere Francisco Flores, el expresidente de El Salvador en el centro del escándalo por una millonaria donación taiwanesa’, BBC, 31 January 2016; ‘Tony Saca, el segundo expresidente a juicio por enriquecimiento ilícito’, El Faro , 23 February 2016; ‘Nicaragua da asilo político al expresidente Funes , investigado por cinco delitos de corrupción’, El Faro, 6 September 2016.
- 13.
Herein clientelism was, however, not free of cynicism , since it was publicly criticized as corrupt yet widely engaged in.
- 14.
Aretxaga (2003: 394) explains these kinds of contradictory investments in the state precisely as a result of the power with which the idea of the state is imbued.
- 15.
Moodie (2010: 139–168) has found similar aspirations for expanded inclusion among San Salvadorans in the post-Accords decade. Their crime stories indicated that they yearned for a state that would protect them, foster a community of belonging, and promote socio-economic development.
- 16.
Yet regional models of this kind of state exist in other Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Brazil, where populist regimes have promised a sort of welfare state but failed to deliver it.
- 17.
The church’s increasingly open attitude toward liberal positions during the twentieth century paved the way for, among other things, the foundation of Christian Democratic parties throughout Latin America (Dussel 1996: 278).
- 18.
It is nonetheless analytically relevant to note that the notion of the ‘welfare state ’ differs—both in origin and substance—from the definition of citizens’ political and economic entitlements introduced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal ideologies. So does the liberal notion of citizen greatly differ from the collective notion, deployed by liberation theologians, of ‘the poor’ as rights-bearers.
- 19.
Indeed, in 2010, the year in which most of the events in this chapter occurred, 50.3 percent of Salvadorans stated in surveys that they approved of Funes’s government, even though the majority believed that the country’s situation was the same as, or worse than, before (IUDOP 2011: 40, 42–43).
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Montoya, A. (2018). The 2009 Shift. In: The Violence of Democracy. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76330-9_7
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