From Exodus to Exitus Causes of post-war violence in El ... - eDoc

2 Heidrun Zinecker
The claim that wartime violence is being perpetuated in a different form can be refuted
in at least three ways. Firstly, the explanatory power of this factor is diminished by Nicaragua,
with its low level of violence, because during the war it had a homicide rate equally
as high (138/1977-1979) as or much higher (208/1981-1989) than El Salvador (138/1981-
1992), but the present homicide rate in Nicaragua is much lower than that in El Salvador.
Secondly, it is precisely those regions in El Salvador which were the worst affected by the
civil war, such as Morazán and Chalatenango, which now have the lowest level of violence,
with the result that in some places in these regions it is not even considered necessary
to station police units. Thirdly, the argument that it is ex-combatants or their children
who are responsible for perpetrating violence nowadays also fails to hold weight. On
the one hand, this is partly to do with the remarkable cohesion of both wartime parties,
accompanied by a particular level of discipline which continues to make its effects felt
since the war. On the other, it can be ascribed to the fact that ex-guerrilleros generally give
their children a political upbringing, whereas modern perpetrators of violence are criminal
and have no political motives or interests. The regions once so badly affected by the
civil war have a low level of violence precisely because, among other reasons, exguerrilleros
have settled there, and they take it into their own hands to ensure that mareros
and other perpetrators of violence do not set foot there (González, L. 2006; Linares 2006).
Unlike certain African countries, in the case of El Salvador (and also of Guatemala) it is
therefore not possible to attribute the high level of violence to clashes between excombatants
from the civil war.
The question arising from the extremely negative homicide rates on the one hand, and
from the positive, by Central American standards, socioeconomic and also political indicators
on the other, is as clear as the puzzle it brings to light: How is this contradiction to
be explained? Elsewhere I have drawn up a causal model, which explains why in three
Central American countries there are such high levels of violence and in two countries
such low ones (cf. Zinecker 2006 a; Zinecker 2006 b: 129-174). The model can be applied
to El Salvador. In this report however the aim is not only, or not primarily, to explain why
El Salvador, like Guatemala and Honduras, has a vastly higher level of violence than Costa
Rica and Nicaragua. Instead it will investigate why, when compared to both the other
countries in the region with a high intensity of violence, Honduras and Guatemala, violence
in El Salvador is ahead of them by quite such a long way. The hypothesis to be tested
is: while high levels of violence per se can be explained by other factors, in comparison to
the rest of Central America in El Salvador two causal factors underlie its extremely high
levels of violence:
1) in the context of recent globalization, a particularly high rate of migration and associated
rate of remittances (foreign workers’ rents), which have transformed the country’s
currency, surplus and income structure at least as radically as the country’s foray into
exporting coffee, and later into import substitution industrialization, once did. If the
failure of this industrialization, along with other factors, was a root cause of the Salvadoran
civil war from 1981-1992, it can be assumed that the transformation to a remittance
economy is having a similar causal effect upon post-war violence;
2) a poor performance linked with a high degree of repressive behaviour on the part of the
security sector (police and judiciary). The lowest figure for homicide rates in the post-