Judicial Reform – A Neglected Dimension of SSR in El Salvador

ABSTRACT

Security Sector Reform is an integral part of peace-building but the focus of international actors tends to be on formal state security providers. This article argues that reforms in the judicial system are key for the non-violent transformation of societal conflicts. Based on historical institutionalism a theoretical argument links justice and peace. Reforms of the judiciary need to be an integral part of SSR because otherwise reforms in the military and the police can easily be undermined or turned back. A case study on El Salvador provides empirical insights on the interrelation between reforms of these institutions.     

Advocacy Perspectives on the Greenbook: Interviews with Domestic Violence Advocates from Three Federally Funded Greenbook Sites

Between 2000 and 2005, six sites engaged in local implementation of recommendations made in Effective Intervention in Domestic Violence and Child Maltreatment: Guidelines for Policy and Practice (the Greenbook), published by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges in 1999. This three‐part article reflects recorded conversations in June and July of 2019 and captures the perspectives of five domestic violence advocates who participated in local Greenbook implementation (in El Paso County, CO; San Francisco County, CA; or Santa Clara County, CA) and their thoughts on the Greenbook work then, since then, and going forward.     

Broadening ‘business’, widening ‘peace’: a new research agenda on business and peace-building

ABSTRACT

What role does business play in peace-building and conflict reduction? This special issue tackles this complex question, exploring varied business efforts to bring peace through six rigorous qualitative cases in Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Somaliland, Brazil, Guatemala and El Salvador. Three main findings cut across this issue. First, local context is paramount to success; there is no one universal formula that a regulator, business or peace practitioner aiming to advance a business agenda for peace can employ for operational success. Second, rather than compartmentalising ‘peace’ into projects that often carry ‘win-lose’ consequences for local communities, business-peace projects must first understand who they are empowering so that they do not unwittingly make the conflict worse. Third, investment and access are deeply intertwined in fragile and conflict-affected areas, and business-peace projects that simply try to improve business access typically exacerbate inequalities favouring elite actors. We close with a discussion on how to take the business and peace-building agenda forward with scholarship and policy, stressing that business-peace projects must be assessed at the societal and not project level if their impact is to be truly beneficial for a political economy of peaceful development.     

Democracy and ‘punitive populism’: exploring the Supreme Court's role in El Salvador

El Salvador is characterized by the sad record of having one of the highest degrees of violence and crime in Latin America. Recent governments have tried to fight it with programmes called ‘mano dura’ or ‘super-mano dura’ with measures and practices that have often violated human rights and judicial guarantees. This paper aims to explore the Supreme Court's role in the application of these policies by the Salvadoran government. We discovered that the highest court in this country supports this kind of policies termed by some analysts ‘policies of punitive populism’. In this sense, the Constitutional Chamber acted in contrast to what is required by democratic theory. The paper proceeds as follows: in the first part we analyse the theoretical framework of public safety policies and frame the Salvadoran case. In the second part, we explore the Supreme Court cases that support (or not) these policies, examining the performance of the court in relation to these cases. The last part is a summary of our evidence.     

The Politics of Negotiating with Gangs. The Case of El Salvador

This paper explores the dynamics of negotiations between the Salvadoran government and the street gangs, called maras. The paper argues that state negotiations with criminal groups can occur when organized crime is a significant part of the social and political order. This tacit order allows a great deal of coordination between and within criminal organizations and the focus of negotiations from the state's point of view is limited to the management of violence, not the dismantling of gangs' territorial control. This article draws on seventeen in‐depth interviews with middle‐level gang leaders, government officials, and participants of the truce negotiations from 2012 to 2016; it also relies on public information published by Salvadoran journalists and government sources about the truce.     

A perfect storm of neglect and failure: postwar capitalist restoration in Northern Morazán,El Salvador

This essay addresses economic relationships in northern Morazán, El Salvador, as they transitioned from a wartime subsistence regime to postwar integration into national and international capitalist circuits of production and exchange. It critically analyses the economic discourses and actions employed by the state, NGOs, and others to discipline the vagrant subjectivities of former FMLN insurgents, their social base, and ex-refugees. Much of the argument is developed via discussions of the postwar fates of residents of Ciudad Segundo Montes and peasant collaborators of the Community Development Council of Northern Morazán and San Miguel. Critical analysis of these cases suggest that economic relationships constitute not merely a product – however contradictory – of struggle over hegemony, but are important channels through which hegemony itself is secured.     

Microsatellite autosomal genotyping data in four indigenous populations from El Salvador

Fifteen microsatellite loci (D3S1358, TH01, D21S11, D18S51, PENTA E, D5S818, D13S317, D7S820, D16S539, CSF1PO, PENTA D, vWA, D8S1179, TPOX, and FGA) have been genotyped in four indigenous populations from El Salvador (Central America), namely, Conchagua, Izalco, Panchimalco, and San Alejo. Here we have obtained values for several indices of forensic interest for these population samples. Population differentiation test showed no significant statistical differences between these four populations, and an AMOVA test indicates that most of the genetic variation (approximately 100%) occurs within individuals. Population pairwise genetic comparisons with other population samples seem to indicate the existence of a major Native American component in the populations from El Salvador.     

The Structure of Negotiation: Lessons from El Salvador for Contemporary Conflict Resolution

During more than a decade of violent conflict (1980–1992) involving the military, rebel forces, and paramilitary "death squads," El Salvador suffered some 75,000 casualties, mostly civilians. After three years of negotiations, the government and the largest rebel group signed a historic comprehensive peace accord that brought an end to the war and instituted wide-reaching political and social reforms. This agreement, and the peace process that produced it, has been widely hailed as a successful example of a negotiated end to civil war. In order to understand the conditions that led to the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords ending the war, this article tests ripeness theory in the context of the Salvadoran peace process.
This article affirms the validity of theories of ripeness and the mutually hurting stalemate as structural explanations for the initiation of dialogue and notes the role of "indicators of ripeness" in forcing the parties to recognize a hurting stalemate that may already exist. It also proposes several hypothesized explanations for the effectiveness of the Salvadoran negotiations themselves. These explanations include the presence of strong, empowered policy entrepreneurs on both sides with the political will and capability to make credible commitments; the combination of internal and external pressure for a negotiated solution that raised the cost of defection; and the active involvement, based on consent of both parties, of a neutral, empowered, and credible mediator who provided both technical assistance and vigilance to move the process forward. After analyzing the Salvadoran case through this theoretical lens, the article applies the same concepts to contemporary conflict cases such as Iraq and Colombia, discussing how the lessons learned in El Salvador do and do not provide instructive guidance for managing civil conflicts today.     

The impact of cuing candidate quality on female candidates

How can parties improve the electoral prospects of traditionally under-represented women? We argue that if a party signals that a single female candidate is of high quality, other women appearing on the ballot with her will receive a boost in support. More specifically, if a female candidate heads a party's list in the district, other women from her party will be rewarded with more votes. We test our reasoning by examining the nomination and election of women in three Free-List Proportional Representation systems where voters can cast multiple preference votes for individual candidates. We find robust support for the finding that when voters receive a signal that women can be quality candidates, they tend to reward additional women with preference votes regardless of their rank on the ballot.     

The Spanish model of New Journalism in a European context

This work deals with the study of the evolution and the historical experience of Spanish journalism in the context of decades of transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the selection of the most relevant cases and the examination of tracking, or not, of models and European patterns of the reference press, singularities and analogies of the historical evolution of the Spanish journalism model may be seen – an evolutionary model fully registered within the framework of Western Europe and in one of its most fruitful phases: the origins and first development of the mass media. Therefore, the following trilogy of reference media is selected covering specified time periods: El Imparcial, Madrid, 1867–1933; La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 1881; and ABC, Madrid, 1903.