This week, we read Elizabeth Jean
Wood’s Insurgent Collective Action and
Civil War in El Salvador, and I was repeatedly struck by the rhetorical
parallels in how Wood describes the insurgent actions, both mobilizing and
violent, and how della Porta described the clandestine political organizations
she studied. It made me wonder how della Porta’s model fits Wood’s analysis.
It appears that it’s not a
terrible fit, at least in analyzing the onset of violence. In considering della
Porta’s factors that lead toward the onset of clandestine political violence,
one, enhanced policing, is unquestionably present in Usulutan. There are also
some cases where activation of militant networks is present, such as when Wood
discusses the areas where FMLN members had recruitment quotas out of their
extended families. The question of competitive escalation is difficult to
assess, but it appears that it could, potentially, have been present. Wood
acknowledges that the internal divisions between FMLN factions were controlled
for in her research design, at least in part out of her legitimate concerns for
her own safety. The fact that it was known that different FMLN factions were
divided in their approaches to violence (e.g., the increased early militancy of
ERP in comparison to other insurgent groups) suggests that competitive
escalation is at least plausible as a mechanism for the onset of violence.
The four mechanisms della Porta
identifies as important for the maintenance of clandestine political violence
are less present. Action militarization is explicitly disconfirmed in Wood’s
study, as the ERP, in particular dialed back their levels of violence after
mistakenly murdering one of their own under baseless accusations of spying. The
remaining maintenance mechanisms are absent because the violence did not remain
clandestine. Organizational compartmentalization did not arise because campesinos, in particular, sloshed back
and forth between urban safe havens, the contested rural departments, and
FMLN-controlled areas, depending on where safety was most likely to be found.
Thus, the cutting off from out-group ties that drives organizational
compartmentalization was not present. Ideological encapsulation may have been
partially present, but Wood’s interviews suggests that the war was not terribly
ideological, except in the broadest sense, in that insurgents wanted average
Salvadoreans to be treated with human dignity, and the government believed they
were being so treated. Militant enclosure may have been present in
FMLN-controlled areas, where the insurgents may have had better capacity to
control information, but in the contested regions Wood studied, FMLN and the
government had to wage war not only for territory, but for the “hearts and
minds” of the campesinos.
Because of the lack of
clandestinity in the El Salvador civil war, I’m not sure that there’s a lot of
utility in exploring the mechanisms della Porta identifies as driving exit.
Briefly, all of them appear to be present at some point in the process, but
because the insurgents were not clandestine, they don’t appear to have driven
the insurgent movement away from violence. Instead, other factors that allowed
the insurgency to more or less claim some sort of victory were the most
important factors in ending the civil war.
My take: Della Porta’s model is predicated
on the assumption that the radical group lacks the resources to step into the
open and challenge the government for sovereignty, which does not describe
FMLN. Thus, my initial instinct, that della Porta’s model can be used to explain,
at least in part, the El Salvador civil war, appears limited to the onset of
violence, while guerrilla groups were building their base of support. Once FMLN
and its constituent factions were able to create a situation of “dual
sovereignty,” they were no longer engaged in clandestine political violence, and della Porta’s model no longer
applied.