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Truth commissions were created to investigate human rights violations as a result of political negotiations in both El Salvador and Haiti. The commissions included in their reports recommendations designed to secure reparations for the victims. However, despite the gravity of the events and the formal commitment of the governments, neither El Salvador nor Haiti has implemented these recommendations. Two case studies provide an opportunity to examine the economic, social, and political factors that explain non-compliance with truth-commission recommendations on reparations. This paper examines the experiences of El Salvador and Haiti, and presents some conclusions and lessons learned. The first and most important conclusion is that in order to ensure that reparations programs will be put into practice, a correlation of political forces that favors such programs is necessary. The construction of such a correlation depends on the existence of sufficiently powerful and influential players to promote and defend it.

The UN Secretariat assumed the leading role as intermediary to reach a negotiated settlement of the conflict in El Salvador. The Friends of the Secretary-General on El Salvador somewhat revived the concept of the advisory committees that had been established in the 1950s. The transformation of the bipolar system created the permissive political context for a leading role of the United Nations, with the United States and the Soviet Union as guardians of the process in the background. Given the relative success of the Friends, the concept turned into a model which was subsequently applied — with mixed results — to crises in Haiti, Guatemala, Western Sahara, and Georgia.

This chapter analyzes the decision-making process surrounding pension reform in Latin America. It argues decision to emulate the Chilean model did not follow the procedures of full, ‘economic’ rationality. Rather they were shaped by shortcuts of bounded rationality. Instead of proactively scanning the international environment for the relevant information, experts and policymakers mostly reacted to information about Chilean-style privatization that happened to be available to them. Rather than conducting systematic, balanced, cost-benefit analyses of this innovation, many of them were overly impressed by the initial success of Chile's private pension funds and used associative reasoning in depicting social security privatization as the main cause for the dramatic increase in domestic savings and productive investment and the resulting growth boom experienced by Chile. Furthermore, instead of thoroughly adapting the Chilean import to their own country's requirements, decision-makers in a number of countries stayed strikingly close to the original. Thus, these pension reformers did not apply the principles of comprehensive rationality, but displayed the three principal shortcuts documented by cognitive psychologists in innumerable experiments and field studies: the heuristics of availability, representativeness, and anchoring.

This chapter considers the role of ‘memory politics’ – understood as the combination of official and unofficial attempts to deal with the legacy of past violations – in the struggle for democratization in Central America: official initiatives can include truth commissions, amnesty dispensations, criminal investigations and prosecutions, and a range of institutional reforms aimed at redressing the previous failure of the state to guarantee human rights; unofficial initiatives developed by civil society actors to confront the past can include investigations of violations, legal actions, and different kinds of commemorative acts and exercises in collective memory. Memory politics operates at multiple levels and involves a diversity of agents, including local communities, national and international non-governmental human rights organizations (HROs), governments, the media, and, in the case of Central America, the UN; however, it is suggested here that its long-term effects in any national context depend on the interaction between official and unofficial efforts to address the legacies of the past. The experiences of memory politics analysed in this chapter are those of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the three Central American countries that during the 1990s undertook official processes of investigating past violations of human rights. The precise nature of memory politics and the impact it has had varied considerably in these three countries, and it is suggested that four interrelated factors are central to explaining differences between the respective national experiences: the first is the specific political and social legacies of human rights abuse in each country; the second concerns the circumstances of the transition from war to peace, specifically the prevailing balance of forces and the trade-off between truth and justice that this engendered in each case; the third is the role of local HROs and civil society in general in the politics of memory; and the fourth is the role of international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in efforts to uncover the truth about the past and to address the consequences of violations. The first three sections of the chapter compare the legacies of human rights abuses, the transitional trade-offs between truth and justice, and the role of civil society organizations and international actors in the memory politics of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; the final section considers the impact of memory politics on the prospects for democracy in these countries.

The protracted civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s led to a substantial increase in illegal migration into the U.S.A., and to a consequent economic dependency, despite U.S. anti‐immigration policy, on the remittances sent back to El Salvador by migrant workers. The situation that developed produced a fertile arena for cause lawyers engaged in supporting the rights of immigrants – not always working to adequate professional standards. Cause lawyers's advocacy work was not limited to helping immigrants discover loopholes in U.S. immigration law, but served to change the law itself through the mobilization of transnational constituencies.

This chapter examines the efficacy of justice reform in creating effective mechanisms of horizontal accountability in El Salvador and Guatemala. There is little evidence to suggest that reforms have instilled in judges, prosecutors and the police a commitment to horizontal accountability. Moreover, the public remains skeptical about the impact of reform in promoting horizontal accountability.

This chapter talks about when the authors entered the one-time Western Pacific Railroad rail yard in Sacramento. It was October 20, 1995, thirteen years after they had first jumped on a train from the same place. They walked the tracks, climbed atop railcars, sat in the shadow of the icehouse. It was a reunion: they had not seen each other or talked by phone very much for a few years. They had grown a bit estranged because their 1980s had been so fierce—each of them was a reminder to the other of troubled times. In the 1980s, they had covered the war in El Salvador, where they had some bad experiences, and the revolution in the Philippines, among a slew of other intense projects. They had also produced two more books on poverty in America.

This chapter examines rural social movements in El Salvador from the first rural social movements and peasant federations of the 1960s, through the civil war of the 1980s, and into post-war social and political life in rural areas today. It focuses on the movement to repopulate war-torn rural areas and the effort to transform economic and political institutions, reform agricultural practices and land tenure, practice environmental restoration, and create models of a “new society” based on progressive Catholic values.

This chapter analyzes the ethical attitudes and practices regarding the natural environment in both the Salvadoran and Amish communities examined in chapters 1 and 2. Of particular interest are agricultural practices, the links between environmental sustainability and social justice, and the complex ways that religious values and beliefs influence both everyday practice and the shape of collective institutions. It also analyzes and compares the distinctive contributions of Anabaptist and progressive Catholic theology to thinking and practice regarding nature.

This chapter looks at the extent to which the Salvadorans and Amish settlements have achieved social justice, protection for vulnerable groups, and democratic institutions and processes in their communities. It analyzes and compares the distinctive contributions of Anabaptist and progressive Catholic theology to these issues. Particular attention is given to the religious dimensions of social movements and other mechanisms for seeking political change, and to the interactions between religious ethics and the actual practices of religious communities.

This chapter reflects on the possibilities for reclaiming and rethinking progressive utopian thought in light of the experiences of both Amish and Salvadoran experiences in creating environmentally sustainable and socially just communities. The distinctive contributions of religion to these experiences are explored, as well as the significance of recent changes in the political left, in the nature of progressive social movements, and in religious and cultural life in the Americas.

This chapter looks at the army building in three very different political environments: the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), and the civil war in El Salvador (1979–92). Although the objective in both Bosnia and El Salvador was to develop a democratic army in the wake of the civil war, it has not been achieved fully in either setting. Lebanon is unique not just in the category of post-civil war army building but because it is an outlier in the entire group of twenty-seven cases studied in two important respects. First, in the first fifteen years after the civil war, a foreign army of Syria controlled some of Lebanon's territory and was instrumental in rebuilding the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Second, aside from the state-controlled LAF, another local, contending or complementary and yet legitimate military force has functioned in the country: the militia of Hezbollah, a Shi'a Islamist political and paramilitary organization.

This chapter discusses the origins of civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and U.S. involvement in Central America. The Spanish conquest in the early 16th century established a feudal economic system that led to widespread inequality, poverty, and conflict between wealthy landowners and the poor masses. These conditions erupted into civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The US, fearing the spread of communism, backed a series of military regimes and dictatorships in these countries.

In El Salvador, the UN mediated a peace agreement and ONUSAL played a major supporting role in its implementation. An elected government made all executive decisions and set priorities for economic reconstruction, in consultation with the FMLN. Many consider El Salvador's war-to-peace transition the most successful in the post-Cold War period, owing to its emphasis on DDR programs and to a clear exit strategy for ONUSAL as the country moved into normal development. This chapter illustrates how a business-as-usual approach by the UN and the IMF led to confrontations as the separate economic and peace processes moved forward and how the FMLN stopped demobilization, blaming the government for delays in the arms-for-land program. The chapter analyzes how public debate led to better coordination and greater fiscal flexibility in the IMF-supported program, avoiding the return to war. The chapter also looks at the UN performance in economic reconstruction and draws lessons.

Most well-trained economists would agree that the standard policy reforms included in the ‘Washington Consensus’ have the potential to be growth-promoting. What the experience of the last fifteen years has shown, however, is that the impact of these reforms is heavily dependent on circumstances. This chapter argues that this calls for an approach to reform that is much more contingent on the economic environment. It is possible to develop a unified framework for analyzing and formulating ‘growth strategies’ which is both operational and based on solid economic reasoning. The key step is to develop a better understanding of how the nature of the binding constraints on economic activity differs from setting to setting. This understanding can then be used to derive policy priorities accordingly, in a way that would use the scarce political capital of reformers efficiently. The methodology that it proposed here can be conceptualized as a decision tree. The first questions concern what keeps the level of domestic investment and entrepreneurship low. At each node of the decision tree, the kind of evidence that would help answer the question one way or another is discussed. The chapter draws on the experience of three specific countries: El Salvador, Brazil, and Dominican Republic. Aside from providing a useful manual for policy makers, this approach has the advantage that it is broad enough to embed all existing development strategies as special cases. It can therefore unify the literature and help settle prevailing controversies.