Waves Of Protest: Popular Struggle In El Salvador, 1925–2005

Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in El Salvador, 1925–2005. By Paul D. Almeida
Ellen Moodie
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
Volume 15, Issue 1, pages 250–253, April 2010
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 2008 . 295 pp .
Waves of Protest offers a compelling way to think about how popular struggles may shift modes in changing political circumstances.Sociologist Paul D. Almeida's focus on the global South expands theories of collective action, which tend to draw from research in advanced capitalist democracies. Building on concepts of political opportunity and threat, he proposes a clear-cut model: In times of political liberalization, even under authoritarian regimes, civil-society organizations grow and reformist-minded protest actionsproliferate; if such democratic openings close, movements can radicalize and participants are more likely to engage in disruptive actions, even insurgencies. Observing recent events, Almeida suggests that new kinds of social actors are emerging to oppose neoliberal globalization.
The author makes his case through a study of El Salvador during the 20th and early 21st centuries. Relying an impressive rangeof primary and secondary sources, he traces the rise and fall of “protest waves”—defined as “periods of widespread protest activity across multiple collectivities” (12)—from episodes of popular unrest in the late 1920s to the dramatic “white marches” of the early 2000s. The book's dense, data-packed prose is sometimes a bit dry, but its constant return to its main thesis (reiterated in charts andgraphs) makes for a straightforward and ultimately powerful read. It would be a fine text for all levels of classes on social movements as well as on Central America.
Scholars of El Salvador will appreciate Almeida's analysis of the years leading up to the key trauma of that nation's history, indeed one of the most horrifying episodes of state repression in the 20th century (46): the 1932massacre of at least 10,000 peasants after a Communist-led uprising. He demonstrates how a political opening under President Pío Romero Bosque (1927–31) allowed the development of an activist organizational infrastructure, which mobilized workers, peasants, students, and tenants. These citizens engaged in a wave of protests, demanding such things as cheaper rent, lower electricity prices, affordablepublic transport, and an eight-hour workday (40–41). But then in late 1930, facing the global economic depression, the Salvadoran state began to crack down.
Almeida contends that the repression radicalized citizens. He concurs with a finding that the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS) “captured” much of reformist Regional Federation of Workers (FRT). Although scholars debate the extent ofCommunist involvement in the January 1932 revolt in western El Salvador, in which thousands of armed insurgents held a dozen towns briefly (see Lindo-Fuentes et al. 2007; Gould and Lauria-Santiago 2008), no one disputes the genocidal aftermath. The dictatorship that had come to power just before the massacre crushed all social movements. With a few exceptions, military rule suppressed civil society untilthe 1960s.
Almeida's analysis of growing activism between 1962 and 1972 explores a crucial and understudied period in Salvadoran history. The military regime began to liberalize again, allowing electoral competition and opening up a wide space for a stunning array of civil-society organizations. Not only did teachers, university students, textile workers, public employees, doctors, Christians,peasants, and many others come together in trade unions, associations, and organizations, their collective energy crested in a nonviolent protest wave between 1967 and 1972. Inspired by events elsewhere, including the Cuban Revolution and the Christian Democracy movement, activist Salvadorans participated in strikes, rallies, petitions, demonstrations, gatherings, sit-ins and building occupations,...