Grassroots mobilization against US military intervention in El Salvador

Socialism and Democracy

Volumn 22, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 143-159

  Perla Jr , Hector ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 54549119444     PISSN: 08854300     EISSN: 17452635     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08854300802361646     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
2. Sharon Erickson-Nepstad and Christian Smith, "The Social Structure of Moral Outrage in Recruitment to the US Central America Peace Movement" in Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, ed. Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 158-74.
3. Although the CAPSM also included organizations concerned with Guatemala and Nicaragua, in this article I refer only to the portion of the movement that dealt with El Salvador.
4. William LeoGrande, Central America and the Polls (Washington, DC: Washington Office on Latin America, 1987).
5. Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz-Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001)
6. Susan Bibler Coutin, Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants' Struggle for US Residency (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003)
7. Héctor Perla Jr., "Si Nicaragua Venció, El Salvador Vencerá," Latin American Research Review, 43, 2 (2008), 136-58.
8. Perla, "Si Nicaragua Venció, El Salvador Vencerá," 142.
9. Charles Brockett. Political Movements and Violence in Central America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 95.
10. Tommie Sue Montgomery. Revolution in El Salvador (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 64, 71. The account in the following paragraph is based principally on this source.
11. See Maria Cristina Garcia, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 31-34.
12. United States. Department of State. Communist Interference in El Salvador: Documents Demonstrating Communist Support of the Salvadoran Insurgency (Washington: US Government Printing Office, February 19, 1981).
13. Garcia, Seeking Refuge, 19
14. Richard Sobel (ed.) Public Opinion in US Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 108-12, 156.
15. Judith Miller, "Congress Mail Heavy on El Salvador Issue," New York Times, March 26, 1981, A7.
16. However, we now know that US armed forces were involved in combat operations against the FMLN throughout the war. See Graham, Bradley, "Public Honors for Secret Combat; Medals Granted After Acknowledgment of US Role in El Salvador," Washington Post, May 6, 1996, A1.
17. Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 150.
18. Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 221. The murdered Jesuits were leading intellectuals, critical of government human rights abuses.
19. John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
20. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
21. Richard Sobel, The Impact of Public Opinion on US Foreign Policy Since Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
22. William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse, "When Congress Stops Wars," Foreign Affairs (September/October 2007).
23. Hamilton and Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global City.
24. See also Philip Taubman, "Salvadorans' US Campaign: Selling of Revolution," New York Times, February 26, 1982, A10.
25. Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 114.
26. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998)
27. John Guidry and Mark Sawyer. "Contentious Pluralism: The Public Sphere and Democracy," Perspectives on Politics 1, 2 (June 2003).
28. Van Gosse, "'The North American Front': Central American Solidarity in the Reagan Era," in Reshaping the US Left, ed. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1988), 19.
29. Author's interview with Felix Kury, San Francisco, February 2007.
30. Perla, "Si Nicaragua Venció, El Salvador Vencerá."
31. Author's conversation with José Artiga, Executive Director of the SHARE Foundation, February 21, 2007.
32. Leverage politics refers to "the ability to call upon powerful actors to affect a situation where weaker members of a network are unlikely to have influence." Accountability politics refers to "the ability to hold powerful actors to their previously stated policies or principles." Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 16.
33. While the veracity of the White Paper's conclusions has been seriously challenged, in an October 2003 speech at UCLA, Shafik Handal acknowledged that during the war the FMLN established good relationships with North American civil society organizations and congressmen with the express purpose of building opposition to Reagan's Central American policy. Moreover, Van Gosse, a national CISPES leader, acknowledged in "'The North American Front': Central American Solidarity in the Reagan Era" that in the months before CISPES's founding "a few key activists met with the newly-formed Democratic Revolutionary Front [FDR] in Mexico and agreed to help initiate a national solidarity effort" (24), and that CISPES leadership maintained close connections to the Popular Revolutionary Bloc (BPR). The BPR was a member of the FDR, but it was also affiliated to the FMLN's Popular Forces of Liberation (FPL) guerrilla group.
34. Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 41-43.
35. Letter, Kristyna Demaree to Ronald Reagan, February 25, 1983, ID#131368, PR013, WHORM: Subject File, Ronald Reagan Library.
36. Letter, Robert M. Keller to Ronald Reagan, August 1, 1988, Folder "Central America-Presidential Letters," Box 92378, Robert S. Pastorino Files, Ronald Reagan Library.
37. Letter, Sister Mary Canavan to Ronald Reagan, October 5, 1988 Folder "Central America-Presidential Letters," Box 92378, Robert S. Pastorino Files, Ronald Reagan Library (emphasis added).
38. Letter, Ron Holley, to Ronald Reagan, found in Letter, Robert Kelnhofer to Ronald Reagan, October 31, 1983, ID# 194354, PR 003, WHORM: Subject File, Ronald Reagan Library.
39. Mark Falcoff, "The Apple of Discord: Central America in US Domestic Politics," in Rift and Revolution (Washington, DC: American Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984), 368.
40. US House of Representatives. Hearings before Congressional Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office June 8-9, 1976).
41. Van Gosse, "El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam." In The Immigrant Left in the United States, ed. Paul Buhl and Dan Georgakas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 303.
42. Author's interview with Angela Sambrano, Los Angeles, February 17, 2007.
43. Gosse, "'The North American Front.'"
44. SHARE Foundation Homepage, http://www.share-elsalvador.org/about/ about.htm (emphasis added).
45. Author's conversation with Jose Artiga, Executive Director of the SHARE Foundation, February 21, 2007.
46. In "Contentious Pluralism", Guidry and Sawyer define a procedural mode of subversion as involving the use of "accepted, legal procedures to hold the state and dominant actors accountable to their own principles ... A rhetorical mode of subversion is one in which actors use the logic of political ideas and discourse to change opinion in diverse publics, including the dominant ones ... In the demonstrative mode of subversion, actors strike at the structures of power by presenting and modeling alternatives to the existing order" (277).
47. Smith, Resisting Reagan, 151.
48. Robert Tomsho, The American Sanctuary Movement (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987), 30.
49. Tomsho, The American Sanctuary Movement, 209.
50. Guidry and Sawyer, "Contentious Pluralism," 277.
51. Coutin, Legalizing Moves, 138-39.
52. Author's interview with Werner Marroquin, Los Angeles, February 15, 2007.
53. Garcia-Bedolla defines a mobilizing identity in the following way, "Put simply, for individuals to choose to act, they must feel that they are a part of something and that that 'something' is worthy of political effort. That feeling of attachment and group worthiness is what motivates them to act on behalf of the collective." See Lisa Garcia-Bedolla, Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 7-9.
54. Marco A. Mojica, "Mística, Memoria y Nostalgia: The Construction of the Sandinista Political Identity in Nicaragua." Paper presented at the 48th International Studies Association Conference, Chicago, February 28, 2007.
55. Hamilton and Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global City, 129-30.
56. United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador, From Madness to Hope. Available online at http://www.usip.org/library/tc/doc/ reports/el_salvador/tc_es_03151993_casesA.html.
57. See Susan Bibler Coutin, Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).