The resolution of the civil war in El Salvador coincided with the end of the Cold War. After two years of negotiations and a decade-long effort to implement the peace accords, this work examines how peace was made and whether it has endured.

Set against the backdrop of the collapsing Cold War world, this monograph draws on entirely new documentary evidence to chronicle almost two years worth of UN-led peace talks to end the civil war in El Salvador. Presented in 'moment-to-moment' fashion, hitherto private notes and interviews with the chief UN, American and Salvadoran negotiators demonstrate that the key to enduring peace was to restructure relations between the country's powerful entrepreneurs and the armed forces.

El Salvador's civil war, which left at least 75,000 people dead and displaced more than a million, ended in 1992. The accord between the government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been lauded as a model post-Cold War peace agreement. But after the conflict stopped, crime rates shot up. The number of murder victims surpassed wartime death tolls. Those who once feared the police and the state became frustrated by their lack of action. Peace was not what Salvadorans had hoped it would be. Citizens began saying to each other, "It's worse than the war." El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy challenges the pronouncements of policy analysts and politicians by examining Salvadoran daily life as told by ordinary people who have limited influence or affluence. Anthropologist Ellen Moodie spent much of the decade after the war gathering crime stories from various neighborhoods in the capital city of San Salvador. True accounts of theft, assaults, and murders were shared across kitchen tables, on street corners, and in the news media. This postconflict storytelling reframed violent acts, rendering them as driven by common criminality rather than political ideology. Moodie shows how public dangers narrated in terms of private experience shaped a new interpretation of individual risk. These narratives of postwar violence—occurring at the intersection of self and other, citizen and state, the powerful and the powerless—offered ways of coping with uncertainty during a stunted transition to democracy.

This book in Oxfam's Country Profile series gives an account of the history of El Salvador, and the inequalities and political corruption in Salvadoran society which were contributory causes of the long-running civil war. The ecological crisis facing the country, and the unresolved issues of land tenure are also examined. El Salvador: Keeping the Peace reviews the efforts which are being made to rebuild communities, and the obstacles which remain on the road to a stable and peaceful future.

Since the first edition of this book appeared in 1982, El Salvador has experienced the most radical social change in its history. Ten years of civil war, in which a tenacious and creative revolutionary movement battled a larger, better-equipped, US-supported army to a standstill, have ended with 20 months of negotiations and a peace accord that promises to change the course of Salvadorean society and politics. This book traces the history of El Salvador, focusing on the oligarchy and the armed forces, that shaped the Salvadorean army and political system. Concentrating on the period since 1960, the author sheds new light on the US role in the increasing militarization of the country and the origins of the oligarchy-army rupture in 1979. Separate chapters deal with the Catholic church and the revolutionary organizations, which challenged the status quo after 1968. In the new edition, Dr Montgomery continues the story from 1982 to the present, offering a detailed account of the evolution of the war. She examines why Duarte's two inaugural promises, peace and economic prosperity could not be fulfilled and analyzes the electoral victory of the oligarchy in 1989. The final chapters closely follow the peace negotiations, ending with an assessment of the peace accords, and evaluate the future prospects for El Salvador and for the 1994 elections.