Enduring insurgent identities and organizational capacity in El Salvador

I am at Binghamton University today presenting a paper at the Fourth Annual Dr. Han-Jyun Hou Conference. This year's theme is Political Violence: Bargaining Through Coercion. I am presenting a paper that Alberto Martin and I have been working on that looks at the electoral performance of El Salvador's FMLN in areas that it had a strong presence during the war (compared to those where it did not) and in areas where the violence was greatest (compared to those where violence was less apparent.

It's an update and extension of the papers that Leonard Wantchekon (1999) and I (2010) wrote concerning the legacy of the Salvadoran civil war and its likely affect on Salvadoran voters. Both papers evaluated the war's legacy on the first postwar election in 1994. However, our new project brings the analysis up to 2012 and, hopefully within the next few weeks, 2015.

 Basically, what I found looking at the FMLN's performance in the 1994 elections holds through 2012. Over twenty years after El Salvador’s first postwar elections, we find the war’s legacy continues to shape FMLN support. While departmental-level effects are weak, we find that those municipalities that suffered disproportionately from the violence and those that the FMLN controlled during the war continued to support the FMLN at a greater rate than municipalities that suffered less violence and were not controlled by the FMLN.

The only election where this did not hold true occurred in 1997 when looking at FMLN-controlled zones. I think that part of this was driven by the ERP-RN split from the FMLN that occurred between the 1994 and 1997 elections, but I am not certain.

We're still working out the details but the persistence of collective identity and the existence of organizational infrastructure of the FMLN in the old revolutionary areas of control and the memory of repression by the armed forces help explain the geographic support for the FMLN three decades later.