Remembering El Salvador's civil war

Here are two recent articles on El Salvador that I thought you might be interested in reading.

Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra writes on Historical Memory at El Salvador's Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in Latin American Perspectives.

The civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992) resulted in the death of approximately 75,000 people, the vast majority killed by state and paramilitary forces. In the postwar era, the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador promotes historical memory in order to denounce state violence and advance social justice. It departs from the historic role of museums in upholding ruling-class hegemony and offers a progressive model for disseminating and critically engaging with historical memory. This museum makes history relevant to younger generations through the use of oral history, popular pedagogy, and innovative engagement strategies. However, its impact is limited by neoliberal atomization and relatively low levels of grassroots mobilization—common obstacles faced by popular education initiatives around the world.

And Walter C. Ladwig III writes on Influencing Clients in Counterinsurgency: U.S. Involvement in El Salvador's Civil War, 1979–92 for International Security.

After a decade and a half of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. policymakers want to change their approach to COIN by providing aid and advice to local governments rather than directly intervening with U.S. forces. Both this strategy and U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine in general, however, do not acknowledge the difficulty of convincing clients to follow U.S. COIN prescriptions. The historical record suggests that, despite a shared aim of defeating an insurgency, the United States and its local partners have had significantly different goals, priorities, and interests with respect to the conduct of their counterinsurgency campaigns. Consequently, a key focus of attention in any future counterinsurgency assistance effort should be on shaping the client state's strategy and behavior. Although it is tempting to think that providing significant amounts of aid will generate the leverage necessary to affect a client's behavior and policies, the U.S. experience in assisting the government of El Salvador in that country's twelve-year civil war demonstrates that influence is more likely to flow from tight conditions on aid than from boundless generosity.

I haven't gotten around to reading either article yet but I thought that you might want to take a peak.