Memories of Civil War in El Salvador

Realms of Memory

Over a decade of civil war tore apart the tiny Central American nation of El Salvador. Throughout the 1980s the United States poured billions of dollars into the conflict to stop the spread of communism in Central America. Beyond the massive loss of life and even greater human displacement, deathsquads and special military units massacred, tortured, and disappeared civilian populations caught in the crossfire. When a peace agreement was finally reached in 1992, all sides agreed to a general amnesty. There would be no trials, no effort to identify the perpetrators of human rights abuses or war crimes. Yet beginning in the 1990s, El Salvador experienced an unprecedented outpouring of personal accounts of the war from the former participants. Furman University historian Erik Ching, author of Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle Over Memory, tells us what we can learn from these accounts about the civil war and those who fought it.