Violence And Unrest In El Salvador In The 1970's

Violence and unrest began to escalate throughout El Salvador during the early seventies, as the 1972 presidential election witnessed the democratically elected Jose Napoleon Duarte replacement by the military and oligarchy backed Arturo Armando Molina (Anderson 2011). This trend of democratic repression and lack of transparency served to uphold the state’s legacy of economic, social, and political inequality which, Anderson notes, “erupted into revolutionary flames” (2011). The 1970s can be seen as the kindling of this fire, as political organizing centered around liberation theology and unionization became factors in the spark that set El Salvador ablaze, with women and men alike, serving as agentive incendiaries.

Noting Salvadoran women

as incendiaries, Shayne highlights their role in ANDES, a labor union (composed 70% of women) that “paralyzed the educational system” through strikes in the late 60s and early 70s, which in 1971, held one of the most enormous strikes against the authoritarian government (1999). Furthermore, Shayne notes how in these strikes and demonstrations, women held roles as leaders and organizers. Therefore, Shayne argues that pre-war Salvadoran women “were already building political cultures of opposition” (1999) which this paper argues, began to chip away at the gender binary in El Salvador. Guided by Foss Et Al’s conceptualization of the “gender binary,” this paper views it as a Western division system that implies a natural and inevitable distinction “of two--and only two-genders, one feminine and the other masculine” that carry norms and expectations along a complimentary role playing master narrative (2013). Thus, noting pre-civil War El Salvador as embodying a hyper conservative gender binary e.g. stigmatization of women’s economic participation in the public sphere,(Blumberg 2001), the argument can be made that by enacting agency through visible protests and assuming leadership roles, Salvadoran women set in motion the blurring of the gender binary, which in the civil war, proved to be a valuable tactic.