Suchergebnisse

"In December 1931, El Salvador's civilian president, Arturo Araujo, was overthrown in a military coup. Such an event was hardly unique in Salvadoran history, but the 1931 coup proved to be a watershed. Araujo had been the nation's first democratically elected president, and although no one could have foreseen the result, the coup led to five decades of uninterrupted military rule, the longest run in modern Latin American history. Furthermore, six weeks after coming to power, the new military regime oversaw the crackdown on a peasant rebellion in western El Salvador that is one of the worst episodes of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. Democracy would not return to El Salvador until the 1990s, and only then after a brutal twelve-year civil war. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching seeks to explain the origins of the military regime that came to power in 1931. Based on his comprehensive survey of the extant documentary record in El Salvador's national archive, Ching argues that El Salvador was typified by a longstanding tradition of authoritarianism dating back to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The basic structures of that system were based on patron-client relationships that wove local, regional, and national political actors into complex webs of rival patronage networks. Decidedly nondemocratic in practice, the system nevertheless exhibited highly paradoxical traits: it remained steadfastly loyal to elections as the mechanism by which political aspirants acquired office, and it employed a political discourse laden with appeals to liberty and free suffrage. That blending of nondemocratic authoritarianism with populist reformism and rhetoric set the precedent for military rule for the next fifty years. "With his Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching makes a significant and original contribution to the historiography of Central America and to debates on patron-client relations and systems of political development. No doubt the enormous empirical research and attention to archival detail he presents will spark debate in the rich and growing literature on politics, democracy, and authoritarianism in post-independence Latin America." --Justin Wolfe, Tulane University"--

A fight within the right : rivaling visions of modernization -- Modernizing reform and anticommunist repression : the first PCN administration, 1961-1967 -- "A monitor instead of a teacher" : the origins of the 1968 education reform and how television became its centerpiece -- "A feverish laboratory" : the education reform of 1968 -- Modernization projects and authoritarian practices in the 1970s -- "The most thoroughly studied educational technology project in the world

"Anna Maria Gasteazoro (1950-1993) was a Salvadoran opposition leader and renowned prisoner of conscience. In her memoirs, Tell Mother I'm in Paradise, she recounts her trajectory from a privileged Catholic upbringing in El Salvador, with stints at school abroad and early jobs, to her increasing commitment to political work after witnessing the violence and corpses in the streets of San Salvador early in the civil war, to clandestine organizing against the brutal military junta. Her inspiring and, at times, dramatic story culminates in three years as a political prisoner of conscience and then release and exile to Mexico. Readers get a sense of the upper-class milieu of well-connected parents and loving nannies and of Gasteazoro negotiating her education and freedom and exploring her talents in early years. She chronicles her growing rebellion against strictures of the Catholic Church and the conservative group Opus Dei, with which her mother was heavily involved. She was well educated and spoke perfect English and discovered a talent for organizing in administrative jobs abroad and at home. As the war progressed, she quickly became a valuable leader in the opposition movement as a member of the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), a social democratic party, despite the machismo environment. She was often sent abroad as a representative. In two particularly exciting events, she served as a delegate to the Eleventh International Youth Festival in Havana in 1978 and when, with her life in danger, she donned a disguise to give a speech at a conference in Spain. As other MNR leaders were killed or disappeared, she rose to top leadership. Against the backdrop of kidnappings and disappearances of prominent members of the opposition and massive social oppression, Gasteazoro began to live a double life. As an operative in a faction of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), she organized safe houses for fellow activists and proved adept at creative content, handling whatever task was required, for example, writing for an underground radio station and producing what became an award-winning documentary film. In 1981, the notorious National Guard arrested and tortured her, and she was then sent to the women's prison at Illopango. There, she and other activists dedicated their days to organizing through the Committee of Salvadoran Political Prisoners (COPPES). Gasteazoro's love affairs, including with fellow operatives, are woven into the narrative. Accounts of the relationships help reveal her as extraordinary woman in extraordinary times who lived to the fullest in both body and spirit"--