From Not-Knowing to Knowing: Changing Crime Stories in San Salvador, 1994-2014

• In Event: Evolving Conceptions of Violence and Security in Latin America

Abstract

Citizen security measures and senses of citizen insecurity have transformed multiple times since El Salvador’s peace accords were signed in 1992. Throughout the first postwar decade, as the police force converted from military to civilian, murder rates hovered among the highest in the hemisphere. A common refrain: “It’s worse than the war.” In the second postwar decade, the government implemented “mano dura” policies, initially to popular enthusiasm. Though prisons filled up, crime rates skyrocketed, again, as did the sense of the gang threat. More recently the Salvadoran state, since 2009 controlled by the left, has experimented with a gang truce, eventually naming some communities as “free of violence,” to mixed results and much controversy. In this paper, I consider the relationship among these changing political approaches to crime with changes in citizen sentiment and affect among residents of San Salvador, the country’s capital. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research between 1994 and 2004, I explore continuities and ruptures in individual narratives of everyday insecurity. In my original research in the immediate postwar years, I suggested that much anxiety came from a sense of “not-knowing” when and where violence would appear (unlike the war, at least in retrospect); more recently, I propose that today Salvadorans often believe they “know” the threats. But a sense of both private and public impotence today stymies senses of security. This presentation examines how these changes in citizen experience produce and are produced by political ideologies and policies.

Author

• Ellen E Moodie, University of Illinois