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USAID in El Salvador: The Politics of Prevention

Goodfriend, Hilary
http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/5026

Publisher:  Against the Current
Date Written:  01/07/2017
Year Published:  2017  
Resource Type:  Article

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) frames its work in El Salvador in the sterile, technocratic language of neoliberalism. The Agency is devoted to fostering "prosperity, security and good governance" in the small Central American nation. Notions of non-partisanship and apolitical, post-ideological action are key to this discourse

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Violence, of course, is much more than homicides; the obsession with murder rates that dominates public discourse on violence in El Salvador renders invisible the gender violence, anti-LGBTQ violence and structural violence that has historically marginalized communities and perpetuated inequalities.

Furthermore, homicide numbers are a poor measure of gang violence itself, which principally impacts the population not through killings but rather through extortion, mainly of small and informal businesses. This conflation of violence with murder rates reflects or perhaps contributes directly to the impulse to respond with more violence, a tendency that Fuentes and his colleagues are working to counter.

Violence has been a tragic, defining trait of Salvadoran history for at least the past century, as has courageous collective resistance to injustice. In 1932, a campesino uprising coordinated with the Communist Party against the landed elites and their military protectors was met with astonishing force, becoming perhaps the most singularly traumatic event since the conquest and known simply as "La matanza" or "the slaughter."
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