The Broad Socio-political Spectrum of Violence in El Savador

- Patterns of roots of violence in El Salvador• Coercive Land Expropriation by the state and other

economic elite

• Privatization: The state suppressed any attempt against privatization and enforced private property rights by National Guard and other security forces

• La matanza (the massacre): In 1932, approximately 17,000 indigenous people were killed by state forces in the aftermath of an uprising against these measures

Decend into Violence– The unequal distribution of land, income and resulted in:

- Pervasive attitude of self-deprecation, fatalism, conformism and individualism and a patron-client structure

- The clients lived in complete dependence on the patron, as the cost of deviance was to lose everything such as work, food, and home.

– The repression was radicalizing the marginalized small farmers. Their mobilization into armed struggle appeared to be socially as well as individually liberating.

– The Salvadoran peasants were organization around an ideology, Marxist class struggle, romantic socialist populism, and, finally social vengeance and personal dignity” (Bourgeois).

Neoliberal Economics and the Roots of Violence

• Impacts of Structural Adjustment• limit government control over much of the economic • reduction of government sovereignty in several policy areas

• Most loan agreements are negotiated between the executive and officials at the IMF without the input of the legislature

• Increasing unemployment and poverty rates, greater income inequality, and reduced social services result in the diminished living standards commonly observed after economic reform programs

Fighting Violence through Microfinance

– The Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA), has an indirect impact on gang violence in small towns in El Salvador

– The recipients use these loans to free themselves from gang threats

– Micronifance loans provide clients with crucial safety nets to help them endure gang-imposed economic shocks.