Authorizing Death: Memory Politics and States of Exception in Contemporary El Salvador

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to elucidate the workings of what I consider to be one of the main social frames through which the violent past — particularly that of the eighties civil war — is being retrieved in contemporary El Salvador. Up until now, the notion of social frames, first explored by Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1925]) and salient in the work of Irwin-Zarecka (1994), has been used mainly to refer to the set of social meanings, narratives or discourses that make collective memory possible as a socially transmittable experience. In the case of El Salvador, however, it is the sheer physicality of violence and tangible suffering that enacts the transmission of the experience of a shared past at the social level. Indeed, the formation of a discursively articulated collective memory of the civil war is first made possible as a result of interpretations elicited by contemporary concrete suffering and acts of violence, such as street crime, thievery, delinquency and, most importantly, criminal acts associated with a type of juvenile gangs called maras.1 When Salvadorans attempt to grasp, measure and comprehend their suffering and vulnerability to violent acts in the present, they revisit their direct or indirect encounters with violence during the war years (Hume 2004; Moodie 2006; Silber 2004a). In this revisiting process, an embodied social frame is in the making — a frame that, grounded in concrete violence and suffering, points to a reciprocal relation between past and present forms of violence and simultaneously contains and reshapes the memory of the violence experienced during the eighties civil war.