ABSTRACT
The arrival of ‘peace’ in El Salvador in 1992 was greeted with great enthusiasm by a citizenry who were devastated by years of violent conflict and drawn by the promise of a more inclusive social pact. They hoped that the formal ending of war would provide a platform for the construction of new democratic institutions capable of addressing the ‘deep and profound’ socio-economic roots of the conflict (Murray 1997: 3). For international actors, such as the United Nations (UN), the successful negotiation to the end of the conflict ‘set an important precedent for international promotion of human rights principles and democratic institutions’ and El Salvador remains today one of their most successful missions (Burgerman 2000: 63). The then UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, suggested in 1995 that El Salvador. … could confidently be called a nation transformed’ (UN 1995: 3). However, limits in this transformation led many to question whether the accords really did represent ‘a new social pact among Salvadorans, or a superficial consensus imposed upon them by external actors’ (Holiday and Stanley 1993: 1).
