The University of Arizona Press
March 18, 2025
Specters of War: The Battle of Mourning in Postconflict Central America explores mourning practices in postwar Central America, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala. Ignacio Sarmiento delves into the intricate dynamics of grieving through an interdisciplinary lens, analyzing expressions of mourning in literature, theater, and sites of memory. At the heart of this analysis is the contention over who has the right to mourn, how mourning is performed, and who is included in this process. Sarmiento reveals mourning not as a private affair but as a battleground where different societal factions vie for the possibility of grieving the dead.
Through meticulous research and theoretical nuance, Specters of War sheds light on the politics of mourning in postconflict societies. Sarmiento argues that mourning is not merely a personal experience but a deeply political act intertwined with power struggles and societal divisions. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.
This chapter explores memorialization projects in postwar El Salvador and Guatemala. This topic is particularly relevant because, unlike cultural productions, such as the theater and fiction that will be studied in the following chapters, memorials, sites of memory, and museums are inscribed in the public landscape and as a result often enjoy larger visibility. Thus, independently of citizens’ religious beliefs and cultural, political, economic, or social capital, they often interact with different forms of memorialization in their daily lives even without noticing it. Studying processes of memorialization is relevant because despite the common assumption among academics and practitioners that memorialization is anything but neutral or apolitical, these sites are considered by many to be a reliable source of truthful information.
Memorialization in postwar El Salvador and Guatemala has been a controversial issue since the signing of the peace accords. The building (and also the absence) of memorials, museums, and sites of memory results from the struggle between power factions vying for visibility and legitimacy in postwar societies. In their study of postwar Guatemala, Steinberg and Taylor claim that landmarks and memorials can tell the observer not only who won the discursive battle of the internal armed conflict but also about the “continuing struggle for power.” Thus, what is at stake in the memorialization battle is not only who or what is memorialized but also who has the authority to memorialize.
Despite the overt recommendations made by the truth commissions, as of 2023 none of these countries has an official state- sponsored memory museum or memorial, as we find in other Latin American countries such as Chile and Argentina. Also, very little has been done overall to memorialize and honor the victims of the armed conflicts with the exception of some questionable or irrelevant projects that are discussed in the following pages. While someone not familiarized with Central America may be surprised at the almost nonexistent politics of memory, the truth is that this absence is well aligned with the general disinterest expressed by almost all postwar administrations. For example, human rights violations were systematically denied by postwar governments in El Salvador and Guatemala for over one decade after the end of the wars. Only in 2009, thirteen years after the signing of the peace accords, did Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom apologize concretely in the name of the state for the crimes committed during the internal conflict. (Previously, in 1998, President Álvaro Arzú offered a vague apology on the second anniversary of the peace accords, where he stated “yo pido perdón al pueblo de Guatemala por nuestras acciones u omisiones, por lo que hicimos o dejamos de hacer.” In 2005, Vice President Eduardo Stein apologized only to the relatives and victims of the 1982 massacre of Plan de Sánchez, during Óscar Berger’s presidency, following the sentence of the Inter- American Court of Human Rights. The absence of the president in such an important event cannot go unnoticed.) In 2011, Colom also apologized specifically to the victims of the massacre of Dos Erres, which took place in December 1982. Nevertheless, asking forgiveness in the name of the state did not introduce any lasting transformation either in terms of furthering transitional justice or in public opinion.
Starting in 2009 a handful of trials against high-ranking officials took place in Guatemala, but only a small number of them were convicted, and in only a few cases did the sentences involve reparation to the victims. The most noticeable case is arguably the trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemalan dictator from March 1982 to August 1983, accused of genocide. During Ríos Montt’s administration, the army conducted the most ruthless slaughtering of the civilian population, especially targeting Indigenous com-munities. In 2013 Ríos Montt went to trial for several massacres that had occurred in the Ixil region. Guatemala’s Supreme Court found Ríos Montt guilty, acknowledging the existence of a genocide against the Maya population during his administration, and sentenced him to eighty years in prison. Nevertheless, the trial was annulled a few days later for alleged flaws in the process, and Ríos Montt only remained under house arrest. New attempts to bring him to justice were made in 2015 and 2017, but none of them succeeded. Ultimately, Ríos Montt died, at age ninety- one, in 2018. Large segments of Guatemalan society seem unperturbed by all this. After the death of approximately two hundred thousand people and the juridical confirmation of the genocide against the Indigenous population, several powerful voices (including former presidents and presidential candidates) still claim that no hubo genocidio (there was no genocide) during the internal conflict.
The situation in El Salvador is no less disheartening. Only in 2010, eighteen years after the signing of the peace accords, President Mauricio Funes, the first FMLN president since the end of the war, asked for forgiveness in the name of the state for the crimes committed by the army during the internal conflict. Nevertheless, he specified that apologizing for war crimes did not mean seeking justice for the victims. Although transitional justice in Guatemala is scarce, there is more progress than in El Salvador, where the amnesty law remained in effect until 2016, but as of 2023 no case has been successfully prosecuted. The only person condemned for human rights violations during the Salvadoran civil war is former vice president of public security, Colonel Inocente Montano Morales, who stood trial in Spain, not in El Salvador, for the murdering of six Jesuit priests and two women in the Central American University in November 1989. He was sentenced to 133 years in prison in 2020.
The victims of the Central American civil wars are barely acknowledged by postwar administrations. Therefore, a politics of memory and projects of memorialization seem, unfortunately, a far- fetched idea even three decades after the end of the armed conflicts. The following pages will explore how some locations in postconflict Central America play an active role in the rich and complex web of memorialization and how they participate in the battle of mourning.
The tasks of grieving, humanizing, honoring, and remembering the dead have primarily been carried out by civil society organizations. In Diane M. Nelson’s words, this includes “DIY (do-it-yourself) projects—of memorials, reports, and other forms of commemoration.” It would be incorrect, how-ever, to say that the political parties, the former guerrillas, and the national armies do not mourn their dead. They do. But they have little interest in building a far- reaching community that can come together and grieve the dead, privileging instead a self- centered narrative that often seeks to justify the biggest atrocities. While I will consider several aspects in the analysis of these sites—such as their rhetoric, aesthetics, and historicity—my focus will be on how these places undertake (or avoid) the task of mourning the civil war’s losses. This chapter opens with theoretical and historical considerations regarding the construction of museums and memorials and their inherent connection to the work of mourning. The second part offers an overview of memorialization in postwar Guatemala, particularly in Guatemala City. The third and final section, which is also the lengthiest, provides an in- depth study of six sites of memory in present-day El Salvador.
Ignacio Sarmiento is an associate professor of Central American and Transborder studies at the California State University, Northridge. He is the co-editor of Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century and (Re)Imaginar Centroamérica en el siglo XXI. Sarmiento’s research focuses on postwar Central America and the Central American diaspora.
