Indignant Liberalism: Political Protest and Generational Change in El Salvador
In 2013 anthropologist Ellen Moodie embedded with indignados—young middle-class protestors demanding that the government live up to its liberal commitments—to better understand the course of political change since the civil war. In this talk she discusses her forthcoming book, which starts with her work with urban activists of what she calls the “post-postwar” generation. She argues that theirs is only the latest demographic disappointed with liberalism in practice. Moodie looks back not only to the 1992 United Nations-brokered peace accords, which ended El Salvador’s twelve-year civil war, but also to a nineteenth-century “racial liberalism” that saw descendants of colonists “civilizing” Indigenous people while dispossessing them of lands and mobilizing them for labor. Today, the failure to make good on the promises of postwar liberalism has inspired robust support for strongman Nayib Bukele. Moodie argues that El Salvador’s case, though inflected by local concerns, is not unique. Rather, it is another stark demonstration of how liberalism’s imaginary social contract gives rise to populist authoritarianism.
Ellen Moodie is Associate Professor of Anthropology and director of the Global Studies program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has been carrying our research in El Salvador for more than 30 years. Her publications include El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and the co-edited volume Central America in the New Millennium: Living Transition Reimagining Democracy (Berghahn/CEDLA, 2013).
