Human responses to catastrophic natural events form an important research theme in archaeology. Using excavation and radiocarbon data, this article investigates the socio-cultural impact of the mid-first-millennium AD Tierra Blanca Joven eruption at San Andrés, El Salvador. The data, along with an architectural energetic analysis of the Campana structure at San Andrés, indicate that survivors and/or re-settlers made considerable efforts to construct monumental buildings immediately following the eruption, using volcanic tephra as construction material. Such re-building played important religious, social and political roles in human responses to the eruption. The study contributes to discussions about human creativity, adaptation and resilience in the face of abrupt environmental change.

This article takes existing histories of Chilean transnational anti-communist activity in the 1970s beyond Operation Condor (the Latin American military states’ covert transnational anti-communist intelligence and operations system) by asking how the Pinochet dictatorship responded to two key changes in the international system towards the end of that decade: the Carter presidency and introduction of the human rights policy, and the shift of the epicentre of the Cold War in Latin America to Central America. It shows how both Salvadoreans and Chileans understood the Pinochet dictatorship as a distinct model of anti-communist governance, applicable far beyond Chile's own borders. This study of Chilean foreign policy in El Salvador contributes to new histories of the Latin American Extreme Right and to new understandings of the inter-American system and the international history of the conflicts in Central America in the late 1970s and the 1980s.

When the United States invaded Nicaragua in 1912 the popular reaction in El Salvador was so strong that it completely upended politics. The article argues that this anti-imperialist movement, completely ignored by the current historiography, forced Salvadorean governments to make decisions regarding foreign policy that would have been unthinkable had it not been for the pressure from below. Popular pressures contributed to limit the scope of the final version of the Chamorro–Bryan Treaty between the United States and Nicaragua. The treaty did not include Platt Amendment-like provisions. Moreover, the Wilson administration abandoned the idea of extending a protectorate to all the Central American countries and building a naval base in the Gulf of Fonseca.

This article traces the global humanitarian sector’s late twentieth-century embrace of human rights to the brutal civil conflict in El Salvador in the 1980s. Drawing on evidence from NGOs in three Anglophone states (Britain, Canada, and Ireland), it examines the moral and political debates that accompanied the breakthrough for human rights activism in that period, and how they conditioned contemporaneous understandings of ‘aid’. From that foundation, the article makes two claims. First, it argues that the ‘triumph’ of human rights in the late twentieth century was the product of a complex set of diplomatic, intellectual, and ideological factors that were of global, rather than simply of Western, origin. Second, by tracing what could and could not be done in the name of humanitarianism, the article brings us closer to understanding how even the most outwardly progressive vision of intervention was produced within a very specific – hierarchical and paternalistic – imagining of the Global South.

In Central America, population and food demands are rising rapidly, while yields of staple crops, maize and beans, remain low. To identify the main factors limiting production, field trials were established in six maize- and bean-producing regions in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, representing about three-quarters of the maize-producing area. Potential yield-limiting factors were evaluated in 2017 and included: water stress, nutrient deficiency, pest and disease pressure, and/or inter-plant competition. When considering all sites, improved fertilization and pest and disease control significantly improved yields in maize by 11 and 16%, respectively but did not have a significant effect in beans. Irrigation had no effect due to good rainfall distribution over the growing season. Optimized planting arrangement resulted in an average 18% increase in maize yield, making it the most promising factor evaluated. The treatment and site combinations that increased both crop productivity and net profit included management changes that improved resource use efficiency. However, the contribution of each limiting factor to yield gaps varied across sites and no treatment was effective at increasing yield consistently across sites. Production constraints are highly dependent on local management practices and agroecological location. Therefore, public and private development efforts that seek to increase production should conduct multi-year, participatory experiments to identify limitations pertinent to the area in question. The next step is then to evaluate sustainable and profitable practices, to address those limitations and provide sound recommendations to farmers while decreasing the environmental and economic costs.

Why do citizens elect political actors who have perpetrated violence against the civilian population? Despite their use of atrocities, political parties with deep roots in the belligerent organizations of the past win postwar democratic elections in countries around the world. This article uses new, cross-national data on postwar elections globally between 1970 and 2010, as well as voting, survey, archival, and interview data from El Salvador. It finds that belligerents’ varied electoral success after wars can be explained not by their wartime levels of violence or use of electoral coercion, but by the distribution of military power at the end of conflict. It argues that militarily stronger belligerents are able to claim credit for peace, which translates into a reputation for competence on the provision of security. This enables them to own the security valence issue, which tends to crosscut cleavages, and to appeal to swing voters. The stronger belligerents’ provision of security serves to offset and justify their use of atrocities, rendering their election rational. This article sheds light on political life after episodes of violence. It also contributes to understanding security voting and offers insights into why people vote in seemingly counterintuitive ways.

El Salvador’s FMLN is an oft-cited example of a rebel movement which successfully embraced electoral democracy. This article examines the ideological dimensions of this transformation. In the course of the Salvadoran peace process, the FMLN substantially overhauled its ideological orientation and associated modes of engagement with the state and the broader political system. Moderation unfolded in four subsequent stages: the resignification of revolution as a process of reform, the FMLN’s rebel-to-party adaptation, the electoral consolidation of the FMLN, and the FMLN as the party in government. Over the years, while electoral politics invited public moderation, Leninist dogma continued to dominate internal party politics. This article finds that the post-war FMLN has employed seemingly contradictory ideological repertoires in parallel. This ambivalence, strongly rooted in the war, has facilitated the FMLN’s electoral ascendency. It has also strained democratic consolidation in El Salvador.

The world is rapidly urbanizing, and so is internal displacement. However, knowledge about the specific situation of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in urban settings and how it differs from, and impacts on, their host communities is still limited, and responses continue to be inadequate. This article analyzes the particular needs of urban IDPs by taking into account how the various contexts and patterns of urban internal displacement contribute to shaping people's experience. It discusses three key challenges that humanitarian actors are faced with in developing effective responses: identifying and reaching IDPs in urban settings, addressing their urgent protection concerns, and supporting their local integration. It concludes by pointing out the need for methodological and operational guidance on how to bring together area-based approaches that account for the impact of displacement on entire urban communities, and tailored approaches addressing IDPs’ specific needs in urban settings. The need for stocktaking exercises and more effective sharing of experiences among practitioners, municipal authorities and policy-makers is also underlined.

The Classic Maya village of Joya de Cerén is extraordinary in that it was preserved by volcanic ash following the Loma Caldera volcanic eruption. The excellent preservation conditions offer a unique opportunity to understand plants in their primary use contexts, and to examine geospatial relationships between plants—both living and curated—in gardens, fields and households. The geospatial analysis of ‘plantscapes’ at Cerén presented here provides a template for interpreting botanical resource use and management at other contemporaneous Maya sites, and can contribute to a broader understanding of the use of space, plants and agriculture in the past.

Eruption of central El Salvador's Ilopango Volcano early in the first millennium A.D. caused death, cultural devastation, and exodus of southern Mesoamericans. It also left a time-stratigraphic marker in western El Salvador and adjacent Guatemala—the Ilopango Tierra Blanca Joven, or TBJ tephra. Mineral suites and major element abundances identify a silicic volcanic ash in cores from Lago de Yojoa, Honduras, as Ilopango TBJ. This extends its reported range more than 150 km to the northeast. Analyses of glass from the TBJ tephra from the Chalchuapa archaeological site, El Salvador, and from Lago de Yojoa, Honduras, establish the first major element reference fingerprint for the TBJ tephra. The Lago de Yojoa cores also hold two previously undated trachyandesitic tephra layers originating from the nearby Lake Yojoa Volcanic Field. One fell shortly before 11,000 14C yr B.P. and the other about 8600 14C yr B.P.