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Tommie Sue Montgomery. REVOLUTION IN EL SALVADOR: FROM CIVIL STRIFE TO CIVIL PEACE (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. 344 pp.
The reasons that the second edition of Revolution in El Salvador makes an important contribution to the academic and popular literature are very different than those which justified the first edition. In 1982, when the first edition was published, El Salvador was rapidly descending into a seemingly bottomless pit of political chaos, economic desperation, and bloodshed. The Reagan administration had placed the country high on its foreign policy agenda and was investing substantial political and financial capital in its efforts to defeat the rebel force, which the administration saw as a surrogate of its Cold War adversaries. In the United States, the civil war in El Salvador was front-page news, and hordes of journalists, academics, and other "conflict junkies" crowded the hotel bars in San Salvador trading the latest rumors. Montgomery's first edition supplied them - along with policymakers and readers, both general and academic, in the United States - with a clear, concise description of the historical roots, socio-economic context, and evolution of the escalating conflict in this previously obscure Central American country.
In 1995, when the second edition was published, the situation had changed dramatically. After 11 years of fighting which had resulted in almost 80,000 deaths, more than a million people displaced, a seriously wounded economy, and inestimable other hardships, the civil war had ended in a stalemate, and Salvadoreans were attempting the arduous transition, as Montgomery's new subtitle describes it, "from civil strife to civil peace." Most of the journalists and academics (regrettably including this reviewer) moved on to other hot spots, and US officials and the public have all but forgotten about the nasty little proxy war fought in El Salvador. It is axiomatic in US journalism that, if a dam bursts someplace in Latin America, causing hundreds of deaths, it is considered as news; however, if a dam is built to supply electrical power and water for irrigation, thereby improving the economic lot of the country's people, it is not news. In...