Regenerating conflicted landscapes in post-war El Salvador: livelihoods, land policy, and land use change in the Cinquera Forest (original) (raw)
Related papers
This paper charts events that transpired in the spaces between the larger forces that shaped El Salvador's transition from war to peace throughout the 1990s to the present day and tells the story of one place with entwined histories of forests growth, new land rights that were born of peace, and livelihoods being imagined and crafted from both. Over the six years following the signing of the peace Accords in 1992, ten percent of the nation's agricultural land (totaling over 103,300 hectares) was transferred to ex-combatants of both sides and to civilian supporters of the FMLN, through the Accord-mandated Land Transfer Program. By the year 2000, more than 36,000 people had received land through the PTT and an additional program had been created to parcelize and individually title all PTT lands that were formerly deeded collectively. While leaders of both the FMLN and the government set out to influence the post-war social and political landscape and the donor community generated post-war reconstruction projects, a group of ex-combatants, refugees, and displaced returning to the community of Cinquera, department of Cabañas, proceeded to take the land deeded to them as part of the Peace Accords. They subsequently transformed its use and value in ways never foreseen or intended by government land reform officials, FMLN party organizers, or international aid donors. In the process of linking their history to their future, the people of Cinquera created spaces of habitation for themselves and the natural world. To us, they offer a lesson in how a small community's continued struggle to live out their intentions for an alternative society, act by act, may in the end prove the best possible way to negotiate a revolution. Cet article interroge les forces en Salvador de la guerre dans les années 1990 à la paix de nos jours. Il raconte aussi l'histoire d'un lieu, avec des histoires entrelacées de la croissance des forêts, des droits fonciers qui sont nés de la paix, et la façon dont les moyens de vie sont imaginées et façonné à partir de ces forces. Au cours des six années qui ont suivi la signature des accords de paix en 1992, dix pour cent des terres agricoles du pays (totalisant plus de 103,300 hectares) a été transféré aux ex-combattants des deux parties et de partisans civils du FMLN (programme PTT). En l'an 2000, plus de 36,000 personnes avaient reçu des terres à travers le PTT et un programme supplémentaire a été créé pour allouer et de fournir les titres de propriété de toutes les terres qui étaient anciennement PTT sous le régime foncier communal. Les dirigeants du FMLN et le gouvernement a fixé pour influencer le paysage d'après-guerre sociale et politique, et les donateurs internationaux ont appuyé des projets de reconstruction d'après-guerre. Dans le même temps, un groupe d'ex-combattants, des réfugiés et des personnes déplacées retournent dans la collectivité de Cinquera, département de Cabañas. Ils ont pris la terre cédée à eux dans le cadre des Accords de paix. Ils ont ensuite transformé son usage et la valeur d'une façon jamais prévu par les responsables gouvernementaux de réforme agraire, par le FMLN, ou par les bailleurs de fonds internationaux. Les habitants de Cinquera créé des «espaces d'habitation» pour eux-mêmes et pour le monde naturel. Ils offrent une leçon sur la poursuite de la lutte d'une petite collectivité de vivre une société alternative, acte par acte. Il peut en fin de compte se révéler la meilleure façon possible de négocier une révolution. Este artículo ofrece un seguimiento de eventos que tuvieron lugar en los espacios entre las fuerzas más importantes que dieron forma a la transición en El Salvador de la guerra a la paz desde la década de los 90 hasta hoy en día y cuenta la historia de un lugar con historias entrelazadas de crecimiento forestal y nuevos derechos de propiedad de la tierra nacidos de la paz y del sustento imaginado y conseguido como resultado de ambos. En los seis años que siguieron a la firma de los Acuerdos de paz de 1992, se transfirió a excombatientes de ambos bandos y a civiles que apoyaban al FMLN el 10% de la tierra cultivable del país (un total de más de 103.300 hectáreas), a través del Programa de Transferencia de la Tierra (PTT) parte de los Acuerdos. Para el año 2000, más de 36000 personas habían recibido tierras gracias al PTT y se había creado otro programa adicional para parcelar y dar en títulos individuales tierras anteriormente escrituradas colectivamente. Si bien líderes tanto del FMLN como del gobierno trataron de influir en el panorama social y político de la postguerra y la comunidad de donantes generó una serie de proyectos, un grupo de excombatientes, refugiados y desplazados que retornaron a la comunidad de Cinquera, departamento de Cabañas, procedieron a tomar posesión de las tierras que les fueron escrituradas como parte de los Acuerdos de paz, transformando de tal manera su valor y su uso hasta un extremo nunca previsto por los funcionarios encargados de la reforma de la tierra, los cuadros del FMLN o los donantes internacionales. En el proceso de enlazar su historia y su futuro, la gente de Cinquera creó espacios de habitación para ellos mismos y el mundo natural. Para nosotros, esto ofrece una lección de cómo la lucha continuada de una pequeña comunidad por hacer realidad sus deseos de una sociedad alternativa, paso a paso, puede llegar a ser en definitiva la mejor forma de negociar una revolución.
This dissertation traces the history, process, and outcomes of the Programa de Transferencia de Tierras (PTT) in El Salvador, the post-war land transfer initiative that brought together Government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and numerous international aid agencies to implement a state-market hybrid land reform in the wake of a twelve-year civil war. The PTT evidenced an approach to land transfer that has become standard practice globally, emphasizing agriculture as the chief path to reinsertion, and thus to peace, in post-conflict situations, and conducting land transactions and post-transfer assistance largely through market-mechanisms. A qualitative instrumental case study was used, focusing on the social dynamics of land transfer and parcelization, livelihood construction, and governance of ecologically sensitive resources by returned refugees and ex-combatants in El Salvador. Results suggest that the 'developmentalist' project of land...
Globalization and forest resurgence: changes in forest cover in El Salvador
BioScience, 2007
Globalization is often associated with deforestation, but its impacts on forest recovery are less known. We analyzed socioeconomic data, land-use surveys, and satellite imagery to monitor changes in woody cover in El Salvador from the early 1990s to the present. Even where rural population density exceeded 250 people per square kilometer, we documented a 22% increase in the area with more than 30% tree cover, and a 7% increase in the area with more than 60% tree cover. Woodland resurgence reflected processes including civil war, retraction of the agricultural frontier, and international migration and associated remittances. Agrarian reform, structural adjustment, and emerging environmental ideas also played a role in woodland dynamics. Remittances may be especially important for woodland recovery in El Salvador, enabling people in rural areas to buy food without all of them needing to grow and sell it. This study adds to our understanding of the complexity of land-use change in emerging globalized economies and of potential conservation approaches for inhabited landscapes.
Globalization, Forest Resurgence, and Environmental Politics in El Salvador
World Development, 2006
Globalization is often viewed as a driver of deforestation, but there are contexts where it promotes forest recovery. This is the case in El Salvador. In spite of population densities in excess of 200 people per km 2 , the country, which has been seen as a Malthusian parable of population and ecological catastrophe, is now increasingly wooded. This reflects the impacts of globalization (new flows of labor, capital, commodities, and ideas) which profoundly affected the rural economy, as well as local processes such as civil war (which constrained the agricultural frontier), structural adjustment policies, and agrarian reform.
Forest dynamics in the Latin American tropics now take directions that no one would have predicted a decade ago. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped by over 80 percent, a pattern mimicked elsewhere in Amazonia, and is down by more than a third in Central America. Forest resurgenceincreasing forest cover in inhabited landscapes or abandoned landsis also expanding. In Latin America, woodland cover is increasing, at least for now, more than it is being lost. These dramatic shifts suggest quite profound and rapid transformations of agrarian worlds, and imply that previous models of understanding small-farmer dynamics merit significant review centering less on field agriculture and more on emergent forest regimes, and in many ways a new, increasingly globalized economic and policy landscape that emphasizes woodlands. This paper analyzes changing deforestation drivers and the implications of forest recovery and wooded landscapes emerging through social pressure, social policy, new government agencies, governance, institutions, ideologies, markets, migration and 'neo-liberalization' of nature. These changes include an expanded, but still constrained, arena for new social movements and civil society. These point to significant structural changes, changes in tropical natures, and require reframing of the 'peasant question' and the functions of rurality in the twenty-first century in light of forest dynamics.
Loss of ecosystem services and the decapitalization of nature in El Salvador
Ecosystem Services, 2016
Land use change can reduce the wealth and wellbeing of a nation by modifying its biodiversity. We used value transfer methodology to estimate changes in the value of ecosystem services provided by natural ecosystems in El Salvador, a country particularly impacted by natural disasters. Ecosystem services (1998-2011) provided annually only by natural ecosystems declined by 2.6%, and are equal to 44% of El Salvador's GDP in 2011. Changes in services provided by tropical forests account for 90% of those losses, followed by 9% for coastal wetlands. However, sensitivity analysis of changes per biome revealed that changes for coastal wetlands are much more elastic than for tropical forests, emphasizing the severity that further losses in coastal wetlands may incur. Forests reduce soil erosion and landslides while coastal wetlands reduce hurricane damages. Focusing conservation efforts towards these ecosystems could reduce the occurrence of natural disasters, but their services should be complemented by those generated in the agricultural matrix during forest and mangrove resurgence.
Becoming-forest, becoming-local: transformations of a protected area in Honduras
Geoforum, 2005
Neotropical cloud forests have been locked away in protected areas that conservationists seek to fashion into spaces exclusively for “Nature,” but they often cannot do so because of the pressure of migrant agriculture, among other factors. The author documents the case of a protected area in Honduras that, while it fails to evolve into an idealized “conservation space,” nevertheless undergoes transformations until it becomes accepted by local actors as a space that provides protection for marginalized groups under threat from a hydroelectric project that seeks to dislodge them. A Deleuzian theoretical approach loosely drawing from complexity theory is utilized to explain the process whereby diverse and conflicting land-use spatialities come to embrace an alien and imposed national park and in the process ally with each other against a perceived greater threat from the outside. The author shows the transformative potentials of protected areas as allies, rather than enemies, of spatial justice movements currently confronting the challenges of “regional economic integration” initiatives such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
Community Forest Appropriation in the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca in the Face of Forest Policies
Textual, 2020
C ommunity appropriation of forest resources in the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca was the result of disputes and various conflicts of interest. This paper describes the process of agrarian communities in the appropriation of forest resource management. The analysis model was based on the following inflection points: the granting of forest concessions, their abrogation driven by the community movement, and local management of forest resources. The proposed analytical models identified the following concepts: utilitarian, conservationist, multiple-use forestry and sustainable forest management, through the application of forest policy.
Social mobilization plays a major role in nature appropriation strategies. Current forest policy debates seem to bring about a contentious dispute over social core values, i.e., a rational utility-maximizing agent at odds with an emancipated subject more in line with collective action, reciprocity and giving. Most policy frameworks, however, tend to be devised with the aim of administering forest resources under the assumption that rational choice and utility-driven subjects will abide by the market workings vis-à-vis global needs for raw materials or ecosystem services. These policies seldom factor in local efforts carried out by rural communities whose imaginaries hinge on a sense of belonging. This paper departs from field-based work undertaken over the period 2014-2017 in three sites in Guatemala, namely: (i) Ciudad Peronia, where a local community managed to bring about a transfer of land rights from the Army of Guatemala to the National Council of Protected Areas in order to establish a nature reserve; (ii) Tacaná, where small-scale farmers promote agroecology and spread a land ethic in the region; and (iii) the organized resistance along the southern coast, where sugar-cane, banana and oil palm land lords bring about negative externalities by tampering with Madre Vieja River for irrigation purposes. All three sites were analyzed by conducting in-depth interviews. Forest-related issues popped out in all cases, namely: (i) by preserving forest species in the newly created nature reserve; (ii) by differentiated fuel wood consumption levels and a deeply sense of connection with the (forest) land in Tacaná; and (iii) by a forest-restoration argument as one of the main tenets of local efforts to halt river manipulation along the southern coast. This analysis shows the emerging theoretical insights in line with the need for a social contract and a solidarity-based economy exemplified by the ethically grounded drivers behind local advocacy efforts.