Indignant Liberalism: Political Protest and Generational Change in El Salvador

Documenting the rise and disillusionment of El Salvador’s postwar activists in the face of populist authoritarian politics. The conclusion of El Salvador’s long civil war, in 1992, was supposed to bring about equality and political freedom.Leftist insurgents laid down arms, and the government formally embraced liberal ideals.Yet today, El Salvador is ruled by an authoritarian president who came to power via unconstitutional means.What went wrong? Anthropologist and journalist 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.Yet the “post-postwar” generation is only the latest demographic disappointed with liberalism in practice.Their revolutionary predecessors responded to a twentieth-century “racial liberalism” that saw descendants of colonists “civilizing” Indigenous people while dispossessing them of lands and mobilizing them fo