Abstract

In many civil wars, insurgent organisations rely heavily on civilian communities while avoiding systematic violence against them. This article examines how a civilian- dependent insurgency built sustained capacity—understood as the ability to recruit, coordinate, govern, and persist—while limiting direct violence against civilians, in a war in which the vast majority of serious violations were committed by state forces and allied paramilitaries. Focusing on the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in Morazán and Chalatenango, it analyses how campesino cooperatives, liberation theology Christian base communities, and clandestine village communities structured mobilisation, organisation, and control under intense counterinsurgent repression and fragmented authority. Rather than treating identity, organisational incentives, and information as alternative explanations for restraint, the article develops a cumulative account in which each operates at a distinct analytical level: mobilization through shared identities provides the social foundations for participation; organisational incentives, typical of activist insurgencies in resource-poor contexts, shape recruitment, discipline, and investment in governance; and community-embedded information networks enable selective enforcement of violence. Within the Cold War context in which the FMLN emerged as a “robust insurgency” (Kalyvas & Balcells, 2010), the analysis shows why systematic predation by the insurgency would have been counterproductive and strategically self-defeating. This article contributes to debates on identity, insurgent organisation, and civilian protection by showing how political identities formed within local communities became sources of insurgent capacity and constraint, shaping both mobilisation and the character of violence.

Introduction

The Salvadoran civil war (1979–1992) grew out of extreme inequality and a closed political system in which reformist mobilisation was met with escalating repression, culminating in armed conflict between the Salvadoran state and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) (McClintock, 1998, pp. 41–56). The conflict is commonly associated with massacres, scorched-earth campaigns, and death-squad terror on the one hand, and, on the other, with campesino cooperatives and Christian base communities that sustained a long-term insurgency under the FMLN, even as these same communities became primary targets of state repression (McClintock, 1998, pp. 41–43; United Nations, 1993, p. 36). This article views the FMLN as the political and armed expression of an insurgent community in which many rural people redefined their class position, civic status, and sense of agency. Long treated as subordinated labourers and people excluded from political participation, these same rural people came to see themselves as collective actors and citizens with rights. This article analyses how campesino communities (rural peasant communities organised through cooperatives and Christian base communities) in El Salvador, especially in the insurgent strongholds of Morazán and Chalatenango, generated power for the FMLN. That power constrained direct insurgent violence against civilians, while the vast majority of violations during the war were perpetrated by state forces and allied paramilitaries (United Nations, 1993, p. 36; Wood, 2003, p. 15). As a result, the movement’s strength rested less on material resources, given the movement’s limited access to lootable assets, than on robust social endowments. As an activist insurgency in Weinstein’s sense (2007, p. 97), it relied on long-term cooperation rooted in community institutions while investing in governance rather than short-term predation (Wood, 2003, pp. 18, 193).

Methodology

The analysis combines close reading of secondary sources with a structured case study of Morazán and Chalatenango organised around the causal mechanism outlined above. These departments became core FMLN strongholds due to the combination of mountainous terrain and dense campesino organisation and are at the core of Wood’s village-level study (McClintock 1998; Wood 2003). The analysis draws on three main bodies of evidence, combining Wood’s detailed village-level material with McClintock’s broader comparative account of the conflict and the United Nations Truth Commission’s findings on patterns of civilian victimisation. Wood’s (2003) ethnography provides detailed accounts of how cooperatives, Christian base communities, and popular organisations redefined campesino identities and structured participation, information flows, and local governance (Wood, pp. 10–11, 14). McClintock’s (1998) comparative study offers data on regime type, repression, FMLN organisational strength, and patterns of political violence, including estimates of the movement’s relative military capacity and civilian support. The United Nations Truth Commission report provides systematic evidence on civilian victimisation, notably the finding that approximately 85% of documented serious human rights violations during the war were attributable to state forces and allied paramilitaries, with only a minority attributable to the FMLN (United Nations, 1993, p. 36). Because these figures reflect documented cases rather than all acts of wartime violence, they should be interpreted as an estimate of responsibility for major violations rather than a comprehensive record. The analysis is organised around a theoretical framework that integrates Kalyvas’s account of violence and territorial control (2006), Weinstein’s theory of activist insurgency (2007), Elisabeth Jean Wood’s work on insurgent mobilisation (2003), Reed Wood’s work on rebel capability and civilian victimisation (2010), and Valentino et al.’s theory of mass violence (2004).

The case study is structured around a common set of questions applied to each layer of the argument:

(a) How were campesino identities and community institutions transformed and linked to insurgent participation?
(b) How did FMLN recruitment, discipline, and governance practices reflect an activist insurgency reliant on social endowments?
(c) How did patterns of territorial control, information, and threat shape the use of violence against civilians?

These questions organise the empirical sections that follow. They guide the analysis of the cumulative causal mechanism within the single case of the Salvadoran civil war. The analysis traces the sequential causal pathway—from identity-based mobilisation through activist organisational incentives to community- embedded information networks—through which insurgent restraint was produced in this case. Mobilisation through shared campesino and Christian identities drew rural residents into insurgent participation. Recruitment through cooperatives, Christian base communities, and village organisations created incentives that tied FMLN survival to governance and discipline rather than predation. These same community networks structured information flows. They allowed the FMLN to exercise authority through selective enforcement rather than indiscriminate violence against civilians.

Context

Before the civil war, rural El Salvador was organised around large estates that combined economic exploitation with civic exclusion (McClintock, 1998, p. 98). The late nineteenth-century coffee boom expropriated communal land and cemented a highly unequal agrarian order, enforced by the army and allied security forces, including the National Guard and Democratic Nationalist Organisation (ORDEN) (McClintock, 1998, p. 98). The 1932 massacre, in which tens of thousands of rural people were killed following a peasant uprising, became a reference point in popular memory, reinforcing the expectation that collective challenge would be met with annihilation (McClintock, 1998, p. 103).

From the 1960s onwards, this context began to change. Progressive liberation theology Jesuits formed Christian base communities in which peasants read Scripture and were encouraged to see themselves as agents and subjects of history rather than passive recipients of charity (Wood, 2003, pp. 56–58). In parallel, peasant unions and federations demanded access to land and better wages, while agrarian reform programmes in the late 1970s created cooperatives that gave some rural workers formal control of land and collective decision-making (Wood, 2003, pp. 90–92). These community-led programmes provided practical training in assembly, leadership, and mutual obligation (Wood, 2003, 95–97).

At the same time, these developments occurred within a political system that remained closed and increasingly repressive. Military– oligarchic alliances dating back to the 1930s, fraudulent elections in the 1970s, and escalating repression under the military dictatorship of General Carlos Humberto Romero made clear that peaceful mobilisation would not translate into political power (McClintock, 1998, pp. 93–104). Violence against civilians intensified sharply in the late 1970s as security forces and allied paramilitaries targeted opposition groups, while massacres became more frequent with the onset of full- scale civil war after 1980 (McClintock, 1998, pp. 114–115). Subsequent investigations attributed the vast majority of serious human rights violations during the conflict to state forces and allied paramilitaries (United Nations, 1993, p. 36). When the FMLN was formally created in 1980 as a coalition of five insurgent organisations, many rural communities—particularly in Morazán and Chalatenango— already practised self-organisation, clandestine cooperation, and mutual defence and supplied recruits, local knowledge, and local networks to the insurgency (McClintock, 1998, p. 291; Wood, 2003, p. 193).

Taken together, this context yielded three features that anchor the subsequent analysis: dense networks of community organisations, such as cooperatives and Christian base communities (Wood, 2003, p. 193); a closed, violently exclusionary regime that made claims to citizenship rights dangerous for campesinos (McClintock, 1998, pp. 93–104); and a particularly strong insurgency dependent on civilian support (the FMLN) that drew its capacity and resilience from these community networks even as these communities became targets of counterinsurgent violence (United Nations, 1993, p. 36; McClintock 1998, p. 91).

Identity, Community, and Insurgent Power

This section examines how campesino and Christian identities were redefined within community organisations and how these redefinitions generated participation, collective action, and the social foundations of insurgent power.

In the Salvadoran civil war, identity mattered not as an abstract ideological label but as a set of contested, historically grounded understandings of class position and citizenship — whether rural people were subordinate labourers subject to elite authority or members of a political community entitled to participation and protection (McClintock 1998, p. 56; Wood 2003, pp. 51–54). Identity is treated here as socially embedded and relational: the meanings through which peasants, clergy, organisers, and combatants interpreted their social positions and collectively acted on those interpretations (Wood, 2003, pp. 54–56). Communities are organised networks—cooperatives, liberation theology Christian base communities, village committees, and insurgent structures—that institutionalised these understandings in everyday life and provided arenas for mobilisation, coordination, and governance (Wood, 2003, pp. 87–90). Power refers to the collective capacity generated within these communities to recruit, coordinate, govern, and survive under ongoing state repression (Wood, 2003, p. 193).

For Wood, participation in the insurgency and collective action are instances of campesinos actively remaking their identities and claiming political agency (Wood 2003, p. 193). Drawing on village-level accounts, Wood shows that mobilisation followed the reinterpretation of long-standing subordination as unjust, with insurgent involvement understood as a means of claiming dignity, agency, and political inclusion (Wood, 2003, pp. 193– 194). A similar interpretation appears in McClintock’s account of the insurgency. Militants emphasised authoritarian exclusion, class domination, and the closure of legal avenues for reform, and the FMLN’s project was framed in terms of democratic participation and social justice, while communities adopted deliberation, leadership, and collective decision-making in everyday practice (McClintock, 1998, p. 56; Wood, 2003, p. 193). These transformations were consequential because they enabled sustained cooperation with the FMLN without the latter resorting to systematic violence against civilians (Wood, 2003, pp. 194–195).

Motivation alone, however, cannot explain how authority is exercised or how violence is regulated within civilian populations. In this context, Kalyvas’s (2006) account of violence at the local level is essential. He shows that patterns of violence in civil war are shaped by the interplay of territorial control and information about civilian loyalties, rather than by ideology or strategy alone. In zones of fragmented or contested control—where neither incumbents nor insurgents exercise stable sovereignty—armed actors face acute informational uncertainty and rely heavily on civilian collaboration to identify supporters, defectors, and rivals (Kalyvas, 2006, pp. 173–175). Where insurgents are embedded in tightly knit local networks, this uncertainty can be partially mitigated: information flows, monitoring, and dispute resolution become feasible, allowing authority to be exercised through selective enforcement rather than indiscriminate coercion (Kalyvas, 2006, pp. 176–178). Kalyvas and Balcells (2010) place these dynamics within a broader Cold War configuration of “robust insurgency,” in which revolutionary networks linked urban activists, clergy, and students to rural bases. The same dynamics provided organisational templates and legitimating frames that sustained coordination across social spaces even amid contested territorial control (Kalyvas & Balcells, 2010, pp. 418– 420).

These informational dynamics intersect with organisational incentives, as defined by Weinstein’s distinction between activist and opportunistic insurgencies and by Reed Wood’s work on rebel capability and violence. Weinstein (2007) argues that resource-poor movements recruiting through dense social ties tend to attract high-commitment cadres and invest in governance and discipline rather than short-term extraction (Weinstein, 2007, p. 97). In the Salvadoran case, limited access to lootable resources and reliance on cooperatives, Christian base communities, and village networks as recruitment channels meant that the FMLN functioned as an activist insurgency: it depended on social endowments and long-term cooperation, discouraging opportunistic joiners and reinforcing a long-war view (Weinstein, 2007, p. 97; Wood, 2003, p. 193). Reed Wood (2010) extends this logic, showing that more institutionalised insurgents capable of providing security and basic services are systematically associated with lower levels of direct violence against civilians (Reed Wood, 2010, pp. 603–604). Recruitment mediated through community institutions thus served as a filter: it tied organisational survival to continued civilian cooperation, linked governance provision to legitimacy, and made systematic predation costly (Weinstein 2007, p. 97; Wood 2010, pp. 603–604).

Taken together, these strands specify a cumulative mechanism by which identity becomes insurgent capacity. At the motivational level, mobilisation through shared identities supplies the moral and social foundations of participation, making long-term cooperation feasible (Wood, 2003, p. 193). At the organisational level, incentives characteristic of activist insurgencies condition how that participation is incorporated into armed structures, thereby shaping discipline, recruitment, and investment in governance (Weinstein, 2007, p. 97; Wood, 2010, pp. 603–604). At the informational level, networks within local communities structure how authority is exercised on the ground, allowing selective regulation of behaviour and reducing reliance on indiscriminate violence in settings of contested control (Kalyvas, 2006, pp. 173–175). In this configuration, insurgent power depends on preserving the social relations through which it is exercised: systematic predation against civilians would undermine recruitment, disrupt information flows, and weaken capacity (Weinstein, 2007, p. 97; E.J. Wood, 2003, p. 193; R. Wood, 2010, pp. 603–604). Valentino et al.’s and Reed Wood’s work on strategic mass violence and capacity suggests that this configuration is particularly consequential when insurgents are powerful and dependent on civilian support, as is the case in El Salvador, because insurgent restraint towards that base remains a condition of their own strength (Valentino et al., 2004, pp. 384– 385; Wood, 2010, pp. 603–604).

Activist Insurgency in Practice: The FMLN

In FMLN strongholds in Morazán and Chalatenango, the mechanism operated as follows: at the motivational level, Wood’s (2003) interviews and village-level accounts show campesino participation framed as a rejection of subordination and an assertion of dignity and civic worth, with insurgent involvement understood as a claim to agency and political inclusion (Wood, 2003, pp. 193–194). At the organisational level, recruitment flowed through cooperatives, Christian base communities, and village networks, favouring participants embedded in long-term relationships and discouraging opportunistic joiners whose loyalty would be contingent on short-term benefits (Weinstein, 2007, p. 97; Wood, 2003, p. 193). These same community structures supported governance and dispute resolution, providing the institutional channels through which commanders coordinated labour, mediated conflicts, and enforced discipline (Wood, 2003, pp. 194–195).

Rebel capability and community governance formed the third component of this configuration. The FMLN’s ability to provide rudimentary courts, health and education services, and to regulate collective agricultural work supplied tangible benefits that anchored civilian cooperation in its zones of influence (Wood, 2010, pp. 603–604). These practices directly linked insurgent capacity to civilian well-being: the institutions through which power was exercised—assemblies, cooperative structures, Christian base communities—were the same ones that would be degraded by systematic predation, making abuse self- undermining in terms of capability (Wood, 2010, pp. 606–607). Governance and capacity were thus mutually reinforcing: providing order and basic services increased community dependence on and loyalty to the movement, while that dependence in turn widened the organisational costs of violence against civilians, a pattern consistent with findings that more institutionalised insurgents providing security and basic services tend to commit less direct violence against civilians (R. Wood 2010, pp. 603–604; Weinstein 2007, p. 97).

Kalyvas’s (2006) framework linking information and territorial control clarifies how these community ties shaped patterns of violence. He argues that in zones of fragmented or contested control, armed actors resort to indiscriminate violence when they lack information about loyalties, but rely on selective measures when embedded in local networks that provide reliable information and enforce sanctions (Kalyvas, 2006, pp. 173–175). In FMLN strongholds in Morazán and Chalatenango, commanders drew on cooperative leaders, catechists, and village committees to assess who was collaborating with the army, mediate conflicts, and distinguish coerced compliance from active collaboration (Wood, 2003, p. 193). These dense networks meant the FMLN did not face the same information scarcity that drives indiscriminate violence in Kalyvas’s (2006) model; instead, it operated in zones where selective, often limited sanctions— warnings, social ostracism, limited punishment—were viable (Kalyvas, 2006, pp. 176–178; Wood, 2003, pp. 193).

Importantly, insurgent and community identities overlapped. “Combatant” was not a separate identity from “campesino” or “Christian” but was layered onto them: many fighters came directly from cooperatives and Christian base communities and remained embedded in those communities (Wood, 2003, pp. 193–194). To target civilians indiscriminately would therefore have meant targeting the very people whose class grievances and citizenship claims the movement articulated, including members of liberation theology communities who framed their support as a Christian duty (McClintock, 1998, p. 56; Wood, 2003, p. 194). In Kalyvas’s (2006) terms, the FMLN used its informational advantage to manage collaboration and defection through practices embedded in community norms—governance, negotiation, and limited sanctions—rather than through widespread selective killing.

Patterns of violence align with this three-part mechanism. Available data indicate that the FMLN was responsible for only a minority of civilian deaths compared with state forces, with the UN Truth Commission attributing approximately 85% of documented serious human rights violations to state agents and allied paramilitaries (United Nations, 1993, p. 36; Wood, 2003, pp. 233–235). Valentino et al. (2004) argue that regimes confronting powerful insurgencies dependent on civilian support may resort to mass violence against suspected supporter populations. El Salvador fits this broader pattern: state forces and allied paramilitaries targeted rural communities that sustained the FMLN (United Nations, 1993, p. 36; Wood, 2003, pp. 233–235).

This section has suggested that the configuration identified by Wood (2003) helps explain why the FMLN remained relatively restrained towards its own civilian supporters. Operating under the kind of acute threat that Valentino et al. (2004) identify in their theory of strategic mass violence, the Salvadoran state directed large-scale violence against suspected supporter populations (Wood, 2003, p. 193; Valentino et al., 2004, pp. 383– 385).

Strategic Threat, Fragmented Control, and Civilian Risk

In El Salvador, although the FMLN emerged amid an acute strategic threat and highly fragmented territorial control, it was widely perceived as capable of taking power, particularly between 1979 and 1982 (McClintock, 1998). This possibility was ultimately foreclosed not by the collapse of insurgent support but by extensive U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran state, which shifted the balance of coercive capacity while leaving underlying socio-political grievances largely unaddressed (McClintock, 1998, pp. 8–9). The resulting asymmetry produced a conflict in which the state retained overwhelming firepower, while the insurgency remained embedded in rural communities (McClintock, 1998, p. 291).

The consequences for civilians were severe: providing food, shelter, information, or recruits exposed individuals and villages to massacres, disappearances, and displacement. This pattern of violence aligns with Valentino et al.’s “draining the sea” framework and Reed Wood’s capability–violence argument: a regime confronting an insurgency dependent on civilian support has incentives to target the communities from which that support is drawn, whereas an insurgency that relies on those same communities for recruitment, information, and governance has strong incentives not to use systematic violence against them (Valentino et al., 2004, pp. 383–385; Wood, 2010, pp. 603–604).

Crucially, as Wood (2003) emphasises, the persistence of civilian support for the FMLN did not rest on reliable protection from state violence; participation entailed extraordinary risk rather than safety (Wood, 2003, pp. 233–235). In Reed Wood’s terms, indiscriminate regime violence can lower the threshold of protection required to sustain civilian cooperation. Under pervasive repression, even limited improvements in local order, dispute resolution, and everyday security may sustain collaboration relative to the alternative of unmediated state violence (Wood, 2010, pp. 603–604). The strategic significance of this context is therefore twofold. First, it clarifies why regimes confronting powerful insurgencies dependent on local communities may resort to mass violence against civilians, as Valentino et al.’s (2004) macro-level theory suggests. Second, it shows that insurgent restraint, as in the FMLN case, is costly and contingent. Sustaining such restraint requires the incentives characteristic of activist insurgencies and governance organised through local communities, as outlined in the previous section.

Conclusion

The Salvadoran case shows how campesino and Christian identities, rooted in cooperatives, liberation-theology communities, and popular organisations, generated insurgent power without resorting to systematic violence against civilians, transforming rural people into actors who understood themselves as citizens with claims to dignity and agency.

The fact that approximately 85% of documented atrocities were attributed to state forces and allied paramilitaries, with only a minority attributed to the FMLN (United Nations, 1993, p. 36) provides a rough empirical test of the expectations developed here: in a war featuring a powerful, civilian-dependent insurgency, it was the threatened, low-legitimacy state—not insurgents embedded in community networks—that engaged in systematic mass violence against civilians. In debates on identity, communities, and power, the case suggests that identities rooted in participatory communities become sources of both organisational capacity and constraint, simultaneously enabling mobilisation and limiting the strategic resort to violence against civilians.

References

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Valentino, B., Huth, P. and Balch-Lindsay, D. (2004). “Draining the sea”: Mass killing and guerrilla warfare. International Organization, 58(2), 375–407.

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Wood, R.M. (2010). Rebel capability and strategic violence against civilians. Journal of Peace Research, 47(5), 601–614.