Generational units as political agents in the Salvadoran political transition

Abstract

Processes of political change provide an ideal setting for observing the relationships between the agents driving change and the structures they seek to transform. Furthermore, when such processes are led by political organizations composed primarily of young people—who have developed their own interpretive framework to make sense of the objective world shaped by previous generations—a generational approach is also particularly useful for understanding the dynamics at play in these processes. This work offers an interpretation of the political regime change in El Salvador that took place between 1980 and 1992. However, the political-military organizations that drove this change began to emerge as generational units as early as 1970. Shaped by socioeconomic, technological, political-legal, and ideological factors, these units were formed within the very process of political transformation. The organizational forms they adopted, the collective identities they constructed, the goals they pursued, and the strategies they deemed appropriate emerged within that same process through interaction with other social and political actors. Twenty-two years later, the generational units succeeded in transforming the country’s political structure, though not in the way they had initially hoped. Moreover, they themselves and other actors were transformed in the process. A double interplay between agency and structure had taken place. Applying a generational approach, which aims to integrate both agency and structural transformation, poses a significant challenge. Talking about generations is not simply talking about cohorts or age groups. Nor does talking about agency-structure have a single meaning. In both cases, a theoretical-conceptual clarification is required beforehand.