J effrey L. G ould . Solidarity under Siege

Jeffrey L. Gould’s Solidarity under Siege: The Salvadoran Labor Movement, 1970–1990 is a fine-grained study of the working people at the heart of a little-known entrepreneurial success story in El Salvador when shrimp exports after 1960 came to generate one-third of the country’s export revenue and the port of El Triunfo swelled to over five thousand residents in 1970. This boom town proved an island of relative prosperity and peacefulness during the slide into an epic of popular insurgency, radical activism, and counterrevolutionary violence which saw eight thousand to eleven thousand civilians killed in 1980 alone (9). While facing arrests, raids, deaths, and threats, local unionists were spared large-scale killing because businesses and the military were making money while rebels and refugees used the port as a place of shelter and recuperation (21). “Among the more privileged in the country,” local workers were “politically conservative, sympathetic to management, and hostile...

Ancient history · Economic history · Political science · Politics · Prosperity · Refugee · Siege · Solidarity · Spanish Civil War · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies