Burial rights

Even grief is contested in postwar Central America. Review: Specters of War: The Battle of Mourning in Postconflict Central America, Ignacio Sarmiento, by Gavin O'Toole

Specters of War: The Battle of Mourning in Postconflict Central America, Ignacio Sarmiento, 2025, University of Arizona Press

On 16 March 1988 Michael Stone entered Milltown Cemetery in Belfast during a large republican funeral and threw hand grenades at those burying their dead.

It was a merciless attack in keeping with the bloody sectarian divisions cleaving the north of Ireland: Stone was a Protestant paramilitary, his victims Catholics burying three IRA volunteers.

Broadcast across the world on live television as Stone ran though the cemetery shooting, the Milltown massacre became emblematic of the deep internecine hatred that characterised the long “Troubles” in this windswept corner of Europe.

But it was also a perfect example of an overlooked aspect of all civil conflicts that has important social consequences: the battle over mourning.

The Irish are more familiar than most with the symbolic role of mourning, how collective grief can be an act of resistance, and how in turn funerals have so often been controlled, limited, and even banned by the state.

As Ignacio Sarmiento notes in his groundbreaking study of this phenomenon in Central America—also a small region, if traumatised by violence on a far greater scale—mourning is always political.

The civil wars in El Salvador (1980–92) and Guatemala (1960–96) together claimed the lives of 300,000 people and millions were victims of forced displacement and crimes of violence.

Moreover, the overwhelming experience of loss that still haunts these postwar societies is exacerbated by the brazen impunity enjoyed by perpetrators of atrocities, and the state’s indifference to achieving even minimal justice for victims.

Despite recommendations made by the truth commissions, neither El Salvador nor Guatemala has an official state-sponsored memory museum or memorial as can be found in other Latin American countries such as Chile and Argentina.

Relatively little has been done to remember victims of the appalling armed conflicts in these countries, and postwar administrations have expressed striking disinterest in doing so.

For example, it was only in 2009, 13 years after the signing of the peace accords, that the Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom apologised in the name of the state for crimes committed during the civil war.

Sarmiento writes: “It is evident that the Central American states have little interest in maintaining an open work of mourning for the victims of the civil wars. The successive postwar administrations have opted to ignore the sorrow of the dead’s relatives to privilege an accelerated closure regardless of the corpses’ fate, often ignored, and the impunity for war crimes.”

Sarmiento argues that a battle is underway between different communities in post-conflict El Salvador and Guatemala—from victims of the violence to the national armies, guerrillas, elites, and postwar administrations—over the possibility of mourning in the public sphere.

The main struggles in this battle concern who can be grieved, how that mourning takes place, and who is invited to participate in it—importantly, some efforts at public mourning, particularly those for the victims of the civil wars themselves, confront powerful forces aiming to stop them.

As Sarmiento points out, while we assume mourning to be a private, personal practice, it is in fact something that has always been strictly regulated through conventions often enshrined in law that dictate not only how we mourn, but who is worthy of mourning.

Indeed, we see this everywhere: thus, much is made in the corporate media of the Israeli victims of Palestinian violence, yet little of the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians who have become victims of Israeli barbarity.

This confirms that mourning—at least in public—is so often a political act, something recognised in a lengthy bibliography in political history as a foundational element of modern republics.

In his classic 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?”, Ernest Renan argued with great insight that collective mourning was a crucial aspect in the creation of new national identities.

Perhaps the most celebrated example of this was again from Ireland, when the 1915 funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was transformed into a rallying cry that would initiate the momentum leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916.

Sarmiento notes that mourning is particularly important in post-traumatic societies, but that this topic has yet to be explored in detail in postwar Central America—a significant oversight given the sub-region’s unique experience and scale of suffering.

He considers the discussion of mourning in psychoanalytical theory, and favours the perspective of Jacques Derrida, whose focus was on mourning for those who died as a consequence of injustice, political violence and other forms of oppression.

Derrida suggested mourning represented a public act of truth seeking and emphasised the importance of exorcising the ghosts around us, probably the ultimate goal of grieving those lost to violence.

Specters of War pays attention to these expressions of mourning that emphasise a demand for truth and justice, and hence to the forces that aim to prevent this—a fact that, perhaps, explains the sense of melancholia in these societies, where a sizeable proportion of the population are mired in an unfinishable grieving process that they cannot complete.

Using a range of sources, from museums to theatre and literary works, the author aims to tease out not only how people grieve but also the “visible and invisible forces that aim to prevent or defer the mourning process of others”.

He finds evidence of conflicting ideas about who should be mourned and how by comparing different memorials and museums dedicated to the violence built since the late 1990s.

These monuments suggest that the ghosts of the civil wars are a constant threat to the status quo imposed upon the peoples of postwar El Salvador and Guatemala where, as a result, mourning has always been at risk of being coopted by the powers that be.

In El Salvador, for example, after the peace deal both the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) tried to limit expressions of grief only to the former combat groups as a means to promote a process of “national reconciliation”.

Sarmiento considers key sites of memory in both Guatemala (such as the Casa de la Memoria Kaji Tulam and the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional) and El Salvador (the El Mozote memorial, Museo de la Revolución, Monumento a la Memoria y la Verdad, Museo de Historia Militar, Proyecto de Paz y Reconciliación, and Parque Escultórico a la Reconciliación).

He writes: “With considerable nuances in form, power, and visibility, various communities in postwar Central America have conducted a public work of mourning over the last three decades. This includes parties that have made significant efforts to impede the mourning of others, such as the national armies, the postwar governments, and even the guerrillas. All of them mourn. But the difference is in how they do it and who is invited to participate in the process.”

Perhaps the best example of this is explored by the author in the final chapter when, during the failed trial in Guatemala of Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide, a group of notables published a paid advertisement denouncing the process which, they claimed threatened to destabilise society.

The authors of this declaration claimed to be speaking in the name of Guatemala’s many mourners—the survivors and loved ones of the dead of the war—and to want justice and dignity for the victims of the internal conflict.

Yet, their intervention suggested, “conducting a trial against someone who is responsible for the death of thousands of people during the internal conflict is not what mourners desire.”

Such efforts to manipulate mourning, Sarmiento implies, “are part of a systemic (and systematic) abuse of power that has successfully impeded any form of justice, memory, mourning, and real reparation for the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Central American conflicts.”

Other examples have come under the current president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who has dramatically intervened in the memory process by opting for silence and, in some cases, the destruction of memorial projects in an effort to draw a line under the past for his own political purposes.

The battle over mourning, it appears, goes on, as inconclusive as the civil wars of Central America themselves.

As Sarmiento concludes: “If there is a battle over the work of mourning, this is not because people do not want to grieve their dead but rather because there are powerful forces heavily invested in impeding them from doing so. And they might be winning.”

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