From Exodus to Exitus Causes of post-war violence in El Salvador PRIF Reports No. 80

in El Salvador came to an end, having claimed 75,000 victims. While the peace making is documented as a model case, the subsequent peace building proved to be far from quite so exemplary. It brought a variety of ambivalent factors to light. The most crucial of these was the fact that although a stable, concurrent period of peace (i.e. absence of war) has been achieved in El Salvador, the same cannot be said of any civilized life for its citizens (in the sense of a fundamental freedom from violence). On the contrary, El Salvador cur-rently has the highest levels of violence in Latin America. Moreover, the present violence is almost exclusively criminal in nature, rather than still political. The aim of this report is to explain why post-war levels of violence in El Salvador have remained so high to date, and the highest in Central America, despite the fact that socio-economic and political indicators are really positive, more positive than in any other country in Central America, with the exception of Costa Rica, and including even Nicara-gua, which has very much lower levels of violence than El Salvador. Any investigation of this must look for factors which have just as pronounced an effect as violence, so that a correlation between them and high levels of violence can be established, and causalit