Solidarity Under Siege The Salvadoran Labor Movement, 1970–1990

El Salvador's long civil war had its origins in the state repression against one of the most militant labor movements in Latin American history. Solidarity under Siege vividly documents the port workers and shrimp fishermen who struggled yet prospered under extremely adverse conditions during the 1970s only to suffer discord, deprivation and, eventually, the demise of their industry and unions over the following decades. Featuring material uncovered in previously inaccessible union and court archives and extensive interviews conducted with former plant workers and fishermen in Puerto el Triunfo and in Los Angeles, Jeffrey L. Gould presents the history of the labor movement before and during the country's civil war, its key activists, and its victims into sharp relief, shedding new and valuable light on the relationships between rank and file labor movements and the organized left in twentieth-century Latin and Central America.

Introduction: an arc of triumph and despair; 1. Tired of the abuse: gender and the rise of the Sindicato de la Industria Pesquera, 1970–9; 2. The cost of solidarity: the Salvadoran labor movement in Puerto el Triunfo and greater San Salvador, 1979–80; 3. The last chance: the Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno and the impending civil war; 4. Labor conflicts in Puerto el Triunfo, El Salvador, 1985; 5. The far right and fraud; 6. Solidarity and discord in the labor movement, 1984–9; 7. The longest strike in history; Conclusion: tropical deindustrialization and its discontents; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

Jeffrey L. Gould is Distinguished Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979 (1990), To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880–1965 (1998), and with Aldo Santiago, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920–1932 (2008). He has also directed and codirected three documentary films, Port Triumph, which documents many of the events and people in Solidarity under Siege, La Palabra en el Bosque, and Scars of Memory: El Salvador, 1932.