Erik Ching, Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), pp. xiv + 345, $32.00, pb.
recognise, in a context where the claims of universal social justice and land reform have lost their appeal, invented or at least newly fashioned identities, and the rough justice they promise, offer as good a chance as the disinherited can hope for. Thus we see in Colombia that an apparatus of recognition has been developed by the state in the wake of its liberal  Constitution and the decisions of a liberal Constitutional Court – worthy of a country of whose  Constitution Victor Hugo is reputed to have said that it was made for angels but not for men. But the path to recognition is through hurdle after hurdle of patronage politics. The occupants of the special Congressional seats reserved for ‘black communities’ had ‘shady ties to illegal groups’ and, in the eyes of activists, did not ‘look particularly black’ (p. ). Paschel shows that the creation of racial quotas in Brazil’s public universities was achieved through much bureaucratic and some street politics, with strong international NGO backing and, crucially, unanimous support from the Supreme Court. Indeed in both Brazil and Colombia she observes the ritualised character of the process whereby black social movement organisations are absorbed into the state bureaucracy. Movement leaders went in and out of public office, and events with a ‘civil society’ complexion were openly funded by the state. On account of their limited resources and narrow public support, the movements were ‘not exactly poster children of an effective movement’ (p. ). And, as she notes, the quota system for blacks in public universities which eventually emerged in Brazil was a compromise: the law as passed in , which generously sets aside half of the places in public federal universities, allocates them according to mixed racial and socio-economic criteria. Interviewbased research on why, after so much polemics, it was approved unanimously by the Senate would make very interesting reading. In the end Paschel seems to resist the full implications of her analysis: she does not recognise the possibility that in Latin American political culture dissidence is dealt with in a different way from in the United States, sometimes by repression, of course, but also and often at the same time by co-optation into a longstanding corporatist state. It may not be very heroic, but it does dampen the bitterness which still, decades after the epic struggles for civil rights, infects the US body politic. This indifference to the distinctive features of Latin American states may explain the author’s dismissive response to the arguments against quotas which raged among the Brazilian intelligentsia in the first decade of the century. Those arguments were derived from a liberal democratic or social democratic ethos which is inimical to Brazilian or Colombian corporatism, but she has little time for them, so that the serious questions of political philosophy which arise, especially those which reject the identification of the politics of recognitionwith the politics of social justice, do not receivemuch attention. Maybe now shewill turn her discerning eye to those normative issues, which have received such cursory treatment from students of these themes in Latin America.