ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the impacts that the Salvadoran civil war and immediate post-war reconstruction had on cultural resources, challenges to fieldwork, and efforts at crafting policies within the first few years after the end of the war. The challenges during the first couple of years of peacetime in El Salvador focused on what many saw as the basics: rebuilding infrastructure such as roads, making literacy and public education in general more available and effective. They also include fostering short- and long-term growth in the economy, and creating a responsive and representative political system. El Salvador ranks as one of the most violent countries in the world. The hope and restraint that the first flush of peace inspired was not enough to prevent the growth of networks of violent gangs as well as less organized, and therefore unpredictable, acts of assault, rape, and murder.
