Settler Salvador: Hector M. Callejas, ‘Remembering Indigenous Genocide Indigenous Land Rights Advocacy and the Settler State in El Salvador’, Latin American Perspectives, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler Salvador: Hector M. Callejas, ‘Remembering Indigenous Genocide Indigenous Land Rights Advocacy and the Settler State in El Salvador’, Latin American Perspectives, 2025

02Dec25

Abstract: Indigenous movements in Latin America advocate for the collective rights of Indigenous communities to land, territory, and natural resources. This article shows how the production and mobilization of Indigenous genocide memory during the 2010s revealed the limits of Indigenous land rights advocacy in El Salvador. Since the late 19^th century, settler state authorities have facilitated Indigenous dispossession for the development of agro-extractivism across the national territory. In recent decades, the Salvadoran Indigenous movement has reframed a peasant massacre in 1932 as an Indigenous genocide to demand state reparations for Indigenous landlessness. In 2019, the Jaguar Sonriente network organized a commemoration and court case on the genocide to explore the possibilities for reparations within the national judicial system. The still-pending case status foregrounds the inefficacy of using rights-based discourses to challenge the state formation of Indigenous dispossession in El Salvador and beyond.

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