Civilian killings and disappearances during civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992)

Debate over the civilian toll of El Salvador's civil war (1980-1992) raged throughout the conflict and its aftermath. Apologists for the Salvadoran regime claimed no more than 20,000 had died, while some activists placed the toll at 100,000 or more. But no rigorous estimate was available to set...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Demographic research 2019-07, Vol.41, p.781-814
Main Authors: Green, Amelia Hoover, Ball, Patrick
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activism
Activists
Aftermath
Amnesties
Analysis
Assassinations & assassination attempts
Bayesian analysis
Civil war
Civilians
Cold War
Conflict
El Salvador
Estimates
Fatalities
Graphical models
Liberation theology
Massacres
Mathematical models
Mortality
Peace negotiations
Political activism
Population density
Prominence
Prosecutions
Reforms
Research Article
Time
Transitional justice
Uncertainty
Violence
War
War and society
War crimes
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Summary:Debate over the civilian toll of El Salvador's civil war (1980-1992) raged throughout the conflict and its aftermath. Apologists for the Salvadoran regime claimed no more than 20,000 had died, while some activists placed the toll at 100,000 or more. But no rigorous estimate was available to settle the question, which has returned to prominence because of newly opened war-crimes trials. Estimate the total number of civilian killings and disappearances in El Salvador during 1980-1992. We match and merge four lists of reported civilian killings and disappearances, gathered by multiple organizations--approximately 20,000 unique episodes in all. We use log-linear modeling to estimate the number of uncounted cases from patterns of list overlap. To account for uncertainty in model selection, we use Bayesian model averaging over the set of decomposable graphical models. We estimate that there were about 71,629 (60,326, 83,775) civilian killings and disappearances during the conflict, or about 1-2% of El Salvador's prewar population. Correlations between recorded deaths and estimated deaths are imperfect over both time and space. Unusually, our conservative global estimate is similar to nonstatistical 'expert guesses.' However, the estimated distribution of civilian killings and disappearances does not closely track the reported distribution over time or space. Our approach achieves high quality estimates, even in the presence of relatively sparse data.
ISSN:1435-9871
2363-7064
1435-9871
DOI:10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27