El Salvador: Between Revolution and War ended on 17 October 2016. For details of our current exhibitions, take a look at our what’s on page.
Mike Goldwater’s photographs of El Salvador, taken at the height of the country’s civil war in the 1980s, explore the dichotomy between revolutionary aspirations and the reality of waging war.
Gallery
A Salvadorean army unit advances on guerrilla positions in the capital's poor neighbourhood of Cuscatancingo, March 1982.
© Mike Goldwater
Maria Chichilco holding a portrait of herself as head of the civilian administration in guerrilla-controlled Chalatenango. August 2014.
© Mike Goldwater
Families displaced by army invasions into territory contested by the FMLN guerrillas take refuge at a temporary site in the small town of Berlin, March 1982.
© Mike Goldwater
Soldiers, who often take what they want without paying, examine watermelons at a street stall on the outskirts of San Miguel, March 1984.
© Mike Goldwater
Teresa de Jesus Serrano holding a portrait of herself aged 22 in 1984 with pictures of her four brothers and husband, who all died aged 22 during the war. Chalatenango, August 2014.
© Mike Goldwater
Two FPL guerrillas take rest by a village stream as a young woman, also in the FPL, rinses a pot of maize to prepare tortillas. Chalatenango, February 1984.
© Mike GoldwaterThe civil war in El Salvador, a small tropical country in Central America with a population then of five million, began in 1980 and ended twelve years later with the Chapultepec Peace Accords. By the end of the war more than 75,000 people had been killed and over one million displaced.
Three decades ago, at the height of the conflict, photographer Mike Goldwater and researcher Jenny Pearce travelled to Chalatenango, in the north of El Salvador, to record the history of the peasant movement in the region and the role of the rural poor in the Salvadorean revolution.
This exhibition showed the work Mike produced during that trip and other visits to El Salvador. His photographs track the tense relationship between revolutionary aspirations for a new El Salvador and the demands and misery of waging war.
The images from Chalatenango in the early 1980s recall the self-determination that the war was fought for and the role that many rural and urban Salvadoreans played in the struggle for a different kind of society. They were displayed alongside a selection of photographs taken in early 2014, when members of Chalatenango’s Museum of Historical Memory took an album of Mike’s photos to the villages of Eastern Chalatenango and began conversations around the memories they evoked.
El Salvador: Between Revolution and War is part of a process to reconstruct a history of the conflict together with members of the communities it affected, provoking conversations about memory, history, and voice.
