UCLA

Taking a critical archival studies approach, this dissertation engages critical discourse analysis as a means of analyzing the analogous treatment and representation of political dissidents from the civil war and alleged gang members in post-conflict El Salvador through the medium of human rights documentation. By analyzing a cross section of records, including case files, reports, videos and newspapers from three nongovernmental human rights organizations (the Comisi�n de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador, the Fundaci�n de Estudios para la Aplicaci�n del Derecho and Servicio Social Pasionista) and one dedicated archival repository (Centro de Informaci�n, Documentaci�n y Apoyo a la Investigaci�n) in San Salvador, El Salvador, it plots the recurrent discursive formations that evoke the socio-political and cultural marginality of those targeted for human rights violations.

Furthermore, this dissertation examines how human rights records engender a critical reflection on continuities of violence in the country that perpetuate these parallel discourses of ontological expendability for those “victims” of human rights violations deemed most abject to the body politic, and on the persistence of discourses of social and political subversion. It poses an argument for “subversion” as a power inflected, multi-faceted and ideologically perpetuated discourse that is evident in human rights records and popular texts that cuts across both the civil war and post-conflict era in El Salvador, and has material repercussions that are embodied in socially and politically sanctioned human rights violations and abuses. In addition, it maintains that human rights records are critical tools in combating the dehumanization of victims, in disinterring standard definitions of the “human” in human rights and in providing an avenue towards subjectivity that contradicts the silencing and ontological erasure of individuals.