How El Rescate, a Small Nongovernmental Organization, Contributed to the Transformation of the Human Rights Situation in El Salvador

Howland, Todd

doi:10.1353/hrq.0.0019

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Personnel from Tutela Legal interviewed the complainants, checked the credibility of the testimonies, and also compared the denunciations with their existing records to avoid duplication. According to Howland (2008), Tutela Legal required investigating all denunciations before publishing them as human rights violations, which gives us confidence on the quality of the information of this datafile. Nevertheless, these investigations were not carried out when there were military operations or other restrictions in the area, therefore leading to many denunciations not being published, which in turn implies an important undercount of violations in this datafile.…”

Section: Combining Lists Of Civilian Casualties From the Salvadoran Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bayesian Estimation of Bipartite Matchings for Record Linkage

Sadinle

2017

Journal of the American Statistical Association

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The bipartite record linkage task consists of merging two disparate datafiles containing information on two overlapping sets of entities. This is non-trivial in the absence of unique identifiers and it is important for a wide variety of applications given that it needs to be solved whenever we have to combine information from different sources. Most statistical techniques currently used for record linkage are derived from a seminal paper by Fellegi and Sunter (1969). These techniques usually assume independence in the matching statuses of record pairs to derive estimation procedures and optimal point estimators. We argue that this independence assumption is unreasonable and instead target a bipartite matching between the two datafiles as our parameter of interest. Bayesian implementations allow us to quantify uncertainty on the matching decisions and derive a variety of point estimators using different loss functions. We propose partial Bayes estimates that allow uncertain parts of the bipartite matching to be left unresolved. We evaluate our approach to record linkage using a variety of challenging scenarios and show that it outperforms the traditional methodology. We illustrate the advantages of our methods merging two datafiles on casualties from the civil war of El Salvador.

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Section: Combining Lists Of Civilian Casualties From the Salvadoran Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bayesian Estimation of Bipartite Matchings for Record Linkage

Sadinle

2017

Journal of the American Statistical Association

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“…The second data source employed in this project, El Rescate, is the result of a partnership between the Roman Catholic diocese of San Salvador and the American NGO El Rescate, based in Los Angeles (Howland 2008). In an attempt to combat impunity, El Rescate coded and analyzed both violence reported to Tutela Legal (the legal aid of-fice of the diocese) and hundreds of officer biographies.…”

Section: Data Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From Tutela's reports, El Rescate coded more than 22,000 separate acts of violence against civilians, including 8,137 lethal violations, of which 6,442 included name, department, and year information. Howland (2008) describes El Rescate's process.…”

Section: Data Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Ball¹

2019

DemRes

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BACKGROUND 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. OBJECTIVE Estimate the total number of civilian killings and disappearances in El Salvador during 1980-1992. METHODS 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 loglinear 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. RESULTS 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. CONCLUSIONS 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.

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“…Moreover, these relationships could become still more complex to the extent that future courts become more receptive to statistical evidence on patterns of abuse than the ICTY was. Howland (2008) describes a successful project conducted in postwar El Salvador that operated in a transitional justice zone somewhere between truth telling and criminal prosecution. This work used event-level casualty listing data combined with data on areas of responsibility of government military units to identify military personnel with direct command responsibility for human rights violations.…”

Section: Transitional Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Accounting for Civilian Casualties: From the Past to the Future

Jewell¹,

Spagat²,

Jewell³

2018

Soc. sci. hist.

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Assessment of the extent of civilian casualties during times of conflict presents significant challenges in data collection, quantitative methods, interpretation, and presentation. In this article, we briefly consider the motivation and use of casualty accounting and review historical approaches to these questions with illustrative comments on the US Civil War, World War I, World War II, and other conflicts. We provide an overview of several accounting methodologies including excess mortality, epidemiologic surveys, direct and indirect counts, multiple list estimation, and crowdsourcing. We reflect on the evolution toward modern approaches to casualty assessments, permitted by both a deeper understanding of human rights and by contemporaneous technological advances in data collection techniques. Our goal is to introduce several areas of research that deserve attention from social science historians and statisticians.

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How El Rescate, a Small Nongovernmental Organization, Contributed to the Transformation of the Human Rights Situation in El Salvador

Cited by 12 publications

References 8 publications

Bayesian Estimation of Bipartite Matchings for Record Linkage

Bayesian Estimation of Bipartite Matchings for Record Linkage

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

Accounting for Civilian Casualties: From the Past to the Future

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