With the Cold War having ended, there is a real possibility that countries such as El Salvador that served as Cold War battlegrounds will again be relegated to the back burner of American political scholarship. The central argument of this article is that marginalizing El Salvador's recent political history would be a mistake because this history contains a large number of important lessons for ongoing U.S. peacemaking efforts in conflicts such as those in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. Three specific questions are addressed: First, how were the parties to this conflict able, after a brutal, decade‐long civil war that had polarized their country, to achieve a negotiated peace settlement? Second, five years after the 1992 peace accord, what obstacles remain to an enduring peace settlement? Third, while the El Salvadoran civil war had unique features that will not be present in other violent civil conflicts, what are the lessons of the El Salvadoran peace process for peacemakers in such conflicts?