Have US border enforcement efforts deterred unauthorized migration from Mexico? Neoclassical economic theory suggests that wage differentials should matter most in migration decisions, yet border enforcement and other immigration controls are designed to restrict access to labor markets. In the current era of economic globalization, states have insisted on strict immigration controls, even while liberalizing the flow of goods, services, and capital. While some regions of the world – most notably the states belonging to the European Union – have relaxed or eliminated restrictions on migration among member-states, the general trend has been to increase barriers to entry. This pattern is most striking along the US–Mexico border, where since the early 1990s there has been a step-level increase in resources and personnel to prevent the entry of undocumented migrants. But the recent deployment of ships, planes, and advanced radar systems by EU members to interdict Europe-bound African migrants at sea suggests a similar commitment to border enforcement as the primary instrument of immigration control.
This paper asks whether "policy matters" in the migration decisions of Mexican immigrants to the USA. Has increased vigilance to stop undocumented migration along the 2,000-mile US–Mexico border had a significant influence on propensity of individuals to migrate? Enhanced border enforcement efforts promised to decrease the probability of successful unauthorized entry, thereby lowering the expected benefits of migration. In addition, the evidence suggests that since the initiation of "Operation Gatekeeper" and other such concentrated border enforcement initiatives, the risk of death and injury as a consequence of clandestine entry has increased sharply, along with the fees that professional people-smugglers charge for their services (Cornelius 2001, 2005; Reyes et al. 2002). Do these increased costs and risks deter potential migrants? Or do persisting economic incentives to migrate outweigh these considerations?
Theoretically, answers to these questions shed light on the role of the state in managing migration and controlling its borders. Determining who is allowed access is a key ingredient of state sovereignty (Guiraudon & Lahav 2000; Rudolph 2003, 2006). If current border enforcement efforts do little to counteract labor-market forces, then the ability of the state to enforce its immigration laws is undermined.1 On a practical level, gaining a better understanding of migration decisions can help in formulating better immigration control policies. With more than 400,000 Mexican migrants entering the USA each year, the choice of immigration policy has a profound influence on economic outcomes in both countries and the fortunes of migrants themselves.
In this paper we seek to determine whether the perception of danger and/or difficulty in illegally crossing the border in the current period of heightened border controls has a significant influence on the propensity to migrate. Previous research has sought to measure the deterrent effect of border enforcement by correlating survey data on decisions to migrate with aggregate measures of changes in the US border enforcement effort (numbers of Border Patrol agents deployed, line-watch hours, apprehensions made) and changes in economic performance on both sides of the border (Espenshade 1995; Espenshade & Acevedo 1995; Hanson & Spilimbergo 2001; Reyes et al. 2002; Cerrutti & Massey 2004; Orrenius 2004; Bean & Lowell 2007). Although our results are generally consistent with those of these researchers, who found that increased enforcement resources deployed along the border have had little effect on the probability of undocumented migration, our approach differs from theirs in that it uses direct evidence on the migrant’s own perceptions of danger and difficulty in crossing the border clandestinely.2 The actual resources deployed may be less important than the effect of border enforcement on the perceptions of potential first-time migrants and repeat migrants in Mexico. Our study collected individual and community-level data that enable us to establish direct linkages between changes in immigration control policy (i.e., the implementation of the post-1993 strategy of concentrated border enforcement) and the propensity to migrate.
Literature review: The political economy of international migration
According to classical economic models of factor mobility, differences in factor endowments between two countries should lead to migration out of labor-abundant countries and into labor-scarce regions until the price of labor converges to an equilibrium wage. Quite simply, workers are expected to move to areas where wages are higher. In the case of the USA and Mexico, the average hourly wage in Mexico in 2000 was approximately $1.80 (Chiquiar & Hanson 2005). With wages even for unskilled undocumented workers averaging 4–6 times this amount in the USA, there are powerful economic incentives for people to migrate north. Another economic perspective focuses on the family rather than the individual as the locus of migration decision-making. The sending of remittances to family members who remain in the country of origin can significantly improve on their consumption and investment habits, providing strong social pressures to send at least some members of the household to work abroad (Taylor 1999). Inter-family comparisons of wealth and status between those who receive remittances and those who do not place additional pressures on working age members of the household to migrate to counter this income inequality.
Although economic and sociological theories of international migration have dominated the published work, political scientists have called for a deeper understanding of the politics of international migration (Hollifield 2000; Cornelius & Rosenblum 2005). Whereas labor-market forces are clearly important in shaping the migration decisions of individuals and households, nation-states determine the terms of access to the domestic labor force. States impose immigration controls to shape the overall supply of labor as well as the quality of the labor force. For instance, although most Western industrialized nations provide relatively few visas for unskilled foreign labor, there is strong competition among them to attract highly skilled migrants with advanced degrees (Cornelius et al. 2001). In addition, there have been bolder measures in most OECD countries to fortify national boundaries against the unauthorized entry of "undesirable" migrants (Andreas & Snyder 2000; Geddes 2000; Cornelius et al. 2004; Lahav 2004).3 Despite the academic discourse about economic integration and the emergence of a "borderless world" (Ohmae 1996; Sassen 1996), enhanced migration controls suggest different standards with respect to particular types of flows. Therefore, an individual’s utility for migrating is not a simple function of wage differentials, but must be discounted by the probability of successful entry into the labor market, and this is determined by the state’s immigration policies.
However, economic theory would also suggest that immigration restrictions – just as capital controls and trade barriers – lead to a suboptimal allocation of economic resources as they reduce the supply of labor below that which the market would decide. This undersupply should in turn lead to the creation of a "black-market" for immigrant labor to meet the unmet demand for workers. Indeed, recent years have brought the emergence of elaborate human smuggling operations that rival the international drug trade in terms of ingenuity and profitability (Kyle & Koslowski 2001). This illicit entry of people circumvents the sovereign prerogative of the state to control its borders and restrict the entry of foreign nationals; it also empowers organized crime networks. Whereas it is unclear whether a tough public stance against illegal immigration is the sincere preference of government officials torn between restrictionist voters and powerful employer lobbies, several scholars have noted a growing gap between the stated objectives of immigration control policies and the outcomes of such policies (Joppke 1998; Freeman 2002; Cornelius et al. 2004). Thus, the actual impact of immigration control policies on the migration choices of individuals is an important empirical and theoretical question. Immigration restrictions should, in principle, reduce an individual’s propensity to migrate, but imperfections in immigration enforcement provide opportunities to evade such measures.
Policing the US–Mexico border
The early to mid-1990s brought increased pressure on elected officials in the USA to reduce undocumented immigration from Mexico. Thus, while the USA and Mexico were busy liberalizing regional trade and investment – particularly through the North American Free Trade Agreement – immigration restrictions were strengthened. In the US Southwest in particular, fears that undocumented migrants undercut wages, consumed social services, and contributed to crime led to public clamor for increased vigilance at the border. A series of border enforcement efforts beginning with "Operation Hold the Line" (1993) in El Paso and "Operation Gatekeeper" (1994) in San Diego significantly increased the visibility of US Border Patrol agents. During this period, Congress and the President worked together to significantly increase enforcement personnel and resources along the US–Mexico border. Approximately 70 miles of the border were fenced to prevent crossings in urban areas where illegal entry was most visible. In addition, there has been a remarkable increase in the sophistication of surveillance and apprehension technology, including remote video surveillance systems, infrared monitors, seismic sensors that can detect footsteps, helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), and computerized databases to identify recidivists and people-smugglers among those apprehended. The number of Border Patrol agents rose from 3,965 in September 1993 to 12,349 in September 2006, and spending on border enforcement grew sixfold during this period. Since Fiscal Year 2002, the growth in spending has outpaced increases in apprehensions being made at the border, so each arrest costs more (Fig. 1).
The principal rationale for increasing border enforcement was the doctrine of "prevention through deterrence." It was believed that by significantly increasing apprehension rates and the visibility of the Border Patrol, potential migrants would be dissuaded from attempting a crossing. In testimony before the House of Representatives, Barbara Jordan, Chair of the Congressionally mandated US Commission on Immigration Reform, remarked, "It is far better to deter illegal immigration than to play the cat and mouse game that results from apprehensions followed by return followed by re-entry. To accomplish a true deterrence strategy will require additional personnel as well as a strategic use of technology and equipment" (House of Representatives 29 March 1995, emphasis added). Again, in economic terms, if the probability of successful entry is low enough, then wage differentials between the two countries should matter less in the decision calculus of potential migrants.
In addition to increasing apprehension rates, which was the explicitly stated aim of government officials at the time, enhancing the US Border Patrol’s capabilities had several important unintended consequences. First, whereas urban areas – for example, San Diego, El Centro, Nogales, and El Paso – witnessed the erection of fences, lighting, and an increase in agents, remote areas in the mountains and deserts along the border were left largely unprotected.4 This has led many migrants to attempt riskier crossing strategies over difficult and dangerous terrain; concomitantly, the risk of injury and/or death has increased sharply in recent years (Cornelius 2001). Between January 1995 and September 2006, there were over 4,045 known migrant fatalities because of unauthorized border crossings; dehydration and hypothermia were the most common causes of death. Second, although the use of professional people-smugglers ("coyotes") to assist in illegal entry was widespread among Mexican migrants by the late 1980s (see Cerrutti & Massey 2004, pp. 29–30; Cornelius & Lewis 2006, pp. 64–66), the proportion of migrants using smugglers rose further in the post-1993 period. Coyotes are hired to lead migrants through difficult crossing areas, provide fraudulent identity documents, and transport migrants to pick-up points where relatives or employers retrieve them. As the demand for their services increased with tighter border enforcement, people-smugglers have tripled or quadrupled their fees (see Cornelius & Lewis 2006, pp. 67–68).
This discussion suggests that migration decisions by Mexicans without legal documents are a function of several factors: relative wages, the probability of successful entry, the risk of physical harm, and coyote fees are all taken into consideration. Yet, with expected earnings in the USA being several times that in Mexico, it remains to be seen if the costs and risks of crossing the border have deterred a substantial number of Mexicans from migrating without papers. In the sections that follow we will attempt to determine if migrants’ subjective assessment of these added costs have had a significant influence on their plans to go north. Theoretically, those at the "cusp" of migrating should be deterred by these additional factors, but whether there has been a systematic deterrent effect at the individual level has not previously been substantiated.
Research design and methods
We report results from a survey of 603 returned migrants and potential first-time migrants who were interviewed in their homes in Mexico by a team of bilingual US and Mexican interviewers during January 2005. The research sites were Tlacuitapa, Jalisco, and Las Animas, Zacatecas, rural communities with high rates of migration to the USA, located in states that traditionally have sent large numbers of migrants to the USA. The research communities were chosen purposively to take advantage of extensive baseline data from previous surveys of migration behavior conducted in these towns (Cornelius 1976, 1991, 1998; Mines 1981; Goldring 1992).
A standardized questionnaire was administered to at least one adult in every dwelling unit that was occupied during the fieldwork period. Because of the small sizes of the populations of the research communities (800–1,500), no sampling was necessary. In each dwelling, the interviewer was instructed first to interview the male head of household. If the male head of household was unavailable throughout the fieldwork period, interviewers were instructed to interview his wife about her husband’s migration experiences. If at that time the wife volunteered that she had migration experience of her own, she was interviewed concerning her own migration experience as well. After interviewing the head of household, the questionnaire was next administered to all sons and daughters of at least 15 years of age. We administered the standardized questionnaire only to people aged 15–65, as we expected to find most of the current and potential migrants in this age range. Of the 603 persons interviewed, 68% were categorized by interviewers as having their principal base in the sending community, whereas 31% were based primarily in the USA and were making short visits to their hometowns at the time of our fieldwork.
The questionnaire contained a total of 143 items (see Cornelius & Lewis 2006, appendix A). In addition to questions pertaining to basic demographic attributes, the questionnaire contained sections on employment and residency in 2004; the migratory history of the family from 1995 to 2005; the migratory history of the interviewee; intentions to migrate in the 12 months following the interview; employment and life in the USA; perceptions of the interviewee’s hometown and his economic situation; and plans for the future. Although most of the questions were closed, open-ended questions were included to elicit more fine-grained information on various aspects of the US migration experience. The average administration time was 50 minutes.
Analysis
In general, if the "prevention through deterrence" strategy were effective, we would expect people to become less inclined to migrate as: (i) their information about enhanced US border enforcement measures increases; (ii) perceptions of risk and danger increase; (iii) actual negative experiences during past crossings increases. A show of force at the border can only be effective if people are aware of heightened restrictions and that they perceive and/or have actually experienced that such policies make crossing much more difficult. An ideal test of deterrence theory would gauge people’s attitudes before and after the implementation of border enforcement policies. We cannot do so with our cross-sectional research design. However, we are able to determine if our respondents’ knowledge, perceptions, and experience with border enforcement policies are important determinants of their decisions to migrate. Thus, we can estimate the relative significance of economic/demographic factors and immigration control policies.
Our main dependent variable for the analysis that follows (Q71) asks whether the person being interviewed intends to migrate at some time during 2005.5 While we realize that there may be some slippage between stated intentions in January 2005 and actual migration outcomes during the year, we believe that this question can reliably get at the type of person who is most likely to migrate. Of the people who responded to this question, 51% responded in yes, that they have at least considered migrating to the USA.
One way of ascertaining a deterrent effect is to simply ask the "no" respondents why they do not wish to migrate. As such, we asked these people to give the main reason why they were not willing to migrate (Q77). Although lack of economic need, lack of interest, and family considerations dominated the responses to this question, 41 people answered that difficulty crossing was their main reason for staying home, whereas an additional 14 people answered that they could not afford coyote and/or transportation costs. In all then, 55 out of 603 survey respondents indicated that they were deterred from crossing because of the direct or indirect effects of US Border Enforcement policies.6 However, it is also important to consider the perceptions, information, and experiences of those who do wish to migrate along with additional control variables.
As our main variables of interest, we include survey items dealing with perceptions of difficult and danger crossing the border. One question (Q80) asked about perceptions of difficulty in evading the US Border Patrol in the current period. Six percent of our respondents indicated that it is not more difficult to cross; 23% answered that it is now somewhat more difficult; 66% responded that it is much more difficult to cross; and 5% answered that it is now virtually impossible to cross. A second question (Q78) asked interviewees about their level of information regarding current US Border Patrol policies. People were asked if they were aware of current efforts to make unauthorized crossings into the USA more difficult. In answering this question, 72% of the respondents indicated that they were aware of heightened security at the border. Third, we asked a question (Q84) about the perceptions of danger in crossing without legal documents. The overwhelming majority (80%) of survey respondents answered that it is very dangerous to cross; only 20% believed that it is only somewhat dangerous or not at all dangerous. Although this question is subjective, we also asked people if they actually knew someone who had died while attempting to cross into the USA (Q85), as people who knew someone who died may be more directly attuned to this extreme risk. Sixty-four percent of those who answered the question indicated that they did know someone who died en route to the USA.
To summarize, we found our interviewees to be well informed about Border Patrol efforts; indeed, a large majority believed that it is much more difficult to surmount the obstacle course at the border. Moreover, a majority believe that it is much more dangerous to cross the border clandestinely today as compared with previous periods. Nevertheless, more than half (51%) reported that they were considering a journey north.
Although these perceptual factors are important, we also asked people with a previous migration history about their personal experience crossing the border. Perhaps direct experience is more important than perceptions. In our survey sample, 64% or 383 individuals indicated that they had migrated to the USA before (of these, 184 were undocumented). Of those who had previously migrated, we asked whether they were apprehended by the Border Patrol on their most recent trip to the border (Q62). Of the entire subset of people who had crossed before – with or without legal documents – 13% indicated that they had been caught by the Border Patrol; of only those individuals crossing without papers, 25% indicated that they had been caught trying to cross.7 We also asked whether the most recent trip to the USA was more difficult than they had anticipated versus less difficult/about the same (Q58). Twenty-two percent of experienced migrants reported that the crossing was harder than they had expected. Restricting this analysis to only those crossing without papers, 44% indicated that their journey was more difficult than expected.
These variables form the core of our analysis. In the regressions that follow we include these variables about potential migrants’ level of information about Border Patrol efforts, their perceptions of difficulty/danger in crossing the frontier, and in separate regressions restricted to experienced migrants, we include information about their past attempts at crossing. Summary statistics for each of these main independent variables, along with our main dependent variable of interest are presented in Table 1.
We also include several control variables in the analysis. Much of the published work suggests that the typical Mexican migrant to the USA is a working age man.8 Therefore we include a dichotomous variable for sex (female, 1), along with age and age squared to account for a parabolic relation between age and propensity to migrate (the very young and the elderly are less likely to migrate). We include additional demographic controls for marital status (married, 1) as well as the number of children the respondent has. We also include a pair of controls for the respondent’s economic status. Whereas we lack wage data for our individual respondents, we include a subjective self-assessment of economic status in which people were asked to rate their economic welfare on a scale from 1 to 10. We also include a variable for the number of years of schooling the respondent has completed; while education may have an independent effect on the propensity to migrate, education is also expected to be highly related to one’s income. In addition, because there may be unique characteristics of the two towns represented in our study that are not included in the statistical model, we include a "fixed effect" term for the town itself in the form of a dummy variable for "Las Animas". Finally, when restricting our models to the subset of respondents who had migrated before, we include a dichotomous variable for the person’s legal status (documented, 1; undocumented, 0).
Because our dependent variable is dichotomous, we run our models using a logit estimator with robust standard errors. Because several of our independent variables may be highly correlated with each other, we include them sequentially before presenting a model in which all are included. Additional diagnostic testing shows that multicollinearity does not present a significant problem.9 Our most correlated variables (danger crossing and difficulty evading the Border Patrol) were only correlated at the 0.27 level.
We acknowledge that our survey design may suffer from a particular type of response bias, but we can anticipate the direction of this bias. By conducting our interviews in Mexico, our survey does not include people who have already migrated, did not return to their hometowns during the fieldwork (which was timed to coincide with the towns’ annual fiestas), and therefore were not available to be interviewed. Thus, the sample may overrepresent people who stayed in Mexico and underrepresent people who had left. Clearly, undocumented migrants who were in the USA at the time of the survey were not deterred from migrating. Therefore, if there is a deterrent effect, we are more likely to detect it among those who have been successfully dissuaded by border enforcement efforts. This suggests that our results should indicate something of a bias in favor of a finding that the deterrence strategy has been successful. As we find little evidence of deterrence, this type of response bias is not cause for major concern.
Results
Table 2 presents the results of the logit models. In model 1, we include only our demographic and economic control variables. This model confirms the expectation that migrants are more likely to be men of working age. The coefficient for gender is negative and significant, indicating that women are less likely than men to cross, and the parabolic age and age-squared terms indicate that the very young and very old are least likely to attempt a crossing. Interestingly, marital status and number of children do not have a statistically significant effect on the probability of migrating. We also find that people who report a higher economic status are more likely to migrate. We suspect that this may be because such persons have better means to migrate – for example, paying smuggler’s fees or obtaining legal documents – and/or because of possible reverse causation. People who have migrated in the past may have earned money in the USA to support their current lifestyle and are now considering a repeat visit. Level of education, as our models show, does not have a statistically significant influence on migration propensities.
Models 2–5 sequentially include our main variables of interest. Contrary to the deterrence hypothesis, we find in models 2 and 4 that perceived difficulty evading the border patrol and danger in crossing – although signed negatively – do not have a statistically significant effect on migration decisions. Even more damaging to the deterrence hypothesis, in model 3 we find that individuals who report being well-informed about current Border Patrol efforts are more likely to cross. Additionally, model 5 shows that people who know of someone who died while attempting to cross the border are also more likely to migrate. We believe this result can be easily explained. Persons considering migrating are likely to actively seek information about Border Patrol operations to avoid apprehension. Knowledge of enhanced enforcement is not deterring these people, but is instead leading them to devise better evasion strategies. Moreover, we would expect those planning to go north to have many experienced migrants in their network of friends and family; therefore, they are more likely to know of someone who died while trying to enter the USA. Whereas the risk of death is very real, with thousands of successful crossings being made each day, border-wide, prospective migrants view the probability of dying to be acceptably low. Model 6 includes all of these variables in a single regression and comes to a similar conclusion.10
In Table 3, we restrict the analysis to those migrants who have crossed before. Perhaps perceptions of danger or difficulty are not sufficient; actual experiences in previous crossing attempts may be a more potent deterrent. In these models we also include a control variable for previous crossing with legal documents; not surprisingly, people who were able to enter the USA legally in the past are much more likely to cross. Interestingly, in these models we find that marital status is now statistically significant, with married people being less likely to migrate again. Economic status is no longer significant although we note a moderate degree of correlation between this variable and legal status.
Model 7 shows that people who report having been caught in the past are somewhat less likely to indicate an intention to migrate again in 2005. Although this provides some evidence of a deterrent effect, the result barely reaches statistical significance at the 0.1 level. To get a sense of the substantive impact of this effect, we compute predicted probabilities based upon these estimates by setting all dichotomous variables to zero and all continuous variables to their means. Changing the "caught" variable from zero (not caught) to one (caught) reduces the expected probability of migrating by roughly 8%. To put this in context, our models also show that women are 10% less likely to migrate than men and that married people are 17% less likely to migrate to the USA than singles. Therefore, the influence of border enforcement is substantively small compared to other factors. Model 8 includes our variable for experience of difficulty during crossing. Although this variable has a negative sign, we do not find a statistically significant effect.
Conclusion
The main justification for the strategy of border control implemented by the USA since 1993 was that it would deter undocumented migration at the source, in Mexico and other migrant-sending countries. Although higher wages and abundant job opportunities in the USA constitute powerful economic incentives, a robust border enforcement strategy was expected to limit access to the US labor market, making unauthorized migration less attractive. Whereas our research design does not enable us to compare migration propensities before and after new border controls were introduced, our results suggest that perceptions of the danger and difficultly involved in clandestine crossings have not discouraged migrants from attempting them. Political restrictions on immigration are far outweighed by economic and family-related incentives to migrate.
Our survey and qualitative research in Mexican migrant-sending communities in 2005–2006 indicates that migration strategies have been affected by enhanced border security. For example, border-crossing points have changed, the use of people-smugglers continues to increase, and unauthorized migrants are now more likely to seek entry through legal ports of entry. But few potential migrants are staying home primarily as a consequence of US border enforcement efforts. We also find that migrants who do go to the border have an extremely high rate of success if they persist. Among migrants interviewed in our 2005 survey, 92% of those who were apprehended at least once on their most recent trip to the border eventually were able to gain entry, without returning to their place of origin (Cornelius & Lewis 2006, p. 65). Among those interviewed in our 2006 survey, conducted in a rural community in the state of Yucatán, 97% of those apprehended on their most recent trip were able to enter successfully on the second or third try (Cornelius et al. 2007, Ch. 5).
From a policy standpoint, our findings suggest that current US immigration control policy is fundamentally flawed. The stated aim of reducing the flow and stock of unauthorized immigrants through a robust deterrence strategy has not been achieved. Ignoring this policy failure, in September 2006 the US Congress passed an immigration control bill that focuses exclusively on border enforcement – particularly the construction of new fencing and installation of high-tech detection hardware along 700 miles of the US–Mexico border – without addressing the root causes of migration. But additional investment of taxpayer dollars in a border enforcement-centered strategy of immigration control, leaving intact the employer demand for unauthorized immigrant labor, is unlikely to create an effective deterrent to unauthorized migration. An alternative approach, that is, increasing legal entry opportunities for low-skilled foreign workers through a guestworker program and/or providing a larger number of permanent, employment-based visas for such workers, would have a higher probability of success. By bringing the supply and demand for immigrant labor into equilibrium, the incentives for undocumented migration – essentially a black market for labor – would largely disappear.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Immigration Issues
There are countless things to read on immigration because it is a very contested topic in society today. Here are a few articles though on the lack of enforcement of the law that should be disciplining the employers of illegal immigrants as well as information on the decline in jobs for day laborers.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89953759
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89388156
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89953759
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89388156
Friday, April 25, 2008
Evo Morales on The Daily Show w/Jon Stewart
Hey, here's the link.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=103275&title=president-evo-morales
:)
Enjoy!
Madison
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=103275&title=president-evo-morales
:)
Enjoy!
Madison
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Brazil President Defends Biofuels
By Emilio San Pedro
BBC Americas editor
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has rejected allegations that biofuels are responsible for the recent rise in global food prices.
He said food had become more expensive because people in developing countries were gaining greater access to it.
Mr Lula was speaking at a conference of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Brasilia.
A chorus of opposition to bio-fuels has been growing in different parts of the world in recent months.
Environmental groups, government ministers and even world leaders like President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela have all voiced their concerns that the use of crops like sugar-cane and corn to make fuel for cars could lead to a serious food crisis.
'Crime against humanity'
Critics claim biofuels are also partly responsible for the recent rise in global food prices.
And Jean Ziegler, the UN's Special Rapporteur for Food Rights and a Swiss national, has described biofuel production of bio-fuels as a crime against humanity.
President Lula, whose country is the world's largest exporter of biofuels such as ethanol, said it was easy for someone sitting in Switzerland to preach to Brazil.
He said allegations that global food prices were rising because of biofuels were baseless.
"Biofuels aren't the villain that threatens food security," said President Lula.
"On the contrary... they can pull countries out of energy dependency without affecting foods."
Food prices were going up, he said, because people in developing countries like China, India and Brazil itself were simply eating more as their economic conditions improved.
The president has signed several important cooperation deals with the US, another leading biofuels producer, as well as with several African countries, to work together to improve production.
The battle against biofuels has united a dichotomous group ranging from environmental activists to the leaders of some of the world's largest oil producing countries.
Posted by April Griffith
BBC Americas editor
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has rejected allegations that biofuels are responsible for the recent rise in global food prices.
He said food had become more expensive because people in developing countries were gaining greater access to it.
Mr Lula was speaking at a conference of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Brasilia.
A chorus of opposition to bio-fuels has been growing in different parts of the world in recent months.
Environmental groups, government ministers and even world leaders like President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela have all voiced their concerns that the use of crops like sugar-cane and corn to make fuel for cars could lead to a serious food crisis.
'Crime against humanity'
Critics claim biofuels are also partly responsible for the recent rise in global food prices.
And Jean Ziegler, the UN's Special Rapporteur for Food Rights and a Swiss national, has described biofuel production of bio-fuels as a crime against humanity.
President Lula, whose country is the world's largest exporter of biofuels such as ethanol, said it was easy for someone sitting in Switzerland to preach to Brazil.
He said allegations that global food prices were rising because of biofuels were baseless.
"Biofuels aren't the villain that threatens food security," said President Lula.
"On the contrary... they can pull countries out of energy dependency without affecting foods."
Food prices were going up, he said, because people in developing countries like China, India and Brazil itself were simply eating more as their economic conditions improved.
The president has signed several important cooperation deals with the US, another leading biofuels producer, as well as with several African countries, to work together to improve production.
The battle against biofuels has united a dichotomous group ranging from environmental activists to the leaders of some of the world's largest oil producing countries.
Posted by April Griffith
Brazil's New Oil Find
A new oil field has been discovered off the coast of Brazil. Heraldo Lima, the head of the country’s National Petroleum Agency has announced that it may be the third biggest oil field in the world, but the agency itself has since distanced itself from his claims. More drilling and studies need to be conducted to determine the number of barrels that can be extracted from the region, but in any case, it should turn out be a superfield of at least 5 billion barrels. This would boost Brazil up to the 7th largest oil producer in the world. Traditionally Brazil has been overlooked as a major oil producer because of larger energy providers in the region such as Mexico and Venezuela. Brazil is also at the center of the bio-fuel revolution, currently exporting corn-based ethanol. The new find will therefore bring a lot of political and economic changes to the country.
You can read more about it here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/16/oil.brazil
http://www.forbes.com/energy/2008/04/15/oil-brazil-carioca-biz-energy-cx_pm_0415notes.html
You can read more about it here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/16/oil.brazil
http://www.forbes.com/energy/2008/04/15/oil-brazil-carioca-biz-energy-cx_pm_0415notes.html
The Brazilian MST and some of its developments
Hello class,
Posted below are links to online articles I found regarding the MST Brazilian Landless Workers Movement. Two of the first two link articles are interviews with João Pedro Stédile, one of the leaders of the MST. The third article link describes a brief overview of some of the violence which has resulted from opponents of the MST. The last article link describes a current development of the MST, the "Red April" protest in Brazilia (a push for more farm land). Feel free to comment on these articles or address discussion questions regarding the topic.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=48&ItemID=7036
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=48&ItemID=4003
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/brazil/mst1.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080415/bs_afp/brazilsocialfarmprotest_080415071614
Posted below are links to online articles I found regarding the MST Brazilian Landless Workers Movement. Two of the first two link articles are interviews with João Pedro Stédile, one of the leaders of the MST. The third article link describes a brief overview of some of the violence which has resulted from opponents of the MST. The last article link describes a current development of the MST, the "Red April" protest in Brazilia (a push for more farm land). Feel free to comment on these articles or address discussion questions regarding the topic.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=48&ItemID=7036
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=48&ItemID=4003
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/brazil/mst1.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080415/bs_afp/brazilsocialfarmprotest_080415071614
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Chilean Hunger Strike for Indigenous Rights
I think that there are a few interesting articles about the hunger strike in Chile over indigenous Mapuche rights. The 111-day hunger strike ended in January, but the effects and reactions are very interesting. Hope everyone enjoys
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40992
http://www.mapuche-nation.org/english/html/news/n-118.htm
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40992
http://www.mapuche-nation.org/english/html/news/n-118.htm
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Event: Current political situation in Oaxaca and the role of women in the movement for social justice in Oaxaca
Please see attach information: bio, tour schedule
The Binational Struggle of the Mexican Indigenous Migrant communities: A Oaxacan Perspective Tour.”
Two prominent grassroots indigenous Oaxacan leaders, from the Indigenous Organizations Binational Front will give a talk on:
Current political situation in Oaxaca and the role of women in the movement for social justice in Oaxaca
Centolia Maldonado Vásquez Bernardo Ramírez Bautista
Sunday April 13, 2008
4:00- 7:00 PM
Pico Shalom Ministries community center
1320 South New Hampshire
Los Angeles California
213-447-6248
Come and support our fundraising efforts there will be food, raffles
There will be sale of Handicrafts & Organic Spices by the Triqui Communities.
“For respect to the rights of indigenous peoples”
**********************************************************************************************************
Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales
Presenta su gira:
Presenta su gira: LA lucha binacional de Indígenas migrantes mexicanos desde la perspectiva oaxaqueña
Dos prominentes líderes indigena darán un informe sobre:
La situación política actual de Oaxaca y el rol de la mujer en el movimiento social de Oaxaca.
Centolia Maldonado Vásquez Bernardo Ramírez Bautista
Domingo Abril 13, 2008
4:00- 7:00 PM
Pico Shalom Ministries community center
1320 South New Hampshire
Los Ángeles California
213-447-6248
Venga a apoya nuestra evento comunitario y recaudación de fondos
Venta de comida, rifas
Abra ventas de artesanía y especies orgánicos producido por las comunidades
“Por los derechos de los pueblos indígenas.”
"Por el respeto a los derechos de los pueblos indígenas"
Odilia Romero Hernández
Coordinadora de la Mujer-Consejo Central Binacional
Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB)
www.fiob.org
Oficina Los Ángeles
2936 West 8th Street Suite 303
Los Angeles, Ca 90005
213-251-8481
213-251-8444 FAX
323-806-2198
The Binational Struggle of the Mexican Indigenous Migrant communities: A Oaxacan Perspective Tour.”
Two prominent grassroots indigenous Oaxacan leaders, from the Indigenous Organizations Binational Front will give a talk on:
Current political situation in Oaxaca and the role of women in the movement for social justice in Oaxaca
Centolia Maldonado Vásquez Bernardo Ramírez Bautista
Sunday April 13, 2008
4:00- 7:00 PM
Pico Shalom Ministries community center
1320 South New Hampshire
Los Angeles California
213-447-6248
Come and support our fundraising efforts there will be food, raffles
There will be sale of Handicrafts & Organic Spices by the Triqui Communities.
“For respect to the rights of indigenous peoples”
**********************************************************************************************************
Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales
Presenta su gira:
Presenta su gira: LA lucha binacional de Indígenas migrantes mexicanos desde la perspectiva oaxaqueña
Dos prominentes líderes indigena darán un informe sobre:
La situación política actual de Oaxaca y el rol de la mujer en el movimiento social de Oaxaca.
Centolia Maldonado Vásquez Bernardo Ramírez Bautista
Domingo Abril 13, 2008
4:00- 7:00 PM
Pico Shalom Ministries community center
1320 South New Hampshire
Los Ángeles California
213-447-6248
Venga a apoya nuestra evento comunitario y recaudación de fondos
Venta de comida, rifas
Abra ventas de artesanía y especies orgánicos producido por las comunidades
“Por los derechos de los pueblos indígenas.”
"Por el respeto a los derechos de los pueblos indígenas"
Odilia Romero Hernández
Coordinadora de la Mujer-Consejo Central Binacional
Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB)
www.fiob.org
Oficina Los Ángeles
2936 West 8th Street Suite 303
Los Angeles, Ca 90005
213-251-8481
213-251-8444 FAX
323-806-2198
Social Movements in Oaxaca: Event in Los Angeles
The Tribal Learning Community & Education Exchange (TLCEE), the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies, Critical Race Studies and the Raza Grad Student Association welcome....
Centolia Maldonado Vásquez and Bernardo Ramírez Bautista
Two prominent grassroots indigenous Oaxacan leaders from the
Indigenous Organization Binational Front
(Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales-FIOB)
who will speak on:
Monday, April 14, 2008
2:00-3:30 pm
Law 1347 UCLA
Centolia Maldonado Vásquez is currently the District Coordinator and Director of Economic Development Projects of the FIOB in Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca. Centolia is also member of the outreach committee of ECOMIX (Espacio de Economías Solidarias) a state-wide NGO that provides technical assistance to grassroots organizations in Oaxaca. Centolia's organizational experiences, particularly with women, have been documented in Sueños Binacionales and Mujeres que se Organizan Avanzan.
Bernardo Ramírez Bautista, an indigenous lawyer, is the Regional Coordinator of the FIOB in the Mixteca region. He is also the Director of the Justice Advocacy Program (Procuración de Justicia) for indigenous communities in Oaxaca and coordinates the program- Leadership Development for Traditional Indigenous- for elected officials at the municipal and local levels.
For more information regarding this event, please contact professor Maylei Blackwell at maylei@chavez.ucla.edu
Eleuteria Hernández G.
Student Affairs Officer
UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies
Spring Office Hours: Every day from 11-1:00 & 2-5:00 pm
310.206.7696
fax: 310.825.2449
7351 Bunche Hall
lute@chavez.ucla.edu
http://www.chavez.ucla.edu
Centolia Maldonado Vásquez and Bernardo Ramírez Bautista
Two prominent grassroots indigenous Oaxacan leaders from the
Indigenous Organization Binational Front
(Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales-FIOB)
who will speak on:
Monday, April 14, 2008
2:00-3:30 pm
Law 1347 UCLA
Centolia Maldonado Vásquez is currently the District Coordinator and Director of Economic Development Projects of the FIOB in Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca. Centolia is also member of the outreach committee of ECOMIX (Espacio de Economías Solidarias) a state-wide NGO that provides technical assistance to grassroots organizations in Oaxaca. Centolia's organizational experiences, particularly with women, have been documented in Sueños Binacionales and Mujeres que se Organizan Avanzan.
Bernardo Ramírez Bautista, an indigenous lawyer, is the Regional Coordinator of the FIOB in the Mixteca region. He is also the Director of the Justice Advocacy Program (Procuración de Justicia) for indigenous communities in Oaxaca and coordinates the program- Leadership Development for Traditional Indigenous- for elected officials at the municipal and local levels.
For more information regarding this event, please contact professor Maylei Blackwell at maylei@chavez.ucla.edu
Eleuteria Hernández G.
Student Affairs Officer
UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies
Spring Office Hours: Every day from 11-1:00 & 2-5:00 pm
310.206.7696
fax: 310.825.2449
7351 Bunche Hall
lute@chavez.ucla.edu
http://www.chavez.ucla.edu
Friday, April 4, 2008
Late notice, but...
I know it's late notice, but in case anyone is interested....
Hugo Chavez and the "Bolivarian Revolution" in Venezuela.
Challenges, Contradictions, and Prospects for Liberation: Two Contending
Views.
Presentations by:
George Ciccariello-Maher, author of Monthly Review article: "Dual Power in
the Venezuelan Revolution"
- and -
Raymond Lotta, author of "America in Decline", Maoist political economist,
and contributor to "Revolution" newspaper.
Friday, April 4 at 3pm
Barrows Hall, Room 554
Best, Andrea G.
Hugo Chavez and the "Bolivarian Revolution" in Venezuela.
Challenges, Contradictions, and Prospects for Liberation: Two Contending
Views.
Presentations by:
George Ciccariello-Maher, author of Monthly Review article: "Dual Power in
the Venezuelan Revolution"
- and -
Raymond Lotta, author of "America in Decline", Maoist political economist,
and contributor to "Revolution" newspaper.
Friday, April 4 at 3pm
Barrows Hall, Room 554
Best, Andrea G.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Cuba puts unused land to work for farming
HAVANA, Cuba (AP) -- Cuba is lending unused land to private farmers and cooperatives as part of a sweeping effort to revitalize a floundering agricultural sector and step up food production.
Government television said Tuesday that 51 percent of arable land is underused or fallow, a problem officials hope to rectify by temporarily transferring some of it to private farmers and associations representing small, private producers.
The president of Cuba's national farmers association, Orlando Lugo, said "everyone who wants to produce tobacco will be given land to produce tobacco," and it will be the same for coffee or anything else.
The government began dolling out land last year, but announced the program this week.
It was not clear how much land had been transferred and under what terms.
Government television said Tuesday that 51 percent of arable land is underused or fallow, a problem officials hope to rectify by temporarily transferring some of it to private farmers and associations representing small, private producers.
The president of Cuba's national farmers association, Orlando Lugo, said "everyone who wants to produce tobacco will be given land to produce tobacco," and it will be the same for coffee or anything else.
The government began dolling out land last year, but announced the program this week.
It was not clear how much land had been transferred and under what terms.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
With His Star Rising, Mexican Populist Faces New Tests
With His Star Rising, Mexican Populist Faces New Tests
By GINGER THOMPSON
EXICO CITY, May 3 - He is mayor of the largest city in the hemisphere, and this country's latest political phenomenon.
He can summon tens of thousands into the streets at will. In a whirlwind three weeks he staged the biggest protest in Mexico's recent history and turned back a legal challenge from the Mexican president and Congress that threatened to end his political career.
Now Andrés Manuel López Obrador is considered the favorite to be elected president next year.
"What we saw last Sunday was proof that this is a new society," the mayor said during an interview last week, referring to the protest march, "that the traditional structures of power are not in control, not even with all their money and media."
Indeed, while Mr. López Obrador, a 51-year-old widower and father of three sons, has proven that he can motivate this country's vast underclass, what remains unclear is whether he will be able to keep pro-American businesspeople and the fragile middle class on his side.
He is better known for picking political fights than building bridges. And his left-leaning, hard-charging political style has many in the ruling elite and analysts abroad worried that Mexico could go the way of Venezuela, which is embroiled in a class war as President Hugo Chávez rides a wave of anti-American sentiment.
It is a wave that has swept leftist politicians into power across Latin America. And like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Tabaré Vásquez of Uruguay, Mr. López Obrador personifies the angry disappointment with Washington-backed promarket economic policies that have stabilized the economy for the rich but failed to lift up the poor. His rise to power would move that frustration to the United States' door.
In the interview, Mayor López Obrador rejected comparisons to leftist movements across the region. He said he considered himself a purely Mexican phenomenon, shaped by a devout Catholic mother, a devastating family tragedy and a poet who wrote about Mexico's beautiful landscapes and introduced him to this country's grimmest struggles.
At his core, the mayor said, he remains an underdog activist from the tropics, where politics can be a rough-and-tumble affair. But, he said, he has been a player in national politics for nearly a decade, having served as head of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party before becoming mayor in 2000.
He pointed to his record as mayor of this monster of a city, pulling out financial statements that showed the lowest debt increases in the last 20 years as proof that he is qualified to run the national economy. He pointed to the nearly one million people who marched on this city last month as a sign that a growing number of Mexicans think so too. "The mentality of the people has changed," he said. "They are willing to stand up for democracy. That's what we were betting on. And we bet right."
Indeed, the embattled mayor, known in Mexico - J.F.K.-like - as AMLO, defies easy labels. He holds daily news conferences at 6:30 a.m., but brushes off most substantive questions and has blocked enforcement of freedom of information laws.
He has been criticized by conservatives for spending lavishly on welfare for the elderly, a shelter for prostitutes too old to work and double-decker freeways to ease traffic. He rattled the left when he blocked laws that would have legalized gay unions, forged agreements with business tycoons to restore this city's historic center and brought former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York to help design zero-tolerance crime policies.
And in what even his closest aides considered a major blunder that alienated the middle class, he said the organizers of a citizens' march against crime were pawns in a right-wing conspiracy against him.
Like almost every other political leader in this country, Mr. López Obrador started out in the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which dominated the government for more than seven decades. His supporters point out that he agitated against corruption within that party, then abandoned it to help lead a leftist opposition movement that put Mexico on the road to greater democracy.
Political analysts said the mayor is an expression of the broad disappointment with President Vicente Fox, who has failed to deliver on his sweeping promises for reform; a nostalgia for the firm hand of the PRI; and a reluctance among people to surrender their dreams of change.
"It has been said that López Obrador writes his speeches with his left hand and governs with his right," said Héctor Zagal, co-author of a biography of the mayor. "He's a product of the old PRI, with all its flaws and virtues."
Manuel Camacho Solís, a federal legislator and the mayor's chief political strategist, said: "He is comfortable as a social leader, and he does it well, but he has had to work on learning to govern. To be president he needs to win people's respect through dialogue, not in conflict with them."
Mayor López Obrador did not disagree. "There is the impression that I am authoritarian," he said. "But social movements require strong leadership. This fight is very hard. And at times it hardens the heart, but not forever."
Clues about the mayor, named for his father, Andrés, and his mother, Manuela, are scattered across the southern state of Tabasco. He was born in a tiny town, called Tepetitan, which feels nothing like the city he governs today.
Children play ball in the middle of cornfields and scruffy fishermen like Felipe López González quote scripture from the New Testament as they explain how the average family lives close to this country's richest oil fields on less than $4 a day.
Poverty seemed a passing matter to the young Mr. López Obrador, something he heard about from the men and women who could not pay their tabs at his family's general store. Then, in 1969, that idyllic life was shattered when one of his younger brothers, José Ramón, was killed playing with a pistol when it fired.
Andrés Manuel, 15 at the time, watched it happen. Relatives said he had tried to get his brother to put the gun away.
In the interview, the mayor declined to talk about it or the speculation by some here that the trauma of that shooting gave his politics a messianic zeal. "It affected me and still affects me," he said.
Perhaps the experience that changed him most came years later in the Indian town of Tucta, which he helped raise from a swamp. He first laid eyes on the village in 1976 in the company of Carlos Pellicer Cámara, one of Mexico's most beloved poets.
It was a place that seemed lost in time. The Chontal Indians, descendants of the Maya, had no electricity or clean water. There were no schools or clinics. People lived in huts made from branches and leaves.
"Not only did they have the Chontales stuck out in the margins of society," Mr. López Obrador recalled, referring to government authorities, "they denied that the Chontales existed, even though they are the most intimate reality of Tabasco."
The Indians quickly became an intimate reality for Mr. López Obrador. He moved his wife and baby son into a shack in Tucta with dirt floors and a thatched roof, and - much as he has done in Mexico City - began a combination of welfare and public works programs to help meet people's basic needs and create jobs.
"He could have had a comfortable life with his family, but he brought them here to be with us," said Pedro Bernardo, 58, one of the beneficiaries of Mr. López Obrador's work in Tucta. "There are few people who could endure the blows of this life."
There were even tougher blows to come.
"My dream was to become the governor of Tabasco," Mr. López Obrador said, "because I wanted to change it." It was a dream that would elude him.
Mr. López Obrador abandoned the PRI and then set out to topple it in 1988 when the party refused to run him for mayor of the municipality of Macuspana.
Backed by a peasant political base that he commanded like a general, the firebrand politician ran twice for governor on leftist tickets and lost both times. The elections in 1994 were marred by allegations of corruption. And for several months, Mr. López Obrador and his civilian troops protested every way they could to make the state ungovernable.
Two years later he was at it again, leading thousands of supporters against more than 50 oil wells across the state to protest spills by the government-owned oil company that had contaminated rivers and farmland.
The protests caused the company to lose some $8.5 million in revenues in the first 12 days. Dozens of people were hurt and arrested as the police tried to clear a way to the wells.
In the interview last week, Mr. López Obrador took delight in his old war stories. The principles of those battles still guide him, he said, but his radical days are over.
"I'm a centrist now," he said, with a wry smile.
"When we started, the PRI dominated completely," he said. "Not even the leaves of the trees moved unless the PRI said so.
"A lot of time had to pass before people began to live their freedom. It was up to us to teach them not to be afraid.
"They are not afraid anymore."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
posted by Hyo Jeong "Sara" Kim
By GINGER THOMPSON
EXICO CITY, May 3 - He is mayor of the largest city in the hemisphere, and this country's latest political phenomenon.
He can summon tens of thousands into the streets at will. In a whirlwind three weeks he staged the biggest protest in Mexico's recent history and turned back a legal challenge from the Mexican president and Congress that threatened to end his political career.
Now Andrés Manuel López Obrador is considered the favorite to be elected president next year.
"What we saw last Sunday was proof that this is a new society," the mayor said during an interview last week, referring to the protest march, "that the traditional structures of power are not in control, not even with all their money and media."
Indeed, while Mr. López Obrador, a 51-year-old widower and father of three sons, has proven that he can motivate this country's vast underclass, what remains unclear is whether he will be able to keep pro-American businesspeople and the fragile middle class on his side.
He is better known for picking political fights than building bridges. And his left-leaning, hard-charging political style has many in the ruling elite and analysts abroad worried that Mexico could go the way of Venezuela, which is embroiled in a class war as President Hugo Chávez rides a wave of anti-American sentiment.
It is a wave that has swept leftist politicians into power across Latin America. And like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Tabaré Vásquez of Uruguay, Mr. López Obrador personifies the angry disappointment with Washington-backed promarket economic policies that have stabilized the economy for the rich but failed to lift up the poor. His rise to power would move that frustration to the United States' door.
In the interview, Mayor López Obrador rejected comparisons to leftist movements across the region. He said he considered himself a purely Mexican phenomenon, shaped by a devout Catholic mother, a devastating family tragedy and a poet who wrote about Mexico's beautiful landscapes and introduced him to this country's grimmest struggles.
At his core, the mayor said, he remains an underdog activist from the tropics, where politics can be a rough-and-tumble affair. But, he said, he has been a player in national politics for nearly a decade, having served as head of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party before becoming mayor in 2000.
He pointed to his record as mayor of this monster of a city, pulling out financial statements that showed the lowest debt increases in the last 20 years as proof that he is qualified to run the national economy. He pointed to the nearly one million people who marched on this city last month as a sign that a growing number of Mexicans think so too. "The mentality of the people has changed," he said. "They are willing to stand up for democracy. That's what we were betting on. And we bet right."
Indeed, the embattled mayor, known in Mexico - J.F.K.-like - as AMLO, defies easy labels. He holds daily news conferences at 6:30 a.m., but brushes off most substantive questions and has blocked enforcement of freedom of information laws.
He has been criticized by conservatives for spending lavishly on welfare for the elderly, a shelter for prostitutes too old to work and double-decker freeways to ease traffic. He rattled the left when he blocked laws that would have legalized gay unions, forged agreements with business tycoons to restore this city's historic center and brought former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York to help design zero-tolerance crime policies.
And in what even his closest aides considered a major blunder that alienated the middle class, he said the organizers of a citizens' march against crime were pawns in a right-wing conspiracy against him.
Like almost every other political leader in this country, Mr. López Obrador started out in the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which dominated the government for more than seven decades. His supporters point out that he agitated against corruption within that party, then abandoned it to help lead a leftist opposition movement that put Mexico on the road to greater democracy.
Political analysts said the mayor is an expression of the broad disappointment with President Vicente Fox, who has failed to deliver on his sweeping promises for reform; a nostalgia for the firm hand of the PRI; and a reluctance among people to surrender their dreams of change.
"It has been said that López Obrador writes his speeches with his left hand and governs with his right," said Héctor Zagal, co-author of a biography of the mayor. "He's a product of the old PRI, with all its flaws and virtues."
Manuel Camacho Solís, a federal legislator and the mayor's chief political strategist, said: "He is comfortable as a social leader, and he does it well, but he has had to work on learning to govern. To be president he needs to win people's respect through dialogue, not in conflict with them."
Mayor López Obrador did not disagree. "There is the impression that I am authoritarian," he said. "But social movements require strong leadership. This fight is very hard. And at times it hardens the heart, but not forever."
Clues about the mayor, named for his father, Andrés, and his mother, Manuela, are scattered across the southern state of Tabasco. He was born in a tiny town, called Tepetitan, which feels nothing like the city he governs today.
Children play ball in the middle of cornfields and scruffy fishermen like Felipe López González quote scripture from the New Testament as they explain how the average family lives close to this country's richest oil fields on less than $4 a day.
Poverty seemed a passing matter to the young Mr. López Obrador, something he heard about from the men and women who could not pay their tabs at his family's general store. Then, in 1969, that idyllic life was shattered when one of his younger brothers, José Ramón, was killed playing with a pistol when it fired.
Andrés Manuel, 15 at the time, watched it happen. Relatives said he had tried to get his brother to put the gun away.
In the interview, the mayor declined to talk about it or the speculation by some here that the trauma of that shooting gave his politics a messianic zeal. "It affected me and still affects me," he said.
Perhaps the experience that changed him most came years later in the Indian town of Tucta, which he helped raise from a swamp. He first laid eyes on the village in 1976 in the company of Carlos Pellicer Cámara, one of Mexico's most beloved poets.
It was a place that seemed lost in time. The Chontal Indians, descendants of the Maya, had no electricity or clean water. There were no schools or clinics. People lived in huts made from branches and leaves.
"Not only did they have the Chontales stuck out in the margins of society," Mr. López Obrador recalled, referring to government authorities, "they denied that the Chontales existed, even though they are the most intimate reality of Tabasco."
The Indians quickly became an intimate reality for Mr. López Obrador. He moved his wife and baby son into a shack in Tucta with dirt floors and a thatched roof, and - much as he has done in Mexico City - began a combination of welfare and public works programs to help meet people's basic needs and create jobs.
"He could have had a comfortable life with his family, but he brought them here to be with us," said Pedro Bernardo, 58, one of the beneficiaries of Mr. López Obrador's work in Tucta. "There are few people who could endure the blows of this life."
There were even tougher blows to come.
"My dream was to become the governor of Tabasco," Mr. López Obrador said, "because I wanted to change it." It was a dream that would elude him.
Mr. López Obrador abandoned the PRI and then set out to topple it in 1988 when the party refused to run him for mayor of the municipality of Macuspana.
Backed by a peasant political base that he commanded like a general, the firebrand politician ran twice for governor on leftist tickets and lost both times. The elections in 1994 were marred by allegations of corruption. And for several months, Mr. López Obrador and his civilian troops protested every way they could to make the state ungovernable.
Two years later he was at it again, leading thousands of supporters against more than 50 oil wells across the state to protest spills by the government-owned oil company that had contaminated rivers and farmland.
The protests caused the company to lose some $8.5 million in revenues in the first 12 days. Dozens of people were hurt and arrested as the police tried to clear a way to the wells.
In the interview last week, Mr. López Obrador took delight in his old war stories. The principles of those battles still guide him, he said, but his radical days are over.
"I'm a centrist now," he said, with a wry smile.
"When we started, the PRI dominated completely," he said. "Not even the leaves of the trees moved unless the PRI said so.
"A lot of time had to pass before people began to live their freedom. It was up to us to teach them not to be afraid.
"They are not afraid anymore."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
posted by Hyo Jeong "Sara" Kim
Monday, March 17, 2008
Seeking Justice in Guatemala
Seeking justice in Guatemala
By Piers Scholfield
BBC News, Guatemala City
"A paradise for organised crime," is how the Dutch ambassador recently described Guatemala.
Teunis Kamper made the comment at a news conference where he handed over a cheque for some $2.7m (£1.35m) to help fund the United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).
Carlos Castresana is the Spanish prosecutor appointed by UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon to head the commission and he has a big job ahead of him.
There were some 6,000 murders in Guatemala in 2007, of which only about 100 made it to court.
This near-total absence of justice can be seen largely as a hangover from Guatemala's long civil war that ended only 12 years ago.
Restoring trust
Mr Castresana's team is already up and running and aims to have a full contingent of 150 international and Guatemalan investigators in place by July.
The main objective as Mr Castresana sees it is to start the process of restoring trust in institutions such as the police and judiciary.
These are beset by corruption and perceived by many to be not only involved, but often to be instrumental, in many of the killings.
One of the key tasks of the commission is to identify the existence of illegal security groups and their possible links to the state.
This is probably the most difficult part of the mandate, says Mr Castresana.
"We must work with the institutions and the institutions are obviously infiltrated, so it's very easy for us to be infiltrated at the same time," he says.
"But it is part of the challenge. We need to work with these institutions even if they are infiltrated, even if they are corrupted, and try to make them useful for the citizens."
Bus drivers
Carlos Castresana is no stranger to high-profile cases, which have included indictments against the late Chilean leader General Augusto Pinochet and a network of Italian Mafia leaders.
In Guatemala, he has been prominent in the media, a sign of the importance the country is attaching to the CICIG.
But Mr Castresana says the commission cannot be a magic solution.
"Reform of the institutions is not our mandate because we have neither the personal resources nor the time," he says. "What we can do is create small units inside the bodies to be the beginning of change.
"The change that Guatemala needs can only be made by Guatemalans themselves."
The CICIG has an initial two-year mandate, which can be renewed if both sides are in favour.
"I hope we're going to take care of it so we can thank CICIG and they can go to another country, but we'll keep them as long as we need them. We're going to learn from them and hopefully in a short period of time we can do it ourselves," says Vice President Rafael Espada.
So far, Mr Castresana and his team have agreed to take on two investigations suggested by the government.
One relates to the killing of women, which is all too common in Guatemala. Mr Castresana is confident of some success here.
"If you are able to put together to work all the social, health and educational services, you can prevent most cases of gender violence," he says.
The second investigation comes from a direct appeal by President Alvaro Colom for help with the case of a dozen murdered bus drivers.
They were all killed in Guatemala City in the space of two days in early February.
The killings caused chaos in the sprawling capital and most people are convinced it was a deliberate attempt to destabilise the new government, which took office in January.
"They were very intelligent people with a good organisation from the military point of view. I'm not saying they're military people, but they have a well organised system which makes them very effective and difficult to get at," Mr Espada said.
'Too close'
Mr Castresana had no hesitation in taking on this case as it will clearly help the CICIG fulfil one of its main investigating aims.
But analysts say the commission's ability to examine these groups might already have been compromised.
Frank LaRue is a leading human rights lawyer and, as human rights commissioner in the previous government, helped set up the commission.
He says some of those who should be investigated are already too close to government.
"This government has remilitarised many of the civilian structures that should remain civilian... and they have chosen military people with questionable records in terms of corruption or connections to organised crime," he says.
"We're now living a process of remilitarisation which will make CICIG's job more difficult."
Mr Espada rejects this with a swipe at the previous government.
"They didn't have any military intelligence at all so they were extremely open to a lot of errors. The military people that are working with us are very good military people with very clean records," he says.
Guatemala is not the only country facing high levels of impunity.
CICIG could serve as a model for other countries in the region, many with weak institutions, as well as post-conflict nations in Africa or the Middle East.
As for Guatemala, MrCastresana is unsure about the immediate future.
"We're beginning almost from zero so every result we can get will be an improvement," he says.
So for now the world looks on to see what impact Carlos Castresana and his team can have.
Posted by April Griffith, March 17, 2008
By Piers Scholfield
BBC News, Guatemala City
"A paradise for organised crime," is how the Dutch ambassador recently described Guatemala.
Teunis Kamper made the comment at a news conference where he handed over a cheque for some $2.7m (£1.35m) to help fund the United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).
Carlos Castresana is the Spanish prosecutor appointed by UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon to head the commission and he has a big job ahead of him.
There were some 6,000 murders in Guatemala in 2007, of which only about 100 made it to court.
This near-total absence of justice can be seen largely as a hangover from Guatemala's long civil war that ended only 12 years ago.
Restoring trust
Mr Castresana's team is already up and running and aims to have a full contingent of 150 international and Guatemalan investigators in place by July.
The main objective as Mr Castresana sees it is to start the process of restoring trust in institutions such as the police and judiciary.
These are beset by corruption and perceived by many to be not only involved, but often to be instrumental, in many of the killings.
One of the key tasks of the commission is to identify the existence of illegal security groups and their possible links to the state.
This is probably the most difficult part of the mandate, says Mr Castresana.
"We must work with the institutions and the institutions are obviously infiltrated, so it's very easy for us to be infiltrated at the same time," he says.
"But it is part of the challenge. We need to work with these institutions even if they are infiltrated, even if they are corrupted, and try to make them useful for the citizens."
Bus drivers
Carlos Castresana is no stranger to high-profile cases, which have included indictments against the late Chilean leader General Augusto Pinochet and a network of Italian Mafia leaders.
In Guatemala, he has been prominent in the media, a sign of the importance the country is attaching to the CICIG.
But Mr Castresana says the commission cannot be a magic solution.
"Reform of the institutions is not our mandate because we have neither the personal resources nor the time," he says. "What we can do is create small units inside the bodies to be the beginning of change.
"The change that Guatemala needs can only be made by Guatemalans themselves."
The CICIG has an initial two-year mandate, which can be renewed if both sides are in favour.
"I hope we're going to take care of it so we can thank CICIG and they can go to another country, but we'll keep them as long as we need them. We're going to learn from them and hopefully in a short period of time we can do it ourselves," says Vice President Rafael Espada.
So far, Mr Castresana and his team have agreed to take on two investigations suggested by the government.
One relates to the killing of women, which is all too common in Guatemala. Mr Castresana is confident of some success here.
"If you are able to put together to work all the social, health and educational services, you can prevent most cases of gender violence," he says.
The second investigation comes from a direct appeal by President Alvaro Colom for help with the case of a dozen murdered bus drivers.
They were all killed in Guatemala City in the space of two days in early February.
The killings caused chaos in the sprawling capital and most people are convinced it was a deliberate attempt to destabilise the new government, which took office in January.
"They were very intelligent people with a good organisation from the military point of view. I'm not saying they're military people, but they have a well organised system which makes them very effective and difficult to get at," Mr Espada said.
'Too close'
Mr Castresana had no hesitation in taking on this case as it will clearly help the CICIG fulfil one of its main investigating aims.
But analysts say the commission's ability to examine these groups might already have been compromised.
Frank LaRue is a leading human rights lawyer and, as human rights commissioner in the previous government, helped set up the commission.
He says some of those who should be investigated are already too close to government.
"This government has remilitarised many of the civilian structures that should remain civilian... and they have chosen military people with questionable records in terms of corruption or connections to organised crime," he says.
"We're now living a process of remilitarisation which will make CICIG's job more difficult."
Mr Espada rejects this with a swipe at the previous government.
"They didn't have any military intelligence at all so they were extremely open to a lot of errors. The military people that are working with us are very good military people with very clean records," he says.
Guatemala is not the only country facing high levels of impunity.
CICIG could serve as a model for other countries in the region, many with weak institutions, as well as post-conflict nations in Africa or the Middle East.
As for Guatemala, MrCastresana is unsure about the immediate future.
"We're beginning almost from zero so every result we can get will be an improvement," he says.
So for now the world looks on to see what impact Carlos Castresana and his team can have.
Posted by April Griffith, March 17, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The International Reach of the Mara Salvatrucha by Mandalit del Barco
Check out this link to listen to the story on npr
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4539688
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4539688
Monday, March 10, 2008
The Case for CAFTA Consolidating CEntral America's Freedom Revolution
by Daniel Griswold and Daniel Ikenson
Executive Summary
The next major trade agreement likely to come before Congress will be the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The agreement would eliminate almost all trade barriers between the United States, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and also the Dominican Republic.
If approved, CAFTA would establish free trade with nearby countries that together make up the United States' 13th-largest trading partner and second-largest export market in Latin America, behind only Mexico. Upon implementation, goods in 98 percent of the product categories from which the CAFTA countries could export to the United States would enter duty-free. For U.S. companies, CAFTA would offer guaranteed reciprocal access for our most competitive exports, including agricultural products.
Two glaring exceptions to free trade in the agreement are sugar and apparel. CAFTA grudgingly expands the existing quota on sugar imports from the region, denying U.S. consumers and sugar-using industries the benefits of lower prices. Its apparel provisions contain restrictive "rules of origin" requiring use of U.S.-made textiles, which will add to the cost of production in the region and ultimately undermine demand for U.S. inputs. Nonetheless, CAFTA marks a major step toward liberalizing trade.
CAFTA would enhance important U.S. foreign policy goals by promoting freedom and democracy in a region that has been troubled in the recent past by wars and political oppression. Today, all six CAFTA partners are democracies pursuing political, economic, and trade reforms.
Objections that the agreement does not adequately protect environmental and labor standards are unwarranted. All six countries have adopted laws consistent with core labor standards as established through the International Labor Organization. All six have made measurable progress on a range of social indicators. Promoting trade and development through CAFTA would further that progress.
To check out the rest of the Trade Briefing Paper go to http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/briefs/tbp-021.pdf
Executive Summary
The next major trade agreement likely to come before Congress will be the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The agreement would eliminate almost all trade barriers between the United States, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and also the Dominican Republic.
If approved, CAFTA would establish free trade with nearby countries that together make up the United States' 13th-largest trading partner and second-largest export market in Latin America, behind only Mexico. Upon implementation, goods in 98 percent of the product categories from which the CAFTA countries could export to the United States would enter duty-free. For U.S. companies, CAFTA would offer guaranteed reciprocal access for our most competitive exports, including agricultural products.
Two glaring exceptions to free trade in the agreement are sugar and apparel. CAFTA grudgingly expands the existing quota on sugar imports from the region, denying U.S. consumers and sugar-using industries the benefits of lower prices. Its apparel provisions contain restrictive "rules of origin" requiring use of U.S.-made textiles, which will add to the cost of production in the region and ultimately undermine demand for U.S. inputs. Nonetheless, CAFTA marks a major step toward liberalizing trade.
CAFTA would enhance important U.S. foreign policy goals by promoting freedom and democracy in a region that has been troubled in the recent past by wars and political oppression. Today, all six CAFTA partners are democracies pursuing political, economic, and trade reforms.
Objections that the agreement does not adequately protect environmental and labor standards are unwarranted. All six countries have adopted laws consistent with core labor standards as established through the International Labor Organization. All six have made measurable progress on a range of social indicators. Promoting trade and development through CAFTA would further that progress.
To check out the rest of the Trade Briefing Paper go to http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/briefs/tbp-021.pdf
Neoliberalism, the global elite, and the Guatemalan transition: A critical macrosocial analysis by Robinson, William I
Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs Winter 2000
The trajectory of social change in Central America and Latin America in recent decades and, beyond that, the transformations in the global system are the "big picture" that puts into a larger focus issues of democratization and development in Guatemala. Recent change in Guatemala is part of a complex transition that began in Central America in the 1960s and will continue into the twenty-first century. This process involves the region's ongoing, gradual, highly conflictive, and contradictory entrance into the emergent global economy and society.
Central America is an important site of transnational processes, particularly the unfolding of a hegemonic, transnational agenda of neoliberalism and polyarchy. Transnational processes are defined as the economic and concomitant social, political, and cultural changes associated with incorporation into global economy and society. This essay reassesses the Central American conflict in light of these processes, with a synopsis of the globalization process in each country and a deeper examination of Guatemala.
The central argument here is that the transnational model of society in the Isthmus is inherently unstable and indicates contradictions internal to global capitalism, including social polarization between the rich and the poor, the loss of nation-state autonomy and regulatory power, and the deterioration of the social fabric in civil society, accompanied by crises of authority and state legitimacy. The Guatemalan elite's resistance to such reforms as changes in the tax system creates the image of the transnational project as progressive and obscures the essential polarizing and pauperizing consequences of neoliberalism. The constraints of the exclusionary socioeconomic system undermine efforts to open up the political system as contemplated in the 1996 Guatemalan peace accord. Authentic democratization requires a radical redistribution of wealth and power toward the poor majority; but the peace accord ratifies existing property relations and rules out such a redistribution.
GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND THE AGENDA OF THE TRANSNATIONAL ELITE
Globalization entails the transition from the nation-state phase of capitalism to a qualitatively new transnational phase.' Since 1492, the world has been linked into a single social system by trade and financial flows in an integrated international market. But from the late 1960s on-and accelerating now as the twenty-first century opens-this world economy is giving way to a new global economy. In this global economy, nations are no longer linked by external flows and relations but integrated organically through the globalization of the production process itself, along with the integration of the whole social, political, juridical, and cultural superstructure. The emergence of a truly global economy brings with it the material basis for the emergence of a single global society, including the transnationalization of civil society, of political processes, and of cultural life.
The global mobility of capital has allowed for the decentralization and functional integration around the world of vast chains of production and distribution, the instantaneous movement of values, and the unprecedented concentration and centralization of worldwide economic management, control, and decisionmaking power in transnational capital. Global capitalism is organized in a set of increasingly supranational institutions. These institutions include the transnational corporations that own and manage the world's resources and appropriate the wealth produced by humanity; the international financial agencies (IFIs), such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that impose the conditions necessary for global capital accumulation to take place; the states of the North and their junior counterparts of the South, which create the global and local political, administrative, and legal environment that allow the system to function; and the formal and informal transnational elite forums, such as the Group of Seven, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Economic Forum, that develop strategies to maintain and reproduce the system and supervise its overall operation.
The agent of the global economy is a new transnational elite. This group now controls global decisionmaking and increasingly monopolizes power in the global society. It comprises the owners and managers of the transnational corporations and also the bureaucrats, cadres, and technicians who administer the IFIs, the North and South state bureaucracies, and the transnational forums. Its membership includes the politicians and charismatic figures of public life and the mass media, along with select organic intellectuals, who provide ideological legitimacy and technical solutions for this new global order.
Below this transnational elite in the global hierarchy is a small and shrinking layer of middle classes, who exercise very little real power but who-pacified with mass consumption-form a fragile buffer between the transnational elite and the world's poor majority. Globalization dramatically alters the balance of forces among classes and social groups in each nation, at a level of the global system farther from popular majorities and closer to transnational capital and its representatives. National states increasingly respond to the interests of transnationalized fractions of locally dominant groups.
The transnational elite's program, in broad strokes, is to create the conditions most propitious to the unfettered functioning of global capitalism. In promoting this program, this new global elite has been pursuing a "transnational agenda," involving concomitant economic and political components, in every region of the world since the mid-1980s (Robinson 1996a, b, c, 1997). The economic component is neoliberalism, a model that seeks to achieve the conditions in each country and region for the mobility and free operation of capital. The neoliberal structural adjustment programs sweeping Latin America and the South in general seek macroeconomic stability as an essential requisite for the activity of transnational capital. This model aims to harmonize a wide range of fiscal, monetary, industrial, and commercial policies among many nations as a requirement for fully mobile transnational capital to function simultaneously, and often instantaneously, among numerous national borders.
In the neoliberal model, stabilization, or the package of fiscal, monetary, exchange, and related measures intended to achieve macroeconomic stability, is followed by "structural adjustment," which includes several components: liberalization of trade and finances, which opens the economy to the world market; deregulation, which removes the state from economic decisionmaking (but not from activities that service capital); and privatization of formerly public spheres that could hamper capital accumulation if criteria of public interest over private profit are left operative. This model thus generates the overall conditions for the profitable ("efficient") renewal of capital accumulation through new, globalized circuits, and, along with them, the conditions for social reproduction in the age of globalization. Neoliberal restructuring often results in an increase in poverty and inequality in the adjusted country as wealth is redistributed upward and shifted from the domestic market to the external sector linked to the global economy (Green 1995; Overbeek 1993; Robinson 1999). The unprecedented growth of inequalities worldwide under globalization, along with the emergence of new social hierarchies and cleavages around these inequalities (see, among others, UNDP various years; Korten 1996; Bradshaw and Wallace 1996), is leading to a new global social apartheid and worldwide polarization.
The political component of the project is the promotion of "democracy," or what is more accurately called polyarchy, a system in which a small group actually rules and the majority's participation in decision-- making is confined to choosing among competing elites in tightly controlled electoral processes. This type of "low-intensity democracy" does not involve power (craters) of the people (demos), much less an end to elite rule or to substantive inequality. The crisis of elite rule that developed throughout the Third World in the 1970s and 1980s in the context of globalization was resolved through transitions to polyarchies.
What transpired in these contested transitions was an effort by transnationally dominant groups to reconstitute hegemony through a change in the mode of political domination, from the coercive systems of social control exercised by authoritarian and dictatorial regimes to more consensually based systems of the new polyarchies. At stake was the type of social order-the emergent global capitalist order or some popular alternative-that would emerge in the wake of authoritarianism. The masses pushed for a deeper popular democratization while emergent transnationalized elites-backed by the structural power of the global economy and the inordinate political and ideological influence it brings, and often aided by direct U.S. political and military intervention-gained hegemony over democratization movements and steered the breakup of authoritarianism into polyarchic outcomes.
The transnational elite is now attempting to consolidate fragile polyarchic systems as the political counterpart to neoliberalism. Interaction and economic integration on a world scale are obstructed by authoritarian or dictatorial political arrangements, which cannot manage the expansion of social intercourse associated with the global economy. With its mechanisms for intraelite compromise and accommodation and for hegemonic incorporation of popular majorities, polyarchy is better equipped to legitimate the political authority of dominant groups and to achieve the political stability necessary for global capitalism to operate. The "democratic consensus" in the new world order is a consensus among an increasingly cohesive global elite on the type of political system most propitious to the reproduction of social order in the new global environment.
In Latin America, the transitions from authoritarianism to polyarchy gave functionaries from the IFIs, donor governments, corporate groups, and representatives of transnationalized fractions of the local elite the transnational elites the opportunity to reorganize state institutions and create a more favorable institutional framework for deepening the neoliberal adjustment. With few exceptions, Latin America's new polyarchic regimes, staffed by state managers (the new "modernizers" and "technocrats"), have pursued profound neoliberal transformation. The transnational elite has demonstrated a remarkable ability to wield the structural power of transnational capital over individual countries like a sledgehammer against popular grassroots movements for social change. Indeed, it is global capitalism's power to impose discipline through the market that (usually) obviates the all-pervasive coercive forms of political authority exercised by authoritarian regimes.
TRANSNATIONAL PROCESSES IN CENTRAL AMERICA
The underlying macrostructural dynamic in individual nations and regions over the past few decades has been integration into emergent global society. This has involved the breakup of national economic, political, and social systems, reciprocal to the breakup of the preglobalization, nation-state-based world order. This process of integration into changing world structures takes place through what elsewhere I have termed transnational processes (Robinson 1997, 1998b). Transnational processes are the economic and concomitant social, political, and cultural changes associated with the transition to global capitalism. Transnational processes in Central America should be seen as changes specific to the region that are linked to broader changes in the global system.
One type of change is that productive structures are reorganized, in tandem with the reorganization of global production. Each national economy is rearticulated to the global economy as new economic activities linked to globalization come to dominate and as each region acquires a new profile in the global system. There is also a complete class restructuring. Domestic classes tend to become globalized, preglobalization classes such as peasantries and artisans tend to disappear, and new classes and class fractions linked to the global economy emerge and become dominant. The transnational agenda of neoliberalism and polyarchy take hold as the hegemonic project, under the guidance of transnationalized fractions of local elites. Local political systems and civil societies become transnationalized, and states become integrated externally into supranational institutions and forums, which gradually assume functions that corresponded to the nation-state before globalization. A "global culture" of hyperindividualism, competition, and consumerism eclipses nationalist and developmental ideologies.
We see all these changes in Central America, and more broadly throughout Latin America, as transnational processes have taken hold over the past two decades. Facilitated by the neoliberal opening to the global economy and the export-led development (ELD) strategy, maquiladora production (particularly of garments), tourism, nontraditional agricultural exports, and remittances from emigrant workers have risen dramatically in importance and are coming to eclipse the traditional agroexport model as the most dynamic economic sectors linking Central America to globalized circuits of production and distribution (Robinson 1998). The Central American peasantry, artisans, national industrial, and other preglobalization classes have shown signs of gradual disintegration, and three principal groups have come to the fore: transnationalized fractions of the bourgeoisie tied to the new economic activities, new urban and rural working classes, and a new class of supernumeraries, or superfluous labor pools. (A huge portion of the last has migrated to the United States, where it constitutes a denationalized immigrant labor pool.)
The old authoritarian regimes have crumbled through transitions to polyarchy, and leftist movements that in the 1980s posed an antisystemic alternative to global integration have been defeated or transformed. In each Central American country, a transnationalized "technocratic" or New Right fraction has gained hegemony within the dominant classes. This fraction is pushing the transnational agenda of neoliberalism and the consolidation of polyarchies through diverse institutions, including states, political parties, and other organs of civil society.
Neoliberal structuring has resulted in a massive transfer of resources from the public to the private sphere and, within the private sphere, from the domestic to the external sector. The change in the model of accumulation has thus involved a concomitant change from the "developmentalist state" of the national model to the "neoliberal state" of the transnational model.
The five Central American states have moved gradually toward supranational integration. Politically, this integration is taking place through forums such as the Central American Integration System (SICA), the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), regular presidential summits, and regionwide ministerial meetings. Economically, it includes the negotiation of a new free trade zone based on collective integration into the North American Free Trade Agreement. If the Central American Common Market (CACM) was a form of "inward" integration, intended to create a regional market for multinational (largely U.SJ capital to take advantage of economies of scale, the more recent sets of international agreements represent an "outward" integration, aimed at creating a single Central American field for the unfettered operation of transnational capital.
The IFIs, various agencies of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and other transnational actors, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and international nongovernmental organizations (often linked to the national states of core countries), have increasingly assumed the functions of states through the design and imposition of economic policies, management of peace accords, sponsorship of institution building, and other activities. In this process, each Central American state has been penetrated by two new social forces, one from "within" and the other from "outside." From within, transnationalized fractions of dominant groups vie for and gain control over local states, particularly over key ministries tying the country to the global economy and society, such as the ministries of foreign affairs, finance, economic development, and central banks. From outside, some of the same transnational actors representing an emergent transnationalized state apparatus penetrate local states, form liaisons with transnationalized fractions therein, and help design and guide local policies.
A REASSESSMENT OF THE CENTRAL AMERICAN CONFLICT
These vast and open-ended transformations should be seen as the evolving outcome to the struggle among social forces in Central America as collective agents in dialectical interaction with changes in the global system.' In broad terms, three social forces, representing three distinct projects for the region, contended during the upheavals of the 1960s to 1990s. The landed oligarchies and dominant groups tied to the traditional agroexport model sought to sustain and reproduce the old model of capital accumulation and the particular set of social privileges and relations of domination based on authoritarian political systems.3 As the "autumn of the oligarchs" approached, the popular sectors and the mass revolutionary movements sought radical reforms, such as mass land redistribution, along with farther-reaching revolutionary and socialist-oriented alternatives that would have deeply undermined the region's class structure, upset relations of domination, and redistributed power and resources toward popular majorities.
As the regional conflict unfolded in the 1970s and 1980s, it looked on the surface like a bipolar contest between the old oligarchies and the popular revolutionary movements. In reality, however, globalizing dynamics had begun to transform local social forces. A "New Right" gradually cohered in the 1980s, in fits and bouts, into local transnationalized fractions of dominant groups and acquired its own political protagonism.4 Its project was to advance the agenda of the transnational elite. This transnational fraction came into being not from outside the traditional oligarchy but from within, from the same family networks. Its prospects for accumulating wealth and privilege, however, were linked less to restoring the traditional agroexports and industries under pre1980s social relations than to converting the region into a new export platform. It sought to submit backward oligarchic property relations to a capitalist modernization through a program of neoliberal restructuring and to a new "competitive" insertion into the emerging global economy. This New Right project sought to modernize the state and society with no fundamental deconcentration of property and wealth, nor with any class redistribution of political and economic power.
The New Right also promoted, together with the United States, transitions from authoritarian to so-called democratic political systems. The immediate aim was to preempt the movements for farther-reaching popular democratization through immediate reforms, such as the replacement of military by civilian personnel and controlled elections. But beyond this conjunctural consideration, the insertion of the region into global capitalism would require a political system that could promise more lasting social stability through consensual modes of social control rather than the old oligarchic dictatorships. This involved demilitarization, peace negotiations, the institutionalization of procedurally correct electoral processes, states with a functional separation of powers, and so on.
The persistence of an oligarchic political structure, combined with rapid capitalist development, sparked the revolutionary upheavals by the late 1970s. In the 1980s, the revolutionary movements succeeded in momentarily gathering disparite popular social forces into a movement that broke the hegemony of the landed oligarchy, wealthy industrialists, and financial groups that had come into existence with the CAM. The popular social forces, however, could not impose and stabilize a radical redistributive and socialist-oriented reconstruction of the region. One reason was massive U.S. intervention; a second was the revolutionary movement's own contradictions and weaknesses in the context of a changing world order. The latter included an inability to agree on tactics and strategies of the struggle and, more significant, a chronic disunity over the terms of the reconstruction (reflecting, in part, the complexity and the diverse, even antagonistic interests that made up the popular forces). These factors undercut the consolidation of a new, revolutionary bloc. At the structural level, the growing power of transnational capital and the world market to impose discipline on antisystemic movements made the revolutionary project inviable.
The third reason for the failure of the popular movements' plans for reconstruction was the changing composition of the dominant classes, their socioeconomic articulation, and their political-ideological project. The emergence of the neoliberal New Right in the 1980s in each of the Central American countries was partly a result of that very revolutionary upsurge, which altered the dominant power blocs in each country. It was also partly a reflection of a transnational elite that emerged as both a political and an economic protagonist.
These three factors cannot be separated; they are different dimensions of the same globalizing process. It was the threat of revolution from the popular classes that led to U.S. intervention. From the mid1980s on, U.S. policymakers began to redefine, in ad hoc fashion, the objective of interventionism, from a military defeat of revolutionary forces through counterinsurgency to a more thorough political and economic restructuring of the region and its social forces via the link to emergent global structures (Robinson 1996c, esp. chaps. 1, 2, 1996b). This included a shift to "democracy promotion" as a means to neutralize the revolutionary threat through incorporation. The changes in U.S. strategy helped accelerate the articulation of alternative political-ideological discourse and projects among sectors of the dominant groups that would gradually cohere into the New Right elite. The transnational nuclei of the local elite vied for, and achieved, hegemony over the elite as a whole in the 1980s, and went on in the 1990s to assume state power and to attempt to implement the program of global capitalism in the region.
Political regime change in every country except Costa Rica has been one aspect of a broader shift in the nature of political authority and the mode of social control. The recomposition of the capitalist order has involved a new social structure, based on changes in the economy, state, regime, social, and political system.
This analysis runs contrary to conventional thinking, according to which the old oligarchies, by the end of the 1980s, had virtually disappeared, but neither the popular forces nor their adversaries, the newly dominant groups in Central America together with the United States, could prevail. According to this view, the struggle had reached a stalemate that created the conditions for a historic compromise between different class and social forces in favor of a mutual accommodation. Negotiations and peace settlements led to a broad consensus that shifted the region's struggle from the military to the political-civic arena. This shift, in turn, was to be framed by regionwide processes of democratization and demilitarization. Competition between different social projects would now take place through elections and peaceful mobilization.
This writer would argue, in contrast, that the revolutionary upheavals ended not in stalemate and compromise but in the conditional defeat of the broad popular sectors in Central America and the conditional victory of the newly dominant groups. The popular majority was conditionally defeated in what it set about to do-fundamentally alter the social order in its favor. The dominant groups secured control of the project of global capitalism, but have been unable to stabilize that project and achieve its hegemony, in the Gramscian sense.
This outcome was formalized in the internationally sponsored peace negotiations of the late 1980s and early 1990s, followed by diverse concertacion and "reconciliation" forums. These meetings transferred social contradictions from the military to the political terrain and hammered out fragile, temporary pacts, but did not resolve the social contradictions that gave rise to the upheaval.
SYNOPSIS OF CHANGE IN EACH COUNTRY
In Nicaragua, the Sandinista triumph of 1979 constituted the seizure of state power in one country by a revolutionary movement and an effort to implement the popular project. The overthrow of the Somocista dictatorship destroyed the traditional oligarchy. But the structural constraints of globalization and the direct power of the U.S. state combined to make unworkable an alternative to polyarchy and global capitalism.
Modernizing capitalist fractions had been coalescing since the mid-1960s and, in opposition to Somoza, had linked with the Sandinistas in 1970s class alliances. These fractions stayed inside Nicaragua following the revolution and retained their links to the international capitalist market. They gradually gained structural strength and political importance in the 1980s, as they increasingly replaced the state as the principal intermediaries between Nicaragua and world markets and developed ties to the emergent U.S.-led transnational elite. In highly simplified terms, a transnationalized fraction took over key institutions of the state following the 1990s elections, even as much of the state, and society at large, was in dispute after 1990. This embryonic transnational nucleus pursued the program of reinserting Nicaragua into the global economy and a far-reaching neoliberal restructuring.
In El Salvador, a massive popular movement burgeoned in the 1970s, and the guerrilla movement snowballed into a full civil war by the early 1980s. While the revolutionary forces eventually threatened state power, the U.S.-led counterinsurgency staved off a triumph similar to that which had taken place in Nicaragua. Behind the highly visible battle between the revolutionary armed movement and the U.S.-supported dominant groups, however, lay a more significant process: the reorganization of the Salvadoran state and economy in conjunction with movement at the level of the global economy, a reconfiguration of the dominant groups, and the emergence of a lucid New Right fraction within the ruling party itself, the Nationalist Revolutionary Alliance (ARENA).
The transnationalized fraction gained control over the ARENA party-which, ironically, had first been formed by the most retrograde elements of the oligarchy-and control of the state with the election of Alfredo Cristiani in 1988. The insurgency, combined with changes in the dominant project itself, shattered the old oligarchy and its project. The insurgent fraction was able to gain hegemony over the elite and over the transition as a whole and to implement sweeping neoliberal transformation after 1988.
In Honduras, both the subordinate and the dominant classes were historically the least developed in Central America. The chaotic disequilibrium among internal social forces from early twentieth century into the 1970s created fertile ground for an unstable string of civilian-military regimes responding to competing pressures of a small landed oligarchy, midsized ranchers, bureaucratic elites, and mass peasant and worker mobilizations. The weakness of Honduran social forces and the state allowed foreign companies to dominate the country, making Honduras the quintessential "banana republic."
A transnational fraction began to cohere in the 1980s in consonance with the virtual U.S. occupation of the country as a staging ground for regional counterinsurgency, U.S. sponsorship of economic development and restructuring programs, and a transition to polyarchy. This fraction gained representation in the National Party through Rafael Callejas, who won the 1989 elections and proceeded with sweeping neoliberal reform, a process continued and deepened by the subsequent Liberal Party government.
In Costa Rica, a very different path of twentieth-century development did not deter the outcome in the 1980s and 1990s of integration into the global economy under terms similar to those of the region as a whole. The hegemony of the landed oligarchy was broken in the 1948 civil war and replaced by an alliance of emergent industrial, commercial, and financial capitalists. This united and relatively modernized dominant class incorporated the peasantry and working classes into a stable hegemonic bloc and established a functioning polyarchic political system. Under the model of import substitution industrialization (ISI) and agroexport expansion, with an important redistributive component and significant levels of social welfare spending, Costa Rica experienced development well beyond that of its neighbors.
By the late 1970s, however, this model of dependent capitalist development had become exhausted. The financial crisis of 1981 gave impetus to a gradual restructuring throughout the 1980s and 1990s, along with the reinsertion of the country's productive apparatus into the emergent global economy. Under close AID tutelage, successive governments oversaw liberalization, austerity, deregulation, privatization, and the development of a ELD model that began to replace the old ISI model. Socioeconomic restructuring generated new entrepreneurial groups within both parties of the elite, the National Liberation Party (PLN) and the Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC).
And finally we arrive at Guatemala, which we can now assess in comparative and historical perspective. The traditional agroexport oligarchy was the most deeply entrenched, and it controlled the state-- which was administered directly by the military for much of the 1980s; a transnationalized fraction was the weakest. As in El Salvador, the U.S.-supported Christian Democratic Party, which came to government in the 1980s as part of broader counterinsurgency efforts, was intended to defuse the popular movement with reforms and lead visible transitions to (largely dysfunctional) polyarchy. But the Christian Democratic alternatives were not meant to carry the transnational elite project in the larger scheme of things. With the introduction and expansion of new economic activities in the 1980s-including a powerful new financial sector tied to international banking; incipient export-oriented industry, such as maquila textile production; nontraditional agricultural exports promoted by the IFIs; and new commercial groups-a transnationalized fraction of the elite assumed its own profile and clashed with the old state-protected oligarchy over fiscal, tax, liberalization, and related policies.
This tiny and poorly organized fraction articulated, in the early 1990s, a coherent program for economic and political modernization attuned to the transnational elite agenda, as epitomized, for example, in the policy proposals that flowed out of the influential USAID-funded Association for Research and Social Studies (ASIES). Representatives of this transnationalized fraction, after a false start with the election of Jorge Serrano in 1990, assumed the reins of the government with the electoral triumph in 1994 of the National Action Party (PAN), whose leadership included professionals, administrators, and technocrats schooled in neoliberal economics and a modernizing outlook.
Unlike El Salvador, where the insurgency actually came to dispute state power and constitute a dual power, the Guatemalan insurgency did not threaten the state. But the movement could continue an indefinite insurgency that would make it impossible ever to pacify the countryside and establish the stability that transnational capital required for the country and the region as a whole. The subsequent New Year's Eve 1996 peace accords set the basis for consolidating the transnational elite project for Guatemala. In 1997, the PAN government committed itself to deepening and consolidating a long-term program of neoliberal transformation first launched in 1989 with little success.
The relative strength of the oligarchy and underdevelopment of the transnationalized fraction in the Guatemalan case partly accounts for the tardiness of the transnational project and the severe difficulties of its implementation. The counterrevolution of 1954 and the "counterinsurgency state" that followed gave the oligarchy an internal cohesion that allowed it to resist change in the 1980s (see Jonas 1991).
In comparative perspective, the particular constellation of social forces and historical events in the other Central American countries generated conditions relatively more responsive to the transnational project than those in Guatemala. The old oligarchy was crushed in Nicaragua in 1979, displaced in Costa Rica in 1948, and transformed in Honduras by U.S. intervention and regional dynamics. In El Salvador, U.S. and transnational actors promoted tax, land, and other reforms as a component of the counterinsurgency program-in the process, weakening the old oligarchy and strengthening a transnational fraction-in response to the strength of the revolutionary movement. Guatemala's counterinsurgency rested on postponing any reform; for example, the IFIs did not impose conditionality on Guatemala (Jonas 1991, 81, 88). Counterinsurgency was midwife to the transnational project in El Salvador and an obstacle in Guatemala.
GUATEMALA'S PROSPECTS FOR DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT
In light of the "big picture" presented here, what are Guatemala's real prospects for democratization and development? To phrase the same question in an entirely different manner is to ask, in the current globalized environment, what sources of power can the Guatemalan popular sectors develop to confront transnational social forces averse to the kinds of structural transformation that could benefit the poor majority? And what policy recommendations would support that process?
It is useful to remember that social change is driven by contradictions that make it impossible to continue an existing set of historical arrangements. The underlying structural dynamics at play in Central America have been a transition to a transnational model of society along with changes in the global system. Yet this globalization of Central America has not resolved the social contradictions that generated the regional upheaval in the first place, and it has simultaneously introduced a new set of contradictions. There has been a continuation-and actually a deepening--from the 1970s to the 1990s, under new circumstances, of an extreme concentration of property and wealth, and of political power, in the hands of tiny minorities, side by side with the impoverishment and powerlessness of a dispossessed majority. (The only exception was Nicaragua, but those changes have been largely reversed.) The lives of the vast majority of Central Americans have grown worse, not better.' The very conditions that gave rise to the Central American crisis in the first place remain, for the most part, unaltered.
The neoliberal model specifically precludes policies, such as agrarian reform and redistributive measures, that could ameliorate current social conditions. The new model of capital accumulation might result in renewed growth in the region: but it is not likely to bring about development, whether this concept is understood in integral terms as a process of social transformation that empowers poor majorities to improve their material and cultural conditions, or even in more narrow terms of a sustainable expansion of productive forces. For instance, the maquiladoras constitute an enclave with little or no backward and forward linkage to host nation economies and very low value added. They characterized by the superexploitation of workers and by conditions of extreme oppression within the free trade zone enclaves. Tourism does stimulate greater local economic activity, but it does not generate integrated development. It is generally low-skill, low-wage, seasonal employment, and it depends on highly elastic and unstable demand, over which host countries have very little control.
Neither do nontraditional agricultural exports (NTAEs) hold much promise for regional development, as several recent studies have shown (Conroy et al. 1996; Barham et al. 1992). It may also be noted that disruption of traditional established communities and contraction of domestic demand accompanies deeper integration into the global economy, a consequence of the internal concentration of wealth and productive resources toward groups tied to the external sector and transnational economic circuits and a greater transfer of wealth out of the country. This results in a shift in the sources of profitability from productive to commercial and financial activities as outlets for investment. Any prospects of authentic development, barring a break with capitalism, must involve restoring the profitability of productive investment. This might require a type of state intervention in the accumulation process that is anathema to the neoliberal model.
The transnational model of society in Central America is inherently unstable, and it indicates contradictions internal to global capitalism, including the worldwide social polarization between rich and poor, the loss of nation-state autonomy and regulatory power, and the deterioration of the social fabric in civil society, accompanied by crises of authority and state legitimacy. The Guatemalan elite's resistance to even the most minimal reforms (such as the tax system) creates the image of the transnational project as "progressive" and obscures the essential polarizing and pauperizing consequences of neoliberalism. Let us recall that the transnational elite wants to stabilize its project in Guatemala not to democratize and develop the country but to secure Central America for global capitalism.
By promoting global capitalism in Guatemala, the transnational elite is antioligarchic, but this should not obscure its overarching project of constructing a neoliberal order in Guatemala. The peace accord was the only instrument available for the transnational elite to push forward its agenda. Implementation of the accord, a prerequisite for stability, sets the entire stage for restructuring the Guatemalan state and society, including relations among dominant groups and fractions, for the larger project of constructing a neoliberal order as part and parcel of the transition. A progressive tax reform could redistribute income downward and finance social spending; but the reform designed by the IFIs proposes indirect taxes levied largely on consumption, in a regressive tax system in which 80 percent of the taxes already comes from indirect levies and only 20 percent from direct taxes on income and wealth (Latin America Data Base 1997).
The IFIs see the tax reform as an essential macroeconomic instrument for resuming transnational capital accumulation in Guatemala and proceeding with a more sweeping adjustment. "The commitment to raise the tax base is not just a hollow demand or capricious recommendation on the international community," explained the World Bank representative in Guatemala, "but rather a fundamental prerequisite for accelerated and equitable economic growth" (Latin America Data Base 1997). The poor and popular classes are thus being asked to finance, through austerity, an accord whose purpose, from the transnational elite's perspective, is to stabilize the country so that a neoliberal order can be constructed.
Similarly, by way of further example, the "land reform" (registry and sale of available private lands) is not intended to benefit the dispossessed rural majority, much less achieve social justice. It is a measure that will further facilitate the transition begun several decades ago to a more fully capitalist agriculture, including a market in land and labor, in the countryside (USAID 1990). In this sense, it is similar to the types of land policies associated with the Green Revolution and with 1960s land reform programs promoted by the capitalist powers in the Third World. These programs were aimed at extending and intensifying capitalist agriculture, including the introduction of the types of agribusiness schemes contemplated for Guatemala. In this way, they resulted in an increased concentration of land, a rise in inequalities, and the proletarianization and further impoverishment of the rural population (McMichael 1996).
It is not clear to what extent the 1996 peace accords can contribute to democratization and development in Guatemala. Those accords could, alternatively, actually end up legitimating the emergent neoliberal order by preventing fundamental change in the socioeconomic system and delegitimating opponents of this system (dispossessed campesino squatters, for instance) as "extremists who reject peace." To the extent that they end some of the most brutal human rights abuses, open up even partial and limited space (polyarchy is preferable to dictatorship), and at least legitimate, if not realize, such demands as indigenous rights, the accords are of major importance. But to argue that in doing these things they pave the way for democracy and development (they do not in themselves) is tautological: parallel reasoning leads to a conclusion that the old dictatorships really paved the way for democracy and development because they generated the social forces and historical conditions that brought about changes such as those contemplated in the accords.
The transnational elite has also disassociated Indian cultural issues from socioeconomic changes and autonomous political power for the indigenous. Moreover, achieving even the limited objectives of the accords has proved elusive. A spate of land invasions that began even before the accords were signed and that intensified throughout 1997 and 1998 was met by forcible evictions, large displays of police power, injuries, and death. In 1998, the government negotiated with international donors a modification of the targets of the peace process regarding tax reform, agrarian policy, justice, rural development, public security, and constitutional reforms affecting the military and the indigenous (Spence et al. 1998; Latin America Data Base 1998). The accords' contribution to democratization and development should be gauged not by what was agreed to on paper but by the extent to which proposed changes are actually implemented and by how much they affect the poor majority.
"Success" in a political endeavor is often defined, from the summits of power, as how broadly the ruling structures are imposed and reproduced, how much accommodation and conformity around these structures is achieved among the different components of the privileged strata, and how much social control is maintained at the base. Authentic democratization in Guatemala would require incorporating the excluded majorities in the vital decisions that affect their lives. It would mean political outcomes in the interests of these majorities, predicated on the construction of a democratic socioeconomic system, and therefore a massive redistribution of political power, in Guatemala and in Central America. Political power, in turn, flows from economic power, and economic power is based on control over society's resources, wealth, and culture. Democratization in Guatemala therefore requires a radical redistribution of wealth and power toward what has been termed "the 87 percent majority" (Jonas 1991).
What type of policy recommendations flow from this analysis? We could say that, if it is interested in bringing about democratization and development, the transnational elite "should" promote a far-reaching agrarian reform and income redistribution. It should organize mass health and educational campaigns and special programs for women and children; encourage independent nationwide trade unionism and social movements; place local, grassroots leaders in positions of authority throughout the state's institutions, with special emphasis on the indigenous and women; ban impunity and purge from the state and definitively punish all those responsible for human rights violations and misuse of state institutions. But such policies will not come about until or unless they are forced on the Guatemalan state and the transnational elite by the "87 percent majority," or unless the elite is removed from positions with the institutional power to suppress such policies.
Many in the policy and academic community see such policy recommendations as unrealistic. The current global capitalist order has achieved a remarkable ideological hegemony, in that the structural constraints it sets have become accepted and the only alternatives put forward as legitimate and "realistic" are those that respect those constraints. The extent of social change may be fixed by historical structures, but the outer limits of those structures are always established and reestablished by collective human agency (and our intellectual labor as a form of social action).
Capitalist globalization is the macrostructural-historical backdrop to Guatemala and Central America in the twenty-first century, but this process is not predetermined, insofar as structural change is shaped by agents attempting to influence it from below and above. Varying problems of governability and crises of legitimacy characterize country after country in Central America and all of Latin America. The crisis and eventual collapse of the neoliberal project may create the regional or transnational conditions in which to promote alternatives-alternative projects to the neoliberal one, viable forms of struggle from civil society, and state formations-if and when the fortress of the neoliberal state is pried open. The real question regarding democratization and development, therefore, is what are the popular majority's chances to develop effective new strategies and forms of struggle under the dramatically changed national, regional, and global conditions.
The dominant groups in Central America may have reconstituted and consolidated their control over political society, but a new round of popular class mobilization in the mid-1990s pointed to their inability to sustain hegemony in civil society. Subordinate groups demonstrated a renewed protagonism at the grassroots level, outside of state structures and largely independent of organized leftist parties. Indigenous, women's, environmental, neighborhood, peasant, worker, and other social movements have flourished in civil society. The left's failure to articulate a counterhegemonic alternative and to protagonize a process of structural change from political society has helped shift the locus of conflict more fully to civil society.
Given the ability of transnational capital to utilize its structural power to impose its project even over states that are captured by forces adverse to that project, perhaps the real prospects for counterhegemonic social change in the age of globalization is a "long march through civil society" in the Gramscian sense. This march should be part of a movement of globalization from below, to accumulate counterhegemonic forces beyond national and regional borders and to challenge the power of the global elite from within an expanding transnational civil society.' Continued change-in Guatemala, in Central America, and in global society at large-will be shaped by conflict and crisis among the summits of power as the hegemonic groups find it increasingly difficult to maintain governability and assure social reproduction, by recomposition of civil society at the base, and by the interplay of the two at the local and global levels.
Copyright Journal of Interamerican Studies Winter 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserve
The trajectory of social change in Central America and Latin America in recent decades and, beyond that, the transformations in the global system are the "big picture" that puts into a larger focus issues of democratization and development in Guatemala. Recent change in Guatemala is part of a complex transition that began in Central America in the 1960s and will continue into the twenty-first century. This process involves the region's ongoing, gradual, highly conflictive, and contradictory entrance into the emergent global economy and society.
Central America is an important site of transnational processes, particularly the unfolding of a hegemonic, transnational agenda of neoliberalism and polyarchy. Transnational processes are defined as the economic and concomitant social, political, and cultural changes associated with incorporation into global economy and society. This essay reassesses the Central American conflict in light of these processes, with a synopsis of the globalization process in each country and a deeper examination of Guatemala.
The central argument here is that the transnational model of society in the Isthmus is inherently unstable and indicates contradictions internal to global capitalism, including social polarization between the rich and the poor, the loss of nation-state autonomy and regulatory power, and the deterioration of the social fabric in civil society, accompanied by crises of authority and state legitimacy. The Guatemalan elite's resistance to such reforms as changes in the tax system creates the image of the transnational project as progressive and obscures the essential polarizing and pauperizing consequences of neoliberalism. The constraints of the exclusionary socioeconomic system undermine efforts to open up the political system as contemplated in the 1996 Guatemalan peace accord. Authentic democratization requires a radical redistribution of wealth and power toward the poor majority; but the peace accord ratifies existing property relations and rules out such a redistribution.
GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND THE AGENDA OF THE TRANSNATIONAL ELITE
Globalization entails the transition from the nation-state phase of capitalism to a qualitatively new transnational phase.' Since 1492, the world has been linked into a single social system by trade and financial flows in an integrated international market. But from the late 1960s on-and accelerating now as the twenty-first century opens-this world economy is giving way to a new global economy. In this global economy, nations are no longer linked by external flows and relations but integrated organically through the globalization of the production process itself, along with the integration of the whole social, political, juridical, and cultural superstructure. The emergence of a truly global economy brings with it the material basis for the emergence of a single global society, including the transnationalization of civil society, of political processes, and of cultural life.
The global mobility of capital has allowed for the decentralization and functional integration around the world of vast chains of production and distribution, the instantaneous movement of values, and the unprecedented concentration and centralization of worldwide economic management, control, and decisionmaking power in transnational capital. Global capitalism is organized in a set of increasingly supranational institutions. These institutions include the transnational corporations that own and manage the world's resources and appropriate the wealth produced by humanity; the international financial agencies (IFIs), such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that impose the conditions necessary for global capital accumulation to take place; the states of the North and their junior counterparts of the South, which create the global and local political, administrative, and legal environment that allow the system to function; and the formal and informal transnational elite forums, such as the Group of Seven, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Economic Forum, that develop strategies to maintain and reproduce the system and supervise its overall operation.
The agent of the global economy is a new transnational elite. This group now controls global decisionmaking and increasingly monopolizes power in the global society. It comprises the owners and managers of the transnational corporations and also the bureaucrats, cadres, and technicians who administer the IFIs, the North and South state bureaucracies, and the transnational forums. Its membership includes the politicians and charismatic figures of public life and the mass media, along with select organic intellectuals, who provide ideological legitimacy and technical solutions for this new global order.
Below this transnational elite in the global hierarchy is a small and shrinking layer of middle classes, who exercise very little real power but who-pacified with mass consumption-form a fragile buffer between the transnational elite and the world's poor majority. Globalization dramatically alters the balance of forces among classes and social groups in each nation, at a level of the global system farther from popular majorities and closer to transnational capital and its representatives. National states increasingly respond to the interests of transnationalized fractions of locally dominant groups.
The transnational elite's program, in broad strokes, is to create the conditions most propitious to the unfettered functioning of global capitalism. In promoting this program, this new global elite has been pursuing a "transnational agenda," involving concomitant economic and political components, in every region of the world since the mid-1980s (Robinson 1996a, b, c, 1997). The economic component is neoliberalism, a model that seeks to achieve the conditions in each country and region for the mobility and free operation of capital. The neoliberal structural adjustment programs sweeping Latin America and the South in general seek macroeconomic stability as an essential requisite for the activity of transnational capital. This model aims to harmonize a wide range of fiscal, monetary, industrial, and commercial policies among many nations as a requirement for fully mobile transnational capital to function simultaneously, and often instantaneously, among numerous national borders.
In the neoliberal model, stabilization, or the package of fiscal, monetary, exchange, and related measures intended to achieve macroeconomic stability, is followed by "structural adjustment," which includes several components: liberalization of trade and finances, which opens the economy to the world market; deregulation, which removes the state from economic decisionmaking (but not from activities that service capital); and privatization of formerly public spheres that could hamper capital accumulation if criteria of public interest over private profit are left operative. This model thus generates the overall conditions for the profitable ("efficient") renewal of capital accumulation through new, globalized circuits, and, along with them, the conditions for social reproduction in the age of globalization. Neoliberal restructuring often results in an increase in poverty and inequality in the adjusted country as wealth is redistributed upward and shifted from the domestic market to the external sector linked to the global economy (Green 1995; Overbeek 1993; Robinson 1999). The unprecedented growth of inequalities worldwide under globalization, along with the emergence of new social hierarchies and cleavages around these inequalities (see, among others, UNDP various years; Korten 1996; Bradshaw and Wallace 1996), is leading to a new global social apartheid and worldwide polarization.
The political component of the project is the promotion of "democracy," or what is more accurately called polyarchy, a system in which a small group actually rules and the majority's participation in decision-- making is confined to choosing among competing elites in tightly controlled electoral processes. This type of "low-intensity democracy" does not involve power (craters) of the people (demos), much less an end to elite rule or to substantive inequality. The crisis of elite rule that developed throughout the Third World in the 1970s and 1980s in the context of globalization was resolved through transitions to polyarchies.
What transpired in these contested transitions was an effort by transnationally dominant groups to reconstitute hegemony through a change in the mode of political domination, from the coercive systems of social control exercised by authoritarian and dictatorial regimes to more consensually based systems of the new polyarchies. At stake was the type of social order-the emergent global capitalist order or some popular alternative-that would emerge in the wake of authoritarianism. The masses pushed for a deeper popular democratization while emergent transnationalized elites-backed by the structural power of the global economy and the inordinate political and ideological influence it brings, and often aided by direct U.S. political and military intervention-gained hegemony over democratization movements and steered the breakup of authoritarianism into polyarchic outcomes.
The transnational elite is now attempting to consolidate fragile polyarchic systems as the political counterpart to neoliberalism. Interaction and economic integration on a world scale are obstructed by authoritarian or dictatorial political arrangements, which cannot manage the expansion of social intercourse associated with the global economy. With its mechanisms for intraelite compromise and accommodation and for hegemonic incorporation of popular majorities, polyarchy is better equipped to legitimate the political authority of dominant groups and to achieve the political stability necessary for global capitalism to operate. The "democratic consensus" in the new world order is a consensus among an increasingly cohesive global elite on the type of political system most propitious to the reproduction of social order in the new global environment.
In Latin America, the transitions from authoritarianism to polyarchy gave functionaries from the IFIs, donor governments, corporate groups, and representatives of transnationalized fractions of the local elite the transnational elites the opportunity to reorganize state institutions and create a more favorable institutional framework for deepening the neoliberal adjustment. With few exceptions, Latin America's new polyarchic regimes, staffed by state managers (the new "modernizers" and "technocrats"), have pursued profound neoliberal transformation. The transnational elite has demonstrated a remarkable ability to wield the structural power of transnational capital over individual countries like a sledgehammer against popular grassroots movements for social change. Indeed, it is global capitalism's power to impose discipline through the market that (usually) obviates the all-pervasive coercive forms of political authority exercised by authoritarian regimes.
TRANSNATIONAL PROCESSES IN CENTRAL AMERICA
The underlying macrostructural dynamic in individual nations and regions over the past few decades has been integration into emergent global society. This has involved the breakup of national economic, political, and social systems, reciprocal to the breakup of the preglobalization, nation-state-based world order. This process of integration into changing world structures takes place through what elsewhere I have termed transnational processes (Robinson 1997, 1998b). Transnational processes are the economic and concomitant social, political, and cultural changes associated with the transition to global capitalism. Transnational processes in Central America should be seen as changes specific to the region that are linked to broader changes in the global system.
One type of change is that productive structures are reorganized, in tandem with the reorganization of global production. Each national economy is rearticulated to the global economy as new economic activities linked to globalization come to dominate and as each region acquires a new profile in the global system. There is also a complete class restructuring. Domestic classes tend to become globalized, preglobalization classes such as peasantries and artisans tend to disappear, and new classes and class fractions linked to the global economy emerge and become dominant. The transnational agenda of neoliberalism and polyarchy take hold as the hegemonic project, under the guidance of transnationalized fractions of local elites. Local political systems and civil societies become transnationalized, and states become integrated externally into supranational institutions and forums, which gradually assume functions that corresponded to the nation-state before globalization. A "global culture" of hyperindividualism, competition, and consumerism eclipses nationalist and developmental ideologies.
We see all these changes in Central America, and more broadly throughout Latin America, as transnational processes have taken hold over the past two decades. Facilitated by the neoliberal opening to the global economy and the export-led development (ELD) strategy, maquiladora production (particularly of garments), tourism, nontraditional agricultural exports, and remittances from emigrant workers have risen dramatically in importance and are coming to eclipse the traditional agroexport model as the most dynamic economic sectors linking Central America to globalized circuits of production and distribution (Robinson 1998). The Central American peasantry, artisans, national industrial, and other preglobalization classes have shown signs of gradual disintegration, and three principal groups have come to the fore: transnationalized fractions of the bourgeoisie tied to the new economic activities, new urban and rural working classes, and a new class of supernumeraries, or superfluous labor pools. (A huge portion of the last has migrated to the United States, where it constitutes a denationalized immigrant labor pool.)
The old authoritarian regimes have crumbled through transitions to polyarchy, and leftist movements that in the 1980s posed an antisystemic alternative to global integration have been defeated or transformed. In each Central American country, a transnationalized "technocratic" or New Right fraction has gained hegemony within the dominant classes. This fraction is pushing the transnational agenda of neoliberalism and the consolidation of polyarchies through diverse institutions, including states, political parties, and other organs of civil society.
Neoliberal structuring has resulted in a massive transfer of resources from the public to the private sphere and, within the private sphere, from the domestic to the external sector. The change in the model of accumulation has thus involved a concomitant change from the "developmentalist state" of the national model to the "neoliberal state" of the transnational model.
The five Central American states have moved gradually toward supranational integration. Politically, this integration is taking place through forums such as the Central American Integration System (SICA), the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), regular presidential summits, and regionwide ministerial meetings. Economically, it includes the negotiation of a new free trade zone based on collective integration into the North American Free Trade Agreement. If the Central American Common Market (CACM) was a form of "inward" integration, intended to create a regional market for multinational (largely U.SJ capital to take advantage of economies of scale, the more recent sets of international agreements represent an "outward" integration, aimed at creating a single Central American field for the unfettered operation of transnational capital.
The IFIs, various agencies of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and other transnational actors, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and international nongovernmental organizations (often linked to the national states of core countries), have increasingly assumed the functions of states through the design and imposition of economic policies, management of peace accords, sponsorship of institution building, and other activities. In this process, each Central American state has been penetrated by two new social forces, one from "within" and the other from "outside." From within, transnationalized fractions of dominant groups vie for and gain control over local states, particularly over key ministries tying the country to the global economy and society, such as the ministries of foreign affairs, finance, economic development, and central banks. From outside, some of the same transnational actors representing an emergent transnationalized state apparatus penetrate local states, form liaisons with transnationalized fractions therein, and help design and guide local policies.
A REASSESSMENT OF THE CENTRAL AMERICAN CONFLICT
These vast and open-ended transformations should be seen as the evolving outcome to the struggle among social forces in Central America as collective agents in dialectical interaction with changes in the global system.' In broad terms, three social forces, representing three distinct projects for the region, contended during the upheavals of the 1960s to 1990s. The landed oligarchies and dominant groups tied to the traditional agroexport model sought to sustain and reproduce the old model of capital accumulation and the particular set of social privileges and relations of domination based on authoritarian political systems.3 As the "autumn of the oligarchs" approached, the popular sectors and the mass revolutionary movements sought radical reforms, such as mass land redistribution, along with farther-reaching revolutionary and socialist-oriented alternatives that would have deeply undermined the region's class structure, upset relations of domination, and redistributed power and resources toward popular majorities.
As the regional conflict unfolded in the 1970s and 1980s, it looked on the surface like a bipolar contest between the old oligarchies and the popular revolutionary movements. In reality, however, globalizing dynamics had begun to transform local social forces. A "New Right" gradually cohered in the 1980s, in fits and bouts, into local transnationalized fractions of dominant groups and acquired its own political protagonism.4 Its project was to advance the agenda of the transnational elite. This transnational fraction came into being not from outside the traditional oligarchy but from within, from the same family networks. Its prospects for accumulating wealth and privilege, however, were linked less to restoring the traditional agroexports and industries under pre1980s social relations than to converting the region into a new export platform. It sought to submit backward oligarchic property relations to a capitalist modernization through a program of neoliberal restructuring and to a new "competitive" insertion into the emerging global economy. This New Right project sought to modernize the state and society with no fundamental deconcentration of property and wealth, nor with any class redistribution of political and economic power.
The New Right also promoted, together with the United States, transitions from authoritarian to so-called democratic political systems. The immediate aim was to preempt the movements for farther-reaching popular democratization through immediate reforms, such as the replacement of military by civilian personnel and controlled elections. But beyond this conjunctural consideration, the insertion of the region into global capitalism would require a political system that could promise more lasting social stability through consensual modes of social control rather than the old oligarchic dictatorships. This involved demilitarization, peace negotiations, the institutionalization of procedurally correct electoral processes, states with a functional separation of powers, and so on.
The persistence of an oligarchic political structure, combined with rapid capitalist development, sparked the revolutionary upheavals by the late 1970s. In the 1980s, the revolutionary movements succeeded in momentarily gathering disparite popular social forces into a movement that broke the hegemony of the landed oligarchy, wealthy industrialists, and financial groups that had come into existence with the CAM. The popular social forces, however, could not impose and stabilize a radical redistributive and socialist-oriented reconstruction of the region. One reason was massive U.S. intervention; a second was the revolutionary movement's own contradictions and weaknesses in the context of a changing world order. The latter included an inability to agree on tactics and strategies of the struggle and, more significant, a chronic disunity over the terms of the reconstruction (reflecting, in part, the complexity and the diverse, even antagonistic interests that made up the popular forces). These factors undercut the consolidation of a new, revolutionary bloc. At the structural level, the growing power of transnational capital and the world market to impose discipline on antisystemic movements made the revolutionary project inviable.
The third reason for the failure of the popular movements' plans for reconstruction was the changing composition of the dominant classes, their socioeconomic articulation, and their political-ideological project. The emergence of the neoliberal New Right in the 1980s in each of the Central American countries was partly a result of that very revolutionary upsurge, which altered the dominant power blocs in each country. It was also partly a reflection of a transnational elite that emerged as both a political and an economic protagonist.
These three factors cannot be separated; they are different dimensions of the same globalizing process. It was the threat of revolution from the popular classes that led to U.S. intervention. From the mid1980s on, U.S. policymakers began to redefine, in ad hoc fashion, the objective of interventionism, from a military defeat of revolutionary forces through counterinsurgency to a more thorough political and economic restructuring of the region and its social forces via the link to emergent global structures (Robinson 1996c, esp. chaps. 1, 2, 1996b). This included a shift to "democracy promotion" as a means to neutralize the revolutionary threat through incorporation. The changes in U.S. strategy helped accelerate the articulation of alternative political-ideological discourse and projects among sectors of the dominant groups that would gradually cohere into the New Right elite. The transnational nuclei of the local elite vied for, and achieved, hegemony over the elite as a whole in the 1980s, and went on in the 1990s to assume state power and to attempt to implement the program of global capitalism in the region.
Political regime change in every country except Costa Rica has been one aspect of a broader shift in the nature of political authority and the mode of social control. The recomposition of the capitalist order has involved a new social structure, based on changes in the economy, state, regime, social, and political system.
This analysis runs contrary to conventional thinking, according to which the old oligarchies, by the end of the 1980s, had virtually disappeared, but neither the popular forces nor their adversaries, the newly dominant groups in Central America together with the United States, could prevail. According to this view, the struggle had reached a stalemate that created the conditions for a historic compromise between different class and social forces in favor of a mutual accommodation. Negotiations and peace settlements led to a broad consensus that shifted the region's struggle from the military to the political-civic arena. This shift, in turn, was to be framed by regionwide processes of democratization and demilitarization. Competition between different social projects would now take place through elections and peaceful mobilization.
This writer would argue, in contrast, that the revolutionary upheavals ended not in stalemate and compromise but in the conditional defeat of the broad popular sectors in Central America and the conditional victory of the newly dominant groups. The popular majority was conditionally defeated in what it set about to do-fundamentally alter the social order in its favor. The dominant groups secured control of the project of global capitalism, but have been unable to stabilize that project and achieve its hegemony, in the Gramscian sense.
This outcome was formalized in the internationally sponsored peace negotiations of the late 1980s and early 1990s, followed by diverse concertacion and "reconciliation" forums. These meetings transferred social contradictions from the military to the political terrain and hammered out fragile, temporary pacts, but did not resolve the social contradictions that gave rise to the upheaval.
SYNOPSIS OF CHANGE IN EACH COUNTRY
In Nicaragua, the Sandinista triumph of 1979 constituted the seizure of state power in one country by a revolutionary movement and an effort to implement the popular project. The overthrow of the Somocista dictatorship destroyed the traditional oligarchy. But the structural constraints of globalization and the direct power of the U.S. state combined to make unworkable an alternative to polyarchy and global capitalism.
Modernizing capitalist fractions had been coalescing since the mid-1960s and, in opposition to Somoza, had linked with the Sandinistas in 1970s class alliances. These fractions stayed inside Nicaragua following the revolution and retained their links to the international capitalist market. They gradually gained structural strength and political importance in the 1980s, as they increasingly replaced the state as the principal intermediaries between Nicaragua and world markets and developed ties to the emergent U.S.-led transnational elite. In highly simplified terms, a transnationalized fraction took over key institutions of the state following the 1990s elections, even as much of the state, and society at large, was in dispute after 1990. This embryonic transnational nucleus pursued the program of reinserting Nicaragua into the global economy and a far-reaching neoliberal restructuring.
In El Salvador, a massive popular movement burgeoned in the 1970s, and the guerrilla movement snowballed into a full civil war by the early 1980s. While the revolutionary forces eventually threatened state power, the U.S.-led counterinsurgency staved off a triumph similar to that which had taken place in Nicaragua. Behind the highly visible battle between the revolutionary armed movement and the U.S.-supported dominant groups, however, lay a more significant process: the reorganization of the Salvadoran state and economy in conjunction with movement at the level of the global economy, a reconfiguration of the dominant groups, and the emergence of a lucid New Right fraction within the ruling party itself, the Nationalist Revolutionary Alliance (ARENA).
The transnationalized fraction gained control over the ARENA party-which, ironically, had first been formed by the most retrograde elements of the oligarchy-and control of the state with the election of Alfredo Cristiani in 1988. The insurgency, combined with changes in the dominant project itself, shattered the old oligarchy and its project. The insurgent fraction was able to gain hegemony over the elite and over the transition as a whole and to implement sweeping neoliberal transformation after 1988.
In Honduras, both the subordinate and the dominant classes were historically the least developed in Central America. The chaotic disequilibrium among internal social forces from early twentieth century into the 1970s created fertile ground for an unstable string of civilian-military regimes responding to competing pressures of a small landed oligarchy, midsized ranchers, bureaucratic elites, and mass peasant and worker mobilizations. The weakness of Honduran social forces and the state allowed foreign companies to dominate the country, making Honduras the quintessential "banana republic."
A transnational fraction began to cohere in the 1980s in consonance with the virtual U.S. occupation of the country as a staging ground for regional counterinsurgency, U.S. sponsorship of economic development and restructuring programs, and a transition to polyarchy. This fraction gained representation in the National Party through Rafael Callejas, who won the 1989 elections and proceeded with sweeping neoliberal reform, a process continued and deepened by the subsequent Liberal Party government.
In Costa Rica, a very different path of twentieth-century development did not deter the outcome in the 1980s and 1990s of integration into the global economy under terms similar to those of the region as a whole. The hegemony of the landed oligarchy was broken in the 1948 civil war and replaced by an alliance of emergent industrial, commercial, and financial capitalists. This united and relatively modernized dominant class incorporated the peasantry and working classes into a stable hegemonic bloc and established a functioning polyarchic political system. Under the model of import substitution industrialization (ISI) and agroexport expansion, with an important redistributive component and significant levels of social welfare spending, Costa Rica experienced development well beyond that of its neighbors.
By the late 1970s, however, this model of dependent capitalist development had become exhausted. The financial crisis of 1981 gave impetus to a gradual restructuring throughout the 1980s and 1990s, along with the reinsertion of the country's productive apparatus into the emergent global economy. Under close AID tutelage, successive governments oversaw liberalization, austerity, deregulation, privatization, and the development of a ELD model that began to replace the old ISI model. Socioeconomic restructuring generated new entrepreneurial groups within both parties of the elite, the National Liberation Party (PLN) and the Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC).
And finally we arrive at Guatemala, which we can now assess in comparative and historical perspective. The traditional agroexport oligarchy was the most deeply entrenched, and it controlled the state-- which was administered directly by the military for much of the 1980s; a transnationalized fraction was the weakest. As in El Salvador, the U.S.-supported Christian Democratic Party, which came to government in the 1980s as part of broader counterinsurgency efforts, was intended to defuse the popular movement with reforms and lead visible transitions to (largely dysfunctional) polyarchy. But the Christian Democratic alternatives were not meant to carry the transnational elite project in the larger scheme of things. With the introduction and expansion of new economic activities in the 1980s-including a powerful new financial sector tied to international banking; incipient export-oriented industry, such as maquila textile production; nontraditional agricultural exports promoted by the IFIs; and new commercial groups-a transnationalized fraction of the elite assumed its own profile and clashed with the old state-protected oligarchy over fiscal, tax, liberalization, and related policies.
This tiny and poorly organized fraction articulated, in the early 1990s, a coherent program for economic and political modernization attuned to the transnational elite agenda, as epitomized, for example, in the policy proposals that flowed out of the influential USAID-funded Association for Research and Social Studies (ASIES). Representatives of this transnationalized fraction, after a false start with the election of Jorge Serrano in 1990, assumed the reins of the government with the electoral triumph in 1994 of the National Action Party (PAN), whose leadership included professionals, administrators, and technocrats schooled in neoliberal economics and a modernizing outlook.
Unlike El Salvador, where the insurgency actually came to dispute state power and constitute a dual power, the Guatemalan insurgency did not threaten the state. But the movement could continue an indefinite insurgency that would make it impossible ever to pacify the countryside and establish the stability that transnational capital required for the country and the region as a whole. The subsequent New Year's Eve 1996 peace accords set the basis for consolidating the transnational elite project for Guatemala. In 1997, the PAN government committed itself to deepening and consolidating a long-term program of neoliberal transformation first launched in 1989 with little success.
The relative strength of the oligarchy and underdevelopment of the transnationalized fraction in the Guatemalan case partly accounts for the tardiness of the transnational project and the severe difficulties of its implementation. The counterrevolution of 1954 and the "counterinsurgency state" that followed gave the oligarchy an internal cohesion that allowed it to resist change in the 1980s (see Jonas 1991).
In comparative perspective, the particular constellation of social forces and historical events in the other Central American countries generated conditions relatively more responsive to the transnational project than those in Guatemala. The old oligarchy was crushed in Nicaragua in 1979, displaced in Costa Rica in 1948, and transformed in Honduras by U.S. intervention and regional dynamics. In El Salvador, U.S. and transnational actors promoted tax, land, and other reforms as a component of the counterinsurgency program-in the process, weakening the old oligarchy and strengthening a transnational fraction-in response to the strength of the revolutionary movement. Guatemala's counterinsurgency rested on postponing any reform; for example, the IFIs did not impose conditionality on Guatemala (Jonas 1991, 81, 88). Counterinsurgency was midwife to the transnational project in El Salvador and an obstacle in Guatemala.
GUATEMALA'S PROSPECTS FOR DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT
In light of the "big picture" presented here, what are Guatemala's real prospects for democratization and development? To phrase the same question in an entirely different manner is to ask, in the current globalized environment, what sources of power can the Guatemalan popular sectors develop to confront transnational social forces averse to the kinds of structural transformation that could benefit the poor majority? And what policy recommendations would support that process?
It is useful to remember that social change is driven by contradictions that make it impossible to continue an existing set of historical arrangements. The underlying structural dynamics at play in Central America have been a transition to a transnational model of society along with changes in the global system. Yet this globalization of Central America has not resolved the social contradictions that generated the regional upheaval in the first place, and it has simultaneously introduced a new set of contradictions. There has been a continuation-and actually a deepening--from the 1970s to the 1990s, under new circumstances, of an extreme concentration of property and wealth, and of political power, in the hands of tiny minorities, side by side with the impoverishment and powerlessness of a dispossessed majority. (The only exception was Nicaragua, but those changes have been largely reversed.) The lives of the vast majority of Central Americans have grown worse, not better.' The very conditions that gave rise to the Central American crisis in the first place remain, for the most part, unaltered.
The neoliberal model specifically precludes policies, such as agrarian reform and redistributive measures, that could ameliorate current social conditions. The new model of capital accumulation might result in renewed growth in the region: but it is not likely to bring about development, whether this concept is understood in integral terms as a process of social transformation that empowers poor majorities to improve their material and cultural conditions, or even in more narrow terms of a sustainable expansion of productive forces. For instance, the maquiladoras constitute an enclave with little or no backward and forward linkage to host nation economies and very low value added. They characterized by the superexploitation of workers and by conditions of extreme oppression within the free trade zone enclaves. Tourism does stimulate greater local economic activity, but it does not generate integrated development. It is generally low-skill, low-wage, seasonal employment, and it depends on highly elastic and unstable demand, over which host countries have very little control.
Neither do nontraditional agricultural exports (NTAEs) hold much promise for regional development, as several recent studies have shown (Conroy et al. 1996; Barham et al. 1992). It may also be noted that disruption of traditional established communities and contraction of domestic demand accompanies deeper integration into the global economy, a consequence of the internal concentration of wealth and productive resources toward groups tied to the external sector and transnational economic circuits and a greater transfer of wealth out of the country. This results in a shift in the sources of profitability from productive to commercial and financial activities as outlets for investment. Any prospects of authentic development, barring a break with capitalism, must involve restoring the profitability of productive investment. This might require a type of state intervention in the accumulation process that is anathema to the neoliberal model.
The transnational model of society in Central America is inherently unstable, and it indicates contradictions internal to global capitalism, including the worldwide social polarization between rich and poor, the loss of nation-state autonomy and regulatory power, and the deterioration of the social fabric in civil society, accompanied by crises of authority and state legitimacy. The Guatemalan elite's resistance to even the most minimal reforms (such as the tax system) creates the image of the transnational project as "progressive" and obscures the essential polarizing and pauperizing consequences of neoliberalism. Let us recall that the transnational elite wants to stabilize its project in Guatemala not to democratize and develop the country but to secure Central America for global capitalism.
By promoting global capitalism in Guatemala, the transnational elite is antioligarchic, but this should not obscure its overarching project of constructing a neoliberal order in Guatemala. The peace accord was the only instrument available for the transnational elite to push forward its agenda. Implementation of the accord, a prerequisite for stability, sets the entire stage for restructuring the Guatemalan state and society, including relations among dominant groups and fractions, for the larger project of constructing a neoliberal order as part and parcel of the transition. A progressive tax reform could redistribute income downward and finance social spending; but the reform designed by the IFIs proposes indirect taxes levied largely on consumption, in a regressive tax system in which 80 percent of the taxes already comes from indirect levies and only 20 percent from direct taxes on income and wealth (Latin America Data Base 1997).
The IFIs see the tax reform as an essential macroeconomic instrument for resuming transnational capital accumulation in Guatemala and proceeding with a more sweeping adjustment. "The commitment to raise the tax base is not just a hollow demand or capricious recommendation on the international community," explained the World Bank representative in Guatemala, "but rather a fundamental prerequisite for accelerated and equitable economic growth" (Latin America Data Base 1997). The poor and popular classes are thus being asked to finance, through austerity, an accord whose purpose, from the transnational elite's perspective, is to stabilize the country so that a neoliberal order can be constructed.
Similarly, by way of further example, the "land reform" (registry and sale of available private lands) is not intended to benefit the dispossessed rural majority, much less achieve social justice. It is a measure that will further facilitate the transition begun several decades ago to a more fully capitalist agriculture, including a market in land and labor, in the countryside (USAID 1990). In this sense, it is similar to the types of land policies associated with the Green Revolution and with 1960s land reform programs promoted by the capitalist powers in the Third World. These programs were aimed at extending and intensifying capitalist agriculture, including the introduction of the types of agribusiness schemes contemplated for Guatemala. In this way, they resulted in an increased concentration of land, a rise in inequalities, and the proletarianization and further impoverishment of the rural population (McMichael 1996).
It is not clear to what extent the 1996 peace accords can contribute to democratization and development in Guatemala. Those accords could, alternatively, actually end up legitimating the emergent neoliberal order by preventing fundamental change in the socioeconomic system and delegitimating opponents of this system (dispossessed campesino squatters, for instance) as "extremists who reject peace." To the extent that they end some of the most brutal human rights abuses, open up even partial and limited space (polyarchy is preferable to dictatorship), and at least legitimate, if not realize, such demands as indigenous rights, the accords are of major importance. But to argue that in doing these things they pave the way for democracy and development (they do not in themselves) is tautological: parallel reasoning leads to a conclusion that the old dictatorships really paved the way for democracy and development because they generated the social forces and historical conditions that brought about changes such as those contemplated in the accords.
The transnational elite has also disassociated Indian cultural issues from socioeconomic changes and autonomous political power for the indigenous. Moreover, achieving even the limited objectives of the accords has proved elusive. A spate of land invasions that began even before the accords were signed and that intensified throughout 1997 and 1998 was met by forcible evictions, large displays of police power, injuries, and death. In 1998, the government negotiated with international donors a modification of the targets of the peace process regarding tax reform, agrarian policy, justice, rural development, public security, and constitutional reforms affecting the military and the indigenous (Spence et al. 1998; Latin America Data Base 1998). The accords' contribution to democratization and development should be gauged not by what was agreed to on paper but by the extent to which proposed changes are actually implemented and by how much they affect the poor majority.
"Success" in a political endeavor is often defined, from the summits of power, as how broadly the ruling structures are imposed and reproduced, how much accommodation and conformity around these structures is achieved among the different components of the privileged strata, and how much social control is maintained at the base. Authentic democratization in Guatemala would require incorporating the excluded majorities in the vital decisions that affect their lives. It would mean political outcomes in the interests of these majorities, predicated on the construction of a democratic socioeconomic system, and therefore a massive redistribution of political power, in Guatemala and in Central America. Political power, in turn, flows from economic power, and economic power is based on control over society's resources, wealth, and culture. Democratization in Guatemala therefore requires a radical redistribution of wealth and power toward what has been termed "the 87 percent majority" (Jonas 1991).
What type of policy recommendations flow from this analysis? We could say that, if it is interested in bringing about democratization and development, the transnational elite "should" promote a far-reaching agrarian reform and income redistribution. It should organize mass health and educational campaigns and special programs for women and children; encourage independent nationwide trade unionism and social movements; place local, grassroots leaders in positions of authority throughout the state's institutions, with special emphasis on the indigenous and women; ban impunity and purge from the state and definitively punish all those responsible for human rights violations and misuse of state institutions. But such policies will not come about until or unless they are forced on the Guatemalan state and the transnational elite by the "87 percent majority," or unless the elite is removed from positions with the institutional power to suppress such policies.
Many in the policy and academic community see such policy recommendations as unrealistic. The current global capitalist order has achieved a remarkable ideological hegemony, in that the structural constraints it sets have become accepted and the only alternatives put forward as legitimate and "realistic" are those that respect those constraints. The extent of social change may be fixed by historical structures, but the outer limits of those structures are always established and reestablished by collective human agency (and our intellectual labor as a form of social action).
Capitalist globalization is the macrostructural-historical backdrop to Guatemala and Central America in the twenty-first century, but this process is not predetermined, insofar as structural change is shaped by agents attempting to influence it from below and above. Varying problems of governability and crises of legitimacy characterize country after country in Central America and all of Latin America. The crisis and eventual collapse of the neoliberal project may create the regional or transnational conditions in which to promote alternatives-alternative projects to the neoliberal one, viable forms of struggle from civil society, and state formations-if and when the fortress of the neoliberal state is pried open. The real question regarding democratization and development, therefore, is what are the popular majority's chances to develop effective new strategies and forms of struggle under the dramatically changed national, regional, and global conditions.
The dominant groups in Central America may have reconstituted and consolidated their control over political society, but a new round of popular class mobilization in the mid-1990s pointed to their inability to sustain hegemony in civil society. Subordinate groups demonstrated a renewed protagonism at the grassroots level, outside of state structures and largely independent of organized leftist parties. Indigenous, women's, environmental, neighborhood, peasant, worker, and other social movements have flourished in civil society. The left's failure to articulate a counterhegemonic alternative and to protagonize a process of structural change from political society has helped shift the locus of conflict more fully to civil society.
Given the ability of transnational capital to utilize its structural power to impose its project even over states that are captured by forces adverse to that project, perhaps the real prospects for counterhegemonic social change in the age of globalization is a "long march through civil society" in the Gramscian sense. This march should be part of a movement of globalization from below, to accumulate counterhegemonic forces beyond national and regional borders and to challenge the power of the global elite from within an expanding transnational civil society.' Continued change-in Guatemala, in Central America, and in global society at large-will be shaped by conflict and crisis among the summits of power as the hegemonic groups find it increasingly difficult to maintain governability and assure social reproduction, by recomposition of civil society at the base, and by the interplay of the two at the local and global levels.
Copyright Journal of Interamerican Studies Winter 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserve
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