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
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
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
Nicaragua the Stolen Revolution--transcript by J. William Middendorf, II
US Department State Bulletin, June 1985
The U.S. delegation wishes to note that on July 18, 1984, we last raised the matter of Nicaragua's failure to live up to its solemn promises of july 12, 1979, to the Secretary General of this body. They promised the OAS to hold early free elections, to establish an independent judiciary, and to uphold human rights. The OAS, in turn, for the first and only time in its history, withdrew its support for a sittng member government.
It is my delegation's sad duty to report that, since that date, no progress has been made in the fulfillment of any of these promises. We, therefore, have a continuing responsibility to monitor this situation until these commitments are fulfilled to this body's satisfaction.
When Sandinista troops entered Managua on July 19, 1979, they were met by joyous throngs of Nicaraguan citizens who believed that, at long last, freedom and economic well-being were at hand. We all know now that the Sandinista revolution was stolen--stolen by a small, hardcore group of Marxist-Leninists who did not represent majority opinion within the Sandinista movement but who had long conspired to take the movement over and who were armed to make it possible to carry out their plan.
Impact of Sandinista Rule
Let us look first at the impact almost 6 years of Sandinismo have had on the ordinary Nicaraguan people. We are not talking now about political figures or business leaders but about the nicaraguan "man in the street"--the ordinary Nicaraguan whose only ambition is to make a descent enough living to support his family. What is happening to this ordinary Nicaraguan today?
* His children don't have enough to eat. Robert Leiken, who initially strongly supported the revolution, wrote in the New Republic on October 8, 1984, that children were supposed to be the "spoiled ones" of the revolution. Instead, he noticed on his visit last year far more naked children with signs of malnutrition than he had ever seen before in Nicaragua. most foodstuffs are rationed, with the local Committees for the Defense of Sandinismo handing out ration cards--or witholding them for citizens who show "insufficient revolutionary fervor."
* His older children, from age 11 on up, face the possibility of being drafted into the Sandinista Armed Forces. Strong-arm recruiters snatch them off the streets or from their schoolrooms to fill the ranks of the Sandinista military, which now outnumbers all of the other military forces of Central America combined.
* His freedom of speech is sorely limited. The Committees for the Defense of Sandinismo keep their eye on him. If he complains to a neighbor about something the government has done, he may find himself hauled before a neighborhood court, with no appeal of any sentence that court hands down allowed.
* his freedom to be informed about national and international events is restricted. Radio an television news are under government control, and they broadcast only what the Sandinista party wants them to. There is only one opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and it is so heavily censored by government censors that it frequently suspends publication because after the censors are through there is not enough news left to print. And sometimes the government orders it to suspend publication anyway.
* His livelihood is threatened. If he works in the private sector, the gradual elimination of private enterprise by the Sandinista government may leave him without a job. If he is a farmer, under the laws establishing state agencies--which are the only entities to which he is allowed to sell his produce, at a non-negotiable price fixed by the government--he may not even hold back seed for next season's planting. He may not receive enough income to make ends meet.
* The average nicaraguan has always been religious. He has usually been a devout Catholic or, in the case of the Miskito Indians, a devout Moravian. Now, he finds his church leaders, including the Pope, harassed by Sandinista youth mobs, the "Turbas Divinas." He finds his priest or pastor accused of being "a counterrevolutionary" when he refuses to praise the Sandinista government in his sermons. He can no longer hear the Archbishop's homily on radio or television because the Sandinistas do not allow it to be broadcast without their prior censorship, something to which the Archbishop has understandably refused to submit.
Compare his situation with that of ordinary citizens in neighboring Costa Rica and Honduras, and you will see the contrast. While those countries have problems, they are working democracies where people can say what they please, don't have to worry about their children being drafted, and where farmers can sell their produce in the market themselves or choose among several competing middlemen who will buy the produce for resale.
Yet the Sandinista leaders say that countries such as Honduras and Costa Rica must undergo their own revolutions. Interior Minister Tomas Borge, in his interview in Playboy magazine of September 1983, was asked to respond to the Reagan Administration contention that, following its triumph in Nicaragua, the revolution will be exported to El Salvador, then Guatemala, then Honduras, then Mexico. Borge replied: "That is one historical prophecy of Ronald Reagan's that is absolutely true."
On the second anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, Borge gave a speech in Managua in which he said: "This revolution goes beyond our borders. Our revolution was always internationalist...."
In our special session on February 29, 1984, my esteemed colleague from Nicaragua told this body:
If we had wanted to attack Costa Rica with a specific end in mind, we would have done so, and they wouldn't even had enough time to ask that a special session be called, because by then they would have been occupied....
While supposedly denying an intention of invading Costa Rica, this statement shows how confident the Sandinistas are in their ability to invade their southern neighbor successfully, if they ever feel the desire to do so.
Broken Promises
I think it is worth asking, taking into account these statements I have just mentioned as well as many others, what makes anyone believe that the Sandinista government is willing to live in peace with its neighbors? Just because they have stated their peaceful intentions?
You will recall that promises made to this body on July 12, 1979, have not been kept. how, then, can we assume that promises not to attack their neighbors will be kept by the Sandinistas? When almost daily we observe shots fired by the Sandinistas across the honduran and Costa Rican borders, and guerrillas trained by the Sandinistas carry on their activities in El Salvador and Guatemala, and Managua has been the command center for the guerrilla activities throughout Central America--can we believe their avowal of peaceful intentions?
Let us review the record again. In 1979 the Sandinista junta promised the OAS that it would respect human rights, set up an independent judiciary, and hold "the first free elections in this country."
Human Rights. As I have already pointed out, human rights have been violated on a massive scale. The mistreatment of the Miskito and other Indian tribes was especially noteworthy. Shortly after the revolution, the Miskito Indians' traditional homelands were flooded with Cuban and Nicaraguan personnel who said they were there to "rescue" them. The attempt was made to force them to give up their traditional way of life and adopt the Marxism-Leninism of the revolution. As Freedom House said at the time, the program "is to deprive them of their socio-cultural identity." Their traditional, freely elected leaders were replaced with Sandinista-appointed authorities--some of them Cubans.
Massive relocation of the Miskitos, as well as other tribes such as the Sumo and the Rama, was undertaken. In some instances where they resisted, Miskitos were killed. Men, women, and children were forced to walk long distances on foot. Their farm animals were often appropriated by the state. Ominously, we hear reports today of similar involuntary forced relocation of people from a wide area in rural northern Nicaragua and of Sandinista army personnel putting the torch to the fields left behind. So much for the promise to the OAS to respect human rights.
Independent Judiciary. In 1979 the Sandinista junta promised this body that an independet judiciary would be established. Yet justice has become the servant of Sandinista totalitarianism. The neighborhood courts, where people are judged for such "crimes" as failing to attend Sandinista party rallies, hand down sentences which are not subject to judicial review. The nominally independent Supreme Court of Jusitce has limited power to review decisions handed down by lower courts. The right of habeas corpus has been practically eliminated.
The recent Urbina Lara case illustrates the lack of respect Sandinista justice has for the traditional Latin American doctrine of asylum. Mr. Urbina Lara, who had taken refuge in the Costa Rican Embassy, was forcibly removed from the Embassy building, wounded, and imprisoned by Sandinista authorities at a moment when the Costa Rican diplomats had briefly left the Embassy building unoccupied except for Mr. Urbina Lara. Mr. Urbina Lara was allowed to leave Nicaragua only after the incident threatened to disrupt the Contadora peace process. We understand that President Ortega has told high-level vistors to Managua that Urbina Lara left the Embassy of his own accord. On his arrival in Colombia, however, Mr. Urbina Lara confirmed the details of this breach of the principle of diplomatc asylum. Meanwhile, his defese lawyer was detained for several days in Managua jail without charges. So much for the Sandinista promise to the OAS of justice.
Free Elections. Finally, in 1979 the Sandinista junta promised early, free elections. Late last year, "elections" were held. But they were nothing but a sham, as the Sandinista government refused to create the conditions whereby the largest opposition coalition, the Coordinadora Democratica Nicaraguense, could have any chance to compete. That group's candidate, Arturo Cruz, who had, at one time, been the Sandinista government's own ambassador to Washington, had his rallies disrupted by Sandinista youth mobs--the so-called Turbas Divinas--on repeated occasions during reelectoral period. His pronouncements were censored from the opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and were not carried by the government print and broadcast media. Indeed, Sandinista censors have assured that criticism of the government is all but absent from the media.
Faced with the situation in which the Sandinista government would not allow Curz to conduct a full and free campaign, after many attempts to negotiate campaign guarantees, the coordinadora refused to participate in the election campaign.
Two other parties intended to pull out also. In one case, mobs broke up a meeting of the Partido Conservador Democrata at which a vote to pull out of the elections was about to be taken, with a clear majority in favor. In the other case, Partido Liberal Independiente candidate Virgilio Godoy announced on October 21 that he was withdrawing his candidacy, but the government press continued to run his campaign advertisements, and La Prensa was censored when it attempted to report the withdrawal.
No matter how honest the vote counting itself, an election is nothing more than a sham if parties who wish to run are not given the chance to mount a full and fair campaign.
I think it would be interesting to see what Sandinista leaders themselves hav e said about elections. In May 1984 Comandante Bayardo Arce, one of the nine members of the Sandinista Directorate gave a speech to the Nicaraguan Socialist Party. He did not realize that the speech was being tape-recorded. A text of it appeared in the Barcelona newspaper, La Vanguardia, on July 31, 1984, and I note that the Sandinista goverment has never denied the authenticity of the text. Comandate Arce said, "...of course, it we did not have the war situation imposed on us by the United States, the electoral problem would be totally out of place in terms of its usefulness..."
If we analyze this statement, we are led to believe that if the freedom fighters have not waged their valiant fight to force the Sandinistas to live up to their promises, the junta never would have held elections.
Comandate Arce also said:
...We think the electoral process...was and continues being an offensive tool from the standpoint of confronting U.S. policy.... It is well to be able to call elections and take away from American policy one of its justifications for aggression against Nicaragua...bourgeous democracy has an element which we can manage and even derive advantages from for the construction of socialism in Nicaragua...we are using an instrument claimed by the ourgeoisie, which disarms the international bourgeoisie, in order to move ahead to matters that are for us strategic...we believe that the elections should be used in order to vote for Sandinismo, which is being challened and stigmatized by imperialism, in order to demonstarte that, in any event, the Nicaraguan people are for that totalitarianism, the Nicaraguan people are for Marxism-Leninism...we see the elections as one more weapon of the revolution...
There you have the affirmation, in Comandante Arce's own words, that the elections were held not because of the Sandinistas' love for democracy but for purely tactical reasons. Is it any wonder, then, that they established conditions under which only the Sandinista party had any chance of victory? Had they given the coordinadora democratica a fair chance to campaign on an equal footing, the Sandinistas would have been in danger of being swept out of office--something they could not risk. Thus, on November 4, 1984, the election which was held had to be the sham that it was. So much for the Sandinista promises the OAS Secretary General in 1979.
U.S. Initiatives
In this connection I would like to note that Congressman Claude Pepper, who honors us with his presence today, has written my country's President, Ronald Reagan, to call attention to the recommendation of the U.S. Congress, embodied in Public Law 98-215 of December 9, 1983. This recommendation proposes that the President seek the prompt reconvening of the 17th meeting of consultation of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs for the purpose of evaluating the compliance of the Sandinista government with respect to the promises tothe OAS and also to consider whether that goverment is living up to the terms of the OAS Charter.
I would also note that I have received the text of House Resolution 81 of March 7, 1985, sponsored by 56 members of the U.S. Congress, which calls on the President to grant explicit recognition to the democratic Nicaraguan resistance and urges the President and all members of the OAS to support the Nicaraguan resistance--the so-called contras--in their quest for peace, human rights, free elections, and national reconciliation. Yesterda, Senator Durenberger spoke to the National Press Club about the Nicaraguan situation.
My government's efforts to get the Sandinistas to live up to their promises has often been branded by them as a lonely effort by President Reagan which does not have the support of the American people or their elected representatives in the Congress. I would submit that the existence of these congressional initiatives by conressmen from both the Democratic and Republican Parties shows the deep concern of the American people about the danger to the peace and security of the hemisphere posed by the actions of the Sandinista dictatorship.
The Search for a Solution
I would also like to take note of the recent document on national dialogue of the Nicaraguan resistance, proclaimed in San Jose, Costa Rica, on March 2, 1985, by the coordinadora democratica, which has named as its representatives Arturo Cruz, Alfonso Robelo, and Adolfo Calero.
In it, they request that the Sandinista government engage in a national dialogue leading to democratization of Nicaragua--a political system which guarantees real separation of power, development, and reconstruction; reconigtion of civilian primacy over the state; full respect for human rights; demilitarization of the society; a foreign policy which emphasizes a good relations with neighboring states; an economic system which gives importance to the development of the private sector; institution of a multiparty system which guarantees alternation in power and respct for minorities; freedom to organize labor unions; agrarian reform; municipal autonomy; respect for the culture and traditions of the Atlantic coast; a general political amnesty; and expulsion from the country of advisers from Cuba and other communist countries.
In this connection, the coordinadora is noat asking that Dniel Ortega be ousted as president, but only that he live up to the 1979 promises the OAS. It is a pity that the Sandinista goverment did not take advantage of this opportunity to resolve Nicaragua's problems by peaceful means.
Up to now, the Sandinistas have refused calls for dialogue with the opposition. Yet, in el Salvado and Colombia we have recently seen the occurrence of dialogue with the armed opposition, so why should Nicaragua be a special case where dialogue is inadmissible?
We are told constantly by the Sandinistas that the armed resistance in Nicaragua is nothing more than a movement of forer Somocistas who are battling to return to power. This lie has been repeated so often that even some of my own country's pres seems to have accepted it as true.
I note also that the Contadora group will meet next month in the hopes of establishing a final solution to the Central America problem. It is my hope that this process will finally resolve the crisis not only in Nicaragua but in all of Central America. I would like to say at this point, however, that any agreement is only so many pieces of paper until it is put inot practice. Once again, foolproof measures of verification must be included in any such agreement if it is to be effective. I note the words of Lenin, as quoted by C. L. Sulzberger in the New York Times of June 13, 1956. Lenin said: "We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law breaking, withholding and concealing truth." The Sandinista leaders have proclaimed many times that they are Marxist-Leninists. Are they in accord with this statement by Lenin?
My government only asks that the Sandinista goverment live up to its solemn commitments to the OAS. I would note that no government provided more aid to the Sandinistas during its first 18 months in power than the United States, which gave $118 million in aid. The Sandinista goverment began its inordinate military buildup immediately upon taking office, when the resistance had not yet formed. Texts used in literacy programs and elementary education from the beginning of the revolution used perjorative terms against my country. Radio Sandino from the beginning of the revolution, attacked my country in the most vicious terms. On 15 different occasions over a period of 4 years, President Ortega falsely and irresponsibly accused my government of organizing an imminent invasion of his country, a tactic similar to that used by Castro 20 years ago in Cuba to consolidate power. The record shows that militarism and hostility to the United States were hallmarks of this Cuban-Soviet style revolution from the very beginning.
It is my hope that peace will return to Nicaragua through one or another of the processes that I have mentioned here; but it no process is successful, I would remind this body of its responsibilities. In the final instance, the Organization of American Stats has a responsibility to assure peace in Nicaragua, since in 1979 it took the unprecedented step of withdrawing support from a sitting member government in Nicaragua and replacing it with the Sandinista junta. My government does not intend to allow this organization to ignore its responsibilities in this regard and reserves the right at some future date to introduce a resolution leading toward the satisfactory resolution of the Nicaraguan problem, if the processes which I have already detailed do not bear fruit.
COPYRIGHT 1985 U.S. Government Printing Office
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
The U.S. delegation wishes to note that on July 18, 1984, we last raised the matter of Nicaragua's failure to live up to its solemn promises of july 12, 1979, to the Secretary General of this body. They promised the OAS to hold early free elections, to establish an independent judiciary, and to uphold human rights. The OAS, in turn, for the first and only time in its history, withdrew its support for a sittng member government.
It is my delegation's sad duty to report that, since that date, no progress has been made in the fulfillment of any of these promises. We, therefore, have a continuing responsibility to monitor this situation until these commitments are fulfilled to this body's satisfaction.
When Sandinista troops entered Managua on July 19, 1979, they were met by joyous throngs of Nicaraguan citizens who believed that, at long last, freedom and economic well-being were at hand. We all know now that the Sandinista revolution was stolen--stolen by a small, hardcore group of Marxist-Leninists who did not represent majority opinion within the Sandinista movement but who had long conspired to take the movement over and who were armed to make it possible to carry out their plan.
Impact of Sandinista Rule
Let us look first at the impact almost 6 years of Sandinismo have had on the ordinary Nicaraguan people. We are not talking now about political figures or business leaders but about the nicaraguan "man in the street"--the ordinary Nicaraguan whose only ambition is to make a descent enough living to support his family. What is happening to this ordinary Nicaraguan today?
* His children don't have enough to eat. Robert Leiken, who initially strongly supported the revolution, wrote in the New Republic on October 8, 1984, that children were supposed to be the "spoiled ones" of the revolution. Instead, he noticed on his visit last year far more naked children with signs of malnutrition than he had ever seen before in Nicaragua. most foodstuffs are rationed, with the local Committees for the Defense of Sandinismo handing out ration cards--or witholding them for citizens who show "insufficient revolutionary fervor."
* His older children, from age 11 on up, face the possibility of being drafted into the Sandinista Armed Forces. Strong-arm recruiters snatch them off the streets or from their schoolrooms to fill the ranks of the Sandinista military, which now outnumbers all of the other military forces of Central America combined.
* His freedom of speech is sorely limited. The Committees for the Defense of Sandinismo keep their eye on him. If he complains to a neighbor about something the government has done, he may find himself hauled before a neighborhood court, with no appeal of any sentence that court hands down allowed.
* his freedom to be informed about national and international events is restricted. Radio an television news are under government control, and they broadcast only what the Sandinista party wants them to. There is only one opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and it is so heavily censored by government censors that it frequently suspends publication because after the censors are through there is not enough news left to print. And sometimes the government orders it to suspend publication anyway.
* His livelihood is threatened. If he works in the private sector, the gradual elimination of private enterprise by the Sandinista government may leave him without a job. If he is a farmer, under the laws establishing state agencies--which are the only entities to which he is allowed to sell his produce, at a non-negotiable price fixed by the government--he may not even hold back seed for next season's planting. He may not receive enough income to make ends meet.
* The average nicaraguan has always been religious. He has usually been a devout Catholic or, in the case of the Miskito Indians, a devout Moravian. Now, he finds his church leaders, including the Pope, harassed by Sandinista youth mobs, the "Turbas Divinas." He finds his priest or pastor accused of being "a counterrevolutionary" when he refuses to praise the Sandinista government in his sermons. He can no longer hear the Archbishop's homily on radio or television because the Sandinistas do not allow it to be broadcast without their prior censorship, something to which the Archbishop has understandably refused to submit.
Compare his situation with that of ordinary citizens in neighboring Costa Rica and Honduras, and you will see the contrast. While those countries have problems, they are working democracies where people can say what they please, don't have to worry about their children being drafted, and where farmers can sell their produce in the market themselves or choose among several competing middlemen who will buy the produce for resale.
Yet the Sandinista leaders say that countries such as Honduras and Costa Rica must undergo their own revolutions. Interior Minister Tomas Borge, in his interview in Playboy magazine of September 1983, was asked to respond to the Reagan Administration contention that, following its triumph in Nicaragua, the revolution will be exported to El Salvador, then Guatemala, then Honduras, then Mexico. Borge replied: "That is one historical prophecy of Ronald Reagan's that is absolutely true."
On the second anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, Borge gave a speech in Managua in which he said: "This revolution goes beyond our borders. Our revolution was always internationalist...."
In our special session on February 29, 1984, my esteemed colleague from Nicaragua told this body:
If we had wanted to attack Costa Rica with a specific end in mind, we would have done so, and they wouldn't even had enough time to ask that a special session be called, because by then they would have been occupied....
While supposedly denying an intention of invading Costa Rica, this statement shows how confident the Sandinistas are in their ability to invade their southern neighbor successfully, if they ever feel the desire to do so.
Broken Promises
I think it is worth asking, taking into account these statements I have just mentioned as well as many others, what makes anyone believe that the Sandinista government is willing to live in peace with its neighbors? Just because they have stated their peaceful intentions?
You will recall that promises made to this body on July 12, 1979, have not been kept. how, then, can we assume that promises not to attack their neighbors will be kept by the Sandinistas? When almost daily we observe shots fired by the Sandinistas across the honduran and Costa Rican borders, and guerrillas trained by the Sandinistas carry on their activities in El Salvador and Guatemala, and Managua has been the command center for the guerrilla activities throughout Central America--can we believe their avowal of peaceful intentions?
Let us review the record again. In 1979 the Sandinista junta promised the OAS that it would respect human rights, set up an independent judiciary, and hold "the first free elections in this country."
Human Rights. As I have already pointed out, human rights have been violated on a massive scale. The mistreatment of the Miskito and other Indian tribes was especially noteworthy. Shortly after the revolution, the Miskito Indians' traditional homelands were flooded with Cuban and Nicaraguan personnel who said they were there to "rescue" them. The attempt was made to force them to give up their traditional way of life and adopt the Marxism-Leninism of the revolution. As Freedom House said at the time, the program "is to deprive them of their socio-cultural identity." Their traditional, freely elected leaders were replaced with Sandinista-appointed authorities--some of them Cubans.
Massive relocation of the Miskitos, as well as other tribes such as the Sumo and the Rama, was undertaken. In some instances where they resisted, Miskitos were killed. Men, women, and children were forced to walk long distances on foot. Their farm animals were often appropriated by the state. Ominously, we hear reports today of similar involuntary forced relocation of people from a wide area in rural northern Nicaragua and of Sandinista army personnel putting the torch to the fields left behind. So much for the promise to the OAS to respect human rights.
Independent Judiciary. In 1979 the Sandinista junta promised this body that an independet judiciary would be established. Yet justice has become the servant of Sandinista totalitarianism. The neighborhood courts, where people are judged for such "crimes" as failing to attend Sandinista party rallies, hand down sentences which are not subject to judicial review. The nominally independent Supreme Court of Jusitce has limited power to review decisions handed down by lower courts. The right of habeas corpus has been practically eliminated.
The recent Urbina Lara case illustrates the lack of respect Sandinista justice has for the traditional Latin American doctrine of asylum. Mr. Urbina Lara, who had taken refuge in the Costa Rican Embassy, was forcibly removed from the Embassy building, wounded, and imprisoned by Sandinista authorities at a moment when the Costa Rican diplomats had briefly left the Embassy building unoccupied except for Mr. Urbina Lara. Mr. Urbina Lara was allowed to leave Nicaragua only after the incident threatened to disrupt the Contadora peace process. We understand that President Ortega has told high-level vistors to Managua that Urbina Lara left the Embassy of his own accord. On his arrival in Colombia, however, Mr. Urbina Lara confirmed the details of this breach of the principle of diplomatc asylum. Meanwhile, his defese lawyer was detained for several days in Managua jail without charges. So much for the Sandinista promise to the OAS of justice.
Free Elections. Finally, in 1979 the Sandinista junta promised early, free elections. Late last year, "elections" were held. But they were nothing but a sham, as the Sandinista government refused to create the conditions whereby the largest opposition coalition, the Coordinadora Democratica Nicaraguense, could have any chance to compete. That group's candidate, Arturo Cruz, who had, at one time, been the Sandinista government's own ambassador to Washington, had his rallies disrupted by Sandinista youth mobs--the so-called Turbas Divinas--on repeated occasions during reelectoral period. His pronouncements were censored from the opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and were not carried by the government print and broadcast media. Indeed, Sandinista censors have assured that criticism of the government is all but absent from the media.
Faced with the situation in which the Sandinista government would not allow Curz to conduct a full and free campaign, after many attempts to negotiate campaign guarantees, the coordinadora refused to participate in the election campaign.
Two other parties intended to pull out also. In one case, mobs broke up a meeting of the Partido Conservador Democrata at which a vote to pull out of the elections was about to be taken, with a clear majority in favor. In the other case, Partido Liberal Independiente candidate Virgilio Godoy announced on October 21 that he was withdrawing his candidacy, but the government press continued to run his campaign advertisements, and La Prensa was censored when it attempted to report the withdrawal.
No matter how honest the vote counting itself, an election is nothing more than a sham if parties who wish to run are not given the chance to mount a full and fair campaign.
I think it would be interesting to see what Sandinista leaders themselves hav e said about elections. In May 1984 Comandante Bayardo Arce, one of the nine members of the Sandinista Directorate gave a speech to the Nicaraguan Socialist Party. He did not realize that the speech was being tape-recorded. A text of it appeared in the Barcelona newspaper, La Vanguardia, on July 31, 1984, and I note that the Sandinista goverment has never denied the authenticity of the text. Comandate Arce said, "...of course, it we did not have the war situation imposed on us by the United States, the electoral problem would be totally out of place in terms of its usefulness..."
If we analyze this statement, we are led to believe that if the freedom fighters have not waged their valiant fight to force the Sandinistas to live up to their promises, the junta never would have held elections.
Comandate Arce also said:
...We think the electoral process...was and continues being an offensive tool from the standpoint of confronting U.S. policy.... It is well to be able to call elections and take away from American policy one of its justifications for aggression against Nicaragua...bourgeous democracy has an element which we can manage and even derive advantages from for the construction of socialism in Nicaragua...we are using an instrument claimed by the ourgeoisie, which disarms the international bourgeoisie, in order to move ahead to matters that are for us strategic...we believe that the elections should be used in order to vote for Sandinismo, which is being challened and stigmatized by imperialism, in order to demonstarte that, in any event, the Nicaraguan people are for that totalitarianism, the Nicaraguan people are for Marxism-Leninism...we see the elections as one more weapon of the revolution...
There you have the affirmation, in Comandante Arce's own words, that the elections were held not because of the Sandinistas' love for democracy but for purely tactical reasons. Is it any wonder, then, that they established conditions under which only the Sandinista party had any chance of victory? Had they given the coordinadora democratica a fair chance to campaign on an equal footing, the Sandinistas would have been in danger of being swept out of office--something they could not risk. Thus, on November 4, 1984, the election which was held had to be the sham that it was. So much for the Sandinista promises the OAS Secretary General in 1979.
U.S. Initiatives
In this connection I would like to note that Congressman Claude Pepper, who honors us with his presence today, has written my country's President, Ronald Reagan, to call attention to the recommendation of the U.S. Congress, embodied in Public Law 98-215 of December 9, 1983. This recommendation proposes that the President seek the prompt reconvening of the 17th meeting of consultation of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs for the purpose of evaluating the compliance of the Sandinista government with respect to the promises tothe OAS and also to consider whether that goverment is living up to the terms of the OAS Charter.
I would also note that I have received the text of House Resolution 81 of March 7, 1985, sponsored by 56 members of the U.S. Congress, which calls on the President to grant explicit recognition to the democratic Nicaraguan resistance and urges the President and all members of the OAS to support the Nicaraguan resistance--the so-called contras--in their quest for peace, human rights, free elections, and national reconciliation. Yesterda, Senator Durenberger spoke to the National Press Club about the Nicaraguan situation.
My government's efforts to get the Sandinistas to live up to their promises has often been branded by them as a lonely effort by President Reagan which does not have the support of the American people or their elected representatives in the Congress. I would submit that the existence of these congressional initiatives by conressmen from both the Democratic and Republican Parties shows the deep concern of the American people about the danger to the peace and security of the hemisphere posed by the actions of the Sandinista dictatorship.
The Search for a Solution
I would also like to take note of the recent document on national dialogue of the Nicaraguan resistance, proclaimed in San Jose, Costa Rica, on March 2, 1985, by the coordinadora democratica, which has named as its representatives Arturo Cruz, Alfonso Robelo, and Adolfo Calero.
In it, they request that the Sandinista government engage in a national dialogue leading to democratization of Nicaragua--a political system which guarantees real separation of power, development, and reconstruction; reconigtion of civilian primacy over the state; full respect for human rights; demilitarization of the society; a foreign policy which emphasizes a good relations with neighboring states; an economic system which gives importance to the development of the private sector; institution of a multiparty system which guarantees alternation in power and respct for minorities; freedom to organize labor unions; agrarian reform; municipal autonomy; respect for the culture and traditions of the Atlantic coast; a general political amnesty; and expulsion from the country of advisers from Cuba and other communist countries.
In this connection, the coordinadora is noat asking that Dniel Ortega be ousted as president, but only that he live up to the 1979 promises the OAS. It is a pity that the Sandinista goverment did not take advantage of this opportunity to resolve Nicaragua's problems by peaceful means.
Up to now, the Sandinistas have refused calls for dialogue with the opposition. Yet, in el Salvado and Colombia we have recently seen the occurrence of dialogue with the armed opposition, so why should Nicaragua be a special case where dialogue is inadmissible?
We are told constantly by the Sandinistas that the armed resistance in Nicaragua is nothing more than a movement of forer Somocistas who are battling to return to power. This lie has been repeated so often that even some of my own country's pres seems to have accepted it as true.
I note also that the Contadora group will meet next month in the hopes of establishing a final solution to the Central America problem. It is my hope that this process will finally resolve the crisis not only in Nicaragua but in all of Central America. I would like to say at this point, however, that any agreement is only so many pieces of paper until it is put inot practice. Once again, foolproof measures of verification must be included in any such agreement if it is to be effective. I note the words of Lenin, as quoted by C. L. Sulzberger in the New York Times of June 13, 1956. Lenin said: "We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law breaking, withholding and concealing truth." The Sandinista leaders have proclaimed many times that they are Marxist-Leninists. Are they in accord with this statement by Lenin?
My government only asks that the Sandinista goverment live up to its solemn commitments to the OAS. I would note that no government provided more aid to the Sandinistas during its first 18 months in power than the United States, which gave $118 million in aid. The Sandinista goverment began its inordinate military buildup immediately upon taking office, when the resistance had not yet formed. Texts used in literacy programs and elementary education from the beginning of the revolution used perjorative terms against my country. Radio Sandino from the beginning of the revolution, attacked my country in the most vicious terms. On 15 different occasions over a period of 4 years, President Ortega falsely and irresponsibly accused my government of organizing an imminent invasion of his country, a tactic similar to that used by Castro 20 years ago in Cuba to consolidate power. The record shows that militarism and hostility to the United States were hallmarks of this Cuban-Soviet style revolution from the very beginning.
It is my hope that peace will return to Nicaragua through one or another of the processes that I have mentioned here; but it no process is successful, I would remind this body of its responsibilities. In the final instance, the Organization of American Stats has a responsibility to assure peace in Nicaragua, since in 1979 it took the unprecedented step of withdrawing support from a sitting member government in Nicaragua and replacing it with the Sandinista junta. My government does not intend to allow this organization to ignore its responsibilities in this regard and reserves the right at some future date to introduce a resolution leading toward the satisfactory resolution of the Nicaraguan problem, if the processes which I have already detailed do not bear fruit.
COPYRIGHT 1985 U.S. Government Printing Office
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Sunday, March 9, 2008
El Salvador Social Movements: Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES)
http://www.cispes.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
This website chronicles up-to-date information of the group, "Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador." It provides information on how individuals can get involved with different social movements, and has a news section in which individuals can read about what the group has accomplished over the past few months. This website is a great resource for individuals who wish to get involved, take action or even donate toward the cause of justice for people in El Salvador.
This website chronicles up-to-date information of the group, "Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador." It provides information on how individuals can get involved with different social movements, and has a news section in which individuals can read about what the group has accomplished over the past few months. This website is a great resource for individuals who wish to get involved, take action or even donate toward the cause of justice for people in El Salvador.
Guest commentary: How Cambridge helped human rights triumph in El Savador
Cambridge - Who couldn’t use a human rights success story these days? Well, Cambridge has one in its role in a human rights crisis in El Salvador over the last two months, culminating in a judge on Feb. 19 throwing out a case brought by the Salvadoran government against social movement organizers as “terrorists.” Our story starts with the sister city relationship Cambridge established in 1987 with the village of San José las Flores in El Salvador during the middle of the civil war there. Although the war ended in 1992, a struggle for economic justice and human rights is still essential.
Fast forward to July 2, 2007, and the little town of Suchitoto in the department of Cuscatlán. The government had planned a public ceremony to announce a government project to “decentralize” water in the country, which most people in the social movement in El Salvador interpreted as a step toward privatizing the supply of water, with the possibility that even fewer people would have affordable access to a clean water supply. The Salvadoran social movement planned a forum in Suchitoto on the same day to raise these questions. But the government saw an opportunity to discredit the social movement and make another of several recent, ominous moves to close the democratic space in the country. The day before the government ceremony and the public forum, the security forces, including elements of the Salvadoran military (in violation of the 1992 peace accords), militarized all the roads around the town, and laid plans to trap and arrest the organizers.
On July 2 in the early morning, security forces blocked the road and prevented buses arranged by the forum organizers from picking up people along the road. People standing alongside the road waiting for buses were attacked without warning by police with tear gas and rubber bullets. People fled, but also protested and did their own road-blocking with stones and tree branches. It was a mess. Then when the police had cleared the road and started to let vehicles through, police cars isolated the vehicle carrying two members of one of the organizing groups (CRIPDES), their media person and the driver. The people in the vehicle were forced out of the car, handcuffed, and the driver asked by a conveniently available TV reporter, “Why did you block the road?” These four and nine others were charged as “terrorists” under a November 2006 Special Anti-Terrorism Law in El Salvador, taken before a special tribunal judge, Ana Lucila Fuentes de Paz, and put in jail for a 90-day “preventive detention,” pending potential prison sentences of up to 60 years, if convicted.
At the request of Cambridge Sister City and other U.S. solidarity organizations, Cambridge’s Congressman, Michael Capuano, authored a letter to Salvadoran President Elias Antonio Saca, signed by 41 other members of Congress, raising questions about repression of political expression and raising doubts about the notion the Suchitoto 13 were “terrorists.” The 13 were given conditional freedom July 27, pending a Feb. 8 status hearing before the judge.
U.S. El Salvador Sister Cities formed a 10-member special human rights investigation team, of which I was a member, which went to El Salvador Jan. 19 to 27. With four congressional offices requesting meetings for the human rights team with high officials, the team was able to meet with the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Dr. Agustín Calderon, the vice minister of Foreign Relations, Eduardo Calix (designated by Saca to meet with us), the Human Rights ombudsman, Oscar Luna, and John Speaks, the Human Rights person at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador. The team also went to Suchitoto for a half-day to have direct interviews with eyewitnesses. The team gave a press conference Friday, Jan. 25. Present were two TV stations, two radio stations and the newspaper Diario Co-Latino. They not only listened intently but very strongly carried our message — as the first item in the TV news that afternoon and the headline in the afternoon Co-Latino newspaper. The message: No way does it make any sense to charge these people as terrorists, and if the government is going to suppress political expression in this way, it could jeopardize $461 million in development funds from the U.S. that are conditioned on respect for human rights and responsiveness to the population. That money threat is what caught the headlines. The archbishop of San Salvador, Monse-or Fernando Sáenz Lacalle, expressed his concern over this possibility in an interview Sunday, Jan. 27, as most of us were flying home.
At the Feb. 8 hearing, the Salvadoran prosecutors came back, not with charges of “terrorism” but of public disorder and aggravated damages of state property. Judge Fuentes de Paz decided that, absent charges of terrorism, her special tribunal was no longer the appropriate venue for the case and remanded it to the district criminal court in Cuscatlán for a Feb. 19 hearing. On that date, the judge, having waited for an hour for the Salvadoran government prosecutors to show up, ruled that the case was to be dismissed in its entirety and all charges dismissed. So the Suchitoto 13 went from the prospect of 60 years in prison to unconditional freedom. This is a major milestone along the way to assuring an open, democratic society in El Salvador, and Cambridge can be proud of its part.
http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/homepage/x1637678389
Fast forward to July 2, 2007, and the little town of Suchitoto in the department of Cuscatlán. The government had planned a public ceremony to announce a government project to “decentralize” water in the country, which most people in the social movement in El Salvador interpreted as a step toward privatizing the supply of water, with the possibility that even fewer people would have affordable access to a clean water supply. The Salvadoran social movement planned a forum in Suchitoto on the same day to raise these questions. But the government saw an opportunity to discredit the social movement and make another of several recent, ominous moves to close the democratic space in the country. The day before the government ceremony and the public forum, the security forces, including elements of the Salvadoran military (in violation of the 1992 peace accords), militarized all the roads around the town, and laid plans to trap and arrest the organizers.
On July 2 in the early morning, security forces blocked the road and prevented buses arranged by the forum organizers from picking up people along the road. People standing alongside the road waiting for buses were attacked without warning by police with tear gas and rubber bullets. People fled, but also protested and did their own road-blocking with stones and tree branches. It was a mess. Then when the police had cleared the road and started to let vehicles through, police cars isolated the vehicle carrying two members of one of the organizing groups (CRIPDES), their media person and the driver. The people in the vehicle were forced out of the car, handcuffed, and the driver asked by a conveniently available TV reporter, “Why did you block the road?” These four and nine others were charged as “terrorists” under a November 2006 Special Anti-Terrorism Law in El Salvador, taken before a special tribunal judge, Ana Lucila Fuentes de Paz, and put in jail for a 90-day “preventive detention,” pending potential prison sentences of up to 60 years, if convicted.
At the request of Cambridge Sister City and other U.S. solidarity organizations, Cambridge’s Congressman, Michael Capuano, authored a letter to Salvadoran President Elias Antonio Saca, signed by 41 other members of Congress, raising questions about repression of political expression and raising doubts about the notion the Suchitoto 13 were “terrorists.” The 13 were given conditional freedom July 27, pending a Feb. 8 status hearing before the judge.
U.S. El Salvador Sister Cities formed a 10-member special human rights investigation team, of which I was a member, which went to El Salvador Jan. 19 to 27. With four congressional offices requesting meetings for the human rights team with high officials, the team was able to meet with the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Dr. Agustín Calderon, the vice minister of Foreign Relations, Eduardo Calix (designated by Saca to meet with us), the Human Rights ombudsman, Oscar Luna, and John Speaks, the Human Rights person at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador. The team also went to Suchitoto for a half-day to have direct interviews with eyewitnesses. The team gave a press conference Friday, Jan. 25. Present were two TV stations, two radio stations and the newspaper Diario Co-Latino. They not only listened intently but very strongly carried our message — as the first item in the TV news that afternoon and the headline in the afternoon Co-Latino newspaper. The message: No way does it make any sense to charge these people as terrorists, and if the government is going to suppress political expression in this way, it could jeopardize $461 million in development funds from the U.S. that are conditioned on respect for human rights and responsiveness to the population. That money threat is what caught the headlines. The archbishop of San Salvador, Monse-or Fernando Sáenz Lacalle, expressed his concern over this possibility in an interview Sunday, Jan. 27, as most of us were flying home.
At the Feb. 8 hearing, the Salvadoran prosecutors came back, not with charges of “terrorism” but of public disorder and aggravated damages of state property. Judge Fuentes de Paz decided that, absent charges of terrorism, her special tribunal was no longer the appropriate venue for the case and remanded it to the district criminal court in Cuscatlán for a Feb. 19 hearing. On that date, the judge, having waited for an hour for the Salvadoran government prosecutors to show up, ruled that the case was to be dismissed in its entirety and all charges dismissed. So the Suchitoto 13 went from the prospect of 60 years in prison to unconditional freedom. This is a major milestone along the way to assuring an open, democratic society in El Salvador, and Cambridge can be proud of its part.
http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/homepage/x1637678389
Suchitoto 13: El Salvador’s “American-made” Terrorism Act in Corporate Play
Written by Robert Weitzel
by Robert Weitzel and Meredith DeFrancesco
“Because we were struggling against the privatization of water. Now we have to struggle against the anti-terrorism law.”
In 2001 El Salvador replaced the colon with the U.S. dollar as its national currency. In 2006 its right-wing government replaced lawful dissent with U.S. inspired anti-terrorism legislation as its national policy. In return, the Salvadoran people are offering Americans an object lesson in the value of our Bill of Rights when dollar meets dissent.
On the morning of July 2, 2007, an estimated 400 Salvadorans who were waiting for buses to take them to the small town of Suchitoto to attend a public forum on the privatization of water utilities were accused of blocking the road and were attacked by riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Two women and one man were arrested.
In Suchitoto’s central square, word of the attack and arrests spread through the crowds waiting for the motorcade and press caravan of President Antonio Saca, who was coming to Suchitoto to announce his administration’s new “"National Decentralization Policy,” a plan viewed by many Salvadorans as the first step in privatizing the country’s publicly-owned water resources.
In solidarity with the marchers being attacked, people began moving in the direction of the melee. Met by police and military units supported by helicopters and machine guns mounted on jeeps, people in the front ranks, attempting to avoid further violence, raised their hands in the air pleading for calm and shouting, “we are unarmed.” The riot squad responded by advancing on the crowd firing rubber bullets and tear gas at close range. Many Salvadorans were injured by bullets or overcome by gas. Ten people were arrested.
Oscar Luna, the Salvadoran Human Rights Ombudsman, spoke out against the blatant human rights violations committed by the police and military at Suchitoto, stating, “I was able to identify the following human rights violations: excessive use of force, excessive use of weapons, mistreatment, illegal treatment, acts of torture, because that is torture when you threaten to throw someone out of a helicopter. It’s against all kinds of conventions and violations to human integrity….”
A witness to the protest simply said, “The people who were creating terror here were the police.”
The “Suchitoto 13,” as the defendants are known, were initially charged with public disorder, but Attorney General Garrid Safie quickly upped the charges to “terrorism” under the country’s “Decree 108: The Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism” enacted in 2006. Judge Fuentes de Paz ordered the Suchitoto 13 to be held for three month in preventative detention to allow the prosecutor time to gather evidence supporting the charge of terrorism. Released in late July on conditional liberty, the defendants still face the possibility of 60 years in prison if convicted as “terrorists.”
Writing in defense of the Suchitoto 13, Amnesty International said it, “fears that those concerned were arrested to punish them for their involvement in legitimate acts of protest and to prevent similar acts in the future.” They went on to say, “Any charges that impair the lawful exercise of fundamental rights should be dropped . . ..”
The fate of the Suchitoto 13 should be of particular interest to Americans who value the right to lawful dissent and free speech. El Salvador’s Decree 108 was not only modeled on the USA PATRIOT Act, but the vagueness and ambiguity of its language rivals that used in the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in December 2007 by a 404-6 vote and which is currently being considered in the Senate. The language in both countries’ anti-terrorism legislation has been crafted so that constitutionally protected dissent can, with a corporate nod, be prosecuted as acts of terrorism and result in draconian sentences.
El Salvador’s right-wing government has close ties to the Bush administration. It was with the urging and support from his friends in the Oval Office that President Saca was able to implement CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) in March 2006. Critics of CAFTA say it was no coincidence that the anti-terrorism legislation was enacted six months later, an occasion praised by the United States ambassador to El Salvador as proof that the two countries are partners in the war on terrorism. Or, more cynically stated, partners with the multinational corporations whose interests both Decree 108 and the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act are meant to protect.
Lorena Martinez, one of the Suchitoto 13 and president of CRIPDES, the Association of Rural Communities for the Development of El Salvador, the principal organization coordinating the Suchitoto forum, said that by passing Decree 108 “the government wants to a set a precedence for social movement organizations, especially organizations that have been very visibly protesting against what the government’s been doing . . . CRIPDES and other organizations were very strongly against the free trade agreements, against the interests of multinational companies.”
February 8 was the last day the prosecution had to present its case against the Suchitoto 13. It is not certain whether Attorney General Safie will stay with the charge of terrorism or downgrade the charge to the original public disorder—the definition of which was recently changed and the sentences doubled. The defendants could spend up to eight years in prison if convicted on the lesser charge. Defense lawyers and social movement leaders said that whether the charge is terrorism or public disorder, this case is about the criminalization of social protest.
Whatever the defendants’ ultimate charge, Decree 108 has accomplished what President Saca and President Bush and their multinational corporate partners intended. It has instilled fear and hesitation in the minds of citizens whose right to free speech and dissent are inalienable rights guaranteed by their respective constitutions. In short, it is terrorizing citizens into silence.
Those of us north of the Rio Grande River, who swear by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, can take cold comfort in the fact that forty-two Senators sent a letter to President Saca last July regarding the charges brought against the Suchitoto 13. They wrote, “It’s hard to imagine such acts could constitute terrorism.”
Let’s hope these same Senators remember the Suchitoto 13 when it’s their turn to vote on S. 1959: The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, which was written, like El Salvador’s Decree 108, to protect the corporate dollar and prosecute lawful dissent.
http://atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3411/81/
by Robert Weitzel and Meredith DeFrancesco
“Because we were struggling against the privatization of water. Now we have to struggle against the anti-terrorism law.”
In 2001 El Salvador replaced the colon with the U.S. dollar as its national currency. In 2006 its right-wing government replaced lawful dissent with U.S. inspired anti-terrorism legislation as its national policy. In return, the Salvadoran people are offering Americans an object lesson in the value of our Bill of Rights when dollar meets dissent.
On the morning of July 2, 2007, an estimated 400 Salvadorans who were waiting for buses to take them to the small town of Suchitoto to attend a public forum on the privatization of water utilities were accused of blocking the road and were attacked by riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Two women and one man were arrested.
In Suchitoto’s central square, word of the attack and arrests spread through the crowds waiting for the motorcade and press caravan of President Antonio Saca, who was coming to Suchitoto to announce his administration’s new “"National Decentralization Policy,” a plan viewed by many Salvadorans as the first step in privatizing the country’s publicly-owned water resources.
In solidarity with the marchers being attacked, people began moving in the direction of the melee. Met by police and military units supported by helicopters and machine guns mounted on jeeps, people in the front ranks, attempting to avoid further violence, raised their hands in the air pleading for calm and shouting, “we are unarmed.” The riot squad responded by advancing on the crowd firing rubber bullets and tear gas at close range. Many Salvadorans were injured by bullets or overcome by gas. Ten people were arrested.
Oscar Luna, the Salvadoran Human Rights Ombudsman, spoke out against the blatant human rights violations committed by the police and military at Suchitoto, stating, “I was able to identify the following human rights violations: excessive use of force, excessive use of weapons, mistreatment, illegal treatment, acts of torture, because that is torture when you threaten to throw someone out of a helicopter. It’s against all kinds of conventions and violations to human integrity….”
A witness to the protest simply said, “The people who were creating terror here were the police.”
The “Suchitoto 13,” as the defendants are known, were initially charged with public disorder, but Attorney General Garrid Safie quickly upped the charges to “terrorism” under the country’s “Decree 108: The Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism” enacted in 2006. Judge Fuentes de Paz ordered the Suchitoto 13 to be held for three month in preventative detention to allow the prosecutor time to gather evidence supporting the charge of terrorism. Released in late July on conditional liberty, the defendants still face the possibility of 60 years in prison if convicted as “terrorists.”
Writing in defense of the Suchitoto 13, Amnesty International said it, “fears that those concerned were arrested to punish them for their involvement in legitimate acts of protest and to prevent similar acts in the future.” They went on to say, “Any charges that impair the lawful exercise of fundamental rights should be dropped . . ..”
The fate of the Suchitoto 13 should be of particular interest to Americans who value the right to lawful dissent and free speech. El Salvador’s Decree 108 was not only modeled on the USA PATRIOT Act, but the vagueness and ambiguity of its language rivals that used in the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in December 2007 by a 404-6 vote and which is currently being considered in the Senate. The language in both countries’ anti-terrorism legislation has been crafted so that constitutionally protected dissent can, with a corporate nod, be prosecuted as acts of terrorism and result in draconian sentences.
El Salvador’s right-wing government has close ties to the Bush administration. It was with the urging and support from his friends in the Oval Office that President Saca was able to implement CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) in March 2006. Critics of CAFTA say it was no coincidence that the anti-terrorism legislation was enacted six months later, an occasion praised by the United States ambassador to El Salvador as proof that the two countries are partners in the war on terrorism. Or, more cynically stated, partners with the multinational corporations whose interests both Decree 108 and the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act are meant to protect.
Lorena Martinez, one of the Suchitoto 13 and president of CRIPDES, the Association of Rural Communities for the Development of El Salvador, the principal organization coordinating the Suchitoto forum, said that by passing Decree 108 “the government wants to a set a precedence for social movement organizations, especially organizations that have been very visibly protesting against what the government’s been doing . . . CRIPDES and other organizations were very strongly against the free trade agreements, against the interests of multinational companies.”
February 8 was the last day the prosecution had to present its case against the Suchitoto 13. It is not certain whether Attorney General Safie will stay with the charge of terrorism or downgrade the charge to the original public disorder—the definition of which was recently changed and the sentences doubled. The defendants could spend up to eight years in prison if convicted on the lesser charge. Defense lawyers and social movement leaders said that whether the charge is terrorism or public disorder, this case is about the criminalization of social protest.
Whatever the defendants’ ultimate charge, Decree 108 has accomplished what President Saca and President Bush and their multinational corporate partners intended. It has instilled fear and hesitation in the minds of citizens whose right to free speech and dissent are inalienable rights guaranteed by their respective constitutions. In short, it is terrorizing citizens into silence.
Those of us north of the Rio Grande River, who swear by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, can take cold comfort in the fact that forty-two Senators sent a letter to President Saca last July regarding the charges brought against the Suchitoto 13. They wrote, “It’s hard to imagine such acts could constitute terrorism.”
Let’s hope these same Senators remember the Suchitoto 13 when it’s their turn to vote on S. 1959: The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, which was written, like El Salvador’s Decree 108, to protect the corporate dollar and prosecute lawful dissent.
http://atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3411/81/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)