Revolution And Counterrevolution In Central America And The Caribbean

Donald E Schulz, Douglas H Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000309973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A detailed examination of the roots of revolution and counterrevolution in Central America and the Caribbean, this book draws on the research of an interdisciplinary team of noted scholars. The authors give special attention to the institutional and structural causes of stability and instability—in particular, the traditional role of the United States; the current economic crisis; the changing role of the Roman Catholic church; the influence of the military and security forces, the oligarchy, and the business sector; the problems of instituting socioeconomic reform; the politics of subsistence; and the revolutionary opposition. Following the thematic chapters, a country-by-country focus is employed to assess the situations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Jamaica, and a section devoted to the international dimensions of the crisis looks at Mexican, Soviet, Cuban, and U.S. policies toward the region, The editors' concluding chapter explores prospects for the future of this troubled area.

Part 1
Structural and Institutional Sources of Stability and Instability

1
Ten Theories in Search of Central American Reality

Donald E. Schulz

If hell, as Thomas Hobbes once said, is truth seen too late, then the recent belated discovery of Central America by the United States suggests the hazards of engaging in a quagmire whose origins are only dimly understood and whose dimensions can as yet be only guessed. Prior to the 1978-79 Nicaraguan revolution, few areas of the world were taken more for granted by the State Department and the public. An obscure backwater of the international system, the region (with the notable exception of Costa Rica) seemed perennially somnolent under the rule of traditional oligarchies and military dictatorships. Today all that has changed. Civil strife wracks El Salvador and Guatemala and hreatens to spread to Honduras. Counterrevolutionary exiles, organized, trained, and equipped by the United States and Honduras, attack Nicaragua from sanctuaries in southern Honduras. Rumors of impending war dominate cafe conversation in Managua and Tegucigalpa. The possibility of internationalization and regionalization--of a great brushfire of violence sweeping the isthmus from Mexico to Colombia, drawing in the United States and Cuba in support of their respective clients--remains the ultimate nightmare. Only time will tell whether the specter will become a reality.

How is one to understand these developments? As so frequently happens in highly politicized settings, attempts to explain often obscure as much as they reveal. Complex phenomena are force-fit into Procrustean ideological molds. Reductionism and selective perception abound. The first casualty is truth.

In recent years, a number of theories and arguments have been set forth in an attempt to provide a handle to Central American realities. Some have been presented as monocausal or mutually exclusive, others as links in an interrelated web. ("Everything," Viron Vaky once remarked, "is part of everything else.")¹ This introduction will examine the most prominent of these explanations. Although some are seriously flawed and none are adequate to grasp the full complexity of the Central American crisis, together, viewed critically, they provide a reasonably comprehensive, multidimensional frame of reference, with significant policy implications for the future.

(1) The Theory of Economic Development: Competitive Exclusion and Rural–Urban Underemployment

One of the curiosities of recent U.S. political life is how theories and ideas long discredited in both academia and the "real world" have reemerged and again become politically fashionable. A striking example is provided by the Reagan administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI). In February 1982, the president unveiled a longrange development program consisting primarily of proposals for (1) a one-way free-trade arrangement whereby exports from the affected countries would be allowed to enter the United States duty-free for a period of twelve years, (2) tax incentives for U.S. firms investing in the region, and (3) a supplemental FY 1982 appropriation of $350 million, much of which would be concentrated in the private sector to "help foster the spirit of enterprise necessary to take advantage of the trade and investment portions of the program."² Technical assistance and training would be provided to Basin entrepreneurs. Among other things, the proposed legislation would prohibit recipient governments from imposing confiscatory conditions on U.S. businesses or limiting American access to Caribbean markets and commodities. Rather, the "magic of the marketplace" would be the key to generating self-sustaining growth.

The program itself was quite modest--87 percent of Caribbean exports already entered the United States dutyfree and another 5 percent (textiles) were excluded from the plan. Clearly, this was no Alliance for Progress. Yet much of the impetus, spirit, and rationale smacked strongly of that earlier, ill-fated effort. Notwithstanding the technical problems associated with the two projects, both were based on the dubious proposition that economic growth is a cure for poverty and the revolutionary discontent that it spawns: Create wealth and, even if it is not distributed equitably, some will "trickle down" to the masses.³

Unfortunately, the theory fails to take into account the fundamentally exploitative nature of the socioeconomic and political structures plaguing most Central American countries. It is not simply a question of wealth generated in highly inegalitarian societies flowing disproportionately to those who already have riches, power, and status. That is only part of the iceberg; equally important, the poor have often grown poorer: Newly generated wealth and the promise thereof have whetted the appetites of the rich and powerful, inspiring them not only to make better use of their own economic resources, but also to encroach on those of their less powerful and more impoverished countrymen. The consequence has been the conversion of "trickle-down" theory into "trickle-up" economics.

Although the specifics vary from country to country, the general pattern is fairly clear: Economic "development," through the transformation of subsistence agricultural into agro-export economies, set in motion a process of "competitive exclusion.⁴, which reinforced and deepened existing inequalities and led to the progressive immiseration of large segments of the rural population. In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, this involved the conversion of Indian communal and private lands into coffee latifundios and the attendant dispossession of numerous peasants, as small holdings were bought up, "grabbed," or otherwise consolidated into larger units. Subsequently, in the 1950s and 1960s, as cotton, sugar, and other commodities began to challenge the dominance of coffee, many additional lands were converted to those crops.

The social consequences were formidable: In El Salvador, there was a dramatic decrease in colono arrangements (from 55,000 in 1960 to 17,000 a decade later), as planters increasingly resorted to temporary landless workers and mechanization to cultivate and harvest their crops. The number of landless peasants grew from 12 percent in 1960 to 41 percent in 1975. Only about 6 percent of rural households had access to enough land to meet the subsistence needs of the average family. Over 50 percent of the agricultural labor force was unemployed more than two-thirds of the year.

Similarly, in Guatemala, the modernization of agriculture gave rise to a "qualitative redistribution of rural misery."⁵ Between 1964 and 1979, the number of farms too small to provide a subsistence living increased from 364,879 to 547,572 (reflecting the subdivision and parcelling out of existing holdings from generation to generation), while their proportion of total farmland declined from 18.6 to 16.2 percent. Conversely, the largest 2.1 percent of the farms increased their total land from 2.2 to 2.75 million hectares. Even as peasant holdings were losing 26 percent of their acreage in the 1970s, the area devoted to export agriculture swelled by 45 percent. Rural unemployment grew accordingly. In the 1960s agricultural employment grew .1 percent per year, while the rural population expanded by 2.6 percent. Currently, some 500,000 men, women, and children are forced by poverty and tenancy arrangements to migrate to the Pacific Coast to harvest coffee, cotton, and sugar cane on the large estates, the great majority at no more than the minimum wage of $3.20 a day. In spite of a remarkable agricultural-export performance, domestic food production failed to keep pace with population growth. The result has been increasing malnutrition. (Life expectancy among the rural Indian populace is only 49 years.)⁶

In Nicaragua, too, land concentration was accelerated, most notably in the Pacific zone, where subsistence farmers were increasingly displaced, with an attendant rise in rural and urban unemployment. In the 1950s alone, growing production had forced some 180,000 peasants from small farms into seasonal plantation work. After the mid-1960s, agricultural unemployment climbed steadily, reaching 16 percent in 1977 and 32 percent in 1979. (The latter figure, of course, is largely a reflection of the civil war.) At the same time, real wages and income declined. In turn, the rural poor increasingly expressed their anger through land seizures, strikes, and the formation in 1977 of the Association of Rural Workers.⁷

Meanwhile, in Honduras, the least developed country in the region, the expansion of commercial agriculturemainly coffee, cotton, and cattle--for the first time began to seriously disrupt communal forms of property-holding. Between 1952 and 1965, competitive exclusion produced a 39 percent decrease in ejido land (not to mention the impact on national and ocupante holdings). As elsewhere, the large haciendas often expanded through the simple expedient of enclosing new lands with barbed wire, thereby denying access to peasants whose families had worked these plots for generations. In southern Honduras, for instance, two estates added some 54,000 acres to their holdings through such practices. Nevertheless, employment opportunities in the expanding capitalist agricultural sector and the continuing availability of colonizable land absorbed most of the surplus labor force until the late 1970s: "In combination with the agrarian reform programs of the early 1970s, these factors meant that rural Hondurans overall did not experience a sharp, real deterioration of their incomes, wealth, or control over their livelihoods in degrees or at rates anywhere approaching the declines affecting many rural Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans."⁸

This is a crucial point. Moreover, these less exclusionary conditions were mirrored in Costa Rica, where land reform, colonization, and the continued growth of the banana industry absorbed many of the small-holders displaced in the 1960s and early 1970s. Thus, the two countries in which the impact of competitive exclusion was least devastating were the most politically stable in the region.

And what of industrialization? Clearly, it was not a panacea for the social crisis spawned by agricultural modernization. Modern factories were built and expensive machinery imported. A small minority of the population was enriched, and a certain number co-opted into the rising middle class. The vast majority, however, were excluded. Since industrialization was capital-intensive, relatively few jobs were created. By one estimate, only about one out of every five people entering the Central American labor market between 1970 and 1975 was able to obtain employment.⁹ In El Salvador, for instance, the manufacturing sector grew by 24 percent between 1961 and 1971, while the number of people it employed increased by only 6 percent. Indeed, the number of workers employed in manufacturing as a percentage of the economically active population actually declined. The ranks of the marginally employed mushroomed. Forty-two percent of urban jobs paid below the official poverty level; about a quarter of the workforce was unemployed or underemployed.¹⁰

In short, industrial expansion was fundamentally incapable of absorbing the growing urban workforce being created by rapid population growth and the influx of underemployed immigrants from the countryside. The growth potential in the Central American Common Market was limited, while the high-cost industries created behind the Common Market tariff barriers were unable to compete in the more rapidly growing world market for light manufactured goods. Thus, employment opportunities were restricted by industrial policies moving these countries too far from their prospective comparative advantage, producing for the wrong (i.e., more slowly growing) market and with inappropriate, high-cost technology. This set of policy errors reinforced and deepened socioeconomic polarization and helped pave the way for the political crises of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Will the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) alleviate these conditions, or will it intensify the crisis by exacerbating the very socioeconomic conditions that it is intended to ameliorate? The outlook is problematic, at best. In the 1960s, Central American leaders embraced programs like the Alliance for Progress (its idealistic rhetoric notwithstanding) and the Central American Common Market partly because they were thought to obviate the need for basic structural reforms: It was unnecessary to create a domestic market for their industrial products by raising mass living standards when an external demand could be generated through the Common Market. Workers would thus continue to serve the economy as cheap sources of labor, rather than as consumers wielding economic power of their own. Development, as it occurred in country after country, became part of the problem of political instability, rather than a solution to it.

The central issue has scarcely changed. Agrarian reform has been truncated in El Salvador and is floundering in Honduras. In Guatemala, the land colonization program in El Peten has been subverted by the rush of speculators and generals to acquire properties whose value has escalated due to the exploitation of oil and nickel deposits in the region. At the same time, the CBI does not guarantee the kind of efficient, labor-intensive industrialization, capable of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART 1. Structural and Institutional Sources of Stability and Instability
• PART 2 Stability and Instability: A Country Focus
• PART 3 The International Dimensions of the Crisis
• List of Abbreviations
• About the Authors
• Index