Reviews

State of the Peoples: A Global
Human Rights Report on Societies in Danger
by Cultural Survival, Beacon Press,
1993, 272 PP., $18.00 (paper).
Cultural Survival has assembled an invaluable guide to the world’s indigenous peoples. The book combines a scholarly concern for accuracy and detail, with an
activist agenda. The introductory
essays persuasively argue that the defense of indigenous nations must
go hand-in-hand with the struggle
to preserve endangered ecosys- tems. The core of the book, entitled
“Resources in Action,” begins with
concise summaries of the cases of
indigenous groups at particular risk, grouped under such headings as land titles, logging, uranium
mining and nuclear tests, and the
exploitation of strategic minerals and energy resources. This is fol-
lowed by more in-depth regional sections which contain cogent
short essays by field researchers
about endangered indigenous groups and the nature of the chal-
lenges they face to their well-being and survival.
Organized Labor in Venezuela,
1958-1991
by Steve Ellner, Scholarly Resources,
1993, 247 Pp., $40.00 (cloth).
A casual reader will learn some-
thingeither about trade unions, political parties, the Left, or Venezuela’s industrial structure
on virtually every page of Ellner’ s latest book. Indeed, the greatest
strength of this book is the amount
of institutional information one can
glean from it. Covering the role of
Venezuela’s labor movement dur-
ing the “democratic period” begin- ning in 1958, Ellner takes on the
thesis of Venezuelan “exceptional- ism”: the idea that because of its great oil wealth, and to a lesser
degree because of the astuteness of its dominant political parties and
the early defeat of leftist guerrillas,
Venezuelan development consti- tutes an exception to the Latin
American norm. Rather than sim-
ply dismissing the thesis as a myth,
he carefully shows the effect of the
myth on the actors who believed in
it, and the consequent muting of both class struggle and military
interventionism. After laying out the country’s
economic history, Ellner recounts
the role of organized labor in the
party systemparticularly Accin Democrtica’ s domination of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers. He contrasts the oil
workers who abandoned their mili-
tancy while remaining in the pro- tective party system, with the steel- workers who became more
combative and independent. In this
readable institutional history, Ell-
ner presents not only a history of the trade unions, but a valuable chronology of the Venezuelan
Left.
Winds of Memory
a video by Felix Zurita, 1992, 53 mins,
$390 (sale), $75 (rental), First
Run/Icarus Films.
This film opens with a scene of an
elderly Maya woman weaving as she declares in her indigenous
tongue, “after 500 years, they still haven’t discovered us. We’ve hid- den our face in order to resist.”
Winds of Memory attempts to unveil this unseen face. The film is
most gripping when it captures the
radical disjuncture between the rul-
ing class’ celebration of a postcard
version of indigenous culture and
the reality of brutal oppression. A
high-society gathering at Cobn’s annual folklore festival to select Miss Maya, the Indian Queen, is
juxtaposed with an interview with
festival promoter Benedicto Lucas Garcia, who oversaw the brutal
pacification campaign of 1980. The unctuous general, ten years into
retirement, asserts with a straight
face that the “disappeared” live in Mexico and Cuba, and embraces for the camera two indigenous
women to demonstrate his love for
“his people.”
The Politics of Food in Mexico:
State Power and Social Mobilization
by Jonathan Fox, Cornell University
Press, 1993, 280 Pp., $39.95 (cloth).
This is an interesting academic study of the relations between
social movements and state power in modern Mexico. The focus of Fox’s study is the reform of the Mexican Food System (SAM) which the government embarked
upon in the early 1980s. The gov-
ernment implemented a set of mea- sures to increase production and alleviate hunger, which had the
unintended consequence of mobi-
lizing the rural poorat least tem-
porarilyinto an effective political force. The interplay between state
policy-making and popular mobi- lization is Fox’s chief theoretical
concern.
Democracy and Socialism in
Sandinista Nicaragua
by Harry E. Vanden and Gary Prevost,
Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993, 172
pp., $32 (cloth).
Not very often does one encounter a
book that is: compact but compre-
hensive; sophisticated yet accessi- ble; an introduction providing a
definitive analysis; and a work for
the general reader that must be read
by the specialist in the field. This is
just such a book. In the introductory essay, the
authors trace competing concep- tions of democracy as they have evolved historically both within
capitalist and socialist theory, and
more concretely, within Russia, the
United States, and Latin America.
They link contradictory tendencies within the Sandinista movement
both to authoritarian and bureau-
cratic practices in actually existing socialisms, and to pressures to con-
form to the representative model of
democracy of Western industrial- ized countries, as well as to the
marginalized and repressed concep- tions of direct participatory democ-
racy subsumed in both traditions.
Chapter 2, “The Genesis of San-
dinismo” is an incisive and thor- ough account of the evolution of
Sandinista theory and praxis. Van-
den and Prevost locate the roots of
Sandinismo in Nicaraguan history as well as in the overwhelming
impact of U.S. imperialism on the
political, economic and social evo-
lution of the country. The authors
suggest that Sandinismo emerged as an innovative and successful
leftist movement from elements as
diverse as Sandino’ s war of libera-
tion and his written legacy, Cuban
foquismo, the ideology of the tradi-
tional pro-Soviet Left, the coura-
geous nationalism of Rigoberto Lopez Perez and Pedro JoaquIn Chamorro, and the fortitude and
creativity of the FSLN’s founders.
The core of the book is devoted
to tracing the trajectory of the San- dinista revolutionthe idealism
that impelled it, the contradictions that bedevilled it, and the forces
that undermined it. In the end, Van-
den and Prevost argue, the innova- tiveness and adaptability of the
Sandinistas, which carried them so
far, proved inadequate. They attribute this failure not so much to
concerted counterrevolutionary hostility, but more to the paradoxes within Sandinismo itself: van-
guardi sm and democratic central- ism combined with participatory
democracy, pluralism and elec- tions; centralized planning and state
control atop a mixed economy; and
finally, fighting an anti-imperialist war in the context of nonalignment
and a collapsing Soviet bloc.
The authors provide a well-craft-
ed and convincing account of the
electoral defeat, and give a useful
post mortem and assessment of the challenges ahead. This slim vol-
ume constitutes an invaluable addi-
tion to the expert’s Nicaragua col-
lection, but it is equally valuable as
a basic text for the novice.