The Globalizers: Development Workers in Action by Jeffrey T. Jackson, 2005, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 392 pages.
The colonized parts of the planet bear the ironic marks of a brutal history. Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, takes its name from the Nahuatl language, and means “Silver Mountain.” There was a time when the city was the capital of the mining operations of the Spanish colonial regime in Central America. By the mid 1950s, the great silver mine firm, the Honduran Rosario Mining Company, ended its magnificent run in the seams. Silver production peaked, and then entered a slow decline. World Bank economic statistics for Honduras are miserable: over half the population lives below the official poverty line, close to a third suffer from chronic unemployment, and the income differentials between the immensely wealthy and the immiserated is grotesquely high. As the poet Roberto Sosa wrote in 1969, “Los pobres son muchos y por eso/ es imposible olvidarlos” (“The poor are many and that’s why/ it is impossible to forget them”).
By anthropologist Jeffrey Jackson’s reckoning, the rich never forget the poor. They simply re-brand them as “customers” of “aid,” using this sleight of hand to reproduce colonial levels of exploitation while appearing magnanimous. There is now an enormous literature that questions the ideological stratagems of the globalization industry as propelled by the claims of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Writing in English, Laura MacDonald, Alan Fowler, Anthony Bebbington, Sonia Alvarez, James Petras and others have provided ample testimony on the dubious role also played by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the social development of Central and South America. Jackson goes deeper than these accounts. He takes for granted that the “aid industry” is part and parcel of the technique to undermine the sovereignty of nation-states and, more, to enfeeble democratic processes. What he illuminates is the mechanism by which this democratic powerlessness is produced, one in which consent rather than coercion is the dominant lever. How indeed are the “globalizers”—the hundreds of transnational institutions and their staffs working in recipient countries—able to draw in a coalition among civil society within the former Third World to participate in their own continued dependency? And why did Hondurans, in this case, allow themselves to be so entangled?
Early in The Globalizers, Jackson offers a revealing socio-geography of the institutions of “aid” and “development.” Whereas the constitutional government of Honduras is located in the Comayagüela section of Tegucigalpa and around the downtown Parque Central, the institutions of global government are almost all in the Colonia Palmira neighborhood. The former is a bustle, with family-owned shops and street vendors selling goods at Honduran prices; embassies and expatriate households dominate the latter, where fancy cars traverse bare streets and shops sell goods at dollar prices. “What this institutional geography reveals,” Jackson concludes, “is the tremendous wealth disparity between the foreign development agencies and the Honduran government institutions. This disparity, so clearly revealed by the property—buildings, office equipment, and vehicles—of these organizations, has an impact on the relative power and influence of these institutions on Honduran society.” Jackson goes on to deconstruct this question of power and influence in the rest of the book through a rigorous ethnography of the practice of the global actors based in Honduras.
The author surveys the many different kinds of bilateral, multilateral and Honduran organizations, from the omnipotent U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to the local office of CARE. We meet the cliquish expats and locals who staff these organizations, and find that many of the Honduran professionals (strangely called FSNs—“foreign service nationals”—by their foreign colleagues), formerly trained overseas or by government agencies, now work for the international organizations for the higher salaries and the development agencies’ ability to shape local politics. Jackson calls this “an internal brain drain of some of Honduras’s best and brightest.” Co-optation into the agenda of globalization, he argues, occurs at this personal level as much as at the institutional one. Jackson draws on three concrete examples to follow the institutional story of unequal power: the construction and repair of dams, the creation of consent toward the establishment of maquiladoras and the reconstruction after Hurricane Mitch in the late 1990s. But these cases can offer only an incomplete picture, for as Jackson notes, the globalizers are everywhere: they’re in capitalism’s groundwork and architecture, in the “global scripts” of progress, in every facet of human life.
To adjudge the work of the globalizers in the three examples, Jackson adopts several key propositions: that global agendas tend to win out over local ones; that local agendas succeed only if they are capable of linking into the global; that Honduran institutions (and the country as a whole) do indeed benefit from globalization; that the negative consequences of development are downplayed or ignored; and that the greater, largely hidden benefits of international development actors go to the donor countries. The result is far less conspiratorial than John Perkins’ account of the “economic hit men,” and allows for the agency of the Hondurans who work with and consent to the rule of market fundamentalism.
Jackson only briefly takes up the most significant work of the globalizers, however: the reconstruction of the legal-political apparatus of the Honduran state after the end of military rule in 1982. To implement a new Agricultural Modernization and Development Law, which in 1992 opened up the Honduran market to international agribusiness, USAID paid $8 million to Chemonics, a U.S. contractor, to create an organization called PRODEPAH. This cut-out wrote the draft law (or “anteproyecto”), and then submitted it to the governmental body, who, being understaffed and underfunded, adopted it. As one USAID official told Jackson, “It’s sort of our role, really, to guide the policy discussion…. We’re writing the original draft. We’ve done this in a couple of cases.” Indeed, this official called for the elimination of a Honduran state agency—the Ministry of Planning, SECPLAN—which, in his estimation, “totally ignores market principles and really muddies the waters on a lot of reforms we are trying to put through.” SECPLAN wanted to maintain agricultural programs such as subsidized credit and price controls that USAID considered “throwbacks to a socialist era” and contrary to the Agricultural Modernization Law. Under the pressure of USAID as well as other international donors (the Germans and Japanese, in this example), the USAID source could now casually report that “[s]ome of these agencies are coming around.” The real scandal of the globalizers, then, is the arrogant certainty of their right to reconstruct the world, even superseding the elected officials of a constitutional state.
Jackson’s account is insufficient only in that it does not ask the fundamental question: What explains the globalizers’ success in swamping Honduran civil society, while other former Third World societies have not acceded to the same agenda? For a fuller explanation, we would need to hear more about the Honduran political economy, about the class nature of the state and the role of the dominant economic classes in civil society. How, for example, do elites interact with the globalizers, and by what means do they come to perceive their interests as held in common?
In addition, and importantly, have voices critical of the globalization agenda had any impact in challenging or ameliorating its power and its effects? The dirty war of the 1980s and 1990s certainly decimated resistance, as thousands of activists faced the brunt of the U.S.-backed assault on Marxism and other forms of dissent. Death squads, such as the infamous Battalion 3-16, can then be seen as responsible for doing USAID’s groundwork. This is perhaps what U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte meant in his October 1982 comment, speaking on the counterinsurgency, that “Democracy is being consolidated in this country”—democracy here meaning the construction of a civil society pliant to the interests of the globalizers, and therefore absent of any radical force.
In a 1986 article, U.S. diplomat Edward Sheehan wrote, “The favorite Honduran word is nada—nothing.” After hearing phrases such as el gobierno no hace nada (the government does nothing), la Iglesia no tiene nada (the Church has nothing), no tenemos nada (we have nothing), yo soy nada (I am nothing), Sheehan surmises, “The people are passive and fatalistic, low in self-esteem.” Such an analysis of “the country of nada” is only possible if one occludes the resistance and the counterinsurgency. With it in the analytical framework, Honduran nothingness is not so much existential as it is a sociological statement about imperialism’s detritus.
About the Author
Vijay Prashad teaches at Trinity College. His latest book is Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare, and he is co-editor, with Teo Ballvé, of Dispatches from Latin America: On the Front Lines Against Neoliberalism, forthcoming from South End Press and LeftWord Books (India).
