For two decades, Central America has been in upheaval, experiencing fundamental social and political change. The Nicaraguan revolution and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, the civil war in El Salvador and the U.N.-sponsored peace settlement, and continuing state-fostered violations of human rights in Guatemala and Honduras are all aspects of a crisis still far from resolution. These dramatic events comprise a general disintegration of the “old order” in Central America. While the social characteristics of individual countries make each case distinct, overall there has been a process of social transformation of an extremely violent nature.
In Nicaragua the final demise of coercive patron-client labor relations was the great contribution of the Sandinista revolution. Next door, the ravages of civil war and years of resistance in the liberated zones in El Salvador fundamentally altered social relations based on servitude–possibly beyond reconstruction. Before their partial or complete demise, these regimes were profoundly anti-democratic, based upon a political philosophy that predated the Age of Liberalism. With the exception of Costa Rica, Central American social systems were based as much upon coercion and servitude as upon free wage labor, and embraced an ideology of hierarchy instead of equality before the law.
Twentieth-century Central American history has turned on two axes: the power of landed property, and domination by the U.S. government.[1] The power of landed property–with its systems of forced labor–originated in the colonial period. By the second half of the nineteenth century, with the commercialization of agriculture during the region’s coffee boom, landed property assumed total hegemony in the region. Commercialization was extended by foreign capital to banana production, and culminated in the 1950s with the rapid spread of cotton. All this served to strengthen the hold of landed property over the economic and political life of the region. Although the banana companies employed wage labor, and the legal framework for coercive labor systems was eliminated a decade before the boom in cotton, the interests of landed property remained resolutely opposed to agrarian reform–and the broad individual ownership of land–which would have been the basis for the modernization of Central America.
Courting risks implied by generalization, we suggest, for example, that prior to the late 1970s, capitalist farmers were few in number and relied on systems of labor that combined and juxtaposed free wage labor with servile, non-capitalist relations. Seasonal harvest workers tended to be capitalist wage laborers while permanent laborers were ensconsed within ties of patronage. In the agro-export sector, where capitalism was more highly developed, producers relied on large numbers of temporary wage laborers to harvest cotton, coffee and sugar. But even here, most migrant workers returned to their villages after the round of harvests to plant small parcels of land, more often than not acquired outside of market mechanisms.
When industrialization came to the region, it was managed and directed–with low tariff protection–in a manner subservient to landed property. Perhaps most important, the national capital in the new “import substitution” industries came largely from the agricultural oligarchy. As a result, the modernizing effect of industrialization on the political system was limited.[2] Certainly in no other part of Latin America has the traditional landlord class been so successful in holding back social and political change as in Central America.
The second factor, the role of the United States, was relatively latent in the nineteenth century, asserting itself fully only 80 years ago, when the U.S. government engineered the overthrow of José Santos Zelaya, President of Nicaragua. U.S. hegemony in Central America was made possible because the local dominant classes had not achieved effective, institutionalized control over their territories and populations until quite late in this century. Had the ruling classes in EI Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua been more cohesive, and their power more institutionalized, intervention would have been less necessary to maintain U.S. economic and strategic interests.
The powerful and direct role of the United States in mediating intra-elite disputes, as well as in suppressing popular insurrection, imparted an intensely reactionary and despotic character to the regimes in Central America, with the obvious exception of Costa Rica. With Washington to intervene when disputes threatened to undermine the stability of reactionary rule, the dominant groups felt little pressure to accommodate the demands of the middle and lower classes for reform, or even for nominal political participation. The state, of course, played a central role in the enforcement of coercive labor, intervening through the legal system and with overt repression. The absence of pressure to accommodate complemented the authoritarian system of land tenure and labor coercion that emerged during the nineteenth century. Far from modernizers, these landlord-dominated regimes in Central America blocked the development of capitalism in agriculture, and the attendant ideology of democratic participation.[3]
Despite (or because of) their proclivity for violent repression, the reactionary regimes of Central America faced major challenges during this century. Until the Sandinista revolution and the long struggle in El Salvador, these challenges were defeated. Sandino’s insurrection (1926-33) represented the first major threat to the reactionary order. This brought forth the most extensive U.S. intervention in the hemisphere, ending in the strategic defeat and withdrawal of the U.S. Marines. Because Sandino’s movement failed to consolidate its victory, the Somoza dynasty, which emerged in its wake, proved a long-lasting triumph for U.S. interests and the Nicaraguan dominant classes. The Somoza regime served the interests of Washington spectacularly well, by maintaining relative political stability for 40 years in a country previously rent with civil strife.
The crushing of the Salvadoran insurrection of 1932, in which the direct U.S. role was insignificant, proved equally propitious for the dominant classes. In a matter of weeks the Salvadoran army carried out a massacre of proportions still beyond comparison, and laid the basis for four decades of relatively stable despotic rule.
The Arévalo-Arbenz reform decade in Guatemala presented the third major challenge to the old order in Central America. While the Guatemalan reforms of 1944 to 1954 received strong support from the Left, including the Communist Party, the eventual outcome of the process, had it been left to run its course, would quite probably have been no more revolutionary than the Costa Rican “revolution” of the same period. That Arbenz was considered a radical–and in the Guatemalan context certainly was–tells much about the nature of reactionary despotism in Central America. Mild as the Arbenz reforms were, especially the land reform, they provoked the fury of the landed oligarchy, leading to the overthrow of the elected government by a U.S.-organized coup.
In the 1950s, liberal democracy represented a revolutionary doctrine in Central America, much as it had in Western Europe 200 years before. The violent reaction of the dominant classes to the social and political reforms associated with capitalist modernization cast profound doubt upon whether moderate reform could be achieved peacefully. The Central American oligarchy proved extraordinarily adept at preventing the emergence of political and economic power divorced from property in land.
But successful as this oligarchy was in protecting itself against the current of history, there were changes it could not prevent. Though based on semi-servile labor, the boom in coffee had contradictory results, not all of which the landed oligarchy could control. In the countryside the expansion of coffee production was based upon intensification of coercive labor; however, in the cities commercialization associated with coffee brought modernizing tendencies, increased urbanization, and the development of a small middle class in finance and commerce[4]. The expansion of banana production further stimulated the growth of the urban middle class, and created a rural working class as well. The rise in importance of cotton reinforced these modernizing tendencies.
In order to contain these pressures for modernization—particularly demands for political participation—despotic rule became increasingly deformed and idiosyncratic. In Nicaragua, the struggle against social and political modernization took the form of dynastic rule. During the final years of the Somoza regime, political participation became so narrow that the country was not even a republic of the oligarchy, but the territory of a family. In Guatemala oligarchic rule depended increasingly upon terrorizing the population, which prompted a series of guerrilla insurrections. In El Salvador, too, the oligarchy turned to open terror to stem the tide of modernization. In the 1960s, a mass-based reformist coalition, led by José Napoleon Duarte and Guillermo Ungo, emerged in El Salvador. The coalition won the 1972 presidential election, which the military then nullified. Faced with pressures it could no longer contain, the Salvadoran oligarchy adopted the “Guatemalan solution” of state terror, polarizing society and plunging the country into civil war.
Commercialization and capitalist development tend to generate a class differentiation of society that calls forth the political ideology of liberalism: a secular state nominally based upon the principle that governments rule by the consent of the governed, and that the governed are equal before the law.[5] This ideological change results from the development of the classes that characterize capitalist society: the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, and the capitalists. These classes relate to each other through market exchange, which is based upon the nominal equality of the exchanging parties. Unlike in societies based upon the legal coercion of labor (with slavery the most obvious case), workers in capitalist society are formally free, hence the term “free wage labor.” In the political sphere this formal freedom may express itself in the freedoms–of speech, assembly, etc.–of bourgeois democratic societies. A fundamental tension in capitalist societies arises between the formal equality in exchange and the underlying inequality in production, where capital asserts its domination over labor.
By the end of World War II, the elites in most of Latin America had generally accepted the necessity of granting democratic rights in principle and rhetoric, if not in practice. Not so in Central America. This did not occur in large part because of continuing social relations of servitude in the countryside. The principle that governments are based upon consent remains an innovative concept in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. It is in this context that one can understand the role of Marxist ideology in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. Whatever Marxism and Leninism mean to socialists, in the anti-Communist culture of U.S. policymakers, they have a clear and quasi-religious connotation, standing in relation to bourgeois democratic values as the anti-Christ does to Christianity. However, the role of Marxism in Central America has been quite different from either the demonization of the Right or the idealism of the Left.
Once the reactionary oligarchies crushed the reformist movements in Central America, Marxism provided the ideological umbrella under which reformism and modernization were carried forward. Forced to armed struggle by the closing of the peaceful path to change, reformers found themselves in the same camp as socialists and Communists. More importantly, because the U.S. government and the Central American oligarchy invoked the ideology of liberal democracy to justify its opposite, reactionary despotism, reformers were denied that ideology as the basis of their struggle. In this context, Marxism became the rallying ideology to bring about the very reforms which the elites defended in words but prevented in practice.
Socialism, by most definitions, involves the progressive elimination of private property as the basis for organizing production, and with this, the elimination of all classes of exploiters. Such a program could not be seriously pursued in Central America because of the economic and political importance to the progressive movement of rural and urban small producers. However, it must not be thought that the progressive movement in Central America used the term “socialism” cynically or dishonestly. The point is quite the contrary. In the Cold War context, the language of Marxism and socialism provided Latin Americans with an anti-imperialist rallying ideology, rather than a political and economic program of social transformation. Pointing this out is not a criticism of the Left, but rather an insight that allows us to understand the broad base of the insurrectionary struggles that used the language of Marxism, particularly in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
In the 1970s, the term “national liberation” came to be used loosely on the Left to refer to almost any nationalist insurrectionary movement in an underdeveloped country. This loose usage was not completely wrong because there is a sense in which all underdeveloped countries suffer from external domination because of their economic and political weakness. However, insurrectionary movements in many, if not most of these countries would more precisely be identified as “anti-dictatorial” or “national democratic,” for they sought liberation from an internal oppressor, not an external one. In El Salvador, for example, the struggle launched in the late 1970s began as a conflict to overthrow a landed oligarchy, with the major role of the United States coming only as the Left appeared close to success. In contrast, the Nicaraguan insurrection led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) represented a struggle for national liberation in an almost pure form. The close identification of the Somoza family with U.S. political interests meant that the anti-dictatorial struggle could not be separated from a struggle to free the country from external domination.
The emphasis on national identity and independence was a natural one for the peasants, workers and petty bourgeoisie of Nicaragua, and it defined the radical and populist character of the FSLN. The Frente’s stress on national aspirations also fit well with the class structure of the country, for Nicaragua possessed neither a substantial working class on which to base a socialist ideology, nor a coherent peasant movement which, in El Salvador, gave the struggle of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) its radical class character.
A major revolution attempt swept Nicaragua during the rule of the Sandinistas, though largely outside their control. Indeed, to an extent it occurred contrary to the stated goals of the Sandinista leadership. Peasant struggle fundamentally altered rural society, so that by the end of the 1980s Nicaragua was radically different from what it had been a decade before. From a society of peasants enmeshed in subordinate, non-capitalist class relations with big landlords, Nicaragua became a society of farmers, large and small. After the redistribution of land and the fundamental decline in the power of the traditional landlord class that occurred in the 1980s, servile class relations existed only as the exception. A majority, though far from all, of the rural population had acquired land.
While the Somozas and their coterie developed major capitalist agro-processing enterprises, the dynasty’s support rested on tiers of patron-client ties which dominated the political and economic life of the country. In 1979 most rural Nicaraguans were poor peasants whose access to land depended upon a multitude of forms of servile class relations involving tenancy, debt and patronage.[6] In addition to small-scale agriculture, largely for subsistence, most peasants worked as wage laborers for several months each year harvesting cotton, coffee or sugar. Regardless of the mix between wage work and subsistence agriculture, poor rural Nicaraguans sought two changes above all else: 1) access and legal title to land, and 2) an end to the tyranny of the local Somocistas.[7] The coalition government that assumed power in July, 1979 destroyed the old tyranny, but took few steps to satisfy the demand for land. In fact, the FSLN leadership and its bourgeois partners both opposed land distribution.
The Sandinistas and the anti-Somocista bourgeoisie shared two fundamental goals: 1) to break the power of the old regime; and 2) to develop and modernize the forces of production in Nicaragua, especially in agriculture. Consequently, the coalition government of the early Sandinista period converted confiscated Somocistas properties into state farms. For the FSLN, this policy reflected a desire to preserve the perceived productivity and profitability of large modern enterprises, as well as to eliminate archaic rural class relations perpetuated by landlords and political bosses tied to the Somoza dynasty. Members of the new government, Sandinista and bourgeois alike, opposed the distribution of land, because they thought it ran counter to their objective of agrarian modernization.
Events would prove that peasants felt betrayed by the government’s agrarian reform.[8] From their first General Program of 1969 to their political pronouncements a decade later, on the eve of seizing power, the Sandinistas consistently promised land to the tiller. But their 1981 agrarian reform law was vague and contradictory, reflecting the bitter conflicts that emerged in the process of developing agrarian policy.[9] The law provided guarantees for private property so long as land was efficiently utilized, with no limit to size. Only land not worked productively was subject to expropriation. Between 1981 and 1984, little land was confiscated, and the pace of redistribution remained slow. Peasant beneficiaries of the reform were organized, often against their will, into production cooperatives. If a cooperative was large and considered to be important, it was administered by an official of the Ministry of Agriculture.[10]
For peasants expecting land, turning Somocistas properties into state farms and cooperatives represented a hollow victory, particularly when the wages paid by the state for picking coffee and cotton declined dramatically. Following a series of confrontations with dissatisfied peasants demanding land in 1980 and 1981, the government made negligible concessions, such as making land available for short-term rental to groups agreeing to work within production cooperatives. As a consequence of their faint-hearted distribution policy, the Sandinistas progressively lost support in the countryside. Matters were only made worse when the government decreed that basic foodstuffs–corn, beans and rice–must be sold to the state, at prices which inflation drove below small farmers’ costs of production.[11] By the mid-1980s, many peasants had lost the faith they once had in the Sandinista revolution.
A watershed came in 1985, when armed opposition by the peasantry, along with the growing inability to subsidize the state farms, forced the Sandinistas to modify agrarian policy. The Sandinista organization of medium and small farmers and ranchers (UNAG) called on the government to reverse the course of the agrarian reform and distribute land. Recognizing that their survival depended upon winning the political allegiance of the rural population, the Sandinistas hastened to do so. Acreage on state farms and abandoned or decapitalized private estates passed to cooperatives and, for the first time since the triumph of 1979, to peasant households. Land on large private estates declined from 50% of the nation’s farmland in 1979 to 30% in 1990.[12] Sixty percent of all peasant households benefited from the agrarian reform, either by acquiring land or receiving title to plots which they had occupied illegally. Reluctantly and late, the Sandinistas presided over one of the most redistributive land reforms in Latin American history.
The significance of the agrarian reform lies less in its land distribution per se, than in the transformation of rural society and class consciousness that it brought about. The control of land by the old dominant classes drastically declined. In abandoning their property and maneuvering to subvert the government, they forfeited what measure of economic and political power the Sandinistas had been willing to grant them. At the same time a new political force emerged: small farmers, freed from the servile and patronal relations of production that had held them in subservience before the revolution.
The land question was the most conflictive issue confronting the new government of Violeta Chamorro, which came to power in 1990. During the campaign, Chamorro promised not to reverse the Sandinista agrarian reform, no doubt because more than 250,000 peasant households had benefited from it. Any other electoral position would have courted certain defeat. It was commonly assumed by the Left and the Right that this was no more than an opportunistic election promise.
The moment of decision was forced upon Chamorro, in the summer of 1992. Washington announced that until properties were returned and the security forces cleansed of Sandinistas, it would withhold aid from Nicaragua. But Nicaraguan politics had changed fundamentally since the Somoza dynasty. The Nicaraguan government’s response to the U.S. ultimatum of July, 1992 stunned Washington. In September, President Chamorro announced that all property claims filed with the government would be settled in favor of the former owners–but with a major catch. Instead of getting their lands back, they would receive compensation, mainly in the form of shares in state companies to be privatized.[13] This was a victory for the small farmers who had fought for land and used armed force to defend it, and a defeat for the old landowning class. Stock in state companies–many of which were bankrupt–failed to satisfy either former landowners or Washington.
The Chamorro government consolidated the bourgeois democratic revolution in Nicaragua. But this consolidation did not imply either a commitment to social justice or to small farmers. Nicaragua’s more-or-less democratic distribution of land will survive only as long as the landed petty bourgeoisie can defend its victory–and this is not likely to be for long. Almost certainly, Nicaragua’s small farmers will gradually be expropriated through competition, indebtedness and impoverishment–forces far less blatant than political ultimatums and government decrees, yet far more difficult to defeat.
Even more fraught with uncertainty is the struggle in El Salvador. U.S. military intervention in El Salvador prevented a victory by the FMLN. Unlike in Nicaragua, the revolution in El Salvador liberated only about a third of the country. For this reason the social changes it brought about are even more difficult to protect than those in Nicaragua. It may be too soon to tell to what extent the social order in El Salvador was transformed, or whether or not the new class relations and redistribution of land in the liberated zones will survive. Unfortunately, it can be argued that without its army, the FMLN is powerless. And in the eyes of the world EI Salvador may have lost importance. When the UN observers who are in El Salvador to oversee the implementation of this year’s peace accords depart, the oligarchy may feel free to move against the revolutionaries who prove to be particularly “troublesome.”
Beyond the immediate question of whether, and in what form, the revolutionary forces will survive is the issue of how class relations in El Salvador were transformed by more than a decade of civil war. Joaquín Villalobos, member of the General Command of the FMLN and one of the principal comandantes of the rebel army, is supremely optimistic. This summer he said, “It is not just any peace that is taking place in El Salvador. It is like the entrance into civilization; perhaps EI Salvador will be the first country in Latin America to become a real democracy.”[14] It is hard to imagine that El Salvador has begun a transition to “real democracy,” if by that term one means effective mass participation and protection of political and human rights. It may be that the prospect for a “democratic opening” is greater now than in the recent past, but given the long history of reactionary despotism and class struggle in El Salvador, one must be extremely cautious.
The possibility of bourgeois democratic reforms was recently called into question by President Cristiani’s announcement that his government would once again postpone the disbandment of the notorious Atlacatl battalion, the elimination of which would be emblematic of the minimal steps required to end the flagrant violations of human rights by the military.”[15] This announcement by the government was very much in keeping with the tradition of the Salvadoran oligarchy of rejecting moderate reform. In the 1970s the oligarchy held fraudulent elections to stave off centrist political modernization led by the Christian Democrats. In the 1980s it ordered its death squads to assassinate officials of U. S. AID to block agrarian reform. What the oligarchy refused to accept under threat of a military and political triumph by the Left, it would seem unlikely to concede with the Left disarmed.
Major transformations in the distribution of land and elimination of the state’s use of violence as a political tactic are minimum pre-requisites for the construction of bourgeois democracy in El Salvador. In 1989, Villalobos said, “In El Salvador, to carry out an agrarian reform … is to make revolution.” We would add that in El Salvador, bourgeois democracy requires a revolution, as Central American history has shown. Unfortunately, it appears unlikely that such a revolution has occurred. In the end, the FMLN abandoned its armed struggle for agrarian reform, and the Cristiani government has systematically evaded the negotiated agreement to dissolve the most heinous of the state’s security forces, the National Guard and the Treasury Police.
Instead of agrarian reform, the government has now promised to transfer state lands to people residing in the conflictive zones. And instead of destroying the oligarchy’s storm troopers, the government is trying to retain the old security forces, only changing their names.[17] It is too early to say with certainty whether the government will succeed in repressing the masses in the old way, or whether the struggles of workers and peasants will force fundamental reforms on the oligarchy. At the moment, however, the continuation of violence against the FMLN is ominous. In the first eight months after the peace accords were signed, the number of labor leaders, peasant activists, and FMLN militants killed by the army suggests that little has changed in El Salvador.
The Tragic Dilemma of Central America derives from the postponement of the region’s modernization. With the defeat and containment of the Left in the early 1990s, the isthmus finds itself mired in the death-throes of reactionary despotism, anticipating a capitalist transformation that can no longer deliver the principles of nineteenth-century liberalism. While the development of the capitalism in Central America will, through its sheer power of creative destruction, advance the productive forces, no longer is this associated with the development of liberal democracy.
In the past, the rise of the bourgeoisie was part of a process of country-creation, infused with a nationalist fervor. Even during the Cold War one found many examples of capitalist development that invoked the mythology of national identity to foster a project of modernization.[18] The U.S. government at most only tolerated nationalism in the Third World and least of all in Latin America. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington, far from moderating its reactionary foreign policy, has pursued it with increased vigor. In the words of Washington Post columnist Stephen Rosenfeld, “Gone is the old premise that Communist governments, however loathsome, have their place and need to be accepted…in some civil manner. The notion now seeping into thought and policy is that the surviving regimes are not legitimate and…the point of U.S. policy should not be to get along with them but to see them out of power.” With the passing of the Soviet Union, the U.S. ruling class finds itself freer to impose capitalism in its most flagrantly exploitative form, with less need for the cosmetics of democratic ideology in Central America or elsewhere. In this context, the oligarchy of the region faces relatively little risk in pursuing its own program of reactionary modernization.
The tendency towards liberal democracy, which can accompany capitalist development, realizes itself not through a mechanistic or automatic process, but is achieved by the struggle of the populace. In Central America this struggle has been fierce, but in most cases defeated or neutralized by the alliance between the despotic oligarchy and the U.S. government. At the moment, the popular movements languish in defeat, or at best are restricted to consolidating a minimum set of gains achieved in the 1980s.
In this moment of weakness, limiting the scope of defeat should be viewed as success for the Left, but certainly not victory. The electoral defeat of the Sandinista government and the abandonment of armed struggle by the FMLN have been tremendous victories for the ruling classes in the United States and in Central America. Perhaps an equally important victory for these reactionary groups would be the abandonment by the Left of its ideological commitment to socialism, which in Central America must, in all likelihood, be achieved through armed struggle. The power of counter-revolution in Nicaragua, the stalemate in El Salvador, and the tenacity of despotism in Guatemala and Honduras cannot be denied. To these reactionary victories should not be added a capitulation in the ideological battle.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Elizabeth Dore teaches Latin American history at the University of Portsmouth, U.K., and is a member of NACLA’s Editorial Board. John Weeks is director of the Centre for Development Studies in the School of
