The Dominican Republic
Your March/April report, “The
Dominican Republic After the
Caudillos,” nicely conveys the
complexity of contemporary life in
that country. Several of the authors
seem to suggest that personalism
and patronage in Dominican poli-
tics can be attributed to the
legacy of Trujillo and the personal
style of Balaguer, but these prob-
lems are common in other
Caribbean nations. Thus they might
be usefully analyzed as a function
of a regional political economy and
political culture.
The peoples of the Caribbean
have long oscillated between
regional fragmentation and uneasy
movements toward regional inte-
gration, often under foreign pres-
sure. If competing colonial powers
pulled the region apart in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, contemporary trends promise to
unify it within a “globalized” econ-
omy structured by the Caribbean
Basin Initiative. Then too, many
pressing problems such as drug
trafficking and environmental regu-
lation call for region-wide respons-
es. The Caribbean Community and
Common Market (CARICOM) and
the recently formed Association of
Caribbean States (ACS) are poten-
tially counterweights to foreign
influences in the region, fora for
discussing shared problems, and
bridges to wider links with other
Latin American countries.
Yet these organizations have had
difficulty in establishing a common
ground from which the Caribbean
can confront other hemispheric and
world powers. The Dominican
Republic’s recent conflict with
CARICOM over relative advan-
tages in the European banana mar-
ket shows that if the Caribbean is to
speak with a common voice, it will
have to develop a more complex
understanding of how its regional
identity has emerged in historical,
cultural and geopolitical terms.
Julie Franks
Dominican Studies Institute
CUNY-City College
New York, New York
Mexico’s “Other” Guerrillas
B y using code words to describe
the Popular Revolutionary
Army (EPR), such as the group’s
“penchant for hard-line Leninist
rhetoric,” “The EPR: Mexico’s
‘Other’ Guerrillas” [January/ Febru-
ary 1997] only obfuscates the
underlying ideological and strate-
gic differences with the Zapatista
Army (EZLN).
The EPR has a socialist vision
and believes that the ruling class of
Mexico, a dependent capitalist
state, must be overthrown as a pre-
requisite to end the oppression and
exploitation of the masses, particu-
larly the indigenous population.
The EZLN, on the other hand, is
guided by the mistaken belief that
local changes within the state of
Chiapas, such as land reform and
“democratization” of the political
process, will solve their problems.
The EZLN’s rejection of solidar-
ity with the EPR represents a strate-
gic vision not unlike the
Sandinistas or the FMLN whose
leadership has been infected by
what I like to call the “new thinking
virus,” which replaces class strug-
gle with “universal human values.”
I once asked the FMLN’s
Arnaldo Ramos whether any model
acceptable to U.S. imperialism
could be good for the people of El
Salvador. His answer: “We are not
Cuba.” This response is indicative
of one of several anti-communist
currents in leftist disguise that have
proliferated since the counterrevo-
lution triumphed in the former
USSR.
David Silver
New York, New York
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