The most intriguing and still-unanswered ques- Ition regarding the Central America solidarity
movement has to do with its private allies and
sponsors outside of the left. It is no revelation to note that Reagan’s re-staging of Vietnam in Nicaragua and El Salvador enjoyed less than over-
whelming support from the propertied classes in this country. If that were not the case, there would
have been no need for back-alley operations car-
ried out by second-rank lone rangers like Oliver
North. A true united front of capital, such as exist-
ed from roughly 1945 through the Tet Offensive in 1968, would have easily snuffed out the FSLN, the FMLN and much else, whatever the cost.
But after Vietnam, no such consensus was possi- ble. In the foreign-policy elite, in the investment community, in the Council on Foreign Relations, and finally therefore in Congress, a perspective had
developed that looked at military or paramilitary
intervention in the Third World-and militarism in general-with a skeptical eye. In Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of Ameri-
can Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986),
Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers argue that there
are specific sectors of capital (especially real-estate interests and some multinationally focused invest- ment banks) which periodically support peace
organizing and anti-interventionist or anti-mili- tarist liberal candidates because it is isn their politi-
cal-economic interest to do so. They marshal con- vincing evidence to demonstrate that these sectors “invested” in the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s so as to blunt what was seen as an unproductive and dangerous trend towards mili- tary confrontation with the Soviet Union. Many of the foundations-like Ford and Rocke-
feller-which have supported and influenced the
Freeze and other social movements since the 1960s, also invested in the Central America movement.
Most of the money presumably went to the Wash- ington-based human rights community, though smaller sums were also directed to more radical
forces if they were demonstrably effective. Most
solidarity activists, if they knew of it at all, were
puzzled by the 1992 Republican attempt to smear
Hillary Clinton as a “radical leftist” because she had
chaired the board of the New World Foundation
when it gave CISPES a modest grant. I would con-
tend that this connection was no accident, any-
more than the strange insistence of traditional
Democratic Party leaders such as Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright in pressing for negotiated solutions in
Central America can be attributed to the former’s
“sentimental connections with Maryknoll nuns or
the latter’s egomania.
Is this hypothesis intended to suggest that the
solidarity movement, or its friends in Central Amer-
ica’s revolutionary movements, were bought off or
duped by the discrete charms of the “liberal bour-
geoisie”? Not at all. The whole point of the con-
temporary practice of solidarity-unless one
believes it is merely the mouthing of slogans and
the giving of unwanted advice about how to make the proper kind of revolution-is to operate as a
counter-hegemonic force within the United States,
using the advantages provided by political contra-
dictions here to benefit the struggle there. The
not-inconsiderable merit of the Central America
movement is that it suggested how far those con-
tradictions could be pushed. Given the unipolar world we now inhabit, where
no great or even mid-sized power is likely to act as
an insurance agency for social revolution, move-
ments for justice in the poor regions of the world
will have a very limited margin within which to
maneuver. The lessons of the 1980s-how to con-
found and adapt to the prevailing trends in the
North-may turn out to be very useful.
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