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Prospects for Democratisation in a Post-Revolutionary Setting: Central America*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Carlos M. Vilas
Affiliation:
Research Professor at the Centro de Investigaciones Inter-disciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, UNAM, Mexico City.

Abstract

Prospects for democratisation in those Central American countries that experienced revolutionary processes are discussed in the light of recurrent structural constraints – such as incipient structural differentiation, overwhelming poverty, dependence on foreign financial subsidies – and specific sociopolitical variations, i.e. uneven modernisation of traditional rule; tensions between the recent mobilisation of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ social actors, and political institutions and actors (such as parties, unions, parliaments, government and multilateral agencies) which in some cases lead to current social demobilisation and electoral apathy and in others prevent the effective uprooting of political violence; persistence of traditional authoritarian culture and its articulation to the new ingredients of the post-war political and socioeconomic setting.

Type
Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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36 I found a very illustrative example of this articulation of modernisation and traditionalism in several sugar estates in Escuintla, Guatemala. Over recent years a number of the largest sugar fincas in this coastal area have been improving housing and sanitary conditions for their seasonal workers, in what may be understood as a shift from a traditional approach to labour as an expense, to a capitalist focus on labour as an investment. At the same time, their owners opposed the Cerezo government's tax reform in mid 1980s, and still keep private armies watching over the estates' premises, and bribe government officials and military officers. A PAHO officer in Guatemala City told me (May 1995): ‘It is easier to conduct an inspection in a military barracks than in a sugar estate’, while the comparative perspective of a Ministry of Health regional official was more blunt: ‘It is easier to hold up a bank, than to get into a finca’.

37 A good case for this modernisation-cum-patronage is afforded by the privatisation of El Salvador's banking system conducted by Alfredo Cristiani's ARENA government, where most of the banks were handed over to Cristiani's clique: see Sarto, Francisco and Segovia, Alexander, ‘¿Hacia dónde se dirige la privatizatión de la banca?’, Revista de Político Económica, vol. 12 (1992), pp. 3–2Google Scholar. A number of my own interviewees in San Salvador in March 1995 interpreted Armando Calderón Sol's new wave of privaisations in terms of the claims of Calderón Sol's clique who had been marginalised from the privatisation benefiting Cristiani's ‘golden ring’.

38 The strategic role of US military support was openly acknowledged by Blandón, General Adolfo, El Salvador's Armed Forces Chief of Staff from 1984 to 1989, in a recent interview: El Financiero (Mexico City), 11 09 1995, p. 72Google Scholar; La Jornada, 11 September 1995, p. 58.

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50 The agenda of peace talks between the Guatemalan government and the insurgent URNG included this question as a central chapter. Early in 1995 both parties arrived at an Agreement on the Identity and Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (Acuerdo sobre identidad y derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas).

51 For an updated insightful discussion of these issues, see Sinclair, Minor (ed.), The New Politics of Survival. Grassroots Movements in Central America (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

52 See Crozier, Michael, Huntington, Samuel and Watanuki, Joji, The Crisis of Democracy (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; for subsequent discussions see Arbós, Xabier and Giner, Salvador, La gobernabilidad. Ciudadanía y democracia en la encrucijada mundial (Madrid, 1993)Google Scholar.

53 Offe argues in a similar vein with regard to social movements in Western societies: Claus Offe, ‘Reflections on the Institutional Self-transformation of Movement Politics: A Tentative Stage Model’, in Dalton, Russell J. and Kuechler, Manfred (eds.), Challenging the Political Order. New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (New York, 1990), pp.232–50Google Scholar.

54 The Democratic Party is the joint product of Joaquín Villalobos's ERP and Eduardo Sancho's (‘Ferman Cienfuegos’) RN dissent, plus most of the social democratic Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR). The full text of the Pact was published in El Diario de Hoy (San Salvador) 31 May 1995. It has to be said that the commitment of former leftists to this particular brand of consensual politics has not been matched by their right-wing partners: ARENA keeps on publicly honouring D'Aubuisson's memory, while its ‘Principles, Goals and By-laws’ claim ‘To defend our Western traditions from ideological assault and permanent aggression from international communism’ as the party's primary goal. The Democratic Party decision resembles Williamson's appeal to Left organisations to embrace the economic recipes summarised by the ‘Washington consensus’: Williamson, John, ‘Democracy and the “Washington Consensus”’, World Development, vol. 21, no. 8 (1993), pp. 1329–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 FSLN, Para una salida national a la crisis (Managua, November 1994).

56 See Tapia, Gabriel Gaspar, La Democracia Cristiana en Centroamérica (México City, 1993)Google Scholar.

57 Przeworski, Adam, Democracy and the market. Political and economic reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge, 1991), p. 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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60 Actual absentionism is even higher than reflected in figures if referred to the overall potential voters and not just to registered ones.

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63 Which fits pretty well with World Bank's claim on the need to insulate economic policy-makers from civil society's short–sighted particularistic, selfish messing around: World Bank, The East Asian Miracle. Economic Growth and Public Policy (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar.

64 Take for instance the following case I witnessed in May 1995 during an evaluation of Central American health reforms. The health centre in E.J.L. (a rural municipality in north-western Nicaragua with some 10,000 inhabitants, 85–90% of them living in poverty) participated in a pilot experience of decentralisation and health community management implemented by the Nicaraguan government on behalf of the World Bank's structural adjustment conditionalities. According to a particular conception of ‘self management’, the community is supposed to pay for most of the health services – which in any case are very basic. Nicaragua's Ministry of Health's monthly contribution to the centre's pharmaceuticals budget amounts to 12,000 cordobas, or 1.20 córdobas per person per month (less than 20 US cents). As could be expected, the entire preoccupation of the nurse running the centre was devoted to cost/benefit analysis and management creativity to stretch those twenty cents out as much as she could. It was hard for evaluators to detect the presence of a health worker beyond her efficientist discourse. In November 1995 a deadly leptospirosis epidemic occurred in that same region and rapidly spread over the border to Honduras; Nicaragua's Health Ministry's core recommendation to the population was to use cats, since the main disease vector is rats. The Ministry's exhausted budget prevented it from proposing other than symbolic responses.

65 See World Bank, The Challenge of Poverty Alleviation (Washington, D.C., 1993Google Scholar; Report 12315-ES); IADB, Socioeconomic Report: El Salvador (Washington, D.C., 1993Google Scholar; Report GN–1800).

66 Trevor Evans, ‘Ajuste estructural y sector público en Céntroamerica y el Caribe’, in Evans, T. (ed.), La transformación neoliberal del sector público (Managua, 1995). 147Google Scholar.

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71 According to UN sources in El Salvador, by mid–1994 the new 'National Civil Police', a security body created after the Peace Accords, had turned into the main source of human rights violations: Vilas and Feuer, El Salvador.

72 Painter, James, Guatemala: False Hope False Freedom, (London, 1987), 4751CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Guzmán, Luis Humberto, Politicos de uniforme (Managua, 1992)Google Scholar; Alba, Xavier Reyes, ‘Un general sin laberinto’, El Día Latinoamericano, 116 (Mexico City), 28 08 1993, 5Google Scholar.

74 US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy. A Report of the Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations (Washington, D.C., 1989)Google Scholar; de la, Asamblea LegislativaRepública, de Costa Rica, Informe de la Comisión sobre el Narcotráfico (San Jose, 1989)Google Scholar; ibid., Segundo Informe de la Comision sobre el Narcotrdfico (San Jose, 1989); Sklar, Holly, Washington's War on Nicaragua (Boston, 1989)Google Scholar; Scott, Peter Dale and Marshall, Jonathan, Cocaine Politics. Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar.

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76 Wolf, Eric R., ‘Kinship, Friendship, and Patron–Client Relations in Complex Societies’, in Banton, M. (ed.), The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies (London, 1966), 122Google Scholar; see also Vilas, Between Earthquakes and Volcanoes, chapter 1. Most discussion on ‘exporting democracy’ tends to ignore this cultural dimension of politics – thus reproducing at a literary level US foreign policy failures. Terry Karl, ‘Exporting Democracy…’ offers a stimulating alternative approach. See also Joseph, Gilbert M. and Nugent, Daniel (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation. Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, 1994)Google Scholar.

77 Howard Wiarda's many books offer the crudest version of the argument; for more articulated elaborations see Peeler, John A., Latin American Democracies: Colombia, Costa Rica and Venezuela (Chapel Hill, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Booth, John A. and Seligson, Mitchell A., ‘Paths to Democracy and the Political Culture of Costa Rica, Mexico, and Nicaragua’, in Diamond, Larry (ed.), Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries (Boulder, 1994) 99–13OGoogle Scholar Yet the most sophisticated versions of culturalist hypothesis have not gone beyond the paths opened up and explored by the classic works of Werner Sombart, Max Weber or R. H. Tawney: see for instance Inglehart, Ronald, ‘The Renaissance of Political Culture’, American Political Science Review, 82 (11 1988), 1203–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Nevertheless this outdated culturalist reductionism may be approached from a broader perspective than that of its proponents: emphasis on the protestant, individualistic or rationalist components of liberal democracy in some way point to the cultural peak of a broad range of socioeconomic as well as political preconditions resulting from a particular historical development which set the foundations of that particular political regime–such as state building, development of civil society, domestic regulation of core economic processes as well as appropriation of foreign trade surpluses, etc. See Franco, Carlos, ‘Vision de la democracia y crisis del regimen’, Nueva Sociedad, 128 (1112 1993), 5061Google Scholar.

79 Marx, Karl, La idtologia alemana (Montevideo, 1968)Google Scholar.

80 Pillories and other instruments for punishment were still common in Guatemalan estates as recently as the 1970s (personal communication from Guatemalan lawyer and political leader Catalina Soberanis, September 1995), while jus prima noctt has not been entirely uprooted from landlord culture either there or in El Salvador.

81 Offe, Claus, ‘“Ingobernabilidad”. Sobre el renacimiento de teon'as conservadoras de la crisis’, inC. Offe, Partidospoliticosjnuevosmovimientossociales (Madrid, 1988), 2753Google Scholar; see also Nogueira, Marco Aurelio, ‘Gobernabilidad democrática progresiva’, Análisis político, 25 (0508 1995), 5568Google Scholar.

82 Edelberto, Torres-Rivas, ‘Centroamérica: La transitión autoritaria hacia la democracia’, Polémica, 4 (01 1988), 213Google Scholar.

83 See Vilas, Carlos M., 'Nicaragua: A Revolution that fell from the grace of the people', in Miliband, Ralph and Panitch, Leo (eds.), The Socialist Register 1991 (London, 1991), 300–19Google Scholar.

84 Przeworski discusses democracy as 'a contingent outcome of social conflict', while Bleany and Kamal Pasha argue that under particular circumstances the activation of civil society may lead to rising authoritarianism. Przeworski, Adam, 'Democracy as a Contingent Outcome of Social Conflicts', in Elster, Jon and Slagstad, Rune (eds.), Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge, 1988), 5980CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blaney, David L. and Pasha, Mustapha Kamal, 'Civil Society and Democracy in the Third World: Ambiguities and Historical Possibilities', Studies in Comparative International Development, 28, no.1 (1993), 324CrossRefGoogle Scholar.