Central America
Central America’s Left, Right and “Center”
Envío team
The dizzying changes in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union have politically ushered in the 21st century a decade early. Some toasted its arrival, but those who still had one foot in the 19th century got thrown off balance as the old paradigms collapsed in on themselves. Changes are inevitably beginning to occur in consciousness, methods of struggle and even the definition of the social subjects in conflict, but the pace of these changes lags way behind events since, for many, they are reactions to the implosion and not part of what produced it.
In Central America, for example, the neoliberal model tightened its grip on the region last year, but the new governments are having a tough time administering it. And while the economic adjustment policies, part and parcel of the new model, batter some social sectors on both the right and the left, their traditional organizations do not yet know how to respond. The "crisis of ungovernability" initially provoked by the imposition of this system took on new nuances in 1991 as the opposition from both sides grappled with their own crises of strategic alternatives.
Neoliberalism in the roundNeoliberalism made a very debatable economic showing last year, but those who limit themselves to quibbling about whether or not it has sufficiently increased production or reactivated the economy are missing the forest for the trees. So are those who simply praise it as the necessary formula for entering the highly touted "free market" or damn it as an imposition of US foreign policy. It is, in fact, a wide-ranging proposal to forge the kind of society and culture that the world capitalist system requires in this new stage of its development. It is a response to that system's own contradictions and to the new challenges, opportunities and needs brought by the collapse of the socialist bloc and the crisis of socialist forces worldwide.
The power of the neoliberal right cannot be measured by short-term economic indicators, by its greater or lesser need to reach agreements with the left or by any lack of coherence among the legislative and executive branches and the military. None of this translates into a "crisis" of the system since the forms of control to assure its hegemony are now more indirect, and more effective.
The advent of the neoliberal model is not just a challenge to the left; it is also forcing the right—even in the United States itself—to make important changes in its thinking and actions. The appropriateness or efficacy of traditional instruments of power and influence are being profoundly reexamined in Central America, and from surprising quarters. No cows are too sacred for this scrutiny; not the armed forces or the political parties; not military struggle, parliamentary deals or the use of strikes; not even core sentiments such as nationalism and anti-imperialism. With traditional actors on the left and right perplexed by all these suddenly reopened questions, neoliberalism is quickly filling in its own answers.
The impact of the neoliberal economic programs and ideology has sparked a new social reaction in Central America. Unpredictable in the extreme, this reaction has not yet been, chooses not to be or, perhaps, cannot be corralled into the traditional ways and means of expressing opposition. Protest and violence, to be sure, have not disappeared, but they are no longer necessarily directed by parties, unions or guerrilla forces; they are cropping up in unprecedented proportions as spontaneous crime in specific and social disintegration in general.
The neoliberals hauled in the biggest catch in this turbulent river last year. Using the educational, propagandistic and cultural bait at their disposal, they sank their hook into the semi-organized social eruptions that a year earlier always seemed on the verge of insurrection. Playing out the line then quickly reeling it in when they felt any slack, the neoliberals appear to have worn down such vigorous social protest. In the worst cases, they even successfully turned it into a weapon against the old schemes and structures of the left. In classic "blame the victim" fashion, those who protest violently against the new economic and ideological impositions are, together with other "polarizing" forces, being charged with responsibility for the costs these impositions are exacting.
Despite the crisis—or, more precisely, because of it—the neoliberal right has captured the high ground in this new battle for hearts and minds. Locked in the Cold-War paradigm and thus unable to grasp the nature of the crisis, the old capitalists, including those in the United States, chose to keep battering away at their supposed enemy with their traditional weapon—the rightwing armies. For the same reason, the old socialists continued to resist the battering with their traditional defense mechanism—top-down parties. Both are spent and useless tools against the advance of neoliberalism.
New and old RightThroughout the region, particularly in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama, the primitive rightwing forces linked to the old dictatorships are being shoved aside as historic political relics, merely formal or informal opposition to the new governing elites. Since the neoliberal model tends to impose new behavioral guidelines on the state, these groups are finding it much harder to use the state apparatus simply as a vehicle for their own interests and enrichment.
The influence of the military, to which these groups are linked politically and economically, is also shrinking, or at least being questioned. Significant evidence of this can be found in the negotiations that the new right is engaging in with the left. The neoliberal governments require social consensus to consolidate their model and make it more presentable to foreign capital. They thus defend the need for a social pact involving the Left, and are willing to make certain policy concessions to achieve politically what the old right failed to win militarily.
Since the Left is still mainly demanding an end to the agrarian systems, privileges and bloody practices of the extremist Right, the concessions have so far cost the neoliberals very little. Taking space away from the old Right helps them too, since they tend to fill it before the Left. Even more significantly, the neoliberal scheme itself is not yet being challenged in negotiations anywhere in Central America. This indicates how well it has already established itself and how far behind the new historical starting line the leftist parties are. After the negotiations, they even end up taking a share of responsibility for neoliberal stability.
The new Right advocates understandings not only with the guerrilla forces through peace negotiations, as in El Salvador and Guatemala, but also with the left parties and unions through reconciliation talks and social pacts, as in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras. The governments' stated aim in these pacts is to weave together the interests of private enterprise and the workers in friendly negotiated fashion. The governments tend to play the role of mediator in these negotiations, often with more flexibility than the Left or Right, thus attracting vacillating sectors to their "centrist" positions.
The neoliberal model, very influenced by the current Mexican regime, theoretically relegates the state to "facilitator" status. But while the state is supposed to be the democratic patrimony of private enterprise as a whole—within certain fiscal norms and policies controlled by the multilateral lending institutions and the US Agency for International Development (AID)—the reality is that it is still a fundamental instrument of power and enrichment, but now in the hands of modern big business. In this context, privatizing the state is nothing more than conceding to national and foreign capitalists all the facilities they need to operate. Meanwhile the state alleges ideological reasons for doing away with its regulatory functions and budget reasons for doing away with or not instituting social programs.
New groupings of technocrat-politicians have emerged with increasing quotas of power and room for maneuver in Central America; in Nicaragua, they have even become the government. But the old groups and conceptions are being supplanted unevenly in the different countries. Traditional rightwing parties in Panama, for example, are still fighting among themselves for quotas of power, while new-right technocrats in Nicaragua are still practicing the nepotism of yesteryear.
The power of the new Right is not to be sneezed at, particularly now with the Left politically discredited by events in Europe and the Soviet Union. Neoliberal propaganda loses no opportunity to link Latin America's Left with confrontational and militarist positions, while lauding the business Right as part of the new democratic current in the world that wants to leave the "extremes" of the past behind.
The Central American governing elites representing this current also never tire of repeating that the United States has changed, and that Central America will develop by becoming part of a free trade zone with North America. With their centrist, conciliatory and occasionally even populist discourse, they promise stability and development and express "pacifist" leanings by cutting military budgets. They use mass media effectively to cultivate an image of well-being, peace and modernization, and to predict avalanches of new private investment once the country guarantees stability and reliable laws. In their new electoral contest with the Left, they rely on the advice and organizational support of private "democratic" foundations subsidized by the US government.
The US and the old armiesOver the last decade the United States threw billions of dollars into its effort to extirpate the FMLN and the FSLN from their respective societies. Despite the financing of repressive armies and counterrevolutionary forces, direct intervention and the death of some 200,000 Central Americans, the US failed in its goal. Now the primacy of civil society over the political, ideological or security apparatuses that oppress it is a notion defended not only by neoliberals but increasingly even by their predecessors, the old right. All publicly proclaim the need to subordinate the military and move social conflict to the political-electoral battlefield, preceding the move with a peace accord and following it with a social pact.
Even the US government has joined this chorus of voices, and its message took on new resonance following its key role in forcing El Salvador's most reactionary sectors to sign the peace accords. It is now trying to distance itself from the Salvadoran army, just as it did with the Nicaraguan contras and, earlier, the Guatemalan army, not to mention that of Noriega in Panama. Tensions are even mounting with Honduras' military, so pampered by the Pentagon during its dirty war against Nicaragua.
The United States is putting this space between itself and the military for various reasons. For one, most are involved in drug trafficking and the murder of civilians, including US citizens. For another, the collapse of communism in Europe and the serious economic recession at home is increasing pressure inside the United States to reduce the defense budget. And, finally, the Sandinista government's electoral defeat and now the signing of a peace accord in El Salvador reduce the need to continue propping up these old armies.
But none of these factors fully explain such a major change in the historic US relation with Central America's dependent armies—or, for that matter, with Nicaragua's more independent one, since the neoliberal economic and political vision does not make major distinctions between them. As AID documents indicate, the economic adjustment plans require that our governments reduce their military budgets at the very moment the US is reducing its direct subsidies to them and its indirect ones to our economies in general.
This is obviously creating a dilemma for the military all over Central America, although, in Nicaragua's case, important sectors of the army itself have become convinced of the neoliberal model's merits—or, at least, of the futility of fighting it. But this budget imperative cuts more than one way. It also threatens the traditional rightwing politicians, who for so many years were economically subordinate to the military and politically dependent on its approval if they aspired to be President or even hold a Cabinet post. And while the left certainly stands to gain by the reduction of these brutal armies, the new Right can capitalize on their shrinking geopolitical, economic and strategic weight even more. With the new blessing from the United States, the neoliberals have the luxury of negotiating and even signing accords with the guerrilla forces; they are thus the ones who get to propose reducing the armies in the name of civil society, the need to "depolarize" the country... and neoliberalism.
The new policeThe neoliberal model, however, cannot do without a coercive power to protect the common interests of private business and the United States any more than the old version of capitalism could. But it cannot be the same one. First, the Left would not permit it, and, second, it would be incompatible with political and economic modernization since, at certain moments in each country except Nicaragua, private business found itself asphyxiated by competing military enterprises.
"New police," the appropriate coercive instrument for these new times, have thus begun to appear on the scene. The new police are being particularly promoted by the United States to fight drug trafficking, but they will be there to fight any threat to the security that investors and multilateral lending institutions require. New police will not impose the old counterinsurgency or national security schemes, nor will they fight the governing entrepreneurs for political or economic power. New police will not challenge the hegemony of a civil society cut to the neoliberal business mold, but at some point, they will have to challenge an increasingly unemployed and hungry populace. As defined by US Secretary of State James Baker in Managua on January 17, the new police will be "nonpartisan, independent and professional"—and they will coordinate their intelligence, communications and espionage work closely with the US and with each other in the region from the restructured Southern Command in Panama. The bases there have now become part of a broader system of communications and transport interception covering the whole Caribbean region, supposedly to fight drug trafficking. The new Central American security police will thus go to Panama for their instruction, just as 30 years ago the old army officers went there to train for the counterinsurgency wars of that period.
This neoliberal counterinsurgency scheme is not just another foreign implantation, nor is it exempt from the contradictions and adjustments created by each country's specific conditions. There is notable congruency, however, in statements from the US embassies in each country: while making open or veiled criticisms of the armies and insisting on their reduction, embassy officials simultaneously offer specialized training courses to buttress the structure, technology and personnel of special police units. With this declared US support, the security apparatuses of other countries, mainly Venezuela, are upping their participation in the "modernization" of these new security forces.
Unlike some Andean countries, where the US had to turn again to their armies to wage its anti-subversive battles, the tendency in our countries is to remove certain faculties from the traditional military apparatus. And in contrast to the "new democracies" of the Southern Cone, where the popular and civil forces were only strong enough to force a change of administrative faces but not to effectively reduce the power of the military, even the United States has had to acknowledge the genuine effect of the popular resistance on the correlation of forces in several Central American countries.
In Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama, US policy favors transforming the existing police or creating special corps to be assigned intelligence tasks dressed as a war against drugs. In the Nicaraguan case, the logic is clear: transforming and retraining the police force will provide a political and ideological counterweight to the Sandinista Popular Army. In El Salvador, the idea is to integrate FMLN combatants into the new National Civil Police. Behind the shield of support for the accords, the United States undoubtedly hopes to use this new force to wrest political influence from the army—after which it can deal with the presence of the FMLN, with which it shares only this short-term goal.
If the full political neutrality of the coercive forces could be effectively assured, we would be witnessing a truly pluralist revolution in which the strength of the majority predominated in society without this implying repression of the minority. But this "revolution" grows out of neoliberal thinking, out of an intrinsically antidemocratic economic scheme that views the majority as "excess." In such thinking, coercion and repression are required to control not only civil demonstrations and armed insurgencies, but also new levels of delinquency, including drug trafficking, which offers survival, organizational forms and even upward social mobility to impoverished and manipulable sectors left out of the neoliberal scheme of things.
New and old LeftThere has been debate for years about the nature of the Left's traditional political structures. That debate has now expanded to encompass how the Left—be it through political parties, unions or arms—should confront the current crisis. With its own classic paradigm now buried and the old dependent capitalist model in its death throes, neoliberalism seems triumphant: a new capitalist expression with a political, economic and cultural order able to make adjustments and provide answers that the traditional Left and Right cannot respond to in an equally modern and coherent way.
Faced with the new negotiation processes, left parties, fronts, unions and other organizations—some of them emerging from clandestinity for the first time—are being forced to redefine their role in the new civil societies and the terms of their alliances in relation to the new states. These old organizations must update their own ideas so they do not lose the opportunities—and risks—opened by the new model. The tumultuous spread of civil society into new spaces often overflows or rejects the left's traditional channels and actions.
While this reflects neoliberalism's advances, it also reflects the possibilities created by the contradictions that the model is generating as it lifts off the dead weight of old schemes of thought and action. Its own nature and pretensions are already prompting increasing sectoral manifestations of rebellion in Central America, just as in the rest of the South and even in the North. This is sparking fresh conceptions of political needs, accompanied by new kinds of grassroots leadership.
The struggle of civil society that has just begun in El Salvador, is not yet born in Guatemala, still lags way behind in Honduras, is emerging spontaneously in Panama and is very much alive in Nicaragua. This stage of struggle has a much more promising future in Central America than in other Latin American countries, where the neoliberal model was able to settle in very rapidly. The FMLN is paying close attention to the Sandinista experience as opposition and how it is using its important quotas of power, achieved through many years of struggle and organization. But not even Nicaragua offers clear lessons; there are now as many interpretations as there are Sandinista interpreters. The majority of them, however, do not see political space widening for the left in Nicaragua, despite the FSLN's enormous advantages in terms of organizational unity and influence over the armed forces—neither of which the FMLN has.
In these times of revolutionary ebb, some counsel waiting for a better historic moment; they believe that to not retreat is to advance. Others say that to not advance is to retreat, because the neoliberal project itself is advancing, and will steamroller weakened traditional oppositions that get bogged down in profound introspection.
For some, the political debate revolves around whether or not engaging in the neoliberal framework of parliamentary struggle, high-level negotiations and social pacts risks legitimizing its game rules. For others the debate centers on the search for real alternatives that could lead to a non-capitalist future and not just oases in a consummately anti-popular capitalist desert. The new grassroots movements respond that both battlefields are valid and that the left needs to learn how to maneuver tactically in unknown terrain without losing its strategic perspective. In the new political framework, in which elections are a source of legitimacy and power, no popular sector can afford to dismiss the need for alliances and the search for common denominators. They must seek the greatest possible convergence around an electoral alternative that opens new spaces, even if the alliance that takes office is not the purest expression of popular power.
Even though old "Leninists" debate with new grassroots organizers about whether movements should be subordinated to parties or vice versa, all generally recognize that traditional left conceptions, programs and organizational forms, whether military or political, have not effectively contained the neoliberal advance. The poor in Central America, worn out by so many years of cruel organized repression and/or low-intensity war, are sick of conflict. If they began by associating the traditional right with feudal exploitation, many have ended by associating the left with war and US hostility. The neoliberal discourse about peace and stability with political and economic modernization could win the day with many. In fact, it sounds so attractive that it could even worm its way into the minds of some on the Left. The new model thus plays with its own victims and could convert them into indirect accomplices to its consolidation.
In addition, while the Right has its neoliberal program—which prescribes more capitalism to remedy the ills of capitalism—the Left does not yet have an alternative clearly differentiated from either the new and old forms of capitalism or the classic socialist models. The Central American Left has not even gotten over the shock of discovering that the "socialist" revolutions it fought so hard for have been converted in most cases into "democratic" revolutions of capitalism.
Social movements and new partiesAs arms slowly become less of a factor for power, action by the masses takes on more importance. But the neoliberal adjustment programs are eating away at society. Indiscriminate free-trade formulas are dividing producers from consumers and urban sectors from rural ones, and setting the marginalized sectors to compete among themselves. Growing unemployment caused by the shrinking state sector and a growing informal sector caused by the shrinking formal one have weakened the representativity and activity of unions and the parties that support them. These old transmission belts are thus no longer playing their role and are ceasing to be the channel for the majority's aspirations.
This is forcing the unions to reexamine their classic recourse to strikes and work stoppages, which run the risk of upsetting sectors of the population negatively affected by these actions, or still others in need of jobs. Neoliberalism has thus succeeded in posing a dilemma between union, popular and party struggles, which do not always go hand in hand. The Sandinista experience during its nearly two years in the opposition has shown this, and there are indications of it in the "democratic dispersion" in El Salvador as this new stage opens there.
The current challenge is to regroup what neoliberalism has pulled apart in such a way that it can resist more effectively. There have been multitudes of protests in the streets and countrysides of our countries, but without proposals and without parties. The protests are immediate, single-issue responses to the neoliberal model's very specific destructive effects, and neither academics nor politicians have proven able to adequately lead them. Grassroots civil society itself is directing these rebellions, making itself heard over the parties and other organizations for the first time.
With the transition to political struggle, the social movements are beginning to fight for the new space that the military struggle itself opened. Given the previously necessary top-down nature of the armed organizations, they are having a hard time filling that space themselves. Social subjects that were not sufficiently acknowledged before, due either to their own lack of socio-organizational development or to the narrow-mindedness of the left, are now arising and coming together. They include peasants, merchants, shop owners, bureaucrats, communal and neighborhood movements, organized women, ecologists and a host of other groups. The convergences that were impossible to achieve or maintain from a party or union perspective are being forged in practice, forced by the globalizing neoliberal phenomenon.
Unlike the single-issue struggles of the past, those today have the rich experience of the previous clandestine struggle and of their ties to political parties, in power in Nicaragua's case or exercising parallel power in El Salvador's. But those ties were characterized by the subordination of other issues to the imperatives of the main struggle as the political organizations interpreted it. Another part of the new debate, then, concerns the commitment owed to the higher political body, be it state or party.
Alongside the neoliberals, some of the new grassroots movements and organizations are opposed to the old "politics" and promote the modernization of political systems, although, as always, everyone sees "modernization" through the prism of their own interests. Often lacking the necessary political, electoral and legal experience, these new left movements are engaging in an unequal battle in which they are often their own worst enemy. Their mistrust of traditional politics and methods of struggle is forging new consciousness and new forms of organization, but they have the potential of falling for siren songs. Their hopes for individual and collective change, for example, are symbolized in the candidacy of Ruben Blades in Panama or the political projects of Protestant sects in the whole region, but these are not viable social alternatives.
The old leftist concepts of tutelage are thus as much in crisis as is everything else. Demonstrations of autonomy by the new social movements are multiplying. Even though these movements were born under the protection of the military struggle, they have reached adolescence and are demanding new relations with their "parents." As the political struggle develops, these social movements are effectively assuming the leadership of grassroots organizing and mobilization, which generates their need and desire for greater political autonomy.
Responding to the fragmentation of the old popular bloc, the nascent social movements are beginning to look for ways to reduce their political dependency on the parties and on the persisting paternalism, which makes its presence and interests felt in the legal and electoral framework. This presupposes training, in which the international nongovernmental organizations could play an important role. The appearance of new civil demands, including environmental ones, also means that the base of these social movements must be complemented by the not always operative institutional base of professionals if they want to be truly effective.
All this has called into question the ability not only of governments but of parties to manage the crisis generated by the adjustment policies. Multiple grassroots organizations have emerged simultaneously, and despite their frequent lack of clear slogans—or perhaps because of it—they have managed to bring together old and new forces that are being hit by these policies. There is a growing belief that these same grassroots sectors will eventually convert their protests against the neoliberal project into strategic proposals.
As the social movements slowly become more "political" and start demanding concrete commitments from the parties—such as a search for alliances and votes or financing to carry out effective and modem campaigns—they will have the responsibility to guarantee that the popular alternative is not converted into an electoral one. They could be tempted to try to get legitimization from the United States and other forces that are questioning them, to seek the "blessing" that would turn them into a viable political force. But being "viable" within the neoliberal framework translates in to being unable to modify the structures of power even if they win the presidency. Such "viability" of the left would be capitalism's final victory.
The US and the new leftThe transition from armed struggle to political struggle in El Salvador is opening a new stage in US relations with the whole region and is affecting the domestic correlation of forces in each country. US Undersecretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Bernard Aronson privately told FMLN leaders in New York that his government had supported the Salvadoran army only to prevent the FMLN from winning the war. A similar logic was applied to Nicaragua: suspecting the Sandinistas of active collaboration with the FMLN, the US government's relations with the Sandinista army and the FSLN remained cold for the duration of the war in El Salvador. This comprehensive regional counterinsurgency strategy brought the US into closer relations with ultra-right sectors in Nicaragua, and to a certain extent in El Salvador and Honduras, than it now seems to want to maintain.
Among other things, the lauded demilitarization of the conflicts is changing the basis for counterinsurgency in the region. The end of the war in El Salvador is unquestionably narrowing the extreme right's space and strengthening the new right. It remains to be seen if a new US political offensive materializes in 1992 to force negotiations in Guatemala. If it does, it would buttress even more the neoliberals' "new democracies" and boost the new forms of dependency slowly being put in place so that US economic subsidies to the region, so aberrant to neoliberal orthodoxy, can be slashed.
US policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador, propelled by both strategic calculations and its own domestic economic need, finds itself in the same boat with the left and the neoliberals: it is trying to achieve by political-electoral means what it could not win militarily. This does not mean that the United States has totally discarded the use of force to impose its security interests. It is rather that those interests have been redefined and retooled to the new times, just as the US military presence in the Southern Command in Panama has been.
Today, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is competing with the Pentagon and CIA for control of Central America; it has set up its own intelligence networks, penetrated governments and created special units in several countries of the region, thus aggravating party in-fighting in some of them for control of the security apparatus. Added to this friction, the arrogant way the DEA and its local agents ignore elemental legal procedures in the region is so humiliating that it is sparking a backlash of whatever nationalism remains in these neoliberal governments.
Unfortunately for the new Right, neoliberal ideology is not being accompanied by the financial commitments necessary to assure that the model is consolidated over time. Private capital is supposed to assume the primary responsibility in each country, but the big foreign investments that would bring us this touted development is not materializing, and financial analysts say that the repatriation of Central American capital from foreign accounts is minimal. The multilateral lending agencies demand more in debt service than they offer in loans, and the United States, judging from the skimpy aid now given to Panama and the downward curve of its aid to Nicaragua, will not be a financial guarantor of the model. By this logic, the commitments assumed with respect to El Salvador will only be very short-term measures.
The US still clings to the premise that the Left in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala will get continually weaker, as happened in the rest of Latin America or, better yet, in Eastern Europe. It posits that the FMLN will be unable to make the organizational and conceptual leap needed to transform its military might into political-electoral clout. This would mean that the quota of power it won in the negotiations would slip from its fingers, and that it might even be annulled in the 1994 elections. The US also posits that the new political circumstances and competitive pressure will split the FMLN and cause it to abandon its socialist options over time, thus assuring the ultimate victory of capitalism and the neoliberal bourgeoisie. The idea is to irreversibly domesticate the Left, eliminating it not as an organization, but—worse yet—as a viable option to assure popular hegemony in society.
Although the collapse of the socialist East is a blow to the traditional alternatives of the Left, it is becoming a liberating force for the new Left.. It is accelerating their maturation and political housecleaning, not in the sense of abandoning their revolutionary positions, but by promoting greater levels of democracy within their structures. This, in turn, is introducing a new appreciation of the role of the social movements. The possibilities of breaking the neoliberal capitalist model, perhaps even in the electoral process itself, depends on the political changes of the Left. This becomes possible only if popular mobilization assures the votes and content of the program, and if a new, cohesive base for popular and national organization grows out of the necessary and logical dispersion of this current stage.
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