REVIEWS

...The government responded with overwhelming force, using tear gas and physical violence to remove the protesters from Mactumactza...

...As one USAID official told Jackson, “It’s sort of our role, really, to guide the policy discussion...

...that the negative consequences of development are downplayed or ignored...

...The dirty war of the 1980s and 1990s certainly decimated resistance, as thousands of activists faced the brunt of the U.S.-backed assault on Marxism and other forms of dissent...

...Agency for International Development (USAID) to the local office of CARE...

...The colonized parts of the planet bear the ironic marks of a brutal history...

...When the Governor of Chiapas imposed a standardized exam for graduation from the normales, claiming there were not enough teaching positions in Chiapas for the graduates, students and teachers from one of the normales, called “Mactumactza,” took to the streets in protest...

...This cut-out wrote the draft law (or “anteproyecto”), and then submitted it to the governmental body, who, being understaffed and underfunded, adopted it...

...Ambassador John Negroponte meant in his October 1982 comment, speaking on the counterinsurgency, that “Democracy is being consolidated in this country”—democracy here meaning the construction of a civil society pliant to the interests of the globalizers, and therefore absent of any radical force...

...They simply re-brand them as “customers” of “aid,” using this sleight of hand to reproduce colonial levels of exploitation while appearing magnanimous...

...Whereas the constitutional government of Honduras is located in the Comayagüela section of Tegucigalpa and around the downtown Parque Central, the institutions of global government are almost all in the Colonia Palmira neighborhood...

...In a 1986 article, U.S...

...Jackson goes deeper than these accounts...

...Jackson calls this “an internal brain drain of some of Honduras’s best and brightest...

...There is now an enormous literature that questions the ideological stratagems of the globalization industry as propelled by the claims of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund...

...There was a time when the city was the capital of the mining operations of the Spanish colonial regime in Central America...

...Paradoxically, the Bank sought to improve “access to knowledge” for some of Mexico’s most impoverished citizens by making the loan conditional upon the partial privatization of the publicly run normales rurales, rural colleges dating back to the Mexican Revolution that have offered their students—many from poor, indigenous communities—free tuition, free room and board, and guaranteed employment as schoolteachers upon graduation...

...But Friedberg’s documentation of the resistance to privatization looks deeper than the street mobilizations used so effectively by la CNTE and its allies, and examines the internal, community-based struggles of the teachers as they seek not just access to education, but to health care, good jobs and social justice...

...The result is far less conspiratorial than John Perkins’ account of the “economic hit men,” and allows for the agency of the Hondurans who work with and consent to the rule of market fundamentalism...

...With it in the analytical framework, Honduran nothingness is not so much existential as it is a sociological statement about imperialism’s detritus...

...Friedberg displays masterful documentary skills, exploring the long history of struggle for democratization within the teachers’ union in Mexico...

...Such an analysis of “the country of nada” is only possible if one occludes the resistance and the counterinsurgency...

...For a fuller explanation, we would need to hear more about the Honduran political economy, about the class nature of the state and the role of the dominant economic classes in civil society...

...Jackson goes on to deconstruct this question of power and influence in the rest of the book through a rigorous ethnography of the practice of the global actors based in Honduras...

...In 2002, the world bank offered a “Programmatic Economic Development Loan” of $40 million to the state of Chiapas, Mexico, that would ostensibly improve the “quality, quantity and targeting of public services” in Mexico’s poorest state...

...About the Author Christy Thornton is NACLA's executive director...

...By the mid 1950s, the great silver mine firm, the Honduran Rosario Mining Company, ended its magnificent run in the seams...

...Jackson’s account is insufficient only in that it does not ask the fundamental question: What explains the globalizers’ success in swamping Honduran civil society, while other former Third World societies have not acceded to the same agenda...

...The Bank hoped that “by showing the other states of the Mexican federation that structural adjustment is possible and rewarding, even in the state that is often regarded as the most backward, the Chiapas program will constitute an unprecedented example...

...How, for example, do elites interact with the globalizers, and by what means do they come to perceive their interests as held in common...

...To adjudge the work of the globalizers in the three examples, Jackson adopts several key propositions: that global agendas tend to win out over local ones...

...The author surveys the many different kinds of bilateral, multilateral and Honduran organizations, from the omnipotent U.S...

...A caravan was mobilized from Mactumactza to Mexico City, hundreds of protesters shook down the gates of the Secretary of the Interior and pressured the government into negotiations...

...This is perhaps what U.S...

...To implement a new Agricultural Modernization and Development Law, which in 1992 opened up the Honduran market to international agribusiness, USAID paid $8 million to Chemonics, a U.S...

...Co-optation into the agenda of globalization, he argues, occurs at this personal level as much as at the institutional one...

...that local agendas succeed only if they are capable of linking into the global...

...His latest book is Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare, and he is co-editor, with Teo Ballvé, of Dispatches from Latin America: On the Front Lines Against Neoliberalism, forthcoming from South End Press and LeftWord Books (India...

...In the ensuing conflict, which lasted for weeks, 150 teachers and students were arrested and tortured, and a bus driver was shot and killed...

...Death squads, such as the infamous Battalion 3-16, can then be seen as responsible for doing USAID’s groundwork...

...By anthropologist Jeffrey Jackson’s reckoning, the rich never forget the poor...

...diplomat Edward Sheehan wrote, “The favorite Honduran word is nada—nothing...

...Writing in English, Laura MacDonald, Alan Fowler, Anthony Bebbington, Sonia Alvarez, James Petras and others have provided ample testimony on the dubious role also played by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the social development of Central and South America...

...But even as the buildings at Mactumactza are torn down, the movement that continues to fight for the preservation of free, public education in Mexico—guaranteed under Article III of Mexico’s 1910 constitution—is strengthened...

...As a teacher in Oaxaca puts it, “Where we are really going to transform society isn’t in the marches, it’s in the communities...

...contractor, to create an organization called PRODEPAH...

...We’re writing the original draft...

...a school staffer, with blood running down her neck, describes how the police broke the windows to come in and bring the protesters out...

...We meet the cliquish expats and locals who staff these organizations, and find that many of the Honduran professionals (strangely called FSNs—“foreign service nationals”—by their foreign colleagues), formerly trained overseas or by government agencies, now work for the international organizations for the higher salaries and the development agencies’ ability to shape local politics...

...About the Author Vijay Prashad teaches at Trinity College...

...Ultimately, however, the World Bank’s vision prevailed, and Mactumatza was all but destroyed...

...When the Governor reacted by canceling the semester, teachers, students and their families occupied the school...

...embassies and expatriate households dominate the latter, where fancy cars traverse bare streets and shops sell goods at dollar prices...

...As Jill Friedberg’s riveting documentary, Granito de Arena (Little Grain of Sand), begins, the audience finds itself inside Mactumactza as it comes under siege...

...As the eyes of a hysterical toddler and his mother are flooded with fresh water to flush out the tear gas, another distraught mother screams, “We’re fighting because we’re poor and we have to...

...Indeed, this official called for the elimination of a Honduran state agency—the Ministry of Planning, SECPLAN—which, in his estimation, “totally ignores market principles and really muddies the waters on a lot of reforms we are trying to put through...

...Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, takes its name from the Nahuatl language, and means “Silver Mountain...

...Men are brutally thrown to the ground and repeatedly punched and kicked by security forces...

...The real scandal of the globalizers, then, is the arrogant certainty of their right to reconstruct the world, even superseding the elected officials of a constitutional state...

...As the poet Roberto Sosa wrote in 1969, “Los pobres son muchos y por eso/ es imposible olvidarlos” (“The poor are many and that’s why/ it is impossible to forget them...

...World Bank economic statistics for Honduras are miserable: over half the population lives below the official poverty line, close to a third suffer from chronic unemployment, and the income differentials between the immensely wealthy and the immiserated is grotesquely high...

...We’ve done this in a couple of cases...

...Granito de Arena, a film by Jill Friedberg, Corrugated Films, US/Mexico 2005, 62 minutes...

...Silver production peaked, and then entered a slow decline...

...The former is a bustle, with family-owned shops and street vendors selling goods at Honduran prices...

...How indeed are the “globalizers”—the hundreds of transnational institutions and their staffs working in recipient countries—able to draw in a coalition among civil society within the former Third World to participate in their own continued dependency...

...Jackson draws on three concrete examples to follow the institutional story of unequal power: the construction and repair of dams, the creation of consent toward the establishment of maquiladoras and the reconstruction after Hurricane Mitch in the late 1990s...

...and that the greater, largely hidden benefits of international development actors go to the donor countries...

...Jackson only briefly takes up the most significant work of the globalizers, however: the reconstruction of the legal-political apparatus of the Honduran state after the end of military rule in 1982...

...SECPLAN wanted to maintain agricultural programs such as subsidized credit and price controls that USAID considered “throwbacks to a socialist era” and contrary to the Agricultural Modernization Law...

...And why did Hondurans, in this case, allow themselves to be so entangled...

...What he illuminates is the mechanism by which this democratic powerlessness is produced, one in which consent rather than coercion is the dominant lever...

...The reform of the normales in Chiapas certainly became an example for the country, and indeed the world—though not in the way the Bank had hoped...

...Early in The Globalizers, Jackson offers a revealing socio-geography of the institutions of “aid” and “development...

...He takes for granted that the “aid industry” is part and parcel of the technique to undermine the sovereignty of nation-states and, more, to enfeeble democratic processes...

...After hearing phrases such as el gobierno no hace nada (the government does nothing), la Iglesia no tiene nada (the Church has nothing), no tenemos nada (we have nothing), yo soy nada (I am nothing), Sheehan surmises, “The people are passive and fatalistic, low in self-esteem...

...that Honduran institutions (and the country as a whole) do indeed benefit from globalization...

...She traces the movement from its roots in 1979 with the creation of the dissident National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers, la CNTE, through to the massive strikes of 1989 that ousted the corrupt union leader Carlos Jongitud Barrios...

...According to the Project Information Document, available on the World Bank’s Web site, the Bank anticipated “that better spending in [health and education would] contribute significantly to the reduction of poverty by giving people access to knowledge and by improving their well-being...

...But these cases can offer only an incomplete picture, for as Jackson notes, the globalizers are everywhere: they’re in capitalism’s groundwork and architecture, in the “global scripts” of progress, in every facet of human life...

...Under the pressure of USAID as well as other international donors (the Germans and Japanese, in this example), the USAID source could now casually report that “[s]ome of these agencies are coming around...

...What this institutional geography reveals,” Jackson concludes, “is the tremendous wealth disparity between the foreign development agencies and the Honduran government institutions...

...In addition, she documents the gradual shift toward the privatization of education, from the emergence of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which established public education as a “tradable service” in Mexico, to Vicente Fox’s program of escuelas de calidad (“quality schools”), which rely almost exclusively on standardized testing—with easy parallels to the “No Child Left Behind” programs here in the United States...

...In addition, and importantly, have voices critical of the globalization agenda had any impact in challenging or ameliorating its power and its effects...

...In this way, Friedberg offers a brief but profound look into a tremendously important model for community-based resistance to the imperatives of neoliberal globalization, demonstrating the power of each community in the struggle to offer its little grain of sand...

...This disparity, so clearly revealed by the property—buildings, office equipment, and vehicles—of these organizations, has an impact on the relative power and influence of these institutions on Honduran society...