Up From Feudalism

...International Herald Tribune, September 21,1992, p. 4 . He goes on to say, "The idea of detente has lost its strategic justification...Now detente is little more than a lifeboat for Communist dictators...

...In the 1970s the oligarchy held fraudulent elections to stave off centrist political modernization led by the Christian Democrats...

...In this moment of weakness, limiting the scope of defeat should be viewed as success for the Left, but certainly not victory...

...The Sandinista organization of medium and small farmers and ranchers (UNAG) called on the government to reverse the course of the agrarian reform and distribute land...

...Between 1981 and 1984, little land was confiscated, and the pace of redistribution remained slow...

...economic and strategic interests...

...Indeed, to an extent it occurred contrary to the stated goals of the Sandinista leadership...

...In El Salvador, too, the oligarchy turned to open terror to stem the tide of modernization...

...government engineered the overthrow of Jos6 Santos Zelaya, President of Nicaragua...

...The control of land by the old dominant classes drastically declined...

...At the moment, however, the continuation of violence against the FMLN is ominous...

...Elizabeth Dore, "The Great Grain Dilemma: Peasants and State Policy in Revolutionary Nicaragua," Peasant Studies, Vol...

...Dore and Weeks, The Red and the Black, pp...

...This announcement by the government was very much in keeping with the tradition of the Salvadoran oligarchy of rejecting moderate reform...

...The second factor, the role of the United States, was relatively latent in the nineteenth century, asserting itself fully only 80 years ago, when the U.S...

...The U.S...

...In 1989, Villalobos said, "in El Salvador, to carry out an agrarian reform...is to make revolution...

...In the agroexport sector, where capitalism was more highly developed, producers relied on large numbers of temporary wage laborers to harvest cotton, coffee and sugar...

...The absence of pressure to accommodate complemented the authoritarian system of land tenure and labor coercion that emerged during the nineteenth century...

...9. For interpretation of the 1981 agrarian reform law, see Elizabeth Dore, "The GreatGrain Dilemma: 1979-1988,"EstudiosSociales Centroamericanos, Vol...

...In the countryside the expansion of coffee production was based upon intensification of coercive labor...

...and, in Latin America, anti-clericalism, first appeared in the context of the convention that wrote the republican Cadiz Constitution of 1812, when Napoleon's armies occupied much of Spain and the Spanish monarchy collaborated with the French invaders...

...For elaboration of this argument see Elizabeth Dore and John Weeks, The Red and the Black: The Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 1992), Research Paper no...

...Interview with Joaqufn Villalobos by Bill Hutchinson, MITF CentralAmerica Report (Sonoma, CA: Marin Interfaith Task Force on Central America, Summer 1992), p. 2. 15...

...The possibility of bourgeois democratic reforms was recently called into question by President Cristiani's announcement that his government would once again postpone the disbandment of the notorious Atlacatl battalion, the elimination of which would be emblematic of the minimal steps required to end the flagrant violations of human rights by the military...

...At the moment, the popular movements languish in defeat, or at best are restricted to consolidating a minimum set of gains achieved in the 1980s...

...It is in this context that one can understand the role of Marxist ideology in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s...

...Unlike in societies based upon the legal coercion of labor (with slavery the most obvious case), workers in capitalist society are formally free, hence the term "free wage labor...

...During the campaign, Chamorro promised not to reverse the Sandinista agrarian reform, no doubt because more than 250,000 peasant households had benefited from it...

...T HE TRAGIC DILEMMA OF CENTRAL AMER-ica derives from the postponement of the region's modernization...

...During the final years of the Somoza regime, political participation became so narrow that the country was not even a republic of the oligarchy, but the territory of a family...

...The Nicaraguan revolution and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, the civil war in El Salvador and the U.N.-sponsored peace settlement, and continuing state-fostered violations of human rights in Guatemala and Honduras are all aspects of a crisis still far from resolution...

...Once the reactionary oligarchies crushed the reformist movements in Central America, Marxism provided the ideological umbrella under which reformism and modernization were carried forward...

...Because Sandino's movement failed to consolidate its victory, the Somoza dynasty, which emerged in its wake, proved a long-lasting triumph for U.S...

...And in the eyes of the world El Salvador may have lost importance...

...The Nicaraguan government's response to the U.S...

...and 2) to develop and modernize the forces of production in Nicaragua, especially in agriculture...

...It may be that the prospect for a "democratic opening" is greater now than in the recent past, but given the long history of reactionary despotism and class struggle in El Salvador, one must be extremely cautious...

...and Peter Utting, The Peasant Question and Development Policy in Nicaragua (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, February 1988), Discussion Paper no...

...Land on large private estates declined from 50% of the nation's farmland in 1979 to 30% in 1990.12 Sixty percent of all peasant households benefited from the agrarian reform, either by acquiring land or receiving title to plots which they had occupied illegally...

...A fundamental tension in capitalist societies arises between the formal equality in exchange and the underlying inequality in production, where capital asserts its domination over labor...

...In September, President Chamorro announced that all property claims filed with the government would be settled in favor of the former owners-but with a major catch...

...And instead of destroying the oligarchy's storm troopers, the government is trying to retain the old security forces, only changing their names...

...However, insurrectionary movements in many, if not most of these countries would more precisely be identified as "anti-dictatorial" or "national democratic," for they sought liberation from an internal oppressor, not an external one...

...While the social characteristics of individual countries make each case distinct, overall there has been a process of social transformation of an extremely violent nature...

...policy should not be to get along with them but to see them out of power...

...In 1979 most rural Nicaraguans were poor peasants whose access to land depended upon a multitude of forms of servile class relations involving tenancy, debt and patronage.(6)In addition to small-scale agriculture, largely for subsistence, most peasants worked as wage laborers for several months each year harvesting cotton, coffee or sugar...

...121-122 and "El Salvador: Wobbly Peace Process Back on Track," Central America Report, XIX: 32 (August 28, 1992), pp...

...It is like the entrance into civilization...

...policymakers, they have a clear and quasi-religious connotation, standing in relation to bourgeois democratic values as the anti-Christ does to Christianity...

...In contrast, the Nicaraguan insurrection led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) represented a struggle for national liberation in an almost pure form...

...The land question was the most conflictive issue confronting the new government of Violeta Chamorro, which came to power in 1990...

...For this reason the social changes it brought about are even more difficult to protect than those in Nicaragua...

...In Guatemala oligarchic rule depended increasingly upon terrorizing the population, which prompted a series of guerrilla insurrections...

...But Nicaraguan politics had changed fundamentally since the Somoza dynasty...

...In the 1950s, liberal democracy represented a revolutionary doctrine in Central America, much as it had in Western Europe 200 years before...

...In the political sphere this formal freedom may express itself in the freedoms--of speech, assembly, etc.-of bourgeois democratic societies...

...2. 11...

...E VEN MORE FRAUGHT WITH UNCERTAINTY is the struggle in El Salvador...

...The crushing of the Salvadoran insurrection of 1932, in which the direct U.S...

...The Somoza regime served the interests of Washington spectacularly well, by maintaining relative political stability for 40 years in a country previously rent with civil strife...

...In abandoning their property and maneuvering to subvert the government, they forfeited what measure of economic and political power the Sandinistas had been willing to grant them...

...The powerful and direct role of the United States in mediating intra-elite disputes, as well as in suppressing popular insurrection, imparted an intensely reactionary and despotic character to the regimes in Central America, with the obvious exception of Costa Rica...

...But successful as this oligarchy was in protecting itself against the current of history, there were changes it could not prevent...

...Cristiani digs in his heels over disbanding of elite battalion," The Guardian (Manchester and London) October 21, 1992, p. 9 . 16...

...75109...

...But this consolidation did not imply either a commitment to social justice or to small farmers...

...Whatever Marxism and Leninism mean to socialists, in the anti-Communist culture of U.S...

...99-117...

...With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington, far from moderating its reactionary foreign policy, has pursued it with increased vigor...

...In the 1960s, a mass-based reformist coalition, led by Jos6 Napoleon Duarte and Guillermo Ungo, emerged in El Salvador...

...Unfortunately, it appears unlikely that such a revolution has occurred...

...government at most only tolerated nationalism in the Third World and least of all in Latin America...

...3 (1986), pp...

...To these reactionary victories should not be added a capitulation in the ideological battle...

...In the 1980s it ordered its death squads to assassinate officials of U.S.AID to block agrarian reform...

...A majority, though far from all, of the rural population had acquired land...

...117-21...

...In Nicaragua, the struggle against social and political modernization took the form of dynastic rule...

...The significance of the agrarian reform lies less in its land distribution per se, than in the transformation of rural society and class consciousness that it brought about...

...In Nicaragua the final demise of coercive patron-client labor relations was the great contribution of the Sandinista revolution...

...Peasant struggle fundamentally altered rural society, so that by the end of the 1980s Nicaragua was radically different from what it had been a decade before...

...Consequently, the coalition government of the early Sandinista period converted confiscated Somocista properties into state farms...

...Reluctantly and late, the Sandinistas presided over one of the most redistributive land reforms in Latin American history...

...hegemony in Central America was made possible because the local dominant classes had not achieved effective, institutionalized control over their territories and populations until quite late in this century...

...It is too early to say with certainty whether the government will succeed in repressing the masses in the old way, or whether the struggles of workers and peasants will force fundamental reforms on the oligarchy...

...Had the ruling classes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua been more cohesive, and their power more institutionalized, intervention would have been less necessary to maintain U.S...

...These classes relate to each other through market exchange, which is based upon the nominal equality of the exchanging parties...

...Pointing this out is not a criticism of the Left, but rather an insight that allows us to understand the broad base of the insurrectionary struggles that used the language of Marxism, particularly in Nicaragua and El Salvador...

...Nicaragua's more-or-less democratic distribution of land will survive only as long as the landed petty bourgeoisie can defend its victory-and this is not likely to be for long...

...The coalition won the 1972 presidential election, which the military then nullified...

...The electoral defeat of the Sandinista government and the abandonment of armed struggle by the FMLN have been tremendous victories for the ruling classes in the United States and in Central America...

...Marines...

...Recognizing that their survival depended upon winning the political allegiance of the rural population, the Sandinistas hastened to do so...

...Quoted in Sara Miles and Bob Ostertag, "Rethinking Peace," Report on the Americas XXII: 3 (September 1989), p. 37...

...The Ar6valo-Arbenz reform decade in Guatemala presented the third major challenge to the old order in Central America...

...John Weeks is director of the CentreforDevelopment Studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London...

...31-53...

...6. 4. See, for example, Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., "The Rise and Decline of Liberalism in Central America: Historical Perspectives on the Contemporary Crisis," Journal of Interamerican Studies and WorldAffairs 26,3 (August 1984), and David McReery, "Coffee and Class: The Structure of Development in Liberal Guatemala," Hispanic American Historical Review 56, 3 (1976...

...7)The coalition government that assumed power in July, 1979 destroyed the old tyranny, but took few steps to satisfy the demand for land...

...Although the banana companies employed wage labor, and the legal framework for coercive labor systems was eliminated a decade before the boom in cotton, the interests of landed property remained resolutely opposed to agrarian reform-and the broad individual ownership of land-which would have been the basis for the modernization of Central America...

...Almost certainly, Nicaragua's small farmers will gradually be expropriated through competition, indebtedness and impoverishment-forces far less blatant than political ultimatums and government decrees, yet far more difficult to defeat...

...8. For details of the impact of the agrarian reform see Dore and Weeks, The Red and the Black, pp...

...In the words of Washington Post columnist Stephen Rosenfeld, "Gone is the old premise that Communist governments, however loathsome, have their place and need to be accepted...in some civil manner...

...These dramatic events comprise a general disintegration of the "old order" in Central America...

...2. Elizabeth Dore, "Patriarchy and Private Property in Nicaragua, 1860-1920," in Valentine M. Moghadam, ed., Trajectories ofPatriarchy and Development (forthcoming), and David McCreery, "An Odious Feudalism: Mandamientos and Commercial Agriculture in Guatemala, 1861-1920,"LatinAmerican Perspectives 13:1 (Winter 1986), pp...

...17, No...

...It was commonly assumed by the Left and the Right that this was no more than an opportunistic election promise...

...Twentieth-century Central American history has turned on two axes: the power of landed property, and domination by the U.S...

...perhaps El Salvador will be the first country in Latin America to become a real demnerasv.'"4 It in hard to imagine that Fl Salvador has begun a transition to "real democ- racy," if by that term one means effective mass participation and protection of political and human rights...

...Until the Sandinista revolution and the long struggle in El Salvador, these challenges were defeated...

...Regardless of the mix between wage work and subsistence agriculture, poor rural Nicaraguans sought two changes above all else: 1) access and legal title to land, and 2) an end to the tyranny of the local Somocistas...

...Far from modernizers, these landlord-dominated regimes in Central America blocked the development of capitalism in agriculture, and the attendant ideology of democratic participation.(3) ESPITE (OR BECAUSE OF) THEIR PROCLIVity for violent repression, the reactionary regimes of Central America faced major challenges during this century...

...While the Guatemalan reforms of 1944 to 1954 received strong support from the Left, including the Communist Party, the eventual outcome of the process, had it been left to run its course, would quite probably have been no more revolutionary than the Costa Rican "revolution" of the same period...

...In this context, Marxism became the rallying ideology to bring about the very reforms which the elites defended in words but prevented in practice...

...From a society of peasants enmeshed in subordinate, non-capitalist class relations with big landlords, Nicaragua became a society of farmers, large and small...

...Instead of getting their lands back, they would receive compensation, mainly in the form of shares in state companies to be privatized...

...Perhaps most important, the national capital in the new "import substitution" industries came largely from the agricultural oligarchy...

...What the oligarchy refused to accept under threat of a military and political triumph by the Left, it would seem unlikely to concede with the Left disarmed...

...When industrialization came to the region, it was managed and directed-with low tariff protection-in a manner subservient to landed property...

...In a matter of weeks the Salvadoran army carried out a massacre of proportions still beyond comparison, and laid the basis for four decades of relatively stable despotic rule...

...In order to contain these pressures for modernization-particularly demands for political participationdespotic rule became increasingly deformed and idiosyncratic...

...The Sandinistas and the anti-Somocista bourgeoisie shared two fundamental goals: 1) to break the power of the old regime...

...13-21...

...Though based on semi-servile labor, the boom in coffee had contradictory results, not all of which the landed oligarchy could control...

...The violent reaction of the dominant classes to the social and political reforms associated with capitalist modernization cast profound doubt upon whether moderate reform could be achieved peacefully...

...In El Salvador, for example, the struggle launched in the late 1970s began as a conflict to overthrow a landed oligarchy, with the major role of the United States coming only as the Left appeared close to success...

...But their 1981 agrarian reform law was vague and contradictory, reflecting the bitter conflicts that emerged in the process of developing agrarian policy.' The law provided guarantees for private property so long as land was efficiently utilized, with no limit to size...

...Not so in Central America...

...As a consequence of their faint-hearted distribution policy, the Sandinistas progressively lost support in the countryside...

...Matters were only made worse when the government decreed that basic foodstuffs--corn, beans and rice-must be sold to the state, at prices which inflation drove below small farmers' costs of production.(1)" By the mid-1980s, many peasants had lost the faith they once had in the Sandinista revolution...

...This summer he said, "it is notjust any peace that is taking place in El Salvador...

...But even here, most migrant workers returned to their villages after the round of harvests to plant small parcels of land, more often than not acquired outside of market mechanisms...

...From their first General Program of 1969 to their political pronouncements a decade later, on the eve of seizing power, the Sandinistas consistently promised land to the tiller...

...In the Cold War context, the language of Marxism and socialism provided Latin Americans with an anti-imperialist rallying ideology, rather than a political and economic program of social transformation...

...Members of the new government, Sandinista and bourgeois alike, opposed the distribution of land, because they thought it ran counter to their objective of agrarian modernization...

...ultimatum of July, 1992 stunned Washington...

...More importantly, because the U.S...

...21, No...

...5. In the Hispanic world,"liberalism," implying government by consent, equality before the law, "the rights of man" (sic...

...It may be too soon to tell to what extent the social order in El Salvador was transformed, or whether or not the new class relations and redistribution of land in the liberated zones will survive...

...For details of the process of land distribution, see Carmen Diana Deere, Peter Marchetti and Nola Reinhardt, "The Peasantry and the Development of Sandinista Agrarian Reform Policy, 19791984," Latin American Research Review, Vol...

...government.' The power of landed property-with its systems of forced labor-originated in the colonial period...

...Elizabeth Dore teaches Latin American history at the University of Portsmouth, U.K., and is a member of NACLA 's EditorialBoard...

...3. This is explained in detail, with examples, in John F. Weeks,The Economies of CentralAmerica (New York: Holmer & Meier, 1985), Chap...

...With the exception of Costa Rica, Central American social systems were based as much upon coercion and servitude as upon free wage labor, and embraced an ideology of hierarchy instead of equality before the law...

...All this served to strengthen the hold of landed property over the economic and political life of the region...

...249-251...

...19)With the passing of the Soviet Union, the U.S...

...Sandino's insurrection (1926-33) represented the first major threat to the reactionary order...

...When the UN observers who are in El Salvador to oversee the implementation of this year's peace accords depart, the oligarchy may feel free to move against the revolutionaries who prove to be particularly "troublesome...

...Commercialization and capitalist development tend to generate a class differentiation of society that calls forth the political ideology of liberalism: a secular state nominally based upon the principle that governments rule by the consent of the governed, and that the governed are equal before the law.(5)This ideological change results from the development of the classes that characterize capitalist society: the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, and the capitalists...

...While the development of capitalism in Central America will, through its sheer power of creative destruction, advance the productive forces, no longer is this associated with the development of liberal democracy...

...This did not occur in large part because of continuing social relations of servitude in the countryside...

...government and the Central American oligarchy invoked the ideology of liberal democracy to justify its opposite, reactionary despotism, reformers were denied that ideology as the basis of their struggle...

...Events would prove that peasants felt betrayed by the government's agrarian reform...

...Only land not worked productively was subject to expropriation...

...Instead of agrarian reform, the government has now promised to transfer state lands to people residing in the conflictive zones...

...The notion now seeping into thought and policy is that the surviving regimes are not legitimate and...the point of U.S...

...This loose usage was not completely wrong because there is a sense in which all underdeveloped countries suffer from external domination because of their economic and political weakness...

...Next door, the ravages of civil war and years of resistance in the liberated zones in El Salvador fundamentally altered social relations based on servitudepossibly beyond reconstruction...

...As a result, the modernizing effect of industrialization on the political system was limited.(2)Certainly in no other part of Latin America has the traditional landlord class been so successful in holding back social and political change as in Central America...

...At the same time a new political force emerged: small farmers, freed from the servile and patronal relations of production that had held them in subservience before the revolution...

...Before their partial or complete demise, these regimes were profoundly antidemocratic, based upon a political philosophy that predated the Age of Liberalism...

...For the FSLN, this policy reflected a desire to preserve the perceived productivity and profitability of large modern enterprises, as well as to eliminate archaic rural class relations perpetuated by landlords and political bosses tied to the Somoza dynasty...

...The Chamorro government consolidated the bourgeois democratic revolution in Nicaragua...

...In the end, the FMLN abandoned its armed struggle for agrarian reform, and the Cristiani government has systematically evaded the negotiated agreement to dissolve the most heinous of the state's security forces, the National Guard and the Treasury Police...

...role was insignificant, proved equally propitious for the dominant classes...

...Michael Reid, "Nicaragua to Compensate for Land Losses," The Guardian (Manchester & London) September 11, 1992, p. 1. 14...

...Forced to armed struggle by the closing of the peaceful path to change, reformers found themselves in the same camp as socialists and Communists...

...Elizabeth Dore and John Weeks, "The Attack on the Working Class in 'Revolutionary' Peru," Latin American Perspectives, V:2 (Fall 1976...

...20 (1985), pp...

...In Central America this struggle has been fierce, but in most cases defeated or neutralized by the alliance between the despotic oligarchy and the U.S...

...This brought forth the most extensive U.S...

...96-120...

...Washington announced that until properties were returned and the security forces cleansed of Sandinistas, it would withhold aid from Nicaragua...

...After the redistribution of land and the fundamental decline in the power of the traditional landlord class that occurred in the 1980s, servile class relations existed only as the exception...

...By the second half of the nineteenth century, with the commercialization of agriculture during the region's coffee boom, landed property assumed total hegemony in the region...

...The point is quite the contrary...

...In the 1970s, the term "national liberation" came to be used loosely on the Left to refer to almost any nationalist insurrectionary movement in an underdeveloped country...

...A watershed came in 1985, when armed opposition by the peasantry, along with the growing inability to subsidize the state farms, forced the Sandinistas to modify agrarian policy...

...With the defeat and containment of the Left in the early 1990s, the isthmus finds itself mired in the death-throes ofreactionary despotism, anticipating a capitalist transformation that can no longer deliver the principles of nineteenth-century liberalism...

...That Arbenz was considered a radical-and in the Guatemalan context certainly was-tells much about the nature of reactionary despotism in Central America...

...With Washington to intervene when disputes threatened to undermine the stability of reactionary rule, the dominant groups felt little pressure to accommodate the demands of the middle and lower classes for reform, or even for nominal political participation...

...military intervention in El Salvador prevented a victory by the FMLN...

...6. This interpretation is controversial...

...however, in the cities commercialization associated with coffee brought modernizing tendencies, increased urbanization, and the development of a small middle class in finance and commerce.(4)The expansion of banana production further stimulated the growth of the urban middle class, and created a rural working class as well...

...Such a program could not be seriously pursued in Central America because of the economic and political importance to the progressive movement of rural and urban small producers...

...JItIuglUe ti...

...Following a series of confrontations with dissatisfied peasants demanding land in 1980 and 1981, the government made negligible concessions, such as making land available for short-term rental to groups agreeing to work within production cooperatives...

...The moment of decision was forced upon Chamorro in the summer of 1992...

...Perhaps an equally important victory for these reactionary groups would be the abandonment by the Left of its ideological commitment to socialism, which in Central America must, in all likelihood, be achieved through armed struggle...

...Any other electoral position would have courted certain defeat...

...25-43...

...Socialism, by most definitions, involves the progressive elimination of private property as the basis for organizing production, and with this, the elimination of all classes of exploiters...

...49 (January-April, 1989), pp...

...Major transformations in the distribution of land and elimination of the state's use of violence as a political tactic are minimum pre-requisites for the construction of bourgeois democracy in El Salvador...

...In this <context, the oligarchy of the region faces relatively little risk in pursuing its own program of reactionary modernization...

...If a cooperative was large and considered to be important, it was administered by an official of the Ministry of Agiculture.io For peasants expecting land, turning Somocista properties into state farms and cooperatives represented a hollow victory, particularly when the wages paid by the state for picking coffee and cotton declined dramatically...

...Commercialization was extended by foreign capital to banana production, and culminated in the 1950s with the rapid spread of cotton...

...In fact, the FSLN leadership and its bourgeois partners both opposed land distribution...

...Up From Feudalism 1. For elaboration of this argument see John Weeks, "An Interpretation of the Central American Crisis," Latin American Research Review, Vol...

...In the past, the rise of the bourgeoisie was part of a process of country-creation, infused with a nationalist fervor...

...However, the role of Marxism in Central America has been quite different from either the demonization of the Right or the idealism of the Left...

...El Salvador: Obstacles on the Road to Peace," Central America Report, XIX: 16 (May 1992), pp...

...The principle that governments are based upon consent remains an innovative concept in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras...

...Joaquin Villalobos, member of the General Command of the FMLN and one of the principal comandantes of the rebel army, is supremely optimistic...

...The Central American oligarchy proved extraordinarily adept at preventing the emergence of political and economic power divorced from property in land...

...ruling class finds itself freer to impose capitalism in its most flagrantly exploitative form, with less need for the cosmetics of democratic ideology in Central America or elsewhere...

...Our main point is that capitalist social relations of production, that is the buying and selling of labor power and the means of production, were not the predominant social forms before the Sandinista revolution...

...This was a victory for the small farmers who had fought for land and used armed force to defend it, and a defeat for the old landowning class...

...The power of counter-revolution in Nica-ragua, the stalemate in El Salvador, and the tenacity of despotism in Guatemala and Honduras cannot be denied...

...6)We would add that in El Salvador, bourgeois democracy requires a revolution, as Central American history has shown...

...Stock in state companies-many of which were bankrupt-failed to satisfy either former landowners or Washington...

...intervention in the hemisphere, ending in the strategic defeat and withdrawal of the U.S...

...In the first eight months after the peace accords were signed, the number of labor leaders, peasant activists, and FMLN militants killed by the army suggests that little has changed in El Salvador...

...The tendency towards liberal democracy, which can accompany capitalist development, realizes itself not through a mechanistic or automatic process, but is achieved by the struggle of the populace...

...a"a'UnlU V tL U National Liberation Front (FMLN) its radical class character, A sweptMAJORNicaraguaREVOLUTION during the rule of the Sandinistas, though largely outside their control...

...The Frente's stress on national aspirations also fit well with the class structure of the country, for Nicaragua possessed neither a substantial working class on which to base a socialist ideology, nor a coherent peasant movement which, in El Salvador, gave .L . . . . - -L L '--- L -- J - l R -tie...

...Mild as the Arbenz reforms were, especially the land reform, they provoked the fury of the landed oligarchy, leading to the overthrow of the elected government by a U.S.-organized coup...

...Stephen S. Rosenfeld, "What To Do With Cuba's Ugly Face...

...Acreage on state farms and abandoned or decapitalized private estates passed to cooperatives and, for the first time since the triumph of 1979, to peasant households...

...However, it must not be thought that the progressive movement in Central America used the term "socialism" cynically or dishonestly...

...The close identification of the Somoza family with U.S...

...By the end of World War II, the elites in most of Latin America had generally accepted the necessity of granting democratic rights in principle and rhetoric, if not in practice...

...Peasant beneficiaries of the reform were organized, often against their will, into production cooperatives...

...Faced with pressures it could no longer contain, the Salvadoran oligarchy adopted the "Guatemalan solution" of state terror, polarizing society and plunging the country into civil war...

...Even during the Cold War one found many examples of capitalist development that invoked the mythology of national identity to foster a project of modernization...

...7. The landlords, moneylenders, transporters, wholesalers and political bosses who, all too often, were fused into the one or two powerful local caciques...

...political interests meant that the anti-dictatorial struggle could not be separated from a struggle to free the country from external domination...

...government...

...Unfortunately, it can be argued that without its army, the FMLN is powerless...

...The emphasis on national identity and independence was a natural one for the peasants, workers and petty bourgeoisie of Nicaragua, and it defined the radical and populist character of the FSLN...

...Seasonal harvest workers tended to be capitalist wage laborers while permanent laborers were ensconsed within ties of patronage...

...Unlike in Nicaragua, the revolution in El Salvador liberated only about a third of the country...

...interests and the Nicaraguan dominant classes...

...The rise in importance of cotton reinforced these modernizing tendencies...

...Beyond the immediate question of whether, and in what form, the revolutionary forces will survive is the issue of how class relations in El Salvador were transformed by more than a decade of civil war...

...2 (Winter 1990), pp...

...The state, of course, played a central role in the enforcement of coercive labor, intervening through the legal system and with overt repression...

...While the Somozas and their coterie developed major capitalist agro-processing enterprises, the dynasty's support rested on tiers of patron-client ties which dominated the political and economic life of the country...

...Courting risks implied by generalization, we suggest, for example, that prior to the late 1970s, capitalist farmers were few in number and relied on systems of labor that combined and juxtaposed free wage labor with servile, non-capitalist relations...