Letters
The Dominican Republic Your March/April report, "The Dominican Republic After the Caudillos," nicely conveys the complexity of contemporary life in that country. Several of the authors seem to...
...I once asked the FMLN's Arnaldo Ramos whether any model acceptable to U.S...
...Yet these organizations have had difficulty in establishing a common ground from which the Caribbean can confront other hemispheric and world powers...
...His answer: "We are not Cuba...
...The Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) and the recently formed Association of Caribbean States (ACS) are potentially counterweights to foreign influences in the region, fora for discussing shared problems, and bridges to wider links with other Latin American countries...
...The EPR has a socialist vision and believes that the ruling class of Mexico, a dependent capitalist state, must be overthrown as a prerequisite to end the oppression and exploitation of the masses, particularly the indigenous population...
...This response is indicative of one of several anti-communist currents in leftist disguise that have proliferated since the counterrevolution triumphed in the former USSR...
...Then too, many pressing problems such as drug trafficking and environmental regulation call for region-wide responses...
...The peoples of the Caribbean have long oscillated between regional fragmentation and uneasy movements toward regional integration, often under foreign pressure...
...Thus they might be usefully analyzed as a function of a regional political economy and political culture...
...Julie Franks Dominican Studies Institute CUNY-City College New York, New York Mexico's "Other" Guerrillas B y using code words to describe the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), such as the group's "penchant for hard-line Leninist rhetoric," "The EPR: Mexico's 'Other' Guerrillas" [January/ February 1997] only obfuscates the underlying ideological and strategic differences with the Zapatista Army (EZLN...
...The EZLN's rejection of solidarity with the EPR represents a strategic vision not unlike the Sandinistas or the FMLN whose leadership has been infected by what I like to call the "new thinking virus," which replaces class struggle with "universal human values...
...Several of the authors seem to suggest that personalism and patronage in Dominican politics can be attributed to the legacy of Trujillo and the personal style of Balaguer, but these problems are common in other Caribbean nations...
...imperialism could be good for the people of El Salvador...
...If competing colonial powers pulled the region apart in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contemporary trends promise to unify it within a "globalized" economy structured by the Caribbean Basin Initiative...
...The Dominican Republic's recent conflict with CARICOM over relative advantages in the European banana market shows that if the Caribbean is to speak with a common voice, it will have to develop a more complex understanding of how its regional identity has emerged in historical, cultural and geopolitical terms...
...The EZLN, on the other hand, is guided by the mistaken belief that local changes within the state of Chiapas, such as land reform and "democratization" of the political process, will solve their problems...
...David Silver New York, New York...
Vol. 30 • May 1997 • No. 6
