In the 1980s, revolution, civil war and the anticommunist
drive of the US in the Western hemisphere
turned world attention to Central America.
The year 1990 marked a turning point in these
bloody Central American conflicts. The civil war in
Nicaragua ended. After a fair election the Marxist
Sandinista regime stepped down and handed the
government peacefully over to the opposition.
There are six states wholly in Central America:
Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador,
Panama and Guatemala. Their combined population
was only about 26 million in 1989, though
population growth had been very high in the
region, as it had been throughout Latin America.
Indeed, population growth in the early 1990s
threatened to prevent any increase in the standard
of living and to condemn the masses to deprivation
and poverty. In addition, the resources that
were available were not shared fairly. The continuing
inequalities were most marked in the unjust
distribution of the available land. The wildly fluctuating
prices for the agricultural exports of
coffee, bananas and cotton, on which these
nations were still dependent, created a severe economic
crisis, because the prices of manufactured
imports did not move in unison, while the cost
of oil imports reached dizzying heights before
falling back and rising again in 1990.
An attempt was made in the 1970s to create
more balanced economies that would rely less
on manufactured imports and develop importsubstituting
industries. Ten years later this only
added to the general economic calamities of the
majority of Latin American nations. In common
with the rest of Latin America the Central
American states borrowed heavily from bankers
flush with Middle Eastern oil money. The result
was that a crushing debt burden, getting ever
larger with high interest rates, turned the apparently
temporary difficulties of the 1970s into
permanent crises. Of course, the difficulties never
were just temporary. Political and social reforms,
including a redistribution of land, were indispensable
preconditions of better economic and social
health. The causes of Central America’s problems
required radical remedies, regional as well as international.
Nothing short of a massive effort could
stabilise the region – an effort of will on the part
of the developed world to cease protecting its
own markets and to pay higher prices for Central
America’s agricultural exports, as well as to
guarantee these prices against wild fluctuations.
International bankers would also need to write
down their investments realistically, while wealthy
Latin Americans would have to invest in their own
economies instead of sending their money abroad.
In 1961 hopes and expectations had been
raised by President Kennedy when he launched
the Alliance for Progress. His aim was to transform
Latin America’s economic and social ills by
peaceful means. This was to be the free world’s
democratic answer to the Marxist revolutionary
challenge. But enough aid to meet the enormous
economic problems was not forthcoming; much
of what was given was diverted to military security
against social revolution in the 1960s. Social revolution
and a more equitable distribution of wealth
and land was condemned by the powerful elites in
Latin America, who claimed these measures would
open the way for communism. Just as fearful of
far-reaching reforms were the Latin American
middle classes. Thus there was no will for political
and social change among the ruling and influential
groups. Yet this lay at the very heart of what the
Alliance for Progress was supposed to be about.
With the death of Kennedy, and Johnson’s growing
preoccupation with Vietnam, the Alliance
petered out as more democratic and socially
responsible regimes failed to evolve. The Alliance
for Progress did not achieve for Latin America
what the Marshall Plan had done for Europe. The
cycle of violence, deprivation and revolution was
not broken; the answer given to Marxist revolution
was military suppression.
However, in some of the Central American
states a certain amount of progress was achieved,
especially in Costa Rica and Honduras; but even
here it was too little; in the others – Nicaragua, El
Salvador and Guatemala – repression and the
murder of peasants and of the urban opposition
goaded into armed terrorist resistance created a
thirty-year cycle of bloodshed and violence.
Despite Washington’s good intentions in pushing
for democratic and economic improvements and
for an end to the abuse of the most fundamental
human rights, the image of the US was marred,
especially during the two Reagan administrations
(1981–9) by the priority given to security and to
efforts to halt the spread of Marxism in the
Caribbean and South and Central America. The
misery and destruction borne by the people
through the years of revolution, civil wars and
conflict were a terrible price to pay. Even after
they were settled in the mid-1990s corruption
blighted the region.
Costa Rica
Costa Rica is the most fortunate of the Central
American states, free from civil war (except for a
brief period in 1948), with a GNP per capita in
1987 of $1,610 with the highest income per head
of population and one more equitably distributed
than elsewhere in Latin America. It is also the
only Latin American nation with something
approaching an established democratic parliamentary
system. Abuses of human rights are not
totally absent, as Amnesty International reports
reveal, but their scale is small compared to those
of the other states.
Costa Rica had established a constitutional
liberal state in the 1920s with free and fair elections.
The collapse of coffee prices, on which it
depended, had a devastating effect throughout
Central America. The more liberal oligarchic parliamentary
governments in the region gave way to
the strongmen, the caudillos, who would preserve
the interests of landowners and merchants and
meet the threat of labour and social unrest. Only
in Costa Rica, with its strong constitutional tradition,
was the caudillismo somewhat softened
in the 1930s and 1940s by regular presidential
elections. José Figueres was the outstanding
political leader to emerge in the post-1945
period. Reformist Costa Rica enjoys an extensive
social-welfare programme, and José Figueres’s
revolutionary junta (1948–9) strengthened the
parliamentary tradition. Women were enfranchised
and after losing the elections Figueres
stood down. Perhaps the junta’s most unusual
action, given the Latin American context, was to
abolish the army. Still, by Western standards,
Costa Rican constitutionalism had decided defects.
Organised labour was harshly repressed,
reforms would be granted from above rather than
negotiated with workers and peasant organisations
from below. As in most of Latin America, standards
of living in the early 1990s remained tied to
agricultural prices and the cost of manufactured
imports. Despite diversification of the economy,
coffee and bananas were still the backbone of
exports. The problems of the 1970s and 1980s
burdened Costa Rica with a huge foreign debt.
Meanwhile internationally, Costa Rica, which
aided the Sandinistas in the overthrow of the
Somoza dictatorship in neighbouring Nicaragua,
was drawn into the struggle between the Nicaraguan
Marxist regime and the US. It became the
far from enthusiastic host to the Contra bases
along its borders. Its president, Oscar Arias
Sánchez, was a leading proponent of attempts to
mediate peace in the region. The end of the civil
war in Nicaragua and the electoral defeat of the
Marxist regime in 1990 lessened tension and
promised a better future as the presidency
changed hands and Arias Sánchez left office.
Honduras
Honduras, in contrast to Costa Rica, is the poorest
of Central American states, and its high birth
rate impedes efforts to raise living standards
substantially. The income per head of population
in 2000 was less than $1,000. Look up Honduras
in the index of a Latin American history and the
first subheading is ‘bananas’, yet the miserable
returns from the foreign-dominated banana plantations
kept the country poor and underdeveloped.
Honduras is the most apt example of a
‘banana republic’, practically speaking under US
economic control because Americans own most of
the agricultural sector and much else besides. US
administrations wanted to see progress towards
constitutional democratic government and rising
living standards, especially during the years of the
Kennedy Alliance for Progress, but this would
have necessitated agrarian reform, the raising of
agricultural wages, and the acceptance of some of
the demands made by labour organisations which,
in turn, would have damaged the interests of
American investors. Official Washington had its
own set of priorities. Foremost among them was a
wish to halt the growth of the left. The authoritarian
military rulers were regarded as safer allies,
as well as providing a better guarantee of security
for investors.
The policies adopted by Washington from
Kennedy to Reagan varied, but ideological and
security concerns in the last resort predominated.
In 1954, a successful strike by the banana workers
against the United Fruit Company ushered in a
period of unexpected change in this most backward
of republics. After a period of political
turmoil Villeda Morales became president and
attempted, like Arbenz in Guatemala and
Figueres in Costa Rica, to reform Honduras’s
rigid social structure and to transform society
from above. But when land reforms threatened to
hurt the interests of the United Fruit Company,
Washington forced a retreat. In 1963 a vicious
and bloody military coup overthrew Morales.
Although Honduras gradually returned to civilian
rule in 1981, the army with its American-trained
officers remains, behind the constitutional façade,
the real power in the nation. The economy
cannot free itself from foreign domination, and
progress has been slow, while corruption is rife.
In the conflict with Nicaragua, however, Honduras
was the most important ally of the US and
was host to the principal Contra bases.
Guatemala
The problems besetting Guatemala are those of a
nation half of whose population, the 4 million
Mayan Indians, do not share any sense of identity
with the other, white Spanish-American half.
The gross income per head of population in 1987
was only $870. Power resided with the army and
the coffee-growing elite. For a century, from the
mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth, four caudillos
ruled the country. The first hope for the poor
and illiterate majority came in 1944 with a small
middle-class revolution supported by sections of
the army. Free elections brought to power Juan
José Arévalo (1945–51) and Colonel Jacobo
Arbenz Guzmán (1951–4). Forced labour was
abolished, social reforms were initiated and
extended to the Indians, a labour code and land
reforms were started. Arévalo had opened government
to the left and Arbenz accelerated
the process, thereby thoroughly alarming the
land-owning aristocracy and Washington, which
believed that communism was gaining the upper
hand. US-owned companies and land belonging
to the United Fruit Company were nationalised,
and more nationalisation was threatened. The
Communist Party was legalised.
With the help of the CIA, Arbenz was overthrown
in 1954. The clock was turned back; the
old oligarchy and the United Fruit Company
regained their influence, with the army now again
the real power in the land. There were thousands
of killings and the Marxist labour movement was
wiped out. Corrupt and inefficient military-run
regimes became the despair of the American
advisers, who could see no alternative other than
the communists. In 1960, Guatemala became the
staging post for the invasion of Cuba. After
another military coup in 1963, the military
remained in control of Guatemala until 1982.
The repression of guerrillas and leftist opponents
was particularly bloody – the civil war killed
120,000. The sheer extent of the abuse of human
rights was unequalled in degree even by the low
standards of Central America. Labour leaders,
university teachers and political opponents just
‘disappeared’; 40,000 are estimated to have died
in this way. By the early 1980s the army chiefs
fought each other for the spoils of office – and
this was the army that had received substantial US
military aid. Amnesty in 1982 accused the
Guatemalan government of massacring 2,600
people, and that was an underestimate.
Guatemalan politics are subject to a cycle of
hope and disillusionment. In 1986 Vinicio
Cerezo Arévalo was inaugurated as a popular
reforming president. The hope was that he would
end the brutal excesses of the generals who
had dominated Guatemala for three decades and
under whose authority the security forces had
murdered an estimated 65,000 civilians. But the
reforms did not last. The military soon began to
exert their power again. Death squads resumed
their murderous missions, killing student leaders,
trade unionists and human-rights advocates.
Guatemala became a profitable transit point for
Colombian cocaine on its way to the cities of the
US. Almost half the population was unemployed
and inflation was high; civilian government in
1990 was losing control and making little effort
to check violence, crime or corruption. In January
1991 Jorge Serrano Ellas became president and
assumed the burdens of trying to end violence
and restore the economy.
El Salvador
El Salvador’s descent into civil war and bloody
conflict was equally tragic. It is the smallest and
most densely populated Central American republic.
Some forty families owned most of the coffee
plantations and dominated banking and the mercantile
sector. The distribution of wealth is grossly
unequal and the per-capita income was almost as
low as that of Honduras.
The history of peasant uprisings and protests
is a grisly one. A communist-inspired peasant
revolt ended in 1932 in wholesale slaughter, a
precedent for contemporary times. Here, too, US
attitudes after the Second World War were shaped
by the fear of communist penetration. Alliances
between the wealthy oligarchy and the military
were regarded as the only viable alternative and
the US has supported them, thereby impeding
reform and change. In 1969, El Salvador briefly
went to war with Honduras and the resulting
victory further enhanced the prestige of the military.
But the military and oligarchy began to be
challenged by the rise of an urban middle sector.
José Napoleon Duarte led a rapidly expanding
Christian Democratic Party. By the 1970s there
appeared to be a possibility of more representative
government. It was a false hope. In 1972,
the army frustrated the election that would have
brought Duarte to power and he barely escaped
with his life. But repression in El Salvador did
not bring stability. The economic deterioration
following on the oil-price rise in 1973–4 led to
increased guerrilla activities as more and more
Salvadorans became desperate. It also led to
another ‘dirty war’. Brief efforts at reform were
superseded by military regimes that paid no regard
to human rights. Worldwide attention was directed
to the methods of the hated regime when
Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken critic of
these abuses, was murdered in 1980. Right-wing
death squads set about murdering whomever
earned their disapproval. In 1980 alone there were
close to 10,000 political murders. The civil war
rages on and the US has aided and trained the
Salvadoran army to crush the guerrillas, who terrorise
the countryside. Under pressure from the
Reagan administration, internationally supervised
elections were held in 1982, but the guerrillas
refused to lay down their arms and participate.
The extreme right won, but in 1984 the more
moderate Christian Democrat José Duarte was
finally elected president.
Under heavy US pressure, civilian rule and regular
elections appeared to change El Salvador’s
politics for the better. But the government was
hardly in control: guerrillas dominated regions of
the countryside, and the army remained a law unto
itself. The activities of right-wing death squads
lessened – the US could claim an improvement in
the human-rights position – but so many thousands
had fallen victim that the urban population
was cowed. The Reagan administration in the
1980s gave $6 billion in aid and by lobbying for
land reform hoped to undercut support for the
guerrillas and to promote democracy. But Duarte
did not solve the political or economic problems of
El Salvador and the Marxist-led guerrillas provided
evidence of their ability to strike by knocking out
nearly all the electricity supplies on the eve of the
congressional elections in 1988. People who
bothered to vote turned to the right. The small
country was ravaged by civil war, which by the
early 1990s had claimed at least 70,000 lives, and
by left-wing and right-wing terror. Almost half the
population was unemployed. Duarte, on whom
Washington’s hopes rested, was terminally ill from
cancer and his influence weakened. He was
replaced in the election of June 1989 by Alfredo
Cristiani, the candidate of the extreme right-wing
party. Guerrilla terrorism and right-wing death
squads continued to abuse human rights. Despite
substantial US economic and military aid, the
future for El Salvador remained as uncertain as
ever, though the outgoing UN secretary general
Javier Pérez de Cuellar brokered a peace plan in
December 1991. On 1 February 1992, a peace
agreement was concluded that promised reforms
and UN-supervised elections in 1994. Peace, trade
and democracy have changed El Salvador’s fortunes.
The free-market reforms of the conservative
Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) and the
pegging of the local currency to the US dollar have
led to steady growth and low inflation, though
austerity and readjustment, too, have been painful.
Unlike in Argentina, these reform policies have
worked and democratic government in the early
twenty-first century is more secure, a stabilising
influence in Central America.
Nicaragua
In Nicaragua Washington saw the greatest challenge
to US interests in the 1980s and to Latin
American progress towards constitutional democratic
governments. The Marxist state that
emerged after 1979, which was hostile to private
enterprise and nationalised foreign-owned interests,
also faced severe economic problems. They
were in part due to the economic embargoes of
the US, which could not be fully compensated for
by trade with Europe or loans from sources not
under the control of the US; they were also due
to the inefficiency of planned socialist economies,
as evidenced, for example, in Cuba.
Nicaragua is the most thinly populated state in
Central America, with the lowest per-capita
income after Honduras, at $830 in 1987. Here,
too, can be found the link between the dominance
of coffee and bananas as Nicaragua’s principal
exports, until disease in the 1930s devastated
the crop, and the gross disparity of wealth
between the few plantation owners and merchants
and a landless peasantry, the largest in Central
America. Diversification into beef, cotton and
sugar in the 1960s could not compensate for the
low income from agricultural exports and the
declining terms of trade (commodity export
prices rising more slowly or falling, as against
rising costs of manufactured imports and, in the
1970s, the rising cost of oil). On such a social and
economic basis, democracy could not be built up;
on the contrary, deprivation and extremes of
wealth and poverty provided the soil for revolt
and savage repression.
Nicaragua has traditionally been an area of US
concern. When disorder and foreign financial
claims threatened it in 1912, US marines moved
in and did not finally leave until January 1933. By
then they had had to cope with a nationalist backlash.
Augusto César Sandino led a guerrilla campaign
against them and against the Nicaraguan
government they were supporting. He was tricked
into taking part in negotiations by the Nicaraguan
leaders whom the marines had left behind in
power, and in 1934 he was murdered by the
Nicaraguan National Guard. Sandino was a liberal
reformist and patriot, and now he became a
martyr, a powerful symbol whose name and
mantle the Marxist Sandinistas appropriated in
their struggles during the 1970s against the rule
of the Somoza family.
The Somozas had established a dynasty in
Nicaragua. In the 1930s power in the country was
wielded by the National Guard, which had been
organised by the US to maintain internal security.
At its head was General Anastaslo Somoza Garcia.
The constitutional institutions were a façade
behind which the National Guard operated. In
1937 Somoza made himself president and ruled
the country for the next nineteen years, until he
was assassinated in 1956. His authoritarian rule
became notorious for corruption, nepotism and
repression. This was not a turn of events
Washington had anticipated when creating the
supposedly non-political National Guard, but
defence of constitutional proprieties was not high
on Washington’s list of priorities, as long as US
interests were safeguarded. Somoza’s National
Guard was preferable to having to send in US
marines. Somoza took care not to offend US
interests and aligned Nicaragua as a dependent
and reliable US ally. He was also adept at manipulating
the political and landed interests at home.
In the division of spoils, the National Guard were
pampered, and plantation owners and merchants
were allowed to reap unhindered the profits of
their enterprises. This left the vast majority of the
population in wretched poverty, illiterate and
with no hope for the future. On Somoza’s assassination
his eldest son Luis took over the presidency
and the younger son, Anastasio Jr, assumed
command of the National Guard. The 1950s and
1960s were relatively peaceful in Nicaragua, a
period of diversification into cotton and other
crops; a small but growing middle class began to
emerge with the help of Alliance dollars, and
some economic progress was achieved. But for
the peasants the expansion of cotton-growing
meant displacement from the land.
Luis was the ‘weakest’ of the Somozas, and
in 1967 Anastasio assumed the presidency.
Nicaragua’s most bloody and repressive decade
now began. Anastasio made no pretence of ruling
as a politician. He used the naked power of the
National Guard, employing murder and torture
to crush the growing opposition. When a devastating
earthquake in 1972 all but destroyed
Managua, Nixon sent large-scale aid. It did not
reach the victims; only half of it could be
accounted for by the Nicaraguan treasury.
Corruption was rife, and for a time the National
Guard could keep order only with US help.
Reconstruction after the earthquake benefited
mainly Somoza’s supporters, not the poor. The
guerrilla war flared up and National Guard atrocities
perpetrated in repressing the guerrillas outraged
the Church. Human-rights abuses were
now affecting American support. There was
growing opposition in the US to providing
dollars in support of ruthless dictators, yet even
under President Carter military aid continued to
be granted to Somoza, since the alternative of a
Marxist-led Nicaragua was regarded as totally
unacceptable. But the abuses of Somoza and his
National Guard, worldwide condemnation and
the evident crumbling of Somoza’s power left the
Carter administration little alternative but to
abandon all support for the regime by the spring
of 1979. A few weeks later, in July, Somoza was
overthrown by the broad opposition coalition of
guerrillas, the Sandinista National Liberation
Front (FSLN).
The abuses of the Somoza family, their amassing
of enormous wealth and the general corruption
had made them many enemies, especially among
those who had not shared the spoils. These groups
ranged from the right, conservatives opposed to
any genuine democratic reform, through to the
professional and mercantile middle sectors, and
to the socialists and Marxists. It was an alliance of
the left that formed the first guerrilla groups of the
1960s, recruiting support from peasants and students.
The corruption and repression following on
the Managuan earthquake of 1972 broadened
the opposition. After the assassination in 1978 of
the respected editor of the leading newspaper in
Nicaragua, La Prensa, the middle class and conservatives
were ready to support armed opposition
against Somoza. FSLN forces with Cuban help
were now well organised and, in a series of attacks,
demoralised the National Guard and seized power
on 19 July 1979. Somoza fled the country.
The revolutionary junta was dominated by
the Marxist–Leninist leadership from the start.
Decision-making was collective. FSLN’s most
influential figures were the hardline Tomás Borge
Martinez and the two brothers Humberto Ortega
and Daniel Ortega. The junta was more pragmatic
than most communist regimes, permitting
some degree of political plurality and private ownership.
But it was equally determined on the
Leninist Soviet model to retain real power and
build a socialist society. The National Assembly
reflected the firm control the junta exercised over
the country through the revolutionary party, the
army and the state security services. Until its
closure in 1986, La Prensa remained a lone voice
in opposition. Throughout the country there was
censorship and control of the domestic media.
During the 1980s, splits began to occur among
the junta. The more moderate coalition partners
of the original Council of State went into exile,
leaving the country under the domination of the
FSLN. In exile also were remnants of Somoza’s
National Guard and dissidents from FSLN’s
regime. Together they formed disparate guerrilla
bands on Nicaragua’s borders, the so-called
Contras, who, with the help of supplies from the
US, waged a guerrilla war against the Sandinistas.
Within Nicaragua the junta did not honour its
commitment in 1979 to establish a democracy, but
postponed elections until its power was consolidated
in 1984. Daniel Ortega became president.
By adopting a programme of reforms from above,
and by mobilising nationalist feelings against the
US and its support for the Contras, the junta was
able to dominate Nicaragua for a decade, backed
by the powerful party and security apparatus. The
main opposition refused to participate in elections
before 1990. In health care, housing and particularly
education, the Sandinistas nevertheless
achieved progress. State planning and land reforms
were instituted more gradually. But the combination
of the effects of the civil war, the huge
resources devoted to building up a large army to
fight the US-backed Contras and US economic
embargoes devastated the Nicaraguan economy.
Only the limited Soviet and European assistance
enabled the Sandinistas to survive. But Moscow’s
own economic troubles led to a cut in aid, and the
Soviet–US rapprochement forced Daniel Ortega
and the Sandinista leadership to modify their policies
and invite a more genuine popular mandate
through free elections. At the same time, despite
Reagan’s strong support, the Contras were being
denied essential war supplies by the US Congress’s
refusal to supply the funds.
These conditions provided an opportunity for
the long-drawn-out peace negotiations sponsored
by Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela,
whose presidents met on the island of Contadora
in the early 1980s, and then by Costa Rica’s
president. Arias Sánchez’s peace plan was signed
by the presidents of Costa Rica, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in August
1987 and earned Arias Sánchez the Nobel Peace
Prize. It called for regional ceasefires in all the
guerrilla wars, democratic reforms and the ending
of foreign support for the rebels. It marked an
attempt by the Central American leaders to solve
their own problems without outside interference.
In Washington, the Reagan administration
greeted the peace plan with scepticism and suspicion.
It was difficult to believe that the Sandinista
leadership had any other motive but to persuade
the US Congress that the US administration’s
support for the Contras was an obstacle to peace;
then, with Contra pressure removed, the
Sandinistas would be able to rule with impunity.
As it turned out, Arias Sánchez’s optimism,
despite many setbacks, proved at least partially
justified. Daniel Ortega had changed: he was no
longer the Marxist–Leninist revolutionary leader
determined to build a socialist Nicaragua at all
costs. The failures in Nicaragua were all too
obvious. Daniel Ortega now took the lead in following
the perestroika line. In April 1990, free
elections were held in Nicaragua and the opposition
won, to the surprise of the Sandinistas.
Ortega handed over power peacefully to Violeta
Chamorro. Violeta Chamorro, in turn, followed
a policy of reconciliation acceptable first of all to
the Sandinistas, who were allowed to retain
command of the army, and acceptable in the end
to the Contras as well, who abandoned the armed
struggle. At least for war-shattered Nicaragua
the future began to look a little more hopeful
as the guerrillas gave up the armed struggle. But
the economy remained in dire straits, with almost
half the population unemployed.
Latin America after the early 1960s experienced
accelerating economic and social change.
Its traditional power structures adapted by
increasing reliance on military force and repression,
or they shared power with other sectors of
society but still placed reliance on the military to
check organised peasant and urban labour groups,
as happened in Brazil. Socialist alternatives were
never able to retain power; the hostility of the US
ensured support for anti-socialist opposition
forces in Guatemala (1954), the Dominican
Republic (1965), Chile (1973), Grenada (1983)
and, finally, Nicaragua. The Soviet Union was in
no position to challenge the US effectively in the
Western hemisphere.
During the 1980s, Latin American political
developments came to seem more in conformity
with Western hopes and American intentions.
Military regimes receded in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia,
Uruguay and Brazil. Colombia, Venezuela and
Costa Rica were already ruled by civilian governments.
Indirectly the US helped to bring about the
fall of the military junta in Argentina. By providing
intelligence to London, crucial assistance was
given to Britain’s recapture of the Falklands in
1982, a blow the junta could not survive. In the
Caribbean, the worst of the dictators, Duvalier,
had been forced from Haiti into exile (1986); the
leftist regime in Grenada, which had lapsed into
murderous infighting, was eliminated by a US
invasion in 1983, to the evident relief of the local
population, but to the embarrassment of Britain,
as Grenada was a member of the Commonwealth.
What had led the Reagan administration to intervene
was its determination to halt the spread of
Cuban influence. After a long struggle and despite
many setbacks, US policies also succeeded in making
authoritarian Marxist rule by the Sandinistas
untenable. US policies in Central America and the
Caribbean in the 1980s were an update of the
Monroe Doctrine.
Panama
The US has continued since the Spanish–American
War of 1898 to occupy the Guántanamo naval
base in Cuba. And ever since Alfred Thayer
Mahan highlighted the crucial strategic importance
of a transisthmian canal in the 1890s, the US
was determined to assure itself of predominant
influence in Panama and to exercise sovereign
control over any canal that might be constructed.
In 1903, ardent Panamanian nationalism against
Colombian rule provided the opportunity. The
US helped the Panamanian revolution but exacted
a price: control of the future canal. Herein lies the
crux of Panamanian history in the twentieth century.
Ostensibly independent and sovereign,
Panama was little more than a US colony for six
decades. Panamanian nationalism was inflamed
by the country’s lack of sovereignty in the Canal
Zone and by the extensive rights the US exercised
over its economy and its foreign policy. It was
ruled by a wealthy and corrupt oligarchy of the
kind common in Latin America but one that was
also required to accept a client relationship with
the US. If popular riots occurred, US troops intervened
to suppress them. In Panama too, the
United Fruit Company enjoyed extensive land and
rights. Payments made by the US for use of the
Canal Zone were an important prop for the economy,
at times providing a third of Panama’s
national income (bananas and sugar are other
important resources). President Roosevelt’s
attempts to construct a ‘good neighbour’ policy
could not convincingly reconcile Panamanian
nationalism, resurgent in the 1930s, and US interests.
The 1936 Canal Treaty was wonderfully
ambiguous. ‘The Canal zone’, it stated, ‘is territory
of the Republic of Panama under the jurisdiction
of the US.’ In the 1950s and 1960s
popular resentment against the US grew, and
1964 saw widespread riots.
After 1968 the political oligarchs lost power to
Panama’s National Guard. Any pretence at even a
corrupt democratic constitutional process was
abandoned and General Omar Torrijos emerged
as the undisputed authoritarian leader. He inaugurated
harsh labour laws but also a radical programme
of land reform with a populist promise
that he would help the poor. He also gained support
by adopting a stridently nationalist stance on
the issue of the US-controlled canal and canal
zone. After thirteen years of negotiating with successive
US administrations, carefully controlling
the pressure of mass nationalism and anti-
American feeling, Torrijos in 1977 concluded a
new canal treaty with the Carter administration,
which was ratified by the US Senate in the following
year only with considerable difficulty and the
addition of reservations. In stages the canal passed
under the control of Panama in 2000. Yet the US
is guaranteed passage of the canal in perpetuity for
its merchant ships and warships, and it is entitled
to use force to protect these rights after the year
2000 if Panamanian troops fail to do so. Panama
secured something less than total sovereignty.
The 1980s saw the nadir of Panamanian–US
relations. Torrijos died in an air crash in 1981,
which may have been arranged. General Manuel
Noriega, an unscrupulous and brutal soldier,
soon took his place. He had been recruited by
the CIA, which was anxious to make use of his
contacts to uncover the drug trade passing
from Colombia to Panama and on to the US.
Embarrassingly, Noriega himself drew huge
profits from the drug trade; indeed, in corruption
and brutality no previous Panamanian dictator
compared. He transformed the National Guard
into the Panama Defence Forces, with new
powers, to act as his tool of repression. Even so,
GNP per capita (the population was 2.3 million)
rose to $2,240 in 1987. The elections of 1984,
which allowed his nominee to become president,
were a farce. The US now tried to rid Panama of
the general. In 1988, Noriega was indicted for
drug trafficking in the US. He countered by
beating the anti-American nationalist drum.
President Reagan’s pressure and economic sanctions
were not enough to topple him, nor two
attempted military coups which enjoyed US
goodwill. In May 1989 Noriega held elections
again, but when the leader of the opposition,
Guillermo Endara, gathered most votes despite
intimidation from Noriega’s thugs, the results
were falsified. On 20 December 1989, President
Bush cut the Gordian knot and 24,000 US troops
descended on Panama City to arrest and overthrow
Noriega. He fled to the Embassy of the
Vatican but gave himself up in January 1990. He
was tried and sent to prison. Guillermo Endara
was installed as president of Panama.
Mexico
The hemispheric role of the US was also deeply
resented in Mexico. Yet no country was more
dependent on the US economically. Within the
Organisation of American States, Marxist Cuba
and Nicaragua had in Mexico their only supporter.
Mexico had made its own revolution
already in 1911. The country had good reason to
bear animosity toward her US neighbour having
lost half her territory to her in 1848. Mexico then
suffered a French occupation (1863–7) and only
gained some stability in 1876 when General
Porfirio Díaz seized power and ruled the country
for thirty-five years until 1911. There was spectacular
economic progress during these years; a
wealthy small Creole upper class modelled their
life-style on Europe. The less fortunate masses of
landless native American peasants worked on the
Haciendas of large landowners. Díaz could rely
for support on the Church and the bayonet.
Sweat-shops and textile mills employed labourers
at low wages.
A split among the ruling oligarchy ushered
in the Revolution. Díaz was overthrown in 1911,
and a liberal minded president was elected. But
the fall of Díaz started renewed conflict and civil
war. The hero of the Revolution was Emiliano
Zapata, who led a peasant army on his white
charger and became the romantic martyr. Civil
war raged against the new dictator General
Victoriano Huerta in the presidential palace, a
flamboyant former cattle rustler, Pancho Villa led
a small but well-trained force of mercenaries.
Then in 1914 Huerta faced a third foe. Woodrow
Wilson sent in the marines and Huerta fled. The
outcome of the Mexican Revolution remained in
doubt until 1923. By then both Villa and Zapata
had been killed by government forces.
Despite the socialist rhetoric of the Mexican
constitution, reform would be instituted from
above – peasants and workers were not to become
the arbiters of power. There were to be no revolutionary
social upheavals. The secularisation of
the state and the expropriation of Church wealth
were important outcomes of the revolution. An
alliance between the military, the wealthy and
the middle class consolidated the powers of the
presidents, and their followers were rewarded
by the spoils of office. But the difference between
Mexico and other Latin American countries is
that an effective party organisation, renamed several
times and since 1945 called the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), controls the
country and embraces workers and peasants as
well as the rising middle-income groups. Lázaro
Cárdenas, president from 1934 to 1940, developed
a corporate state in which each section of
the population, workers, peasants, the military,
the middle class, was placed under the party
umbrella as groups rather than as individuals.
Through large-scale land distribution Cárdenas
carried forward one of the principal aims of
the revolution, breaking up the haciendas and
granting the land as private plots or joint peasant
farms; another aim was to take control of
Mexico’s major resources, the most important
of which was oil. Cárdenas nationalised the largely
US-owned oil companies. Dissatisfied with the
compensation received, but even more disturbed
that other countries might follow Mexico’s
example, the international oil companies boycotted
her oil and inhibited development of
the state oil company until uncertainties in the
Middle East after the Second World War made
Mexican oil too valuable a Western resource not
to be utilised.
Westerners regarded Mexico as a truly revolutionary
country for a number of reasons: the
attack on the Church, the official government
espousal of atheism, nationalisation, reforms
which hurt the wealthy landowners, the propagation
of the myth of a peasants’ and workers’
revolution and admiration for Marx and Lenin,
the assertion of a Mexican identity and pride in
her native American roots, immortalised by the
political–historical murals of Mexico’s most
famous artist, Diego Rivera, and the granting of
asylum to Leon Trotsky. In fact Mexico conformed
far more closely to Latin American patterns
than to the Soviet model. In any case
the authoritarian state was not exclusive to the
Soviet Union but was common among the fascist
nations of Europe in the 1930s. Private property
in the early 1990s remained the source of great
wealth in Mexico for a minority, while poverty
was the lot of the peasants and the urban masses,
the high birth rate undermining efforts to raise
living standards. Mexico too had seen extensive
migration from country to city. In ten years, from
1970 to 1980, Mexico City increased its population
by 7 million to 15 million, with a huge marginalised
population living in shanty slums. The
population of the country as a whole grew from
25.8 million in 1950 to 34.9 million in 1960, to
84.6 million in 1989 (by which year the gross
per-capita income was US $2,010).
The Mexican state is a conglomeration of elements
of socialism, state planning and a constitutional
electoral process. Mexico enjoys a surfeit of
elections for mayors, governors, assemblies and
the president; some opposition parties are tolerated
and compete. Presidential elections have
occurred every six years, and the presidency has
always changed hands peacefully, so the spoils are
regularly redistributed. But only one party, the
PRI, dominates and has decided the outcome
of national and presidential elections. Miguel de
la Madrid Hurtado, candidate of the PRI, was
elected president in 1982 with a vote of over 74
per cent.
Distribution of land to the campesinos, the
peasant owners of smallholdings, and revolutionary
rhetoric kept the majority of peasants quiet as
the 1990s began, engaged in trying to make a
subsistence living. The seasonal and illegal exodus
across the 2000-mile border into the United
States provided a safety valve for tens of thousands
of the poor. Even so, in urban areas where
most Mexicans live, there was massive unemployment.
The well-to-do were surrounded by mass
poverty. The middle classes enjoyed the high
standard of living which the growth and diversification
of the Mexican economy had made possible,
while the spoils of office were used to
ensure a faithful following for the incumbent
president and the dominant PRI party. There was
more freedom in Mexico than in many Latin
American states, but it was carefully controlled.
Most sections of the population tended to accept
their lack of political influence. In any case the
state had a special security police, which, according
to Amnesty reports, in the early 1990s continued
to employ torture and murder against
anyone considered to disturb Mexico’s political
order. In Mexico too, hundreds ‘disappeared’,
but repression was not on the same vast scale as
Argentina or Chile experienced. Mexican stability
rested for four decades on a revolutionary myth
and authoritarian conservative control.
Below the surface, the rapid economic changes
caused dissatisfaction with the authoritarian style
of government to grow. During the Olympic
Games in 1968, widespread student protest led
to the killings of hundreds in Mexico City and
attracted worldwide attention. In the early 1970s
guerrilla bands appeared but were suppressed by
the security services. With the enormous increases
in oil prices engineered by OPEC (of which
Mexico was not a member) and new oil discoveries,
export earnings after 1975 increased ten
times to US$20 billion. But lavish expenditure
and ambitious development resulted in high
inflation. The end of the oil boom in the 1980s
and worldwide economic stagnation burst the
Mexican bubble. Heavy foreign borrowing and
austerity programmes drastically reduced standards
of living, while the birth rate, if it continued
unabated, would double the population every
twenty years; and half the population was under
sixteen years of age. Mexico was saddled with one
of the largest foreign debts in the world, whose
payment had to be periodically rescheduled; the
bankers demanded austerity and Mexico found
itself caught between trying to satisfy international
financiers by making economies, while
trying to prevent internal unrest as a result of
policies imposed externally. The inability of the
regime to cope effectively with the catastrophic
earthquake that hit Mexico City in September
1985 added to a loss of credibility, which was
compounded by Mexico’s economic crises. The
stability maintained by the political system began
to look increasingly fragile. The right-wing opposition
Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) claimed
massive electoral fraud, but the ruling PRI
made few concessions. Despite misgivings about
the undemocratic nature of Mexican politics,
Washington saw a greater danger in further destabilising
Mexico and provided financial support. In
the 1988 presidential elections the PRI candidate,
Carlos Salinas de Gortari, claimed to have won.
There was fraud on a colossal scale, but the PRI
monopoly of power had been broken in the
Mexican Congress. Nevertheless, the PRI President
remained firmly in power and an economic
austerity programme was instituted. But for the
first time in many decades there were indications
of future political changes.
In 1961, Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was
to have been the starting point for the transformation
of Latin America. The cycle of deprivation,
economic and social injustice was to have
been broken and Latin American societies were to
have started on the road to political democratic
reform. Over thirty years later the problems of the
continent were still daunting. Population growth
outstripped development. The danger of Marxist
revolution had been contained, but terrorism and
repression continued. The root causes of instability
had not been removed. The immigration from
the countryside had swollen the shanty towns that
surrounded the fashionable streets of the wealthy.
Everywhere there were thousands of children
begging, stealing or offering themselves for prostitution.
Mexico City served as but one example
of their plight. The pependores, or rubbish pickers
(10,000 of them), made the City’s three huge
rubbish dumps their home. Even here they were
exploited by ‘bosses’ who made their money out
of the refuse that could be recycled.
By turning to a market economy, privatising
and liberalising trade with the expected coming
into operation of a free-trade region comprising
herself, the United States and Canada, Mexico
hoped in the 1990s to create her own economic
miracle. Many companies were privatised and in
1990/1 a good growth rate was achieved, while
inflation, which in 1987 ran at 160 per cent, was
slashed in 1992 to 12 per cent. Foreign debts
were reduced and foreign investment began to
return. Salinas toured the country and won
support among the peasantry. He used proceeds
from the sale of state-owned companies to build
schools, to link rural communities with the electricity
network and to ensure that clean drinking
water was available. More than 1200 health clinics
were opened in 1991 to serve the people. Huge
problems remained. Carlos Salinas de Gortari
declared that his aim during his six-year term of
office as president from 1988 to 1994 was to take
Mexico from Third World to First World status.
During the first years of his presidency he made
a dynamic start.
There were at last some hopeful indications of
change in Latin America in the 1990s. A number
of countries were determinedly trying to turn the
economic corner and make a start on raising
the standard of living of the most deprived.
The enormous level of Latin American debt,
which had risen from $68 billion in 1975 to $410
billion in 1987, threatened to cripple efforts
towards further investment and development.
But, unable to recover all of it, the West agreed
to write a portion of it off. Western institutions
such as the International Monetary Fund insisted
on the medicine of austerity and better economic
management, which Mexico had to accept in
order to attract new funds. Among left-wing guerrilla
movements there was a collapse of morale
following the demise of the Soviet Union. All but
Marxist fanatics were ready to end the fighting and
to exchange the rifle for the ballot box. Civilianelected
governments and multi-party parliaments
became the norm. It was not democracy, but it
was progress, a move away from tyrannical and
authoritarian regimes.
Even so, there was no guarantee that democratic
representative institutions could long
survive economic mismanagement, as the example
of Peru showed in 1992. Democracy cannot be
divorced from social and economic progress. It
can not take firm root unless the needs of the
poor are also met. When elected officials accept
that their power derives from the people and not
just from the nation’s elite, true democracy can
be established.
Widespread corruption still plagued Latin
America in the last decade of the twentieth
century. Birth rates still tended to be too high,
though they were dropping in Argentina, Chile,
Brazil and Mexico. High birth rates meant that
even countries on the path of economic reform
would be faced with increasing poverty. The
distribution of wealth, or rather lack of it, to
the poor majority scarcely diminished the gap
between rich and the poor. The statistics for
income per head of population obscure this
because they are averages: the poor were much
worse off than the average. Simply absorbing the
young and providing some employment for them
when nearly half the population was aged under
twenty was a formidable problem. Urbanisation
and the growth of mega-million cities magnified
the problem. The power base of the energetic
political leaders of Latin America was fragile and
their austerity policies to cure inflation were
deeply unpopular. The leaders themselves were all
too often tempted by the fruits of office.
World History
