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NEWS & LETTERS, November-December 2005Central American JournalHurricanes, neoliberalism, resistanceSan Jose, Costa Rica--A month traveling and speaking in several Central American countries--Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica--brings one face to face with some of the stark realities as well as some of the hopes and aspirations of people in a part of the Third World: the unnatural consequences of natural disasters, the unmitigated poverty and inequality of capitalism’s neoliberal face (including the arms one finds almost everywhere to keep order) and at the same time an interest in ideas and activities of liberation, especially among the youth. The rains and flooding from the series of tropical storms and hurricanes that have crossed the Caribbean and hit Central America this fall have meant the death of thousands and homelessness for tens of thousands in the region. In Guatemala an entire village was covered in a sea of mud, burying close to 1,000 people. Hundreds lost their lives in El Salvador and in Nicaragua when rains and flooding destroyed neighborhoods and villages. But as with the devastation from Hurricane Mitch in Honduras in 1998, the socioeconomic components contributed significantly to the tragedy. The export-oriented agricultural model has helped lead to massive deforestation, soil erosion and pesticide contamination--resulting in a denuded land far more venerable to massive storms. In recent decades the rural population, forced from these export-oriented agricultural lands, ended up in mass migrations to the cities or to more marginal lands in order to grow subsistence crops in the countryside. In the cities, squatter settlements form on hillsides, or in flood plains because that is where a little land is available--further stripping vegetation. Those who try to do subsistence farming on more marginal areas end up further degrading the land. "Development" projects, often done without environmental controls near cities, further degrade and contaminate the land. The natural power of hurricanes pummel regions with significant prior environment damage. The unnatural tragedies we have seen in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua this year are the consequence. To be in the capital cities like Guatemala City, San Salvador and Managua is to witness the vulgar, harsh consequences of neo-liberalism in everyday life. One goes into a grocery store in Guatemala City to see food prices often higher than in the U.S. And this in a city where salaries for workers, among those that can find a job, are far less than $10 a day. Whoever shops in these markets or eats in the fast-food outlets in San Salvador and Managua are certainly not the overwhelming majority of the people who, when they can shop at all, do so in poorly stocked tiny food stores--perhaps buying a few potatoes, or a little rice, and, if they are able that day, a small piece of chicken. Life is hand to mouth, each day is a challenge. The "informal economy" abounds. You take a bus outside Managua, and before it leaves half a dozen or more vendors of cookies, small cakes, sodas, water, pour through the bus trying to sell their goods. What can they earn in a day--two or three dollars? I am told the life in the rural areas is even more difficult. There are people who can afford to go to the glitzy shopping centers that one finds dotted throughout Managua, but it is an upper-middle class and small ruling class. In El Salvador it is an even smaller and more tight group, who control by raw power. In the block where I lived, shotgun carrying guards roam 24-hours a day. Armed guards are everywhere in San Salvador, Guatemala City and Managua. Armed guards seem to be the one means of employment--in stores, in neighborhoods, in the streets. The one progressive daily paper in San Salvador calls for the "depistolization" of the country. No chance so long as the deep inequality and immiseration continue. One shock for me in Nicaragua is to see how little of the Sandinista revolution, with years in power, is in evidence. The Sandinistas are in the legislature. But it means so little now. The vision of a new society is completely absent--only political deals and trying to obtain power is in evidence. Meanwhile, illiteracy is back up and neoliberalism runs amuck. I am not sure what the U.S. has to fear from a possible Sandinista electoral victory in the next election. In El Salvador one feels great sadness at the almost decades of war waged by death squads and the right-wing military, which ended less than a decade and a half ago. I went to a part of San Salvador city where chiseled upon the walls of one part of the city are thousands and thousands of names of the civilian deaths and disappeared from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, divided year by year--some 40,000 names, though perhaps as many as 80,000 may have been killed in a country of only five million. It was an honor for me to return to two universities in San Salvador to give presentations on ongoing liberation movements in Latin America in relation to emancipatory philosophic thought. I found rich discussion among students who came to participate. This was true not only here, but also in public talks and individual conversations I had in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica on today’s liberation movements and ideas in relation to the Hegelian dialectic, the ideas of Marx, and of Marxist-Humanism. I found a strong resistance to Bush’s policies globally, including his economic imperialism within Central America, a willingness to look as contradictions within the freedom movements of their own countries, and a deep interest in finding pathways forward, including an openness to a dialogue on Marxist-Humanism. --Eugene Gogol |
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