Introduction
The 1980sâ transitions from military dictatorships raised expectations of enduring political and social democratization in Latin America. However, hopes of deepening democracy and accompanying social improvements were soon abandoned when the new democracies, under duress from Washington and ideologically aligned international financial institutions (IFIs), adopted neoliberal, âmarket-friendlyâ structural adjustment policies to deal with the regionâs debt crisis. That crisis too was mostly manufactured in Washington, i.e., by its âsudden, unexpected and unprecedented increase in the interest rateâ in 1980â1981 (Stiglitz 2003, 11). The eighties became a âlost decadeâ in Latin America, as economic growth came to a halt, governments handed over power and sold public assets to private corporationsânational and foreignâand social programs were slashed as parts of adjustment policies that, in the words of economic historian Rosemary Thorp, had âextreme short- and long-term social costsâ (1998, 218). In the early 1990s, economic growth rates began to inch upward, but only to be followed by a âlost half-decadeâ of stagnation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poverty in most Latin American countries still stood above pre-adjustment levels, and the distribution of income had worsened (Lustig et al. 2011). Meanwhile, national and international capital had gained new ground through the privatization of public assets and the withdrawal of the state from its regulatory, social, and planning responsibilities.
There were signs of optimism, nevertheless. The early- to mid-1990s brought an end to civil wars in Central America through negotiated peace agreements that mandated demilitarization, to be monitored by United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions; they also promised a new era of political participation and respect for human rights that might lead to social incorporation and redistributive reforms, to be supported by various UN agencies and a broad array of pubic and private international institutions.
Hopes of region-wide social progress and revitalized democratization were raised yet again during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Another transition appeared to be under way, as the neoliberal policies favored by Washington and local elites were abandoned and various progressive parties and movements gained political power in most of Latin America. Some promised to redistribute power and wealth, as in Venezuela (1999), Bolivia (2006), and Ecuador (2007), but most ran on a commitment to growth with equity, as in Argentina (2003), Brazil (2003), Nicaragua (2006), Paraguay (2008), Uruguay (2009), and El Salvador (2009). In Chile too, the left sector of the political alliance that had ruled the country since its 1990 return to democracy gained dominance in 2000 under a Socialist President. The southern hemisphere appeared to be moving toward a post-neoliberal development era that promised to deepen democracy, redistribute wealth, combine economic growth with social equity, and assert national independence vis-Ă -vis Washington and the globalized international trade system through nationalistic policies and the so-called âreturn of the stateâ.
A âpink tideâ flowed through the region as one ânew leftâ government after another rose to power through democratic elections (Beasley-Murray et al. 2010). Some observers even saw the birth of a new kind of â21st-century socialismâ in all this. For the first time in Latin Americaâs history, the voices of Indigenous peoples, women, and environmentalists found expression in party platforms and new national constitutions, alongside the long-standing demands of the urban laboring and middle classes that had been mobilized into political action in earlier eras.
The leftward political trend coincided with an international commodity boom, largely fueled by Chinaâs rapid industrialization (Ellis 2014), 1 and just about all governments, not just those of the ânew leftâ, invested much of the new export-boom revenue in a great variety of social programs that reduced poverty and indigence to historically low levels. Renewed spending on public education and public health, and both conditional and non-conditional income support programs of many kinds underwrote generally improved opportunities and living standards, although some groups experienced greater improvements than others (Lustig et al. 2011; BĂĄrcena and Byanyima 2016). Not only poverty rates dropped, but also the intensity of poverty came down (CEPAL 2014, 64) as growth picked up, and the share of social spending in the gross domestic product (GDP) began to rise steadily: from an average of 13.8% in the early 1990s to 16.7% in 2006â2007, and then to a high 19.1% of the regionâs GDP in 2012â2013, before beginning to decline again (CEPAL 2014, 46; Larrea 2014). In effect, the pace of social progress depended on rising export values and volumes, and it began to stagnate when the commodity boom came to an end during the second decade of the twenty-first century.
In the context of plummeting export prices and fiscal revenues, the progressive âpink tideâ governments of South America began to unravel as a resurgent right took power, first in Paraguay (2012) through a parliamentary coup, then in Argentina (2016) through narrowly won elections, and in Brazil (2016) through highly questionable congressional maneuvers that some termed a âconstitutional coupâ; the right also gained ground in Venezuela, the country most affected by plummeting petroleum prices, and it gained space in other countries, such as Ecuador, also highly dependent on petroleum exports. 2 In post-civil-war Central America, in El Salvador the not-so-new left guerilla movement of the armed conflict years converted into a political party with the peace agreements of 1994 and started winning elections in 2000, but it was blocked from advancing on any significant redistributive agenda; in Guatemala, the political right was never threatened by substantial reform; and in Honduras, an elite-backed military coup broke movement toward progressive change in 2009.
How much social transformation and sustainable redistribution was accomplished during the commodity boom years of progressive policies and programs? Was capital brought to heel, or was the power structure that was consolidated under neoliberalism so entrenched that it could not be fundamentally challenged? Was the power of local capitalists and landlords undermined or consolidated? While social spending went up and social conditions improved under the post-neoliberal governments of the new century, in fact, the studies presented in this volume argue that few if any policies to redistribute accumulated wealth were actually pursued. Indeed, in some countries, land and other assets continued to be further concentrated in the hands of traditional or reconfigured elites, whose influence over national economic policies remained decisive throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And nationalistic policies vis-Ă -vis foreign investment, for the most part, involved âtinkering around marginsâ although somewhat more substantive changes were accomplished in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela (Haslam 2010; Cameron and Sharpe 2010).
Below, historical patterns of class domination in the six case study countries are first discussed with reference to a few empirically and historically grounded works that were completed before neoliberal policies reversed much of the social progress that was achieved during the developmental era of the 1950sâ1970s. The case studies presented in this volume are introduced in the second section. The Chilean study focuses on the neoliberal reconfiguration of dominant capitalist groups through the state during the military dictatorship that created a new capitalist elite and structure of domination that subsequent democratically elected governments have struggled to change; the cases of Brazil and Ecuador examine the extent to which new left governments failed to implement substantive and durable redistributive and agrarian reforms, as national elites and their foreign allies concentrated ever more economic power; the chapter on Colombia analyzes the ways in which peasants were driven off their lands and criminal organizations gained political power and came to control state institutions in various regions of the country during its long civil war; and studies of El Salvador and Guatemala attest to the failure of UN-monitored peace accords to achieve promised redistributive social reforms as traditional elites became even more powerful through the implementation of âmarket-friendlyâ, supposedly peace-building, policies by states that were funded by international banks and development agencies.
A common theme that emerges from the chapters that comprise this volume is the central role played by states in the restructuring of elite domination. Rather than a withdrawal of the state, in all the cases presented here, in different ways and in somewhat different moments, states played critical roles in sustaining, reinforcing, or reconfiguring historic elites and structures of domination, as did international military and development assistance in Central America and Colombia in particular. Indeed, in all cases states were more or less captured or severely constrained by elites, despite some appearances to the contrary. And in all cases, in one way or another, the United States and the principal International Financial Institutions (IFIs) played critical roles in these transformations.
Histories of Domination
The imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment policies in Latin America, beginning in the early 1980s, represented a dramatic change vis-Ă -vis the policies of the previous period of developmentalist Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), dating approximately from the mid-1940s through the 1970s. Nevertheless, only in a few cases, such as Chile under the Socialist government led by Salvador Allende (1970â1973), was traditional elite power threatened by the forms taken by ISI policies, and Cuba, of course, left the capitalist orbit altogether in 1959. To be sure, all over Latin America during the developmentalist decades, the role of the state in economic planning and regulation expanded and deepened, new institutions were created, significant social investments were made, and some countries pursued nationalistic policies that included the expropriation of prominent foreign-owned enterprises, especially in the natural resource sector. Nevertheless, the policies of the ISI years did not alter the structures of elite power and domination that had become entrenched in the course of the regionâs history, dating back to the colonial period of Spanish and Portuguese rule. In fact, the progressive policies associated with â[i]ndustrialization and import substitution were inserted into and reinforced the existing extremely unequal economic and social system. Even brave efforts at land reform did not modify the essential picture of poverty and exclusionâ (Thorp 1998, 199; see also North and Grinspun 2016). 3
Several important studies have documented the structures of class domination that generated poverty and exclusion in the region, and specifically about the countries presented in this volume. With respect to those studies, Maurice Zeitlin and Richard Earl Ratcliffâs Landlords and Capitalists: The Dominant Classes of Chile stands out as an in-depth work on the 1960s. Based on the analysis of the family relations and enterprise ownership patters of 229 corporate officials and directors, 68 of their counterparts in the largest commercial banks, the 132 owners of the largest landed estates, and 502 large-scale investors, they identified the presence of âkineconâ (kinship/economic) groups, referring to âa complex social unit in which common economic interests and close kinship relationships are indissolubleâ (1988, 7). Contrary to the view that the structural transformations in the economy produced by industrialization would result in divisions between the old landed aristocracy and the new (potentially progressive) industrial capitalists, Zeitlin and Ratcliff demonstrated how traditional landowners successfully diversified their economic activities and incorporated urban industrialists and foreign capital into their dense socioeconomic networks; moreover, the extended family networks of landlords, who had consolidated possession of the countryâs agricultural lands through civil wars in the nineteenth century (Zeitlin 1984), remained at the apex of political power, blocking advance toward agrarian reform. As the eminent Brazilian economist and historian Celso Furtado had argued earlier, some of these groups dated back to the early independence period when âplanters and merchants came to have joint interests and presented a perfectly u...