Central America on the Precipice (video)

Christine Wade and I gave a presentation on Wednesday night at the invitation of the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues at Dickinson College. It was a great trip and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and speaking with Dickinson students and faculty about recent developments in Central America. We also met with several faculty from the nearby US Army War College.

Christine spoke about challenges to democracy while I was tasked with tackling criminal violence, especially drug trafficking.

I started off my talk by borrowing a bit from John Donaghy's discussion of Honduras from last week. I wanted to let every one know that it would be a mistake to reduce Central America's violence "problem" to drug trafficking, organized crime, and maras. Violence goes so much deeper than these issues, into the homes and elsewhere. I remember a Jose Miguel Cruz talk from fifteen years ago where he said that El Salvador was one of the region's most violent countries in the 1970s (prior to the civil war) so it would be a mistake to characterize the challenge of today's violence simply as a consequence of the civil war or various post-war processes.

It would also be a mistake to reduce violence to "their" problem since it is a shared challenge that affects us all. Obviously, the illicit drugs are primarily consumed by the US and produced somewhere south of the US border. However, as seen in the recent Los Cocos convictions (three Mexicans and six Guatemalans) and the Facundo Cabral murder (people from half the region's countries seem to have been involved at some point), everybody has a stake in this game.

A few other brief notes - I am getting kind of annoyed when people say that people in the US do not feel the effects of the drug war. As someone who lives in a pretty safe, middle class suburb outside the thralling metropolis of Scranton, I don't feel it too strongly. However, given the damage that the drug trade has caused to our inner cities and to the destruction of families, the misallocation of precious resources, and to making the US have the highest incarceration rate in the world, we are sure feeling the effects.

One of the audience members also asked about the difficulties of and our sensitivities in carrying out research in a region of the world where the US role has been so, I don't know what's the word, terrible. I hope I wasn't too harsh, but I disagreed with the premise of the question to a certain extent. I carry out mostly elite-based interviews in the region and the perspectives on the US role, both historical and contemporary, are quite varied.

I was, more or less, cursed out by Alfonso Bauer Paiz. He still had very strong emotions towards the US because of its efforts to overthrow Arbenz in 1954. Other guerrillas do not appear to have much animosity towards the US. The US and Guatemalan guerrillas were on opposing sides in a war.

Last summer I spoke with a former guerrilla who works for an NGO in Guatemala City. The interviewed occurred about two months after the Rios Montt trial had concluded. I asked about the role of the US in Guatemala today. He characterized the US government's role as rather positive. He said that pressure from the Ambassador and other US government officials is the only reason why Guatemalan political and economic elite ever execute a policy in favor of the Guatemalan people.

A few days later, I met with the head of CACIF. He explained to me how he had met with US Ambassador Chacon several times to explain why the US' support for the judicial proceedings against wrong and dangerous.

Finally, I mentioned during the talk (or just afterwards in some comments) that ARENA was formed in El Salvador because the country's economic elite thought that the could not rely upon the military and the US to support their interests. The US and the military promoted some land reform in 1979 and the early 1980s and the nationalization of some key components of the coffee industry which directly struck at their power and privilege. The death squads not only killed peasants, the Archbishop, and US churchwomen, but they also killed US land reform advisers. There is more complexity to attitudes of Central Americans about the war and about contemporary issues than is generally recognized.

Click for video of the event.