Give $1 billion to the Northern Triangle - no strings attached

As I mentioned the other day, Hermano Juancito was on campus to speak to students about his missionary work in Honduras. In his talk "Accompanying the Poor in Honduras," he provided students, staff, and faculty a list of best practices for short- and longer-term immersion trips. While his talk was much more complicated, it boiled down to "open your heart," "open your eyes," "open your ears," and "shut your mouth." That's not entirely fair but the lesson was not to go into a community for a few days, months or years, telling the people how things should be done or how you would do things differently.

The poor are remarkable people with exceptional skills who have figured out how to accomplish a great deal with very little. I think that reflects some of the reasons why so many relatively poor Latin American countries wind up scoring rather well on the world's most happiest countries lists.

Several other thoughts emerged, for me, during his talk. One question that came up several times related to the proposed $1 billion aid package to Central America. Will it help? I think so. Is it enough? Obviously, not. However, what I was thinking about was whether or not the US should have any say in how the money is spent. We seem to have pretty good evidence that governments giving poor people cash without any strings attached has helped improve a number of socio-economic indicators. Why not pursue the same principle in this case?

Skip the government and give money directly to the people. Now the US is not actually giving $1 billion dollars in cash. Much is the value of the services we are currently support or intend to increase. Another problem is that we are only proposing approximately $33 per person in the Northern Triangle for the entire year. That's not much. Even if we only provide assistance to half the region that falls below the poverty line we are only thinking about $66 per person which is only $5 per month.

I'd also like to see an extension of programs such as the one involving Walmart, the Asociación de Pescadores Artesanales de la Playa El Cuco (Aspescu), an USAID. They worked for two years to satisfy the sanitary and legal requirements needed for Aspescu to sell their fish to the transnational Walmart. Help Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan cooperatives and small-producers gain access to US corporations in their countries and regionally. Coffee, fish, it's all good.

It was a great turnout for John's talk. We had about 100 students, faculty, and staff in the audience. That's great for our Latin American Studies program. However, hours earlier the administration retracted its support for a Fulbright Scholar that we had successfully worked to bring to Scranton from Mexico.

Guatemala's Rios Montt trial and other assorted thoughts

I traveled to West Virginia University last week to give a presentation on The Genocide Trial of Efraín Ríos Montt and the Struggle Against Impunity in Guatemala. It was a great trip where I met with some terrific students in the political science and the Latin American Studies programs. I also gave a talk in an undergraduate international relations course about the recent unaccompanied minors crisis and the US and Central American response to the crisis.

West Virginia seems to be confronting the same challenges as we do at the University of Scranton - declining undergraduate interest in Latin American Studies and continued questions from colleagues and administrators about the universities' allocation of scarce resources to "under-performing" departments. A few years after arriving in Scranton, we were approaching 30 students enrolled in our Latin American Studies program. As we have moved to offering a major and and concentration (roughly equivalent to a minor), we are now at two majors and eleven concentrators.

I don't know if this is a general pattern.For those of us at the University of Scranton, I don't think that our students have a strong interest in international affairs. Many do, obviously, but I don't think that the level of interest reaches those at other institutions. We have a good number of students whose interest in Latin America flows from their participation in volunteer trips to the region and to the Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice in Washington, D.C. and to the history of the Jesuits in El Salvador. However, that has not translated into interest in studying the regionally academically. One barrier is language. Students generally don't want to complete the Spanish-language requirements for completing the concentration and the major. We, the faculty, don't want to remove the requirements (yet).

We are also, unfortunately, more limited in terms of faculty than we were a few years ago. That means we offer fewer classes in the program. While one of our Spanish language professors will most likely be replaced, I can't say that the Philosophy Department's interest in hiring a philosophy professor who can teach Latin American Thought, or something similar, is high on their agenda. How is everyone else doing?

Back to Guatemala and the Rios Montt trial. The International Justice Monitor has an update with A New Judge is Appointed to Hear Genocide Trial as Final Decision Around CICIG’s Mandate Approaches.

On April 9, the high-risk appeals court named Judge Jaime Delmar Gonzalez to complete the three-judge trial court set to rehear the case against former dictator Efrain Rios Montt and his head of military intelligence, Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez. They are charged with genocide and crimes against humanity in relation with the killing of 1,771 indigenous people and the rape and torture of many others.

A new trial was scheduled to start on January 5 but was suspended the same day after Rios Montt’s defense attorneys succeeded in forcing the recusal of Presiding Judge Jeannette Valdes. With the naming of Judge Gonzalez, there is again a full panel.

However, many obstacles remain for a new trial to start. The high-risk court’s calendar makes it unlikely that a new date can be set before 2017. Moreover, the former general’s declining health situation could impede a new trial, as he has refused to appear by video conference, as recommended by the Guatemalan national health institute. There is still an outstanding question of whether a historic amnesty might prevent the prosecution, contrary to prior domestic and international decisions on this issue. Further, the investigative judge, Carol Patricia Flores, has not yet resolved various preliminary matters and has refused to do so without Rios Montt appearing in person.

I don't remember hearing 2017 before. Ouch. There seems to be a greater likelihood that CICIG's mandate is extended than there is that Rios Montt spends another day in jail.

Next scattered thought. I invited Hermano Juancito to the University of Scranton to give a presentation on his missionary work in Honduras. John is a graduate of the University. In case you are in the area, the talk is scheduled for 6:00 PM in Brennan 228. Latin American Studies might have to do some recruiting tonight.

Neoliberal Forms of Capital and the Rise of Social Movement Partysim in Central America

Paul Almeida has a new article in the Journal of World-Systems Research entitled Neoliberal Forms of Capital and the Rise of Social Movement Partysim in Central America. Here's the abstract:

Historical shifts in global economic formations shape the strategies of resistance movements in the global South. Neoliberal forms of economic development over the past thirty years in Central America have weakened traditional actors sponsoring popular mobilization such as labor unions and rural cooperatives. At the same time, the free market reforms produced new threats to economic livelihood and well-being throughout the region.

The neoliberal measures that have generated the greatest levels of mass discontent include rising prices, privatization, labor flexibility laws, mining projects, and free trade. This article analyzes the role of emerging antineoliberal political parties in alliance with popular movements in Central America. Countries with already existing strong anti-systemic parties in the initial phases of the global turn to neoliberalism in the late twentieth century resulted in more efficacious manifestations of social movement partyism in the twenty-first century resisting free market globalization.

Paul takes an interesting look at the participation of Central American social movement parties in several recent contentious issues, including privatizations, negotiations over CAFTA-DR, and model cities programs among others. There are a lot of potential extensions from the project. One could focus on individual social movement parties in opposition and in government (FMLN, FSLN); explain the success/failure of various social movement parties electorally and on specific issues; and transnational linkages among social movement parties.

Transnational support for the Salvadoran counterrevolution

Aaron T. Bell has a terrific article on A matter of western civilisation: transnational support for the Salvadoran counterrevolution, 1979-1982 in Cold War History.

This article considers how transnational right-wing networks contributed to the origins of El Salvador's civil conflict (1980–1992) using research from the archives, scholarship, media, and popular histories of the United States, El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala. Salvadoran counterrevolutionaries used material resources, training, and advice procured from foreign sympathisers to develop a political-paramilitary organisation that undermined socioeconomic and political reforms through violence and intimidation, before transforming that organisation into a formal political party capable of participating in the democratisation process. Additionally, these networks facilitated right-wing Salvadoran contributions to debates in the United States over the direction of US policy in El Salvador at the beginning of the Ronald Reagan administration.

I think that the title of the article is somewhat inaccurate as the history told is more about the mobilization strategies and effectiveness of the Salvadoran right-wing to gain international support for their policies. They sought assistance in South and Central America, Taiwan and in the United States to help confront the threat posed by the revolutionary and moderate left as well as the centrist alternatives proposed by the Carter administration. As is, the title makes it sounds as if D'Aubuisson, de Sola, ORDEN, FAN, and ARENA were more passive recipients of assistance organized from outside of El Salvador rather than active participants. The article really emphasizes their agency in a way that the title does not.

Another minor quibble, is using counterrevolution in the title. Counterreaction is more common to characterize ARENA and the Salvadoran right's response to the reforms proposed by the US and PDC and the revolutionary alternative posed by the FMLN. The Contras would be an example of counterrevolutionaries organized in response to the Salvadoran revolution. Perhaps it's a disciplinary matter.

While the article covers up to the year 1982, it is really light on 1981 and 1982. There's little coverage of the relationship between the Salvadoran right and the US right in that pivotal 1981 - the January offensive, Reagan inauguration, progress on the investigation into the churchwomen murders, and the December 1981 massacre at El Mozote. And into 1982, it would have been helpful to learn more of the Salvadoran right's mobilization against the certification process imposed by the US congress on the Reagan administration, if there was such mobilization. Instead, Bell focuses on the relationship between the Salvadoran and Guatemalan right that led to the creation of ARENA.

Jesse Helms is still awful.

Bell provides some great insights into the Salvadoran right's lobbying firms located in Washington, D.C. When studying Guatemala, I don't think that I've come across any work that addresses that issue. However, there's more coverage of the Guatemalan right's relationship with the US evangelical community. I was wondering if there was the same level of success among the Salvadoran right. It's clear that they did have an important relationship, it's just absent from this article.

Anyway, it's a really solid contribution to recent academic work on the Salvadoran civil war.  

The Politics of Modern Central America: Civil War, Democratization, and Underdevelopment

I have a review of Fabrice Lehoucq's The Politics of Modern Central America: Civil War, Democratization, and Underdevelopment in the newest edition of Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice.

While public attention has turned away from Central America since the end of the Cold War, scholars have been busy trying to make sense of its civil wars, transitions to democracy, and postwar economic development. Scholars have utilized a variety of different methods from different disciplinary perspectives in order to better explain the causes, course, termination, and aftermath of civil war. Given the amount of research accumulated over the last few decades on the Central American states, individually and comparatively, and the number of cross-national studies on the causes and consequences of civil war, democracy, and economic development, Fabrice Lehoucq has embarked on quite an ambitious journey to tie them all together in a much needed contribution with The Politics of Modern Central America.

I wasn't the biggest fan of the book but you can find the review here. It wasn't mean to replace it, but I still prefer Understanding Central America.

***Update*** Might as well add the conclusion:

Fabrice Lehoucq surveys a vast literature on civil wars, democratization, and  underdevelopment in The Politics of Modern Central America. Much of my disappointment from the book comes from the fact that there is such rich literature on each topic and a good deal of itwas excluded. Even with these criticisms, however, the text still provides a solid introduction to Central America for those interested in learning about the political and economic development of the region over the last several decades and how those experiences compare to the rest of the world.

Historians save the world...one human rights violator at a time

Time magazine has interesting background on some of the people who work for the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit in Meet the Historians Who Track Down War Criminals for the U.S. Government. This group works with the FBI and the Justice Department to track down human rights perpetrators living in the US so that they can be prosecuted and deported for immigration violations. They just finished contributing to the recent case against El Salvador's former general Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova.

Historians have the background in the culture, language and politics of particular regions of the world; they know where to look for the sources that might prove who was responsible for particular crimes. This kind of research relies on personal testimony, written records, photographs — and today, social media.

An important part of their work is creating the narrative, the story that the U.S. Attorney can present in court. This means putting together the threads that link pieces of evidence, building a full picture of a person’s role in human rights abuses. A particular challenge is state-sponsored abuses, where historians must contend with (in some cases) decades of cover-ups and silencing.

For perpetrators from some countries, the U.S. immigration trial will be the only trial they face. That decision, in a U.S. court, may be the only legal acknowledgment their victims ever receive. The ICE team knows this, and they want to make very case count. “Our historians are absolutely critical to getting these cases moving forward,” Shaffer told me.

It's great that the unit has three historians who are looking into human rights violators from Africa, the Balkans, and Latin America who might have relocated to the US. On the one hand, I see the skills that they possess as those that make a liberal arts education at the undergraduate level so valuable. Perhaps there's nothing special about history however.

At the graduate level, historians seem to have the skills that are needed. Anthropologists probably certainly do as well. Political Science? I don't know. When I was finishing graduate school ten years ago, I can't say that there would have been many people capable of carrying out the tasks required of people in the ICE unit. However, I'd like to think that has since changed. My general impression is that the discipline values scholars with a strong understanding of research methods (both qualitative and quantitative) and theory and in-depth knowledge of content and language more so than it did when I was in school. Maybe not as much as it should but still more than it used to in the recent past.

Over the last four years, the war crimes unit has "issued more than 67,000 lookouts for people from more than 111 countries and stopped 140 human rights violators or war-crime suspects from entering the United States." They have also helped to deport 650 known or suspected human rights violators since 2003.

Freedom House: Discarding Democracy: A Return to the Iron Fist...but not necessarily in the Americas

Freedom House's newest edition of its flagship Freedom in the World launched on Wednesday. The 2015 theme is Discarding Democracy: A Return to the Iron Fist. Here's the overview:

More aggressive tactics by authoritarian regimes and an upsurge in terrorist attacks contributed to a disturbing decline in global freedom in 2014. Freedom in the World 2015 found an overall drop in freedom for the ninth consecutive year.

Nearly twice as many countries suffered declines as registered gains—61 to 33—and the number of countries with improvements hit its lowest point since the nine-year erosion began. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a rollback of democratic gains by Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s intensified campaign against press freedom and civil society, and further centralization of authority in China were evidence of a growing disdain for democratic standards that was found in nearly all regions of the world.

Fortunately, it appears that the Americas are (is?) doing somewhat better than much of the rest of the globe. However, that doesn't mean that last year was a banner year for the region.

In Mexico, public outrage at the authorities’ failure to stem criminal violence and corruption reached a boiling point after the disappearance of 43 politically active students in Guerrero. Protests initially led by the families of the students, who were killed by a criminal gang linked to local officials, grew into mass demonstrations across the country that challenged the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. Organized crime and gang violence also continued to rise in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, leading thousands of citizens to flee to the United States during the year.

A major development in the region was the announcement that the United States and Cuba had agreed to the normalization of relations after a rupture of more than 50 years. Although Cuba is the Americas’ worst-rated country in Freedom in the World, it has shown modest progress over the past several years, with Cubans gaining more rights to establish private businesses and travel abroad. In 2014, Cuba registered improvement for a growth in independent media, most notably the new digital newspaper 14ymedio. While it remains illegal to print and distribute such media, independent journalists have found ways to share their stories online and via data packets that circulate in the black market. As part of the normalization agreement, Cuba released a number of political prisoners, including U.S. contractor Alan Gross. However, the accord included no other human rights stipulations.

...

The governments of Venezuela and Ecuador continued their pattern of cracking down on the political opposition and other critical voices. Venezuelan authorities responded to opposition-led demonstrations in the spring with particularly repressive measures, including mass arrests, excessive force, and alleged physical abuse of detained protesters.

Once again, I contributed to the reports and scores for several of the Central American countries, including those for Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Belize. To no one's surprise, freedom deteriorated in Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama in 2014. However, conditions did not deteriorate in a significant enough manner to make the "Notable gains or declines" list where instead one finds Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela - all in the negative direction.

2015 hasn't started off that great either with deteriorating press freedom and questionable court maneuvering in Guatemala, police/gang violence and a difficult to decipher gang truce in El Salvador, and intensifying allegations of corruption against former president Ricardo Martinelli and his administration in Panama.

The individual country reports come out later this year.

Could El Salvador have avoided civil war in 1980?

In a 2001 interview, US Ambassador Robert White had this to say:

After Reagan's inauguration, Alexander Haig recalled White to Washington. Twenty years later, White still believes that "had we had a united policy in Washington to achieve a peaceful solution to El Salvador's problems in 1980–81, it could have been done. It was a tough problem, but not insoluble." And so he tried to convince Haig.

"But the Reagan conservatives wanted to demonstrate an ability to crush revolutions. They wanted to say in El Salvador, this is what we could have done in Vietnam, had we not been saddled by reporters, by columnists—all those liberals. I tried to tell Haig, you're not going to do it, not with the tools available to you, not with the forces available to you." Haig was not interested in White's analysis. He congratulated the ambassador on doing a fine job in El Salvador and summarily and unceremoniously removed him from his post.

I respect Ambassador White but it is difficult to conclude that had the US had a coherent policy in 1980-1981, A Salvadoran civil war might have been avoided. That's what I thought and what comes out in chapter 6 of William Stanley's The Protection Racket State.

The left was divided in 1980. Most popular organizations still held out hope for a more peaceful transformation of the political system. However, they were decimated in 1980 by right-wing death squad activity that picked up in December 1979 and would continue for the next two years. And while the masses were interested in avoiding bloodshed, many of their leaders were hoping for greater repression as that would encourage greater numbers of Salvadorans to join the revolutionaries. Several leaders of mass organizations were aligned with or incorporated into the guerrillas.

The more progressive members of the PDC were killed in 1979 and 1980 as well. They were mostly killed by right-wing death squads, but some were probably killed by the left as well. Attorney General Mario Zamora was murdered by the right-wing in February 1980. The left-wing of the PDC joined the FDR or left the country. While there was a rightist civilian on the first junta, there was none on the second junta. That cut off most communication between the PDC and the moderate civilian right.

The FMLN formed in 1980 but the only organization that seemed interested in a negotiated solution was the National Resistance Armed Forces (FARN or RN). They had entered into on-again, off-again discussions with the junior members of the military but there was still a certain level of distrust between the two organizations. And the military had successfully infiltrated the RN which made collaboration between the reformist military and guerrillas difficult. It's not clear, I might say highly unlikely, that the FPL or the ERP were ready to negotiate in 1980. White described the FPL's Cayetano Carpio "as a total fanatic" and compared him to Cambodia's "Pol Pot left." We are also talking months after some of them had participated in the July 1979 Sandinista revolution in neighboring Nicaragua. They were looking for their own revolution.

The hard-line and junior members of the military were trying to outmaneuver each other throughout the late 1970s and early 1980. Adolfo Majano and Mena Sandoval seem to have been outmaneuvered at nearly every turn. The senior, hard-line officers had seniority, political awareness, and the support of the right-wing elites. In many ways, they also had US support at this time. Not White's support, but the US government's support (as well as the CIA). However, the US government didn't support them simply because it backed a hard-line approach to El Salvador. The US, for the most part, backed the hard-liners because they were in charge of the military and security forces; they were the military brass. The US feared that if they supported the rebellious junior members, military unity would have collapsed thus opening the door for the revolutionaries.

It appears that the US was not fighting back against the right-wing military, just trying to prevent them from overthrowing the first and second juntas. Had the junior officers successfully outmaneuvered their superiors, the US might have backed them simply because they were in charge. Washington wanted to send support to the military in order to gain leverage over it. White disagreed and said that it would only look as if the US was supporting repression and would do little to gain leverage over those hard-liners. He was correct. White wanted the right-wing to bring the violence under control before providing support.

The US was successful in getting the army to allow the civilian PDC to govern, at least symbolically. The US was also successful in getting the military's support for land reform. Some of the worst elements of the army and security forces were removed during the first junta although it is not clear that the US had much to do with that. However, the US could not get Garcia, Vides Casanova, Carranza and others to clean up their units and to use less repression because that was not in the military's interest.

Finally, the elites were caught off guard by the October 1979 coup but they regained some control in 1980. Instead of fracturing like the elite in Nicaragua, the Salvadoran elite grew more cohesive. While the rural elite were often the most conservative and hard-line, the political-military organizations did not discriminate. They kidnapped and killed some of the more progressive and urban elites. What sympathy some elites had for reform, died with their targeting by the FMLN.

For White to have been right, the leadership of the popular movements and the guerrillas, more than just the RN, would have had to support a political solution and not wanted to emulate the recent success of the Sandinistas. The Guatemalan guerrillas were on the offensive at this time as well although they were suffering devastating losses in the city.

The junior officers in the military would have had to outmaneuver the hard-line faction and then hold off any counter-reaction from them. The security forces would have to have been isolated and its leadership decapitated (not literally, well maybe). The right-wing elite would have had to negotiate with the communist PDC and the communist political-military organizations. There might have been an opportunity for the US to back Majano against the hard-liners in May 1980 but even Majano was reluctant to push too far out of fear that there would be rebellion within the military's ranks.

As the year went on, right-wing violence continued unabated. The left-wing political-military organizations killed 1,488 civilians between June and the end of the year. Death squads killed Monsignor Oscar Romero, the leadership of the FDR, the US churchwomen, and thousands of other Salvadorans. The political-military organizations continued their attacks against the civilian right and formed the FMLN. Jimmy Carter was also defeated in the November elections in the US. The fifty year protection racket involving the military and the elite would have had to have been broken within a few months.

I just don't see it.

See also Liberal reform and conservative counter-reaction in El Salvador and El Salvador's failed October 1979 coup.

Understanding the transitions of armed groups to political parties

I recently was given an opportunity to discuss my academic research on the transition of former armed groups to political parties in Central America with The Academic Minute.

Dr. Mike Allison is a professor in the department of political science at The University of Scranton. His current work asks a fundamental question related to the transition of insurgent groups to political parties that has only recently begun to be seriously investigated. Namely, how do we account for the success or failure of former insurgent groups as political parties? To date, Dr. Allison’s research has primarily focused on the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG) in Guatemala. He earned his PhD from Florida State University. Follow him on twitter at @CentAmPolMike.

Click through to listen to what I say. You can also check out my academic scholarship by clicking on the Research tab above.

Jesuit alumni in the 114th Congress

From The Atlantic's article on The New Brand of Jesuit Universities which addressed how Jesuit universities are responding to the challenges of the 21st century.

Jesuit schools regularly surpass their secular counterparts in the number of service hours contributed by students per capita. One of the central tenets of Ignatian Spirituality is service to and with others; a concern for the poor and marginalized and a belief in social justice underpin many of the extracurricular activities on campus. Jesuit schools send high numbers of graduates into the Peace Corps and other service programs throughout the U.S. and around the world.

Jesuit education is about forming men and women for and with others. In a foundational speech in 1973, Fr. Pedro Arrupe said

Today our prime educational objective must be to form men-and-women-for-others; men and women who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ - for the God-man who lived and died for all the world; men and women who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors; men and women completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce. 

Jesuits schools place a strong emphasis on service that often boils down to encouraging students to volunteer. That can be great but the call is to do more. We don't just want students to perform acts of charity but "to set the world on fire," to engage in transforming the world.

And it is not just serving humanity but doing so in the service and promotion of faith. We lose some faculty and students when we move from volunteering to transforming and from serving one's fellow man to serving God. That's one of the challenges that Jesuit universities confront today.

It's easy to emphasize serving others but it's more difficult when we say that we want to help form men and women for and with others in the service and promotion of faith. We also lose some faculty here because they believe that we are here to educate; campus ministry and student affairs are here for formation.

And while we often convey a rather limited vision of what it means to serve others, it's clear that Jesuit universities are doing something right. Nine percent of the 114th U.S. Congress (11 in the Senate and 37 in the House of Representatives) are alumni from Jesuit institutions, including high school, university and graduate work.

Representative John Boehner (R-OH, Xavier University) is serving his third term as Speaker of the House of Representatives and Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD, Georgetown University) continues to serve as the House Minority Whip. In the Senate, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL, Georgetown University) serves as the Assistant Minority Leader.

Of the 48 alumni/ae, seven were newly elected in 2014. Of note, Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI, Georgetown University) succeeds her husband, Representative John D. Dingell (D-MI), a Georgetown University alumnus who was the longest-serving Member of Congress in history (1955 – 2015).

There are currently 14 Jesuit colleges and universities represented by alumni/ae in the U.S. Congress. Georgetown University has the most alumni/ae with a total of twenty-three, followed by Boston College with six and Fordham University with four. The College of the Holy Cross has three, while Creighton University and Saint Peter’s University both have two alumni/ae represented. The remaining schools with alumni/ae in Congress are Loyola University Chicago, Loyola University Maryland, Marquette University, Saint Joseph’s University, Santa Clara University, University of Detroit Mercy, Wheeling Jesuit University and Xavier University.

"We are proud that nine percent of Congress are alumni/ae of Jesuit colleges and universities,” said AJCU President Rev. Michael J. Sheeran, S.J. “We are grateful for their leadership, and we look forward to strengthening the excellent working relationships we have already established with those in Congress and forging ties with new members of the 114th Congress.”

Click here for the complete list. That is unfortunately down from the 113th Congress when there were 52.

Teach Me to Be Generous: The First Century of Regis High School in New York City

Regis High School

My most favorite gift of the Christmas season by far was Teach Me to Be Generous: The First Century of Regis High School in New York City by Anthony D. Andreassi, C.O. I graduated from Regis in 1992. It is a special high school in many ways, especially because "Regis remains singular among all Jesuit (and all Catholic) high schools in the nation in that all its students are academically gifted and on scholarship."

Regis opened its doors in 1914 thanks to an imaginative Jesuit, Father David W. Hearn. Fr. Hearn sought to establish a high school that could serve poor Catholic young men, frequently the sons of immigrants, in New York City in the true spirit of Jesuit education. He succeeded when convinced Julia Grant, the widow of former New York City mayor Hugh Grant (1889-1992), to fund such an endeavor. Julia Grant and her children's financial support of Regis High School would not be recognized for several decades as the family preferred to keep their generosity anonymous.

The book provides interesting insights into Catholic and Jesuit education, especially in the New York area, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Teach Me to Be Generous traces the school's development through the depression (fortunate financial decisions by Julia Grant), World War II (over 1,000 alumni served in the war), the free-spirited 1960s and 1970s (students wanted more control over their education), the 1980s (Latin no longer required), and today (fewer New York City students, efforts at remaining true to providing a superior education for economically disadvantaged Catholic boys).

The book will mainly be of interest to alumni and others interested in Jesuit and Catholic education. There was a bit of redundancy across chapters that seemed a bit awkward. Some of the statistics were spotty (financial backgrounds of student families, hometowns, college acceptance) and instead we are left to trust that those presented are representative of the times. As an alumnus and social scientist, I would have appreciated more details everywhere, more interviews, and descriptive statistics in tables and figures.

Regis has so far been able to excel in spite of the challenges confronted by Jesuit high schools and colleges throughout the country. Over the first 100 years of its existence, Regis High School was able to provide a superior education to young Catholic boys because of the generosity of the Hearn family, alumni beginning in the 1960s, and friends and family in more recent years. Unfortunately, Mr. Andreassi seems somewhat pessimistic that the free model of Jesuit education offered by Regis High School will complete its bicentennial in 2114.

The New Brand of Jesuit Universities

Autumn Jones looks at The New Brand of Jesuit Universities for The Atlantic. It had the potential for an interesting article but, in my opinion, it falls flat. To be fair, though, maybe it is just the Jesuit institutions that they highlight that fall flat.

In the likeness of Martin and Colbert, Pope Francis uses modern media to address points of tension in the Catholic Church. Having held the institution’s highest office for nearly two years, the pope’s approach is quite different than that of his predecessors. His strategy is, in many ways, "rebranding" the Church for a new audience and providing an updated image for its most ardent constituents—the very same thing Jesuit universities are doing across the country.

What is left at stake for both Pope Francis and Jesuit universities is whether this rebranding attenuates the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church. As a branch of Catholic education, Jesuit universities are required to fall in line with the Church as a whole and with the requests of the local bishop. Yet, similar to secular colleges and universities, they are also places where young adults are encouraged to think critically and to explore variations in religious ideology. The balance of mission, identity, and modern times—and whether that balance negates the central principles of Jesuit and Catholic education—is what lies at the root of the tensions present for these schools.

Of the 251 Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S., 28 are run by the Society of Jesus. The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, was founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1540 and is the largest male religious order of priests and brothers within the Catholic Church. Though St. Ignatius didn’t originally intend to establish schools for the broader public, the Jesuit order quickly became recognized throughout the world for its achievements in education, community service, and the sciences. From the get-go, the Jesuits started compiling a number of documents to outline the kind of education the order would provide. These documents would later become the foundation of what’s known as Ratio Studiorum, the official plan of Jesuit education, published in 1599.

I'm not going to go into everything, but Jesuit and Catholic universities and colleges confront myriad problems similar to other institutions of higher education (cost, increasing reliance on part-time work, board members disconnect from what it means to be a university, societal pressure for universities to provide their graduates with a near guaranteed job, and so on) and others that are more unique (maintaining religious identity among increasing secularism throughout the US - not just students but faculty and administrators, fewer clergy available on campus not just to teach but to manage large, complex institutions, relations with the local bishop and the Newman Society, and so on).

That's all fine in the article although I believe the author could have been clearer distinguishing between challenges to higher-ed at Jesuit institutions and higher-ed institutions in general.

In surveying the 28 Jesuit institutions, Jones narrows in on Regis, Rockhurst, St. Joseph's and Gonzaga. Other than Gonzaga, perhaps (at least that's my impression), let's just say that those are not the most competitive Jesuit Universities out there today. Here are the Jesuit universities that make the cut on the top 201 in the 2015 US News & World Report rankings

21. Georgetown University

31. Boston College

58. Fordham University

76. Marquette University

99. Saint Louis University

106. Loyola University Chicago

106. University of San Francisco

While Jesuit universities do confront similar problems in many ways, the rankings tell me that the article should more accurately reflect how weaker Jesuit and Catholic universities are confronting the 21st century.

Father Martin and Pope Francis are in some way "rebranding" the Church but they are more accurately doing what Jesuits have historically done by abiding by the principle to “meet people where they are." They are extending invitations to individuals to become closer to God. However, it is disappointing that the solutions posed by the individuals identified in the article do no such thing. "Rebranding" of their Jesuit universities entails hiding or removing their Jesuit and Catholic identities.

At a time when Jesuits are more popular than they have been in some time with Fr. Martin in the US and Pope Francis globally, Rockhurst University in Kansas City removed the word "Jesuit" from the university's tagline to hide its Jesuit tradition. At least they kept "Catholic" in some of their materials.

Regis University, on the other hand, wants to drop Catholic and play up Jesuit as if you can be Jesuit without being Catholic.

"We hide the word ‘Catholic’ from prospective students," said Traci McBee, who helps oversee fundraising efforts at Regis University. "We focus on the Jesuit piece rather than the Catholic piece. We’re able to transform a little quicker because we are not waiting for the archbishop to give us permission. We don’t have to ask the Pope when we want to make changes."

So in reaching out to donors that have already completed an education at Regis, they want to hide who they are from their alumni? I'm more with Gonzaga's McCulloh who says "the Jesuits are completely and wholly a part of the Church." You shouldn't run away from the need to convince people that you cannot be Jesuit without being Catholic. Hopefully, Regis' development office isn't spearheading this radical change.

What Regis and Rockhurst are doing seems completely at odds with what Fr. Martin and Pope Francis are doing. They are hiding their Jesuit and Catholic identities from prospective students (ethics in advertising?) and alumni (sorry, forget about your four years here) rather than embracing them.

I'm a little biased. I attended a Regis High School in New York City and Fairfield University in Connecticut. I now teach at the University of Scranton in Northeastern Pennsylvania - all Jesuit institutions. In my opinion, universities can be successful not in spite of their Jesuit and Catholic identities but because of them.

Big data and crime fighting

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I thought I'd plug my friend and colleague today. Mike Jenkins is a assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Scranton.

My research explores the innovations police executives are implementing in the new community problem-solving policing era. While this new era has had its share of growing pains in recent years, there is no question that better data and technology will help make this form of policing even more effective, while simultaneously enhancing community relations.

He recently recorded a segment for The Academic Minute excerpted above on the role of big data in fighting crime.You can also see him in this video talking about his new book on Police Leaders in the New Community Problem-Solving Era.

In his spare time, he enjoys writing for The Huffington Post and elsewhere.

Exciting times at the University of Scranton!

University of Scranton Commemorating 25th Anniversary of the Martyrs of El Salvador

The University of Scranton just released its programming to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the martyrdom of six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and daughter at the Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador. The Jesuit Center took the lead on the event's programming with the assistance of Education for Justice (perhaps just not enough to warrant a mention I guess).

I am facilitating the Friday panel on “What the Martyrs Mean for Us Today” where I would like to encourage the faculty and administrators to contemplate what the martyrs mean for the University of Scranton as a Jesuit and Catholic University in Northeast Pennsylvania.

Father Ignacio Ellacuria, and Román Mayorga Quirós before him, focused the UCA's resources on solving El Salvador's most pressing problems of the day. They created a human rights institute and a public opinion institute, carried out research on the effects of the violence, and were deeply involved in trying to get the FMLN and the Army to dialogue in hopes of ending la locura through a political process.

Tonight, we are unofficially kicking off the commemorating with a screening of "A Question of Conscience." The film tells the story behind the massacre, including interviews with Fr. Jon Sobrino who was away the night of the murders and a profile of Lieutenant Espinoza, a graduate of the Jesuit prep school in San Salvador, who was a member of the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion that carried out the massacre.

Education for Justice and the Center for Service and Social Justice are co-sponsoring tonight's film which was initially motivated to provide some background for our University of Scranton students who are traveling to Washington, D.C. next weekend to participate in the Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice 2014.

Tonight's film in the Moscovitz Theater begins at 8pm.

National Children's Alliance at the University of Scranton

As some of you know, I am the coordinator of the University of Scranton's Education for Justice office. We are a group that encourages faculty to incorporate justice-related themes into the courses and provide some financial assistance for programming.

Last night we welcomed Denise Richards to campus. Denise is the director of government affairs for the National Children's Alliance (NCA), the national association and accrediting body for Children's Advocacy Centers (CAC). It was a great opportunity for our students, many of them engaged in service opportunities and committed to helping others as part of their post-graduation plans, to hear from someone who was able to turn her passion and faith into a very effective advocacy career. We had a good turnout, especially among counseling and human services majors and the Scranton community. Unfortunately, I can't say that the political science representation was at their level.

Denise spoke about her efforts to keep the federal government committed to funding the nationwide Children's Advocacy Centers. These centers are community-based, public-private partnerships that coordinate child abuse investigations and intervention needs of children who experienced abuse and their families. As as foster parent this past year, I have a much better understanding of how important these centers are and how important Denise work is.

One of the issues that can up during her talk and our conversation during the day was the unaccompanied minors crisis. She is optimistic that Congress is going to move on legislation related to unaccompanied minors in the new year. There is more across the aisle cooperation on children's issues than most others in Congress. When I asked her about the media coverage of Republicans who had wanted to do away with the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, she said that is was a small but vocal group of House members. She did not think that repeal or significant changes to the law would have passed the Senate or President Obama's desk. There was more bite than bark this summer.

Denise's visit was a great opportunity for our student body and wider community to come together to learn more about a very important issue and to continue a conversation as to how we can continue to work together to improve our Scranton community.

New volume on the Salvadoran civil war and its aftermath

I have a new chapter on "Los partidos políticos en El Salvador: Una vision desde el extranjero" that was just published in Historia y debates sobre el conflicto armado salvadoreño y sus secuelas. 

The book is based on a February 2012 seminar on "History, Society and Memories: the armed conflict on the 20th anniversary of the Peace Accords" organized by Unit of Investigations about the Salvadoran Civil War (UIGCS) of the Universidad de El Salvador. 

Jorge Juarez coordinated the volume and it was published by the Instituto de Estudios Históricos, Antropológicos y Arqueológicos Universidad de El Salvador and the Fundación Friedrich Ebert in El Salvador. 

If you are interested in a PDF of the book, shoot me an email.

Primera parte

1. Actores armados: génesis, evolución y reconfiguraciones

Presentación by Alberto Martín Álvarez

Las relaciones urbano-rurales en la insurgencia salvadoreña by Ralph Sprenkels

Radicalismo político en los estudiantes de la Universidad de El Salvador durante el siglo xx. La Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios Social Cristianos (frusc) by Jorge Cáceres Prendes

Del partido a la guerrilla: los orígenes de las Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí (fpl) by Alberto Martín Álvarez

Transición a la democracia electoral y neoliberalismo en El Salvador by Carmen Elena Villacorta Zuluaga

Los partidos políticos en El Salvador: una visión desde el extranjero by Michael E. Allison

Los procesos de aprendizaje de Arena y del fmln durante la guerra civil by Heidrun Zinecker

Mujeres, lucha armada y crisis estructural del capital: de los Acuerdos de Paz al neoliberalismo by María Gabriela Guillén Carías

2. Memorias e historia reciente

Presentación by Eduardo Rey Tristán

La Comisión de la Verdad y la gestión de la memoria en la posguerra salvadoreña by Ralph Sprenkels

El despliegue de las memorias: el peso del pasado reciente en El Salvador by Jorge Juárez Ávila

«Memorias de la revolución»: resituando el pasado en el presente (reflexiones para su estudio) by Miguel Ayerdis

El Salvador 1972-1992: conflicto social y memoria de un pensamiento político by Francisco Eliseo Ortiz Ruiz

El historiador y la creación de un documental by Jeffrey Gould

3. El conflicto armado y las relaciones internacionales

Presentación by María Julia Flores

México ante el conflicto centroamericano, 1976-1996. Una perspectiva histórica by Mario Vázquez Olivera

La diplomacia paralela en el conflicto armado salvadoreño by Oscar Martínez Peñate

Los Estados Unidos y el golpe de Estado de 1979 by Gilles Bataillon

Segunda parte

1. Estado de la cuestión sobre el conflicto armado.

Sus principales tendencias

Presentación by José Alfredo Ramírez Fuentes

Mesa de debate (Alberto Martín Álvarez, Jorge Cáceres Prendes, Rafael Guidos Véjar)

2. Fuentes y pistas para la investigación del conflicto armado

Presentación by Eduardo Rey Tristán y Ralph Sprenkels

Mesa de debate (Claudia Ponce, Óscar Campos Lara, Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, Jaqueline Morales de Colocho, Alexis Hurtado, Coronel Adalberto García, Eudald Cortina Orero)

3. Principales enfoques teóricos y metodológicos para la investigación del conflicto

Presentación by Pablo Morales

Mesa de debate (Heidrun Zinecker, Rafael Guidos Véjar, Gilles Bataillon, Carlos Lara-Martínez)

Las relaciones entre Estados Unidos y Centroamérica en el siglo XXI

During my 2013 Fulbright to Guatemala, I gave a series of lectures at the Rafael Landivar University on United States - Central American relations in the post Cold War period. While not perfect, the first talk covered eight years of Bill Clinton and the second eight years of George Bush. The third talk covered the first Obama term with an eye towards his second term.

“Barack Obama, América Central y el future de las relaciones EE.UU. – América Central.” June 2013.

“El Impacto de los atentados del 11-S en las relaciones EE.UU. – América Central.” May 2013.

“Las Relaciones EE.UU. – América Central después de la Guerra Fría.” April 2013.

Alberto Martin and I more fully developed the presentations and they were just published by the Landivar as "Las relaciones entre Estados Unidos y Centroamérica en el siglo XXI" in La Politica Exterior de Estados Unidos, (Colección Cátedra de Coyuntura Internacional n.º 4, Guatemala, 2014: 103-176).

In addition to our entry, the university included contributions from Beatríz Zepeda on "Los desafíos de las relaciones internacionales en el siglo XXI", Josefina del Prado on "Obama y el cambio: política exterior de EEUU," Carlota García Encina on "¿Pragmatismo o debilidad? La política internacional del presidente Obama," Ana Esther Ceceña on "La dominación de espectro completo sobre América," and Claudio Katz on "Bloques y problemas de América Latina."

Click here if you'd like to take a read.

Central American Revolutionary Ties: The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG)

Alberto Martin Alvarez and I are presenting a paper on the relationship among the Central American revolutionary groups between the 1960s and 2000 at next week's XVII Congreso Internacional de AHILA in Berlin Germany. The paper is tentatively titled "Central American Revolutionary Ties: The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG)."

There are a lot of interesting stories involving cooperation between the Guatemalan FAR and the Salvadoran ERP. Joint bank robberies and kidnappings. We still have some more research to conduct as we've mostly interviewed Guatemalans about the topic.

We hope to have it published at some point in English but since the conference is in Spanish, the paper is not as fully developed in either language as we would have hoped. 

Drop me a line if you are heading to AHILA or are in Berlin next week.

In the end, there is still much that we can learn about the relationship among the Central American revolutionary groups. Salvadorans and Nicaraguans traveled to Guatemala to participate in guerrilla training during the 1960s. The Salvadorans and Guatemalans engaged in joint activities in both El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1970s. Like many others from throughout Latin America, Guatemalan and Salvadoran guerrillas traveled to Nicaragua to participate in the downfall of the Somoza regime in 1978 and 1979. In the 1980s, weapons traveled from Cuba and elsewhere through Nicaragua and into the hands of the FMLN and the URNG. It seems that more weapons were smuggled into El Salvador for a variety of reasons, including the belief that the Salvadoran rebels were closer to victory than were the Guatemalans.

Along with the Cubans, the Sandinistas were a key factor in the consolidation of the Guatemalan guerrillas into the URNG in 1982. Cooperation between the Guatemalan guerrillas and those from Nicaragua and from El Salvador does not appear to have been as strong as the cooperation that developed between the FSLN and FMLN. While one factor is obviously distance (the URNG used Mexico as its rearguard, while the FMLN used Nicaragua), there were other factors that help explain the weaker ties between the Guatemalan guerrillas and those from neighboring countries.

Finally, in the 1990s, the URNG saw the peace processes and the transitions to political parties of their neighbors as significantly different from their own, so much so that they had nothing to learn from them. In particular, the FMLN’s political settlement was very vague and the organization was quite fractured in the postwar period. Those were mistakes that the URNG wanted to avoid. 

There’s a great deal about the relations among the three groups that we still do not know but we hope that this paper and, hopefully article when we are done, we help uncover some of the story that is not yet widely known. 

When Mothers and Fathers Migrate North

I just finished reading "When Mothers and Fathers Migrate North: Caretakers, Children, and Child Rearing in Guatemala" by Michelle J. Moran-Taylor (gated, ungated).

A substantial portion of Guatemala's population—about 10—15 percent of a population of 12 million—emigrates to the United States. Although this northward movement has produced significant social change, few studies have examined it from the perspective of the increasing involvement of household structures in transnational migration processes. Ethnographic research focused on transnational families reveals the social relationships that develop between caregivers and children and between parents and caregivers because of the necessity for transnational migration and identifies the emotional costs of these arrangements.

While violence and economic stress are clearly contributors to the recent surge in unaccompanied minors to the US, so too is family reunification. In this article, Moran-Taylor looks at what happens when one or both parents leave their children in Guatemala to seek out a better life in the US. In many ways, it isn't pretty.

Extended family, particularly grandmother and aunt caretakers, often watch the children of those who have left for the US. The caretakers raise the kids as their own. However, the parents who have traveled to the US often don't appreciate the sacrifice that their relatives are making in caring for the children. The children, while they appreciate the caretaker immensely, still have that unbreakable bond with their parent or parents in the US.

Over time, lots of negative effects are seen. The children left behind in Guatemala become almost single-mindedly obsessed with the remittances that they receive from the US. They get upset if they are interrupted or decreased. It often becomes the only thing that they care about.

The caretakers often have trouble when the parents send for the kids that had been left in their care. They've raised them as their own for years. The caretakers often do not want to expose the children that they have cared for to the dangers of the journey north through Mexico. That has led to conflict between the relatives. Sometimes they have paid their own way to accompany the children to the border.

They wanted me to send her [the niece] illegally. But I didn’t want to because I knew the mishaps she could potentially endure along the way. Because you hear of so many despicable things that happen, right? When we spoke on the telephone my brother-in-law would even insult me. He would say that I didn’t want to send their child because I was taking the money, the U.S. dollars they sent. But I never took any of the money for myself. I did, however, lump it together with mine to use for the household expenses, but even that wasn’t enough. They would send me $75 each month. And with these funds, I placed my niece in a private school. My youngest son, who just turned twenty, was very distressed about this whole situation. He then decided to go there [the United States] to accompany my niece along the way and drop her off at her parents’ house in Arizona. So now, there she is.

Since her arrival over there [Phoenix], my sister and her husband don’t even write to me—and they don’t even want my niece to have anything to do with us. My husband now tells me: ‘you see… since you raised her, they don’t even want anything to do with you now.’ But my little niece still keeps in touch—she calls me when they [the parents] are not around. Her father, though, always tells her that she needs to forget about us altogether. After children who have been cared for leave for the US, the remittances to the caretaker (the grandmother or grandmother-in-law, sister, sometimes friend) end abruptly. They might have sent a few hundred dollars a month to an aunt to take care of their nieces and nephews but once the kids are no longer in their care, the relationship ends. 

There are a great number of actual family scenarios described in this 2008 article, most of them negative.

Drug war and pandilla articles in LARR

The Latin American Research Review has two articles of interest to readers.The first is Drug Wars Collateral Damage: US Counternarcotic Aid and Human Rights in the Americas by Horace A. Bartilow of the University of Kentucky.

Abstract: Existing case-study research suggests that the recent increase in human rights violations in Latin America is attributed to the US-funded drug war. This narrative, which is referred to as the collateral damage perspective, stands in contrast to US human rights law, which makes governments’ respect for human rights a precondition to receive aid. The apparent endogeneity between aid and human rights introduces bias that casts serious doubts on the validity of the collateral damage narrative. In addressing endogeneity, this article presents a simultaneous instrumental variable analysis of the human rights effects of US counternarcotic aid in the Americas.

The results show that while counternarcotic aid to regimes increases overall violations of human rights, this effect is greater among democracies than autocracies. And with the exception of torture, this finding is consistent when disappearances, political imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings are also considered. The implication of this research suggests that policy makers in Washington risk losing regional support for US drug control policies if US laws that govern the allocation of aid are not effectively implemented.

The second article is  Pandillas and Security in Central America by Thomas C. Bruneau of the Naval Postgraduate School.

Abstract: This article introduces the topic of pandillas (street gangs) and their implications for security in Central America. There is minimal scholarly literature on pandillas and security. In part this is due to serious challenges in analyzing pandillas. First, pandilla members consider truth to be situational; data derived directly from them is suspect. Second, those who know most about them are involved in NGOs that rely on foreign assistance for their work. The project reports they produce go to funders abroad and are generally not published. Third, to research and write on pandillas is dangerous.

I can't say that the articles excited me too much but maybe they'll work for you.