The Socialist Impulse: Latin America in the Twentieth Century 0813033098, 9780813033099

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The Socialist Impulse

University Press of Florida Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee New College of Florida, Sarasota University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola

Also by Charles D. Ameringer, from the University Press of Florida: The Cuban Democratic Experience: The Auténtico Years, 1944–1952 (2000)

The Socialist Impulse Latin America in the Twentieth Century

Charles D. Ameringer

University Press of Florida Gainesville/Tallahassee/Tampa/Boca Raton Pensacola/Orlando/Miami/Jacksonville/Ft. Myers/Sarasota

Copyright 2009 by Charles D. Ameringer Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper All rights reserved 14 13 12 11 10 09 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ameringer, Charles D., 1926– The socialist impulse : Latin America in the twentieth century / Charles D. Ameringer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-8130-3309-9 (alk. paper); ISBN 978-0-8130-3812-4 (e-book) 1. Socialism—Latin America—History—20th century. 2. Latin America—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. HX110.5.A6A78 2009 335.098—dc22 2008044600 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611-2079 www.upf.com

To Jean

Contents

Introduction: An Overview 1 Part I. The Southern Cone: The Pacesetters

1. Argentina: The Socialist Ferment 15 2. Uruguay: Batlle’s Way 26 3. Chile: The Road to Socialism 38 Part II. Eruption in the North

4. Ideas Serving the Mexican Revolution 53 5. Implementing the Constitution of 1917 68 6. The Mexican Fallout: Nicaragua 80 Part III. The Peruvian Influence

7. The Three: González Prada, Mariátegui, and Haya 91 8. APRA: The Maximum Program 100 9. APRA: The Minimum Program 110 Part IV. The Social Democratic Ascendancy

1 0. Venezuela: Democratic Action 123 11. Costa Rica: Tico Socialism 136 12. From the Caribbean to the Andes 148 Part V. The Socialist Impulse at Mid-Century

13. Juan Perón and Justicialismo 165 14. The Rise of Christian Socialism 176 15. “Is the Mexican Revolution Dead?” 187

Part VI. The Guerrilla Socialists

16. The Cuban Revolution 199 17. Central America Aflame 212 18. Rural Violence and Urban Terror 223 Part VII. The End of Socialism

19. The Collapse of Creole Socialism 237 20. The Neoliberal Onslaught 250 21. Fin del Siglo/End of the Century 260 Notes 273 Bibliography 309 Index 321

Introduction An Overview

The impulse to create a socialist form of government was common among the countries of Latin America during the twentieth century. Committed leaders perceived socialism as a cure-all for overcoming poverty, oppression, ignorance, racism, underdevelopment, and foreign domination. A variety of political systems evolved, but the economic model uniformly contained state intervention, a dominant public sector, and extensive social spending. Above all, the socialist impulse was a reaction to the positivist theory of development that prevailed in Latin America during the second half of the nineteenth century. The positivism of Auguste Comte, avowing that order enabled progress, along with the Darwinian and Spencerian promises of evolutionary advancement, was used to justify tyranny and foreign economic domination. Comtean positivism was also racist, resulting in the denigration and “marginalization” of the indigenous and mestizo populations.1 Carlos Octavio Bunge, of Argentina, the author of Nuestra América (1903), proclaimed that representative government was “suitable only for the purest of European races.”2 The only way for “non-European races” to advance, he opined, was through “the heavy hand of scientific management.”3 Even so, concluding that Latin America was a “sick society,” because of “bad blood,” the Bolivian essayist Alcides Arguedas argued that the Indian and mestizo races could be trained only “to a point.” In his book, Pueblo enfermo (1909), he wrote that no amount of education would produce “an English worker.”4 The Mexican despot, Porfirio Díaz, carried this bigotry to the extreme and placed emphasis “on order rather than progress.”5 He deprived the children of

2 / Introduction

Cuauhtémoc of their remaining lands and turned over the resources of Mexico to foreign ownership, all in the name of material progress. Díaz’s “open door” policy enabled U.S. businesses to acquire 100 million acres of “the national territory,” along with vast holdings of railroads, mines, factories, and oil fields.6 After a half-century of this state of affairs, not just in Mexico but throughout the hemisphere, dissenters began to press for change, with socialism having a strong attraction, except for Brazil. Brazil was unique. Brazil stuck with positivism; it even inscribed it on its national flag: ordem e progresso. Besides being distinct linguistically, culturally, socially, and geographically, Brazil did not experience the economic imperialism and hostility toward capitalism to the extent that drove the socialist impulse elsewhere in the hemisphere. Native entrepreneurs dominated the coffee industry that provided its principal export after the turn of the century and created internal economic and regional forces that transcended ideology in political affairs. Above all, Brazil’s lengthy, open frontier isolated it from its neighbors, except in the south, and its vast size impeded the development of national political movements. Even so, Brazil’s neighbors viewed the country as a rival, even a predator, placing it further on the periphery of Latin American political and intellectual movements until later in the century when Brazil’s activists and thinkers contributed to dependency theory and liberation theology. Given Brazil’s exceptionality, particularly with reference to the central theme of the socialist impulse, this study will focus principally upon the Spanish-speaking nations of Latin America. Many scholars attach the label “populism” to the movements for radical change in twentieth-century Latin America, but “populism” does not convey the goal of systemic transformation that was fundamental to the socialist impulse. Moreover, these same scholars define populism in distinct ways, which makes the term ambiguous and confusing as a concept. Paul Drake notes that “scholars have applied ‘populism,’ as a descriptive term, to movements espousing ideologies as diverse as liberalism, socialism, and naziism in countries as varied as Russia and the United States. . . . It never approaches the rigor of a ‘model’ or ideology.”7 According to Michael Conniff, “Latin American populists were leaders who had charismatic relationships with mass followings and who won elections regularly.”8 He insisted that populism was “less ideological and more a leadership style of attracting mass support and maintaining it through showmanship and spending.”9 For his part, W. John Green affirms that “There were . . . two opposite tendencies within the phenomenon of populism: it could be either a form of elite social domination through controlled mobilization of the popular

An Overview / 3

classes, or a mode of popular mobilization and resistance to existing relations of power.”10 Thus, populism could be either a “brake” exercised by the elite, or “pressure” exerted by the grassroots.11 Compounding the problem, scholars in the discipline of economics have their own interpretation of populism. Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards, for example, “define ‘economic populism’ as an ‘approach to economics that emphasizes growth and income redistribution and deemphasizes the risks of inflation and deficit finance, external constraints and the reaction of economic agents to aggressive non-market policies.’”12 The economists made it simple by stating that populism “involves a set of economic policies designed to achieve specific political goals.”13 That is, relative to Conniff, the effort of charismatic leaders to increase the income of the popular classes and reduce their outlay for goods and services through the expansion of the public sector and the imposition of monetary, taxation, and regulatory policies. This diversity of opinion led the political scientist Margaret Canovan to conclude, in her book, Populism, that populism as a term “is exceptionally vague and refers in different contexts to a bewildering variety of phenomena.”14 Accordingly, she proposed “a typology of populisms,” consisting of two broad categories (agrarian and political) and subdivided into seven types: farmers’ radicalism; peasant movements; intellectual agrarian socialism; populist dictatorship; populist democracy; reactionary populism; and politicians’ populism.15 Essentially, a grab bag of styles and outcomes. Carnovan herself asked, “Is ‘populism’ a meaningful concept?”16 In any event, populism is an unsatisfactory term for what it is not: an ideology. In contrast, the socialist impulse in Latin America had deep philosophical and ideological roots. It may have fallen short of its goals, but it was the force that drove the governments and movements discussed herein. Although the varieties of socialism were nearly as numerous as those of populism, distinct leaders and activists shared a common vision of structural change that banished capitalism (the market economy) and imperialism (foreign economic presence) and professed an optimistic belief in their ability to make things happen. Activists and thinkers as far-ranging as José Batlle y Ordóñez, Manuel González Prada, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and José Vasconcelos, to name a few, rejected the scientific determinism of Comte, Herbert Spencer, G.W.F. Hegel, and Karl Marx and embraced the concepts of “free will,” “categorical imperative,” and “creative evolution.” There were repeated references in what they said and wrote to Immanuel Kant, Karl Christian Frederick Krause, and Henri Bergson. Whether gradualists or revolutionaries, they did not deviate too far from the classic defi-

4 / Introduction

nition of socialism as the collective ownership of the means of production and distribution. They were determined to revolutionize the economy through the nationalization of natural resources, services, and industry and by the destruction of latifundia, in order to achieve “autonomous economic development.”17 Unlike populism, which was limited to the “redistribution of income,” socialism sought the “redistribution of property and wealth.”18 Essentially, while all socialists might be referred to as populists, not all populists could be classified as socialists. Although the socialist impulse was widespread in Latin America at the beginning of the twentieth century, this study will begin in the countries of the Southern Cone, where fertile ground existed for the propagation of ideas and movements. Argentina, especially, was a land of intellectual ferment and worker discontent. Argentina’s economic boom early in the century attracted massive Italian and Spanish immigration and large-scale investment of English capital. The immigrants found jobs, but encountered discrimination and wretched living and working conditions. They responded by drawing upon European anarchist and syndicalist movements. However, not all agitation was foreign-bred. “By the turn of the century, Argentine thinkers were attracted by socialism almost as fully as by positivism.”19 José Ingenieros, for example, railed against “the heartless competition of the capitalistic regime” and proclaimed “the need for revolution.”20 Juan B. Justo, a medical doctor who founded the Argentine Socialist Party in 1895 professed that he “became a socialist without having read Marx,” claiming that he was converted by the experience of treating “victimized” workers.21 From these beginnings, the socialist impulse persisted amidst the vagaries of the Hipólito Yrigoyen era and set the stage for the radical transformation of the Argentine state and economy under Juan Perón at mid-century. A similar transformation took place much earlier on the east bank of the Río de la Plata, in Uruguay. There, a remarkable leader, José Batlle y Ordóñez, created the first socialist-style state in Latin America. As in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, Uruguay’s economy was export-based and dominated by foreign interests. Influenced by the philosophy of Heinrich Ahrens, “a post-Kantian German follower of Karl Krause,”22 Batlle believed in “innate human morality” as a force to overcome injustice and make change. But, whereas Ahrens advocated delaying reforms until popular demand was overwhelming, Batlle was prepared to proceed as soon as he “felt it was possible to enact them.”23 And proceed he did, with the goal to make Uruguay “a model country, to transform and expand its economy, reduce foreign control of national wealth, and . . . to redeem the disinherited classes.”24 He implemented an expansive economic and social pro-

An Overview / 5

gram by nationalizing the principal economic institutions and enterprises and making the state responsible for the well-being of every Uruguayan. Batlle believed, moreover, that equality was essential for national unity, in order to resist the threat of annexation by either Argentina or Brazil. Because Batlle achieved his goal of a welfare state by the second decade of the twentieth century, the opportunity arises to assess its effectiveness over time and to analyze the factors that led to its eventual collapse. Whereas Batlle dominated the socialist impulse in Uruguay, in Chile many more individuals took the lead, making it a persistent factor in political and economic developments during much of the twentieth century. Chile’s dependence upon mineral exports (initially nitrates and subsequently copper) and the fact that the mines were owned and operated by U.S. companies stirred dissent. From the beginning of the century, Chilean labor was consistently radical, dominated early on by “home grown” anarcho-syndicalists, affiliated for a time with the U.S.-based Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).25 Despite the violent antilabor stance of the otherwise benign “parliamentary republic” (1891–1925), the anarcho-syndicalists “kept alive anti-authoritarian, anti-Communist, and revolutionary spirit, . . . reserving a place on the left which the Socialist Party would later [1933] occupy.”26 Concurrently, owing to the relatively relaxed political atmosphere, Chile became a gathering place for radical thinkers from around the hemisphere. Literary and political exiles found safe haven, and Chilean journals and publishing houses achieved distinction in intellectual circles. The Chilean road to socialism was well charted by the early 1930s. The twin shocks of the collapse of nitrate production during World War I and the Great Depression of 1929 were markers along the way. Luis Emilio Recabarren organized the Socialist Workers Party (POS) in Iquique in 1912, which he converted to the Communist Party of Chile in 1922. Sensitive to the unrest, the Radical Party candidate Arturo Alessandri, whom the POS labeled “a demagogic oligarch,”27 won the presidency in 1920 and enacted a Labor Code described as a model of advanced social legislation.28 However, economic distress in 1932 led a group of socialists to stage a coup. The “Socialist Republic” lasted only twelve days ( June 4–16), demonstrating that the Chilean “road to socialism” was “a winding path.”29 The colorful Marmaduke Grove, one of the leaders of the movement, organized the Socialist Party the following year. He was an “idealistic socialist”30 who admired “humanistic French socialism or the British Labour Party at least as much as Marxism.”31 Despite Grove’s popularity and the broad appeal of socialism during the 1930s, the orthodox Marxist faction led by Salvador Allende wrested control of the Socialist Party in 1943. Allende fol-

6 / Introduction

lowed an electoral strategy, competing in time with the proto-socialist Christian Democratic Party led by Eduardo Frei Montalva. By the 1960s, Chile was moving toward a socialist-style government, either Frei’s “revolution in freedom,” or Allende’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.”32 Allende won the Chilean presidency in 1970, but his hard-line stance created a crisis and caused an abrupt change of direction. The socialist impulse in the countries of the Southern Cone caused sporadic outbreaks of violence, but up north, in Mexico, it contributed to an explosion. The standard histories of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 tend to concentrate on the warriors, but men of ideas were extremely important as well. In the decade before the fighting began, the socialist impulse was manifest. At the Ateneo de la Juventud in Mexico City, Antonio Caso, José Vasconcelos, and Alfonso Reyes, among others, criticized positivism, on which the iron rule of Porfirio Díaz relied. They gleaned from the thought of Kant, Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Miguel Unamuno the concept of “man’s creativity,”33 with the implication of revolution. In San Luis Potosí, Camilo Arriaga possessed a library stocked with the works of Marx, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin, which provided grist for a formal discussion group severely critical of the existing order.34 Among its participants were Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, who became an advisor to Emiliano Zapata, and Ricardo Flores Magón, the leading firebrand in the years prior to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Not until the fighting broke out and the warring factions neared exhaustion did the Revolutionary goals take shape. According to Robert E. Scott, “The problem in defining the revolution is not that it lacked an ideology but that it had too many.”35 The force of the socialist impulse overwhelmed the limited goals of Francisco Madero. Flores Magón drafted the Mexican Liberal Party Manifesto in exile in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906, which “served as a base for the social and economic reforms of the Constitution of 1917.”36 At the Aguascalientes Convention (1914–15) the Zapatista delegate, Díaz Soto y Gama, radicalized the assembly with calls for “bread and justice,” “land and liberty.”37 These demands carried over to Querétaro, where the Constitution of 1917 was drafted. There, a combination of anarchists (old magonistas) and jacobinos obregonistas (followers of Alvaro Obregón) professed the need to put “an end completely to capitalism, economic slavery, clericalism, and ignorance.”38 They did not succeed entirely, but Querétaro produced a revolutionary document nonetheless. Articles 27 (Land and Property Rights) and 123 (Labor and Social Welfare) alone empowered an interventionist state as the “ultimate authority in the use of land” and the “final arbiter” in defining “the character and the content of Mexican industrial life.”39

An Overview / 7

This outcome did not please Venustiano Carranza, the “First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army,” which foretold the zigzag course of the revolution (socialism) for the next seventy-five years. A Mexican socialist state began to take form during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), marked by land distribution, the creation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and the nationalization of oil production.40 The presidents of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s changed direction, monopolizing the revolution politically while modifying it economically. Their policies promoted economic growth and investment but failed to alleviate ignorance and poverty. Following massive, student-led demonstrations in protest in 1968, presidents Luis Echeverría (1970–76) and José López Portillo (1976–82) tried to get the revolution back on track. Contending that development did not have to sacrifice equity, they undertook an “enormous growth in the public sector.”41 They achieved it by borrowing abroad on anticipated oil revenue, leading to bankruptcy in 1982 when the oil market collapsed. With the socialist impulse in retreat, President Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88) inaugurated a neoliberal economic policy highlighted by privatization, which reduced the number of SOEs drastically.42 It may be difficult to assess the success or failure of the socialist impulse based upon the Mexican experience, but this study makes the effort. What occurred in Peru is easier to understand. In an irony, Peru was not a friendly environment for the socialist impulse, yet the country produced three of the foremost thinkers stirred by it. All three were moved by the near feudal status of the Indian population. Manuel González Prada, an avowed anarchist and mentor of the trio, set the tone with his disgust for traditional (creole) Peruvian society, blaming it for keeping the nation divided and retarding its development. He demanded a “thorough cleansing,” encouraging the Indian masses to rebel.43 José Carlos Mariátegui shared his outrage and agreed that the solution to the Indian “problem” was not just education but also land—that is, “schools and bread.”44 Despite his early death at age thirty-five in 1930, Mariátegui’s writings made him Peru’s most celebrated Marxist thinker, even though the writings of Bergson and Nietzsche interested him as much as those of Marx. But he was Marxist enough for Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who broke with him over the issue of communism. Haya was the principal exponent of anticommunist socialism in Peru from the 1920s until his death in 1979. Although influenced by Marxism, Haya regarded it as a European import. He based his thinking on a “new interpretation” of the experience of “IndoAmerica,” a “rediscovery” of the collectivism of the indigenous past.45 Moreover, he advocated a multi-class movement, comprised of “workers, farmers, and middle class,”46 each a victim of feudal rulers and foreign imperialists. Still, Haya’s “long-range objective” was a socialist state.47 He

8 / Introduction

began the process in exile in Mexico in 1924, organizing the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA). Haya proposed a “minimum” program for the socialization of Peru and a “maximum” program for the liberation of IndoAmerica from imperialism.48 For the purpose of the minimum program, Haya established APRA as a political party within Peru. Despite his popular appeal, the Peruvian military persecuted him and prevented him from achieving power for over forty years. Then, in 1968, as proof of tumultuous times, General Juan Velasco Alvarado staged a coup and “stole the very soul of APRA,” 49 putting its program in place, with disappointing results. Haya had more success with APRA’s maximum program. Haya’s concept of an “American” (creole) socialism inspired the establishment of Aprista-style parties in many countries of the hemisphere and promoted the growth of the social democratic movement throughout: for example, the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) of Bolivia, the National Liberation Party (PLN) of Costa Rica, the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) of the Dominican Republic, and the Democratic Action party (AD) of Venezuela. Driven by the socialist impulse, these parties modified their rhetoric in the context of the Cold War. Their anticommunism made them natural allies of the United States, but their opposition to dictatorship in general created dilemmas for U.S. policy. In power, they adopted a gradualist approach in order in part to appease the United States, which brought forth accusations of selling out to Yankee imperialism from radical groups impatient for revolution. In fact, these parties, AD and the PLN in particular, established mechanisms giving the state control of economic decisions, nationalized key elements of the economy, and enlarged the public sector enormously. At the same time, the Apristas and social democrats adopted an import-substitution industrialization (ISI) strategy that further enhanced central planning and state control of the economy. Despite their pragmatism, the performance of these parties during the second half of the twentieth century provides clues for analyzing the eventual collapse of socialism in Latin America. But their action offers only a partial explanation for the outcome. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the socialist impulse in Hispanic America ran on three distinct tracks: (1) aprismo and social democracy; (2) Moscowdominated Communist parties; and (3) guerrilla socialism, a “resurgence of the anarchistic roots of the early twentieth century.”50 Viewed as representing an alien ideology, orthodox Communist parties had little success initially, except for the Popular Front movements of the 1930s, but gathered momentum during the Second World War and accelerated in the Cold War years owing to the su-

An Overview / 9

perpower status of the Soviet Union. However, the principal beneficiaries of the rise of the Soviet Union were the guerrilla socialists, who seized the opportunity for direct action in the context of a challenged United States and the collapse of European colonialism. The non-Marxist socialists had run out of ideas. In contrast, the guerrilla socialists were brimming with them, including existentialism as popularized by Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and theories of guerrilla warfare by Mao Tse-Tung, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, plus dependency theory and liberation theology. Success, above all, stirred the insurgencies of the 1960s and ’70s, and that is where Fidel Castro shone. Castro led a small band of guerrillas to overthrow a well-armed dictator and make a revolution. Although there was more to Castro’s victory than Che Guevara’s claim of “maoist-inspired guerrilla warfare,”51 the guerrilla socialists accepted Castro’s version unequivocally. Beginning with the expropriation of the Standard Oil (ESSO) facilities in June 1960, Castro transformed Cuba into a socialist state. It is difficult to make generalizations about the performance of socialism based upon the Cuban experience, owing to the effect upon it of the Cold War rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union. U.S. economic warfare and Soviet subsidies are factors to consider. However, the special nature of the course of the Cuban Revolution aside, its immediate impact was the spread of revolutionary activity, with mixed results. The socialist impulse was in apogee in the 1960s and ’70s, but the resort to armed action by the guerrilla socialists contributed to its decline by the end of the 1980s. The early movements in the 1960s were ill-conceived and hastily prepared and ended in failure: for example, the “weekend guerrillas”52 of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) in Venezuela and Guevara’s misadventure in Bolivia. During the 1970s and ’80s, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador fared better. But the Sandinistas alone gained power. The Sandinistas achieved victory by doing what Castro did in Cuba. They allied with “more moderate political actors” and concealed their revolutionary goals.53 Furthermore, they opposed a corrupt, authoritarian regime that much of the population despised, and exploited historical roots that went back to the insurrection of their namesake fifty years earlier. They also followed Castro’s example once in power by jettisoning the “moderate allies” and installing a socialist economy, causing reaction in the form of a counterrevolutionary movement (the Contra war) assisted clandestinely by the United States. Economic policies that produced hyperinflation, combined with the Contra war and the U.S. trade embargo, ended Sandinista rule in 1990. As evidence of the changing fortunes of the

10 / Introduction

socialist impulse, Chile elected a Marxist president in 1970, and Nicaragua voted out a Marxist regime in 1990. The violent actions of certain guerrilla socialists, amounting to terrorism, contributed to this turn of events. In the 1970s and early ’80s three guerrilla movements began campaigns that threw their societies into turmoil and evoked powerful reactions. The Tupamaros in Uruguay and the Montoneros in Argentina waged urban warfare, and the Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) in Peru operated in the mountains around Ayacucho and in the slums of Lima. The movements were “drawn disproportionately from the intelligentsia, not only highly educated, but also largely involved in the production of theories.”54 Batlle’s welfare state in Uruguay had been in economic distress since mid-century, but it remained a model democracy, and it seemed incongruous that it should be the target of revolution. The Tupamaros engaged in assassination, bombing, kidnapping, and robbery. They failed to arouse popular sympathy, only the enmity of the armed forces that wiped them out and installed a dictatorship that lasted for over a decade after 1974. The Montoneros carried out a similar campaign in Argentina, with the same results. The military crushed them and by 1979 had eliminated most other dissidents in a “dirty war” that claimed over ten thousand lives. The Maoist Sendero Luminoso was a “unique phenomenon,”55 becoming “one of the most effective and thriving, terrifying and mysterious armed organizations ever encountered in Latin America.”56 But it met its match in Alberto Fujimori, who set up an authoritarian rule to hunt down and destroy the senderistas, and root out vestiges of aprismo as well. By 1990, the three tracks of the socialist impulse had reached a dead end: the guerrilla socialists were defeated; the orthodox Communist parties were irrelevant; and the Apristas and social democrats had encountered economic disaster. While the guerrilla socialists were active in their way, Mexico and the social democratic governments continued to follow the gradualist path. Their economic systems were exhibiting signs of trouble, but in 1973 the actions of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) (in the context of the Arab-Israeli War) caused a dramatic increase in the price of oil that threatened to compound their distress—indeed, to bring on a worldwide economic depression. Just as suddenly, the situation improved, because the oil states had more revenue (“petrodollars”) than opportunities for investment. The result was irrational lending and borrowing. Commercial banks competed aggressively for loan clients, and Mexico and the social democratic countries, among others, seeing the opportunity to fund public projects and social programs “unconditionally,” borrowed willingly.57 They contracted obligations beyond their capacity

An Overview / 11

to repay. The “credit boom” of the 1970s ended in August 1982, when Mexico stopped servicing its debt, bringing on the “debt crisis” of the 1980s.58 In time, the creditor countries helped the debtors out of their predicament, but they required the adoption of neoliberal economic policies, the antithesis of the socialist impulse. The crisis affected creditors and debtors alike, and the administration of Ronald Reagan in Washington recognized the need “to nurse the debtors back to health.”59 The prescription was a set of neoliberal principles, referred to commonly as the “Washington Consensus.” By the 1990s, most of the Latin American countries had adopted free trade, free market, and privatization policies. In Argentina, President Carlos Saúl Menem dismantled the Peronista system and undertook “a program of privatization of almost everything that could be transformed to private hands.”60 In Mexico, the government of Miguel de la Madrid made “a shift toward an emphasis on economic liberalization and private investment,” marked by a single exchange rate and the effort “to lower trade barriers, diversify exports, and reduce the scope of the public enterprise sector.”61 Even Costa Rica and Venezuela, the models of social democracy, adopted the small-government principle, selling off state-owned enterprises (SOEs), reducing the size of the public sector, and trimming social programs.62 Subsequently, there was a violent reaction in Venezuela that caused the ouster of President Carlos Andrés Pérez and led to the rise of Hugo Chávez, who pledged to restore socialism. Despite the persistence of holdouts such as Fidel Castro and, later, Chávez, the Mexican scholar, Jorge G. Castañeda, surveying the scene in 1993, concluded, “Socialism is no more.”63 However, he warned that the conditions that gave rise to it remained. Indeed, neoliberalism produced growth, but at the cost of social and economic inequities. There were “winners and losers,” with the poor taking the hit.64 The situation raised the question: “How to achieve a synthesis of the capitalist engine of growth with the socialist concern for the improvement of the oppressed, exploited, and marginalized majorities and minorities?”65 A response came from the emerging “new” Left that abandoned concern over ownership of the means of production and economic issues.66 It was inspired by the thought of the Italian revisionist Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that it was essential to dominate civil society through the purging of bourgeois values (hegemony) in order to sustain the revolution “when the State trembled.”67 Accordingly, as “a substitute for political parties, traditional unions, armed groups, etc.,”68 a “grass roots” movement “exploded,”69 comprised of popular organizations and advocacy groups that included “neighborhood associations, church-based communi-

12 / Introduction

ties, ecological movements, and feminist and gay groups.”70 These movements are continuing and will likely play out in the twenty-first century. For now, the vision of “autonomous economic development” is being adjusted to the rules of the global economy. The twentieth century was a socialist century in Latin America in general, but, for the most part, it had its time and there is the opportunity now to look back upon it and learn.

I

The Southern Cone The Pacesetters

1

Argentina The Socialist Ferment

Argentina began the twentieth century having experienced three decades of phenomenal economic growth. Export products that had limited commercial value in 1870, because of economies of scale, had grown to become significant items of world trade by 1900. Wheat exports, for example, had increased from 77,000 tons in 1870 to over 1.9 million tons in 1900.1 The beef industry grew more slowly during this period, but was poised to take off dramatically, which it did in the succeeding ten years, owing to new technologies in refrigeration. Railway construction mirrored the booming economy, spreading out like the spokes of a wheel into the fertile pampas, and, at the wheel’s hub, the city of Buenos Aires likewise modernized its port facilities to service the transatlantic trade. The population also kept pace, increasing from nearly two million in 1870 to over four million by 1900, approximately 30 percent of which was foreign born. Buenos Aires alone had a population of a million and a half by 1914, about half of which had emigrated, mainly from Italy or Spain. The immigrant wave during these years was one of the largest in the world,2 and exemplified the positivist philosophy that helped fuel this dynamic change. The government of President/General Julio A. Roca (1880–86) embraced positivism, although his version was described as “more Spencerian than Comtean.”3 That is, Roca’s “Peace and Administration” was less authoritarian than the “Order and Progress” of Porfirio Díaz of Mexico. Roca paid lip service to the Liberal Constitution of 1853, with its paper freedoms and rights, but by devising the unicato (one-party rule), he and his followers controlled access to power.

16 / Chapter 1

Given limited suffrage, restrictive qualifications for office-holding, and a process of indirect elections, the oligarchs had no problem in manipulating the ballot and perpetrating electoral fraud. Just before taking office, as general, Roca had secured the pampas for the agricultural bonanza to come, by pushing the indigenous tribes who occupied that land into the bleak Patagonia territory, or by exterminating them altogether. With English capital and Italian and Spanish immigrants, the mainstays of positivist thinking, Argentina underwent an “economic transformation.”4 From their wide estancias or elegant homes surrounding the Plaza del Mayo, the gente decente (upper class) surveyed the landscape and were pleased with what they saw.5 They held the immigrant masses in contempt, believing that they “represented the country with greater fidelity than did the newcomers, who were scarcely a part of the nation.”6 They were certain that it was their leadership that was responsible for the country’s prosperity, and they took credit for the fact that Buenos Aires had become “the Paris of South America.”7 The view from the conventillos (tenements), where the immigrants and creole laborers (gente de pueblo) lived, was considerably less attractive. Immigrants found work as hired hands in crop and livestock agriculture, in the mills and packing plants, on the docks and with the railroads, and in construction, but under grossly unjust conditions.8 In the absence of factory laws for health and safety standards, they endured long hours and low pay. Strikes were illegal, and laws were designed to protect private property (including managerial decisions). A worker could be dismissed without cause. There was no compensation for accidental injury or work-related disability or illness. The employers took no responsibility; the workers absorbed all the risks. When the workers returned home, circumstances were just as bad. The workers’ living conditions were “appalling.”9 Given the rapid influx of immigrants (2,500,000 between 1870 and 1914), Buenos Aires experienced a housing shortage. The oligarchy failed to anticipate it, and allowed unscrupulous landlords to convert old buildings—even former single-family homes—into conventillos (tenements), where entire families were packed into one room. Accompanying the overcrowding were unhealthful, unsanitary, and vermin-infested conditions. Any attempt to secure relief from these circumstances was met with indifference or worse. The oligarchy viewed the immigrants with suspicion and questioned their patriotism.10 The creole gente de pueblo regarded them as rivals and made them objects of discrimination and ethnic slurs.11 Buenos Aires was not a nice place at the beginning of the twentieth century, but, invoking the Liberal tenets of Juan Alberdi and Domingo Sarmiento, a variety of political movements, driven by the socialist impulse, challenged the existing order.

Argentina: The Socialist Ferment / 17

The socialist impulse was present in at least four distinct movements. First, owing to the lack of social services, the immigrant community organized mutual aid societies as an incipient form of “communal bonds” and a prelude to labor unions.12 Second, among the immigrant groups, especially the Italians and the Spanish, there were leaders experienced in anarchism and its variants, syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism. Third, the Socialist Party, founded in 1896, adhered to the electoral route, but found it difficult to gain traction given that its target constituency was disfranchised. However, it attracted the leading intellectuals of the day and exerted influence far beyond its tiny membership. Fourth, the Radical Civic Union, a middle-class party founded in 1891, advocated “popular democracy,” but its watchwords, “revolution and abstention,” attracted a mass following that had higher expectations. These movements kept socialism in ferment up to its ripening in the fifth decade of the century. Mutual aid societies were a primitive form of labor organization. When the first immigrants arrived in Argentina, there were no unions, no social services, and no welfare agencies to aid them in their adjustment. Borrowing from their European experiences, they formed what amounted to fraternal and social clubs, which they perfected into mutual aid societies to help workers in time of need. These societies took the form of schools, hospitals, orphanages, insurance agencies, and craft and credit unions. By circa 1914, there were 1,500 “voluntary organizations” active in all aspects of society.13 One of the most successful of these organizations was the Club Alemán Vörwarts (German Workers Club), founded in 1882. The Vörwarts was avowedly socialist in orientation. The club engaged in electoral politics, but it had little success in winning over Italian and Spanish immigrants, who followed the anarchist line that any form of cooperation with a bourgeois system amounted to a betrayal of the masses.14 Taking advantage of an economic downturn in 1890, Vörwarts persisted in its “evolutionary political methods” and formed the Workers Federation of the Argentine Region (FTRA), but again the anarchists boycotted, reiterating that all forms of government were repressive.15 The anarchists competed with the socialists for control of the labor movement and for a time managed to dominate it. The immigrants may have been neophytes in a strange land, but among them were many veterans of class warfare. These militants, coming from such places as Barcelona and Naples, were well-versed in the ideas of the Russian anarchists Michael Bakunin (1814–1876) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). It didn’t matter whether the militants were followers of Bakunin or of Kropotkin, no form of government was acceptable to them, and revolution was the only means of bringing a government down. In its “organized indiscipline,” the individualist and extremist Bakuninist movement was highly decentralized, believing that

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the masses, not the leaders, must initiate action.16 The movement contained the proverbial bomb-throwers and assassins. Its vision of a new society would not have any police, because private property would not exist, and hence there would be no thievery; everything would be share-and-share-alike. The Kropotkinists were more structured in nature—that is, they were collectivist. They proposed to establish communes, where the sharing would be more orderly but where there would still be no top-down government to restrict individual freedom. Both anarchist groups clung to their ideas, managing to radicalize the Argentine laboring classes but at the same time retarding effective labor organization. Their uncompromising, all-or-nothing, violent tactics failed to advance the status of labor in the face of unicato resistance. Given these circumstances, toward the end of 1890s new arrivals and second-generation anarchists modified their stance to accord with the thinking of Georges Sorel (1847–1922).17 Sorel, the originator of syndicalism, shared the anarchists’ disgust for any form of central power and had as his ultimate goal a society made up of communes of workers who would control industrial and agricultural production. However, instead of employing terrorist tactics, Sorel encouraged the labor movement to organize and to utilize the general strike and mass demonstrations to achieve specific goals, such as the eight-hour day. Not all anarchists gave up on the idea of a “cure-all revolution,”18 but a tenuous anarcho-syndicalist movement emerged to provide yet another variant of anarchism. Whatever its philosophy, none of the anarchist movements accepted the deterministic theories that would have relegated the worker to bystander status, to await the right revolutionary moment or the evolution of a perfect society. Anarchism was an active force in the Argentine labor movement, especially during the 1890s until 1910, and surfacing again during the 1920s. Part of its strength stemmed from its effective leaders. Examples include the Italian immigrant Ettore Mattei, who founded the Circulo Comunista-Anarcho in 1884;19 Antonio Pellicer Paraire, a Bakuninist from Barcelona and the publisher of La Protesta (1909);20 and Pietro Gori, the organizer of the Argentine Regional Workers Federation (FORA) in 1901, which became the most important labor union for the next decade.21 Such leaders planned the first May Day celebration in Argentina in 1890. By the turn of the century, strikes and clashes with the police had become common. Roca, during his second term (1898–1904), declared that he had had enough of these “outside agitators,” and caused the enactment of the Ley de Residencia (Residence Law) in 1902, which provided for the summary deportation of “undesirable aliens.”22 Despite this stern measure, the anarchists were not deterred; in fact, they escalated their direct-action methods.

Argentina: The Socialist Ferment / 19

By 1902, the immigrant masses had been aroused.23 Frequent strikes, demonstrating a growing labor militancy, caused the government to declare a state of siege (that is, the suspension of constitutional guarantees) on five separate occasions, totaling eighteen months, between 1902 and 1910.24 Despite enduring “the most violent labor repression in the nation’s history,”25 the anarchist-led FORA grew in strength and attracted popular sympathy. FORA’s finest hour occurred on May Day, 1909, when it rallied between 200,000 and 300,000 workers in a general strike that lasted six days.26 Just as quickly, however, owing to a series of terrorist acts in the same year,27 the union’s fortunes fell. Aware that the anarchists were planning a general strike in 1910 to coincide with the centennial celebration of Argentine independence, the Congress enacted the Ley de Defensa Social (Social Defense Law), “designed to destroy the anarchist movement.”28 The act barred anarchists from entering Argentina and outlawed anarchist “meetings, slogans, and symbols.”29 Its enactment enabled the government to crush FORA, and it turned anarchists into “hunted criminals,”30 but it contributed to the fall of the unicato as well. Although the violence of the anarchists horrified the general population, their essential message—the need for a just society—had broad appeal. The Socialist Party had been working toward that end as well. The socialists had been competing with the anarchists for labor’s support since the first May Day celebration, in 1890. Most of the time, they ran a distant second to the anarchists, particularly after the formal organization of the Socialist Party in 1896. The party program lacked revolutionary fire, and its method of electoral politics suggested collaboration with the enemy. Only in the intellectual realm did the socialists lead and exert influence. Nonetheless, the Socialist Party responded to the socialist impulse in its way, and it contributed to the decline of the unicato. The principal leader of socialism in Argentina was Juan B. Justo (1865–1928), a surgeon, who founded the Socialist Party and remained at its head until his death. Justo represented the evolutionary style of socialism and shunned violence. According to Justo, he had not read the works of Marx before being attracted to socialism in 1893.31 His early influences included the scientific theories of Spencer and Darwin, and the modernizing concepts of Alberdi and Sarmiento— which is to say, a belief in the positive effects of education, immigration, and foreign capital. He became a socialist through his experiences in treating workers who he believed were the victims of unsafe workplaces and unhealthful living conditions.32 In 1894, Justo returned to Europe, where he had earlier studied medicine, but this time he went to study “the operations of socialists rather than surgeons.”33 This experience led him to Marx, under the tutelage of Belgian and

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French socialists (Emile Vandervelde and Jean Jaurès, respectively), and, during a stay in Spain, to translate Marx’s Das Kapital into Spanish.34 When he returned to Argentina, Justo organized the Socialist Party, in collaboration with other doctors, educators, and thinkers, among them Alfredo L. Palacios, Américo Ghioldi, and José Ingenieros. Despite his new acquaintance with Marxism, Justo remained more evolutionary than revolutionary and insisted on following the electoral path. In early elections, beginning in 1896, the Socialist Party candidates obtained a mere handful of votes. Electoral fraud accounted in part for the small tallies, but the Socialists were also appealing to an immigrant base that did not have the vote. The Socialists sought to ease the requirements for naturalization, but because registering to vote also made one eligible for military conscription, the effort was not very productive. Moreover, the Socialist Party’s platform was relatively mild. It advocated such items as universal suffrage, the eight-hour day, “the nationalization of basic industry,” and “protective labor legislation.”35 Although Justo sought to “free the country of economic imperialism,” he persisted in the Liberal concepts of attracting foreign capital and promoting free trade.36 Justo qualified his complaint about the drain on Argentine resources of English capital by observing: “May capital come in all good time—but the capitalists ought to come with it.”37 This moderate stance caused defections. José Ingenieros (1877–1925) gave up “his connection with the Socialist Party in 1899, but never his socialism.”38 He objected to Justo’s “reformist position” and argued for a revolutionary tone.39 In any event, Ingenieros was too much the cynic, the elitist, and the quintessential Darwinian to be effective in politics. He became influential as one of Latin America’s foremost thinkers through his journal, Revista de Filosofía, wherein he extolled youth, as it had “no complicity with the past.”40 His argument against capitalism was moral rather than economic, and cited “the need for revolution as a result of the use of the state as a political instrument by plutocratic capitalism and the loss of moral quality under the heartless competition of the capitalistic régime.”41 As evidenced by the intellectual impact of the strong-willed Ingenieros, it would be misleading to measure the socialist impulse by the actions of organized parties alone. Ingenieros’s defection did not degrade the Socialist Party, for his independent activities likely enhanced its appeal. In 1904, the party’s perseverance paid off, with the election of Alfredo L. Palacios (1880–1966) to the Chamber of Deputies. His election launched a brilliant career in law and education. As an outstanding speaker and a nimble debater, Palacios became one of socialism’s most effective spokespersons in Argentina and

Argentina: The Socialist Ferment / 21

throughout the hemisphere. Palacios supported Justo’s parliamentary policy, but rejected the scientific, positivist approach that Ingenieros was fixated upon. He admired the works of Jaurès, Marx, and the German socialist Karl Kautsky, but he maintained that socialism had Argentine roots in the writings and actions of the intellectual-activists Mariano Moreno, Esteban Echeverría, and Bernardino Rivadavia.42 Despite being the lone Socialist deputy in the Chamber, Palacios rose to speak regularly and with effect. He denounced police brutality in labor disputes and condemned the Residence Law.43 He cooperated with Catholic deputies in the 1904–5 session to enact the “Sunday rest law,”44 which closed “all stores in the Federal District on Sunday.”45 And he alone secured passage of Law 5291, which prohibited the employment of children less than ten years of age and restricted nighttime or other “unsuitable” labor for children under sixteen.46 As modest as these measures might appear, they indicated that Argentina was on the verge of significant change. The unicato’s enactment of the Social Defense Law and the subsequent crackdown on FORA, and anarchists in general, were in reality final acts of desperation. The unicato had exercised power for thirty years, and time and circumstance now caught up with it. The combination of the anarchists’ agitation and the socialists’ perseverance, plus the economic and social changes taking place in the country, caused certain elements of the unicato to recognize that the choice before them was reform or revolution. Former president Carlos Pelligrini (1890–92) broke with Roca in 1904 over the need for electoral reform, and, despite Pelligrini’s death in 1906, his faction overrode Roca’s authority and elected Roque Sáenz Peña to the presidency in 1910. The new president “promptly” sent to Congress a bill providing for the secret, compulsory ballot for every male citizen eighteen years of age and older.47 The Sáenz Peña law, enacted in 1912, ended the oligarchy’s absolute control of elections and may have averted violent revolution.48 In the elections of that year, Palacios and Justo won seats in the Chamber, but the principal beneficiary of the electoral reform law was the Radical party. The Radical party (the Radical Civic Union, or UCR) arose in 1891 as part of a protest movement by prominent politicians against the prevailing authoritarianism. The Radical party represented elements of the middle class that opposed the unicato and advocated “popular democracy.”49 Its slogan, “Revolution and Abstention,” mimicked that of the anarchists, but avoided any connection with the government and its acts of repression. By abstaining from the electoral process, the UCR denied legitimacy to the unicato and was able to occupy the moral high ground. The style of its leader, Hipólito Yrigoyen (1850–1930), enhanced the party’s “moral force, moral prestige.”50

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Yrigoyen was a strange person. He was enigmatic and secretive, he avoided public speeches and appearances, his attire and personal habits were austere, and his writings were “nonsense,”51 which added up to a mystique that was compelling. Guiding Yrigoyen’s conduct was the philosophy of Karl Christian Krause, who believed that one could make a more perfect society by living in the image of God and following one’s conscience (which was God within).52 “Krausism held that human beings and society as a whole were capable to being perfected.”53 Although the Radicals appeared to move to the left, they presented no specific program and relied solely on the perception of having worn down the oligarchy. It was enough to elect Yrigoyen as president in 1916. The fact that the Radical party occupied the presidency from 1916 to 1930 may lead one to conclude that the socialist impulse was diminished, but that would be mistaken. The strength of the Radical party rested not upon what it promised explicitly, but upon what it represented implicitly—which is to say, it was anti-unicato. Moreover, despite the Sáenz Peña law, a huge number of Argentines (those not naturalized) were still disfranchised. Among the laboring classes, expectations were high; among the oligarchy, the Radicals were tolerated as the lesser of evils. Beyond the political arena, the far left unions were slowly recovering from the repression of 1910. The syndicalists reorganized FORA as FORA IX (the new name taken from the union’s Ninth Congress), and by following a pragmatic approach in cooperation with Yrigoyen, they dominated the labor movement from 1915 to 1922.54 Within artistic-intellectual circles, the “Generation of 1910” produced an impressive protest literature that attacked trusts and monopolies and slum conditions in the style of the muckrakers in the United States.55 The clearest example of the vitality of the socialist impulse was the university reform movement. The movement that began at the University of Córdoba in March 1918 was a cardinal event for the socialist impulse in Argentina and the hemisphere. It began modestly with demands for students’ rights and curriculum changes, and ended with a radical overhaul of the university’s governance and mission.56 In­ genieros had been informing Argentina’s youth that the World War then raging was proof of the collapse of European civilization (especially capitalism and imperialism) and of the U.S. model as its heir.57 The revolutions occurring in Mexico and Russia further “radicalized” the university reform movement.58 With the backing of the Yrigoyen administration—“one of its more positive and lasting achievements”59—the students won all their demands. Key among them were student representation in university government and an enhanced role for the social sciences in order to confront national issues.60 The university ceased to

Argentina: The Socialist Ferment / 23

be an elite institution, “an ‘ivory tower’ of classical learning.”61 Indeed, it now became a hotbed for radical activism. The Córdoba reform spread to other universities in Argentina and abroad. Although the movement avoided partisan affiliation, socialists and the Socialist Party embraced it enthusiastically. While the students of Córdoba agitated for their demands, Justo spoke forcefully on their behalf in the Chamber of Deputies.62 At the University of La Plata, the philosopher Alejandro Korn (1860–1936) aided the students in their efforts to extend la reforma there. Korn, a confirmed foe of positivism for its treatment of human beings as cogs in a machine, extolled “the autonomy of the human personality.”63 Socialist deputy Palacios rallied the students of the University of Buenos Aires, where he was a law professor, and also traveled to Bolivia and Peru to spread the message of university reform and socialism. In Chile, Peru, Mexico, Cuba, and elsewhere, students turned their national universities into centers of revolutionary thought and action. Amidst this radicalism came a reminder that the oligarchy still had teeth and could bite hard. What came to be known as La Semana Trágica (the Tragic Week, January 7–14, 1919) began as a limited strike by metallurgical workers. The government’s forceful action in suppressing the strike led to a reaction and the call for a general strike by FORA IX. In the context of the worldwide Red Scare, the police and vigilante bands attacked the strikers and launched a hunt for “Bolsheviks.” Abetted by the army and navy, the vigilantes formed the Argentine Patriotic League (Liga Patriótica Argentina) and went on a killing rampage, with the numbers of victims running into the hundreds. The league targeted immigrants, particularly Russian Jews, “who were falsely accused of masterminding a Communist conspiracy.”64 The terror tactics of the league and the new hard line of the army and navy broke the hold of FORA IX over the labor movement and sent the anarchists into hiding again. The Socialist Party was too fragmented to fill the void. The party began to splinter in 1915, when Palacios was expelled for advocating “creole nationalism.”65 Palacios and Manuel Ugarte (whom the party had removed earlier) espoused protectionism as a means of stimulating Argentine manufacturing and defending the nation against foreign economic domination. Their views conflicted with those of Justo, a free-trader who believed that foreign capital properly regulated could accelerate the evolutionary process of development.66 Justo favored the nationalization of key industries as the end goal, but believed that foreign capital could play a positive role in the meantime. Palacios went his own way and formed the Argentine Socialist Party (PSA), accusing the

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Socialist Party of having become inbred and of blocking the rise of young new leaders.67 Another division occurred over the question of Argentina’s role in the First World War, when a group favoring absolute neutrality formed the International Socialist Party (PSI). This group affiliated with the Third International in January 1921 and became the Communist Party, the most serious breach in the socialist movement.68 Nevertheless, Justo maintained the Socialist Party’s nonviolent, electoral profile. He won election to the Senate in 1924, and that year the party achieved its highest total in the Chamber, with eighteen seats.69 Moreover, the Socialist Party managed to control the one union that remained strong and effective during the 1920s, the Railroad Workers Union (UF), which, in turn, dominated the Argentine Workers Confederation (COA), established in 1926.70 On the political scene, the Radical party continued to occupy the presidency and to drift. In the 1922 presidential election, Marcelo T. de Alvear succeeded Yrigoyen. Alvear was even less inclined to meet the expectations of the popular classes than Yrigoyen was, and Yrigoyen cynically railed against him, splitting the Radicals in two. He engaged in a campaign of demagoguery and “blatant rabble-rousing,”71 and exploited anti-foreign sentiment, accusing the English-owned railroads and the U.S. meatpacking companies (Armor and Swift) of monopolistic practices. He became the undeserving beneficiary of the intellectual ferment of Buenos Aires, wherein “Marxism, socialism, bohemianism, and anarchism mingled.”72 Samuel Glusberg (the pseudonym of Enrique Espinoza) and Victoria Ocampo were among the literati who sponsored forums and published works of radical thinkers from throughout the hemisphere, including those of Waldo Frank (United States), José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru), Jorge Mañach and Juan Mari­ nello (Cuba), and Alfonso Reyes (Mexico).73 Ingenieros and Palacios promoted the idea of a Unión Latino Americana, urging a “new generation” of Latin Americans to resist “the invasion from the north,” and calling for “social justice, national sovereignty, democracy, and nationalization of natural resources.”74 Indeed, the nationalization of Argentina’s petroleum industry was the central issue of the 1928 presidential election, and Yrigoyen led the charge. Yrigoyen won the election, pledging to establish a state oil monopoly with control over all producing fields as well as petroleum “refining, subproducts, and distribution.”75 Although the Socialists accused him of opportunism, economic nationalism was one of the few specific principles that Yrigoyen openly avowed.76 In 1922, Yrigoyen had created a public entity, the Dirección Nacional de los Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), to supervise the nation’s oil deposits, as a replacement for the private companies (mainly foreign) that had been

Argentina: The Socialist Ferment / 25

performing that function.77 In the 1928 election, he took the fight to the highest level—nationalization—with a choice target: Standard Oil of New Jersey. This maneuver gave him an overwhelming victory at the polls, but he failed to prevail in the Senate. Yrigoyen was like the Wizard of Oz: he was the figure behind the curtain manipulating a big-screen illusion of omnipotence and empathy for the common folk. This posture served him in good times, when he could spend and dispense patronage, but when economic depression hit Argentina hard in 1930, his wizardry no longer worked. For some time, the army and extreme right-wing elements had had misgivings about the Sáenz Peña law. They viewed popular democracy in a negative light, regarding it as incompetent, unstable, corrupt, and, worst of all, ineffective against the threat of communism.78 With the downturn in the economy and Yrigoyen’s failure to live up to expectations, along with rumors that he was senile, even the university students demonstrated against him. The army, encouraged by Yrigoyen’s declining popularity, seized the opportunity to overthrow him on September 6, 1930. General José F. Uriburu and his successors instituted a thirteen-year military dictatorship that was fascist in orientation.79 The generals suppressed radical thought and action, but they could not wipe out forty years of ferment. That spirit of ferment continued to guide the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), founded on September 27, 1930, through the joint action of the socialist COA and the syndicalist Unión Sindical Argentina (USA). In time, the CGT became Argentina’s “most enduring and effective central labor organization.”80 The socialist impulse also found expression in the pages of the literary magazine Sur, founded by Victoria Ocampo in 1931. The Socialist Party continued to participate in elections, but was weakened by further divisions following the death of Justo in 1928. The generals kept a close watch on “subversives,” but failed to take into account that the socialist impulse might exist within their own ranks. At some point in his career, Colonel Juan Perón became convinced of the need for radical economic change and that social justice for the gente de pueblo should be a key element of that change. The rise to power of Juan Perón in 1943 was not the end of the socialist impulse in Argentina; it was the culmination. This assertion will be tested in chapter 13, but consider: “Much of the social legislation either introduced or implemented by Perón . . . originated with the Socialist Party.”81 What took almost fifty years to develop in Argentina required less than half that time for the country of Uruguay, just across the Río de la Plata.

2

Uruguay Batlle’s Way

In 1900 Uruguay did not appear to be on the threshold of becoming a socialist state. It was just beginning to enjoy a degree of political stability and economic prosperity after nearly a century of turbulence marked by civil wars and military interventions by its two large neighbors, Argentina and Brazil. During that turbulent century, two factions—the Blancos (whites/conservatives) and the Colorados (reds/liberals)—had made war on one another. And each time the two groups fought, Argentina or Brazil had intervened, seeking to take advantage of the situation. To these two giant predators, Uruguay was either the Banda Oriental (Argentina’s East Bank) or the Cisplatina (Brazil’s side of the river). Uruguay was a buffer state created to keep Argentina and Brazil apart. From 1872 to 1890, a series of Uruguayan military dictators with positivist ideas imposed peace between the two factions, which encouraged economic growth. Uruguay benefited from the same set of conditions that promoted Argentina’s prosperity at the beginning of the twentieth century, albeit on a smaller scale. Uruguay’s land use mainly consisted in sheep ranching, which produced wool and meat for export. With political stability came foreign investment and immigrants. English capital built railroads and helped improve the port city and capital of Montevideo. Immigrants made significant economic change possible. When Uruguay first became independent in 1830, the country had fewer than 60,000 inhabitants, but by 1900 the population stood at one million, of which 400,000 were immigrants, largely from Italy and Spain. In 1889, 68.6 percent of the working population of Montevideo was foreign born.1 Living and working

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conditions were hard, but probably not as desperate as conditions across the river in Argentina, owing to the higher ratio of immigrant to creole stock and the lack of an effective oligarchy with its attendant repressive machinery in place. Immigrants in Uruguay tended to abstain from politics, following the anarchist line, and they refrained from the feuding that flared up once again between the Blancos and Colorados at the turn of the century. Up to the early decades of the twentieth century, the Blancos were mainly rough-hewn warrior ranchers, quite distinct from the wealthy landowner class of Argentina. Their strength was concentrated in the northern departments along the Brazilian border, where they had close ties with the farrapos, the former Brazilian separatists of Rio Grande do Sul. The Colorados were urban-oriented, influenced by the modernizing ideas of the Argentine Liberals. In 1897, President Juan Lindolfo Cuestas (1897–1903), a Colorado, reached a modus vivendi with the Blanco caudillo Aparicio Saravia, under which the Blancos received control (virtual autonomy) over six departments in the North. This arrangement was called “coparticipation,” but it was, in effect, divided government. In January 1904, the truce between the Blancos and the Colorados was broken, and eight months of warfare ensued. By then, José Batlle y Ordóñez (1856–1929) was president, and he was determined to disarm the Blancos, now called the “Nationalists,” and end the policy of divided government in Uruguay. With the death of Saravia in battle in September, Batlle imposed a peace that deprived the Blancos of their territorial control but pledged to respect their status as a minority party in the national congress. This task completed, Batlle turned his attention to the radical change he envisioned. Batlle was driven by the socialist impulse, but he concealed this propensity until he had solidified his political base and unified the country. His was a peaceful revolution, made after transforming the Colorado Party into an electoral machine and acquiring political power. His first term in the presidency (1903–7) was a period of consolidation of power and unification of the nation that set the stage for the political, economic, and social transformation of Uruguay that would be initiated during his second term (1911–15). Batlle is described by his biographer, Milton I. Vanger, as “the creator of his times,”2 whereas M. H. J. Finch has argued that he was “the creation of his times.”3 In reviewing Batlle’s career and accomplishments, a stronger case can be made for Thomas Carlyle’s “great man” theory of history than for that of Karl Marx or any of the determinist school. This is essentially Vanger’s position, as opposed to Finch’s when he asserts that “the ideology of batllismo was fundamentally middle class or petty bourgeois in character.”4 Marxist thinkers have failed to grasp the basic humanistic

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philosophy of Latin American socialism: rooted in Kant, Krause, and Bergson, and espousing “moral imperative” and “creative evolution,” it runs the gamut from Batlle to Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Batlle’s impulse toward socialism was formed early in his life, and, of course, environment played a role. Batlle had been born into a distinguished family that fell on hard times when he was in his teens. His father, General Lorenzo Batlle, a businessman and military figure, had served as president of Uruguay from 1868 to 1872, during which time he was so overwhelmed by political problems that he neglected the family milling business (the Molino Uruguayo). When he left office, an army pension was his only means of support.5 For the succeeding two decades, José Batlle harbored resentment toward the military dictators that succeeded his father in office. As a student in law and philosophy at the University of Montevideo, he participated in debates on “religion and philosophy,” but he cloaked his criticism of the then reigning Colonel Lorenzo Latorre. The university students had organized an Ateneo, wherein the Idealists (holding that “Man’s attributes [are] innate”) debated the Positivists.6 As a member of the former group, Batlle identified with his mentor, Prudencio Vázquez y Vega, who condemned positivism, blaming “its relativistic morality for encouraging men to collaborate with military dictatorship.”7 Vázquez used as a text the Course on Natural Law, by the Belgian Krausist Heinrich Ahrens, which “exalted the human personality and made proposals for the reform of society based on the innate dignity of man.”8 This book deeply affected Batlle’s thinking. In 1907 Batlle told the Argentine socialist Alfredo Palacios that the Course on Natural Law was the one book that had had the greatest influence on him. He wrote that it served “as guide in [his] public life.”9 Ahrens’s emphasis on “innate human morality” was straight out of Kant’s categorical imperative, which Ahrens defined as: “Do good for good itself, without consideration of reward or penalty.”10 And it reflected Krause’s concept of finding God in conscience: “Society was a spiritual and not a biological organism; it represented the conscience of its individual components and permitted man to attain personal liberty.”11 Batlle manifested the Krausist philosophy in his somber apparel and plain lifestyle. He was also persuaded by the ideas of the U.S. socialist Henry George (1839–1897) concerning the taxing of unimproved land and the need to overcome “the injustice of society.”12 Batlle determined to make overcoming injustice his life’s work. In 1883 he abandoned his studies in law and philosophy and turned his energies full time to politics. Batlle tempered his idealism with practicality. He believed that nothing could be achieved without power. He thus set about developing the Colorado Party

Uruguay: Batlle’s Way / 29

into a genuine political machine that could impose discipline and win elections. He wanted to take politics off the battlefield and put it on the stump. In 1886 he began editing a newspaper, El Día, wherein he attacked the colonels then in power and called for free elections and the restoration of civilian authority. Up to the time he ran for president, in 1902, Vanger writes, “Batlle always concentrated his preaching on political questions, not on social reform.”13 In private, however, he continued his philosophical “ruminations,” confiding his thinking on one occasion to President Julio Herrera y Obes (1890–97), whose reaction was, “Why, man, you’re a Socialist!”14 But Batlle knew how politics worked, and that the president was elected indirectly by the Senate, so he kept the socialist impulse to himself. In the 1903 presidential race, Batlle’s campaign was based on pure politics, employing an old-fashioned politicking within the Colorado bloc but also aided by the ineptness of the Blanco leadership. Despite the “legend” of “an aroused mass calling for social justice, and Batlle heeding the call,”15 Batlle’s triumph that year had nothing to do with any promise of social reform. His promises were exclusively political.16 Such behavior was more Machiavellian than Krausist, but Batlle was playing by the rules of the game in order to provide the “remedy” for “the tremendous injustice” being borne by the disfranchised workers.17 When asked “if the prize was worth the effort,” Batlle replied that “he was not thinking in terms of a four year presidency but was thinking of the effects for the next thirty or forty years.”18 Finch contends that since he achieved political power through compromise, Batlle’s program, in economic terms, can not be seen as “radical.”19 Batlle may have followed a peaceful and pragmatic election strategy, as opposed to revolutionary action, but once he had achieved the power to act, he would unleash the socialist impulse without limitations. All of this took time, however. The first two years of Batlle’s presidency were absorbed by conflict with the Blancos. Aparicio Saravia, the Blanco leader, was still armed, and his loyalty to the state was in question. Saravia’s relationship with the Brazilian gauchos of Rio Grande do Sul also caused concern. The frontier with Brazil was not secure, in any event, and there were repeated cross-border incidents, especially in the town of Rivera. Batlle’s efforts to assert his authority there, particularly through the appointment of municipal officials, were resisted by Saravia as a violation of the policy of coparticipation. After a year of bitter contention, Saravia rose up in revolt in January 1904. The fighting, often bloody, continued until September, when Saravia was mortally wounded in battle. Batlle himself had survived an assassination attempt in August.

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As Vanger points out, the war “was not a class war,”20 being more in the nature of the Blanco-Colorado clashes of old. However, it did establish the political supremacy of Montevideo, and it relieved Batlle of “the promises he had been obliged to make as a presidential candidate.”21 The war thus removed a major obstacle to the socialist impulse, but now Batlle only had two years left to his presidency. He intended to obey the Constitution and not succeed himself, which meant that he now had to divide his time between governing and maintaining his constituency, in order to assure a return to office in 1911. Nevertheless, he began to provide clues about the direction in which he was headed. For one, Batlle became more open about his attitude toward foreign capital. He opposed foreign capital that took profits out of Uruguay. In the fashion of the Argentine socialist Juan Justo, Batlle declared that foreign capital was welcome only insofar as it was accompanied by its capitalist.22 In expressing his resistance to foreign capital, Batlle made his first moves toward the creation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In 1906 the English and German companies that owned the Montevideo trolley lines sought to electrify the system, and proposed either buying the municipally owned power plant or building one of their own. Batlle was against both alternatives.23 He submitted legislation that laid the groundwork for the eventual nationalization of electric power and a government takeover of the trolley lines as well. His accompanying message made his intentions clear: “The experience of those nations which have taken over the furnishing of electric light and power . . . demonstrates that only operation by public administration can meet the needs of this public service.”24 In affirming that Uruguay’s industrial policy ought to be “service not profit,”25 Batlle revealed that he was not friendly toward private capital, foreign or domestic, though he would handle each differently. The companies of foreign capitalists who took their profits out of Uruguay would be nationalized. And Uruguayan capitalists would be stripped of their wealth, “through stiff inheritance taxes at their death.”26 Moreover, Batlle planned to tax them along the way. Batlle was strongly influenced by the ideas of Henry George relating to the land tax. George argued that it was population pressure, not any act of the landowner, that caused land to increase in value, and that society had the right to reclaim such “unearned increment” through taxation. In imposing a modest levy on rural properties in 1903, Batlle cited George, who wrote, in Progress and Poverty, that “society, not the landowner, was responsible for rises in land values.”27 Through taxation, Batlle intended to “end profit in land ownership . . . and encourage more intensive land use.”28 If Batlle was hard on capital, he was easy on labor. When he became president,

Uruguay: Batlle’s Way / 31

there existed little legislation regulating working conditions, and his office had no authority in labor disputes. Anarcho-syndicalists dominated the Uruguayan Regional Workers Federation (FORU), which did not gain strength until around 1914. In the meantime, the group shunned political activity, remaining on the sidelines during the War of 1904, and abstaining from any direct labor action, such as the general strike of workers in 1906. For his part, Batlle did not treat the FORU as undesirable aliens, and he even provided refuge in Uruguay to anarchists who had been expelled from Argentina. Anarchists of every variety were aware “that they had a friend at the top.”29 The Socialist Party, under Emilio Frugoni, likewise viewed Batlle in a favorable light, as “an exceptional figure within the bourgeois system.”30 Batlle was no Marxist, but he understood the concept of the “surplus value of labor,” and he was convinced that the workers were not getting their due share. Moreover, he felt that Uruguayan workers endured hunger and overwork, and he respected the efforts of anarchists and socialists to overcome this misery. This attitude manifested itself in May 1905, when Uruguay experienced its largest strike to that time. In 1905 eleven thousand port workers went on strike, demanding union recognition, an eight-hour day, and better pay. The strike lasted a month before the strikers conceded defeat, having been unable to match the resources of the employers. The strike exposed the weakness of Uruguay’s unions and the lack of any legal authority on Batlle’s part to intervene. The best he had been able to do was to instruct the police to remain neutral, and to consult with Frugoni in a futile effort to bring the opposing parties together. Batlle learned from the experience, however. His true feelings were vented in a series of editorials written by Domingo Arena, Batlle’s confidant and the editor of El Día. In them, Arena condemned the employers’ efforts to blame the strike on “foreign agitators.” “Exploitation of workers,” he wrote, “not the machinations of agitators, caused strikes.”31 As for agitators, he suggested that it was just such “agitators” who had initiated “the great new ideas of all times.”32 “Socialism, for example, whatever may be its errors and utopianisms contains a great and unanswerable truth . . . that evils are perpetuated within the existing social system.”33 The strike taught Batlle that the struggle between labor and capital was unequal and that the government would have to take sides. As one of his last acts before leaving office, Batlle introduced legislation that would have provided for the eight-hour day and six-day work week. He then sailed for Europe, in March 1907, on a fouryear, self-imposed exile. In a remarkable display of his political power, however, Batlle continued to exercise control over the Colorado Party, so as to assure his return to the presi-

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dency in 1911. He hand-picked Claudio Williman to sit in for him during his absence. Williman was no toady, but neither did he have an independent constituency. Batlle stayed away so as not to humiliate him, and Williman remained loyal for that. During Batlle’s first two years in the presidency, he had asserted the authority of the central government throughout the national territory, and in so doing had made the Colorados the dominant political party in the country. The party faithful were deeply indebted to him. The achievement of national unity and political stability had not left Batlle much time to fulfill the socialist impulse, but he had made a number of beginnings. He had begun the process of nationalizing basic industry with the creation of the state-owned electric power system. His land tax initiative was confiscatory, not merely redistributive in nature. And although he had made no effort to organize the Colorado Party as a labor party, his advocacy of the eight-hour day caused workers to be anxious for his return. If the workers experienced anxiety, Batlle’s frustration must have been excruciating. He could only spend so much time studying, observing, and sightseeing. Moreover, Batlle’s ideas for transforming Uruguay had been set long before he went to Europe. Vanger reports that he told Alfredo Palacios, prior to his departure, that “he didn’t know if he was Socialist, . . . [but] more than once I have tried to put into practice socialist ideas which appear to me to be very acceptable.”34 According to Vanger, what he sought in Europe were “practical ways of implementing his plans . . . [including] enterprises the state could operate effectively.”35 He did pick up one new idea: during a three-month stay in Switzerland he became intrigued with the concept of the plural executive, which he later tried to put in place in Uruguay. By 1910, Batlle’s patience was nearing exhaustion, but he continued to stay away in deference to Williman. The year 1910 was an election year, and the majority of the Colorado candidates for the Chamber of Deputies and Senate (it was the latter body who would elect the president in March 1911) were pro-Batlle. The Blancos/Nationalists, in a frenzy over Batlle’s inevitable victory, expressed their fear of his “socialist and revolutionary ideas.”36 The so-called Radical Nationalists even attempted an armed uprising in October–November, and failing at that (with heavy casualties), the Blanco/Nationalist Party then abstained from the elections in December. With the abstention of the Nationalists and the anarchists (as usual), Frugoni saw an opportunity for the Socialist Party to win a few congressional seats, but not at the expense of Batlle or his party. Indeed, in a manifesto stating the party’s position, Frugoni, a devotee of Edward Bernstein,37 endorsed Batlle “as the only candidate who [can] be considered a sure

Uruguay: Batlle’s Way / 33

pledge of a government respectful of the rights and demands of the working class.”38 With his election to a second term certain, Batlle was at last ready to return home. Batlle had remained relatively noncommittal during the 1910 campaigning, but, according to Vanger, he wrote from Europe to his “confidants” in Uruguay that “he intended to make Uruguay a model country, to transform and expand its economy, reduce foreign control of the national wealth, . . . [and that] he wanted to redeem the ‘disinherited classes.’”39 Vanger adds that the key words here were “model country.” Batlle was no populist playing to the crowd: he did not campaign openly about his plans for transforming Uruguay into his vision of a just society, nor did he reveal that he was driven by the socialist impulse. The Blancos/Nationalists, of course, suspected the worst, and rumors of assassination plots circulated widely. Batlle returned to Uruguay in secrecy and was sworn in as president. He immediately picked up where he had left off four years earlier, by reintroducing the bill for an eight-hour day that had languished in his absence. Batlle’s actions in his first year after returning had the appearance of urgency. He knew now that his time would be limited, so he quickly offered up a host of projects and legislative proposals. Acting on a 1906 report that indicated that fully two-thirds of Montevideo’s conventillos (tenements) “lacked adequate light, air, and space,” Batlle ordered an inspection of these buildings, giving their owners one year to make any necessary improvements.40 In a similar fashion, he assessed property owners for two-thirds of the cost of paving Montevideo’s streets. In May, Uruguay experienced the first general strike in its history. When some trolley workers were fired for trying to institute a union, FORU called for a general strike in retaliation. During the strike, Batlle’s sympathy for the strikers was clear, even though the Federation’s declared objective was “the achievement of Anarcho-Communism.”41 The strike ended when the trolley workers received a pay increase, which pleased Batlle, since that meant that less money would be leaving Uruguay to line the pockets of the stockholders of the trolley companies who resided in London and Berlin. Batlle would act to keep even less money from leaving Uruguay, by creating the Tranvía del Norte, a state-owned trolley company that would be dedicated to service, not profits. Battle’s friend, the journalist Domingo Arena, wrote that the state enterprise would pay and treat its personnel “better than anywhere else,” would expand service “even [to] where there [were] no immediate profits,” and would charge lower rates, “so that not only workers but poor people [could] all use the cheap trolley.”42 The creation of the Tranvía del Norte

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was actually the initial step in the nationalization of Uruguay’s entire railway system, a feat that Batlle had accomplished by 1914. The creation of this and other state enterprises was facilitated by Batlle’s nationalization of the Bank of the Republic. Batlle secured approval of his plan to convert the Bank of the Republic into a state-owned bank in July 1911. The bank had been operating successfully since 1896 as a mixed public-private enterprise, but Batlle’s plans called for it to become a “colossus”—the engine of growth for financing state enterprises and promoting national development.43 He quickly followed nationalization of the Bank of the Republic with a proposal to create a national insurance bank, in effect, a vehicle that would create a state insurance monopoly. Despite vigorous objections from the British government, Batlle prevailed, and the measure to create the insurance bank became law on October 11. Finance Minister José Serrato brushed off charges that the measure was socialist, commenting wryly: “If by socialism one means the improvement of the working class, the raising of their culture, their means of existence and their human dignity, . . . then this project is clearly socialist.”44 Batlle then completed a hat trick, with the June 1912 nationalization of the Mortgage Bank (Banco Hipotecario). Serrato again served as spokesperson, explaining that, together, the nationalized Mortgage Bank and the Bank of the Republic would enable the state to “direct and orient bank credit, influencing the general direction of the economy, which cannot be left exclusively to private institutions.”45 Batlle next developed a new taxation strategy, which included land and inheritance taxes and tariffs. Batlle did not adopt Henry George’s thesis about the single tax, but he did borrow George’s land tax idea as one way to force farmers and ranchers to practice intensive agriculture and to force urban lot-owners to put up buildings.46 As for inheritance taxes, Batlle believed they could be used to provide opportunities for impoverished individuals to develop their talents, thus serving as an equalizer for future generations.47 Batlle’s taxation policy was hard on private capital, but his tariff policy was protectionist, designed to stimulate domestic production. To this end, he secured passage of a tariff on sarnífugo (sheep dip) in November 1911, which quickly stimulated local production.48 Beyond steering economic development, Batlle’s tax proposals were intended to tax away personal wealth in order to create a just society. In mid-June 1912, referring to the needs of unwed mothers and illegitimate children, he revealed his vision: “The State, owner of all great fortunes or at least a large part of them, will be able to support the woman and educate the child.”49 This statement is yet another indication that Ahrens’s concept of “innate hu-

Uruguay: Batlle’s Way / 35

man morality” strongly influenced Batlle’s socialist impulse. Thus, Batlle’s educational projects also were driven by a sense of equality and doing good. They included the establishment of liceos (secondary schools) in all nineteen departments of the nation (1911), the founding of a women’s university (1912), and the introduction of free secondary education (1914) and free university tuition (1915). Batlle proposed to make up for tuition shortfalls by doubling taxes on the property of out-of-country owners.50 Batlle also followed Ahrens in the arena of “moral legislation,” treating such matters as “the end of the death penalty, the rights of illegitimate children, divorce, [and] the banning of brutal sports like bullfighting.”51 In 1914, Batlle proposed a bill that would have banned any “game or entertainment which would cause mortification for men or animals.”52 This high moral tone permeated virtually all of the reforms of Batlle’s second term and beyond in areas such as women’s suffrage, the eight-hour day, the minimum wage, old-age pensions, compensation for work-related injury, and regulation of working conditions. Nevertheless, Batlle’s practical side made him aware that he needed to find a political strategy if he hoped to preserve his just society for all time. He believed he could accomplish this by converting the presidency into a plural executive. The idea of the Colegiado (collegial executive) was one that Batlle had been formulating since his visit to Switzerland in 1910. In it, he proposed to replace the president with a nine-member council of ministers, each elected separately and each responsible for a specific executive function, such as finance, foreign affairs, or industrial relations. This was Batlle’s way of protecting individual liberties and democracy while also preserving the collective economic and social order. The institution of the Colegiado was the first of Batlle’s ideas to encounter insurmountable resistance. The Nationalists (Blancos), suspecting that the proposal was merely a concealed grab for power, began arming themselves with guns supplied by their gaucho allies across the border in Brazil. Their threat of violence was reinforced by a group of dissidents from within the Colorado Party itself, among them the essayist José Enrique Rodó, one of Latin America’s leading thinkers. Rodó was an elitist and individualist. His belief in “classical and humanistic values over those of materialism and utilitarianism,” allowed him to see Latin America’s lag in economic development and technology, in comparison with the United States, as a virtuous thing.53 He feared that the Colegiado would be susceptible to division and indecision, and would result in a dictatorship, precisely the result Batlle’s proposal was intended to prevent.54 Despite his powerful hold over the Colorado Party, Batlle was forced to settle for a compromise.

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The compromise was embodied in the Constitution of 1919, enacted after Batlle left office. It established a modified form of a plural executive, creating a directly elected president with authority to appoint the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of War, and Minister of the Interior (national security), as well as a nine-member National Council of Administration, which would be responsible for overseeing the remaining (essentially, nonpolitical) ministerial functions. Domingo Arena had tried his best to sustain Batlle’s original proposal, arguing that the accusation that it was a scheme to continue Batlle in office was “an immense humbug,” and that innovation was imperative for the Colorado Party in order to “assimilate all the human, all the practical, all the accomplishable that isn’t utopian from the Socialist Party.”55 This candid revelation, during the debate on the Colegiado, shows that by this time the wraps were certainly off regarding Batlle’s socialist impulse. Similar admissions would be quick to follow. In July 1913 Feliciano Viera, who would become Batlle’s choice to succeed him as president, noted that Batlle’s “advanced” social legislation had made it “virtually unnecessary” for socialism “to exist” in Uruguay.56 That same month, Batlle appointed the secretary of the presidency, Virgilio Sampognaro, to be the police chief of Montevideo; the chief ’s duties included monitoring the conduct of the police during industrial strife. To the rumors that he was a Socialist, Sampognaro responded by denying any formal affiliations, stating, in an echo of Serrato, “If one means by Socialist, . . . the improvement of the proletarian class [and] the suppression of privilege, . . . how could I not declare myself a Socialist.”57 With the Colegiado issue still unresolved and elections coming up in 1914, Batlle sought to offset the opposition of the Nationalists, and of the dissidents within his own Colorado Party, by appealing to the workers and to the Socialist Party with the argument that “those who would be Socialists elsewhere should be Colorados in Uruguay.”58 Although Batlle did not achieve his proposal for the Colegiado, he did set in motion the process for creating a new constitution that would “institutionalize” the reforms of his two administrations.59 The Constitution of 1919 fulfilled his boast “that in Uruguay the Colorados would accomplish what Socialists elsewhere could only aspire to.”60 Batlle succeeded in making the public sector the dominant and directing force of the economy; he also put in place a social and welfare system aimed at ensuring Uruguayans a decent living, including time for leisure and culture. His successors in office would not possess his vision or his sense of “innate human morality,” but for as long as he remained alive Batlle would continue to dominate the Colorado Party and to exert his will. In 1928, the year before he died, the government would add the meatpacking industry to

Uruguay: Batlle’s Way / 37

its list of SOEs. More than any other industry, the addition of the meatpackers symbolized the extent of Uruguay’s socialist economy. How that economy stood the test of time is the subject of subsequent chapters, but it is worth noting here that Uruguay’s experience provides a concise example for analyzing the successes and failures of socialism. José Batlle, almost single-handedly, fulfilled the socialist impulse in Uruguay, whereas in other countries, in Chile, for example, the process involved more actors and took longer.

3

Chile The Road to Socialism

In 1970 Chile elected Salvador Allende Gossens, a socialist, as president of the republic. The election marked the end of a seventy-year journey on the road to socialism, a road that was “not linear,” but rather “a winding path that frequently turned back upon itself.”1 These detours were caused by the opposition of an entrenched landed oligarchy and a prussianized military, both buttressed by foreign interests in banking, commerce, and mining. Chile’s workers had set out on the road to socialism, to overcome poverty and gross exploitation amid economic prosperity, even despite these obstacles.2 Chile possessed rich mineral deposits (nitrate and copper) that were in demand on world markets, but its pseudo-aristocratic oligarchy lacked an entrepreneurial spirit. Their encouragement of foreign capital to come in and develop the mines worked fairly well during the nineteenth century. In 1830 Diego Portales (1793–1837) defeated the forces of the Liberals on the battlefield, and for most of the remainder of the century Chile’s Conservatives dominated that country’s political affairs. Although their power would begin to wane toward the end of the century, the Constitution of 1833, with its restricted suffrage, would provide them with enough leverage to exercise control until 1925, when the constitution itself would be replaced. At the beginning of their rule, the Conservatives could afford to be “enlightened”—exhibiting noblesse oblige, respecting individual rights, and promoting material development by using the money they received from the rent of the mines. Notwithstanding the misery of its masses, Chile acquired a reputation as a

Chile: The Road to Socialism / 39

constitutional republic, thereby attracting political exiles, who further enhanced the country’s liberal reputation. Andrés Bello, for example, the mentor of Simón Bolívar, had fled Venezuela for Chile, establishing the University of Chile in 1842 and making it a citadel of learning in the southern hemisphere. Likewise, Domingo F. Sarmiento, escaping the tyrannical regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas of Argentina, brought his pedagogical skills to Chile and helped create that country’s normal schools, another indicator of the government’s support for education. During the War of the Pacific (1879-83), Chile, alone among the Spanish American countries, actually expanded its national territory, earning the sobriquet, “Yankees of South America.” In that war, Chile conquered the nitrate provinces of Bolivia and Peru, adding to its wealth. But by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, progress was creating conditions that threatened order. In general, over time, the success of positivist philosophy in the economic sphere created social tensions that broke down the political regime. In 1886, after the removal of the property qualification for voting, Chile elected José Balmaceda, a Liberal, as president. Balmaceda’s efforts to undertake programs of social reform and public works would meet with Conservative resistance, but it was his attempt to assert executive authority over the Congress, the center of Conservative power, that would result in civil war. In a twist, the country’s reactionary forces accused Balmaceda of dictatorship and overthrew him, ushering in what became known as the Parliamentary Republic (1891–1925), a period marked by weak presidents and congressional rule. It was a time of notoriously bad government, but the congresistas were sustained by two factors: a professional army that had been trained by the legendary Prussian colonel Emil Körner, and the foreign mining companies and enterprises that thrived on the oligarchy’s laissez-faire attitude. Nevertheless, the system was in decay, and forces of change, driven by the socialist impulse, were in play. The roots of Chilean socialism, in fact, go back to the mid-nineteenth century. The Liberal Francisco Bilbao, in exile in France, had witnessed the revolutions of 1848, and he returned to Chile on fire, inspired by French utopian socialism. He founded the Society of Equality in 1850 and began publishing a newspaper, Friend of the People. Bilbao (d.1866) in a short life “founded and nurtured the romantic democratic movement of Chile which . . . emerged to victory by the twentieth century.”3 In 1887 the Democratic Party was organized as an incipient socialist movement. “For several decades it maintained more or less close relations with the Socialist parties of Europe and was a corresponding member of the Socialist International.”4 In Chile, however, the electoral route held little promise for the socialist impulse, especially during the Parliamentary Republic.

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Given the limited suffrage, the oligarchy was able to purchase seats in the Congress through political brokers (bosses) who manipulated the small number of eligible voters. The action for change rested outside the political arena, among the laboring elements, where the anarchists shone. At the beginning of the twentieth century, anarchism dominated the labor scene, especially among the urban workers of Santiago and Valparaiso.5 As noted, anarchists shunned the electoral process, believing any involvement with government betrayed the workers’ interests. They believed in direct action—strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, sabotage—as the means for bringing down “a corrupt society.”6 Owing to the fact that Chile did not experience the immigrant waves that Argentina and Uruguay did, the Chilean anarchists were essentially “homegrown.”7 They absorbed anarchist and socialist ideas through “printed sources,” such as El Perseguido, printed in Buenos Aires, and from anarchist “notables” who visited Chile on occasion.8 Because they were homegrown, and isolated geographically, the Chilean anarchists tended to be “ideological mavericks”— which is to say, they proved to be more “practical,” to the extent of bargaining with employers on bread-and-butter issues.9 Chilean anarchists began their activity by organizing mutual aid societies. In addition to insuring workers against misfortune, the societies propagated “revolutionary and reformist ideologies,” holding night classes and discussion groups and maintaining libraries stocked with the works of European radicals.10 Not satisfied with this passive activity, anarchists then formed “resistance societies,” which took a more militant stance and organized strikes. By the turn of the century, the resistance societies were evolving into unions. But true to their aversion to highly organized movements, the anarchists formed individual unions among the trades. “Revolutionary ideology most frequently penetrated unions composed of highly skilled, well-paid, and well-educated workers, which in turn spread Anarchist and Marxist ideas to the bajo pueblo.”11 However, when faced with the alternative of making a revolution or getting drunk, most workers apparently chose the latter, “alcoholism [being] a major force inhibiting the organization, economic betterment, and revolutionary potential of the working class.”12 Still, the anarchists did succeed in radicalizing the labor movement. The period from 1902 to 1907 was particularly violent. In 1902–3, the anarchists “led ten of thirteen strikes” in Santiago and Valparaiso.13 The Valparaiso maritime strike of April–May 1903 was particularly bloody, and “drove employers to the bargaining table.”14 And a May Day demonstration in 1906 attracted three thousand workers and “closed down many Santiago industries for the day.”15 The government condemned these events as acts of rebellion and sided with management in reprisals against strike leaders and organizers. It blamed the agitation

Chile: The Road to Socialism / 41

on “foreign subversives” (of which there were none) and proposed a “residence law” similar to one that had been passed in Argentina.16 In December 1907, the government sent troops to put down an anarchist-led strike in the nitrate camps around Iquique in the north, resulting in the massacre of a thousand miners. One of the leaders of this strike was Luis Emilio Recabarren (1876–1924), who rose to prominence during this period. Recabarren, as a Marxist, was more politically oriented than his anarchist comrades. A typographer by trade, he served as secretary-general of the Democratic Party and edited “several labor newspapers in the nitrate areas.”17 In 1909 he took another step out of character with anarchism and organized the Chilean Workers Confederation (FOCh). Three years later, he abandoned the Democratic Party and founded the Socialist Workers Party (POS). The new party “took root in outlying geographic zones of raw material specialization, production which was mainly for export and usually tied to foreign firms.”18 In 1922 Recabarren converted POS into the Communist Party of Chile and joined the Third International. The radicalization of the labor movement affected partisan politics, causing “an incipient leftward movement of the Chilean electorate . . . [and] building toward a long-term trend.”19 The socialist impulse was gaining momentum. Already in 1906 a group of “socially-conscious medical students”20 had formed the Chilean Students Federation (FECh). The students were likely influenced by Valentín Letelier, the rector of the National University of Chile (1906–16), a positivist with “suggestions of Marxian socialism.”21 In the second decade of the century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) began to organize Chilean workers, adding anarcho-syndicalism to this dynamic. An industrial union, the IWW tended to concentrate on hardscrabble industries—mining, lumbering, seafaring—whose workers, leathery men with calloused hands, lived together in company towns or camps, or on the docks or at sea. The IWW established its first local in Valparaiso in 1918, the result of contact between the “New York and California-based Marine Transport Workers’ Industrial Union of the IWW and Chilean dockers.”22 From then until 1927 the IWW organized locals in nineteen cities, although “few functioned for more than a year or two.”23 The IWW affiliation produced a “new generation” of anarchist leaders, such as Juan Onofre Chamorro, “a part-time sailor and operator of a butcher shop in Valparaiso’s market.”24 The IWW also attracted “young intellectuals of working-class origins,” who, as the “Generation of 1920,” composed a literary movement that produced works recording a particularly grim time for the Chilean masses.25 The misery of Chile’s workers was compounded by a downturn in the econ-

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omy. The workers, who shared little of the prosperity, absorbed the major share of the depression. The outbreak of the First World War raised expectations that the nitrate industry would prosper. It did not happen. With a British blockade in place, German scientists developed a process for the synthetic production of nitrogen. The result in Chile was economic depression and social unrest. During the period 1911 to 1920, there were “almost three hundred strikes involving more than 300,000 workers.”26 By 1919, the FOCh was avowedly Marxist, demanding “the abolition of the capitalist regime.”27 At the time, the socialist impulse was almost completely outside the political arena, but the agitation was beginning to attract politicians, who reacted “in a number of ways, ranging from the drafting of social legislation [workmen’s compensation] to increased repression [blacklisting].”28 Arturo Alessandri (1869–1950) was one of the “enlightened” politicians. A lawyer and senator, Alessandri was no socialist, but he observed the troubled society and determined that there was political capital to be made in addressing the workers’ grievances. Alessandri’s bid for the presidency in 1920 represented the beginning of the end for the Parliamentary Republic. He organized the Liberal Alliance and promised “the earth and sky to workers.”29 In doing so, he unwittingly brought the socialist impulse to the political scene. The POS leader, Recabarren, sensing both a challenge and an opening, entered the contest, supported by FOCh, the IWW, and the student federation, FECh, which had been “inspired by anarchism and socialism-communism.”30 Although “foreign elites considered [Alessandri] a quasi-socialist,”31 Recabarren and his followers branded him a “demagogic oligarch”32 and a fake who offered “false promises of a false evolutionism.”33 Alessandri won the election, touching off a decade of intense political conflict. Alessandri occupied the presidency, but the Congress refused to enact any of his programs. The expectations that he had aroused, plus the continuing economic crisis, caused a wave of strikes and retaliatory lockouts that at times brought Santiago and Valparaiso to a standstill. In addition, the Russian Revolution had divided the country’s socialists and hardened ideological lines. The Chilean road to socialism now became a multilane highway, with anarchists, syndicalists, anarcho-syndicalists, communists, and Marxist and non-Marxist socialists, each professing that their way was the surest route. The impasse between Alessandri and the Congress produced two military coups, the first in September 1924, which forced him to leave the country, and the second in January 1925, which restored him to office. After his restoration, Alessandri achieved the writing of the Constitution of 1925, which provided for the direct election of the president and established the voting age for literate males at twenty-one.

Chile: The Road to Socialism / 43

It further empowered the president to appoint and remove members of his cabinet. With the establishment of a balance between the executive and legislative branches, Alessandri was able to secure a labor code that legalized collective bargaining, set standards for safe and sanitary working conditions, and regulated the labor of women and children. However, hard economic times persisted, and the army, believing that its intervention in 1924–25 had been responsible for resolving that crisis, remained vigilant. Colonel Carlos Ibáñez (1877–1960), one of the leaders of the 1925 coup, emerged as strongman. He imposed his presidency in a special election in 1927, and the new executive powers suited him fine. Blaming Chile’s ills on communists, he declared upon taking office, “Henceforth, there will be in Chile neither Communism nor Anarchism.”34 He jailed labor leaders and deported “undesirables,” enforcing the Residence Law that had been enacted in 1918. He “crushed” free labor.35 Improved economic conditions and a major public works program helped sustain Ibáñez’s harsh rule for a time, but the Great Depression of 1929 reinvigorated the socialist impulse and swept the dictator aside. “[The] depression struck hard. . . . Out of the resulting chaos came a new style of national politics and a new breed of mass parties and leaders.”36 The socialist impulse dominated the 1930s. The overthrow of Ibáñez in 1931 and the persisting economic crisis stimulated the creation of five small parties that professed to be socialist.37 In the instability following the ouster of Ibáñez, however, intrigue replaced politics. Eugenio Matte Hurtado, the leader of Nueva Acción Pública (NAP) and editor of the Socialist daily, Claridad, conspired with Air Force colonel Marmaduke Grove Vallejo to overthrow President Juan Esteban Montero Rodríguez (in office less than a year) and establish the Socialist Republic of Chile. Their junta government lasted barely twelve days ( June 4–16, 1932), too short a time to fulfill its promise “to feed, clothe, and house the people.”38 The experience convinced Grove that it was factionalism among the socialists that caused them to fail. Upon his return from banishment to Easter Island, Grove managed to unite the five factions, and he formed the Socialist Party of Chile (PSCh) on April 19, 1933. For the first time in Chile, the socialist impulse was now embodied in a Socialist Party. The leadership of the new Socialist Party came largely from the middle sectors. The anarcho-syndicalist movement that had sustained the socialist impulse for three decades now assumed a supporting role. But to give it its due, “Six of the twelve members of the Central Directory of the Socialist Party in October 1933 were former Anarchists . . . who converted to revolutionary politics after the fall of Ibáñez.”39 The most prominent among them was Oscar Schnake, the

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leader of Acción Revolucionaria Socialista (ARS), who served as secretary general of the PSCh from 1933 to 1939. Schnake, along with Matte Hurtado and Grove, represented the “new breed” of leader. An avowed anarchist, member of the IWW in 1919, and a president of FECh while a medical student, Schnake agreed with Grove that divisiveness had been the undoing of the Socialist Republic. He urged the formation of a disciplined party, with cadres trained in socialist theory.40 To that end, he held regular sessions in his home for the study of socialist and related works in translation, including volume one of El Capital (translated by Juan B. Justo).41 Schnake believed in the necessity of unity between workers and intellectuals, so as to defeat “the landed oligarchy and national banking and financial institutions, allied with powerful foreign capitalism.”42 Matte Hurtado was of similar mind. Matte Hurtado was a lawyer by profession, and the Grand Master of the Masonic Order in Chile. Although he died in 1934 at the age of thirty-seven, Matte had a strong influence in the early orientation of the PSCh. Like Schnake, he favored multi-class (policlasista) cooperation, by which all the “victims” of capitalism acted in harmony. Accordingly, Matte eschewed class conflict in favor of “social cooperation and solidarity,”43 following a nonviolent, electoral path to achieve an “evolutionary state socialization of the means of production.”44 These concepts reveal the influence of the Peruvian Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and of aprismo (see chapters 8 and 9). Following the fall of the Socialist Republic, and while he was still in exile, Matte was elected senator, which gave him parliamentary immunity during the hectic early days of the PSCh. In his short life he attained a reputation as an eloquent speaker, rising in the Senate to condemn the “imperialistic spoliation” of Chile.45 Grove also was an effective speaker, but he was not as doctrinaire as Matte.46 Marmaduke Grove Vallejo (1879–1954) was a career military officer. He had taken part in the coup of January 1925 alongside Ibáñez. Described as a “late convert to socialism” and as “at heart an alessandrista,” Grove was idealistic, highly nationalistic, and influenced by the “napistas” (Matte) and the Masonic Order.47 He was flamboyant and charismatic: “Ibáñez once said of Grove, ‘He was born a revolutionary, as others are born blond or brunette.’”48 Grove was not a Marxist—he insisted he had not read “the major works of Marx,” although he criticized Marx’s concept of “class conflict.”49 As with Schnake and Matte, he adopted the policlasista position of worker and middle-class cooperation and solidarity in achieving the socialist order. He disagreed with Marx’s interpretation of history as well, relying more on Carlyle, that is, a belief in the “transcendence” of leaders and “heroes,” which accounted for his reputation as “the Socialist cau­ dillo.”50

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Grove popularized two issues that became the driving force of the socialist impulse for the next four decades: foreign ownership of the nation’s wealth and the injustice of the fundo (the Chilean term for latifundium). Addressing the First General Congress of the PSCh on December 31, 1933, Grove rebuked the owners of large estates, “promising to liberate the land and those who work it,” and he condemned international imperialism, “pledging to invalidate all international contracts.”51 Grove perceived “the fundamental mission of Chilean socialism to be the successful achievement of the second national independence, meaning the liberation of the country from underdevelopment, poverty, and imperialistic dependency and exploitation.”52 In 1934, Grove, then a senator, addressed the chamber on the issue of agrarian reform, declaring that the “hacendados would no longer live as parasites, al margen de la justicia, de la moral, y del orden.”53 Although the PSCh had defined its mission as “a struggle against the semifeudal agrarian oligarchy and the imperialist penetration by the monopolies of international capitalism,”54 the scholar Paul Drake observed: “For most Chileans, socialism during the Great Depression vaguely signified state mobilization to heal the economy and lessen the suffering of the disadvantaged groups.”55 In this context, he noted: “Everyone, it seemed, had become a ‘socialist.’”56 The sense of the socialist impulse was stated well by a leader of the PSCh, who remarked: “‘The great masses, although they do not find themselves capable of defining what is socialism, have acquired, nonetheless, a marvelous sensitivity for feeling it.’”57 This consensus in opposition to the status quo led to the election of the Popular Front government in 1938. In Europe, the Popular Front movement was associated with the Communist International, but in Chile it was the PSCh’s Schnake who was instrumental in bringing it into being. He organized the Bloc of the Left in 1934, comprised of Socialists, Radical Socialists, Democrats, and Trotskyite Communists, for the purpose of promoting Grove’s presidential candidacy for 1938. Arturo Alessandri had returned to the presidency for a second time (1932–38), but his government was unpopular, owing to its anti-labor policies and austerity programs. In March 1936, the Bloc (sans the Trotskyites) invited the Radicals and the Stalinist Communists to join them in the formation of a Popular Front. Whether Moscow-inspired or not, the move conformed to the new Communist strategy of coalition politics. In order to assure victory for the Popular Front, Grove withdrew his candidacy in favor of the Radical Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1878–1941), who went on to win the presidency. Although Aguirre Cerda was the candidate, “the working classes, rallied by the Marxists, were mainly voting for Grove and his brand of socialism in 1938.”58 The Popular Front government was a milestone on the Chilean road to social-

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ism, but not its terminus. The government was not as radical as the elites feared it would be. It inaugurated a number of progressive programs in education, health, housing, agrarian reform and colonization, electrification, and industrial development,59 but it left virtually untouched the foreign mining companies and the land-owning oligarchy. Its signal achievement was the creation of the Chilean Corporation for the Development of Production (CORFO), a state planning and credit agency designed to promote and assist SOEs. However, the Marxist elements in the PSCh complained that the government did not go far enough in creating a “state-run economy.”60 Disillusionment over their affiliation with the Popular Front quickly rose within the PSCh, along with a sense that the party had “abandoned its principles,”61—that it had been lured into playing “traditional politics” and had missed the opportunity for “structural change.”62 The PSCh’s triumph proved to be its undoing. While the membership of the PSCh grew during the Popular Front period, the party itself disintegrated. César Godoy Urrutia, declaring that he wanted to “return to the class struggle,”63 was the first to defect; he formed the Socialist Workers Party (PST) in 1940. As the conflict between the Marxist and non-Marxist factions of the PSCh continued, Grove himself was forced from the leadership in 1943 by Raúl Ampuero and Salvador Allende. Grove left the party the following year and organized the Authentic Socialist Party (PSA), ending, in effect, his career as the “Socialist caudillo.” Ampuero and Allende vied with Bernardo Ibáñez for control of the PSCh. Ibáñez, “a non-Marxist admirer of the welfare state and the British Labour government,”64 assumed the position of secretary general in 1946 and, in the context of the Cold War, attempted to follow a policy more friendly to the United States. His failure to protest the banning of the Communist Party in 1948 led to yet another split in the Socialist ranks that same year. Ibáñez bolted the party, taking the Socialist Party label with him; Ampuero and Allende then formed a new entity and named it the Popular Socialist Party (PSP).65 By the end of the 1940s, the organized socialist movement was badly divided, with the Marxist factions having the upper hand. They exploited the issue of foreign ownership of the copper mines that continued to fuel the socialist impulse. Despite the fact that Chile’s social welfare system at mid-century was “only equaled in Latin America by Uruguay and far ahead of most European countries,”66 the nation relied on the price of copper on the international market for its well-being. Copper production enabled Chile to prosper during the Second World War, but it also created the circumstance that had bedeviled it earlier with nitrates—that is, dependence on a single export commodity. Moreover, in 1955, two U.S. companies (the Anaconda Mining Company and the Kennecott

Chile: The Road to Socialism / 47

Corporation) controlled 90 percent of Chile’s total copper production.67 President Carlos Ibáñez, elected to a second term (1952–58) did little to change the situation, other than pressure the United States for help in stabilizing the price of copper. The situation with copper energized the socialist impulse. In preparation for the 1958 election, Allende formed the Popular Action Front (FRAP), a coalition comprised of the PSP, PSCh, the outlawed Communist Party, and two small splinter groups.68 He demanded “nationalization and redistribution, . . . a comprehensive [program of ] state intervention to reshape Chile’s economy and society.”69 In the 1958 election Allende lost to Jorge Alessandri (the son of Arturo) by just 33,500 votes, but equally significant was the strong showing of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1911–1982) and the Christian Democratic Party. The Christian Democratic Party (PDC), newly organized in 1957, gathered 20 percent of the vote in the three-way race for president in 1958. With FRAP taking a militant stance, abandoning the gradualist approach and advocating “the Marxist alternative,” that is to say, “a revolutionary change in the status quo,”70 a place opened up for a party that could reconcile the socialist impulse with Chile’s traditional freedoms. Two papal encyclicals—Rerum Novarum (1891, issued by Leo XIII) “On the Condition of Workers,” and Quadragesimo Anno (1931, Pius XI), “On Reconstructing the Social Order”—by placing the church “in support of the economic and social aspirations of the people,”71 had served to establish the “doctrinal and ideological formulations” of the Christian Democratic movement. That movement had taken root in Chile in 1936 with the formation of the Social Christian National Falange by “young [Catholic] reformers” influenced by the “leftward drift” of the 1930s.72 Eduardo Frei, one of these “young reformers,” had been educated in the United States (at the University of Notre Dame). Twenty-one years later and now a senator, he organized the movement as a political party. The PDC, as a social democratic alternative to Allende’s “Marxist vanguard party,”73 clearly responded to the socialist impulse. It had no commitment to free enterprise and regarded “private capital [as] the root of nearly every evil.”74 It offered a diverse range of reform measures—specifically, “nationalization of public utilities, closer control over foreign investment . . . and ‘Chileanization’ of the country’s mineral wealth.”75 Frei’s “Chileanization” scheme, which proposed that the state acquire a 51 percent controlling interest in the American copper companies, was the key difference between him and Allende, who demanded the outright nationalization of the industry. This was the defining issue of the 1964 election. Chile was going to have a socialist-style government. The two candidates were not too far apart in their proposals for economic and social change—both were

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driven by the socialist impulse—but Frei pledged a “revolution in liberty” as opposed to Allende’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.”76 In the election of 1964, Allende was committed to “the class struggle,” and he described Frei’s reformism as “a sellout to international imperialism and to the local bourgeoisie.”77 In turn, Frei declared that the election of Allende would convert Chile into “another Cuba and a Soviet satellite.”78 The election took place in a heated atmosphere, not just in Chile, but in the region and the world as well. In Latin America, authoritarian regimes had recently fallen in Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and, most critically, in Cuba. Chilean conservatives, fearing a possible Allende victory, did not offer their own candidate, choosing instead to back Frei as a way to keep Allende out. This leaving of the field to the two leftist parties alone was a departure from the usual multi-party elections in Chile. Out of the same fear, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency secretly expended $2.6 million in support of Frei’s election. In the end, Frei achieved a striking victory, obtaining 56 percent of the vote to Allende’s 39 percent. In times when everybody played by the rules, Frei’s gradualist approach might have had a chance to prove itself, but that was not the situation in Chile in the 1960s. The Cuban Revolution had inspired a militancy and an arrogance (see Part VI) that held Frei’s type of gradualism in contempt. Despite the fact that Frei achieved the “Chileanization” of the copper industry, initiated agrarian reform, and provided new housing for slum-dwellers and the homeless, it was not enough. The miners, led by the Communist-controlled Central Unica de Trabajadores de Chile (CUTCh), remained uncooperative, agitating for nationalization. In the cities, two urban guerrilla groups—the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) and the Popular Socialist Union (USP)—engaged in terrorism, keeping the government off stride and eroding public confidence. Frei even lost support from within the church. The group Iglesia Jóven (Young Church), an organization of “ultraprogressive Jesuits,” viewed “an association with Marxism as the only means to abolish socioeconomic inequities and to attain a socialist society.”79 The left wing of the PDC itself adopted a radical stance, demanding nationalization of the copper and nitrate industries. As the 1970 election approached, Allende founded Popular Unity (Unidad Popular, UP), a new coalition of the Socialist and Communist parties. The 1960s had radicalized the Socialist Party, changing it from a party once identified “with APRA and populism” to one identified with “Fidel Castro and socialist revolution.”80 The election of Allende in 1970 was predictable given the steady presence of the socialist impulse in Chile for over seven decades. Allende, running under

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the UP banner, obtained a plurality of the vote with 36.3 percent, ex-President Jorge Alessandri won 34.9 percent, and the PDC candidate Radomiro Tomic followed with 27.8 percent. The Chilean Congress abided by the rules of the game and confirmed Allende as president, anticipating that he would also obey the rules in exercising the presidency. The Chilean road to socialism had been extremely long, but Allende’s stay in office would last only three years. For a complete understanding of why this occurred, it is necessary to suspend discussion of Allende’s socialist government, in order to trace developments elsewhere in Latin America. For this purpose, Mexico is a good place to begin. The course of the socialist impulse in the countries of the Southern Cone had been evolutionary, whereas in Mexico it was revolutionary. The experiences were distinct, but each had an influence upon the region at large. The Mexican Revolution was notorious for its violence, yet it contributed much in the realm of ideas.

II

Eruption in the North

4

Ideas Serving the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1910, was a violent event, and, consequently, men of action have received most of the attention—but men of ideas played a critical role as well. Ideas and those who spread them put a macro face on the Mexican Revolution, contesting the argument that what occurred in Mexico was a series of local insurrections and perhaps not a revolution at all.1 In fact, in the decade before the fighting began, the philosophical underpinnings of the regime of Porfirio Díaz were under assault. Díaz (1830–1915) ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1911 under the precepts of positivism. The undemocratic philosophy of Auguste Comte, professing that order brought progress by overseeing the evolution of society under the unfettered observable facts of science, provided justification for the repressive rule of Díaz. Díaz, indeed, gave Mexico material progress, but at the expense of political freedom, economic independence, social justice, and racial equality. Díaz governed Mexico longer than any ruler in the history of independent Mexico. He accomplished this by placing friends and loyalists in governing positions, where they were free to enrich themselves, and by destroying his enemies pitilessly. “Pan o palo” (Bread or the stick) was his motto, and it worked almost to the end. Although Díaz did not get rid of the Liberal Constitution of 1857, he mocked it. He held regular elections, which provided a facade of legality, but the outcome was never in doubt, since he counted the votes. He centralized the authority of the national government, posting army garrisons in major towns and reinforcing the Rural Guard—the infamous rurales—to keep peace in the countryside. The rurales enjoyed tacit consent to extort and terrorize, as long as

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they kept the roads open for commerce and remained loyal to Díaz. Through the use of torture and inhumane treatment in the San Juan de Ulúa prison, banishment to the deadly penal colony of Quintana Roo, or the ley fuga (“shot while attempting to escape”), the dictatorship maintained itself in power.2 In reflecting upon his rule, Díaz appeared almost apologetic, but he believed it had been worth it: “‘We were harsh. Sometimes we were harsh to the point of cruelty. But it was necessary then to the life and progress of the nation. If there was cruelty, results have justified it.’”3 The results to which Díaz referred were impressive, if one overlooked the cruelty and injustice. They could be measured in the 24,560 kilometers of railroad track that were laid between 1880 and 1910, in the phenomenal growth in silver and copper mining over the same period, in the development of the petroleum industry, and in the rapid expansion of commercial agriculture in cotton, sugar, and henequen. But the results were further tainted because foreign interests controlled the bulk of the profits from economic development. Comte, Spencer, and Darwin were wrong. Progress required more than order; it needed capital, and Díaz had to go outside of Mexico to get it. Díaz courted foreign investors by offering generous concessions of land and mineral rights, favorable laws, tax exemptions, and “enhanced police protection.”4 The adventurer-entrepreneur William E. Greene, who developed the rich copper deposits at Cananea, Sonora, creating “one of the world’s ten largest copper companies,” received “special breaks [that] saved him more than one million dollars per year.”5 Similar deals enabled American (Standard Oil) and British (El Aguila) interests to dominate the oil fields of Tamaulipas and Veracruz. French interests owned the textile mills of Orizaba and Puebla, exploiting workers and counting on the intervention of federal troops as strike breakers should the workers protest. Díaz’s giveaways were so extraordinary that the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who had acquired huge tracts of land in the states of Sonora and Chihuahua, wrote to his mother in 1886: “I really don’t see what is to prevent us from owning all of Mexico and running it to suit ourselves.”6 Yet, despite Hearst’s bravado, foreign domination of the economy did not extend to agriculture. In agriculture, the Mexican hacendados held their own, although their land engrossment, so as to produce cash crops for export, had a devastating effect upon small farmers and Indian communities. The improved banking and transportation facilities that general economic development provided brought opportunities for the hacendados to engage in commercial agriculture. In Morelos, for example, it was the grinding capacity of the sugar mills that dictated the

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amount of acreage planted in cane. As technology allowed for enhanced capacity, the hacendados expanded their holdings, displacing small farmers and Indian villages. With the complicity of Díaz’s bureaucrats in Mexico City, they executed landgrabs by contesting titles, carrying out fraudulent surveys, and enforcing the Lerdo Law. The Ley Lerdo of 1856, designed to deprive the church of its landholdings by outlawing corporate ownership of land, was applied as well to Indian communal holdings (ejidos). The land engrossment created a vicious cycle. The Indians, driven off their lands, flooded the job market, which depressed already low wages further. At the same time, the increased acreage in cash crops reduced the production of food crops, forcing the importation of food and driving up the cost. No longer able to grow their own food, the Indians were forced to purchase it at rising costs with falling wages. The Díaz regime was not moved by the Indians’ plight. Their misery merely confirmed the Comtean and Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest, to which Díaz, his advisors, and the educational establishment—the so-called científicos—adhered. The Indians were regarded as inferior and subject to exploitation, or elimination, if necessary. They were marginalized politically and economically and scorned culturally and racially. The Porfiriato dared to be racist in a country where Indians and mestizos made up over 70 percent of the population. Striving for “whiteness,” the elites sported bigotes (mustaches), including Díaz (himself a mestizo), on the premise that Indians could not grow facial hair; dressed in European style (wearing frock coats and ties, even in the tropical sun); and shunned native dances and music. Mexico City, stripped of any reminder of its past as the Indian city of Tenochtitlán, became just another “Paris of the New World,” with its wide, tree-lined boulevard (Paseo de la Reforma) and its Palace of Fine Arts (a replica of the Paris Opera House), begun in 1905 but not finished before Díaz’s ouster. Such were the “results” that Díaz boasted about, and that drove the socialist impulse. Ten years before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, an anarchist movement began to take shape. It arose out of the Club Liberal “Ponciano Arriaga,” a study group in San Luis Potosí founded by Camilio Arriaga (1862–1945) that became the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) in 1905. Camilio came from an ultraLiberal family that deeply resented Díaz’s betrayal of the Constitution of 1857.7 He was reacting against Díaz’s favoritism toward foreign economic interests,8 and against the renewed activism of the church in response to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891).9 His intention was to “regenerate” the principles of the Constitution of 1857—equal justice, restrictions on the church, and agrarian reform—but his teachings in anarchism ended up stimulating the “plotting

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for a violent revolution to overthrow Díaz and introduce profound social reforms.”10 Arriaga possessed a library containing the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, Prince Peter Kropotkin, and “other European Socialists and Anarchists.”11 Before the turn of the century, he was meeting in the Liberal Club “regularly” with other “dissenting Liberal youths” and introducing them to “the most advanced revolutionary authors of the time.”12 He was the “precursor par excellence”13 of the Mexican Revolution, influencing the thinking of a group of men who would apply their ideas to the radical transformation of the nation: Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama (1880–1967), a law student from an impoverished background, who would become a principal advisor to Emiliano Zapata; Juan Sarabia (1882–1920), still a teenager when he joined the Club, who would become one of the most admired anarchist/socialist journalists of the period; Librado Rivera (1864–1932), a schoolteacher with a rural background, who would prove effective in organizing peasants and workers; and Ricardo Flores Magón (1874–1922), one of three activist brothers from Oaxaca. The only outsider in this closed group, Ricardo would become the recognized anarchist leader of the Revolutionary era, having set northern Mexico aflame even before 1910. In anticipation of organizing a “new” Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), Arriaga hosted the First Liberal Congress in San Luis Potosí in February 1901. He intended to protest the growing influence of the church and to oppose Díaz’s expected bid for reelection in 1904, but his agenda was too mild for the young men who were strongly influenced by his anarchist ideas, having “made good use of ” his library.14 The First Liberal Congress became a rallying point for a “generalized” protest against the Díaz regime and a call for “collective action.”15 Flores Magón visualized the incipient PLM as being more than a forum for anticlericalism, proposing to make it “a basis for socialist organization.”16 His elder brother Jesús (1871–1930) had begun publishing the journal Regeneración in 1900, in which Ricardo wrote that the U.S.-owned railroads of Mexico pillaged the Mexican economy by charging exorbitant rates and “killing” small businesses.17 While the PLM took shape, Liberal clubs appeared throughout Mexico, voicing opposition to Díaz, and in August 1901 Regeneración demanded that the president resign.18 Díaz responded with a crackdown, closing the newspaper and throwing Ricardo, Jesús, and Díaz Soto y Gama in jail. By September 1902 all the Liberal leaders had been imprisoned,19 but the repression served only to radicalize the movement. By 1903 the movement was criticizing “the social and economic injustices of

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the Díaz regime, . . . [condemning] the monopoly of land ownership and the predominance in Mexico of ‘money, power, priest, and foreigner.’”20 In November 1903, Díaz Soto y Gama wrote to Ricardo that he was “‘a convinced socialist, or better said, a communist through and through.’”21 Ricardo had fled north of the border, to San Antonio, Texas, where he, Sarabia, and Rivera, among others, continued to publish Regeneración. Ironically, Arriaga, having formally organized the PLM in 1905, urged Ricardo to “tone down” his revolutionary rhetoric, causing the two men to become estranged.22 Harassed by authorities in Texas, Ricardo moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he organized the Junta of the Party. On July 1, 1906, Ricardo Flores Magón issued the PLM’s “St. Louis Manifesto.” The document was “more reformist than revolutionary,”23 but was radical for its time, and “served as a base for the political and economic reforms of the Constitution of 1917.”24 Its provisions included the following: a four-year presidential term; no reelection; elimination of the death penalty; compulsory schooling to age fourteen; the eight-hour day; a six-day workweek; institution of a minimum wage; special protections and restrictions regarding the labor of women and children; a right to safe and sanitary working conditions; accident and sickness benefits; cash wages; abolition of company stores; and the right to strike. Notably, it also provided for “protection of the Indian race.”25 Signed by Ricardo (as president of the junta), Juan Sarabia, Antonio I. Villarreal, Librado Rivera, Manuel Sarabia, Rosalío Bustamante, and Enrique Flores Magón (the youngest of the three brothers, 1877–1951), it was Ricardo’s “final gesture” toward liberal reform, and it came after he had “lost his faith” in constitutional government.26 Ricardo Flores Magón’s experiences in prison and in exile transformed him into a true anarchist. Although he had been influenced by the works of Bakunin, Proudhon, and Errico Malatesta, he was most deeply affected by Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread. Ricardo Flores Magón espoused the anarchist “direct action” strategy: strikes, boycotts, sabotage, etc. In the United States, he received the support of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), an IWW affiliate, and of the radical labor leaders William “Big Bill” Haywood, Emma Goldman, and Eugene V. Debs.27 During much of the period 1906–8, reinforced by an economic downturn and food shortages in Mexico, the Floresmagonista/PLM movement inspired a series of strikes and acts of violence. Anarchists and PLM militants led strikes against Greene’s Consolidated Copper Company at Cananea in June 1906, and the French-owned Río Blanco textile mill in Orizaba in January 1907. The government sent troops to suppress

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both actions, which resulted in at least fifty fatalities at Orizaba alone, and caused Díaz to remark, “‘Thank God I can still kill.’”28 Nevertheless, the unrest persisted. Generalized railroad strikes occurred throughout 1906–8, especially in the north, where the strikes were led by the Gran Liga Mexicana de Empleados de Ferrocarril, a union described as “among the first in Mexico to agitate for Socialism and Syndicalism.”29 Amidst this agitation, a group of young intellectuals also began to challenge the essential philosophical foundations of the Díaz regime. The challenge began as a protest against the dogmatism of the científicos and their monopoly on academic appointments, and it escalated to a rejection of positivist philosophy. The Ateneo de la Juventud (Athenaeum of Youth), founded by thirty-two young people in October 1909, with Antonio Caso (1883–1946) as president, evolved from a 1906 discussion group that had morphed into the more formal Sociedad de Conferencias (Lecture Society) in 1907. The finest young minds of the era made up the Ateneo membership: Caso, José Vasconcelos (1881–1959), Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946), and Martín Luis Guzmán (1887–1976). They questioned the concept “that science had all the answers,” and sought to overcome the “smothering” effect of “scientific positivism” on liberal thought by studying such humanistic thinkers as Immanuel Kant, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Emile Boutroux.30 “We felt the intellectual repression, together with the political and economic repression of the country,” wrote Henríquez Ureña.31 Caso prepared lectures on Henri Bergson’s 1907 work, L’evolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), which contested the positivist position that all phenomena were observable, arguing instead that innate experience—intuition—could serve as a means of choice and decision. Bergson’s concept of the élan vital (the creative impulse), whereby man might beat the laws of nature and accelerate the pace of change, undermined the positivist justification for Díaz’s tyranny. Influenced also by Kant and Krause, Caso and his colleagues criticized positivism as being value-neutral—as lacking compassion and concern for poverty and inequality. In its contention that “society was a spiritual and not a biological organism,”32 Krausism was the antithesis of positivism, and thus was revolutionary in the context of the Porfiriato. It affirmed that free human beings, guided by conscience (God within), were capable of achieving a more perfect society (progress), and that if the state denied personal liberty, “it was not doing its duty,”33 and therefore needed to be replaced. The Ateneo, and particularly Vasconcelos, also espoused the concept of indigenismo, a radical idea that ascribed the achievements of high culture to the ancient Mexicans, implicitly contradicting the racism of the científicos. At the time, the philosophical ruminations of the

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Ateneo were only a minor annoyance for Díaz, if he was aware of them at all, but he could not similarly ignore a more public intellectual challenge to his regime. It was the appearance of two important books in Mexico that precipitated the end of the Díaz era. Andrés Molina Enríquez (1869–1940), a sociologist from Yucatán, published Los grandes problemas nacionales (The Great National Problems) in 1909. In it, he analyzed the pattern of landholding in Mexico, detailing its injustices and calling for the breakup of the hacienda system. “‘It will come,’ he wrote, ‘whether in peace . . . or by revolution.’”34 When the latter occurred, Molina’s ideas would find expression in the future forms of land ownership in Mexico. The second book that had a great effect on Porfirio Díaz was written by Francisco I. Madero (1873–1913), a member of one of the ten wealthiest families in Mexico. La sucesión presidencial en 1910 (The Presidential Succession in 1910), published in 1908, while not the equal of Molina’s book in “scholarship, originality, or social significance,”35 nevertheless struck at Díaz where he was the most vulnerable: the issue of his age. Madero conceded that Díaz might run for reelection in 1910, but, anticipating Díaz’s mortality, and as a means of achieving an orderly transition to political democracy, he suggested that the vice-president in that upcoming contest should be chosen in a free election. Ignoring Madero’s advice, Díaz announced his plans to run for reelection and personally selected Ramón Corral to be his running mate, a man despised for having shipped Yaqui Indians to Yucatán as slaves. Madero, in turn, announced his own candidacy for the presidency, reviving a campaign slogan Díaz himself had once used: “Effective suffrage and no reelection.” Madero was interested mainly in political reform; he was no revolutionary. He had earlier shown an interest in Arriaga’s movement, but had later backed off, a reaction to the radicalism of Flores Magón. Nevertheless, Díaz had Madero imprisoned on trumped-up charges, and he went on to win reelection that June by a landslide of 1,000,000 votes, to Madero’s 196. Out on bail, Madero fled to Texas, where he issued his Plan de San Luis Potosí (dated October 5, 1910), in which he declared the recent election “illegal,” and, naming himself provisional president, he designated November 20 as a day “for all towns in the republic to rise in arms after 6 o’clock P.M.”36 The response to Madero’s call to arms was overwhelming. He had uncapped the volcano that had been smoldering for the past decade at least.37 In the state of Morelos, Emiliano Zapata (1883–1919) raised a peasant army to reclaim the land that had been taken from the Indian villagers. Ricardo Flores Magón invaded Baja California, but after occupying the capital city of Mexicali momentarily, he was driven back across the border to the United States, where he was arrested

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by U.S. authorities. Flores Magón had no further direct role in events in Mexico (he died in Leavenworth prison in 1922), but his ideas would resonate with the miners, cowboys, peasants, and schoolteachers who would soon volunteer to fight with the maderista commanders Pascual Orozco Jr. (1882–1915) and Francisco “Pancho” Villa (1877–1923) in Chihuahua and Coahuila. Orozco and Villa would prove more than a match for Mexico’s federal troops, and after a series of successful skirmishes they occupied Ciudad Juárez in May, effectively ending the era of Díaz. There was no fight left in the octogenarian Díaz, who resigned on May 25, 1911, and sailed for France, observing: “Madero has released a tiger in Mexico. Let’s see if he can handle it.”38 It turned out that Madero could not tame the tiger because he did not share the anger nor the goals of Flores Magón, Villa, or Zapata. There is no evidence that he had read any of the radical works in Arriaga’s library, or that he was aroused by the racism of the Díaz regime. He expressed ambivalence about the founding of the labor organization Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker), in 1912, under whose banner Díaz Soto y Gama was able to promote the tenets of anarcho-syndicalism within the Mexican labor movement.39 Madero promised only political reform, demanding that the rebel armies lay down their arms and trust in democratic government to resolve all differences and serve the needs of the nation. He appeared to have forgotten that Article III of the Plan de San Luis Potosí had pledged the “reinstatement of land illegally acquired by estates.”40 Zapata had not forgotten. Zapata was the first to defect from Madero’s government. He did not intend to disarm without a guarantee that the lands he had seized would remain in the possession of the Indian villages. Accusing Madero of betraying “the principles” of the movement, and of having tricked “the will of the people,” Zapata issued the Plan de Ayala on November 25, 1911.41 Withdrawing his recognition of Madero as Chief of the Revolution and President of the Republic, he now recognized the Chihuahuan, Pascual Orozco Jr., as “Chief of the Liberating Revolution.”42 Zapata reiterated his support for the Plan de San Luis Potosí, with these additional provisions: that the pueblos and citizens would recover the lands “of which they [had] been despoiled by bad faith”; that one-third of the monopolized land (haciendas) would be expropriated for distribution to landless peasants; and that the “landlords, científicos, or bosses” who opposed the plan would have their goods nationalized and the remaining two-thirds of their lands seized “for indemnifications of war.”43 The “general principles” of the plan were Zapata’s, but the rhetoric was very much the work of Otilio Montaño, “a schoolteacher from Ayala.”44 Montaño was an intellectual associated with the

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Ateneo de la Juventud who had spoken out in 1909 “about the war ‘of the poor against the rich.’”45 Pascual Orozco acted next to join Zapata in rebellion. Citing many of the same reasons for disavowing Madero as Zapata did, Orozco issued his Plan Orozquista on March 25, 1912. This plan was based almost entirely upon Flores Magón’s St. Louis Manifesto of 1906. Ricardo Flores Magón had been most successful among the miners and railway and factory workers of northern Mexico, and, additionally, Orozco’s “top military leaders and ideological guides were PLM veterans.”46 Whereas Madero had referred only in passing to economic and social issues in the Plan de San Luis Potosí, Orozco made these issues the centerpiece of his program. He reiterated the PLM’s support of advanced labor reforms regarding hours, wages, working conditions, benefits, and limitations on child labor. In the area of land reform, he did not go as far as the Plan de Ayala, but he did endorse Zapata’s demand for the restoration of lands “despoiled by bad faith,” and called for the confiscation and distribution of excess hacienda lands not under cultivation. Among its innovations, the Plan Orozquista stipulated the “immediate” nationalization of the railroads.47 Orozco, as Zapata, adopted the anarchist slogan, “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty). As Orozco advanced south toward Mexico City, Madero committed a grave error that cost him his presidency, and ultimately his life. In order to stem Orozco’s advance, Madero appointed General Victoriano Huerta (1854–1916), a holdover from the Porfiriato, as his chief of staff. Huerta defeated Orozco in battle, but, having saved Madero, he entered into a conspiracy with conservative elements to restore the old order. On February 18, 1913, Huerta arrested Madero and forced his resignation as president, and three days later he murdered him (“shot while attempting to escape”). The Mexican Revolution now entered a new stage, with forces of the center and the left spending the next year and a half trying to remove the usurper Huerta. While Zapata remained in rebellion, Madero’s state governors also now took up arms in defense of constitutionality. Venustiano Carranza (1859–1920), the governor of Coahuila, with the support of the governors of Chihuahua and Sonora, issued the Plan de Guadalupe in March 1913. The plan was strictly political in nature, declaring Huerta’s presidency illegitimate, naming Carranza as “First Chief ” of the Constitutionalist Army, and providing for an interim presidency for the period after Huerta’s anticipated defeat and before new elections could be held.48 Carranza, like Madero, was no revolutionary, but he was in the forefront of a social revolution, whether he liked it or not. The author/historian Robert Quirk described Carranza as “bourgeois mediocrity incarnate,”49 but there were radical leaders within the Carrancista

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movement who persistently nudged it to the left. For example, among Carranza’s field commanders, Heriberto Jara (1879–1968) of Veracruz state had helped organize the strike at the Río Blanco textile mill in 1907, and Francisco Múgica (1884–1954) of Michoacán was an avowed socialist. Luis Cabrera (1876–1954), lawyer, schoolteacher, an associate of the Ateneo, and Carranza’s principal advisor, counseled “that it was imperative to command some legitimacy in matters of socio-economic reform.”50 Neither could Carranza ignore the diverse goals of his allies, particularly Alvaro Obregón (1880–1928), in command of the Sonoran forces, and Villa, the military leader in Chihuahua. These differences were initially overshadowed by the task of overthrowing Huerta. The task was facilitated by the refusal of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to extend recognition to the government of an assumed murderer. Wilson imposed an arms embargo on the fighting forces in Mexico and even occupied the port of Veracruz, in April 1914, to prevent a German shipment of arms from reaching Huerta. In the meantime, he did not block Pancho Villa’s trafficking in rustled cattle for weapons across the Texas border. Beset by the Revolutionary armies, an economy in ruins, and the American intervention, Huerta fled the country in July 1914. With their common enemy removed, the Revolutionary factions faced the need to resolve their distinct ideological positions. Their initial steps toward this goal were promising, but did not hold. Following Huerta’s fall, representatives of Carranza and Villa met in Torreón in July in an effort to reach an understanding. They agreed to the Pact of Torreón, which included an article proposing “land division for the peasants and social legislation for the urban proletariat.”51 Antonio Villarreal was among those responsible for this provision; the former Floresmagonista and co-author and signatory of the 1906 St. Louis Manifesto had joined the Carrancista movement, seeking to make it “a movement of the masses against the classes.”52 Carranza rejected the pact almost immediately, but did agree to sponsor a nominating convention along with Villa and Zapata at Aguascalientes in October 1914 for the purpose of naming a provisional president while national elections were pending. Obregón, distrustful of civilian politicians, insisted that only “revolutionary generals and governors, or their representatives,” should be able to attend.53 Even so, Díaz Soto y Gama, a civilian, attended as a representative of Zapata, and with his oratory split the assembly wide open. He had fled Mexico City following Huerta’s takeover and the shutting down of the Casa del Obrero Mundial. Some leaders of the labor organization had gone underground, but Díaz Soto y Gama had joined Zapata in Morelos and had become a principal advisor. Blunt and “acid-tongued,” he blasted Carranza, having previously denounced him as

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a “middle-class politician” whose “vague promises were less than useless.”54 Describing himself as an “anarchist” and invoking the slogans “Bread and Justice,” “Land and Liberty,” he demanded that the Plan de Ayala be accepted “unconditionally.”55 Díaz Soto y Gama managed to convert the political gathering into an ideological battleground. The Villistas and Zapatistas took charge, proclaiming the Convention of Aguascalientes “sovereign” and naming Eulalio Gutiérrez, a second-tier provincial commander, as provisional president. Carranza repudiated the legitimacy of the actions of the Convention. He withdrew his forces from Mexico City, leaving it open to the Conventionists, and retreated to the port of Veracruz, where the American occupation had just ended in November. Obregón, although leery of Carranza, sided with him out of his deep hatred for Villa, among other factors.56 After occupying Mexico City, Villa and Zapata met in Xochimilco on December 4 and resolved to carry the struggle to Carranza. Neither did. Zapata advanced as far as Puebla, but not beyond; he was essentially a regional chieftain, who did not feel secure outside his Morelos redoubt. Similarly, Villa was a northern commander who lacked the capacity and vision to be a national leader. Other than Martín Luis Guzmán, who served more as a chronicler, Villa failed to attract serious thinkers to his cause. He was not a cerebral anarchist, but he was one intuitively, favoring direct action to destroy the old order and envisioning decentralized communes of miners and peasants organized militarily.57 With the pressure off, Carranza and Obregón were able to regroup the Constitutionalist forces. At the same time, Carranza reluctantly agreed that it was essential to address the social issues that were tearing Mexico apart. Prodded by Obregón and Cabrera, he began issuing the so-called Veracruz decrees in January 1915, in which he promised “‘legislation for the improvement of the condition of the rural peon, the worker, the miner, and in general the proletarian classes.’”58 These pledges included the restoration of the lands defrauded from the Indian pueblos and a minimum wage for industrial workers, along with the right to unionize and to strike.59 The concessions to labor were timely in that the underground leaders of the Casa del Obrero Mundial had resurfaced, and in February 1915 they entered into an agreement of support for the Constitutionalists. The formation of “Red Battalions” comprised of industrial workers swelled the ranks of Obregón’s army, and as he advanced to confront Villa’s forces, “he left the House’s labour agitators in his wake; they organized unions and spread Carrancista promises.”60 The climactic battle between Obregón and Villa occurred at Celaya in April, where Obregón’s forces decimated those of Villa. Obregón employed the tactics

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of the ongoing war in Europe (trenches, barbed wire, and machine-gun nests) and mowed down Villa’s massed cavalry and infantry attacks. It was a slaughter. Carranza moved to solidify his position. He had the superior army, possessed a viable economic base, and enjoyed the de facto recognition of the United States (October 1915). Only the Convention, remaining in session and presuming to exercise sovereign authority, stood in Carranza’s way. Díaz Soto y Gama continued to rally the seated delegates with fiery rhetoric, but Villa and Zapata, serving as the Conventionist military force, were unable to mount an effective offensive. Villa, in fact, had become embroiled with the United States over incidents along the border, and had even provoked an incursion into Mexican territory by U.S. troops. With Villa routed, the Zapatistas alone controlled the Convention, guiding it on “a more radical course than at any time in its history.”61 In addition to labor and social reform, it proposed a divorce law and acted to deprive the church of any role in education “whatsoever.”62 Díaz Soto y Gama even sought to create a “Committee of Public Safety” to pursue the “‘enemies of the Revolution,’” imagining himself “another Robespierre.”63 With the Conventionists asserting legislative power and in possession of portions of the national territory, Carranza determined that it was essential to formalize his authority by means of a new constitution and presidential elections. In September 1916 Carranza issued the call for the election of a Constituent Assembly, to meet in convention in the city of Querétaro in December. He took every measure to stack the election in his favor. Balloting was held only in the territory under his control, and candidates were limited to those who subscribed to the Plan de Guadalupe. Carranza then prepared a draft constitution that “differed little” from that of 1857,64 totally ignoring agrarian and labor reforms, and informed the delegates that they had two months to complete their work (December 1, 1916 to January 31, 1917). Despite his precautions, Carranza had ignored the lesson that had cost Madero his life—that is, that the Revolution had been consistently driven by the socialist impulse. To that time, the Revolution had been opposed to Díaz, Madero, Huerta, and now himself. Part of the Revolutionary impulse was to tear down: it was anti-authoritarian, against the prevailing culture (positivism, clericalism, feudalism, racism), anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist. Another part, the part founded on ideas, wanted to build up. With the effect of a tar ball, the Revolution had accumulated ideological layer upon layer as it had rolled from San Luis Potosí to Querétaro. Some contend that the radical outcome of the Querétaro Convention was “accidental,”65 but it must be said, despite Carranza’s planning, many of the delegates had over a decade of Revolutionary experience and their ideological mindset was distinct from that of the “First Chief.”

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Rejecting Carranza’s limited reforms, certain key delegates succeeded in producing a document that expressed the ideas for which they had been fighting throughout. Among them were the longtime Floresmagonistas: Generals Múgica, Jara, and Esteban B. Calderón, and Luis G. Monzón. Múgica had been associated with the Flores Magón brothers beginning in 1906 and had been the “Michoacán correspondent” for Regeneración.66 In the Convention, he “served as floor leader and spokesman for the radical reformers.”67 Jara, as noted, had been a strike organizer at the Río Blanco textile mill in 1907. He, too, had collaborated with the Flores Magón brothers, in the PLM. As a delegate, “he considered himself as fighting for the ‘vindication of the proletariat’ and fortunate to ‘represent the working class in [the] Constitutional Convention.’”68 Calderón, of Jalisco, had been one of the leaders of the Cananea copper strike in June 1906, for which he had been imprisoned in San Juan de Ulúa. During the Convention, although professing loyalty to Carranza, he refused to accept that the First Chief ’s draft was “infallible.”69 Monzón, forty-four at the time, was a schoolteacher from San Luis Potosí. Although historian James Cockcroft does not list him as one of the potosino precursors, E. V. Niemeyer writes that he had “read Kropotkin and Bakunin” (possibly from Arriaga’s library?) and had “turned to anarchism.”70 He was an “active” Floresmagonista and had smuggled arms from Arizona into Sonora during preparations for the 1906 disturbances in and around Cananea.71 “He later became one of the first Mexican Communists.”72 These men, and a number of other so-called Jacobins, figured prominently in the drafting of the radical articles of the Constitution of 1917, that is, Articles 3, 27, and 123. One must refer also to the likely influence of Obregón. Although he was not present at Querétaro, there were many obregonistas as delegates, and they were aware of his influence in the Veracruz decrees. Múgica was principally responsible for the drafting of Article 3, which provided for compulsory, free, and secular education. The Article was revolutionary, and exceeded Carranza’s draft in that it prohibited religious institutions and personalities from providing elementary, secondary, or normal education in any form and manner and placed the state in absolute control of the content and nature of the educational system. In defending the Article, Múgica revealed the depth of his anticlerical feeling, declaring the clergy to be “the cruelest and most tenacious enemies of our liberties.”73 The church absorbed a further blow, along with other property owners, in Article 27. Article 27 (on land) placed limitations on the size, use, and ownership of property. Although the Article recognized private property, it empowered the state to regulate its use in accordance with “the public interest,” and declared “inalienable” the nation’s ownership of surface waters and subsurface mineral

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resources and substances. It ordained the division of large private estates, while authorizing communal holdings (ejidos), exempting them from any limitation in size. At the same time, it prohibited religious institutions from possessing property of any kind and placed severe restrictions on the ownership of property and the exploitation of natural resources by foreigners. It contained the very heart of the Plan de Ayala, restoring the lands of Indian communities that had been acquired illegally during the Porfiriato and expropriating hacienda lands for distribution to villages lacking communal lands. Inspired by the 1906 St. Louis Manifesto, it mandated procedures “to fix the maximum area of rural property and to carry out the subdivision of the excess lands.” Although Zapatistas were generally excluded from participating in the Querétaro Convention, Luis Navarro, of Puebla, was one who was there. As a colonel in the Constitutionalist Army, his credentials were in order, but during the Huerta government he had fled to Morelos, “where for some months he fought alongside Zapata.”74 In the debate on Article 27, he invoked the Zapatista principle, “that the nation was the only owner of lands and that these should be made available to those who worked them.”75 Molina Enríquez, the author of Los grandes problemas nacionales, also contributed to the victory of the Jacobins. He served as an advisor to the drafting committee and, at the request of its head, Pastor Rouaix, he prepared the committee’s preliminary draft. Rouaix edited the draft extensively, finding that it was not sufficiently revolutionary, but Molina, with good nature, praised Rouaix for converting Querétaro from “a purely political congress, into one of a social character.”76 Rouaix, although he was described as a Carrancista, in his role as acting governor of Durango had condemned the existence of latifundia as “exploitation of the rural population,” believing that such injustice could be wiped out “only by revolution.”77 With the support of Múgica and Jara, he got his opportunity in the writing of Article 27. These same leaders also collaborated in the achievement of Article 123. Article 123 (on labor and social security) was the most comprehensive and socialistic labor code and social security program of any country to that point in time. The law prescribed an eight-hour day and the six-day work week; created limitations on the labor of women and children; allowed for paid maternal leave; and created procedures and requirements for setting a minimum wage, for profit sharing, for payment in legal tender, for equal pay for equal work, for racial and gender equality in the workplace, for the maintenance of safe and hygienic working conditions, for employer responsibility for work-related accidents and occupational diseases, and for the right to organize and strike. The Article did not establish a social security system, but it mandated its enactment and set the

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following minimum guidelines: “It shall cover work accidents and occupational diseases, non-occupational illness and maternity; and retirement, disability, old age, and death.” The draft of this revolutionary Article was actually prepared by delegates who were avowedly loyal to Carranza, probably as a face-saving gesture in the realization that the Jacobins were in control, but also in recognition of the contribution of the “Red Battalions” in the fighting at Celaya. In the debates on Article 123, delegates with trade union experience figured prominently. For example, Dionisio Zavala, a twenty-nine-year-old miner from San Luis Potosí, reminded the delegates of the workers’ sacrifices. “‘The workers are the ones who have made the Revolution,’ he proclaimed. Who had ever seen rich people engage in the fighting? Who had ever seen la brigada de intelectuales? No, the workers had been the cannon fodder, had done the dirty work; and they deserved recognition.”78 Robert Quirk argues that the alliance between Carranza and the Casa del Obrero Mundial “proved to be of little consequence.”79 Nevertheless, a review of Article 123 demonstrates that labor was well-rewarded at Querétaro. Frank Tannenbaum suggests that it was painless for Carranza loyalists to make these concessions, since Mexico was not industrialized and what industry existed was principally foreign-owned.80 This observation overlooks the convictions of the radicals inspired by the socialist impulse, which Niemeyer ascribes to “simple humanitarianism . . . the wish to enhance the quality of life for the Mexican worker and his family.”81 For more than a decade, many delegates to the convention, like Múgica, Jara, and Monzón, had fought with pen and rifle to defeat the injustices of Díaz, lati­ fundia, and foreign mill, mine, and railroad owners. Although their demands for labor reform might appear to have been in the abstract, they had had sufficient experience with the hard edge of capitalism, at Cananea and Río Blanco, for example, to be able to relate to the ideas of European anarchists and socialists. They aspired “to put an end completely to capitalism, economic slavery, clericalism, and ignorance,”82 but they settled for a blueprint for change wherein the ideas of those who had been vanquished on the battlefield or imprisoned in Leavenworth prevailed in the hall of the Iturbide Theater, the site of the Querétaro Convention. Querétaro, then, was only a beginning, after which Múgica and Jara, as the governors of Michoacán and Veracruz, respectively—and joined by like-minded activists across Mexico—began the task of implementing the Constitution of 1917.

5

Implementing the Constitution of 1917

The implementation of the Constitution of 1917 was a slow and uneven process. The Constitution set the course for the creation of a socialist society, but no national leader fully committed to its achievement appeared until Lázaro Cárdenas in 1934. In the meantime, the rhetoric of social revolution did not abate, only the pace, especially at the national level. The radicals won at Querétaro, but Venustiano Carranza won the presidency, and he had no intention of carrying out their will. He could not tame the tiger because, like Madero, he refused to be one himself. In attempting to pacify the country, he substituted coercion for change, ordering the ambush slaying of Emiliano Zapata in 1919 and creating the circumstances for his own overthrow and assassination a year later. Succeeding him, Alvaro Obregón combined reform with pacification. Obregón was no tiger either, but he recognized the need to accommodate one if Mexico were ever to be whole. At the risk of overdoing the metaphor, we might say that he fed the tiger scraps, while simultaneously removing its claws and fangs. In paying attention to Article 27 during his tenure (1920–24), Obregón pursued a calculated program of land redistribution, whereby he allotted “some 3 million acres to 624 villages,”1 selecting to pursue reform in those states where it would be most effective politically.2 At the same time, he promoted commercial agriculture, giving priority to economic reconstruction, which meant, in effect, the restoration of the Porfirian export economy. This expediency extended to subsurface rights, with consequences for the direction of the Revolution. Article 27 declared the nation’s ownership of subsurface minerals and substances to be inalienable, raising the issue of how to deal with those who had

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prior claims. Relations with the United States had been strained throughout the Revolutionary struggle, including two armed interventions and German intrigues in connection with the First World War. U.S. oil interests had a huge stake in Mexico, and they induced the administration of Warren G. Harding to withhold diplomatic recognition of the Obregón government pending guarantees of their rights. Obregón acquiesced in the so-called Bucareli agreements in 1923, whereby in return for diplomatic recognition he pledged not to apply Article 27 retroactively against producing wells. Having compromised with foreign economic interests over Article 27, Obregón determined to show more backbone with reference to Article 123, although in a manner distinct from what the framers intended. Obregón entered into a secret agreement with Luis Morones (1890–1964), a former anarchist who founded the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) in 1918. The constitution guaranteed labor rights and benefits not readily available elsewhere in the world, but it also mandated compulsory arbitration, with the government representative able to cast the deciding vote. Under Obregón, the state ruled “supreme” in determining the relationship of labor to capital.3 In return for cooperation and political support, Obregón provided CROM with subsidies and favorable rulings. Obregón’s preferential treatment enabled Morones to grow his union into a dominant force and to fend off would-be challengers. Despite the “sweetheart deal” between Obregón and Morones, private corporations, especially foreign enterprises, acknowledged that “the revolution had changed power relationships and political consciousness, and [they] would have to adjust.”4 Mexico was changing just enough under Obregón to enable him to undertake the task of disarming the Revolution. The Revolution had needed guns to succeed, but once it had claimed victory, the guns needed to be spiked. Obregón began by forcing retirement upon and buying out the Revolutionary “generals” (of whom there was an excess). Pancho Villa received a magnificent hacienda as an inducement for his “retirement” in 1920, although Obregón had him killed three years later, on suspicion that he was planning a comeback. Obregón reduced the military budget, seeking a smaller and more professional officer corps, and required the routine rotation of assignments in order to discourage the rise of local caudillos, or warlords. At the same time, since the constitution mandated compulsory military service, Obregón determined that such service should have a social function. He saw the mandate as an opportunity to conduct an anti-illiteracy campaign, instruct recruits in the rudiments of hygiene, and engage in civic action: the building of roads, bridges, and schools.5 The construction of rural schoolhouses symbolized

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Obregón’s most faithful execution of Article 3 of the constitution, on education. Obregón appointed José Vasconcelos as minister of education and gave him a generous budget to promote the ideals of the Revolution. Vasconcelos left his post as rector of the National University and undertook to provide a teacher for every school that the army built. He recruited young people, charging them with the mission to transform the nation by making the school the center of the Revolution in the country’s remote villages. The young teachers were the new soldiers of the Revolution, and its newest casualties as well. Some became the victims of lynching, carried out by villagers who feared changing “their traditional ways” or were inflamed by local priests who resisted secularization and the loss of their standing in the community.6 Despite the risks, Vasconcelos extended Revolutionary nationalism into every aspect of artistic and intellectual endeavor. As an indigenista, he perceived education as a means of integrating the Indian into national life and of unifying the country by recognizing the cultural achievements of the native race, thus proclaiming the “richness” of diversity.7 Vasconcelos was the patron of the “Mexican Renaissance,” an outpouring of fine and popular art and music that reinvigorated the radical spirit of Querétaro. Instead of commissioning artwork to hang in art museums and studios, he commissioned artists to paint the walls of public buildings, where the people could come and view them. Inspired by the Revolutionary struggle and Marxist ideology, the artists Diego Rivera (1886–1957), José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), and David Alfaro Siquieros (1898–1974) painted spectacular murals glorifying Aztec civilization and depicting the struggle of peasants, workers, and Revolutionary heroes against the enemies of the nation, particularly priests and capitalists. In the spirit of indigenismo, composer-conductor Carlos Chávez (1899– 1978) composed pieces employing the pentatonic scale of the early peoples, and orchestrated them with native instruments. Vasconcelos, for his part, elevated native arts and crafts by establishing a Museum of Popular Arts and promoting cottage industries. With Vasconcelos’s support, the university reform movement flourished as well, and he provided a refuge, forums, and funding for both radical thinkers and leftist émigrés. The daring of Vasconcelos contrasted with the caution of Obregón. If the Revolutionary promise remained unfulfilled under Obregón, it experienced a reversal under his successor, Plutarco Elías Calles (1877–1945). Calles grew up poor in Sonora, but with a sharp mind and hard work had become a schoolteacher, and during the Revolution he had risen to the rank of general through skill and ruthlessness. During his presidential term (1924–28),

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he almost tripled Obregón’s record of land distribution, and his collaboration with Morones accelerated the growth of CROM, which reached a membership of 1.8 million in 1928.8 On the other hand, he undermined the Revolution with his heavy drinking, bullying nature, and avarice. The corruption of the so-called millionaire socialists belied the North American headlines that labeled the Calles regime “Bolshevik” and “Red.” These epithets were brought on by Calles’s anticlericalism and his strict enforcement of Article 130, which placed severe restrictions on the churches of Mexico. Calles’s decision to get tough provoked a reaction by the Catholic church. The Cristero Rebellion (1926–29) became the defining event of the Calles presidency. It had its origins in the heavy-handed tactics of CROM against an independent labor organization, the Catholic Labor Confederation (CLC), and it escalated into a Catholic resistance movement marked by the battle cry “Viva Cristo Rey.” Both sides committed unspeakable atrocities. The Cristeros, groups of nightriders, murdered farm agents and teachers and blew up the Mexico City-Guadalajara train, “killing over a hundred innocent civilians.”9 The federal army and government-sponsored thugs struck back, killing priests, summarily executing suspected Cristeros, and vandalizing and burning churches. In time, the exhausted combatants agreed to a truce brokered by the U.S. ambassador Dwight Morrow, but, in a touch of irony, not before the struggle claimed the life of Obregón, giving Calles six more years of power. Obregón had been elected president in 1928 for a six-year term (the constitution having been amended to provide for such), but he never served again, as an angry Catholic, blaming him for the persecution of the church, gunned him down. Calles, the person responsible for the persecution, was the beneficiary of the deed. Calles did not reclaim the presidency, preferring instead to be the “Jefe Máximo de la Revolución,” a puppeteer, manipulating the strings of three successive “presidents,” who were dubbed, derisively, “the three stooges.” During the period of the Maximato (1928–34), Calles ruled from his luxurious villa in Cuernavaca, where he hobnobbed with the new American royalty: the movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks and the dime-store heiress Barbara Hutton. There, in the seat of Zapata country, the international set had built spacious mansions, and Calles and his minions resided on what critics called “the street of Ali Baba and the forty thieves.”10 The only noteworthy accomplishment of the Maximato was the creation of a political party, the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), which Calles used as a vehicle to choose the country’s presidents and dispense patronage. The Great Depression slowed the economy, but in any case land distribution and other Revolutionary programs

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were virtually abandoned. While Calles took the Revolution into its Thermidor, certain governors, operating at the state level, remained committed to the Revolution’s goals and continued to be driven by the socialist impulse. Prominent radical governors included Francisco Múgica and Lázaro Cárdenas in Michoacán; Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto in Yucatán; Adalberto Tejeda Olivares and Heriberto Jara in Veracruz; and Tomás Garrido Canabal in Tabasco. Múgica, one of the framers of the constitution, endeavored to make it effective. As governor of Michoacán from 1920 to 1922, and founder of that state’s Socialist Party, he spurned Obregón’s caution, promoting agrarian reform and socialist education. He vigorously supported the Tarascan leader Primo Tapia, whose organized peasant leagues and Indian militias sought “to recapture land taken from them by hacendados during the Porfiriato.”11 Múgica welcomed Vasconcelos’s teachers, with the aim of making his state a model of rural education. His independent behavior, as evidenced by his distribution of 50,000 acres of land on his own authority and the closing of “several Catholic schools,” displeased Obregón, who stood aside when the federal garrison in Morelia forced Múgica to resign.12 Nevertheless, “the agrarian revolution in Michoacán had a momentum of its own.”13 Tapia had been forced into hiding, but he carried out guerrilla warfare until he was assassinated in 1926. Following Tapia’s death, the extermination of the “most capable peasant leaders” caused his movement to fall “on hard times,”14 but the appointment of Cárdenas as governor in 1928 gave agrarian reform new life. Governor Cárdenas revived the policies and actions of Múgica, his close friend and collaborator. The two men had shared a “faith in socialistic solutions and the revolutionary process.”15 Cárdenas created the Michoacán Revolutionary Confederation of Labor (CRMDT) “to confront the power of the landowning class and the clergy.”16 The makeup of the CRMDT included “Primo Tapia’s disbanded Agrarian League, teachers dedicated to secular education and socialism, and Communist Party members.”17 Cárdenas “opened a hundred new rural schools in Michoacán,”18 and distributed 141,663 hectares (a hectare equals 2.47 acres) among 181 villages.19 His distribution of land in the form of ejidos stemmed “from his assumptions about the viability of communal farming in colonial times as well as his belief in socialistic solutions to economic underdevelopment.”20 Cárdenas believed that the ejido would work in modern Mexico for the just production of food and commercial crops. Like Franklin Roosevelt in the United States, his counterpart as a state governor during desperate times (1928–32), he too experimented with social programs; both men would put their programs into effect nationally after each of them became their nation’s presi-

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dent. Cárdenas also acted to curb alcoholism, an issue that became the hallmark of the reforms put into place by the socialist governors of Yucatán. General Salvador Alvarado was the wartime governor of Yucatán (1915–18). Though Alvarado was a Sonoran, Carranza had ordered him to occupy Yucatán in order to secure the henequen revenue for the Constitutionalist cause. Once in control, Alvarado had organized the Partido Socialista de Yucatán as well as ligas de resistencia (regional agrarian leagues) there: “[His] vision for the Yucatán included freeing Maya laborers from their bondage on the henequen plantations and mobilizing worker support for the revolution through the creation of government-controlled unions.”21 At the same time, he believed that moral reform was critical for the success of the Revolution. At Querétaro, Múgica had argued forcefully for a constitutional provision prohibiting “bullfights, cockfights, gambling, and the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors.”22 Alvarado was particularly energetic in his efforts to control “the use of alcohol in order to eradicate poverty, backwardness, and sloth.”23 His restrictions on drinking, “known collectively as La Ley Seca (the Dry Law),”24 were aimed additionally at the protection of women and children. Prohibition became a central issue in the struggle for women’s rights, for “in the early years of Yucatecan Socialism, women were much more than a red auxiliary.”25 Carranza disapproved of Alvarado’s reforms; he saw them as hurting the economy, and he recalled Alvarado to Mexico City. Nevertheless, upon his departure Alvarado could say that he was leaving the state “without alcohol . . . and without vagabonds.”26 Felipe Carrillo Puerto, a Yucatecan and an active lieutenant of Alvarado, assumed the deposed leader’s legacy. He converted Alvarado’s party into the Socialist Party of the Southeast (PSS), which became one of the most dynamic of the regional socialist parties. Dubbed the “Red Caesar,” he claimed that his was “the first socialist government in the Americas.” Carrillo Puerto united 470 individual ligas under the banner of the Liga Central de Resistencia, which enabled him to carry out “exciting experiments in labor and educational reform and women’s rights.”27 Carrillo Puerto even translated the Constitution of 1917 into the Mayan language, “and taught peasants their rights.”28 Nor did he overlook the issue of temperance. In his inaugural address, in 1922, he beseeched the assembled throng: “I ask all of you to promise me with all your hearts that you will never go to the cantinas to get drunk, because if you keep doing it, the working people will be held back forever.”29 However, the temperance issue split Socialist men and women, with men opposing the PSS position favoring women’s suffrage, out of concern that with the vote women would promote Prohibition.30 Moreover, the restrictions already in place (La Ley Seca) had led to

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corruption within the PSS. “Alcohol lubricated gears of the Socialist political machine [payoffs by speakeasy owners] and many red caciques used the Ley Seca to create de facto local monopolies of aguardiente.”31 The situation deteriorated further after the execution of Carrillo Puerto, in January 1924, during the rebellion of General Adolfo de la Huerta, who was contesting the choice of Calles as Obregón’s successor. The corruption in Yucatán and at the national level under Calles was an early indicator of a defect in the socialist system, even as developments in Veracruz appeared to demonstrate otherwise. The radical governors Adalberto Tejeda Olivares and Heriberto Jara of Veracruz stood in sharp contrast, and often in sharp conflict, with the leaders of the national government. Tejeda, a native of the state, had been a key commander in the Constitutionalist army and had supported Obregón’s fight for the presidency in 1920. Obregón rewarded him with the governorship, but came to regret it, as Tejeda’s policies exceeded Obregón’s wishes. Tejeda, a declared Marxist, “felt socialism represented the only ideal system, explaining the totality of the social universe no longer in terms of personal liberties but in terms of social justice.”32 As governor, Tejeda “encouraged labor, peasant, tenant, and socialist groups to organize freely and to fight for their own interests.”33 To this end, he sponsored the creation of a statewide peasant league in 1923. During his first administration (1920–24), Tejeda distributed 160,190 hectares of land to 154 settlements.34 He remained loyal during the de la Huerta rebellion, enabling him to overcome Obregón’s displeasure and to help elect the equally radical Heriberto Jara as his successor. The pace of land redistribution slowed under Jara, but not because of a lack of Revolutionary zeal. Jara had difficulty establishing a peasant base of support, largely because of the continued domination of the Veracruz peasant league by Tejeda and the belief that he favored urban workers’ interests, having been an organizer of the Río Blanco strike.35 Peasant leaders overlooked the fact that, in supporting Article 27 at Querétaro, Jara had declared, “This law will clearly say: no longer will you [the small farmer] be the slave of yesterday but the owner of tomorrow.”36 In truth, Jara’s energies were absorbed by his hard-line position toward foreign oil companies in the Huasteca region. In 1925 he supported the strike by the Federation of Workers of the Sea and Land against El Aguila and the Huasteca Petroleum Company, even though Calles and Morones opposed it and wanted it ended.37 He irritated Calles further by demanding that the Huasteca Company pay the state thirty million pesos in past-due royalties, an action that was upheld in court by Judge Francisco Méndez. Jara’s intention to enforce the ruling, despite appeals from Mexico City, led to his undoing. “Mén­

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dez was mysteriously assassinated. Morones made a compromise with the oil companies . . . and Jara’s regime was toppled by the central government in a military coup in September 1927.”38 In deposing Jara, Calles exchanged one irritant for another, as Tejeda was installed for a second term as governor. During his second term (1928–32), Tejeda took control of the Veracruz Peasant League and made it the dominant political force in the state. He managed to elect his candidates for municipal and state offices, defeating those of the PNR. Tejeda vigorously pursued the goal of a socialist state. He allocated over 40 percent of the state’s budget to be used for education, building schools and training teachers.39 He enforced the labor laws, expropriating those industries that did not comply and turning them into workers’ cooperatives.40 He reduced the church to a shell of its former self, passing legislation that fixed a limit of one priest for every 100,000 communicants.41 However, he enjoyed his greatest success in the area of agrarian reform, distributing approximately 297,542 hectares, despite “stop” laws issued by the central government.42 Tejeda dreamed of “making Veracruz the most progressive state in the nation by radically changing all its social, political, and economic institutions,”43 but in so doing he probably sacrificed any chance for the presidency in 1934.44 He described “the crisis of capitalism” as “a crisis of poverty,” and prescribed a socialist revolution as the only remedy.45 There were other radical governors and caudillos during this period, specifically Tomás Garrido Canabal, who ruled Tabasco from 1921 to 1935, earning notoriety for his paramilitary “Red Shirts” and his extreme persecution of the Catholic church. However, the examples cited are sufficient for demonstrating the persistence of the socialist impulse during the unfriendly era of Calles. As 1934 approached, Calles cast about for another puppet, choosing Lázaro Cárdenas, whom he liked personally and referred to as “the kid.”46 Cárdenas may have been likeable, but he was driven by the socialist impulse, and Calles was either arrogant or ill-informed if he believed he could control him. The revolutionary social programs implemented by Cárdenas as governor of Michoacán served as clear indication of what to expect from him in the presidency.47 But first Cárdenas had to wrestle power from Calles. Cárdenas spent most of his first two years in office in a power struggle with Calles. While building a popular base through his extensive travels crisscrossing Mexico, he systematically replaced callistas with his choices in the military, the bureaucracy, and the PNR. The showdown came in the labor sector, in which he supported the efforts of Vicente Lombardo Toledano (1894–1968) to create the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) to take over the labor movement

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from CROM. Lombardo Toledano, an avowed Marxist whose views had been tempered by the humanistic philosophy of his teacher Antonio Caso, amassed almost a million members and successfully marginalized the “ineffective and corrupt” CROM,48 which provoked an angry reaction from Calles and Morones. By publicly denouncing the Cárdenas government as “communist” and as stirring up “political passion and personal hate,”49 they gave Cárdenas the opening he needed. On April 10, 1936, he exiled them to the United States, explaining his action as necessary for the “public safety.”50 Cárdenas could now put the Revolution back on track. Cárdenas placed a strong emphasis on secular, actually socialist, education. Under Cárdenas, the Marxist historian Luis Chávez Orozco and others “produced new textbooks that portrayed Mexican history as a constant struggle of the oppressed masses against the capitalist classes, imperialist interlopers, and the Roman Catholic Church.”51 The attack upon the church was unrelenting. During a visit to Tabasco, Cárdenas stated, “Man should not put his hope in the supernatural. Every moment spent on one’s knees is a moment stolen from humanity.”52 Although the Cristero Rebellion had ended in a truce in 1929, the struggle for minds continued to cause terrible atrocities, against teachers on the one hand and priests on the other, especially in rural areas. As a result, Cárdenas’s commitment to public education bore mixed results. Although his administration would spend a record 10 million pesos on education in 1936 (a figure that would rise to 11.3 million pesos by 194053) in an effort to “put more children into the classroom [with] increased opportunities for social mobility and material progress,”54 it was never able to replace a belief in Christ with a belief in socialism. In 1936 Cárdenas decided to call another truce, and he instructed teachers “to limit de-Christianization to ‘careful’ and ‘intelligent’ discussion based on scientific persuasion.”55 Cárdenas’s efforts in agrarian reform had similar mixed results. Primarily, the Revolution had been a struggle for land, and Cárdenas was determined to give the land to those who had worked it. During his six years in office he distributed 18 million hectares (49 million acres) of land, twice the combined total of his predecessors. Although some land was parceled out to individual farmers, the vast percentage was awarded to communities as ejidos, to be worked cooperatively, with community members sharing in its production. Cárdenas envisioned the ejido “as the germ of a socialist society. He not only gave the ejido villages land. He aided them with credit, schools, dams, and roads, for they were his ideal of a new order.”56 In order to enable them to succeed, in 1938 he created the Banco de Crédito Ejidal and sponsored the formation of the Na-

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tional Peasant Confederation (CNC), for overseeing the distribution of ejidos and representing agrarian interests in the national political party. Cárdenas’s “ideal” was showcased in the La Laguna ejido in the Torreón region, an 8-million-acre spread worked by 30,000 families. It was an impressive project, with a huge dam providing irrigation and hydroelectric energy, along with housing, schools, a hospital, and recreational and social facilities. The La Laguna ejido produced commercial crops, primarily cotton, but also alfalfa, maize, and wheat, and most families had small plots for raising food crops for their own consumption.57 Yet even this favored project had its critics, a reflection of the overall problems of the ejido program generally. First and foremost, the country experienced a decline in agriculture productivity. “Cotton production [at La Laguna] fell by almost nine thousand tons from 1936 to 1938, and henequen production on the new Yucatecan ejidos dropped by forty-five thousand tons during the same period.”58 Rebutting his critics, Cárdenas avowed that he had “embarked upon the ejido program to meet a social, not an economic, need,”59 but economics could not be ignored. The Ejidal Bank did not have enough investment capital to go around, and the ejidos “failed to generate sufficient wealth to sustain Mexico’s growing rural population.”60 Moreover, evidence existed of “bureaucratic malfeasance and corruption” and of favoritism on the part of the Ejidal Bank in granting loans.61 The ejido did not eradicate rural poverty, but it did eliminate “the type of servitude that had bound hacendado and peon for centuries.”62 For the time being, that was good enough for Cárdenas, as he continued fulfilling his Six Year Plan “vaguely calling for socialism.”63 Cardenas’s vision of a socialistic society was demonstrated in his plan for the Secretariat of Communications and Public Works (SCOP). The Secretariat became the government’s largest employer, administering the nationalized telephone, telegraph, railway, and postal services and carrying out road-building, dam construction, and infrastructure maintenance and repair. SCOP constructed a huge housing project in Mexico City for its employees, complete with schools, a library, nurseries, clinics, playgrounds, a post office, cinema, meeting rooms, and shops. After the Second World War, SCOP constructed the Mexico CityAcapulco autopista (toll road), opening up Guerrero and the Pacific beaches to development and tourism. As with La Laguna, however, the SCOP experiment required heavy subsidies to get started and, consequently, its initial success was not easy to repeat, given the lack of resources. Economic constraints notwithstanding, the boldest action of the Cárdenas presidency was yet to come. On March 18, 1938, Cárdenas nationalized the foreign-owned oil companies, all seventeen of them. Mexico’s “second declaration of independence”—

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economic independence—had been over a year in the making. In November 1936, oil workers had announced plans to strike for improved wages and greater control of the workplace. In order to avert a strike that might disrupt the economy, Cárdenas submitted the dispute to the Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration, which ruled in favor of the workers. The oil companies balked at the finding and appealed to the Mexican Supreme Court, which upheld the board’s decision. The companies still refused to yield, publishing full-page newspaper advertisements that predicted dire economic consequences and urged Mexicans to protest the position of the Cárdenas government. Viewing these actions as attacks upon Mexican sovereignty, Cárdenas expropriated the companies and created a national oil monopoly. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) became Mexico’s largest state-owned enterprise and the backbone of the state sector of its economy. U.S. oil executives denounced the “Communist” Cárdenas, but the Roosevelt administration did not intervene. Times had changed. Roosevelt was committed to the “Good Neighbor” policy, and New Dealers were ideologically attuned to Cárdenas’s reforms; besides, European Fascism was a growing threat. Standard accounts have described the oil expropriation as a nationalistic reaction to accidental events, overlooking the fact that Cárdenas campaigned in 1934 on the possibility of taking over the petroleum industry under Article 27. Moreover, as Cárdenas affirmed: “I believe that there are few opportunities so special as this for Mexico to achieve independence from imperialist capital, and because of this my government will comply with the responsibility conferred by the revolution.”64 Cárdenas’s commitment to the revolutionary transformation of Mexico reflected the socialist impulse, and he acted to make the Revolution permanent. Within weeks after the oil expropriation, Cárdenas replaced the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) with the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM). The action was more than a name change. The PRM was designed to be the official party of the Revolution, in control of the government. According to its declaration of principles, the PRM considered “as one of its fundamental objectives the preparation of the people for building a workers’ democracy, for arriving at a socialist regime.”65 The party was organized corporately, with its constituent councils comprised of delegates representing four Revolutionary sectors: the military, the agrarian sector (CNC), labor (CTM), and the “popular” sector (a general category made up of organized groups of students, teachers, women, professionals, government employees, and businessmen). Cárdenas had established the foundation for a socialistic society, and he created the PRM to preserve the reforms he had put in place and assure that there would be more to come in the

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future. However, one might challenge this interpretation, considering whom Cárdenas picked to be his successor. Cárdenas selected Manuel Avila Camacho (1897–1955), his secretary of war and a moderate, to succeed him in 1940. The logical choice for Cárdenas was Francisco Múgica, a fellow socialist, his close friend and mentor, and a framer of the Constitution of 1917. The selection of Avila Camacho created an uncertainty about the future course of the Revolution that would not have existed under Múgica. The explanation for Cárdenas’s choice has a touch of irony. The oil nationalization, Cárdenas’s most revolutionary act, had caused economic hardship, and it created the political conditions that forced him to retreat. The industry was virtually shut down in the short term, caused by the loss of experienced technical and managerial personnel and retaliatory actions by the foreign oil companies. With the economy already experiencing high unemployment and inflation, owing to the decline in agricultural production, and with the world on the brink of war, Cárdenas sensed the need to choose a “unifying figure,” even if it meant putting the Revolution on hold until more favorable times.66 As it turned out, Avila Camacho did not turn back the clock, even founding the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS) as mandated by Article 123 of the Constitution. Mexico remained on the road to socialism that had been paved by Cárdenas. Mexican socialism had yet to succeed or fail, but a young Nicaraguan working in the oil fields around Tampico in 1923 was inspired by it, and hoped to take it back to his homeland and transform his country in the same way.

6

The Mexican Fallout Nicaragua

Francisco Múgica “hoped that the Mexican Revolution would serve as a model for socialist revolution around the globe.”1 Although his wish was rather ambitious, political exiles and radical thinkers flocked to Mexico to observe the Revolution firsthand and plot the transformation of their own nations following the Mexican example. Despite the uneven performance of Alvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles, the Mexico of José Vasconcelos was a vibrant place where leftist ideas and dissident expression flowed freely. During the twentieth century Mexico City spread the ideas of the Mexican Revolution far and wide, just as Paris had radiated the principles of the French Revolution during the nineteenth century. What Paris and the French Revolution were to Karl Marx in 1844–45 and again in 1848, Mexico City and the Mexican Revolution were to the Peruvian revolutionary Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in 1923–24 and again in 1927–28, to Leon Trotsky from 1938–40 and, to a lesser extent, to Che Guevara and Fidel Castro during 1955 and 1956.2 As it turned out, the revolutionary figure most directly affected by the Mexican Revolutionary ambiente was neither a political exile nor a radical thinker, but, at the time, a drifter and a fugitive from justice. Augusto César Sandino (1895–1934) of Nicaragua worked in the oil fields around Tampico, Mexico, from 1923 to 1926. Before leaving Nicaragua in 1920, he had not been active politically. He grew up in Niquinohomo, a small town

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just west of Granada, as the illegitimate son of two teenagers: Gregorio Sandino, a member of a well-to-do landowning family, and Margarita Calderón, an Indian criada. Although his father took him in and reared him as a son, providing him with a secondary education, his social consciousness was aroused early. “While running the family farm, the teenage Sandino realized how merchants took advantage of peasants, and he organized a cooperative marketing association to help the latter. He understood why those of his father’s class fared well whereas his peasant mother became a streetwalker.”3 Nevertheless, his relationship with his father was cordial, which enabled him to read the classics in his father’s well-stocked library and become familiar with the egalitarian tenets of his father’s Liberal Party. At the same time, he was proud of his Indian heritage, and he made a connection between race and class. Sandino’s uneventful life ended abruptly when during a fight he shot and wounded a man, causing him to flee town “to avoid arrest.”4 Sandino spent the next three years wandering, using his mechanical and managerial skills to land jobs, usually with U.S.-owned companies. Among these employments he worked on banana plantations in Honduras and Guatemala (Vacaro Brothers/Standard Fruit and United Fruit, respectively), before winding up in Tampico to work for the American-owned Huasteca Petroleum Company (a subsidiary of Standard Oil of Indiana). These experiences, plus the presence of U.S. marines in his homeland, gave him “little reason to doubt Yankee omnipotence.”5 (The U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1925, and again from late 1926 to 1933.) Although he was likely aware of the indictment of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” policy by his countryman Rubén Darío, there is no public record of Sandino’s attitude toward U.S. intervention in Nicaragua prior to his flight from that country in 1920. However, not too long after his return, he exhibited an “uncontrollable Yankeephobia,” naming as his enemies “the blonde beasts” (U.S. Marines), “Wall Street bankers,” and the “White Sepulcher” (the White House).6 During his stay in Mexico, “he was ridiculed by native workers who were inflated by the achievements of their revolution and condemned Nicaraguans for their subservience to the United States.”7 Hatred of “Yankee imperialism” was not all that Sandino learned in Tampico. In the 1920s Tampico was a city with a population of close to a hundred thousand, a busy gulf port and oil center. “Its name was synonymous with oil.”8 The combination of the Mexican Revolution and continued exploitation of Mexican oil by U.S. companies served to make the oil fields of Tampico “a hotbed of political agitation. . . . Sandino assimilated anarchist, socialist, and communist ideas from these agitators.”9 Although Communist unions began organizing after

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1918, and CROM became dominant under Obregón and Calles, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had been there first, and they propagated anarchist philosophy among the oil workers. The anarchist ideas of Ricardo Flores Magón had taken root there, and Sandino adopted them fervently. The anarchist ideas that Sandino encountered were those of the full-blown Flores Magón. He did not encounter the Flores Magón of the PLM, the 1906 St. Louis Manifesto, and electoral politics; rather, he found the Flores Magón of Michael Bakunin, of the “cure-all revolution,” of direct action and violence as the only means of overthrowing a “corrupt society.”10 Sandino studied Flores Magón in Semilla libertaria (Libertarian Seed), a collection of articles in Regeneración that appeared from 1910 to 1918, wherein Flores Magón “defined communism as a social arrangement in which the means of production are owned in common and the workers share the products according to their needs.”11 In March 1918, Flores Magón had issued his “last” manifesto, “a final and defiant call for the world Anarchist revolution,”12 resulting in his imprisonment in Leavenworth and causing critics to describe him as an “increasingly warped individual.”13 Sandino was something of an eccentric himself. Sandino’s socialist impulse was fueled by revelation, intuition, and metaphysics. In Mexico, Sandino was influenced by Spiritualism, an occult wisdom deriving from communion with spirits. Francisco Madero was a Spiritualist. He sought to communicate with the dead through a medium, and his dreamy aspect of otherworldliness had led Pofirio Díaz to underestimate him. Sandino had that look, too. He became a Freemason. The Mexican “brand” of Freemasonry, extending back to the French Revolution, enabled conspiratorial activity owing to its secret lodges and clandestine ritual.14 He delved into theosophy, entering the realm of the mahatmas—creative spirits who possessed individuals who were devoted to “universal good and human welfare.” This messianic concept and his sense of having been chosen also led Sandino to Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion committed to making a better world through the victory of Good over Evil.15 Sandino was further attracted to indigenismo, then in vogue in Mexico, and the concept of Indo-Americanism also became part of his belief system. When Sandino returned to Nicaragua in 1926, he carried “a peculiar blend of revolutionary politics and theology [as] ideological baggage.”16 Sandino thus combined anarchist thought with a sense of mission that had been revealed to him through clairvoyance and ESP. Sandino’s return to Nicaragua coincided with the outbreak of civil war there and the return of the U.S. Marines as an occupying force. The United States had withdrawn the Marines in August 1925, satisfied that its trans-isthmian interests

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were secure and that Nicaragua’s finances were in order. With the election of a Liberal-Conservative coalition comprised of Conservative Carlos Solórzano as president and Liberal Juan B. Sacasa as vice-president, the political situation had appeared stable. However, the defeated candidate for president, General Emiliano Chamorro, claimed fraud and overthrew Solórzano in September, casting Nicaragua into civil strife once again. The United States refused to recognize Chamorro, which encouraged the Liberals, under Sacasa and General José María Moncada, to take up arms. The revolt faltered in May 1926, but was revived in August, leading to Chamorro’s resignation. In November, the Congress named ex-President Adolfo Díaz to serve out Solórzano’s term, but the Liberals, with substantial aid from Mexico, remained in armed opposition. In the meantime, Sandino had arrived home in Nicaragua on June 1, 1926. Sandino’s rise to the rank of general in the Liberal (Constitutionalist) army was meteoric. He had returned home with the likely intention of joining Sacasa’s uprising, but he found that the Liberal forces were in eclipse.17 With no war to fight, he took a job with an American-owned gold mine in the northern province of Nueva Segovia, until fighting broke out again in August. He believed that finally “his time had come.”18 By rallying the miners with stories about how much better off workers were in Revolutionary Mexico and purchasing arms from Honduran gunrunners, he raised a small force and attacked a government garrison in the nearby town of Jícaro. His forces inflicted a few casualties before being driven away; they withdrew to Puerto Cabezas on the Caribbean coast, where Moncada had his headquarters. The Liberal chieftain showed little enthusiasm for the upstart rebel, noting that he spoke of “‘the necessity for the workers to struggle against the rich and other things that [were] the principles of communism.’”19 Nevertheless, as Moncada advanced on Managua he permitted Sandino to operate on his right flank. Sandino encountered success along his route, gathering in arms and recruits and earning the rank of general in the Constitutional army.20 By this time (March 1927), the United States had determined to uphold the Díaz government and had dispatched a force of two thousand Marines to make its intentions clear. Concerned that Mexico was attempting to spread its “revolutionary virus,”21 the United States recognized the Díaz government and sent Henry L. Stimson to Managua to mediate the dispute. With the sine qua non that Díaz must be allowed to finish his term, Moncada and Stimson met at Tipitapa on May 4, 1927, and fashioned an agreement that called for the cessation of hostilities and American supervision of the 1928 presidential election. The agreement also guaranteed Liberal participation in the Díaz government and authorized the United

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States to train a nonpartisan constabulary force, a Guardia Nacional, to maintain order in the future.22 Moncada beseeched his generals to accept the terms, but Sandino held out: “I decided to fight, understanding that I was the one called to protest the betrayal of the Fatherland.”23 He assembled his force of several hundred men and headed for the mountains of Jinotega and Nueva Segovia, daring the Marines to come and get him. Although he lost his first skirmish with the Marines at Ocotal in July, he became an instant hero of the left in defiance of “Yankee imperialism.” The Sandino insurgency emphasized anti-imperialism as a dynamic factor of the socialist impulse. “Latin American intellectuals applauded [Sandino’s] antiimperialist actions. Socialist men of letters such as Peru’s José Carlos Mariátegui and Argentina’s Alfredo Palacios and Manuel Ugarte praised [his] struggle, which resembled a class war.”24 They were seconded by the poet Gabriela Mistral of Chile, who “was obsessed with the ‘spectacular concept of a clash of races’; she urged the formation of a Hispanic League to fight in Nicaragua.”25 Joaquín García Monge, the editor of the Costa Rican literary journal Repertorio Ameri­ cano, solicited articles extolling Sandino and “helped organize a ‘Pro-Sandino Committee’ in San José to raise money for the Nicaraguan general.”26 The Communist International (Comintern) weighed in, using the front organization, the Anti-Imperialist League, to engage in pro-Sandino propaganda and hold fundraising rallies. Heading up the league’s chapter in Mexico City, the Venezuelan Communist-in-exile Gustavo Machado organized the “Hands Off Nicaragua Committee,” which solicited funds by displaying an American flag taken from the body of Marine Sergeant/Guardia Lieutenant Thomas Bruce, who had been killed in a clash with Sandinista guerrillas outside Quilali on January 1, 1928. Even in New York the Comintern’s All American Anti-Imperialist League lionized Sandino, and his half-brother Sócrates, a resident of Brooklyn, spoke at the league’s rallies, collecting money to purchase “medical supplies” for Sandino’s army.27 (Incredibly, Americans contributed money that likely was used to buy bullets to kill marines.) In truth, Sandino received little financial support from outside of Nicaragua, but his timing was right. The intervention in Nicaragua was not popular in the United States. The Coolidge administration, and especially that of Herbert Hoover, felt that the “Big Stick” policy in the Caribbean and Central America was counterproductive. Seeing the resentment that it caused and feeling that it did not serve American interests in the long run, they adopted a policy of “liquidating imperialism.” Although keeping it confidential until 1930, Hoover and his secretary of state Henry L. Stimson subscribed to the Clark memorandum that repudiated the

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Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. J. Reuben Clark, then the undersecretary of state, had prepared the memorandum in December 1928, which stated that the Monroe Doctrine did not justify intervention in Latin America. “The Doctrine states a case of the United States vs. Europe,” he wrote, “and not of the United States vs. Latin America.”28 Moncada was elected to the Nicaraguan presidency in December 1928 and inaugurated the following January, so when Hoover took office in March 1929 he began to reduce the size of the Marine force in Nicaragua, leaving the pacification of the country increasingly to the Guardia. In the meantime, after initially engaging the Marines in conventional military clashes, Sandino resorted to guerrilla warfare. Operating in the remote mountainous and jungle regions of Nueva Segovia and Jinotega, “he avoided combat,” choosing to strike “from ambush [and] only when the odds were clearly in his favor.”29 Sandino’s hit-and-run tactics frustrated his pursuers and kept him in the headlines, but Moncada’s election and the announced drawdown of Marine forces deprived his movement of momentum. Sandino decided in January 1929 to travel to Mexico to personally lobby Calles and President Emilio Portes Gil for support. Receiving misleading word that “the Mexican President would furnish him arms and ammunition,”30 Sandino departed Nicaragua in late May. Unbeknownst to him, Portes Gil and U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow had cut a deal whereby he would receive only asylum and a place to reside in Mérida, Yucatán. Mérida was where he ended up after arriving in Veracruz and having been denied permission to proceed to Mexico City. Sandino’s second stay in Mexico, from mid-June 1929 to late April 1930, had a profound effect upon the future of his movement. While he awaited the opportunity to go to Mexico City, various elements competed for his allegiance. Dr. Pedro José Zepeda, a Nicaraguan physician who had been acting as Sandino’s agent in Mexico City, representing traditional Liberal Party thinking, counseled Sandino to exercise patience and moderation in order to build a multi-class movement against injustice and imperialism. On the other hand, the Peruvian Esteban Pavletich, representing the aprista movement on Sandino’s staff, sought to enlist Sandino for the creation of “a Socialist United States of Indo America based on the mestizo race.”31 However, Pavletich could not match the resources of the Comintern’s representatives in Mexico—Machado in Mexico City and the Salvadoran Communist Agustín Farabundo Martí serving on Sandino’s staff. Nevertheless, “Sandino refused to take orders from the Communists and disagreed with their strategy, but, like them, he wanted to abolish exploitation and the capitalist system through a worldwide proletarian revolution.”32

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Because he challenged “the Comintern’s claim to a monopoly of revolution,”33 Sandino’s relations with the Communists in Mexico became estranged. In December 1929 Machado accused him of accepting his money “and then taking a $60,000 bribe from the United States to exile himself in Mexico.”34 Sandino vigorously denied the allegation and turned on Martí, expelling him from his staff and ordering him “out of his sight forever.”35 Sandino’s breakup with the politicians courting him, except for Zepeda, coincided with an infatuation of another sort. Left to his own devices in Mérida, Sandino now came under the influence of the Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune, founded by Joaquín Trincado with headquarters in Bueno Aires, Argentina. The cult went a step beyond theosophy, preaching that “all things are full of spirits.”36 Standing for a commune of brothers, the Magnetic-Spiritual School offered “a custom-made fusion of anarchism and Spiritism,”37 which enabled Sandino to present “his anarchist convictions under the protective covering of his theosophy.”38 After his return to Nicaragua, he ordered that the officers and men of his army address one another as “Brother.”39 Those who did not understand Sandino’s conversion regarded his behavior as bizarre, but in truth he was more focused than ever. Although Sandino stated in 1926 that he “was not a Communist [Bolshevik], but rather a socialist,”40 four years later he described himself as a “rational communist,” defining his brand of communism as being based on “knowledge”—that is to say, on the knowledge provided by science and from revelation in communion with the spirits.41 This mode of thinking later provided the inspiration for his agricultural cooperative at Wiwilí (Guiguili) (1933–34), which was dedicated to “the emancipation and social well-being of the working class.”42 Before returning to Nicaragua, in late April 1930, Sandino did get his chance to meet with Portes Gil, but the meeting proved unproductive. In Nicaragua, Sandino resumed command of guerrilla operations and issued a decree specifically targeting American-owned property,43 but the Hoover administration would not be provoked. In the midst of the Great Depression and with the American people down on the business community, Hoover was in no position to send in more Marines to protect Standard Fruit or any other American company in Nicaragua. On the contrary, he remained determined to reduce the size of the Marine force in Nicaragua, with the ultimate objective of a complete withdrawal following the 1932 presidential election there. His goal was facilitated by the Nicaraguans themselves; both the Liberals and Conservatives agreed that, whoever won the election, the top priority of the new govern-

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ment would be the pacification of the country, and that both parties, winner and loser, would cooperate toward that end. They agreed further to seek a negotiated peace with Sandino, conceding that they could not prevail militarily. Despite the fact that Sandino continued to terrorize the countryside, there were so few American forces left by election day, November 6, that the Americans were able to supervise only 182 of the 429 polling places.44 The Liberal candidate, Juan B. Sacasa, won the election and was inaugurated on January 1, 1933. The next day, the remaining Marines departed Nicaragua. With imperialism no longer an issue, Sandino was prepared to treat with his Nicaraguan brothers. The opposing sides negotiated a truce, and Sandino called on Sacasa at the presidential palace on February 2; before the day was done, they had drafted a peace settlement. The government granted amnesty to Sandino and his followers in return for a pledge of loyalty and an agreement to disarm (modified by “gradual”). It gave Sandino what he wanted most: specifically, a grant of land “of ‘sufficient amplitude’ in the wilderness of the Coco Valley for an agricultural colony.”45 Also, for a year at least, subject to the government’s will, Sandino was permitted to keep one hundred men under arms. The Communists excoriated Sandino for abandoning the revolution, but Sandino had already defined himself as a “rational communist,” by which he meant the “communism of the commune.”46 The peace settlement did not approach his vision, expressed to a Spanish visitor to his headquarters in 1932—“Spain and America will communize the earth”47—but it was a start. Sandino’s dream of an agricultural cooperative at Wiwilí was pure utopian socialism. The concept of the universal commune (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity), derived from Trincado, obviously owed more to Rosseau than to Marx.48 Sandino was determined to make it work. The Río Coco, from its source in the mountains of Nueva Segovia to the Caribbean Sea, wound its way through the hot, wet, crocodile-infested jungle of northeastern Nicaragua. Sandino proposed to colonize that wilderness area as a cooperative effort, adopting “the communal organization of his Indian ancestors.”49 If he had been left alone in his jungle enclave, Sandino might have succeeded where no one else had previously, producing food crops for the local towns, and even a commercial crop for export. But circumstances would not leave him alone. The war had produced ill feelings between the Guardia Nacional and the Sandinistas. The U.S. Marines had trained the Guardia to be a nonpartisan constabulary that would uphold constitutional government regardless of which party occupied the presidential palace. The concept was well-intended but ill-conceived. In Central America the military had always been a partisan body, and, traditionally,

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commanding generals had always shot their way into power. The Guardia was no different. Anastasio Somoza (1896–1956), a political appointee with no professional military standing, was the Guardia’s commander in 1933, and he deeply resented the virtual autonomy that Sandino enjoyed—even if it was in a remote part of the country. Throughout that year there were sporadic clashes between the Guardia and Sandino’s “auxiliaries,” but the situation became intolerable in November, owing to Somoza’s insistence that Sandino’s forces be disarmed completely, one of the terms of the government’s peace agreement with Sandino. President Sacasa, caught between the warring sides, “summoned [Sandino] to Managua for a ‘frank discussion.’”50 It was already too late. Somoza was determined to eliminate Sandino. On the evening of February 21, 1934, after dining with Sacasa at the presidential palace, Sandino was apprehended by a detachment of the Guardia and taken to the Managua airfield, where he was executed by a firing squad. The martyred Sandino might have been forgotten in time, except for the fact that the man responsible for his death seized power in 1936, ruling as a dictator for the next twenty years and serving as a living reminder of the Sandinista movement. After Somoza was assassinated in 1956, his sons, Luis and Anastasio Jr., perpetuated the “dynasty,” until it was overthrown by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1979. Invoking the name “Sandinista” was an effort by the FSLN to demonstrate that their movement was rooted in Nicaragua and not “made in” Moscow or Havana. Whether this was a stratagem or not will be discussed in chapter 17, but we can affirm here that the socialist impulse in Nicaragua persisted from one generation to another. “Nicaragua was . . . the first instance of the confluence of two different generations of revolutionaries: the surviving veterans of Sandino’s army and the new Marxists of the FSLN.”51 But we are getting ahead of the discussion. Of immediate concern is the theme of this chapter: the fallout from the Mexican Revolution. For that, it is appropriate to turn to events in Peru, where the thinking of certain radical figures eventually merged with the ideas expressed in the Mexican Constitution of 1917.

III

The Peruvian Influence

7

The Three González Prada, Mariátegui, and Haya

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many of the conditions that caused a revolution in Mexico existed in Peru, but the dynamics were totally different. In Peru, a small, predominantly white elite exercised economic and political power over a large indigenous population. Ownership of land was concentrated in a few hands. Foreign companies dominated the exploitation of the nation’s mineral resources. The masses endured poverty and oppression. But a revolution was not imminent. The Indian population was inert, mindful of the terrible retribution that followed the Tupac Amaru uprising of 1780–81. The creole population was fearful too, conscious of the atrocities that Tupac Amaru had committed during the rebellion. The oligarchy was united, and it preyed upon the fear and racism of the other groups. Geography and topography also played critical roles, segregating the populations and serving as obstacles to national unity. Three men, driven by the socialist impulse, emerged from this state of indecision and injustice to offer distinct solutions to the Peruvian dilemma. “In few areas of Spanish America have political radicalism and intellectual radicalism existed in as intimate relationship as they have in Peru.”1 The poet and essayist Manuel González Prada (1848–1918), a descendant of a noble Spanish and Peruvian family, became politically active in the aftermath of Peru’s defeat by Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879–83). Infuriated and ashamed that Peru had suffered an ignominious defeat, he blamed the “weakness” of Peruvian society and urged “a thorough cleansing.”2 No segment of the ruling class escaped his anger. Referring to the economic boom of the 1850s that

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had accompanied the mining of guano, González Prada wrote: “Riches served as an element of corruption, not of material progress. . . . No means of acquisition seemed illicit. The people would have thrown themselves into a sewer if at the bottom they had glimpsed a golden sol.”3 González used the word “sewer” again in describing the Peruvian Congress as a place “where all the filth of the country had come together.”4 His criticism of the church was even more scathing: “Our Catholicism is an inferior paganism, without greatness in its philosophy or magnificence in its art.”5 He condemned the church for its role in the virtual enslavement of the Indian masses: “We talk about Christian charity . . . and stand by consenting to the crucifixion of a race.”6 González Prada was convinced that the oppression of the Indian masses had been the fundamental factor in Peru’s defeat by Chile.7 He deplored the fact that the once mighty peoples of the sierra were bound in servitude and denied the opportunity to contribute to the growth of the nation. Believing that the Indian was key to Peru’s future, he spurred a revival of indigenismo, which recalled the past greatness of the Inca empire and espoused the “moral and material uplifting of the Indian.”8 To promote these goals, he established the Círculo Literario (Literary Circle) in 1886, through which he hoped to stimulate “a nationalistic literature of ‘propaganda and attack.’”9 He encouraged writers to cast aside “tradition” and find a new voice.10 Despite his efforts to promote change, González Prada was disappointed in the results. He would leave Lima for Paris in 1891, beginning a seven-year self-imposed exile. There his anger would find a focus. In Paris, González Prada “attended meetings of free thinkers and came under the influence of socialism.”11 His anticlericalism was honed by Joseph Ernest Renan (1823–1892), the French atheist; his scorn of Hispanic aristocratic tradition was reinforced by the literature of the Spanish “Generation of ’98” that dissected the decline of Spain as a world power. But his greatest transformation came with the adoption of anarchism as a guiding philosophy. He read Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon avidly and was persuaded that there was no hope in the political process. Whereas earlier he had advocated education as a means of integrating the Indian into Peruvian society, his experience in Paris caused him to urge the Indian masses to rebel.12 As a committed anarchist, he concluded that the solution to the Indian “problem” was not schools but land. The hacienda system that held the Indian in bondage had to be destroyed, and he exhorted the Indian to do it through direct action. “The Indian must achieve his redemption through his own efforts,” he wrote, “not through the humanity of his oppressors.”13 When González Prada returned to Lima in 1898, he was the “single most important intellectual figure [among Latin Americans] to respond to anarchist philosophy.”14

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González Prada introduced anarchism to Peru; his ideas spread rapidly in the Lima-Callao area.15 Important changes were taking place in Peru in the early decades of the twentieth century. Commercial agriculture (cotton and sugar) was undergoing expansion in the coastal regions, and foreign capital flowed in to exploit copper, silver, and petroleum. Manufacturing was taking root, especially during the First World War and particularly in textiles. Labor began to organize, with anarcho-syndicalism dominant. Civilian leaders replaced military chieftains in the presidency and followed a more enlightened policy with regard to labor-management relations. Yet the condition of the Indian population in the sierra did not improve. González Prada began publishing the anarchist newspaper Los Parias (The Pariahs) in 1904, in the pages of which he continued his literary bomb-throwing and urged the Indians “to spend on rifles and cartridges the money they now wasted on drink and fiestas.”16 As a writer and anarchist, he shunned electoral politics, but his fiery rhetoric inspired a new generation of activists and thinkers. Although they recoiled from his efforts to incite what would amount to a race war, they did recognize that economic and social reforms were essential for overcoming the misery and powerlessness of the Indian. José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895–1979) were prominent among the “Generation of 1919,” which believed that a combination of socialism and indigenismo would unify Peru and fulfill the potential of “Indoamerica.” Mariátegui, a brilliant and charismatic writer and thinker, accomplished a great deal in his very short life. Overcoming poverty and a terrible accident when he was eight years old that denied him the effective use of his left leg, he rose to be the leader of the Peruvian Left during the second half of the 1920s. His schooling beyond the primary grades was undisciplined and unstructured, but his innate genius enabled him to reflect upon the writings of Friedrich Nietzche, Miguel de Unamuno, Max Weber, and Walt Whitman, among others. His writings displayed the influence of contemporary European thinkers, namely, Romain Rolland, José Ortega y Gasset, Benedetto Croce, Oswald Spengler, Sigmund Freud, and Vladimir Lenin.17 Although a committed Marxist, his selfstyled learning introduced him to humanistic thought that caused him to seek “to provide Marxism with an ideological dimension grounded in human passion.”18 He believed that myth, faith in an ideal, and virtual religious fervor were essential in order to arouse the masses.19 Accordingly, Mariátegui was inspired by Georges Sorel, who avowed, “The workers need enthusiasm as well as science,” and by Henri Bergson’s “nonrational motivating force” and William James’s “will to believe.”20 He was even moved by the “liberal and pacifist sentiments” of

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Woodrow Wilson.21 Throughout his career, Mariátegui’s relationship with the Communist International (Comintern) was “stormy.”22 Mariátegui began his journalistic career in 1909 as a copy boy, eventually rising to the job of reporter. In 1919, he founded the socialist daily La Razón, and became its editor and publisher. That was also the year that Augusto B. Leguía (1863–1932) seized power in Peru, beginning an eleven-year dictatorship. Although an authoritarian, Leguía, a highly successful entrepreneur before becoming president, was a road- and bridge-builder and believed strongly in capitalist development fueled by foreign investment. Annoyed by Mariátegui’s reporting, Leguía packed him off to Italy as a “Peruvian foreign press agent,” in effect expelling him from the country. During his four years in Italy, Mariátegui engaged in concentrated study of Marxist literature and became a Communist; after he returned to Peru in 1923, Mariátegui was likely an organizer of a clandestine Communist cell in that country. Once back in Peru, he met Haya de la Torre, in April 1923. Haya was at that time the president of Peru’s Federation of Students and a leader of the university reform movement. He was also director of the González Prada Popular Universities, student-led storefront schools designed to unite students and workers in the struggle for revolutionary change, specifically, “to realize the anarchist ideal of true freedom and emancipation of the proletariat.”23 In October, Leguía had Haya deported for his anti-regime activities, leaving the field open to Mariátegui as the intellectual leader of the Peruvian Left. Mariátegui established his reputation in the journal Amauta (amauta: Quechua for “Inca wise man, or teacher”24), a journal of political commentary and literary criticism that he founded in 1926. By then, he had synthesized Marxism and indigenismo as the basis for the transformation of Peru. He turned back the clock four hundred years, recalling Inca collectivism and arguing that the Andean masses were socialists instinctively.25 Basing his philosophy on the “Indian past,” Mariátegui sought to restore what the Spanish conquest had destroyed by proposing “an Andean version of socialism as a prescription for Peru’s problems.”26 On the one hand, Mariátegui was harassed by Leguía as a Communist, whereas on the other, “the creative melding of the Andean experience and Marxism brought [him] into conflict with the strict Communist orthodoxy of the Third international.”27 Mariátegui compiled his ideas, originally expressed in Amauta, into a full-length book, 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality), published in 1928. In 7 Ensayos, Mariátegui agreed with González Prada that education alone would not liberate the Indian from exploitation and poverty. “The soul of the

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Indian is not raised by the white man’s civilization or alphabet,” he wrote, “but by the myth, the idea, of the Socialist revolution. The hope of the Indian is absolutely revolutionary.”28 He dismissed as “obsolete” the “bourgeois reformers” who approached the solution to the Indian problem from “humanitarian and philanthropic points of view.”29 The solution was economic. “We begin by categorically asserting [the Indian’s] right to land,”30 by which he meant the destruction of latifundia and an agrarian reform based on the Indian’s “natural inclination to communal work.”31 Mariátegui referred specifically to the ayllu system of agriculture (the Andean version of the Mexican ejido) that, he affirmed, had enabled the Incas to live “in material comfort.”32 His assertion of an American origin of socialism contradicted the “Eurocentric view of history” and, as noted, placed him at odds with orthodox Marxists.33 “On the ruins and remnants of a socialist economy,” Mariátegui wrote, “they [the Spanish] established the bases of a feudal economy.”34 To undo that wrong, he combined the ayllu with “modern scientific socialism” and appealed to peasants and workers to organize in order to achieve the revolutionary transformation of Peru.35 In 1928 Mariátegui founded the Socialist Party of Peru (PSP), “to be directed by declared Marxists.”36 At the same time, he endorsed the Anti-Imperialist League in its support of the Sandino movement in Nicaragua. Nevertheless, the Comintern censured him sternly, “for establishing a socialist party instead of an outright Communist Party.”37 The party line proclaimed that his ideas were “no more advanced than the ideas of old-fashioned petit bourgeois socialism.”38 In truth, it was “pointless” to argue his orthodoxy. Mariátegui was an original; a “multi-dimensional” thinker driven by the socialist impulse. 39 He even broke with Haya de la Torre. In exile, Haya had founded APRA as a multi-class (policlasista) movement. Mariátegui disagreed with Haya’s thesis that accepted the middle class in the revolutionary movement and professed that Peru could benefit from investment by capitalist states.40 Mariátegui’s death in 1930 at age thirty-five removed him as a political rival of Haya, but the two men had been collaborators before their split, and each espoused indigenismo and proclaimed an “American socialism” rooted in the Andean experience. Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the third member of Peru’s triptych, was influenced more by life experience and the living than by dead philosophers and thinkers. Born and reared in the northern coastal town of Trujillo, Haya had seen the dramatic expansion of sugar-cane cultivation during the early decades of the twentieth century. The land engrossment and support facilities of the largely foreign-owned sugar enterprises had displaced local farmers and related businesses, providing Haya with an early lesson in the effects of “Yankee im-

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perialism.” His negative attitude would be strengthened in time by the favorable treatment of foreign investment by the Leguía regime. Leguía’s ambition to modernize Peru and convert its capital city, Lima, into “one of the loveliest of South American capitals”41 was achieved by means of a major public-works program, financed by incurring foreign debt and by generous concessions to foreign companies, which caused critics to complain that the “only real winners . . . were U.S. corporations.”42 As this transcurred, Haya was absorbing radical ideas in the reading room of Trujillo’s union hall, where anarchists and labor leaders would come from Lima to organize the sugar workers against the new industrial-style commercial farms.43 Thus, when Haya left home, in 1917, to study law at the University of San Marcos in Lima, he was already under the influence of the socialist impulse. At San Marcos, Haya rapidly emerged as a radical student leader. He studied under González Prada in the last year of the old don’s life and heard his message of the putrescence of creole society and the need to purge it by an uprising in the sierra. Haya understood the difference between revolution and annihilation, but he admired González Prada as the precursor of the movement for radical change that his generation was determined to make. Haya took part in the general strike of January 1919, organized by the anarcho-syndicalist leader Nicolás Gutarra, which won the eight-hour day for Peruvian workers, but it was the movement for university reform, originating in Argentina, that provided Haya with the opportunity to challenge the traditional order head-on. The arrival in Peru of the Argentine socialist Alfredo Palacios, in May 1919, to spread the doctrines of university reform and socialism, evoked strong emotions in both Mariátegui and Haya, and in Haya’s lifelong collaborators, Luis Alberto Sánchez (1900–1994) and Manuel Seoane (1900–1963). As president of the Federation of Students, Haya proved to be an avid disciple of Palacios, acting to remove “reactionary” professors and winning student participation in university governance.44 In March 1920 he organized the First National Congress of Students, meeting in Cuzco, which supported the idea of creating popular universities for the purpose of promoting student–worker collaboration. With their extension courses designed to improve the educational and cultural level of workers, the universities were used by Haya and his fellow students as a means of raising class consciousness and achieving revolutionary change.45 The González Prada Popular Universities proved “enormously successful,” as they held “friendship picnics” and offered courses in union organization and Inca civilization.46 However, Leguía’s patience with Haya reached its limit in May 1923, when Haya led a massive demonstration protesting plans to conse-

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crate Peru to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.47 The president charged Haya with “disrespect” and had him and other student leaders rounded up and deported.48 Haya took refuge in Mexico, where he came under the influence of José Vasconcelos. Serving as the education minister’s private secretary, Haya undertook the task of “internationalizing” the Mexican Revolution.49 The Bucareli agreements taught him firsthand about the powerful effect that U.S. economic interests could have in countering revolutionary goals. He also understood why Mexico might wish to export its Revolution, and adopted Leon Trotsky’s position that “socialism in one country” was a prescription for failure. In 1924 Haya founded APRA as a movement to fight imperialism in order to promote and defend socialist revolution throughout the hemisphere. He outlined a five-point program: “action against Yankee imperialism, political unity of Indo-America, nationalization of land and industry, internationalization of the Panama Canal, and solidarity of all oppressed peoples and classes of the world.”50 He explained his reasoning in the 1934 book, El antiimperialismo y el Apra, in which he argued that in order to overcome imperialism, Indo-America “must unite and production must be socialized.”51 The work was written in 1928 but not published until 1934; in it Haya clarified the APRA program point by point. Drawing upon his experience in Mexico, Haya concluded that Yankee imperialism was too powerful for one country to succeed alone. He contended that Indo-America was vulnerable because it was divided. Pointing out that the boundaries of the Latin American states were artificial and represented a holdover from the Spanish colonial period, he argued that in order to resist imperialism, it was essential for the nations of Indo-America to unite.52 With a “united front against U.S. imperialism,” each country would be free to fulfill its revolutionary goals through the strategy of the “anti-imperialist state.”53 Haya’s concept of the anti-imperialist state rested on the premise that foreign capital was necessary for the economic development of Indo-America but it needed to be “conditioned.” Foreign capital, by itself, was not an evil, he reasoned, but foreign capital “coming to a country in an improper manner,” that is, direct investment serving only the interests of the imperialists, was.54 Accordingly, Haya’s anti-imperialist state would create mechanisms to bargain with and receive foreign capital in order to invest it according to the state’s needs and the “national interest.”55 Haya viewed this process as an intermediate step toward the ultimate goal of socialism, arguing that the proletariat of Indo-America was “still in formation: it has no class consciousness.”56 In order to overcome this lack, Haya advocated a multi-class (policlasista) movement, comprised of “all the oppressed victims” of imperialism: peasants, workers, and the middle

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class. Whereas much of Haya’s thinking was influenced by the “principles of the Mexican Revolution,” the concepts of the anti-imperialist state and a multi-class movement originated from his travels to the Soviet Union and Germany. Haya had visited Moscow in 1925, where he was dismayed to observe that the Communist leaders demonstrated an “abysmal ignorance” of Latin American conditions.57 He declared that he was a Marxist, but that Marxism must be adapted to Indo-American reality.58 Indo-America would have its socialist revolution, he reasoned, but it would be of the Mexican variety, not the Bolshevik kind.59 It would be “uniquely American,” rooted in the “indigenous past.”60 Haya had refined his thinking further during an “exile” in Germany. Having arrived in Panama in 1927, U.S. authorities there had “literally shipped him” to Germany, where he had spent the next four years.61 In Germany, Haya was introduced to Albert Einstein, and he adapted the theory of relativity to his personal political philosophy, in which he argued that space (environment) and time (the stage of development) explained the historical differences between Europe and Indo-America and would provide Indo-America with the opportunity to shape its own destiny.62 Whereas Marx had stated that imperialism was the last stage of capitalism, Haya contended that in Indo-America it was the first stage.63 “The discoveries of science produce new philosophies,” he wrote.64 The philosophies of Marx, Hegel, and Kant were based on Newtonian physics, but Einstein’s relativity had rendered their ideas “passé.”65 In sum, “Marx’s ideas were the product of his epoch and not eternal truths.”66 Echoing Bergson, Haya rejected determinism and theorized that the anti-imperialist state could manage events (capitalistic development) and create the outcome (socialism). In order to facilitate that outcome, Haya called for the internationalization of the Panama Canal. None of the points in the APRA program was as purely Peruvian as that concerning the Panama Canal. Although Haya and Mariátegui split over the issue of middle-class participation in the revolution, they were in full agreement over the internationalization of the Panama Canal. In fact, it is likely that Mariátegui influenced Haya in that regard. In 7 Ensayos, Mariátegui described the tremendous economic and psychological effects that the opening of the Panama Canal had had on Peru. Before the construction of the canal, he wrote, Peru had been isolated, which contributed to its backwardness and lack of economic development. Now, with the canal, Peru’s trade was growing and the country felt “nearer” to the United States and Europe, which had given Peru a “profound” psychological boost.67 Given the importance of the waterway to Peru and, indeed, to world trade in general, Haya believed that it ought not to be under the control of one

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nation, especially one as dominant as the United States. This stance conformed to Haya’s position of solidarity with all peoples and oppressed classes. Haya envisioned APRA as an international movement whose aim was the promotion of multi-class parties dedicated to the anti-imperialist state in each country of Indo-America. This was its “maximum program.” He had hoped to establish an international headquarters with branches in individual states, but that goal eluded him. Instead, as a result of his writings and those of his collaborators, during periods of oppression, when political and intellectual exiles congregated in places like Santiago de Chile and Mexico City (especially during the 1920s and 1930s), Aprista-like parties sprouted in a loose network with a common purpose. The influence of the APRA movement was widespread and effective owing to its “impressive theoretical foundations.”68 Few Latin American political movements had as many activist pensadores as the Apristas, who were “cerebral” and prolific.69 Among them, Haya became “the philosopher of the whole Latin American revolution.”70 APRA also implemented a “minimum program,” consisting of a national political party in Peru. With the overthrow of Leguía in 1930, Haya had returned to Peru and founded the Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP). He ran for president in 1931 and lost to Lieutenant Colonel Luis M. Sánchez Cerro, a national hero for having ousted Leguía. The campaign was bitter and violent. APRA claimed that “only Aprismo will save Peru,” and the Sánchezcerristas labeled Haya a “crypto Communist.”71 Nor did the election end the turmoil. In March 1932 an Aprista youth shot and wounded President Sánchez Cerro, who had declared that “it was necessary to crush the APRA.”72 With Haya imprisoned, militant Apristas staged a revolt in Trujillo in July, resulting in the commission of atrocities by both sides that “spawned an intense feud between the armed forces and [APRA] that would endure for more than a half century.”73 The Peruvian Aprista Party would be outlawed during much of that time, and Haya and other party leaders would either go into hiding or endure imprisonment or exile. Thus, APRA’s minimum program would be held in abeyance for several decades, during which time a Peruvian diaspora sought to revive it by promoting the maximum program abroad. While Haya spent the 1930s in hiding in Peru, some of his trusted lieutenants, such as Luis Alberto Sánchez and Manuel Seoane, chose to flee the country, disseminating his writings throughout Latin America and organizing Apristas in exile. It was in this time of troubles that APRA exerted its greatest influence and drove the socialist impulse.

8

APRA The Maximum Program

APRA’s maximum program was most active during the periods of exile of Peru’s socialists, principally because when Peruvian Aprista leaders were scattered throughout Latin America, they were engaged directly in its promotion. These periods of exile corresponded with the authoritarian rules of Augusto B. Leguía (1919–30), Oscar Benavides (1933–39), and Manuel A. Odría (1948–56). The 1920s were a formative period of ideas and organization; the 1930s, an era of tremendous intellectual and political ferment and exchange; and the post–World War II period (the mid-1940s to mid-1950s), a time of opportunity and trial. Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre began his exile in 1923 as a roving ambassador of university reform. He traveled to Havana in that year, where he lectured and influenced the student leader (and later Communist martyr) Julio Antonio Mella to create the José Martí Popular University, modeled after the Popular Universities of Peru. He traveled next to Mexico, where José Vasconcelos welcomed him enthusiastically and gave him a position in the Revolutionary government. The Mexican experience inspired Haya to found APRA in 1924, which was “aimed at making new revolutions on the Mexican model.”1 Haya’s ambition to achieve this through a hemisphere-wide organization did not materialize. Instead, what developed were a series of Aprista-style parties bound by “fraternal ties,”2 of which the Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP) was one. In the meantime, Haya continued his travels and refined his thinking. He attended world youth congresses—the Comintern’s favorite recruiting venue—in Moscow (1925) and Brussels (1927), where he refused to be enticed, preferring

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“to remain independent of international communism and to control his own Indo-American movement.”3 Indo-America would be socialist, but it would be an American socialism free from foreign ideas and domination. Looking to Inca civilization as his model, Haya wrote of “a sacred aspiration for the future[,] the restoration of a social system of the past.”4 In 1927 Haya published Por la emancipación de la América Latina: Artículos, mensajes, discursos, 1923–1927, providing insights into his thinking and chronicling his peripatetic activity. This collection of essays, among other things, clarified Haya’s policlasista position, in which he affirmed that “foreign imperialism oppressed a wide array of classes,” and hence that “nationalism, not class conflict, was the crucial variable in any future revolutionary transformation.”5 Although Haya and José Carlos Mariátegui split over this issue, Mariátegui’s 7 Ensayos nevertheless contributed to the popularity of APRA because its argument was essentially Aprista, i.e., it was anti-feudalism, anti-imperialism, and pro-indigenismo. Still, Haya’s collaborator, Luis Alberto Sánchez, was concerned over Haya’s lengthy absence abroad; he wrote to Haya in 1930 urging him to return to Peru to take a stand against the political status quo and communism.6 At the same time, Manuel Seoane, the cofounder of APRA, observed that “Aprismo is a state of conscience, not yet an organization.”7 Haya, responding to these anxieties, returned home in 1931 to organize APRA as a national party and run for president. As noted in chapter 7, Haya’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1931 polarized Peruvian society and led to acts of violence during the presidency of Luis Sánchez Cerro (December 1931–April 1933). Haya initiated APRA’s minimum program with the establishment of PAP in 1931, and stirred his followers to a virtual religious fervor of good (Haya) versus evil (Sánchez Cerro). In March 1932 an Aprista youth attempted to assassinate Sánchez Cerro, and in April 1933 another Aprista teenager succeeded in killing him. Emulating Mohandas K. Gandhi, whom he admired, Haya generally avowed a philosophy of nonviolence, but he allowed “that if a certain element of non-violence had been necessary in India because of British dominance, the situation was different in Indo-America.”8 Peru’s new president, General Oscar R. Benavides (1876–1945), “a member of Peru’s elite ‘forty families,’”9 initially granted amnesty to the country’s political prisoners, including Haya, but the continued unrest in the country led to a new crackdown in 1934. This time, Haya remained in Peru, going underground to defend the minimum program, while many of his key collaborators went into exile to agitate for APRA and its maximum program. Haya remained in Peru, in charge of PAP’s National Executive Commit-

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tee (CEN), whereas Aprista committees-in-exile were scattered throughout the hemisphere, from New York and Mexico to Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile. The largest contingent was the Peruvian Aprista Committee of Santiago (CAPS) —seventy-five in number—headed by Luis Alberto Sánchez.10 Sánchez, widely known by the acronym LAS, was a distinguished scholar and literary figure and lifelong Aprista leader. He was the author of an impressive list of articles and books, mainly scholarly volumes of Peruvian and Spanish literature, but also polemical works dealing with his heroes, Manuel González Prada and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. He served three times as the rector of San Marcos University, and in 1985—in the eighty-fifth year of his life—he was elected first vice-president of Peru. In exile in Santiago in 1934, LAS served as assistant editor of the Editorial Ercilla, a major publishing house, where he maintained a lively correspondence with a galaxy of political and literary figures. This correspondence provides a fascinating insight into political and intellectual exchange, primarily on the left, during the Great Depression, years of despair marked by the crisis of capitalism, the rise of Fascism, and the excesses of Stalinist Russia. Among the leading intellectuals of the time was the North American author Waldo Frank, whose thinking struck a responsive chord among the Apristas and the Latin American Left in general. Frank was popular among the Latin American Left because he told its followers what they “wanted to hear.”11 His message was anti-capitalist, denouncing capitalism as “inherently corrupt and corrupting.”12 He attacked Yankee imperialism and materialism, praising Latin Americans “for their mystical sensitivity and [speaking] of their destiny to help redeem the spiritually starved United States.”13 Expanding on this theme and echoing José Enrique Rodó, he “proclaimed the possibility of two American ‘half-worlds’ becoming ‘one mystical organic whole, coexisting in harmony and combining the best qualities of the materialistic North and the spiritual South.’”14 Frank expressed these ideas in his book Our America (1919), for which he received an acclaim that he could not match again, except on the lecture circuit in Latin America. Labeled a “fellow traveler” in the United States, he actually embraced anarchism, as did most of the radical intelligentsia of Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 1930s.15 Although Frank wrote that he “could belong to no organized political or theological party, since all of them were based on untrue psychological interpretations of man’s nature,”16 Mariátegui and the Cuban communist Juan Marinello were instrumental in arranging a lecture tour for him in Latin America in 1929.17 Frank’s tour in Latin American began in July 1929 and lasted six months, dur-

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ing which time he became “the rage.”18 In Peru, LAS introduced him to the audience at San Marcos, stating, “By his insistent refusal of the chaos of his country . . . we recognize Frank as ours, and of our race.”19 In Argentina, too, he was perceived as speaking “from within,” as being one of them.20 This “success” was repeated in Mexico, where he was welcomed as coming “from his own sense of alienation as being a victim of ‘Yankee economics and culture,’ as were the Mexicans.”21 The bohemian sense of alienation from the industrial age shared by most anarchists resonated in Mexico, where positivism was anathema. In Cuba, Frank applauded the “Generation of ’30,” urging the students to “go on” in their war against Gerardo Machado, which he characterized as “a war against capitalism.”22 In all his appearances, he emphasized the need for a “cultural union” between North America and Latin America, one premised on the belief that “each America needs the other to be whole, each has what the other lacks.”23 There is little doubt that the “cultural elites” of Latin America liked what they heard.24 Frank was particularly fond of Mariátegui and mourned his death in a piece in The New Republic in 1930. In it, he discussed his own differences with Sovietstyle communism, just as Mariátegui, also driven by the socialist impulse, could not conform to the orthodoxy of the Comintern.25 Frank also dedicated his book America Hispana, published in 1931, to Mariátegui. In it, he took another approach to the concept of the whole, discussing the mestizo as the concept’s possible embodiment, in the style of Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race). Wholeness, in this sense, won him the favor of Lázaro Cárdenas, who confided to Frank that he had given him the courage to nationalize Mexico’s oil industry.26 Frank’s relationship with Haya was never that close. He told LAS that he had difficulty understanding the “utterances” of Haya and that the tenets of Aprismo were “vague,” but that he realized the need for a “national revolutionary party,” since the Communists were “so dreadfully out of touch with the American ambiente.”27 This was, it will be recalled, Haya’s own rationale for breaking with the Communists in 1927, an action that marked APRA as an anti­ communist party on the left. Throughout the 1930s APRA shunned collaboration with any Communist Party, maintaining its maximum program as an alternate road to socialism. Manuel Seoane, APRA’s second in command, who worked as a journalist during his exile, lamented Mariátegui’s death in April 1930, considering him “a friend even though his political ideology veered.”28 However, he was adamant in wanting “nothing to do with the communists,” adding, “an alliance with the left might be feasible, but not with the Russian variety.”29 Haya, being especially wary of the Popular Front movement of the 1930s, was equally unswerving. He refused

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to participate in a Popular Front in Peru, arguing that it had been “made in Moscow.”30 He regarded the Popular Front as a maneuver by the Peruvian Communist Party leader Eudocio Ravines to divide APRA, and he denounced Ravines as a “Judas Iscariot.”31 He wrote to LAS that APRA must declare itself “anti-communist and anti-fascist,” adding, “Peru does not need European models to emulate.”32 Despite these admonitions, LAS reported to Haya in 1939 that APRA-Santiago maintained “cordial relations” with the Chilean Popular Front, and particularly with Marmaduke Grove (the president of the Chilean Popular Front), Carlos Contreras Labarca (secretary general of the Chilean Communist Party), with Communist author Gerardo Seguel, and with Pablo Neruda.33 Sánchez’s ties to the academic and literary communities enabled him to make contact with an array of intellectual and political activists and to spread the Aprista message. Moreover, his position as assistant editor (1934) and then editor (1936) of the Editorial Ercilla put him in touch with editors and publishers of journals throughout Latin America, in whose publications he placed articles and commentary about APRA. These included Jorge Mañach, the editor of Re­ vista de Avance (Havana); Jesús Silva Herzog, editor of Cuadernos Americanos (Mexico); Joaquín García Monge, editor and publisher of Repertorio Americano (Costa Rica); Mariano Picón Salas, a leading Venezuelan intellectual and writer in exile in Chile in the 1930s, where he edited the journals Indice and Frente; Lucio Diez de Medina, editor and publisher of Revista Motivos (Bolivia); Samuel Glusberg (known also by the literary pseudonym Enrique Espinosa), editor of La Vida Literaria (Argentina); and Victoria Ocampo, founder and editor of Sur (Argentina). LAS’s correspondence with these personalities provides insight into the success of APRA’s maximum program and the extent of the socialist impulse. For example, Mañach, in exile in 1936 in the United States, where he was teaching at Columbia University, informed LAS that Aprismo “emerged” in Cuba after the fall of Machado.34 The literary scholar Federico de Onís, on the faculty of Columbia University, was instrumental in bringing Latin American writers to the United States for lecture tours or visiting professorships. In early 1942, with the cooperation of others in the Latin American field, he tried to arrange an appointment for LAS at “an important U.S. university” (Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, or Yale).35 Earlier, in Chile in 1934, the Venezuelan exile Picón Salas had written LAS that “his group” had much in common with APRA, describing it as “not marxists, nor fascists; rather, anti-capitalist, anti-nazi, anti-bourgeoisie and anti-marxist.”36 Picón Salas, a refugee from the tyranny of Juan Vicente Gómez, was a

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founder in the 1930s of the Movement of Venezuelan Organization (ORVE), the forerunner of the Aprista-style Democratic Action party (AD). LAS responded with the observation that Rómulo Betancourt (the founder of AD in 1941 and a future president of Venezuela) was a “brillante muchacho.”37 Finally, the Bolivian writer Diez de Medina informed LAS in 1940 that he was “active in leftist socialist circles” and sympathetic to the Aprista cause.38 LAS’s correspondence with fellow Apristas was equally illuminating with reference to insider thinking and strategy. LAS wrote extensively to Seoane, Alfredo González Prada (the son of Manuel), and Haya. He suggested to Seoane in 1937 that they use Peruvian sailors, “50 percent of whom are now Apristas,” to distribute Aprista materials.39 As previously seen in events in Chile, maritime workers there had had a significant role in the spread of radical ideas. LAS collaborated with Alfredo in the editing and publishing of his father’s papers and in the writing of LAS’s novel, Don Manuel (1930), based on the life of the famous poet and essayist. Alfredo spent much of the 1930s in exile in New York, where he maintained contact with Waldo Frank and the radical U.S. journalist Carleton Beals. He wrote to LAS of his concern over the civil war in Spain, lamenting that if Francisco Franco triumphed, “fascism will permeate Latin America for years to come.”40 In that regard, Haya informed LAS that if individual Apristas wanted to volunteer on the Republican side, it should be “a personal decision with no fanfare.”41 The correspondence between Haya and LAS took on a more official tone, with LAS acting as Haya’s agent abroad. In a bit of secret diplomacy, Haya instructed LAS, in October 1935, to “cooperate” with Adolfo Cienfuegos, the Mexican ambassador to Chile, for the purpose of obtaining a loan of “at least $100,000.”42 LAS was unsuccessful in this effort, but he advised Haya that “further talks with the PNR [the National Revolutionary Party of Mexico] were still on.”43 Haya was in hiding during this time, and he urged LAS to wage a campaign to expose the “severe repression” that APRA was enduring in Peru. To that end, he asked LAS to arrange for a telegram to be sent from Marmaduke Grove in Chile protesting the treatment of Aprista prisoners in Peru, which was done.44 The campaign succeeded in March 1936, when the release from prison of APRA’s top woman leader, Magda Portal, was achieved through an appeal of Carleton Beals directly to President Benavides.45 With the approach of the presidential election in October 1936, Benavides probably wanted to polish his image. Nevertheless, when the election was held, Benavides suspended the vote count and assumed dictatorial powers for another three years. Despite being a

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fugitive, Haya had announced his candidacy, but he was disqualified on charges of plotting against the government. The repression of APRA in Peru intensified after the fraudulent election, which caused Haya to undergo a dramatic change in his thinking. His thinking evolved from an anti-feudal and anti-imperialist emphasis to stressing an anti-dictatorial and pro-democratic position. In addition to the dictatorship of Benavides, the rise of fascism alarmed him. In August 1936 he had written to LAS attacking the racism of the Nazis, specifically, the discrimination that U.S. athlete Jesse Owens had endured during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.46 Later, he wrote that European leftist ideologies had failed in Latin America, but that Fascism was making “great headway.” The “only hope” for the Left was Aprismo, he believed, “which could serve as a pivot against Naziism.”47 The Nazi threat alone did not alter Haya’s thinking. The Good Neighbor Policy of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt also had an effect, with the result that Haya dropped “Yankee” from his anti-imperialist position. During the Second World War, Haya reasoned that Indo-America could not remain neutral. He stated that “imperialism was bad, but racism was worse.”48 In favoring the “capitalist, imperialist countries over the Axis,” he explained, “we are always anti-imperialists, but we are always democrats.”49 Rebuking those who criticized his pro-U.S. stance, Haya declared that he had not changed, but that, “fortunately,” the United States had.50 Moreover, Haya saw the opportunity to shed APRA’s image of conspiracy and violence and rally the hemisphere in defense of social democracy. In 1941, he published the “Plan for the Affirmation of Democracy in Latin America,” in which he argued that the “war of the democracies should be against all dictators”—that is, it should take place in Latin America as well as in Europe and Asia.51 It was a harbinger of things to come. LAS was critical of Haya’s “swing” toward the United States, and in 1943 he even wrote of leaving the party.52 In response, Haya disagreed with LAS that APRA had “lost credibility,” asserting that its prestige had “never been higher.” He affirmed that “for the past twenty years there has been a worldwide shift to the left,” and that for LAS to think of leaving the party “at its hour of triumph” was a “‘crisis de fé,’ typical of intellectuals in [these] troubled times.”53 LAS stayed on, and Haya was not far off in his proclamation of APRA’s hour of triumph. By 1945 Haya and APRA had achieved legal status and a large share of political power. But it was not to last. In the 1945 elections, the Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP) supported José Luis Bustamante y Rivero (1894–1989), the victorious presidential candidate, and also won eighteen seats in the Senate and forty-six in the Chamber of Deputies. Bustamante, a respected legal scholar, ran on an Aprista platform that in-

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cluded labor, land, and educational reform. “Peru entered the postwar ‘democratic springtime’ with high hopes.”54 But those hopes proved deceptive. The Apristas had provided Bustamante with his margin of victory, and the PAP’s being the largest voting bloc in the Congress had subsequently created a divided government. Bustamante balked at implementing APRA’s minimum program precipitously, which created severe tensions between the president and Haya. Meanwhile, the oligarchs and their military allies awaited the opportunity to pounce. Serious economic problems, coupled with the deteriorating political situation, enabled General Manuel A. Odría (1907–1974) to overthrow Bustamante in October 1948, making Haya a fugitive once again. Such a turn of events was common in Latin America in the late 1940s and into the 1950s as military dictatorships proliferated. APRA’s maximum program entered a new stage during Odría’s dictatorship (1948–56). After a few months of eluding capture, Haya sought asylum within the Colombian embassy in Lima in January 1949. Odría refused to grant him safe conduct out of the country, so Haya remained a virtual prisoner in the embassy for the next five years. Odría had the embassy surrounded and cut off its water and electricity services, but Colombia held firm to the rights of asylum and safe passage under international law. LAS and Seoane, in exile in Santiago, undertook to rally the international community in Haya’s behalf. APRA now made the defense of human rights a major element of Aprismo. The achievement of Indo-American unity was a feature of APRA’s five-point maximum program, and the human rights issue provided an opportunity to attain that goal. LAS resumed command of the Peruvian Aprista Committee in Santiago (CAPS), and Seoane organized the Exile Postal Exchange (CPD) to coordinate the activities of the more than one hundred party officials outside of Peru.55 They made the “Haya asylum case” the centerpiece of their efforts, taking the matter before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Inter-American Regional Organization of Labor (ORIT). LAS coordinated his activities with Juan Bosch, the leader of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) in exile, and Juan José Arévalo, the president of Guatemala.56 At the time (October 1949), Bosch was the personal agent of Cuban president Carlos Prío Socarrás in the intrigues taking place in the Caribbean region, particularly those related to the filibustering operations of the Caribbean Legion.57 The moves of LAS and Seoane also dovetailed neatly with those of the AD party of Venezuela, also then in exile. The fate of the Democratic Action (AD) party of Venezuela paralleled that of the Apristas of Peru. AD achieved power in 1945 and was overthrown by a

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military coup in November 1948 (see chapter 10). There were claims that Odría’s coup in Peru had given the “green light” to the junior officers in Venezuela. With AD enduring persecution in Venezuela, its president, Rómulo Betancourt (1908–1981), in exile in Havana, sought to make the defense of democracy and the protection of human rights a concern of the inter-American community. To that end, he organized a conference in Havana in May 1950 for the creation of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom (IADF), made up of Aprista-inspired and -allied parties in opposition to all forms of imperialism and totalitarianism: Fascist, Nazi, Communist, Falangist. The Colombian scholar Germán Arciniegas wrote to LAS in March to say that the conference that Betancourt was organizing would be “important.”58 And so it was. It was the opening salvo of a decade-long struggle against dictatorship in Latin America, organized for the implicit purpose of forging an alliance of revolutionary parties, because, as Haya had observed in Mexico in 1924, “in the defense of national sovereignty no country can win alone.”59 Betancourt concurred, relating to LAS in 1951 that one could no longer think in terms of individual countries, “but rather of the salvation of Latin America as a whole.”60 The founding conference of the IADF reiterated that sentiment, proclaiming that its purpose was to defend “the freedom of peoples to determine their own political destiny.” In essence, it envisioned an alliance of revolutionary parties inspired by the principles of the Mexican Revolution and APRA. Although no formal alliance resulted, the conference promoted bonding among political parties influenced by APRA and motivated by the socialist impulse. These parties were major protagonists in the revolutionary change that occurred in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. They included the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement of Bolivia (MNR); the National Liberation Party of Costa Rica (PLN); the Cuban Revolutionary Party–Auténtico (PRC–A); the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD); the Revolutionary Party of Guatemala (PR); the Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP); and Democratic Action of Venezuela (AD). Also included in the mix and present in Havana were representatives of the Liberal Party of Colombia (PL), the Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico (PPD), and the Colorado Party of Uruguay, along with the Christian Democrats from Chile. A large number of North American liberal activists, labor leaders (including the socialist Norman Thomas of the Institute for International Labor Research), and intellectuals (including Waldo Frank) attended the conference, believing, in the context of the Cold War, that the non-Communist Left of Latin America (i.e., Apristas, social democrats, and Christian Democrats) provided a better

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means of resisting the spread of Communism than right-wing dictators did. Among them, Roger Baldwin and Frances Grant of the International League for the Rights of Man had already been active in denouncing Haya’s “incarceration” in the Colombian embassy and had protested the “atrocious conditions in Peru.”61 Grant was designated secretary-general of the IADF, with an office in New York. In Montevideo, the association was supposed to function under its president, the Socialist Party leader Emilio Frugoni, but political conditions in Uruguay forced it to close down, and Grant’s New York office became the de facto headquarters. The 1950s were a time of adversity for “the democratic forces of the continent” that the IADF professed to represent, but Grant persevered, lobbying U.S. public opinion and Washington officials to restrain the hands of dictators in Latin America.62 With authoritarian regimes dominating Latin America for much of the decade, she endured tough times. Odría felt secure enough that he permitted Haya to leave Peru in 1954. Ramiro Prialé, a senior Aprista leader, was overjoyed by Haya’s release and urged him to take the lead in “unifying and rejuvenating” APRA. He declared that the movement should be “ni con Washington, ni con Moscú” (neither with Washington nor with Moscow) but “democratic Inter-Americanism without imperialism.”63 Haya had complained to LAS during his asylum that APRA’s message was being “muted” and that no one was answering the anti-APRA propaganda of Odría.64 Haya’s frustration was understandable, but he could take heart that APRA’s maximum program had done its job. It may not have achieved a “revolutionary alliance,” but it had stimulated the creation of revolutionary parties throughout Latin America. Some of the Aprista-inspired parties that emerged in the 1940s were described as social democratic or national revolutionary, but Haya was not dismayed. He remarked to LAS that “Aprismo is like a tree dropping seeds; these seeds grow and develop but are distinct from the parent tree.”65 Haya’s PAP was one of these seedlings. It was APRA’s minimum program, but its performance in Peru provides insights into that of Aprista and social democratic parties in general. Putting theory into practice proved to be Aprismo’s greatest challenge. The socialist impulse received satisfaction in Peru, but not in the way Haya de la Torre planned it.

9

APRA The Minimum Program

The Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP) was founded in 1931 as the instrument for carrying out APRA’s minimum program. When Haya returned to Peru in 1931 to run for president, he set forth a program influenced by his experiences in exile in Mexico and Germany. He relied heavily on the principles of the Mexican Revolution in the areas of land, labor, and natural resources. Although the “socialization” of Peru was projected as a “long-range objective,” in the short run Haya visualized the state as “taking an active part in planning, stimulating, and financing production” by means of public ownership of “certain important sections of the economy and the development of cooperatively-owned enterprises.”1 He proposed the expropriation of the commercial farms of the coastal region and the haciendas of the sierra. He promised to organize the commercial farms as workers’ cooperatives and to turn over the haciendas to the Indian communities for the restoration of the ayllu system of agriculture. In both categories, the state would provide administrative, technical, educational, and social support, and in no way would “the decision as to what is to be grown . . . be left to the individual.”2 The intended labor reforms were a facsimile of Article 123 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917. They included the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, retirement pensions, factory and mining laws to protect workers, the protection of working women and children, and unemployment, accident, and health benefits.3 Labor had the right to organize and bargain collectively and possessed the right to strike. In the industrial and mining sectors, PAP pledged “nationalization as soon as possible.”4

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Haya modified the pledge of nationalization in accordance with his position on the role of the middle class in the revolution and his concept of the anti-imperialist state. Following the nationalization of foreign-owned enterprises engaged in the exploitation of minerals and hydrocarbons, foreign capital would be “welcome” under conditions imposed by the state in accordance with national priorities and interest.5 Further, Haya was employing his time-space theory, whereby he viewed imperialism as the last stage of capitalism in the northern nations but as the first stage in Peru. Haya believed that an intermediate stage—a mixture of free enterprise, central planning, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs)—would be necessary in order to make the transition to socialism.6 Even Mariátegui admired certain aspects of capitalism, praising its “love of adventure, drive to create, and organizing ability.”7 He wrote, “Capitalism is not just a technique; it is also a spirit.”8 A sense of spirit is what Haya sought to create. Haya sought to make Aprismo more than a political party. Accordingly, his leadership style “took on the attributes of a moral crusade.”9 He preached the need for a “spiritual transformation,” urging Apristas to be “honest,” “pure,” and have “clean hands,” proclaiming that “a sound mind in a sound body” and “only a better people can make a better society.”10 Although Haya abhorred Nazism as racist, his use of slogans, songs, salutes, and banners demonstrated the influence of his residency in Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler. This influence probably extended to a tendency on his part toward putchista or golpista (coup) tactics. The PAP program professed a commitment to democracy, and Haya clearly was willing to follow the electoral route to power in 1931. However, the militancy and cultic character of Aprismo and the reviling of the existing order as unjust and unworthy meant that democracy could function only after a cleansing. From the moment of Luis Sánchez Cerro’s victory over Haya in 1931, PAP declared the election to be “fraudulent” and served notice that the party “would not play the role of a loyal or constitutional opposition force.”11 There was a contradiction between the commitment to democracy and the goal of revolutionary change. For the first twenty years of PAP’s existence, the party resorted to subversive and violent tactics. As a revolutionary movement, APRA had its roots in the anarchistic thought of Manuel González Prada and in the experience of Haya himself. Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, PAP engaged in direct action, including strikes, boycotts, sabotage, and random acts of violence, keeping the oligarchy on edge. However, Haya and his major lieutenants were not men of action. They were “cerebral,” men for whom ideas and publications were their “lifeblood.”12 Fearing another Haiti, they dismissed González Prada’s idea of promoting an Indian uprising, nor did they favor guerrilla warfare. While pursuing

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the electoral route, Haya repeatedly conspired with elements of the military for a putsch or coup. The abortive military uprising in Trujillo in July 1932 fed on the rivalry between Sánchez Cerro and Colonel Gustavo A. Jiménez. In May, two months before the attempted coup, Luis Alberto Sánchez (LAS) wrote to Jiménez, describing Aprismo as a “totally open, socialist-oriented movement.”13 The coup was suppressed, but not before both sides had committed atrocities that caused ill-will between APRA and many senior officers in the army, which lasted for almost fifty years. Nevertheless, just before the presidential election in 1936, Haya conspired with David Toro, the president of Bolivia, to overthrow the government of Oscar Benavides. The plot was discovered, and Haya, still a fugitive in hiding, was barred from running for president. As previously noted, Benavides annulled the election in 1936, continuing in power for another three years, during which time he cracked down hard on Haya and the Apristas. All the while, Haya’s will-of-the-wisp existence in Peru and the propaganda activities of LAS and Seoane in exile added to the appeal and mystique of APRA. International events also enabled PAP to survive, and it abandoned the putchista tactic for the time being. The victory of democracy over Fascism in the Second World War enhanced APRA’s position. The changing circumstances enabled Haya to gradually surface from the underground and seek legal status for PAP, first during the presidency of Manuel Prado y Ugarteche (1939–45), and subsequently during that of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero (1945–48). In the election of 1945, with PAP employing the rubric “Party of the People,” Haya and the Apristas helped Bustamante win the presidency and secured for themselves the largest bloc of seats in the Congress. Haya sought to allay the concerns of the oligarchy by proclaiming that “it [was] not necessary to seize the wealth of those who possess it but rather new wealth should be created for those who do not have it.”14 This statement could have been interpreted as an abandonment of the ultimate goal of socialism, but it was a smokescreen. As Seoane wrote in 1953, “Aprista doctrine has not changed for twenty-five years.”15 Haya was generally frustrated in his attempts to advance APRA’s minimum program during the Bustamante presidency. The flamboyant Haya and the scholarly Bustamante could not reach a working relationship. Haya expected that he would be appointed prime minister and that his party would receive a number of cabinet positions. When Bustamante refused, Haya sought to use his control of Congress to prevail over the president. Nevertheless, he moved cautiously, looking toward the future.

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Instead of proposing land reform immediately or the nationalization of foreign firms, Haya took steps that would put in place the anti-imperialist state. He secured passage of a measure to create a “national economic congress,” to function as a planning body, and he proposed a “national financial corporation,” tasked to finance the planners’ projects by negotiating with foreign investors and international lending institutions.16 In expanding the role of the state in the economy, Haya pursued pro-labor policies, enlarged the bureaucracy by packing it with Apristas, and initiated an ambitious public works program.17 Moreover, APRA gained control of the Peruvian labor movement. First, its principal labor leaders, Arturo Sabroso and Arturo Jáuregui, outmaneuvered the Communists for control of the Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CTP); next, APRA hosted the founding conference in Lima in January 1948 of the Inter-American Confederation of Workers (CIT), to compete with the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL) headed by the Mexican Communist Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Despite Haya’s talk of creating new wealth, his policies were decidedly redistributive in nature. In any event, his success in governing through the Congress was short-lived. In July 1947 conservative elements in the Congress conspired to shut the body down. By boycotting the annual organizing session of the Senate, which required the presence of two-thirds of the membership, they in effect prevented both houses of Congress from functioning.18 The resulting impasse further polarized Peruvian society. Militant Apristas disappointed with Haya’s moderate course had already reverted to direct action, including assassination. In the midst of demands to outlaw APRA, both Apristas and anti-Apristas plotted the ouster of Bustamante. Following an unsuccessful military uprising in Callao on October 3, 1948, engineered by “certain ‘Young Turks’ of aprismo,”19 Bustamante decreed APRA illegal, but it was too late. On the pretext that Bustamante had lost control, General Manuel A. Odría (1907–1974) removed the president on October 27 and established a dictatorship that lasted eight years. Haya took asylum in the Colombian embassy, and Odría kept him there for five years. The military coup in Peru was not an isolated event. A cabal of military officers ousted the democratically elected Rómulo Gallegos of Venezuela the following month. Authoritarian regimes ruled in at least thirteen of the twenty Latin American nations during much of the decade of the 1950s. Against these odds, the Aprista leadership, and that of related social democratic parties, adopted a Cold War strategy designed to enlist the aid of the United States in the struggle against dictatorship. Using the argument that Communism exploited the conditions of poverty and injustice, APRA and its allies sought to persuade

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the United States in its foreign policy to denounce dictatorship in Latin America and take positive measures to establish representative democracy. Aware that the American nations had agreed in Montevideo in 1933 not to intervene in the internal affairs of one another, the strategy called for “collective intervention for the maintenance of democracy.” This concept had its roots in Haya’s “plan for the affirmation of democracy in Latin America,” cited earlier,20 and in a circular note dispatched by Eduardo Rodríguez Larreta, the foreign minister of Uruguay, in November 1945, “asserting that it was the responsibility of American governments to act collectively in defense of democracy and human rights.”21 In the context of these ideas, partisans of the non-Communist Left in Latin America and liberal activists and labor leaders in the United States cooperated in behalf of human rights and free trade unionism by means of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom (IADF) and CIT (succeeded in 1950 by the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers [ORIT]). This agitation had contradictory results, exemplified by significant U.S. aid to the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) of Bolivia beginning in 1952 and the intervention by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Guatemala in 1954. Nevertheless, dictatorship in Latin America gradually receded during the decade of the 1950s. In Peru, Odría stepped down voluntarily in 1956. During his rule, he outlawed APRA and acted to eliminate its influence in the CTP. The economy did well, sustained by the demand for exports during the Korean War, and Odría “embarked upon a program of military populism,”22 emulating his hero, Juan Perón, but hard times ensued at the war’s end, making authoritarianism less tolerable. Moreover, Odría’s “prosperity” did not alleviate the gross disparity between the number of rich and poor or between the coastal region and the sierra. Sensing the mood for change and spurred by the nationalist revolution in neighboring Bolivia, Odría announced that he would not stand for reelection. He supported a handpicked civilian candidate, but former president Manuel Prado won with the support of APRA. APRA had agreed to support Prado in return for legalization and a pledge to enable Haya to run for president in 1962. The Prado presidency was a waiting game for Haya. But younger leaders, nurtured on Aprista doctrine, exhibited less patience. Prado continued Odría’s export-led model of growth that left out the majority of the population. Although Haya kept organized labor, mostly urban, in check, miners and peasants took action on their own. In the department of Pasco in 1958, an Aprista, Genaro Ledesma Izquieta, led copper miners in a strike against the Cerro Corporation and organized local peasants to invade

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Cerro’s ranch lands.23 In an effort to settle the unrest, Prado appointed Ledesma mayor of Cerro de Pasco, but the land seizures persisted. Beginning in 1960 and lasting for two years, Hugo Blanco, “a Cuzco agronomist and Trotskyite,” led the Peasant Federation (FTC) in the valley of La Convención, near Cuzco, in the seizure of lands that resulted in the takeover of 40 of the valley’s 380 haciendas before Blanco had to flee into the jungle.24 Haya played it safe and took no part in these events, causing certain Aprista militants to break away in 1959 to form APRA Rebelde. Under Luis de la Puente Uceda the splinter group changed its name in 1962 to the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) and linked up with Hugo Blanco in plans for “a guerrilla campaign in the sierra.”25 Perceived as having turned “to the Right,”26 Haya stood for election to the presidency in June 1962. He “gave assurances to the elites that APRA was still fully committed to a conservative program emphasizing anti-communism and pro-capitalism.”27 It appeared to critics that Haya had abandoned the Aprista doctrine, even though among Haya’s theories was that of the need to create capitalism in order to have socialism. Haya and the Apristas had endured severe repression over the years, and they had reached the conclusion that violence had not served them. They came to embrace democracy as the most effective means of securing economic liberation and social justice and their “long-range objective” of socialism.28 But such gradualism did not satisfy the activist youth of Peru; if the Aprista “old guard” did not intend “to take to the hills” and fight for socialism, they were ready to do so. They had grown up in a changing world that included both the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions; the detonation of a hydrogen bomb by the Soviet Union; the launching of Sputnik; the writings of Mao Tse-tung, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Che Guevara; and the collapse of Western European colonialism. They were convinced that they should not have to wait to bring down the old order; they could do it in the present with guns, just as Fidel and Che had done. The election of 1962 was Haya’s last chance to persuade them otherwise. Haya put his trust in democracy on the line and lost. In a three-way race that included Francisco Belaúnde Terry (1912–2002) and the former dictator/ president Odría, Haya led the way with 32.98 percent of the vote, just shy of the one-third required by the constitution for election. With the election then left in the hands of Congress, Haya and Odría (who had placed third) reached an agreement. Haya supported Odría for president in return for Odría’s support of Seoane for first vice-president and Aprista control of Congress. Haya’s intention was to “reduce” Odría to a “mere figurehead” and to govern through the Congress, as he had done during Prado’s first presidency.29 This arrangement, which

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“shocked and disgusted even the more sophisticated and cynical of the Peruvian electorate,”30 outraged General Ricardo Pérez Godoy, the head of the military’s joint command. Using the argument that a third-place finisher did not deserve to be placed in the presidency, he led a coup that annulled the election and installed a junta government. Haya was denied the prize that had eluded him for so long, but the junta offered him a second chance. The junta governed for a year in a relatively mild, even reformist, fashion, which enabled the same candidates to campaign freely for the June 1963 election. This time, Belaúnde, by allying his Popular Action party (AP) with the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), won with 36.2 percent of the vote, edging out Haya’s 34.4 percent. Belaúnde, a U.S.-educated architect, ran on a program that mimicked APRA’s and sought to reconcile the differences between the coastal regions and the sierra by respecting the unique features of each and by promoting decentralization and local self-help programs. He promised agrarian reform and “a more activist government.”31 Belaúnde faced the daunting task of trying to govern a country that had been the fount of Aprismo, the implementation of whose philosophy was believed long overdue, and this caused even more radical ideologies to emerge. Whereas in the mid-1960s most Latin American countries were committed to state-led economic development and were engaged in the strategy of import substitution industrialization (ISI), Peru continued to rely on the export of commodities and minerals that linked the economy to foreign entrepreneurship, discouraged manufacturing and economic diversity, and rendered the state’s role in the economy among “the smallest . . . in Latin America.”32 There was “a general conviction of being left behind by the modern world.”33 This situation existed, owing to the deep cultural divide between the coast and sierra, which enabled “a small, coastal capitalist class to resist change and reform,” largely because the Left “invariably associated [change and reform] with indigenismo.”34 Rebellion in the sierra finally forced the enactment of APRA’s minimum program, but it was not by Haya’s doing. In 1965, the MIR, disappointed with Belaúnde’s efforts at land reform, established a headquarters on the Mesa Pelada, near Cuzco, and prepared to launch a guerrilla movement based on Che Guevara’s tenet: “It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.”35 The leader of MIR, Luis de la Puente Uceda, an erstwhile member of Aprista Youth ( JAP), had traveled to Havana in 1959, where he met Hilda Gadea, also a former member of JAP and the wife of Guevara. Stirred by the idea that “a small vanguard of guerrillas [a foco] could gain the support of peasants in an isolated

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area and from there initiate a successful revolutionary war,”36 de la Puente returned to Peru, finished his law degree at the University of Trujillo, and determined that Belaúnde’s promise of agrarian reform was being thwarted by conservative opposition in the Congress. De la Puente’s foco consisted of middle-class urban youths, alien to the culture and language of the peasants they intended to rally. Moreover, he committed the tactical error, among others, of establishing a “fixed command center” at Mesa Pelada.37 Nevertheless, in the context of the Cuban Revolution, Belaúnde took the threat seriously and ordered the army to put down the insurrection. Within six months of the June 1965 outbreak, the army had crushed the movement, resulting in the death of de la Puente and more than eight thousand Indian peasants.38 In victory, however, the officer corps became radicalized, having seen “firsthand the grinding poverty and oppression of the sierra peasantry.”39 Indeed, for some time the Peruvian military had been undergoing a metamorphosis. It had been rethinking its mission, changing “from a purely defensive posture to one promoting security through national development or ‘nation building.’”40 The process had begun in 1950 with the creation of the Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM), proposed by General José del Carmen Marín, who argued that “underdevelopment and the nonintegration of the Indian population” was a concern for national security as much as the threat of external aggression.41 “By 1962, 70 percent of the generals in the army had graduated from the CAEM,” whose curriculum included courses in sociology and development theory.42 Following the experience of Mesa Pelada, and observing the inability of Belaúnde to make good on his promised reforms, the army’s progressive officers felt compelled to act in order to avert a Cuban-style revolution in the sierra. Moreover, it appeared that Haya was the frontrunner for the presidency in 1969. Whereas the army had formerly opposed Haya as being too radical, it now perceived him as not radical enough. On October 3, 1968, the army overthrew Belaúnde and “[stole] the very soul of APRA.”43 General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1910–1975) led the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (GRFA), which aimed to impose “revolution from above.” Velasco was not CAEM-trained, but he sprang from humble beginnings and had “experienced physically how it [felt] to be poor and without rights.”44 He had also been deeply influenced by the new social conscience of the Christian Democratic movement, which criticized the oligarchy for treating Peru as if it were its very own hacienda.45 But, driven by the socialist impulse, it was the APRA program that Velasco put in place. It was no accident that one of his top civilian advisors was Carlos Delgado, an ex-Aprista.

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The army coup had its genesis in the Plan Inca, “a contingency plan . . . [that] called for major structural reforms . . . in the areas of industry, land tenure, taxes, banking, and government.”46 But the heart of the movement took aim specifically at the principal Aprista targets, namely, foreign-owned enterprises and latifundia. “When the revolution began, foreign firms controlled the commanding heights of the Peruvian economy. Eight years later, state enterprises had taken over most of these firms.”47 Within one week of seizing power, Velasco nationalized the International Petroleum Company (IPC) and transformed it into Petroperú, a state-owned oil monopoly. He continued this process with the seizures of the U.S.-owned companies ITT (the national telephone system), Chase Manhattan Bank, the Cerro de Pasco mining complex (copper, lead, and zinc), Marcona Mining (iron ore and steel), Casa Grace (sugar), and Anderson, Clayton (cotton). He created additional SOEs to take over the railroads, Peru’s international airline, the cement, chemical, paper, and fishmeal industries, and “most of the banking and insurance industries.”48 Among the 150 new SOEs, with nearly 670,000 employees, were the giants Mineroperú (mining), Pesca­ perú (fishing), Siderperú (steel), and Moraveco (industry). “By 1975 these enterprises accounted for more than half the mining output, two-thirds of the banking system, a fifth of industrial production, and half the total investment in the economy.”49 Velasco’s actions in the area of land reform were equally dramatic. Velasco eliminated the centuries-old hacienda system that had held the Indian population of the sierra in servitude, and he expropriated the commercial farms (mostly foreign-owned) of the coastal region. Velasco’s decree of June 24, 1969, expropriated all haciendas and commercial farms and transformed them into agricultural cooperatives—called Agrarian Production Cooperatives (CAPs), mainly on the coast, and Agrarian Social Interest Societies (SAISs) in the sierra. “The members of the CAPs and SAISs were the former permanent workers, or peasants, of the estates, who now became simultaneously the workers, managers, and shareholders of the enterprise.”50 Although the transformation in the sierra did not go smoothly, owing to conflict between the former estate peasants and the Indian communities committed to the ayllu, by 1979 “some 8.5 million hectares, representing 60 percent of the country’s agricultural income, had been adjudicated to 375,000 families, or 25 percent of all farm families.”51 Nevertheless, the inequities in the sierra reform permitted unrest to smolder and eventually to flare into insurrection. More satisfactory were the results of the land reform on the coast, where “the Velasco regime had challenged—and broken—the power of the export oligarchy in Peru, as APRA from its very origins, had proposed doing.”52 Sensitive to the

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complaint that the reform was made “with little input from below,”53 the revolutionary government created the National System in Support of Social Mobilization (SINAMOS), in an effort to connect with peasants and workers. The GRFA envisioned SINAMOS—whose acronym conveyed the meaning “sin amos” (“without masters”)—as becoming the equivalent of a political party for the task of organizing the participation of the masses in the revolution. It grew into a huge bureaucracy, employing between seven thousand and eight thousand technocrats,54 all engaged in the planning and managing of economic and social affairs. In line with this effort to establish a popular base and effect real systemic change, Velasco initiated the “industrial community” and “social property” programs. These programs were designed to give the workers a share of, and in some cases, complete ownership of, their places of work. The Industrial Communities (CIs) program mandated that industrial firms should reinvest 15 percent of gross earnings annually in company stock in the name of their employees, until the employees owned 50 percent of the business. At the same time, the workers were to share in the company’s profits, up to 10 percent of gross earnings annually.55 The social property program was more ambitious, in that it consisted of businesses whose workers “participated fully in the direction, management, and economic benefits of the firm.”56 However, these firms did not belong to the individual workers alone, but to the social property sector at large, meaning that profits were shared industrywide “for the benefit of society as a whole.”57 This program was barely in operation at the time of Velasco’s ouster in 1975. Velasco’s effort to create “a unique Peruvian socialism”58 lost its forward momentum owing to the president’s failing health, brought on by a severe circulatory condition that required the amputation of his right leg in 1973 and that contributed to his death two years later.59 Nevertheless, it is no exaggeration to say that Velasco took the Peruvian economy to the brink of socialism. In the meantime, APRA enjoyed a comeback, claiming that it could do better with its program than those who had usurped it, and that it could do it without sacrificing democracy. Moreover, the aging Haya had relaxed his control over the party and begun grooming a successor. The Peruvian Aprista Party would have the opportunity to prove its claim in the years ahead, but before going forward, it is essential to backtrack once again, this time to trace the evolution of the socialist impulse elsewhere, specifically within the social democratic parties of Latin America. In August 1960 PAP would host the First Conference of Popular Parties of Latin America in Lima, among which Democratic Action (AD) of Venezuela and the National Liberation Party (PLN) of Costa Rica were prominent.

IV

The Social Democratic Ascendancy

10

Venezuela Democratic Action

The social democratic movement in Venezuela originated with a handful of youths—the “Generation of ’28”—classmates in the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). They grew up in a Venezuela dominated by Juan Vicente Gómez (1857–1935). The “tyrant of the Andes” ruled from 1908 to 1935, holding power for that long owing to a combination of ruthlessness and oil riches that enabled him to crush dissent on the one hand and buy and maintain support on the other. He and his minions amassed fortunes through concessions to foreign companies to extract the nation’s petroleum. This state of affairs, described as “the alliance of [a] military caudillo with colonizing imperialism,”1 went unchallenged until “Students Week” (Semana del Estudiante), February 6–12, 1928. Raúl Leoni (1906–1972), a future president of Venezuela (1964–69) but at that time the president of the Venezuelan Students Federation (FEV), organized Student Week as a way to celebrate student life. But instead of poetry readings and cultural discussions, the students seized the opportunity to attack the Gómez regime. Jóvito Villalba (1908–1989), a second-year law student, speaking before the tomb of Simón Bolívar, called for “a vast reform of national life,”2 appealing to the Liberator to rally the university as “the last refuge of the fatherland.”3 His classmate, Rómulo Betancourt, bemoaned that “our poor people seem forgotten by God and crucified in republican anguish.”4 The two youths were arrested on charges of subversion, and Betancourt spent his twentieth birthday (February 22) in jail. More arrests followed, after which many of the young men who would one day lead the nation—Betancourt, Leoni, Villalba, Valmore Rodríguez, Ricardo Montilla, and Gonzalo Barrios—were exiled.

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Initially, the exiles attempted a filibustering expedition to overthrow the dictator, but they learned that derring-do was not enough to arouse the masses. They needed an ideology for transforming the nation. Betancourt confessed that they “had not had access to modern social doctrines,” although he added that “Sachka Yegulev, the nihilist book of Leonidas Andreiev, [had been their] Bible.”5 Considering the powerful influence of Andreiev upon Pablo Neruda and Leon Trotsky, the young exiles had wasted little time becoming radicalized. Not that their revolutionary education had been totally neglected before leaving the homeland. Despite the closed society of the Gómez regime, the students had been able to see through “cracks” in his “Chinese Wall,” getting glimpses of the “unknown world” of the Mexican and Russian revolutions and the student uprisings in Argentina.6 University reform undoubtedly had been the hidden agenda of Students Week. Moreover, Betancourt had studied at the Liceo Caracas under the future president Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969). Gallegos was no radical, but he taught the theme of civilization (modernization) versus barbarism (backwardness), as expressed later in his novel Doña Bárbara (1929). In that book, Gallegos was careful to use symbolism to critique the Gómez dictatorship, using the conflict between his protagonists, Doña Bárbara (representing the untamed llanos) and Santos (the civilizing figure), to demonstrate that underdevelopment and resistance to change were “unqualified evils.”7 However, he was more open in his characterization of Mr. Danger (Sr. Peligro), who represented “foreign domination and corruption.”8 The influence of Gallegos’s reformist stance would surface later in Betancourt’s career, but in 1929 the young student gravitated more toward Marxism. In exile in Curaçao in 1929, Betancourt was outraged to observe Venezuelan crude oil being refined by the Royal Dutch Shell operations there. Determined to liberate Venezuela “from the grasp of monopolistic capitalism,” he “voraciously” read the books and authors that had been banned in Venezuela, including Lenin, Marx, and Trotsky; the utopian socialists François Fourier and the Comte de Saint-Simon; and the radical writers José Ingenieros, Alfredo Palacios, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and Sinclair Lewis.9 This heavy dose of socialist literature converted Betancourt from a political neophyte at age twenty to a “Marxist of confessed faith and militancy” by the time he was twenty-four.10 He went to Costa Rica in 1929, where his socialist impulse began a zigzag course. When Betancourt arrived in Costa Rica, he joined the Aprista section there and became a disciple of Haya de la Torre’s thinking, but by 1932 he was a critic.

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Writing to a friend, in July 1931, he described Haya as the “most capable” of Latin American leaders for achieving change, and noted that “precisely because he is so valuable, there has descended over his person, his work, and his ideology . . . all of the virulent phobias of the embarrassed reds.”11 By May 1932 his attitude had changed. He had become one of the “embarrassed reds,” complaining that “Aprismo, with its policy of a liberally interpreted united front, had allowed social sectors within its ranks that would inhibit an effectively revolutionary policy.”12 In condemning Haya’s concept of a policlasista party— a position that he would fully embrace almost a decade later—Betancourt had adopted the position of Mariátegui and others. But in May 1932 Betancourt was a member of the Costa Rican Communist Party (PCC), and he wrote: “It will be the working classes . . . who will realize our national possibilities, forging a new type of state, socialist and anti-imperialist—an instrument of the people for the achievement of social justice.”13 Betancourt joined the Communist Party, led by Manuel Mora Valverde, making it a family affair by marrying Mora’s sister. He worked hard at being a Communist—serving in the party’s politburo, editing the party newspaper, Trabajo, and teaching in the PCC’s San José Workers’ University. But Betancourt was no Stalinist. He had difficulty accepting “the stereotyped formulas of the Third International and the autocratic dictates of the Caribbean Bureau [of the International].”14 His essential nationalism led him to reject “the politics of mimeographed circulars.”15 In his search for an ideology, he tended to return to Haya’s conviction that American problems required American solutions. By 1936 Betancourt had abandoned the Communist Party, explaining: “I reject the Communist party with all the force of my intransigent Venezuelan nationality, because its dependence upon Moscow converts it into a mere bureaucratic appendage of the Soviet state.”16 In the meantime, his fellow student agitators— Leoni, Montilla, and Valmore Rodríguez—had taken refuge in Barranquilla, Colombia. Leoni and his comrades also flirted with Marxism, but none of them joined the Communist Party, as Betancourt did. Instead, they formed the Leftist Revolutionary Group (ARDI), a small discussion group which studied the Mexican and Russian revolutions and the history of Venezuela in search of an ideology suitable for the transformation of the nation. In March 1931 ARDI formulated the Plan of Barranquilla, a synthesis of ideas that was strongly influenced by Aprismo and “tinged” with Marxism.17 Mariano Picón-Salas had joined the group, bringing with him the experiences of his exile in Chile. Although Venezuelan authorities claimed that the plan was Communist-in-

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spired, it was in reality Aprista-like in content, to the extent of endorsing the policlasista thesis. The plan condemned the evils of latifundia, caudillismo, and “foreign capitalist penetration.”18 While it charged that foreign capital “had deformed the Venezuelan economy and was exercising a powerful influence over its social and political organization,” it did not demand immediate nationalization of petroleum resources, only “the revision of the petroleum contracts granted by the dictatorship.”19 The plan set forth “the basic ideas which were to constitute [Betancourt’s] philosophy during a half-century of intense political activity.”20 This would become apparent in the time between the death of Gómez, in December 1935, and the founding of the Democratic Action party (AD), in September 1941. General Eleazar López Contreras (1883–1973) succeeded Gómez in the presidency and “showed considerable sensitivity to the need for a less repressive political style,”21 but only for a year. The political opposition tried to make the most of this period. The Ardistas (ARDI) returned from exile, but lacking a formal political organization, they were still trying to find an identity. Initially, heeding the advice of Picón-Salas “to look for what unites us and to avoid what divides us,”22 they participated in a coalition with the Movement of Venezuelan Organization (ORVE), formed in March 1936. In the spirit of the Popular Front strategy, the Communists were included, as were some middle-class businessmen, the students’ federation (FEV), and certain trade unionists. Despite the wide array of leftist groups, Betancourt, Leoni, and others of the “Generation of ’28” asserted leadership over ORVE and converted it into an embryonic organization of AD. While Betancourt and his comrades did not abandon the long-range goal of a socialist state, they began to issue position papers that were less theoretical in nature, particularly with reference to the perceived realities of Venezuelan oil production. Akin to Haya and his thinking about the anti-imperialist state, they saw the need to bargain with the foreign oil companies as a matter of expediency until nationalization became feasible. ORVE limited its demands to higher fees for the granting of concessions, a larger share of the profits from existing oil production, and higher wages and improved benefits for oil workers.23 Still feeling their way, the Orvistas decided to elevate their movement to a political party and founded the National Democratic Party (PDN) in October 1936. ORVE, the Communists, the FEV, and two trade unions formed the Democratic Party as the “only party of the left.” PDN pledged to be “the political organization that will unify all Venezuelans interested in the implanting of an

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authentically democratic regime guaranteeing the independence and liberty of our people.”24 However, President López Contreras regarded the leaders of the new party as “surreptitious communists”25 and ordered their expulsion. Fortyseven political activists were exiled “for a term of one year,” beginning in March 1937.26 Although Betancourt was among those named in the order, he eluded capture and went into hiding for over two years. During that time, he continued to mature politically. Betancourt became a legendary figure, acquiring a certain mystique and a national recognition. He traveled throughout the country making contact with farmers and workers. The “Generation of ’28,” comprised mainly of young men and women with middle-class backgrounds, lacked a worker’s sense, and Betancourt traveled to the oil fields of Zulia to remedy that. Among his peripatetic activities, he wrote a column, “Economía y Finanzas,” which appeared almost daily in the newspaper Ahora. In it, he criticized liberal economic policies and advocated state intervention in the economy.27 However, it was his irrevocable break with the Venezuelan Communists that was the most significant development during this period. Betancourt’s insistence that the PDN maintain a policlasista line as essential for achieving victory in a democratic election was the principal cause of the split. When the break occurred, in February 1938, the PDN issued a manifesto declaring unequivocally that the party was “revolutionary, democratic, anti-imperialist, and policlasista.”28 Betancourt’s falling-out with the Communists was influenced also by his changed attitude toward the United States, owing to Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership against Fascism and Nazi aggression. The authorities finally caught up with Betancourt in October 1939, but, as his confidant, Leonardo Ruiz Pineda, wrote, not before his work in the underground had “formalized the ideology and philosophical course of the PDN as the organization of the left, making it an instrument of the democratic, anti-imperialist revolution.”29 Betancourt spent his second exile in Chile. In Chile, the Socialists received Betancourt warmly, regarding him as one of them.30 He enjoyed the friendship of Oscar Schnake and Salvador Allende, both of whom held ministerial positions in the Popular Front government of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda. He was especially close to Allende, whom he considered “a very good Social Democrat . . . opposed to the Communist Party.”31 At the time, Chile was neutral toward the war in Europe, and Betancourt met with Marmaduke Grove in an effort to persuade him to adopt a pro-Allied stand. As a refugee from tyranny, Betancourt believed that the war against Fascism in Europe provided the opportunity to end dictatorship in Latin America. He helped

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organize the First Congress of Democratic and Popular Parties of Latin America (which was another way of saying Aprista and Social Democratic) in Santiago in October 1940, for the purpose of endorsing a “defensive alliance” with the United States to prevent Nazi penetration of the hemisphere.32 Betancourt was on the right side of history as López Contreras relaxed his grip in Venezuela and permitted political exiles to return and engage in political activity. The death of Gómez, the Second World War, and the modernizing trends of the oil boom were having profound effects upon Venezuela. Although López Contreras imposed General Isías Medina Angarita (1897–1953) as his successor in the “election” of 1941, that political style was beginning to creak. Betancourt, Gallegos, Leoni, Barrios, and Montilla, among others, converted the clandestine PDN into the Democratic Action (AD) party in September 1941 and secured legal recognition. AD’s initial statements were intentionally vague in order to facilitate official approval. Nevertheless, the founders had lengthy paper trails that identified them as democrats and socialists. During the war years, which corresponded with the presidential term of Medina Angarita (1941–45), AD served as a loyal opposition, while its leaders concentrated on “party-building,” awaiting their opportunity to achieve political power. It came sooner than they anticipated. Medina Angarita’s intention to pick his successor precipitated a coup by junior and middle-rank officers in October 1945. Seeking to broaden support for their movement, Major Carlos Delgado Chalbaud and Captain Mario Vargas approached Betancourt and AD to solicit their collaboration. The AD leaders were convinced that the coup was inevitable, and so made the “painful” decision to take part, but on their terms. Betancourt wrote: “We would never allow ourselves to be brought like poor relatives, secretly, into Miraflores Palace [the presidential residence] by the servants’ door. We would only assume power if free elections could be held and a program of bold social reform initiated.”33 The soldiers acted, and AD entered Miraflores through the front door. Betancourt, as provisional president, presided over a seven-person junta government that included himself, the military conspirators Delgado Chalbaud and Vargas, an independent civilian power-broker, Edmundo Fernández, and three AD leaders, Leoni, Luis B. Prieto, and Barrios. Democratic Action governed for three years (from October 1945 to November 1948), the so-called Trienio, and while it had the chance, made a revolution. Feeling a sense of urgency, Betancourt converted Miraflores into “the decree machine,” issuing decree laws that eventually filled two thick volumes.34 Although his was a de facto government, he moved quickly in November to set the foun-

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dation for democratic government by appointing a commission of legal experts and jurists to prepare a new electoral statute and draft of a new constitution.35 The following March, the junta adopted the commission’s recommendation for an electoral statute that, Betancourt boasted, could “be considered without exaggeration as the most democratic ever promulgated up to that time in all of America.”36 In the meantime, Betancourt put in place his oil policy as the basis for the economic and social transformation of the nation. Working with him was his close friend and advisor, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo (1903–1979), who served as minister of development, but who, in effect, was the “oil minister.” Betancourt implemented what he described as “a responsible, energetic nationalistic oil policy.”37 He had been careful not to promise immediate nationalization, observing that Venezuela lacked the “technical capacity” and “diversified economy” that would permit “such a bold nationalistic policy.”38 He proposed, instead, to condition the oil industry to the needs of the nation, as determined by the state. He achieved this purpose through taxation, labor legislation, and government input in all matters affecting the petroleum resource, including environmental questions and conservation. Moreover, he intended to “sow the petroleum,” that is, to use the oil revenue to finance, incrementally, a state oil industry, promote economic diversification, and underwrite a broad social program in education, health care, and housing. Betancourt increased taxes and rents on the foreign oil companies, with the goal of attaining a 50/50 split in profits. Moreover, he demanded part of the royalty payments in kind, for sale or barter on the open market, providing notice “that Venezuela was the owner of its oil wealth.”39 Furthermore, he required the concessionary companies to invest a share of their earnings in non-petroleum activities in Venezuela; one such project was Nelson Rockefeller’s creation of the Basic Economy Corporation to develop the cattle-raising and fishing industries.40 Betancourt also tapped into oil company earnings through decrees mandating improved wages, benefits, and working and living conditions for all workers, not just oil workers. This amounted to a redistribution of oil company income among all Venezuelan workers.41 AD’s relationship with labor grew extremely close during the Trienio, with Minister of Labor Leoni supporting the creation of the Confederation of Workers of Venezuela (CTV) in November 1947. While Betancourt acted to deal with existing circumstances, he and Pérez Alfonzo simultaneously planned for systemic change in the long term. The key to the socialization of Venezuela was the “no-more-concessions policy.” Betancourt determined that Venezuela must discontinue “the colonial system of concessions to private parties.”42 In order to create a state-run oil industry

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and “sow the petroleum,” the revolutionary government organized a state agency for planning and development modeled after the Chilean Corporation for the Development of Production (CORFO), which Betancourt had studied during his 1939–41 exile in Chile. In 1946 Betancourt established the Venezuelan Development Corporation (CVF), with the authority to invest oil revenue to promote the material and human advancement of the nation. He revealed his social democratic mindset in setting up the CVF, stating: “The idea of laissez-faire has passed into history. Planning is now the hope of our time.”43 He had little faith in private initiative, believing that state intervention in the economy was essential for “collective welfare and national achievement.”44 In addition to developing a national oil industry, the CVF had the responsibility for economic diversification through industrialization and agrarian reform and the provision of expanded social services. Betancourt scorned the idea that Venezuela did not need to industrialize because it could buy what it needed from abroad with its oil revenue. “No nation can be truly sovereign,” he argued, “while accepting the role of exporter of raw materials and importer of manufactured goods.”45 In the spirit of the policlasista concept, the CVF sought to stimulate the private sector in the industrialization process.46 However, if entrepreneurs were perceived to place private interest above public service, the CVF did not hesitate to create an SOE to do the job, especially in basic industries—“electricity . . . and those related to human welfare.”47 The least radical of the actions of the Betancourt junta concerned agrarian reform. There was a determination to eliminate latifundia and place the land “in the hands of those who work it,”48 but in practice only the huge holdings of the former dictator, Gómez, were redistributed. Betancourt was cautious, not wanting to endure even a temporary decline in productivity until “the government [had] sufficient plans and technical support to assure the rational and productive development of the land.”49 He let stand cattle ranches and commercial farms that respected the decrees establishing workers’ rights. At the same time, he acted to improve the quality of life of farmers and rural workers through education, health care, and housing, providing them with dwellings that had “sanitary facilities, [a] roof, and floor.”50 The social programs undertaken in the rural areas were a sample of the junta’s investment in “human capital” nationwide. During the Trienio, Betancourt acted on the dictum of Domingo Sarmiento: “If the people are the sovereign, the sovereign must be educated.” His programs increased the number of children in primary school from 131,000 to 500,000

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and taught almost 100,000 illiterates to read and write.51 The plans for health care were equally radical, involving not just doctors, clinics, and hospitals, but clean water, sanitation, and social security. His immediate steps were taken to overcome what he described as a “purgatory” with reference to health conditions, but he also visualized carrying out a policy whereby “medicine as a private and lucrative practice would have receded and finally would have been eliminated before the progressive development of public health services.”52 His housing policy was just as socialistic and ambitious, having as its goal “a decent house for everyone.”53 Betancourt spent over seven times as much on public housing in 1947–48 as Medina Angarita had in 1945.54 In the midst of this burst of activity, the revolutionary junta oversaw the restoration of constitutional, democratic rule. Under the new electoral statute of March 1946, the nation elected the National Constituent Assembly the following October. AD dominated the polling, winning 137 of the 160 seats in the Assembly, enabling it to write a constitution that made the economic and social programs of the revolutionary junta the law of the land. The Constitution of 1947, promulgated on July 5, Venezuelan Independence Day, contained the heart of Article 123 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, that is, a comprehensive social security system and sweeping guarantees for labor. It also had a Mexican-style Article 27, pertaining to private property—the principle that “he who works the land has the right to it”—and it affirmed the nation’s vested ownership of subsurface minerals and substances. At the same time, the Constitution preserved the democratic process, including universal, direct, and popular suffrage. It mandated a four-year term for the president, with no reelection upon leaving office until eight years had elapsed. Under this new political order, Venezuelans went to the polls, on December 14, 1947, and elected a president directly for the first time in the nation’s history. Rómulo Gallegos took the oath of office as president on February 15, 1948. Gallegos promised to continue the programs initiated by the junta government, declaring, “My party [AD] won the right to govern with its program by winning the electoral field.”55 He kept most of the Cabinet intact. However, he was more moderate in disposition and style than Betancourt, and he had to govern with a congress in session and facing an agitated opposition. Betancourt had governed by decree and had relied upon a small circle of advisors. During Betancourt’s more than two years in office, the opposition parties, the Social Christian Party (COPEI) and the Democratic Republican Union (URD), had felt ignored, and they had resented Betancourt’s aggressive exercise of power. The military, which had generally followed a hands-off policy during the junta’s rule,

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had nevertheless become concerned over the pace of change under Betancourt, and, observing rising discontent among the “traditional forces in society,”56 it now determined to rein in Gallegos. Its leaders demanded that more officers and representatives of COPEI be appointed to the Cabinet, and that Betancourt be exiled. When Gallegos rejected that ultimatum, the military removed him from office, on November 24, 1948, and a military junta consisting of Lt. Col. Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, Major Marcos Pérez Jiménez, and Major Felipe Llovera Páez took control.57 The socialist impulse in Venezuela was now interrupted for a decade. Pérez Jiménez, seemingly the least likely of the three-person junta to assume sole power, eventually emerged as the dictator/president of Venezuela, holding office until January 1958. Although he abandoned AD’s policies of conservation and nomore-concessions to the oil industry, he retained the 50/50 split in oil earnings, which allowed him to engage in “pyramid building” and to preside over a booming economy. In the United States, Time magazine put his picture on its cover, with a cover story entitled “Skipper of the Dream Boat,” which seemed to tell all.58 The outlawed AD opposed the dictatorship on two fronts: an underground resistance within the country and an exile movement abroad. The resistance endured murder, torture, and imprisonment, inflicted by the dictator’s National Security police (SN). SN, led by the infamous Pedro Estrada, established a prison camp on the insalubrious Guasina Island in the Orinoco River that needed no fences or walls. Three of AD’s most talented young leaders suffered martyrdom in the struggle: Leonardo Ruiz Pineda, Alberto Carnevali, and Antonio Pinto Salinas. In order to bring these atrocities to the attention of the outside world, the resistance communicated by secret radio with Betancourt in Havana and Costa Rica.59 The AD exiles endeavored to aid the resistance by transferring funds clandestinely and rallying international support in behalf of human rights and the restoration of democracy. As previously discussed, the 1950s were a time of trial for Latin America’s democrats, and AD and the Apristas sought to enlist the United States as an ally in the anti-dictatorial struggle, employing a Cold War strategy. They argued that poverty and injustice were breeding grounds for Communism. In order to stir hemispheric opinion and exert pressure on the United States and the international community, Betancourt raised the issues of human rights, free trade unionism, and freedom of the press. He rivaled Haya as the leader of the Democratic Left in the hemisphere. By 1957, the international front was AD’s main strength. The terrible repression suffered by the resistance forced AD to adopt a “new tactic” in 1957. The party decided to enter into a pact with COPEI and URD

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to present a single candidate for the presidency, with the expectation that Pérez Jiménez might be persuaded to hold a free election. The tide was beginning to turn: Juan Perón had been overthrown in Argentina, Manuel Odría had stepped down in Peru, and Fulgencio Batista was battling an armed insurrection in Cuba. Pérez Jiménez did decide to hold an election in December 1957, but as a plebiscite on the question of his continuation in office. It was a miscalculation. The absence of civil liberties, corruption, and neglect of social needs in the midst of ostentatious display disgusted elements of the armed forces, and a new student generation that had grown up under tyranny and imperialism was also ripe for rebellion. Pérez Jiménez’s plebiscite was the last straw. The Air Force was the first to rebel, on New Year’s Day 1958, the same day that a secret Patriotic Junta led the students into the streets in support. After three weeks of uncertainty and bloody rioting, Pérez Jiménez was gone. After a decade in exile, Betancourt was returned to power, but the future would not be easy. The socialist impulse in Venezuela was now on two tracks: that of the Democratic Left, represented by the AD’s “old guard,” scorned as “those who came from outside”; and that of the Revolutionary Left, represented by the “Generation of ’58,” belittled as the “Muchachos.” Betancourt stated as an article of faith that “The ideal for Venezuela . . . is the nationalization of the oil industry,”60 but, he added, not now, not “under present national and international circumstances.”61 That was an extremely hard sell in Venezuela in 1958. The young students wanted a thorough cleansing of the existing order immediately, and they accused Betancourt of betraying “true revolutionary principles.”62 They had even less sympathy for AD’s conciliatory policy toward the United States, having witnessed U.S. officials awarding medals to Pérez Jiménez and Pedro Estrada. They showed their contempt by stoning and spitting on the limousine of the U.S. vice-president Richard Nixon when he visited Caracas in May 1958. This division beleaguered Betancourt throughout his presidency (1959–64). In addition to the sobering effects of the Trienio and his lengthy exile, Betancourt was limited in his action by the Pact of Punto Fijo (October 31, 1958) that committed AD, COPEI, and URD to a coalition government with a common minimum program and an agreement to respect the winning presidential candidate in December 1958. A junta under Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal governed provisionally during 1958 in order to restore order and prepare for the presidential election. Betancourt won the election and was inaugurated in February, determined to preserve the democratic order. It was this determination that caused him to appease the Right and run afoul of the Left, losing much of the youth of the party in the process. Fidel Castro attended Betancourt’s inauguration in February 1959 and virtu-

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ally stole the show. The Muchachos flocked to him. Betancourt advised them to return to the classroom and prepare for leadership roles in the future, but they saw that the young people in Cuba were making a revolution now. Despite AD’s affirmation that “it conceived of the peaceful Venezuelan revolution as a gradual march toward socialism,”63 the Muchachos regarded Betancourt’s gradualist approach as a “sellout.”64 In the context of the Cuban Revolution, and having endured the crucible of SN terror, the Muchachos could not be contained in their zeal for revolutionary change. Led by the radical Domingo Alberto Rangel (1923– ), they bolted AD to form the Leftist AD, which claimed to stand for the “original principles” of AD. Subsequently, in May 1960, they openly professed Marxism-Leninism and took the name Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR). In time (1962), they would join with the Communists (PCV) to organize the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), a guerrilla group that hoped to begin its campaign in the cordillera. The alienation of youth was a severe setback to the social democratic solution in Venezuela, but Betancourt persevered, picking up where he had left off in 1948. Betancourt retained the 50/50 split with the existing oil concessionaires, but restored the no-more-concessions policy. He also created the Venezuelan Petroleum Corporation (CVP), instituted to develop the nation’s oil reserves and to establish a state refining industry. Moreover, he and Pérez Alfonzo were instrumental in 1959 in the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), an international cartel originally made up of Venezuela, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, for the purpose of controlling the price of oil through production quotas. “The strategy of OPEC,” Betancourt explained, “is to unite the developing countries in defense of their rights.”65 Not even Betancourt envisioned the international force that OPEC would become. In the meantime, in accordance with his belief in a planned economy, Betancourt converted the Office of Coordination and Planning (CORDIPLAN) into an adjunct of the presidency, in order “to provide the president . . . with longrange national planning . . . and with a mechanism [for coordinating] the work of bureaucratic organizations.”66 With a multitude of SOEs and autonomous agencies funded by the CVF and committed to providing everything from electricity to surgery, Betancourt promoted economic diversification through ISI by setting in motion plans for a major hydroelectric dam on the Caroní River, which would later (1974) supply energy for the newly nationalized iron and steel industry. In the social sector, Betancourt’s efforts with reference to education were “phenomenal.”67 The literacy rate rose “from just over 50 percent in 1950

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to 65 percent in 1961 and 77 percent in 1971.”68 Labor also benefited from Betancourt’s “sowing the oil,” with its share of the national income rising “from an average of less than 55 percent in 1955–58 to 58 percent in 1959 and over 61 percent in 1960 and 1961.”69 The figures indicated that Betancourt was succeeding in his promise to make a “peaceful revolution.” This success was matched on the hemispheric front by that of the Aprista/Social Democratic Cold War strategy. The rise of Fidel Castro caused the United States to take a second look at Betancourt’s anti-dictatorial policy, and the election of John F. Kennedy to the U.S. presidency settled the issue. Betancourt became the target of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo on the right and of Castro on the left. In June 1960 agents of Trujillo attempted to assassinate Betancourt, and during 1962 and 1963 Cuba appeared to be arming the FALN. In March 1961 President Kennedy announced the Alliance for Progress, a ten-year, ten-billion-dollar program for Latin American economic and social development, and it designated Venezuela to be the “showcase” for the Alliance. Although the failed Bay of Pigs invasion took some of the shine off the Alliance for Progress, the assassination of Trujillo in May of that year helped to minimize the damage. In December 1961 Kennedy visited Caracas and described Betancourt as “one of the great democratic statesmen of the Western Hemisphere.”70 Later, in February 1963, when Betancourt came to Washington on a state visit, Kennedy told him, “You represent all that we admire in a political leader.”71 The assassination of President Kennedy reversed these good fortunes, but during Betancourt’s presidency, at least, social democracy in Venezuela appeared to be working. Despite the FALN’s threat to murder voters, Venezuelans went to the polls in record numbers on December 31, 1963 (91.33 percent of registered voters turned out) and elected Raúl Leoni to succeed Rómulo Betancourt as president.72 Betancourt’s act of delivering the sash of office to his democratically elected successor was unprecedented in Venezuela,73 but just as significant, he had set the nation on “a gradual march toward socialism” with the apparent approval of the United States. The socialist impulse in Latin America appeared to have found a niche in the social democratic thesis. Contemporaries in neighboring states following a similar path sought to emulate Betancourt’s success. Haya’s vision of an Indo-American unity that would preserve social revolution against reaction and imperialism seemed within reach. Among the leaders who had also been working toward that end was José Figueres of Costa Rica.

11

Costa Rica Tico Socialism

Up to the early decades of the twentieth century, Costa Rica had a history that was distinct from the rest of Latin America, which earned it the sobriquet “Switzerland of the Americas.” Owing to its geographic isolation, lack of mineral wealth, and tiny, homogeneous population, it had had only limited experience with caudillismo, latifundia, and imperialism. It had enjoyed relative political stability under a governing class that was neither avaricious nor repressive. Although the political order respected individual freedoms, and the relatively wide distribution of land and a scarcity of labor afforded the mainly rural population a moderate degree of independence, the ruling powers were elitist in nature, thirty-three of the nation’s forty-five presidents up to 1975 having descended from just three families of the original conquistadors.1 The emergence of the coffee economy during the latter part of the nineteenth century reinforced the elites’ domination. Members of the elite comprising the “Generation of 1888” set the standard for political behavior until the 1930s, professing the liberal principles of small government, laissez-faire, and anticlericalism. Two leaders of that generation, Cleto González Víquez (1858–1937) and Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno (1859–1945), held the presidency between them for twenty of the thirty years between 1906 and 1936. They were described as “the Olympians” and respected for their honesty and restraint. González Víquez served two terms as president (1906–10 and 1928–32), and Jiménez Oreamuno served three times (1910–14, 1924–28, and 1932–36). They represented their class in a highly personalistic fashion, but

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maintained small government that limited itself to public safety, education, and essential public services and works. Because they ignored the country’s mounting economic and social inequities, their principal accomplishments of educating the people and extending the suffrage led to their undoing in the long run. Beneath a placid surface, sharp disagreement existed over the fairness of Tico society. (The term “Tico” derives from Costa Rica’s common use of the diminutive in speech as a form of politeness.) In an early act of dissent, Bishop Bernardo Augusto Thiel wrote a pastoral letter in 1893 that raised the issue of “just wages” for workers and artisans and criticized the huge fortunes of the coffee elites.2 The Catholic church had been the target of liberal reformers during the nineteenth century, but Leo XIII’s 1891 papal encyclical, Rerum Novarum endorsing the labor movement, had marked a change in the church’s relationship with the masses. A number of progressive Costa Rican priests reflected this revisionism in the church, Bishop Thiel among them. Jorge Volio of Cartago, a descendent of the conquistadors, was another. Volio studied at the University of Louvain in Belgium, where he was influenced by Desiré Cardinal Mercier (1851–1926), a leading proponent of neo-Thomistic thought and a fiery advocate of Rerum Novarum. Although Volio left the priesthood in 1915, his political activity was grounded in the Social Christian philosophy that supported labor and sought improved wages and working conditions. He founded the Reformist Party in 1923, charging the oligarchy with governing “for its own benefit, oblivious of the problems of the people.”3 The party was the only real ideological challenge to the status quo up to that time. Volio lost favor because of his bizarre behavior, which caused some to question his sanity. His movement collapsed, but the desire for change persisted, and the economic crisis of 1929 gave that movement a strong push to the left. The demise of the Reformist Party and the Great Depression contributed to the organization of the Costa Rican Communist Party (PCC) in 1931. At the time, Costa Rica had a very small intellectual community. Liberal reformers had closed the University of Santo Tomás in 1889, opposed to its Jesuit control, which left the Law and Normal Schools as Costa Rica’s only institutions of higher learning until 1940. Costa Rica had not been entirely bereft of radical thinkers and activists in the meantime, but none possessed the organizing skills and dedication to politics of Manuel Mora Valverde (1909–1994), Costa Rica’s “Red Pope” and the founder of the PCC. As a teenager, Mora had been moved by the “revolutionary message” of Volio, and when he entered the Law School in 1928, “he immersed himself in the writings of Kropotkin, Marx, Engels, and Lenin.”4 Along with the Venezuelan

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exile Rómulo Betancourt, he organized the Workers’ Revolutionary Culture Association, a Marxist study group and Popular University, and he participated in the Costa Rican section of APRA. Like Betancourt, he abandoned Aprismo for Communism, but of the Tico variety. “Unlike most other Latin American Communist parties with ties to Moscow, [the PCC] developed comunismo criollo, a native brand of Marxism with strong democratic and progressive currents.”5 The PCC did not have much success in attracting followers on the Meseta Central (the Central Plateau), where most Ticos lived, but conditions on the banana plantations of the United Fruit Company on the Caribbean coast provided greater opportunities for the movement. The banana industry was a product of the late nineteenth century. Unlike the case of the coffee fincas of the Meseta, which were owned by Ticos, the commercial production of bananas on the hot, humid, neglected Caribbean coast was developed with foreign capital. Black laborers from the English-speaking Antilles had been recruited as the industry’s principal work force. Limón, the tiny east coast port, and its environs were an enclave community, distinct and segregated from the rest of Costa Rica. Conditions in the banana zone were portrayed darkly in the novels Mamita Yunai and Bananos y hombres, by Carlos Luis Fallas (1909–1966) and María Isabel Carvajal Quesada (pseud. Carmen Lyra) (1888–1949), respectively, both of them members of Mora’s intellectual circle and of the PCC. In 1934 Fallas had led a strike that won a wage hike and union recognition for the banana workers, and converted Limón province into a Communist stronghold. The Meseta elites reacted strongly against the PCC’s limited success on the coast, complaining that President Jiménez should have used force to suppress the banana strike. “The reality,” Jiménez admonished, “is that the Communists exist.”6 Undeterred, the denizens of the Club Unión (the elites’ exclusive club in San José) elected León Cortés (1882–1946) to the presidency in 1936. He was an ultra-conservative coffee grower whose pro-Nazi sympathies had won him favor with a small but highly influential German immigrant element that had married into the conquistador class. Cortés managed to contain any further gains by Mora and organized labor, even denying Mora the seat in the National Congress to which he had been elected. Nevertheless, by hand-picking Rafael Calderón Guardia (1900–1970) as his successor in 1940, Cortés would unwittingly deliver power into the hands of a Social Christian reformer who would change Costa Rica forever. Calderón had given little indication in his political career up to 1940 of the radical changes he intended to make, but his personal and professional back-

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ground provided certain clues. As president of the National Congress from 1936 to 1940, he had done the president’s bidding and seemed a likely puppet. But as a leading lay Catholic and an admired pediatrician, he had also carried out charitable works, including going into the homes of the poor to tend to ailing children. Calderón had studied medicine at the University of Louvain, the hotbed of advanced Catholic social doctrine. He was a close friend of the Archbishop of Costa Rica, the Monseñor Víctor Sanabria Martínez (1899–1952), another of the nation’s progressive priests: in 1943 Sanabria had assigned the young priest Benjamín Nuñez (1915–1994) to organize the Costa Rican Confederation of Workers Rerum Novarum (CCTRN). It was with Sanabria’s encouragement that Calderón would carry out major social reforms during his presidency.7 Calderón outlined his intentions in his inaugural address. He promised to enact a comprehensive social security system and to amend the constitution to include “social guarantees.” To that end, he established the Office of Social Security in 1941, to administer a program that provided accident, sickness, disability, old age, and unemployment benefits, and he ordered the construction of hospitals and clinics as the basis for a public healthcare system. The “social guarantees” he promised included the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, the right of workers and employers to organize, requirements for safe and healthful working conditions, preferential treatment for Costa Ricans in the job market, provisions for the establishment of cooperatives, and measures for improved housing.8 Calderón’s reforms altered the relationship between capital and labor and expanded the role of the state in the area of social welfare, but they did not affect the ownership of the means of production. Nevertheless, the coffee barons were furious with Calderón, calling him “a traitor to his class,” and they even invited Mora to join them in plans for a coup. Mora rebuffed their overtures, offering his support to Calderón instead. The Social Christian and Communist leaders merged their parties and formed the Victory Bloc in 1942. Still, in order to satisfy Sanabria, Mora changed the name of the Communist Party to the Popular Vanguard Party (PVP) and omitted any reference in its platform to a “defined ideology” or doctrine that might be considered to conflict with the tenets of the Catholic church.9 For his part, Sanabria stated that membership in the Victory Bloc would present “no conflicts of conscience” for Catholics.10 This exchange was facilitated by the wartime alliance of Costa Rica with the Soviet Union, which enabled Mora to label his critics “fifth columnists.” With the Communists’ support, Calderón enacted the Labor Code of 1943, incorporating the “social guarantees.” The election of 1944, however, would bring into play new elements that would favor Calderón’s reforms and

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were even inclined toward socialism, but that were opposed to any role for the Communists in the government. During Cortés’s presidency a group of young men had grown up observing the disjuncture between his stern conservative rule and the misery of the majority of the Costa Rican populace. The group had all been students at the Liceo de Costa Rica (a prep school), where two teachers, Carlos Monge Alfaro (1909–1979) and Isaac Felipe Azofeifa (1912-1997), had singled them out as potential leaders. Indeed, Rodrigo Facio (1917–1961), Daniel Oduber (1921–1991), Alberto Cañas (b. 1920), Jorge Rossi (1922–2006), and Gonzalo Facio (b. 1918) did become leaders of the nation. Monge and Azofeifa had studied in Chile, where they had been classmates of Salvador Allende, and they had returned to Costa Rica determined to propagate Marxist and Aprista thought.11 With their collaboration and encouragement, the young graduates of the Liceo founded the Center for the Study of National Problems (CEPN) in March 1940, for the purpose of systematically studying Costa Rican society as a preparation for political action. These Centristas formed study groups to prepare working papers in all areas of economic and social affairs. Although the groups endorsed Calderón’s programs in social security and labor, they charged that the programs were being implemented in an ineffective and corrupt manner. They stressed their commitment to democracy and urged the creation of cooperatives in order to overcome the problems of underdevelopment and low productivity. Although the CEPN program was not radical, it professed an ideology that was “a symbiosis of liberal and socialist elements.”12 The Centristas affirmed that “a doctrinaire political party could not be formed overnight,”13 but the circumstances surrounding the presidential election of February 1944 convinced them of the need to act, ready or not. The 1944 election pitted Teodoro Picado Michalski (1900–1960) of the Victory Bloc against former president León Cortés, representing the Democratic Party (PD). Although Cortés stood for the stale politics of the past, Democratic Action (AD), a dissident faction within the PD “made up of men young in age and spirit,”14 induced the CEPN to endorse him. One of the leaders of AD was José Figueres Ferrer (1906–1990), an agro-industrialist who had had a run-in with Calderón in 1942 that resulted in his expulsion from the country. While in exile in Mexico, Figueres had written a statement for the CEPN’s journal Surco, in which he described the Calderón-Mora government as “an orgy of cutthroats,” and declared, “We have to put our house in order.”15 Nevertheless, Picado won the election amid widespread violence and fraud. Affirming that the “First Republic of Costa Rica died in February 1944,” Figueres returned home the fol-

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lowing May with the pledge that “one day the sun would rise upon the Second Republic of Costa Rica.”16 Figueres was already planning to make that happen; he had spent much of his life up to that time thinking about the way his country ought to be. As a youth in the village of San Ramón, he had become interested in electrical engineering, and in 1924 he had gone to the United States to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He dropped out, however, and while working as an electrician for the Salada Tea Company, he educated himself by spending his time in the Boston Public Library. By his own account and others’, his reading was eclectic, including the classics and philosophy, but it was the works of the socialists Charles Fournier, Romain Rolland, and Eduard Bernstein that “set his mind on fire” and started him “dreaming of a more perfect world.”17 He remained in the United States until 1928, having moved to New York, where he “sat in on” lectures at Columbia University and continued his self-instruction, reading Shakespeare, Whitman, Rousseau, Voltaire, Bacon, and Spinoza.18 Upon his return to Costa Rica, he acquired a rundown finca in the rugged mountains south of San José, which he named “La Lucha Sin Fin” (The Endless Struggle). He raised cabuya (an agave-type plant), building a factory to convert the plant’s fibers into coffee bags and rope. Living modestly, he reinvested his earnings to erect a school, library, clinic, commissary, playing fields, and a cinema. This was his “pilot project” for the future of Costa Rica. The workers addressed him as “Don Pepe,” and he greeted them, in turn, as “Comrade,” speaking to them about “our enterprise” and “our lands.”19 At night, Figueres continued his reading, specifically, Martí, Cervantes, Kant, and Nietzsche. He never earned a college degree, but he strove to be “a renaissance man,” and was described by friends as “a socialist before it was fashionable to be one.”20 After more than a decade of hard work, his enterprise was a success, and he was prepared to satisfy his socialist impulse on a larger scale. Figueres and his close associates Francisco Orlich (1907–1969) and Alberto Martén (b. 1909) formed the Democratic Action faction within Cortés’s Democratic Party, designed to oppose the Calderón-Mora alliance without turning back the clock. In July 1942 Figueres delivered a radio address in which he accused Calderón of promoting a riot that led to the sacking and looting of the businesses of German and Italian residents in San José. He was arrested and exiled to Mexico. There, Figueres plotted the overthrow of the Calderón-PicadoMora regime, believing force was essential. He befriended Rosendo Argüello Jr., a political exile from the Nicaragua of Anastasio Somoza, and the two agreed to make common cause against their respective “tyrants.” When Figueres returned

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to Costa Rica, it was for the purpose of raising money to enable Argüello to purchase and stockpile arms in Mexico. In the meantime, Figueres and other Ticos formed the Costa Rican Cultural Center, which Carlos Monge referred to as the Mexico City branch of the CEPN.21 Among his activities, Figueres wrote a lengthy essay, “Palabras gastadas” (Worn-out Words), which Orlich and Martén printed and distributed in Costa Rica. In it, he declared socialism to be the most efficient and equitable of systems, defining it as “the aspiration toward an economic order in which each performs to his maximum ability in the organized production of goods, in exchange for the highest standard of living attainable, in accordance with the accumulated wealth and daily production of the society.”22 At the same time, he condemned the “class struggle,” insisting that full production required “the solidarity of all classes.”23 In Costa Rica, Figueres’s plan for armed action received a lukewarm reception. At the time, it was viewed as a measure of last resort. The CEPN preferred political action, and merged with AD in March 1945 to form the Social Democratic Party (PSD). Figueres addressed the founding convention, pledging “to establish the Second Republic” and restore Costa Rica’s “free institutions.”24 In its platform, the PSD declared that its purpose was to carry out “a program of nationalization and state intervention in public services in such areas as hydroelectric energy, transportation, coffee, and sugar cane.”25 The death of Cortés in March 1946 made Figueres a potential presidential candidate in 1948, in rivalry with Otilio Ulate (1891–1973), the head of the National Union Party (PUN) and publisher of the newspaper Diario de Costa Rica. Ulate was a traditionalist and a strong anticommunist, but his newspaper had been supportive of the CEPN. In February 1947 the PSD and PUN formed the National Opposition coalition and nominated Ulate as its candidate for president. Beforehand, Figueres had advised that the united opposition needed to choose a “war chieftain,” not “a puppet in a new electoral masquerade.”26 Ulate expressed his confidence in the electoral process, but he appointed Figueres as his jefe de acción (action chief ) “just in case.” Figueres withdrew to La Lucha to prepare for the clash that he believed was inevitable. The 1947 presidential campaign was a contentious affair, with acts of violence being committed by both sides. Calderón was the candidate of the Victory Bloc, and Mora imported banana workers from Limón as shock brigades, to which opposition gangs responded with midnight bombings and drive-by shootings. Figueres was certain that Calderón would not respect the vote, but he lacked the resources for action. The Mexican authorities had arrested Argüello in early

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1947 and seized his arms cache. In desperation, Figueres made a rash move. In December 1947, he negotiated the Caribbean Pact with an exile group that came to be known as the Caribbean Legion. Led by the Dominican Juan Rodríguez García, the legion had an arsenal of weapons in Guatemala, and Figueres persuaded Rodríguez García to assist in the “liberation” of Costa Rica in return for his pledge to make Costa Rica a staging area for the overthrow of Somoza in Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.27 He made the agreement in the nick of time. As predicted, Calderón did not honor the vote. Ulate won the election of February 1948, but when the Electoral Tribunal failed to certify the result unanimously, the Calderonista-controlled Congress met on March 1 and nullified the result. From his redoubt in the mountains, Figueres launched a five-week “War of National Liberation,” his forces overcoming the small and inexperienced Tico army. Figueres’s Caribbean allies had air-lifted arms from Guatemala and equipped and trained a force of seven hundred volunteers. Mora threatened to rally the workers in a Madrid-style defense of San José, but he agreed to surrender after Figueres promised to retain the country’s “social guarantees” and Labor Code intact. Figueres entered San José on April 24 as the head of the “Founding Junta of the Second Republic.” The Founding Junta governed for eighteen months, after which it transferred power to the elected president Ulate. Figueres made the most of his time in office, putting his ideas into practice. At the same time, he prepared for the future by holding elections for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution as the blueprint for the Second Republic. The fundamental concept for the socialization of Costa Rica was the creation of “autonomous institutions” (AIs)— independent, nonpartisan state agencies managed by experts and staffed by a career civil service based on competitive examination and merit. The process began with the nationalization of the banking system and the creation of the Central Bank of Costa Rica (BCCR), the junta’s first AI, in order to control credit and undertake economic planning. “The administration of money and credit ought not to be in private hands,” Figueres explained, “any more than the distribution of water and the mails.”28 He followed this action with the establishment of the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE), charged with the production and distribution of electrical energy. To provide for the rational marketing of agricultural products and to stimulate new industries, Figueres and the junta devised the National Council of Production (CNP). In time, the CNP erected grain elevators, silos, and cold-storage facilities and established canneries, powdered-milk factories, and even retail outlets as AIs. While

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Figueres sought to expand the role of the state, he did reduce it in one area, by abolishing the National Army on December 1, 1948. This was a daring move, given that Figueres was committed by the Caribbean Pact to aid in the overthrow of the region’s dictators. Fortunately, for him and Costa Rica, he did not have to fulfill his part of the bargain. Later that same December, Somoza allowed a small force of Calderonista exiles to cross into Costa Rica. At Figueres’s request, the Organization of American States (OAS) intervened to halt the invasion, but the OAS imposed the condition that the Caribbean Legion abandon Costa Rican soil. The crisis passed, and Figueres was through with filibustering for the time being. Despite this episode, Figueres and the junta had enjoyed a successful seven months governing by decree, but they faced a more difficult task ahead as they endeavored to make their structural changes permanent in the new constitution. Ulate’s PUN won an overwhelming majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly that was elected in December 1948. The PSD failed to campaign effectively, winning only four seats out of forty-five. The junta had maintained absolute neutrality in the process, with none of its members resigning to present a candidacy. Nevertheless, through the hard work and persuasion of its four delegates, Carlos Monge among them, and the lobbying of Figueres, the Constitution of 1949 retained the essential enactments of the Founding Junta. It enshrined the “social guarantees” and authorized the system of autonomous institutions. In the spirit of the democratic institutions and political rights, now embodied in the constitution, the Founding Junta stepped aside in favor of President Ulate on December 8, 1949. Following his tenure as leader of the Founding Junta, Figueres served two terms as the elected president of Costa Rica, 1953–58 and 1970–74. To prepare for his first campaign for the presidency, Figueres, along with Francisco Orlich, Rodrigo Facio, Benjamín Nuñez, and Carlos Monge, among others, founded the National Liberation Party (PLN) in October 1951. The PLN’s fundamental charter identified it as democratic and socialist, professing the optimism of Henri Bergson and Eduard Bernstein, and a belief in creative and accelerated evolution and in the policlasista and anti-imperialist tenets of Haya de la Torre. It pledged to strive for “the fullest enjoyment of freedom for individuals and the widest distribution of wealth produced by society.”29 Although promising to respect private property, the PLN program stated its commitment to a planned economy, and with reference to major socioeconomic activities of a public service character or tending to monopoly, it advocated government ownership, in the form of autonomous state agencies.30 It embraced Haya’s concept of the

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anti-imperialist state specifically, referring to the defense of the nation’s resources and the regulation of foreign investment.31 One of Figueres’s earliest acts in his presidency concerned this latter issue. In early 1954 Figueres entered into negotiations with the United Fruit Company (UFCO) for the revision of its operating contract. Proclaiming, “We maintain an international doctrine which is contrary to the establishment of large foreign investments of a permanent nature,” Figueres accepted what was already done, under the condition of “a considerable improvement” of the existing contract and with a view toward the gradual withdrawal of UFCO.32 Figueres sought to remove the tax breaks and tariff exemptions that the company had enjoyed since the 1930s, and he wanted a 50/50 split of the profits (akin to Betancourt’s deal with the oil companies in Venezuela). The settlement that Figueres signed with UFCO in June 1954 included only a 30 percent tax on profits, but he secured a minimum wage for workers, and the state assumed responsibility for social services, including schools and medical facilities, which the company had been providing, putting an end to Costa Rica’s image as a “banana republic.” Critics on the left cited Figueres’s gradualism as evidence that he was not a socialist and compared his deal with UFCO to events occurring in Guatemala, where the government was expropriating the company’s properties. Figueres believed that he was a socialist, albeit a criollo socialist of the Tico variety. He was no Marxist, rejecting determinism and the class struggle. He argued that the equitable distribution of goods and services mattered more than the ownership of the means of production. Figueres’s thought was shaped by three influences: European social democracy as inspired by Eduard Bernstein (the PLN eventually affiliated with the Second International); Aprismo, which reflected the American realities of the socialist impulse; and the reforms and mixed-economy concepts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Figueres was fond of saying, “Had we been there [in the United States during the 1930s], we would have been New Dealers.”33 Figueres’s two presidencies, and those of the PLN’s Orlich (1962–66) and Daniel Oduber (1974–78), were responsible for profound systemic changes in the Costa Rican state. By 1980, there were 182 AIs, with 127,762 employees, constituting nearly one-fifth of the total work force. The AIs offered the full range of social services, including education, health care, housing, public works (water and sanitary sewers), and welfare. Among these, the Costa Rican Office of Social Security (CCSS) administered the socialized medical system, and the National Institute of Housing and Urban Development (INVU) was charged with

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providing low-cost housing and undertaking slum clearance. In the economic sphere, the AIs, charged with everything from banking and insurance to running the railroads and coffee marketing, had developed piecemeal, usually to meet a current need, so that in time a more orderly planning process would be needed. The creation of the Office of National Planning and Economic Policy (OFIPLAN) in 1974 was an effort to bring order to the process. It acted as a coordinating and planning agency for the entire system, although the existing AIs continued to exercise a great deal of independence, especially those generating an income. Despite the turf wars, similar umbrella agencies were created to coordinate economic and social development in specific areas or activities, such as the Administrative Port Authority of the Atlantic Coast ( JAPDEVA), designed to develop the Limón area, and the National Administration for Community Development (DINADECO), intended to assist the national government in the planning and allocating of resources to municipalities. With the headstart provided by the Founding Junta (and Calderón), the PLN achieved a transformation of Tico society in less than twenty-five years. Costa Rica’s social democracy gave it a standing in the international community that exceeded its small size. During the 1950s, in particular, Figueres enjoyed a unique position. Costa Rica was a democratic oasis amidst dictatorial regimes. Figueres attended the founding conference of the IADF in Havana in 1950, where he declared that the “afflicted peoples” of the hemisphere “needed to be shown” that help was on the way. He demanded that the United States take action against the dictators of the hemisphere within the OAS, where the issue of non-intervention would not be an obstacle.34 Adopting the Cold War strategy of Betancourt and Haya, Figueres boycotted the Tenth Inter-American Conference in Caracas in 1954; Costa Rica was the only country not to send a delegation. Following the Nixon riots in Caracas in 1958, Figueres remarked, “You can’t spit on a foreign policy,” implying that that was what the demonstrators were trying to do. Figueres had been the maverick during that decade, but by its end he was in the mainstream. In November 1959 Figueres organized the Inter-American Institute of Political Education (IIEP) with the backing of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The U.S. State Department continued to follow a discreet policy with reference to the anti-dictatorial struggle in the hemisphere, but the CIA, acting covertly, gave the U.S. a stake, especially in the context of the Cuban Revolution. The CIA channeled money to the Kaplan Fund, a private New York foundation that acted as the agency’s conduit, which in turn awarded grants to the International Institute of Labor Research, headed by the socialist Norman Thomas, which then

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funded the IIEP in Costa Rica. Thomas denied that he knew the funds originated with the CIA. Figueres knew, explaining, “We had to organize and we needed and welcomed U.S. funds,” but insisting, “There were never any restrictions on our actions.”35 The IIEP provided promising young leaders of the hemisphere’s Social Democratic/Aprista parties with instruction in socialist doctrine and party-building. This placed Figueres in competition with Fidel Castro in determining the future direction of the socialist impulse in Latin America. The election of John F. Kennedy as the U.S. president in 1960 gave the social democratic solution the edge. When Kennedy announced the Alliance for Progress on March 13, 1961, he stated: “In the words of José Figueres, ‘Once dormant peoples are struggling upward toward the sun, toward a better life.’”36 The reference to Figueres was not incidental. Figueres enjoyed a close personal friendship with Adolph A. Berle, a former New Dealer whom Kennedy had appointed to head his task force on Latin America in December 1960, and who wrote to Figueres asking “if [he had] any ideas as to what American policy should be.”37 In the early 1960s Figueres’s star was rising high. With funds made available by the CIA, Figueres sponsored the First Conference of Popular Parties, in Lima in July 1960. He was in a position to realize Haya’s dream of an alliance of the popular revolutionary parties of America. The PLN and the Venezuelan AD were in power, but related parties elsewhere in Latin America were experiencing only mixed success. They welcomed the ascendancy of the social democratic movement as an opportunity to turn their fortunes around.

12

From the Caribbean to the Andes

They were very different in place and ethnicity, but Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Colombia, and Bolivia each produced serious movements for change driven by the socialist impulse. In these states, the social democratic movements generally took form during the 1930s and 1940s, drawing upon the principles of the Mexican Revolution and the anti-imperialist doctrine of APRA. However, Cuba’s inspiration had even deeper roots. Cuba achieved its independence from Spain at the end of the nineteenth century, but José Martí (1853–1895), the leader of the liberation movement, believed that a country was not free as long as economic and social injustice prevailed. “In my view,” he wrote in 1882, “the solution to the Cuban problem is not a political but a social one.”1 In March 1895, as he prepared for his final campaign, Martí promised “there would be a new economic system, which would give work to all, and therefore a free nation.”2 Despite the fact that some of Martí’s most ardent supporters were the socialist and anarchist tobacco workers of Cuban origin in Tampa, Florida,3 he himself abhorred violence. “Although Martí praised in glowing terms Marx’s boundless humanitarian feelings, . . . [he] could not support either Marx’s theories concerning the necessity of class struggle or his defense of violence as a means of implementing social justice.”4 Martí’s death in battle in 1895 left unfulfilled his vision of social justice as part of “a larger process” in which political independence was but a first step.5 In Martí’s words, “tyranny and hungry exploiters” prevailed in Cuba,6 until the Revolution of 1933 restarted the process. The United States helped liberate Cuba in 1898, but required the island nation

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to enact the Platt Amendment, which dictated the conditions under which the U.S. would withdraw its forces from Cuba in 1902. Moreover, the United States imposed a trade treaty the following year, the effect of which would be the creation in Cuba of huge sugar enterprises to the detriment of small producers and a diversified economy. The Platt Amendment stated, among other things, that the United States had a unilateral right to intervene in Cuba “for the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” The mere threat of U.S. intervention caused Cubans to place a premium on political stability and to tolerate their leaders even when they governed abusively. Until the election of Gerardo Machado (1871–1939) as president in 1925 Cuban politics were marked by “Plattism” (the sense of being a protectorate), corruption, and electoral fraud, after which Machado compounded this sort of behavior with tyranny. His attempt to continue his rule in 1928 by imposing a new constitution unleashed the Cuban citizenry’s smoldering resentment that could no longer be contained. During almost three decades of this state of affairs, a new generation had grown up, disgusted by the kowtowing of their elders to U.S. interests and alarmed over the economic and social changes that the expansion of the sugar industry had brought. In September 1930, students of the University of Havana (UH), emboldened by the presence of the Peruvian Haya de la Torre in Cuba, organized the University Student Directorate (DEU) and took to the streets to demand “a total and definitive change of regime.”7 The revolution unfolded slowly. Machado resorted to severe repression, and the resistance movement went underground to wage a war of terror. Convinced that Machado had lost control of the island, the United States intervened to remove him on August 12, 1933, imposing a more moderate successor. Still, these actions could not stem the “authentic revolution.” The DEU issued a manifesto on August 22 in which it defined “its ideological position,”8 and the students then joined with a group of noncommissioned officers in the so-called Sergeants’ Revolt on September 4, which ushered in “the government of 100 days” of Ramón Grau San Martín (1887–1969). The DEU’s manifesto proposed the creation of a plural executive, similar to that of Uruguay, as well as agrarian reform. Its agrarian reform proposal was based on the thinking of Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, the author of Sugar and Society in the Caribbean, who attacked the monopolistic organization of the sugar industry. In order to encourage a system of small producers, the reform placed severe restrictions on the size of foreign-owned properties and prohibited “administration cane” (cane produced on mill-owned lands that were worked

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by hired labor).9 Moreover, it did not exclude the possibility of nationalizing the sugar industry, “as well as the mining industry ‘and others that [might] be essential to national development.’”10 The manifesto further outlined an extensive social reform, a labor code, expanded health care, “the elimination of urban slums and shantytowns,” and a public works plan “to alleviate the problem of unemployment.”11 Although the DEU scrapped the idea of a plural executive as unworkable, the August manifesto served as a guide for Grau’s “government of 100 days.” Grau was too old to be a member of the student “Generation of ’30,” but, as one of them noted, a generation was “not a matter of biology” but a “philosophical concept.”12 Grau ruled by decree, putting into effect many of the proposals of the DEU’s August manifesto. Hundreds of decrees were issued “under the injunction of ‘Cuba for Cubans,’” including the right of women to vote and “a Nationalization of Labor decree requiring Cuban nationality for 50 percent of all employees in industry, commerce, and agriculture.”13 Anticipating the progressive nationalization of the sugar industry, a series of decrees regulating the industry mandated production quotas, fixed prices, wage formulas, profit sharing, and wages in cash. These measures unnerved the U.S. special envoy, Sumner Welles, who withheld recognition of the Grau government and conspired with former Sergeant (now Colonel) Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973) to overthrow the regime in January 1934. To remove the sting of intervention, the United States abrogated the Platt Amendment. This crucible of unrest and revolution produced the Cuban Revolutionary Party–Auténtico (PRC-A), founded on February 8, 1934, to resist Batista’s rule and revive the revolutionary process. The party was social democratic and Aprista in ideology, adopting the democratic, policlasista model and, as a reflection of the bitter experience of the previous month, strongly anti-imperialist. It declared, “We demand an end to the bloody, onerous, underhanded intervention that . . . is deeply responsible for all the ills occurring in Cuba today.”14 Looking to the future, the party pledged “the intervention and control of the national economy by the State,” and “the direct intervention by the wealth-producing classes in the direction of the State.”15 Although he was in exile at the time, the PRC-A named Grau as its president. Batista dominated events of the next decade, but the socialist impulse did not lie dormant. Batista himself appeared to respond to the pressure of the socialists. He enacted the Sugar Coordination Act of 1937, which put into effect the sugar decrees of 1933. In March 1941 he codified all existing sugar laws under Law No. 21. “Under this omnibus measure, the sugar industry ceased to exist as

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a free enterprise system.”16 It gave the Cuban president absolute authority over all aspects of sugar production. Moreover, in 1939 Batista collaborated with the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in the formation of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC), which made organized labor one of the strongest groups on the island, and he appointed the Communists Juan Marinello (1898–1977) and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez (1913–1997) to serve in his cabinet. Initially, Batista suppressed the PRC-A, but toward the end of the 1930s, with the United States rallying the hemisphere against Fascism, he modified his stance and sponsored elections for a Constituent Assembly that would write a new constitution. The Auténticos won a plurality of seats in the convention, and Grau served as its presiding officer. Described as “one of the most liberal and progressive ever written in the American hemisphere,”17 the Constitution of 1940 embodied the principles of 1933. It guaranteed the broadest exercise of individual freedom and rights, authorizing the national government to intervene in the economy, manage fiscal and monetary policy, and provide programs for social security and economic well-being.18 After a four-year hiatus during which Batista served as a wartime president, Grau was elected president of Cuba in 1944. Grau became president amid high expectations that he would resume the “authentic revolution.” He began well, committing his government to “the economic and social imperatives of contemporary democracy,”19 which meant state intervention in the economy and the enactment of social security. He wanted education to be the centerpiece of his administration, and made it the mostfavored item of the budget, funded by a tax of 9 centavos on every sack of sugar produced. Unfortunately, his minister of education, José Manuel Alemán (d. 1950), turned out to be one of the biggest thieves in Cuban history. He stole from the ministry’s funds to oil a political machine and amass a personal fortune. The scandals of the Grau presidency caused Eduardo “Eddy” Chibás (1907–1951), an Auténtico stalwart, to remark that Grau had transformed himself from the “apostle of honesty” to the “apostle of the black market, botellas [sinecures], and corruption.”20 The most that could be said for Grau was that he respected freedom of expression. Grau’s successor in office, Carlos Prío Socarrás (1903–1977), who served from 1948 to 1952, initially attempted to clean up the mess, but he eventually succumbed to a lavish lifestyle and corrupt practices. A member of the “Generation of ’30,” Prío had served as Grau’s minister of labor, making his mark by enabling the PRC-A to wrest control of the CTC from the Communists. As president, he fulfilled one of the mandates of the Constitution of 1940 by creating the National Bank of Cuba, the nation’s first autonomous central bank, empowered

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to issue and manage the national currency and regulate credit and banking. Despite the shortcomings of the Auténtico governments, Prío made Cuba a refuge of social democracy at mid-century. The IADF held its founding conference in Havana, and the Cuban capital also served as the headquarters for the InterAmerican Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT). Aided and abetted by Grau and Prío, Cuba became the center of conspiracy against the tyrants of the Caribbean. Nevertheless, the contradictions of the PRC-A in office were too much for Chibás to bear. In 1947, he founded the Cuban People’s Party–Ortodoxo (PPCO) for the purpose of fulfilling the aims of autenticismo: “nationalism, anti-imperialism, and socialism.”21 Among the founders of the Ortodoxo Party was the law student Fidel Castro (b. 1926), an ardent admirer of Chibás. Prime Minister Manuel Antonio Varona (1908–1992), in turn, criticized Chibás for condemning the PRC-A for the crimes of certain individuals, and affirmed that the party had achieved two of its goals with the abrogation of the Platt Amendment and the regulation of the sugar industry, and was working to realize the third. Toward that end, Varona was instrumental in drafting the PRC-A platform (the Programa) for the 1952 presidential election. The Programa pledged to achieve “the socialization of the economy” by “empowering the State, as the economic organ of the nation, to intervene directly in the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth.”22 Moreover, it avowed that “the exercise of private ownership was not unlimited,” but that it was subject to regulation and “the needs of society,” including nationalization, “when the public interest [demanded] it.”23 With reference to social policy, the platform pledged to enact a labor code containing “all the gains achieved by the national working class,” and to create the Cuban Institute of Social Security. The latter was to be responsible for establishing “a social medical service . . . guaranteeing free care to the poor and extending it to the remainder of the social classes in accordance with one’s ability to pay.”24 The PRC-A lost the opportunity to implement the Programa; Batista overthrew the Prío government on March 10, 1952. The quest for social justice as part of “a larger process” was interrupted once again, until a new generation—the “Generation of ’50”—and Fidel Castro renewed it in a radically different fashion from that of the social democrats, and even from Martí, who cherished freedom above all. Although the PRC-A’s exclusivity, corruption, and bureaucratization set a poor example for social democratic government, its principles and positive accomplishments encouraged the formation of similar movements elsewhere. The PRC-A had its most direct influence upon the formation of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD).

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The PRD was founded by Dominican exiles in Cuba in 1939. It had to be; no independent political party was allowed to function in the Dominican Republic after Rafael Trujillo (1891–1961) seized power in 1930. Among its founders were Juan Bosch (1909–2001) and Angel Miolán, who had fled to Cuba in 1937 and would spend the next twenty-four years trying to replace the tyranny of Trujillo with the ideals of the PRD. According to Miolán, these ideals were inspired by “the revolutions of North America, England, France, Mexico, and the great humanistic movements of universal character that [were] the motivation of Latin America’s democratic left.”25 Specifically, he acknowledged the “decisive impact” upon the PRD’s “theory and action” by Peruvian Aprismo, the “big brother” of the social democratic movement.26 For the time being, Bosch was less interested in theory than in action. Bosch was the face of the PRD during the exile years. A gifted writer and intellectual, Bosch was closely connected with Rómulo Betancourt, José Figueres, and Juan José Arévalo, and was part of the inner circle of Carlos Prío Socarrás. He served as Prío’s liaison with these leaders in the preparation of filibustering expeditions against the Dominican Republic, known as the Cayo Confites (1947) and Luperón (1949) affairs.27 They were failures, but the success of Fidel Castro’s revolution against Batista a decade later changed the situation radically. The United States sought to enlist the aid of Betancourt and Figueres against Castro, and they showed a willingness to cooperate, but at a price. As part of their Cold War strategy to get rid of dictators, they insisted on “Trujillo first.” Betancourt, for one, “pressed the United States to take affirmative action against Trujillo to dispel criticism that the U.S. opposed dictators of the left only.”28 Indeed, Trujillo was expendable; he was assassinated on May 30, 1961, amid much speculation that the CIA was involved.29 It was easier to remove a tyrant than create a government of the people. Following a period of provisional government during which the PRD led in drafting a new constitution, Bosch was elected president on December 20, 1962, amassing 60 percent of the vote. When Bosch returned to the Dominican Republic, he proclaimed that the country needed “a revolution to bring it up to at least the twentieth century. . . . [A] revolution that would permit [the nation] to advance in a few months to at least the point Venezuela reached in 1945, when Betancourt first came to power. This would be almost a dream come true.”30 Bosch was unable to make the dream come true. Opposition elements— mainly the “propertied classes” and the military—considered the PRD’s draft constitution “a Communist Constitution.” They complained that “it did not protect any property right except the right to ‘enjoy’ private property. It autho-

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rized expropriation of property without compensation. . . . It said property must serve the needs of the masses.”31 Bosch answered these complaints with defiance, accusing the opposition of wanting to undo his electoral victory by defeating the proposed constitution. “‘This we cannot permit. . . . The people voted for a democratic revolution. . . . This revolution cannot be given to them if we do not have a revolutionary Constitution.’”32 Bosch’s defiance lasted only seven months; he was overthrown by a military coup on September 25, 1963. Bosch’s task of creating a viable government had been staggering, let alone making a revolution. “[He] alienated the upper classes by his words without winning over the lower by his deeds, while his faith in civil liberties allowed his foes, especially in the army, to stigmatize him most unjustly as pro-communist.”33 If the army believed it was defeating Communism by getting rid of Bosch, it erred. “No single event in a generation drew so many ordinary Dominicans to Communism’s banner up to that time as the coup of September 25, 1963.”34 The outbreak of violence that many expected to occur after the assassination of Trujillo took place nearly four years later, in April 1965. A palace coup on April 24, which sought to restore the 1963 Constitution and the return of Bosch, escalated into a civil war. As the killing intensified, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the landing of four hundred U.S. marines on April 29, for the declared purpose of protecting American lives and property and the undeclared (though widely assumed) purpose of preventing “another Cuba.” Eventually, an OAS peacekeeping mission restored order under the conditions of democracy and reform, but the revolution was crushed. The 1965 revolt produced a deeply divided PRD, and a splintered socialist impulse as well. Bosch returned to the Dominican Republic in 1970. Believing that “the U.S. State Department would never allow another popular explosion of the Mexican type, such as the Dominican Revolution of 1965,” he advocated a “dictatorship with popular backing,” like the one that was occurring in Peru under Juan Velasco Alvarado.35 Bosch bolted the PRD in 1973 and founded the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), running for president under its banner several times and almost winning in 1990. In the meantime, the PRD limped along without Bosch, adhering to its principles and managing to win the presidency in 1978 and 1982, but under entirely different circumstances than in its heyday of 1962–63. The circumstances that derailed the socialist impulse in the Dominican Republic had already played out in Guatemala in 1944–54. The Guatemalan Revolution of 1944 seemed to come out of nowhere, when in reality it had been germinating for some time. Since the beginning of the century, Guatemala had been ruled by a series of brutal dictators, the most recent

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being Jorge Ubico (1878–1946). Ubico governed from 1931 to 1944. He was a positivist of sorts, believing in order (the stifling of dissent) and progress (forced labor by the Indian masses to promote commercial agriculture). He labeled those who opposed him “Communists” and “despised writers almost as much as Communists.”36 According to one such writer, under Ubico, “terms such as union, strike, proletariat, and labor justice were blasphemies punishable by torture and imprisonment.”37 Guatemala was not a safe place to live unless one was among the 2 percent of the population that owned 60 percent of the land, or a Yankee manager of the United Fruit Company (UFCO), which ran the banana industry and a great deal more in the country. The Second World War opened a breach in Ubico’s closed society. The anti-Fascist rhetoric of the war placed Ubico on the defensive and made him vulnerable to calls for democratization. During the war, a trio of young lawyers mentoring law students at San Carlos University were at the center of agitation against Ubico. Under the leadership of Manuel Galich (1913–1984), José Manuel Fortuny, and Guillermo Toriello (1910–1997), the group studied the forbidden works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Pablo Neruda, and Peter Kropotkin and organized the Association of University Students.38 In June 1944, sensing democracy’s victory worldwide, the students confronted Ubico with a petition that demanded university autonomy, self-government, and “the incorporation of the Indian in the life of the country.”39 Ubico’s effort to suppress the movement led to violent clashes throughout the summer, so that not even the installation of a puppet government could prevent the fall of the regime in October, when army junior officers joined the rebellion. Major Francisco Arana (1905–1949), Captain Jacobo Arbenz (1913–1971), and Toriello formed a junta government, pending the election of a new president and the drafting of a new constitution. The overthrow of Ubico appeared to stem more from emotion than from ideology, there being no organized political party in place, but that was because freedom of thought and political action had been suppressed. In reality, ideas abounded, and prominent among them was concern for the exploited Indian majority. Toriello, for example, was an indigenista who admired Benito Juárez and “saw the Guatemalan Indians as noble descendants of the Maya.”40 Galich, too, praised Juárez “for emphasizing native potential” and for citing “the dangers of imperialism.”41 Sharing the view of Juárez as one who “elevated Indian culture to a place of honor in society,”42 Juan José Arévalo (1904–1990) believed that “an aura of servitude existed in Guatemala, and [he] condemned biological theories [that were] designed to make those of other races subservient.”43 The young

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revolutionaries rallied around Arévalo, who had been teaching and writing in Argentina since 1936, and made him president in 1945. Arévalo had earned a Ph.D. in Education in 1934 from the University of La Plata (Argentina), a center of socialist thought and university reform. He studied under the philosopher Alejandro Korn, who scorned positivism as a philosophy that subordinated the individual to “a world of blind and mechanical force.”44 After receiving his degree, Arévalo had returned to Guatemala, where he had served in the Ministry of Education for two years before taking a teaching position at the University of Tucumán in Argentina. Under the general assumption that he had refused to work for Ubico, Arévalo was admired secretly as a hero in Guatemala. Abroad, Arévalo enhanced his reputation as a critic of dictatorship, monoculture, and economic imperialism. During his self-imposed exile, he perfected the concept of “spiritual socialism,” as a means of reconciling individual liberty with collective welfare. He was inspired by Haya de la Torre’s notions of multi-class cooperation and the anti-imperialist state. When Arévalo assumed the presidency in 1945, he declared, “We are socialists because we live in the twentieth century. But we are not materialist socialists. . . . We believe that man is above all else a will for dignity.”45 Arévalo’s socialist impulse, nurtured in a modernized Argentina, had difficulty thriving in a semi-feudal nation like Guatemala. Arévalo had difficulty undoing unjust legislation, much less enacting progressive laws. Under Ubico the Indian masses had been required to work on commercial farms for a pittance under the threat of forced labor on road gangs. Arévalo had to overcome thirty-two attempts to unseat him during his presidency (1945–50). He admitted that “only secret arms shipments from [ Juan] Perón to Guatemala kept the revolutionary movement from going under.”46 Nevertheless, the Guatemalan people enjoyed individual freedoms for the first time in the century under a new constitution modeled after Mexico’s Constitution of 1917. Arévalo hoped to make a “little Mexican Revolution,” and to that end he enacted the Labor Code of 1947, based upon Mexico’s Article 123. At the same time, Arévalo pursued an aggressive foreign policy that distracted him from internal reform. Arévalo believed that the Guatemalan Revolution could not stand in isolation. In the spirit of Aprismo, he sought to defend the revolution by promoting revolutionary movements in neighboring states. He favored a Central American federation and regarded the region’s dictators as the principal obstacle to that end. He became the main actor in the filibustering activities in Central America and the Caribbean in 1948 and 1949. In December 1947, he brokered the

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Caribbean Pact that enabled José Figueres to overthrow Rafael Calderón Guardia in Costa Rica in April 1948. The following year, he permitted the Caribbean Legion to use Guatemala as a base for an invasion of the Dominican Republic (the unsuccessful Luperón affair, in July 1949). The previous August, Juan Bosch and the Cuban president-elect Carlos Prío Socarrás had traveled to Guatemala to coordinate their activities with Arévalo for the overthrow of “tropical dictatorships.”47 If this conspiratorial activity represented a social democratic alliance among Arévalo, Bosch, Prío, Figueres, and Rómulo Betancourt, the situation in Guatemala veered sharply to the left in 1950 with the election of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1913–1971), made possible by the assassination of the moderate Francisco Arana in 1949. Arbenz surrounded himself with radical elements that were less interested in filibustering than in consolidating the revolution in Guatemala. Avowed Communists took control of organized labor and the media and infiltrated the bureaucracy. Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez, the Communist leader of the teachers’ union, became secretary general of the General Confederation of Guatemalan Workers (CGTG); Carlos Manuel Pellicer, in the Ministry of Agriculture, distributed land to peasants in the name of the Communist Party; and Fortuny served as secretary-general of the Communist Party and edited its newspaper, Octubre. The wife of Arbenz, the Salvadoran María Cristina Villanova, was an active Communist. They helped influence the defining act of the Revolution, namely, the Agrarian Reform Law of June 1952, which provided for the expropriation of uncultivated lands over 666 acres in size and mandated the distribution of such properties to poor or landless peasants. The measure was aimed specifically at UFCO, “which had over 500,000 acres and only 43,000 in cultivation, much of the rest being reserve banana land.”48 In the two years between the passage of the law and the overthrow of Arbenz, the government distributed 1,500,000 acres of land to 100,000 families. Charging that Communists were running the Arbenz government, the U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and his brother, the CIA director Allen Dulles, engineered the overthrow of Arbenz in June 1954. They claimed that Guatemala was in danger of becoming a Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere. They cited Guatemala’s effort to import a large shipment of arms secretly from behind the Iron Curtain. John Foster Dulles secured a resolution at the Tenth Inter-American Conference in Caracas, in March 1954, declaring that the establishment of a Communist government in the Americas constituted a threat and called for collective action. Allen Dulles organized an invasion of Guatemala from Honduras by the Aranista Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (1914–1957)

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on June 18, 1954. The CIA also carried out air raids from Nicaragua, using unmarked fighter planes, and the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, John Peurifoy, an experienced covert operator, persuaded key army colonels not to defend Arbenz, who fled to Mexico on June 27.49 Critics of the intervention charged that the threat of Communism was merely an excuse for recovering the UFCO properties, whereas defenders maintained that “an organized Communist presence had clearly been established in Guatemala.”50 The real tragedy of the intervention was that nothing good came of it. The nation was polarized, with right-wing death squads on one side and Marxist guerrillas on the other, and Indian peasants caught in the crossfire. “No fewer than 80,000 people were killed or ‘disappeared’ between the 1960s and the 1990s.”51 Guatemala’s brief response to the socialist impulse was similar to what occurred in Colombia during the 1930s and 1940s. Colombia did not develop a specific social democratic party, but Jorge Elié­ cer Gaitán (1898–1948) endeavored to create one within the established Liberal Party. Two political parties, the Conservative and Liberal, had dominated Colombian politics almost since its independence in 1830. People were born either Conservative or Liberal, and no other political movement had been able to overcome the hegemony of the two established parties. Accepting this reality, but moved by the socialist impulse, Gaitán determined to remake the party of his birth from within. Gaitán was aware that there were “individualistic” and “collectivist” tendencies within the Liberal Party. He was inspired by the turn-of-the-century leader Rafael Uribe Uribe (1859–1909), who professed a “collectivist creed” and a belief in “Socialism of the State”—that is, in the state as the engine of development, progress, public health, and education.52 Gaitán was further stirred intellectually by the French radicalism of 1848, as exemplified by Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Louis Blanc, among others.53 As a law student at the National University in Bogotá, Gaitán wrote a graduate thesis, Las ideas socialistas en Colombia, in which he described capitalism in Colombia as “a false step largely imposed from abroad by the imperialist interest of advanced nations and a tiny local minority.”54 He was not an orthodox Marxist; “first and foremost, he was a socialist,” placing the state above the individual and supporting state intervention to assure the “just distribution of material means,” and viewing socialism as a system providing “a greater amount of equity and happiness.”55 After graduating, he traveled to Italy (1926–28) to study penal law under the socialist Enrico Ferri. There, he observed the speechmaking of Benito Mussolini and, without becoming a Fascist, adopted some of the char-

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acteristics of Mussolini’s speaking style. Gaitán’s education and experiences in Europe established “the socialist principles that would guide him in his future career.”56 That career took off in 1929, as a result of a speech he made to the House of Representatives in which he condemned the government’s role in smashing the 1928 strike of banana workers against UFCO.57 He became the “Tribune of the People,” advocating the principle of “the social function of property” as a means “of opening the way to widespread state intervention in every aspect of Colombian life.”58 Responding to complaints that he was dividing the Liberal Party, Gaitán paraphrased Uribe Uribe, declaring “that liberalism had ‘to become socialist’ or be ‘condemned to perish ideologically.’”59 Yet Gaitán left the party momentarily in 1933 and formed the Revolutionary Leftist National Union (UNIR), in order to lead “‘the struggle for socialism.’”60 Although the UNIR movement was short-lived, it revealed the elements influencing Gaitanismo: Marxism, Italian corporatism, positivism, APRA, the Mexican Revolution, and the socialist ideas of Uribe Uribe, “all fit to Colombian reality.”61 Gaitán adopted Haya’s policlasista thesis, declaring, “We are not enemies of riches but rather of poverty.”62 When Gaitán returned to the Liberal Party in mid-1935, many branded him an “opportunist,” especially since he had earlier been portrayed as “‘the Colombian Clarence Darrow . . . and . . . socialist leader.’”63 Defending himself, Gaitán asserted that he had “succeeded in pushing Liberalism to the left.”64 This boast appeared reasonable in view of the election of the Liberal Alfonso López Pumarejo (1886–1959) as president in 1934, under the slogan, “Revolución en Marcha” (Revolution on the March). Gaitán’s return to the Liberal Party and his renewed determination to remake it from within was facilitated by the failure of the “Revolución en Marcha” to go very far and the high expectations that it had aroused. The stout resistance of the Conservative Party under the leadership of Laureano Gómez (1889–1965) frustrated the efforts of López Pumarejo and subsequent Liberal presidents for change, causing a decade of virtual inaction that is referred to as “the Pause.” The sharp difference between promises and performance polarized Colombian society, and Gaitán, with his spirited oratory, had no intention of calming the masses; rather, he inflamed them.65 Gaitán, in mobilizing the masses, was the interpreter of their will, not its creator. “Gaitán was the unifying symbol, but the rank-and-file Gaitanistas made it happen.”66 Serving in various offices during “the Pause,” including as mayor of Bogotá, Gaitán defeated the “regular” Liberals for the leadership of the party in 1946. The Liberals lost the presidency that year, largely because Gaitán split the

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party, but from defeat came the realization that only Gaitán could secure a future victory. Proclaiming the watchwords “Democracy and social justice,” Gaitán issued the Plataforma del Colón in January 1947. It was his bid for the Liberal Party’s nomination for president in 1950, which he received in October 1947. Gaitán muted his socialist rhetoric and offered a clear social democratic program. Within the framework of representative democracy, the platform assigned “the central role to the state” for the economic and social well-being of the nation.67 It proposed centralized economic planning, state intervention in the economy, and the nationalization of utilities and essential services.68 Gaitán not only had taken over the Liberal Party, he had redefined its mission. Traditionally, the Liberal Party had fought for “political liberty”; now, Gaitán perceived that the “pueblo” had “other chains which humble it,” and he sought to achieve “economic liberty.”69 It was widely anticipated that Gaitán was going to be the next president of Colombia, but on April 9, 1948, as he left his office building for lunch, a lone gunman shot and killed him. The Ninth Inter-American Conference was meeting then in Bogotá, and the delegates, including U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, scrambled for their lives as rioting and chaos engulfed the city following Gaitán’s assassination. The so-called Bogotazo intensified the fighting that had been going on in the countryside since 1946, and Colombia entered into the period of La Violencia, which lasted two decades and consumed over 200,000 lives. Although there had been only the promise that Gaitán’s programs might work, his murder deprived Colombia of the opportunity to experience the social democratic solution under a strong leader. At the same time, Bolivia got that chance with the eruption of revolution there in 1952. The Bolivian Nationalist Revolution of 1952 was a reversal of what had been happening in general in Latin America. In virtually every country of the region, military strongmen were in control, but in Bolivia a popular, civilian uprising seized power, proclaiming “democracy and social justice.” The revolution was led by the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR), an Aprista/social democratic party founded in 1941 as a policlasista alliance of peasants, workers, and the middle class that claimed to be anti-oligarchy, anti-imperialist, democratic, mass-based, and dedicated to social justice.70 Its founder was Víctor Paz Estenssoro (1907–2001), trained in the law and a veteran of the Chaco War (1932–35), who viewed his country’s defeat in that conflict as evidence of the misgovernment and failure of La Rosca (the ruling clique), comprised of political hacks, tin barons, and latifundistas. Inaugurated as president on April 16, Paz worked fast; on October 2, he nationalized the tin mines owned by the “Big Three” families: Patiño, Hochschild, and Aramayo, the source of 80 percent of the nation’s

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foreign earnings and the bulk of the state’s revenue.71 He organized the Mining Corporation of Bolivia (COMIBOL), a state monopoly charged with running the mining industry in collaboration with the Bolivian Labor Central (COB). The workers were empowered in the operation of the mines, able to veto “any management decisions they considered against their interests.”72 The MNR revolution also drastically altered the rural landscape. Under the Agrarian Reform Law of 1953, the MNR distributed 10,000,000 acres of former latifundia land to peasant farmers during the twelve years that it exercised power. Bolivia was one of the poorest countries of Latin America, and 70 percent of its population were Indians that previously had endured serflike conditions. Although moved by the indigenista philosophy of Aprismo, the MNR land reform did not establish cooperatives or ayllus, but legalized what the Indians were already doing for themselves, that is, seizing the land to work as small, individual plots. This resulted in a dramatic drop in food crops for sale, but, coupled with a new electoral law that extended the suffrage to all adults (male and female, literate or not), the reform provided the MNR with overwhelming support in the countryside. In spite of the radical nature of the MNR’s early enactments, the United States lavished Bolivia with more financial and technical aid than any other country in Latin America. The U.S. was not suddenly supporting socialism, but it viewed the survival of Paz as one means of thwarting the more radical elements in the MNR. The United States was concerned about Juan Lechín (1914–2001), the secretary-general of COB and leader of the Leftist Sector of the MNR. Lechín, an avowed Marxist, had led the tin miners in the April 1952 Revolution, and afterward he organized them as workers’ militias to replace the national army. The COB was virtually a “co-government” in operating the tin mines,73 and Lechín fought every effort to control or trim the size of the work force or the benefits, wages, and work rules of the miners. In 1957, when Paz’s successor, Hernán Siles Zauzo (1914–1996), tried to curb inflation by means of a monetary stabilization (austerity) plan, Lechín ordered his miners to strike. Siles retaliated by restoring the army, as leverage against the workers’ and peasants’ militias. In time, the personal ambition and ideological differences of the principal leaders of the MNR caused the Revolution literally to fall apart. The MNR endeavored to be the party of the Revolution, similar to the PRI in Mexico, and its founders—Paz, Siles, and Walter Guevara Arze (1912– )—agreed to rotate in the presidency (with Lechín in the wings). Paz broke that promise by running for president in 1960, causing Guevara, who represented the MNR’s right wing, to withdraw from the party and form the Authentic Nationalist Rev-

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olutionary Movement (MNRA). Four years later, with Paz seeking a third term, his vice-president, Lechín, bolted the MNR and created the Revolutionary Party of the Nationalist Left (PRIN). The infighting became so intense in September 1964 that Paz accused Lechín and Siles of plotting his assassination and expelled them from the country.74 With Paz acting increasingly in an authoritarian manner and the miners aroused, General René Barrientos (1919–1969) led an army coup on November 3, 1964 that removed Paz from office. Paz had declared that his objective was “to achieve a socialist regime,” and the MNR’s Revolutionary government (1952–64) changed Bolivia forever, but as a social democratic movement it exhibited severe shortcomings, especially the inefficient management and diminished productivity of the mining industry. These deficiencies will be discussed further in connection with an assessment of the social democratic experience in Latin America in general (see chapter 19). The Aprista/social democratic parties that developed during the 1930s and 1940s, and that generally peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, were not the only manifestations of the socialist impulse in that era. Other movements traveled on the road toward socialism during those years, intent on the economic and social transformation of their respective nations.

V

The Socialist Impulse at Mid-Century

13

Juan Perón and Justicialismo

Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974) would be among the last to admit that he was moved by the socialist impulse. Yet, he stated in 1950, “It is utopian to want to make communism disappear if exploitation and the abuses of capitalism do not disappear.”1 Moreover, Haya de la Torre wrote to Luis Alberto Sánchez in November 1952 that he believed “even Perón” had been influenced by Aprista ideology.2 Perón virtually wiped out the free market economy in Argentina, replacing it with one that was planned and regulated, with a massive public sector of nationalized industries and social services, and redistributive in nature through wage increases, workers’ benefits, and price controls. Although Perón refrained from imposing land reform, because he counted on agricultural exports to underwrite his plan for industrialization, he achieved the same end by depriving the rural sector of economic independence, particularly in marketing and pricing.3 There are numerous aspects of Perón’s background that provide insights into his economic and social philosophy. His grandfather was a noted physician in Buenos Aires, but Perón was born in a small town on the pampas and reared in bleak Patagonia, where his father worked a small farm. Perón had empathy for the peones and little for the estancieros.4 He entered the Colegio Militar in 1911 and became a career officer, but he was strictly middle class and not part of the oligarchy. Among his many assignments, he taught at the School for Non-Commissioned Officers in Mendoza, where he earned “a reputation as a scholar and historian.”5 There, he read the works of Harold Laski and William Henry Beveridge and exhibited compassion for “shoeless recruits” and lower-class enlisted

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men.6 His provincial upbringing was reinforced by the economic nationalism of the proto-Fascist Argentine army of the 1930s. During the 1930s the Argentine army encouraged a policy of import-substitution industrialism (ISI), designed to approach autarky in order to support its militaristic ambitions. It entertained irredentism toward Uruguay, had expansionistic designs in the Chaco, and regarded Brazil as a rival to be outdone. The creation in 1941 of the General Directorate of Military Manufacturers, to produce arms under the command of the army,7 served as a precedent for the dominant role under Perón of the Ministry of Defense in the administration of nationalized industries and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Perón’s experiences as a military observer in Italy, from 1939 to 1941, convinced him further of the link between industrialization and the attainment of nationalistic goals. He was among the twenty officers of the United Officers’ Group (GOU) who made the “revolution” of 1943 for that very purpose. But Perón had more in mind. While Perón’s fellow officers argued about Argentina’s role in the Second World War, he established a base of support among the masses. He sought to provide the Revolution with a “social content,” that is, “to bring the masses into national life.”8 During the brief presidency ( June 7, 1943–March 9, 1944) of General Pedro Ramírez (1884–1962), Colonel Juan Perón headed the National Labor Department, elevating it to the Secretariat for Labor and Social Welfare, and using it to reshape, strengthen, and control the General Confederation of Labor (CGT). Having been a “negligible” force in national affairs before Perón’s rise, the CGT grew in membership, “from around 520,000 in 1945 to almost 3.2 million in 1955.”9 Prior to 1945, the CGT had been dominated by the Communist and Socialist Parties, representing the “aristocracy of labor; the skilled European stock,”10 but during the 1930s and 1940s the Buenos Aires workforce underwent a transformation, changing from one made up of predominantly European immigrants to one made up of a vast majority of criollo migrants from the Argentine interior. Whereas the CGT ignored these rural migrants, Perón favored them, and he engineered their control of the CGT, using their “criollo identity” to overcome the “elite” workers and the Communists and Socialists.11 With nationalism as his “watchword,” Perón showered select unions with a range of benefits, including recognition, the right to strike, and a social security plan.12 When Perón’s rivals in the military imprisoned him temporarily in October 1945, it was the workers—the “descamisados” (the shirtless ones)—who staged a massive demonstration on October 17 to demand his release, and who anointed him as “the symbol of the egalitarian nation they envisioned.”13 Helping him to win his

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freedom was Eva (“Evita”) Duarte (1919–1952), soon to be Eva Duarte de Perón and destined to become one of the most remarkable women in Argentine history. In the presidential election of February 1946, Perón ran as the candidate of the Argentine Labor Party (PLA), which stood for, among other things, “nationalization of public services and a few basic industries owned in large part by foreigners.”14 In his inaugural address in June, Perón spoke of the “intervention of public power in the economy on behalf of industrialized development and otherwise.”15 He put these intentions into practice without delay, introducing a five-year plan in October that would be paid for by the estancieros and that was designed to industrialize Argentina. The plan put the state in charge of the economy through the nationalization of banking and credit, public services, and basic industries, and increased the workers’ share of the national income by means of improved wages, social services, public housing, and extended health care.16 The means to these ends was the Argentine Institute for the Promotion of Trade (IAPI), a state trade monopoly empowered to purchase export products (mainly agricultural) at a fixed price and sell them on the international market. Again, Perón moved quickly. He nationalized the British-owned railways in February 1947, and followed up with a takeover of Unión Telefónica, formerly owned by the International Telephone Company (ITT), a U.S. company. “By 1955, . . . sectors of the economy once in foreign hands . . . became wholly ‘Argentine.’”17 A massive transfer of assets took place: “In 1935–1936 the wage share in national income was estimated at 38.3 percent; by 1953–1955 it was 46.4 percent.”18 The improved condition of the working class was augmented by the social assistance programs of the Eva Perón Foundation. The foundation, established by Evita Perón in July 1948, was ostensibly private, but it had back-channel access to public monies and the use of official agencies for its “fund-raising” efforts. The foundation became the nation’s major social welfare institution, with assets of over $200 million and a work force of 14,000.19 It was socialism with a personal touch. Evita Perón, an actress from the provinces, had endured a life of hard knocks before she became First Lady, and she found her niche in works for the poor. But she did not consider her work “charity”; rather, she saw it as “a return to the people of what they were rightfully entitled to.”20 Evita got her socialist impulse not in the library but from life. She was a tremendous asset to Perón, adored by the descamisados as a “saint,” and a key force in the enactment of women’s suffrage and the organization of the Feminine Peronist Party (PPF). Perón endeavored to make his vision for Argentina permanent with the Con-

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stitution of 1949. The document guaranteed workers the “right to work” and made “private property, capital, and natural resources ‘subject to the national interest.’”21 It mandated that private property should have a “social function,” meaning, according to Article 39, that “‘Capital must be put at the service of the national economy and must have social well-being as its principal objective.’”22 Separate articles validated the nationalized services and enterprises already in place and put private property on notice that it was subject to regulation and expropriation. The constitution also strengthened the powers of the president, but it made the office vulnerable to tyranny by permitting “reelection to an unlimited number of six-year terms.”23 Perón’s power grab, in the rewriting of the constitution and in his authoritarianism in general, caused the celebrated Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges to label him a “Nazi.”24 Although Perón might be considered a National Socialist of sorts, but unlike Adolf Hitler, who exploited anti-Semitism and the middle class’s fear of Communism, Perón was not anti-Semitic and he had established his base in organized labor and in his opposition to the oligarchy.25 Actually, the Peronista movement defied definition. Perón called his philosophy Justicialismo, proclaiming it to be the “right combination” of the forces of idealism, materialism, individualism, and collectivism, distinct from capitalism and socialism.26 He set forth the “cardinal principles” of Justicialismo as “social justice, economic independence, and political sovereignty.”27 In affirming the goal of a society in harmony, Perón referred to Plato and the “Greek concept of the just state as one in which each class or element [like the human body] exercises its functions and its special abilities for the benefit of all.”28 For all the propaganda that Perón expended on Justicialismo, it was he who would betray the concept of harmony and cause his own downfall. Perón’s vision was of a modern, industrialized Argentina with an uplifted working class that could be achieved by the transfer of wealth from the cattle and wheat estancias to the socialized industrial sector. It appeared to work, as long as the monetary reserves accumulated during the Second World War held out, but when those funds were gone, the vision blurred. Agriculture did not support ISI in the first place, preferring imported products, which were viewed as better made and less expensive, but it lost further incentive when it was forced to sell commodities to IAPI at low, fixed prices. Their sales no longer market-driven, the wheat farmers and cattle ranchers tended to limit production, cutting costs and reducing employment, and looking to invest elsewhere. The occurrence of drought in the late 1940s and the recovery of agriculture in Europe diminished Argentine production further. Argentine laborers, accustomed to grilling steaks

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for lunch, began to experience meat shortages. As unemployment rose, Perón packed the bureaucracy, “with the number of national government employees soaring from 243,000 in 1943 to . . . 541,000 in 1955.”29 With IAPI beset by waste and inefficiency, and ISI and shortages fueling inflation and creating a trade deficit, Perón attempted to divert attention from his faltering economic model by pursuing an aggressively nationalistic foreign policy. Just as Justicialismo was touted as neither capitalism nor communism, Perón assumed a nonaligned stance in the Cold War, what he called a “third position.” He challenged the leadership of the United States in the hemisphere and maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Perón enjoyed ties with Juan José Arévalo in Guatemala, and he likely also had a hand in the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, Víctor Paz Estenssoro having been in exile in Argentina for six years before then. Perón also maintained friendly relations with Manuel Odría of Peru and Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela, both of them having studied at Argentina’s Superior Military School. He made a bid to lead the labor movement in the hemisphere by creating the Association of Latin American Trade Union Workers (ATLAS), in competition with the U.S.-backed ORIT and the Communist CTAL. ATLAS, which used labor attachés posted to Argentine embassies as conduits, lasted only as long as Perón subsidized it. Perón even arranged a barter deal with the Soviet Union, trading wheat for tractors. The effort made Perón a player in hemispheric affairs, but it did not stem his domestic woes. Perón’s troubles were not sufficient to prevent him from receiving a second term, beginning in June 1952, but the death of Eva Perón in July of that year accelerated his decline. Although the military had blocked Evita from running for vice-president, she had been a powerful force connecting with the masses, one that Perón could ill afford to lose, since he no longer connected with them himself. Perón had introduced a second five-year plan that was a contradiction of the first. He now sought to stimulate agriculture, attract foreign investment, and cut labor costs by freezing wages. “IAPI began to purchase farm goods at prices higher than those on the world market.”30 Perón made deals with the automobile manufacturers Fiat of Italy and Kaiser of the United States to construct assembly plants in Argentina. Perón even entered into an agreement with Standard Oil of California for oil exploration, violating the preserve of the state oil monopoly (YPF). Because it failed to curb “union power on the shop floor [that] led to featherbedding and sometimes grotesque inefficiency,”31 the wage freeze was ineffective. Perón’s planned economy was a disaster, beset by “a rundown and antiquated transportation system, insufficient sources of fuel and

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energy, and the absence of a steel industry.”32 He made matters worse by resorting to oppression. Perón’s style always had been personalistic and authoritarian. Refusing to honor the concept of a “loyal opposition,”33 he ended university reform, censored the press, and deprived labor of its independence. In 1953 Perón added street gangs to his means of intimidation. On April 15, marauding bands burned down the exclusive Jockey Club, the epicenter of the elite, and moved on to raze the headquarters of the Socialist Party.34 The following year, Perón picked a fight with the Catholic church. Up until then, Perón’s relations with the Catholic church had been acceptable. He had justified his labor reforms on the basis of the Rerum Novarum encyclical, and in his declarations of Justicialismo he referred to Christianity as the “culmination” of the “just state.”35 But his description of Justicialismo as “doctrine” and his attempt to impose its teachings in religious schools caused one priest to accuse him of “attempting to create a ‘godless socialist Argentina.’”36 Convinced that the Catholic church was encouraging the opponents of the regime, particularly within the military and the unions, Perón discontinued “compulsory religious instruction in the schools.”37 With relations deteriorating, an abortive mutiny by the Air Force, in June 1955, sent Peronista mobs into the streets to set churches ablaze. The Vatican, which had rebuffed Perón’s petitions in 1952 for the canonization of Evita, now reacted by excommunicating him. The clash with the church led his enemies in the military to demand his resignation or face civil war. To his credit, Perón avoided the slaughter of Argentines by stepping down and going into exile on September 19, 1955. Perón had departed, but the socialistic industrial sector that he created remained in place. The CGT, in particular, was intact and, free of the yoke of Perón, was determined to exercise its independence and preserve the gains of the past twelve years.38 The generals were divided over how to proceed. General Eduardo Lonardi (1896–1956), who governed for sixty days, wanted to follow a conciliatory policy toward the Peronistas. General Pedro E. Aramburu (1903– 1970), who ousted Lonardi and governed for almost three years, undertook to eradicate Perón’s influence from all aspects of Argentine life, going so far as to make it a crime to say his name. Aramburu outlawed the Peronista Party, arrested scores of Peronista labor leaders, and declared the Constitution of 1949 “null and void.”39 Aramburu’s hard-line policies had the opposite effect of what was intended; instead of getting rid of Perón, they rehabilitated him. The oppressed workers looked beyond Perón’s dictatorial record, evoking only the “benefits” he had bestowed.40 At the same time, Aramburu lacked the resolve to attack the economy in any systemic way.

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The hemisphere’s decade of dictators was nearing its end. Civilian regimes were being restored throughout Latin America, and the Argentine generals were anxious to get in step. In February 1958 the Radical Party was returned to the presidency with the election of Arturo Frondizi (1908–1995), the leader of the party’s Intransigent wing (UCRI). Although a bold critic of Perón’s authoritarianism, Frondizi was stirred by the socialist impulse, having been an active leader of university reform while a student at the University of Buenos Aires Law School. The Intransigents were the left wing of the Radical Party, and closest to the Peronistas in doctrine. During his campaign, Frondizi even promised further nationalizations.41 He owed his election to Perón, having agreed secretly to work to restore legal status to the Peronista Party in return for support at the polls. He strongly favored industrial development, which, according to his minister of economy, Rogelio Frigerio, “required social and industrial peace and some accommodation with the Peronist masses.”42 However, his effort to revive the economic and social revolution within the framework of democracy (“Peronismo without Perón”) ignored the troubled agricultural sector—the principal source of exports—causing a serious balance-of-payments deficit. In attempting to solve this problem, he would jeopardize his chance of winning over the “Peronista masses.” Frondizi negotiated a loan of $328 million from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the cost of implementing a stabilization plan that included “a 200–percent devaluation, . . . cuts in public spending, . . . and dismissal of redundant public employees.”43 The Peronistas were outraged, and the CGT carried out a wave of strikes throughout 1959. Devaluation also hurt small, private manufacturers who were dependent on imports, causing bankruptcies and enabling foreign companies to scoop them up at bargain prices. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., arriving in Buenos Aires in early 1961 on a fact-finding mission for the Kennedy administration, noted that the IMF program had “brought Argentine national income down 10 percent and real wages as much as 30 percent . . . and had produced much stagnation and unemployment.”44 The loser in the long run was Frondizi. Despite degrading his chance of gaining Peronista support, he fulfilled his promise to obtain legal status for the Peronista Party. In the congressional elections of March 1962, the Peronistas outpolled all other parties. The military immediately forced Frondizi to annul the elections, and a few days later, since he could not form a governing coalition, they removed him from office, replacing him with Senate president José María Guido. The Argentine military was the real power behind the next two civilian presidents: Guido, who served provisionally from March 1962 to July 1963, and Arturo

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Illia (1900–1983), who was elected in July 1963 and served until his overthrow in June 1966. The armed forces were divided over how to make the country whole again and restore its once enviable prosperity. One element wanted to reinstate constitutional government and participate in the Alliance for Progress; the other worried about Fidel Castro in Havana and Juan Perón in Spain, distrusting the resolve of civilian politicians to meet those threats. Neither side was disposed to make structural changes in the economy, even though it was obvious that Perón’s variety of national socialism ( Justicialismo) was a failure. The Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch had recommended to Aramburu in 1956 that he deregulate the economy and reduce the number of SOEs,45 but as of the mid-1960s that had not happened.46 Illia lacked a serious plan to fix the ailing economy, and the Peronista Party, thriving on the distress, won a plurality of seats in the congressional elections of March 1965. The military, alarmed over growing sentiment for the return of Perón, removed Illia from office in June 1966. The Argentine generals determined that the only solution was to emulate the action of the Brazilian generals in 1964 and establish a permanent military government, eliminating civilian politics altogether. General Juan Carlos Onganía (1914–1995) assumed the task, clamping down on the unions, abolishing all deliberative bodies, disbanding political parties, firing civilian policymakers, and disciplining the universities. Military officers occupied all positions of authority, relying on technocrats for advice and planning. On the economic front, Onganía introduced yet another stabilization plan, which consisted of tinkering with the old model without any thought of trading it in for a new one. Repression and wage freezes were not the answer. In May 1969 two groups strongly affected by Onganía’s repression, workers and students, rose up in the city of Córdoba to engage in a two-day melee of rioting and destruction. The cordobazo exposed the discontent lying beneath the surface of the military rule and led to an outbreak of urban guerrilla activity. The collapse of colonialism worldwide and the new anarchists of Cuba fueled the guerrilla movement generally (see chapter 18), but it had specific links to Peronismo in Argentina. Whereas the Left had shunned Peronismo in the past, a Peronista Left emerged in the mid- to late 1960s, led by a new generation who had “drifted into a common belief in socialism, often Marxist in character, with emphasis also on extreme populist orientation and a strongly anti-United States nationalism.”47 Perón, in exile, encouraged the youthful leftists, writing to them that “the history of the world has been the history of the peoples against the imperialists.”48

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Encouraged “that Perón was a socialist at heart,”49 these youths, “nearly all in their early twenties,”50 formed several terrorist groups in 1970, the most significant being the Montoneros (adopting the name of a band of gaucho horsemen of the Independence era). A non-Peronista group also formed, the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), which claimed to be inspired by Che Guevara. The Montoneros wanted to revitalize Peronismo, whereas the ERP embraced Che’s “tricontinental strategy of total war against imperialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.”51 All groups resorted to violence that included abduction and assassination, the most notorious act being the kidnapping and execution of former president Aramburu in June 1970. The government struck back in kind; right-wing death squads seized and murdered student and labor leaders merely for being identified as such. Excess begat excess; overcoming this ugly situation required wise leadership, and the military institution was incapable of providing it. Onganía was replaced by General Roberto M. Levingston (1920– ) in June 1970, who in turn was replaced in March 1971 by General Alejandro Lanusse (1918–1996). Lanusse determined to end this tragic game of “musical chairs” by restoring constitutional government. He revived the legal status of political parties and facilitated the return of Perón to Argentina, gambling that he could rein in the guerrillas. Perón had been playing a dangerous game himself. He had encouraged the Montoneros in their “murderous excesses,” causing them to believe that he was one of them, when in fact he was only using them.52 During a visit to Argentina in November 1972, prior to his permanent return the following June, Perón cautioned the Peronista Youth to “remain calm,” leading one member to complain: “The Peronist Youth expected him to lead a Socialist revolution and now we’re completely disoriented.”53 Both sides had miscalculated. Perón did not have any new ideas; he expected to recycle the ineffective Peronismo of the 1940s.54 He failed to take into account the fanaticism of the young revolutionaries or the changes that had occurred in Argentina during his eighteen-year absence. The economy was stagnant. The rural sector showed none of the vigor and growth that it had displayed early in the century. The rural population had declined, while that of the urban areas had grown to a massive 79 percent of the total population. Buenos Aires alone contained 34.3 percent of the population,55 with “shanty town [dwellers] . . . reckoned at 750,000, perhaps double this number in Greater Buenos Aires.”56 In this depressing situation, Perón took office in November 1973 intent upon resurrecting the economic policy that had contributed to Argentina’s ruin. Perón was elected president in September 1973, along with his third wife,

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María Estela Martínez de Perón (“Isabelita”) (1931– ), a former nightclub performer, who was his choice for vice-president. Given his advanced age (he was seventy-eight) and failing health, it was irresponsible for him to have chosen as his possible successor a person as poorly qualified as Isabelita. She was no Evita. He was blessed early on in his presidency with high prices for beef on the international market, but economic misery quickly resumed with the “oil shock” of 1974—a spike in the price of oil brought on by the Arab-Israeli War. Perón turned on the Montoneros and purged them from positions of influence, referring to them as “terrorists and Marxists”57 and publicly denouncing them as “callow and stupid.”58 While he lived, terrorist violence threatened, but after his death, in July 1974, it escalated exponentially. Not only was Isabelita Perón incapable of governing, but she allowed herself to be controlled by the country’s welfare minister, José López Rega, a Svengalilike figure and self-styled astrologist, who represented the Peronista right wing. He was behind the organization of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA), a paramilitary group in conflict with the Montoneros and ERP in the wake of Perón’s death. “In the latter half of 1974 the Triple A murdered some seventy of its opponents, mostly prominent intellectuals or lawyers; by early 1975 they dispensed with leftists at the rate of fifty a week.”59 As the political situation veered out of control, and with inflation hovering around 400 percent, the military stepped in again in March 1976 and replaced Isabelita with a junta government under General Jorge Rafael Videla (1924– ). The Videla government determined to put an end to the guerrilla warfare. It launched a campaign that wiped out 40,000 persons, without trial, in three years. Suspects simply “disappeared,” subjected to who knew what horrors, in what came to be called the “Dirty War.” The guerrillas were crushed, but at enormous cost to the soul of the Argentine nation. Videla also determined to put an end to the Peronista economic system. Inspired by the neoliberal approach of the Augusto Pinochet government in neighboring Chile, where a so-called economic miracle was occurring, Videla hoped to end state intervention in the economy and install free market principles. In an irony, the hope, which included privatization of SOEs, was shattered by a faction within the military itself. Since 1976, military officers placed in charge of the SOEs had been amassing personal fortunes; needless to say, they blocked the efforts at privatización.60 It took a Peronista to dismantle Peronismo. Carlos Saúl Menem (1930– ) was elected president in May 1989 as the Justicialist Party candidate, and he took power amid hyperinflation and a soaring external debt. The “Dirty War” and the Falklands/Malvinas conflict had thor-

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oughly discredited the Argentine armed forces, and the “debt crisis” of the 1980s (see chapter 19) triggered the collapse of socialist economies throughout Latin America. To the surprise and dismay of the Peronistas who elected him, Menem pursued an aggressive free market strategy. When he took office in 1989, there were approximately seven hundred SOEs; during the next three years, he privatized all of them.61 It was a thorough housecleaning. There was no assurance that neoliberalism (deregulation, privatization, reduced government spending, etc.) would be successful in Argentina. The experience of Chile provided a clue as to certain negative effects, especially the heavy burden placed on the poor, but given the failure of Perón’s socialist-style economic measures, Menem believed he had no option other than to restructure the economy. As will be seen, many of the failures of Justicialismo were similar to those of Aprismo/social democracy, which enabled one to conclude that corruption, waste, and inefficiency were common elements of the pathology of socialism in Latin America, conditions engendered by one-party rule, overstaffing and irrational employment practices, inertia, lack of innovation, and technological backwardness. Nevertheless, in the intervening years prior to these outcomes, the socialist impulse inspired distinct movements to overcome economic and social injustice in Latin America. Among these, Christian socialism became a force, of which the Christian Democratic and Social Christian movements were major components, although not the only ones.

14

The Rise of Christian Socialism

During the nineteenth century, liberals attacked the Catholic church as an ultraconservative institution, the government of La Reforma in Mexico (1858–61) with its severe anticlerical program being a prime example. This circumstance changed in the twentieth century, with the Catholic church, either directly or indirectly, becoming associated with some of the most radical movements in Latin America. At the root of this change was Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Re­ rum Novarum (1891) that addressed “the rights and duties of capital and labor.” Leo XIII described at length the misery of the working classes and expressed strong support for “workingmen’s unions” as the means of overcoming injustice. “A brother that is helped by his brother is like a strong city,” he wrote. Although Leo affirmed the right of private property, proclaiming that “every man has by nature the right to possess property of his own,” he admonished that to deny the worker a just wage deprived him of his opportunity to exercise that right. “It is a great mistake” to assert, he declared, “that class is naturally hostile to class.” In refuting class warfare, he called for harmony, declaring, capital needs labor, as labor needs capital. On the fortieth anniversary of the issuance of Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1931), Pope Pius XI reaffirmed its principles “on the condition of workers.” In Quadra­ gesimo Anno, “On Reconstruction of the Social Order,” Pius wrote: “Leo’s Encyclical has proven itself the Magna Charta upon which all Christian activity in the social field ought to be based.” Having said that, he went further, asserting “the right and duty [of the church] to pronounce with supreme authority upon social and economic matters.” He instructed that the economic and moral orders

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were not distinct, thereby placing the church in the midst of the struggle for economic and social justice. In taking an activist role, he advised his brethren of the need to “avoid the reefs of individualism and collectivism,” and recommended instead the counsel that “human society conform to the needs of the common good.” However, he warned that “Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”1 This admonition created a dilemma for Catholic activists responding to the spiritual call to act for social justice and also driven by the worldly impulse to socialism. Although Rerum Novarum provided the ideological foundation for the Social Christian movement, it did not flourish in Latin America until near the middle of the twentieth century. The movement encountered serious obstacles both within and without the church. Many local clergy did not share the progressive views stated in the encyclical and either ignored or defied it, and the Mexican and Russian revolutions persecuted the church severely, outlawing its political activity altogether. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) also created a crisis of perception that linked the church with Fascism, to the dismay of Catholics who were anticommunist but not reactionary or rightist.2 Despite the obstacles, a few powerful voices spread the message of Rerum Novarum. Foremost among them, Cardinal Mercier (1851–1926), a protégé of Leo XIII, made the University of Louvain the center for radical Christian action. Equally influential, Jacques Maritaine (1882–1973), of the “French School of ‘New Catholicism,’” made a strong philosophical argument for activism on behalf of workers’ aspirations for a wider distribution of wealth.3 The success of Christian Democratic parties in Europe after World War II provided the “practical impetus” for the development of the Social Christian movement in Latin America.4 Christian Democratic parties had been developing in Latin America since the early 1930s, so that by mid-century parties existed in almost every country of the region. Although the Christian Democratic movement was international in scope, the national parties were independent and responded to local realities, although they exhibited common features. Among these, they assumed a “third position” in opposition to communism and capitalism, denouncing both systems as evil and materialistic.5 Additionally, the parties were Christian but non-confessional, that is, “the stress [was] on Christian duty rather than on special truth or a particular Christian competence.”6 Finally, they were democratic and popular. Romero Carranza wrote, “‘Jesus Christ did not outline any particular form of government,’ and yet: ‘Christians have begun to understand that . . . dignity and liberty can only be advanced . . . by means of a democratic regime.’”7 The parties were popular through identification with the aspirations

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of labor and campesino movements and in their denunciation of the oligarchy as “a small circle . . . who prosper unlimitedly at the expense of the misery of all the rest.”8 The parties also adopted common principles to guide their economic programs. At the First International Congress of Latin American Christian Democracy, held in Montevideo in 1947, the Christian Democratic parties adopted the concept of “economic humanism” as a system for providing “the material and social necessities of the community.”9 The essential features of the idea included “the replacement of patronage by co-ownership and the replacement of salary by profit-sharing.”10 In order to have economic humanism succeed, and not violate the right of private property as prescribed by Rerum Novarum, the Christian Democrats engaged in creative thinking. In addition to the requirement that private property perform a social function, the party in Argentina devised the concepts of “‘publicly disciplined’ private property” and “‘socially controlled’ private initiative.”11 Ultimately, Christian Democratic ideology transformed the idea of private property into one of corporate ownership of the means of production. It envisaged a “communitarian society” in which the term “worker” would be applied, regardless of function, to all persons participating in a given enterprise. It proposed to achieve this through “the reform of the enterprise,” whereby “capital and labor . . . jointly participate[d] in the three fundamental aspects—ownership, direction, and distribution of profit.”12 What the Christian Democrats called communitarianism in the urban industrial sector and cooperativism in the rural agrarian sector appeared to critics as socialism. The Christian Democrats conceded that the movement was socialistic, but avowed, “not in the Marxist sense of the term.”13 “In a communitarian regime,” a Mexican party leader wrote, “the employees have full and direct access to the ownership of the means of production of the enterprises in which they work. . . . In a communistic regime, the State is the owner of the means of production and it is the employer of the workers.”14 The Christian Democrats believed that they were proposing an entirely “new form of society.” Eduardo Frei Montalva (1911–1982) explained that the new society represented a “communitarian sense,” that being “a social structure where . . . men who work in the same enterprise . . . acquire fundamental importance. This implies the supercession of class conflict inherent in our present organization.”15 Frei was one of the most important leaders and thinkers who tried to put Christian Democratic theory into practice. The Christian Democratic movement in Latin America seemed to appear

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from out of nowhere following the 1947 Montevideo conference. Over the next three decades it grew to be a force in most Latin American countries and succeeded in electing presidents in Chile, Venezuela, and El Salvador. The election of Frei in Chile in 1964 was a breakthrough for the movement, even though his time in office proved to be fleeting. Frei had led the Social Christian movement in Chile for over thirty years, but he achieved power at a time when the socialist impulse had taken a radical turn. Salvador Allende, for one, berated Frei’s gradualism “as a sellout.”16 Owing to the intense obstruction by both the Left and the Right, Frei achieved only limited success with his “Chileanization” scheme and in setting up rural cooperatives.17 In the heated political environment, the communitarianism of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) was too cerebral. Even Frei had difficulty explaining how the concept of the common good worked as a “limiting factor” on the right of private property.18 Moreover, despite being bedeviled by left-wing militancy, Frei upheld the PDC’s commitment to democracy. He respected his own words of 1956, when in opposition to the effort of the government of Carlos Ibáñez to outlaw the Communist Party, he had stated: “In this country which lacks portions of tea, of milk and of houses, we should not also suppress liberty.”19 Frei attempted to carry out a “revolution in freedom” in a decade when young radicals were more interested in revolution than in freedom. The Christian Democrats endured the same challenge in Venezuela and El Salvador. Rafael Caldera (1916– ) was elected president of Venezuela in 1968. Like Frei, he had been a Catholic political activist since his student days. In fact, the two men had met as youths in 1933 during a conference in Rome. There, they had heard Father Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, speak of the need for the church to “struggle against communism” and “do more to help the poor.”20 As a student in the mid-1930s, Caldera was caught between the authoritarian Gomecistas and the Marxist-leaning “Generation of ’28.” In 1936 he organized the National Students Union (UNE), in protest against the anticlerical and radical positions of the Students’ Federation of Venezuela (FEV) led by Jóvito Villalba and in competition with the developing political movement of Rómulo Betancourt. Although Caldera’s anticommunism and rivalry with Betancourt led to claims that the UNE was conservative, the movement was firmly in step with the principles of Christian Democracy, particularly “social justice [calling] for a more equitable distribution of wealth.”21 The Social Christian movement was well developed in Venezuela even before the Montevideo conference of 1947. Following the coup of October 1945, in January 1946 Caldera organized the Committee of Independent Electoral Political Organization (COPEI), which

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led to the formation of the Social Christian Copei Party. The party identified itself popularly with the acronym COPEI in order to stress the word “independent” and to demonstrate its non-confessional nature. During the Trienio, COPEI had bitterly resented AD’s monopolization of power and had clashed with it frequently, but the party had taken no part in the overthrow of Rómulo Gallegos in 1948. Although COPEI did not suffer the same brutal repression as AD under the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, it was not permitted to meet or be active politically, and its members, including Caldera, were constantly harassed and even jailed from time to time. The experience radicalized COPEI and paved the way for the Pact of Punto Fijo (1958) and COPEI’s collaboration with the Betancourt administration (1959–64). By the time Caldera became president in 1969, Venezuela had already undergone substantial change during the Betancourt and Raúl Leoni administrations. Public services and key industries had been nationalized, and the bureaucracy had grown huge. Caldera had intended that COPEI’s collaboration with AD would be tactical not doctrinal, in line with the resolution he had sponsored at the Third World Conference of Christian Democratic Parties in Santiago in 1961. The resolution had affirmed “the convenience of collaboration or understanding with those advanced social currents which . . . are disposed to struggle . . . for the achievement of social justice within the defense of democracy and of liberty.”22 However, by 1963 COPEI “was almost a mirror of AD.”23 The Punto Fijo system of AD-COPEI collaboration created political stability, which enabled economic growth, but it also had the effect of one-party rule, which undermined the democratic process. From the 1960s through the 1970s, the Punto Fijo consensus “witnessed gradual improvement in income distribution, declining poverty, and a steady rise in indicators of social welfare.” 24 At the same time, consensus meant “an agreement on the distribution of positions within the state administration and the financial resources stemming from the oil rent.”25 With access to the oil spigot, AD and COPEI succumbed to the temptation of machine politics, exploiting the right of patronage and funneling petroleum revenue into party treasuries. As both parties came to dominate the electoral process, each had a stake in perpetuating the system, and each became inbred and resistant to reform. Relying on party loyalists, AD and COPEI lost their intellectual edge and were caught in a downward spiral of inefficiency and corruption.26 COPEI was not as culpable as AD—mainly because it had fewer turns in the presidency (Caldera from 1969 to 1974, and Luis Herrera Campíns [1925– ] from 1979 to 1984)—but it was no less responsible for the eventual collapse of Venezuela’s socialized economy than AD. Foreign policy was one area where COPEI departed from AD.

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Caldera abandoned the Betancourt doctrine, proclaiming instead “pluralistic solidarity.” He believed that Betancourt’s non-recognition policy divided Latin America and made it easy prey for the wealthy and powerful nations of the world. Responding to the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967) of Pope Paul VI, which encouraged “social justice among nations,”27 Caldera affirmed that Latin American unity was critical for achieving that end. He argued that the Latin American nations should engage in collective bargaining with the rich and powerful to convince them that “they did not have more rights, only greater responsibilities and obligations.”28 This concept echoed the words of the encyclical Mater et Magistra (1961) of Pope John XXIII, which proclaimed that “the duty of wealthy industrialized nations [was] to help less privileged countries.”29 In pursuit of “pluralistic solidarity,” Caldera renewed diplomatic relations with the Onganía government in Argentina, and he was among the first to recognize the Pinochet regime in Chile. Moreover, Caldera established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and came close to doing so with Cuba. The diminished violence domestically facilitated improved relations with Cuba. The Betancourt and Leoni administrations had largely succeeded in defeating the FALN guerrilla movement, but Caldera’s offer of amnesty to the remaining holdouts, in March 1969, was “a death blow to the guerrillas.”30 As a further effort at pacification, Caldera legalized the Communist Party and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR). Aside from its foreign policy and its “accommodation with local Marxists and communists,” COPEI’s Christian Democracy was not significantly different from the Social Democracy of AD.31 Whereas Caldera capped a guerilla insurgency, the Christian Democratic solution in El Salvador fell victim to one. José Napoleón Duarte (1925–1990) became president of the Salvadoran junta government in December 1980 in the midst of serious political upheaval. Duarte, the recipient of an advanced degree in civil engineering from the University of Notre Dame (Indiana), had been a founder of the Salvadoran Christian Democratic Party (PDC) in 1960, a time of hope. El Salvador had overthrown the longtime dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (1883–1966) in 1944, and although an alliance of landowners and the military continued to dominate the nation’s political affairs and the economy, the country experienced an awakening during the 1950s and 1960s that enabled modest political and social reform. The administration of Colonel Julio A. Rivera, from 1962 to 1967, seemed especially to offer the promise of change. Rivera was enthusiastic about the Alliance for Progress, and he vigorously promoted the Central American Common Market (CACM), which made El Salvador the region’s center for U.S. pharmaceutical firms and the producer of the area’s finest machete blades. In 1964, in this im-

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proved atmosphere, Duarte was elected mayor of San Salvador, and the PDC won mayoralties in thirty-six additional municipalities. Duarte’s victory was a breakthrough for the PDC as an opposition party. He ran on a program of “metropolitan reform,” which sought to implement the Christian Democratic doctrine of political decentralization and communitarianism.32 The centerpiece of the reform was the construction of “modern, sanitary markets,” which would provide public space for vendors of a variety of goods and produce and would promote grassroots commercial activity. Akin to this form of economic humanism, Duarte organized Communitarian Action, a program under which neighborhood groups “met weekly . . . and contributed labor to the building of schools, bridges, . . . community centers, . . . and other civic projects.”33 Duarte served as mayor from 1964 to 1970, stepping down in order to prepare for a presidential run in 1972. The 1972 presidential election was the critical test in El Salvador for Christian Democracy’s “revolution in freedom.” Success would depend on a free election, a rarity in the country’s history. The PDC entered the contest determined to confront the key issue of agrarian reform. It proposed a reform measure whose intent was to wipe out “individualistic values regarding landholding and production” and establish new principles of land tenure and use based on “a collective or ‘communitarian’” consciousness.34 It was unrealistic to suppose that the oligarchy would submit to a concept as radical as this, but Duarte was optimistic. He ran as the candidate of the National Opposition Union (UNO), a coalition consisting of the PDC, the social democratic National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), and the small, left-leaning National Democratic Union (UDN). With an honest count, he would have won the election, but the electoral commission’s tally gave the victory to Colonel Arturo Armando Molina of the ruling Party of National Conciliation (PCN). The fraudulent election of 1972 was the prelude to tragedy in El Salvador and evidence that the PDC’s peaceful revolution was an illusion. Duarte attempted a coup and failed, after which he was arrested, beaten, and exiled. The oligarchy clung to power for the remainder of the decade as acts of violence by leftist and rightist elements grew in intensity. A coup by junior military officers and civilian moderates in 1979 attempted to find a solution to the turmoil, but extremists at both ends of the political spectrum were armed and irreconcilable. Duarte, presiding over the junta government in 1980, was passed over even by elements within the Catholic church. Certain priests and members of the laity, inspired by the new liberation theology, were organizing the Salvadoran poor “in defense of their rights.”35 Most outspoken among them was Monsignor Oscar Romero,

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archbishop of San Salvador, who declared, “When all peaceful means have been exhausted, the church considers insurrection moral and justified.”36 The murder of Archbishop Romero in March 1980 was only one act that demonstrated the hopelessness of the situation. The PDC broke up that same month. Its left wing formed the Popular Social Christian Movement (MPSC), which allied with the social democrats (MNR) in April to organize the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), to serve as the political arm of guerrilla forces then operating in the countryside. The socialist impulse reached its zenith in October when five Marxist guerrilla movements united to form the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), dedicated to the seizure of power and the creation of a socialist state. As the Christian Democratic movement faded, liberation theology rose to take its place. Liberation theology had evolved during the radical 1960s from a series of pronouncements by the Catholic church that certain members of the clergy interpreted as a call to revolutionary action. Beginning with the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), convened in 1962 by Pope John XXIII, the church produced documents over the next four years that represented “the positive response of the Catholic Church to the challenges of the modern world.”37 Foremost among them, Gaudium et Spes (1965) emphasized “the special responsibility Christians have toward ‘those who are poor or in any way afflicted.’”38 It stated that the church was not “bound to any single social, economic, or political system” and that labor had “the right to strike . . . for a fairer distribution of goods,” whilst the church itself had “the right—even the duty—to pass moral judgments on political matters.”39 A series of encyclicals during the decade addressed the same social concerns as those of Vatican II. Pope John XXIII issued the encyclicals Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), in which he proclaimed that “all forms of economic activity must be governed by the principles of social justice and charity.” He wrote in the former that it was “impossible for wealthy nations to look with indifference upon the hunger, misery, and poverty of other nations.”40 In the latter he declared, “Consideration of justice and equity can at times demand that those in power pay more attention to the weaker members of society.”41 In 1967 Pope Paul VI vigorously reinforced his predecessor’s words in Populo­ rum Progressio. Denouncing “the scandal of glaring inequalities” among nations and acknowledging “situations where injustice cries to heaven,” he allowed that “recourse to violence, as a means to right these wrongs to human dignity, is a grave temptation.”42 He called upon Catholics “to heed [the] cry of anguish” and to endeavor to achieve “an economy which is put at the service of man.”43

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The social message of Vatican II and the encyclicals of the 1960s inspired elements of the Catholic church to act “to eliminate [Latin America’s] political and economic domination and create [its] own destiny in the community of nations.”44 This spirit was made manifest during the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM II), which met in 1968 in Medellín, Colombia, often referred to as “the cradle of liberation theology.”45 Medellín produced sixteen documents, the “heart” of which, according to Professor Deane William Ferm, was the call for mobilization: “The Lord’s distinct commandment to ‘evangelize the poor’ ought to bring us to a distribution of resources and apostolic personnel that effectively gives preference to the poorest and most needy sectors.”46 Indeed, Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928– ), a leading figure of liberation theology, wrote that a “preference for the poor” was the essence of the movement. In that vein, Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest and the author of Teología de la liber­ ación (1971), avowed that “the responsibility of theology now becomes that of changing the world . . . and of joining the struggle against oppression and poverty.”47 Although he did not advocate a specific social system, he believed “that in achieving liberation from foreign capitalist domination, socialism ‘represents the most fruitful and far-reaching approach.’”48 However, as was the case with his countryman, Haya de la Torre, it was to be American socialism. The principal means by which Gutiérrez and others sought to change the world was through the creation of “Christian base communities” (CEBs). Christian base communities (consisting of the impoverished) combined the Christian message with the struggle to overcome existing economic and social conditions. They were the “poor in action,” and were organized throughout Latin America.49 In El Salvador, for example, “between 1970 and 1980, seven centers trained approximately fifteen thousand persons . . . to be catechists and leaders” for mobilizing the masses “‘to begin taking control of their own lives.’”50 It was the activities of the CEBs that made Archbishop Romero and other clergy the targets of death-squad atrocities during the Salvadoran civil war. Owing to the strong anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist rhetoric of liberation theology, critics accused the movement of being Marxist in Christian robes. The deeds of Camilo Torres (1929–1966), a Colombian priest who joined with Marxist guerrillas in the cordillera, contributed to this sentiment. Because of his martyrdom as a guerrilla fighter in 1966, Camilo Torres became a symbol for Christian socialism. Following his ordination in 1954, Torres had spent five years at the University of Louvain studying sociology. Gustavo Gutiérrez had been one of his classmates. After returning to Colombia and ministering

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among the poor, Torres formed the United Front (FU) in 1965 for the purpose of “taking power by the people forever.”51 Moved by the socialist impulse, he declared: “Revolution is not only permitted for Christians, but obligatory.”52 The persecution of the United Front by the National Front government caused Torres to remove his priest’s collar and join the National Liberation Army (ELN), a guerrilla force that operated in the mountains of Santander, whereupon he declared, “I have ceased to say Mass [in order] to practice love for people in temporal, economic and social spheres.”53 In taking up a rifle, he begged to have a combat role. Torres was killed in action in February 1966, achieving hemispherewide attention for his message of “the need for unity between Christians and Marxists.”54 Eighty Latin American priests meeting in Salvador Allende’s Chile in 1971 adopted Torres’s message. They formed the Christians for Socialism movement, declaring, “As Christians we do not see any incompatibility between Christianity and socialism. Quite the contrary is true.”55 A year later, four hundred Christians, also meeting in Chile, concluded: “There is a growing awareness that revolutionary Christians must form a strategic allegiance with Marxists within the liberation process on this continent.”56 These statements represented the extreme position of liberation theology and created a division within the Catholic church. The profound involvement of priests in the Sandinista takeover in Nicaragua in 1979 (see chapter 17), wherein five of them assumed high-level positions in the Revolutionary government,57 caused the Vatican to seek to apply the brakes. The Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM III), meeting in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979, provided the new pope John Paul II with an opportunity to assert the Vatican’s authority. John Paul spoke against priests becoming active in politics. “He pointed to Jesus as one who opposed all forms of injustice although not himself becoming a political activist.”58 Nevertheless, Puebla did not foreclose on the spirit of Medellín. In closing, the conference stated: “We identify as the most devastating and humiliating scourge, the situation of inhuman poverty in which millions of Latin Americans live.”59 Pope John Paul II attempted again to clarify the church’s position regarding Marxism, in his encyclical Laborem Excercens (1981), on “human labor,” published on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. The pope referred to Marxist ideology as aiming “to a monopoly of power in each society, in order to introduce the collectivist system into it by eliminating private ownership of the means of production.”60 He noted that “the right of private property,” upheld in Rerum Novarum, “diverged radically from the pro-

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gramme of collectivism as proclaimed by Marxism.”61 However, he insisted, “one cannot exclude the socialization, in suitable conditions, of certain means of production.”62 The distinction between socialism and the socialization of private property was specified in an extensive discussion of conditions that constituted “joint ownership” or “shareholding by labor.”63 The words of John Paul did not have the desired effect upon activist priests, who only heard what they wanted to hear. Thus, it became the responsibility of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Benedict XVI), prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, to rein them in. Acting for the Congregation, Cardinal Ratzinger published the Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation” on September 3, 1984. The document was a powerful indictment of Marxism, referring to socialism as “the shame of our time.”64 Displaying an understanding “of the situation of excruciating misery” at the root of the “challenge to theologians,”65 the Instruction cautioned that “the use of Marxism will lead Christians to ‘deviate’ from the faith and precisely betray the cause of the poor.”66 It maintained that Marxism was “an indivisible ‘block of steel,’ whose elements [were] mutually ‘indissociable,’” which was not only a rejection of Marxism “en bloc,” but also a “warning against borrowing its ‘concepts,’ ‘elements,’ and even ‘methods.’”67 On September 7, only days after the publication of the Instruction, Cardinal Ratzinger had a “conversation” with Father Leonardo Boff of Brazil, a leading liberation theologian, in effect, taking him to the woodshed. Father Boff was the author of Igreja, charisma e poder: Ensaios de eclesiolo­ gia militante (Church, Charisma, and Power: Essays in Militant Ecclesiology) (1981), which a critic complained began “with the premise that the institutional Church as it exists today has no connection with the Gospel, and contains only lies and illusions.”68 Cardinal Ratzinger reviewed the book, criticizing “not a few positions that are less than fully worthy of acceptance.”69 Although Father Boff remained defiant—stating, “The whole affair evinces once again the limitations and finitude of all things created, including the organs of Church authority”70— he had been reprimanded, and liberation theology lost momentum. Cardinal Godfried Daneels, archbishop of Malines-Brussels, could only lament: “It is painful to see theologians blacklisted and their credibility harmed. The grassroots ministry suffers.”71 If the socialist impulse had lost favor within the Catholic church, it was struggling to survive in Mexico, where it had once dominated.

15

“Is the Mexican Revolution Dead?”

Is the Mexican Revolution Dead? is the title of a book of essays, edited by the historian and Latin Americanist Stanley R. Ross, that was originally published in 1966. That Professor Ross even raised the question tells us that the “fundamental objective” of Lázaro Cárdenas, of “arriving at a socialist regime,”1 was being challenged. However, Cárdenas had no one to blame but himself. His choice of the moderate, Manuel Ávila Camacho, over the socialist, Francisco Múgica, for the presidency in 1940 had not been in keeping with his goal. But personalities alone were not responsible. The Second World War created shortages of imported goods that promoted local manufacturing and stimulated the idea that industrialization offered a better future for Mexico, even if it meant substituting growth for equity in the short run. To that end, Ávila Camacho established the Nacional Financiera, a government agency in support of industrial enterprise, and enacted a measure permitting investment by foreign capital, although this was limited to a 49 percent interest in any business. The phenomenal growth of national income, from 6.4 billion pesos in 1940 to 18.6 billion pesos in 1945, appeared to vindicate those who favored industrialization, promising prosperity and enabling the nation to control its destiny.2 Nevertheless, the major threat to a socialist regime was the socialist state itself. The year 1946 was rife with change. The Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM) changed its name to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The party was intended to be the guardian of the Revolution, but instead it would become a party of corruption and insider rule. Miguel Alemán Valdés (1900– 1983), elected president in 1946, represented a new generation. A civilian and

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an attorney, he ended the succession of Revolutionary generals in the presidency. A strong advocate of industrialization, he accelerated the policy of the war years, enacting protectionist legislation in order to promote import-substitution industrialization (ISI). Alemán relied on the state and foreign capital for investment. The state was a huge trough of funds that facilitated private-sector growth. As a member of Ávila Camacho’s cabinet, Alemán favored opening up the Mexican market to U.S. investment, even opposing the 49 percent limitation “as a matter of principle.”3 In time, smooth operators and influence peddlers manipulated that limitation, setting up dummy companies and front organizations that enabled foreign investors to maintain control of their Mexican operations. Alemán’s own business relationship with the U.S. impresario Mike Todd (and his wife Elizabeth Taylor) in the development of Acapulco was a high-profile example. Although Alemán mixed the policy of economic development with personal enrichment, he had vision. He undertook a massive public works program. The Secretariat of Communications and Public Works (SCOP), whose constituency made up the most socialized sector of the economy, supervised the construction of dams and highways throughout the nation. SCOP built dams on the Colorado, Río Grande, and Papaloapan rivers for the purposes of flood control, the irrigation of thousands of acres of arid land, and the production of electrical energy.4 It increased the number of miles of paved roads, “from about twenty-five hundred in 1946 to over ten thousand by 1952.”5 The SCOP monument standing at the entrance to the Mexico City-Cuernavaca-Acapulco autopista (superhighway) symbolized this vast achievement, marred only by the fact that Alemán had bought up prize real estate in Acapulco in anticipation of what the road would mean for the growth of tourism in the Pacific resort. He also built University City (Ciudad Universitaria) in the Federal District. This was a magnificent work of architecture and art that concentrated the faculties of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in one location, in the Pedregal district on the south end of Avenida Insurgentes. These projects stimulated the private sector, especially the suppliers of construction materials, particularly cement and iron and steel. Mexico was an odd case, where socialism promoted capitalism. However, Mexico’s was a hothouse-style of capitalism that relied more on political connections (favoritism) than on the free market. State and party officials each received their mordida (literally, “little bite,” meaning bribe). Public functionaries depended more on their investments than on their salaries—not a good sign.6 Businesses survived by beating the system, which bred corruption, inefficiency,

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and inequity. “The eleven largest business firms were exclusively owned by the state”7—including PEMEX, the Federal Commission of Electricity (CFE), the National Railways of Mexico, and the National Bank of Ejidal Credit—and they all purchased items produced by local manufacturers. The state supported ISI through legislation providing subsidies, tax exemptions, and foreign exchange controls.8 With foreign investment permitted, multinational corporations (MNCs) seized the opportunity and provided a degree of competition, although they were obliged to use Mexican materials and products where possible in their industrial operations. The huge General Motors assembly plant in the Federal District combined U.S. and Mexican components—particularly rubber goods—so that when the Chevrolets and Pontiacs rolled off the line they bore large decals proclaiming “Hecho en México” (Made in Mexico). Alemán fostered this culture of corruption and a parasitic economy. There were exceptions. The Monterrey Group of industrialists, representing two hundred entrepreneurial families in the state of Nuevo León, “never depended on government aid and . . . always opposed ‘excessive’ government intervention in the economy.”9 Still, the public sector was dominant. “Of the top thirty corporations in 1964, the Mexican state controlled 82.8 percent of the ownership.”10 Although the Constitution of 1917 remained in force, with its revolutionary articles regarding education, landholding, and labor rights, the PRI appropriated it as its own. The PRI was unchallenged at the polls for three decades, producing cookie-cutter presidents every six years—principally UNAM-educated lawyers and party regulars—with varying degrees of personal honesty and integrity. Alemán’s successor, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1890–1973), was chosen specifically because he was an honest man. Ruiz Cortines’s reputation for honesty preceded him in the presidency, and he tried to live up to it in office. He rooted out some of the most egregious grafters, but the mordida was so pervasive that bribes were expected as a means of getting things done. More disturbing, postwar development had failed to produce social justice. Ruiz Cortines continued to favor the industrial sector as promising more for Mexico’s future, and he welcomed U.S. businesses, but along with dollars came advanced technology that did not necessarily provide jobs in the short run. The gross national product (GNP) was growing at 6 percent a year, yet the distribution of income was becoming increasingly unequal. “Between 1950 and 1969 the income share going to the poorest tenth of the population dropped from 2.4 percent to 2.0 percent. Meanwhile, the richest tenth increased its share from 49 percent to 51 percent.”11 Redistributive income policies that had been prevalent under Cárdenas “essentially disappeared,” and “meaningful

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agricultural reform” occurred only infrequently.12 As the president left office, he expressed regret that the masses “had not benefited from the revolutionary process as much as he had anticipated. . . . Illness, ignorance, and poverty had not been overcome.”13 Vicente Lombardo Toledano (1894–1968), the Communist leader and deposed head of the Confederation of Workers of Mexico (CTM), declared that it was “necessary and urgent to get the Mexican Revolution moving again.”14 The PRI apparently heeded his counsel, and chose a candidate from its left wing for the 1958–64 presidential term. Adolfo López Mateos (1910–1970), a labor lawyer and secretary of labor in the Ruiz Cortines government, won the presidency with about 90 percent of the vote, in an election where women voted for the first time. Describing himself as “a leftist within the limits of the Constitution,”15 López Mateos indeed got “the Mexican Revolution moving again.” He “Mexicanized” foreign subsidiary companies in mining, electric power, and automobiles, essentially giving real Mexican control over the MNCs,16 and he nationalized the motion picture industry. He used a hitherto ignored provision of Article 123 to enact a profit-sharing law, whereby “a tripartite government-management-labor committee was formed in every private corporation of Mexico to determine what percentage of profits would be shared among full-time employees.”17 He even revived the Revolutionary commitment to land reform, distributing 30 million acres, “more than any president except Lázaro Cárdenas.”18 However, these policies and Mexico’s exceptional record of “sustained economic growth”19 could not keep pace with demographic changes. From the time of Cárdenas’s presidency in 1934 until that of López Mateos’s in 1958, the Mexican population increased from about 16 million to more than 32 million, having “doubled in only twenty-four years.”20 This population boom and the emphasis on industrialization triggered a mass migration to the cities. Whereas in 1930 the urban population had accounted for one-third of the total, thirty years later, slightly more than 50 percent of the population resided in urban areas.21 With more people to feed in the cities and fewer people to produce food on the farms, Mexico was headed toward disaster. Despite the fact that ISI actually created an increase in imports,22 the PRI stayed with the policy, and even swung to the right in choosing its candidate for the 1964-70 sexenio (sixyear presidential term). With a law degree from the University of Puebla, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1911– 1979) broke the monopoly of UNAM-educated presidents in the postwar period, but he was still within the mold of PRI-style chief executives. He had risen in the ranks from municipal councilman to secretary of the interior under Ló-

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pez Mateos. Dark-skinned and “Indian in appearance,” he was a public relation’s ideal for appealing to the rural masses, but during his presidency he paid little attention to the land redistribution policy of his predecessor. In fact, the Federal District received all of his attention. Mexico was slated to host the 1968 Olympics, and the Díaz Ordaz government went all out to “showcase” Mexico to the world. Responding to critics who complained about the expenditure of millions on the various venues and facilities for supporting the games, the government pointed out that tourism would be greatly enhanced by the new construction and modernization of the city. However, there was more to the protests than how money was being spent. The mystique of the Mexican Revolution was fast fading. A new generation of Mexicans, for whom the carnage of the Revolution was a thing of the history books, was stirred by the radical activism of the New Left of the 1960s. The rhetoric of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the Third World liberation movements, and the civil rights movement and emergence of the counterculture in the United States resonated among the students of UNAM and the National Polytechnic Institute. The students were in a rebellious mood, lashing out against “injustice,” whereas the government wanted everything “orderly and mannerly” for the upcoming games. The students really did not care if the Olympics came off—in fact, according to their thinking, it was a good time to expose the Mexican “miracle” for what it was. The government panicked. In the summer of 1968 a series of clashes between student demonstrators and the granaderos (riot police) led in mid-September to the occupation of the UNAM campus and the arrest of five hundred students and hangers-on.23 In reaction, the National Student Strike Committee held a mass rally in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, in the Tlatelolco district of the city, on October 2. The granaderos showed up, reinforced by the army, and someone started shooting— the authorities denied it was they—and in the end, by unofficial count, several hundred persons were killed, many of them innocent bystanders. The tragedy had a sobering effect. Díaz Ordaz and the students agreed to a truce so that the Olympic games could proceed without incident, and the government agreed that it would subsequently negotiate with the students for resolving their grievances. The students had little choice. Coming from middle-class—and even affluent—backgrounds, their movement lacked working-class and peasant support. The government’s accusation that they had sought to kill the Olympics isolated them further. There was a sense of nationalistic pride on the part of Mexicans, and even those who were not followers of the PRI wanted the games to be held. The events at Tlatelolco signalled the beginning of the end for PRI,

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but circumstances were ambiguous enough to stave off that eventuality until the next crisis. Aware of the challenge, PRI selected a leftist candidate for president in 1970. Luis Echevarría (1922– ) had served as secretary of the interior under Díaz Ordaz, and, as such, he shared responsibility for the Tlatelolco massacre, but as president (1970–76) he promoted the most radical program since Cárdenas. He was determined to rekindle the socialist impulse within the PRI and to reassert Mexico’s independence in hemispheric affairs. Believing that the private sector had infiltrated the PRI and that “business [was intervening] in government rather than government [intervening] in business,”24 he intended “to get the Mexican Revolution back on track.”25 Responding to the demands of leftist intellectuals on the faculty of UNAM for “a return to the state,” meaning “state activism,”26 Echevarría made “a conscious decision to take over the role of the private sector as the main producer of goods and services.”27 He expanded the public sector into telephones, steel, hydroelectricity, resorts (Cancún and Ixtapa), airlines, etc., increasing the number of SOEs from 86 to 740.28 This socialization of the Mexican economy was made possible by the sudden availability of loans from foreign private banks. The “four-fold increase in the price of oil,”29 a result of the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, created a surplus of “petrodollars,” which the OPEC nations deposited in U.S. and certain European banks. With an abundance of funds to lend, the banks competed for clients (borrowers), and Echevarría (not alone in Latin America) was pleased to oblige. In fact, the deals being offered were incredibly soft—that is, the loans by the private commercial banks, unlike those made by governments or international financial institutions (IFIs), were “unconditional,” tied neither to specific projects nor to “macroeconomic programs involving tough conditionality.”30 “Excess liquidity” and the lack of regulation led banks to “overlend.”31 Moreover, there was a “herd instinct”—a tendency to “follow the crowd”—whereby the lesser banks, lacking experience and resources, organized syndicates and relied on the market research and analyses performed by the “lead banks.”32 If the banks were reckless in their lending, Echevarría was equally careless in his borrowing. Echevarría seized the opportunity for borrowing to expand the role of the state, but he lacked a serious plan for amortizing the debt. He acted “as if the practically unlimited supply of credit was to last forever,”33 pursuing policies of his choosing that included spending on social programs and engrossing a public sector already known to be corrupt and inefficient. During his presidency he increased the external debt from $6 billion in 1970 to $20 billion by 1976. At the

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same time, Mexico was experiencing a huge trade deficit. Import-substitution industrialization was intended to reduce reliance on imports, but in practice, owing to the need for capital goods and specialized machinery to support ISI, the policy had led to an increase in imports and even greater dependence on foreign technology and manufactured items.34 Moreover, because ISI was biased against agriculture, the balance of payments received a double whammy: the loss of revenue from reduced commodity exports, and the need to import foodstuffs arising from the population shift from rural areas (farming) to the cities (industry). As long as the loans poured in, the day of reckoning was postponed, but certain problems had to be faced without delay. The expense of imported foodstuffs, affecting the trade balance, created inflationary pressures. During the 1950s and 1960s, Mexico’s inflation rate had been relatively low, but during Echevarría’s presidency it ballooned to 20 percent (rising to 30 percent by the time he left office),35 brought on by a balanceof-payments deficit that demonstrated the need to devalue the peso. The peso was overvalued, which adversely affected Mexico’s competitiveness on the world market and further worsened its trade deficit. Echevarría resisted devaluation, but the mere suggestion of such an eventuality fueled a massive flight of capital, possibly amounting to $6 billion in 1976.36 This hemorrhaging of capital forced a 60 percent devaluation of the peso in September 1976, followed by an additional 40 percent a month later. The dramatic result of Echevarría’s efforts to breathe life into the Mexican Revolution by posturing against the business community and expanding the public sector was a huge external debt, an unfavorable balance of payments, rising inflation, and currency devaluation. The “credit boom of the 1970s”37 would enable this situation to continue and even grow worse. Echevarría, for his part, exploited his leftist image, achieving international prominence. Displaying sideburns and sartorial elegance, Echevarría formed a hemispheric “mod squad,” along with Pierre Elliot Trudeau of Canada and Carlos Andrés Pérez of Venezuela. All three were outspoken critics of U.S. foreign policy in the Vietnam era, and Echevarría identified himself with various Third World causes in a bid to become secretary-general of the United Nations. Mexico continued to recognize and trade with the Castro regime in Cuba, in defiance of OAS sanctions, and Echevarría sympathized with Salvador Allende of Chile, providing asylum for his widow after his overthrow and death in 1973. Echevarría ended his tenure with a flourish, expropriating 250,000 acres of choice farmland in the Northwest, in the only “meaningful” act of agrarian reform in postwar Mexico,38 which sparked a “huge protest strike” by Mexican industrialists and business-

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men.39 In an effort to mollify the private sector, the PRI selected a candidate for president in 1976 who was less hostile to its interests yet attuned to the protests of the ’60s. José López Portillo (1920– ), Mexico’s next president (1976–82), was obviously aware of the country’s precarious economic situation, having served as minister of finance and public credit under Echevarría. But he took the “easy way out”;40 he continued to borrow in order to avoid facing reality. With the discovery of vast deposits of oil in the Gulf of Mexico in 1974, he was not troubled. The foreign commercial banks, still “recycling petrodollars,” virtually competed for Mexico’s business,41 emboldened by the possibility of a petroleum bonanza. As López Portillo observed, “There are two kinds of countries in the world today—those that don’t have oil and those that do. We have it.”42 López Portillo acted to improve relations between the state and the private sector, but at the same time he wanted to make a “great leap forward,” in terms of development, by targeting “the capital goods industry, . . . the elimination of poverty, . . . and the achievement of self-sufficiency in energy and basic grains.”43 In order to meet these goals, the López Portillo administration, after lengthy debate, determined to exploit its vast oil reserves as “the engine of development,” following the Venezuelan model.44 By 1981, Pemex had become “the largest single employer in Mexico and, some say, the most important enterprise in Latin America.”45 The decision to bet the Revolution on petroleum production turned out badly. Mexico was counting on the continued high price of oil to buy its way out of debt. There was a “spike” in the price of oil in 1978–79—a second “oil shock”— but afterwards the price declined again. Moreover, the petroleum industry was not one that generated large numbers of jobs, being “capital-intensive, not labor-intensive.”46 With the Mexican population continuing to increase, the unemployment rate in the country exceeded 26 percent in the late 1970s, which brought about the illegal migration of millions of Mexicans into the United States in search of work.47 López Portillo sought to stem the exodus by promoting agricultural production, while at the same time hoping to improve the balance of payments by reducing food imports. He initiated the Mexican Food System (SAM), a program designed to achieve “agricultural growth of 4 percent a year”48 and “reduce poverty and improve nutrition of lower income groups.”49 With the fall of the price of petroleum, López Portillo’s programs became “meaningless.”50 In the hope that petroleum prices might recover, López Portillo continued spending, using borrowed money. The failure of López Portillo to undertake any measures of adjustment “devastated the Mexican economy.”51 In 1981 Mexico’s foreign debt increased from $49 billion to $75 billion. A year later, when López Portillo left office, inflation

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had reached 100 percent and the external debt stood at $92.4 billion.52 López Portillo had gotten along well with the private sector during most of his term, but at the eleventh hour he turned against it, accusing “the country’s private banks of . . . [aiding and abetting] the flight of Mexican capital in the amount of $22 billion.”53 In a pique, López Portillo nationalized the banks, in what may have been the last act of the Mexican Revolution. If López Portillo wanted to blame someone for the country’s problems, he needed only look in the mirror. He had enriched himself shamelessly while president, and others had done so too: Jorge Díaz Serrano, the director of Pemex, embezzled $43 million from the enterprise entrusted to him.54 In August 1982 the day of reckoning arrived, as Mexico declared a moratorium on its debt service (interest payment)—this was euphemistically described as a de facto default, but it was a default nevertheless—which sparked a debt crisis that affected all of Latin America in general. “The international financial markets awakened to the fact that Latin American countries had borrowed far more than was sustainable, and international banks had lent well beyond a reasonable level of exposure.”55 The Mexican economy was nearly bankrupt when Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (1934– ) assumed the presidency in December 1982, but the fact that the position of the creditors was as perilous as that of the debtors prevented a total meltdown. If the banks were going to save themselves, they needed the debtors to survive. Accordingly, the administration of Ronald Reagan in the United States recognized the need to “nurse the debtors back to health.”56 To this end, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided a “rescue loan” to enable debt restructuring, but this time the loan came with conditions, including trade liberalization (reductions in import licensing and tariffs), macroeconomic adjustments (the institution of market-sensitive exchange and interest rates), reduced public spending (affecting social programs), and privatization (impacting the hallmark of the socialist economy). President de la Madrid, “a technocrat with a law degree from UNAM” and a master of arts degree in public administration from Harvard,57 undertook the enormous task of privatizing as many of the 1,115 state-owned enterprises as he could. Amid CTM and left-wing opposition, he “managed to sell off nearly 100 and to close down 279 by late 1986.”58 Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1948– ), his successor as president (1988–94), held a doctorate in political economics and government, also from Harvard, and was even more aggressive, cutting the number of parastatals (SOEs) to 269 by 1991. “Major companies, including telephones, airlines, and banks passed into private hands.”59 If the Mexican Revolution was not dead, it was no longer serving the economic and social needs of the Mexican nation. To begin with, de la Madrid launched an austerity program that cut deeply

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into social spending, which impacted heavily upon the poor. Inflation hovered around 159 percent in the same year, depressing real wages and compounding the misery. Salinas de Gortari, for his part, pursued a privatization policy that favored cronies, relatives, and wealthy insiders, creating private monopolies that violated the free market principles of neoliberalism and intensified economic and social inequities. The PRI managed to hold on to the presidency for the remainder of the century, but its once political domination steadily eroded. On the left, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (1934– ), the son of the revered former president, bolted the party and nearly upset Salinas de Gortari in the 1988 election. Formerly on the right, but now professing a Social Christian philosophy, the National Action Party (PAN) grew in strength, gaining an increasing number of governorships and seats in the Congress, and electing Vicente Fox (1942– ) to the presidency in 2000. The slashing of social programs and an earthquake that devastated Mexico City in 1985 spawned a host of grassroots and volunteer movements that stepped in to provide services the government was unwilling or incapable of performing. Amid the rubble of the earthquake, “many popular organizations emerged to help rescue victims, build replacement housing, and assist with urban planning and environmental problems.”60 In a strange twist, the demise of Mexican socialism may be attributed, in part, to supply-side banking run amok in the United States and other capitalist countries.61 Mexican socialism was unique, making it a poor example for evaluating the performance of socialism in general. However, there were certain outcomes that appeared to be in common with those of other Latin American movements driven by the socialist impulse. Foremost was political dominance by a ruling party through access to public funds and control of positions and jobs in the bureaucracy and state-owned enterprises. This condition was the source of the corruption that permeated the entire system: the misuse of public monies for political campaigning and party-building; the abuse of the patronage to reward partisans and ease unemployment. The resulting elitist/authoritarian structure resisted innovation, new ideas, and internal reform; it overstaffed the bureaucracy and public sector, promoting featherbedding and gross inefficiency. Lacking sufficient accountability, peculation and bribery (the mordida, in Mexico’s case) were commonplace and went unpunished. Given these failings, the revolutionary ethos of Mexico, for one, lost its dominance, and a New Left arose after midcentury that exhibited contempt for the Old Left and a readiness to use violence as a means of achieving change now.

VI

The Guerrilla Socialists

16

The Cuban Revolution

In the beginning, the Cuban Revolution lacked a clear ideology and was essentially a response to the socialist impulse. As noted earlier with reference to the Mexican Revolution, it was not that the revolution lacked an ideology, but rather that there were too many. Cuba had a long revolutionary history reaching back to the thinking of the national icon José Martí and extending to the diverse approaches of Antonio Guiteras, Ramón Grau San Martín, and Eduardo Chibás, each a veteran of the frustrated Revolution of 1933. For the most part, Fidel Castro (1926– ) and the young people who gathered around him were influenced heavily by life experiences, dismissive of the older generations whom they perceived as tolerating corrupt caudillos like Fulgencio Batista and as failing to overcome ignorance, imperialism, poverty, and racism. Castro attended the University of Havana in the mid- to late 1940s, when armed gangs (bonches) had ruled the campus, terrorizing students and faculty alike. The bonches were affiliated with neo-anarchistic groups that had roots in the overthrow of Gerardo Machado and the resistance to Batista during the 1930s—among them, the Revolutionary Insurrectional Union (UIR). Judging from the numerous newspaper accounts that described Castro in the company of UIR pistoleros (gunmen), he probably was connected with that group, but, in any case, he was part of the violent culture that afflicted the Auténtico governments of 1944–52.1 He took part in the failed Cayo Confites expedition in 1947 and was a prime suspect in the murder of rival pistolero Manolo Castro (no relation) the following year. In addition to his experiences in pistolerismo, Castro participated in mainstream politics, at least through the first two years of the 1950s.

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Castro appeared to admire Eddy Chibás, arguably the most popular political figure in Cuba following the Second World War. As previously noted, Chibás had quit the Auténtico Party in May 1947 in disgust and had formed the Cuban People’s Party–Ortodoxo (PPC-Ortodoxo). Despite the fact that Chibás had once refused to let Castro ride with him in his auto, explaining that he did not want to be seen in public with a gangster, Castro became a founding member of the Ortodoxo Party and a devoted follower of Chibás.2 When Chibás committed suicide in 1951 in protest over the continued corrupt practices of the Auténtico governments, Castro stood watch over his bier and burned the floral offerings of those whom he judged to be “corrupt politicians.”3 After the death of Chibás, Castro remained active in the Ortodoxo Party, in the hope of eventually succeeding the fallen leader. He campaigned as a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in the election scheduled for June 1952. Seeming to settle down for awhile, he practiced law, married, and became a father. This relatively calm phase ended abruptly, on March 10, 1952, when Batista overthrew the Prío government. Castro was outraged over Batista’s takeover. He condemned Batista as usurper who had ended Cuba’s era of “civic peace,” and he quickly reverted to his pistolero stage, abandoning domestic life. Castro was never a member of the Communist Party, and he had no patience for the rigid formulas of Marxism. He was an anarchist at heart, believing in direct action and the “cure-all revolution.” He provided leadership for a diverse group of young Ortodoxos who had been moved by the rhetoric of Chibás and were angry over Batista’s coup. Havana was rife with plotters against Batista—“café conspirators”4—but Castro was serious in his determination to liberate Cuba. His plan—an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba in Oriente Province, far from the principal army base of Camp Columbia outside Havana—appeared doable. But it was also quintessentially Cuban: a heroic assault that, if successful, could “light the flame of a general rising in the country.”5 Its program was emotional and strictly Cuban, reflecting the socialist impulse of recent decades: “The Revolution . . . recognises and bases itself on the ideals of Martí . . . and it adopts as its own the revolutionary programme of Joven Cuba [founded by Antonio Guiteras of the “Generation of ’33”], the ABC Radical [the clandestine anti-Machado revolutionary movement] and the PPC (Ortodoxos). . . . The Revolution declares its absolute and reverent respect for the Constitution which was given to the people in 1940.”6 Castro launched his attack on July 26, 1953. It was a perfect failure. The assault by about 200 untrained and poorly armed men against a fortress holding a contingent of 1,400 soldiers was

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over almost before it began. Castro was captured a few days later by army patrols and taken to police headquarters, rather than to Moncada, which likely spared his life. A myth grew up that during Castro’s trial for insurrection he had made a lengthy statement in defense of his action. In reality, Castro’s trial was held in secret and no transcript of what he said was ever released. After being sentenced to fifteen years in the infamous La Cabaña prison, Castro prepared an extended version of his remarks to the court, entitled, “History Will Absolve Me.” It provided clues to Castro’s thinking, although critics charged that it was deceptive and designed to hide his true intentions. Taken at face value, the statement was social democratic in nature. “Once upon a time there was a Republic,” Castro lamented, referring to Cuba in the 1940s. “It had its constitution, its laws, its civil rights, a president, a Congress and law courts. Everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with complete freedom.”7 Fortunately for Castro, he did not languish in La Cabaña for fifteen years. He was imprisoned instead in the Modelo Prison on the Isle of Pines, where he served only twenty-two months. There, he did serious reading—Dostoevski, Hugo, Marx, Freud, and Kant—entering the realm of ideas without dampening his conviction that the sword was mightier than the pen. At the same time, Batista, in the belief that his position was secure, having been “elected” president in November 1954, signed a bill on May 6, 1955 that granted amnesty to all political prisoners. Castro, released from prison, left for Mexico in July, where he could conspire without Batista’s secret police shadowing him. Mexico was a haven for émigrés during the 1950s, a time when uniformed presidents ruled most of the countries of Latin America. The refugees gathered in cantinas, making speeches and listening to mariachis sing of revolution. Castro would speak for hours at a time, winning converts, among them a young Argentine medical doctor named Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967), who wrote that he was “drawn” to Castro “‘from the outset, moved by a feeling of romantic, adventurous sympathy, and by the conviction that it would be worth dying on an alien beach for such a pure ideal.’”8 Guevara was a drifter of sorts; he left home after completing his medical studies in 1953, traveling northward with the intention of serving in a leprosarium in Venezuela, but he had ended up in Guatemala, where he witnessed the CIA’s overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz. With little idea of Castro’s plans, Guevara was among the eighty-two men who set sail from Tuxpan, Mexico, on November 24, 1956, on the fifty-eight-foot “yacht,” the Granma, to make a revolution in Cuba. Castro had spent almost a year and a half preparing for the invasion of Cuba

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by his 26th of July Movement (M-26-7), named to commemorate the failed Moncada assault. Despite repeated scrapes with Mexican authorities and Batista’s agents, Castro had been able to recruit, train, and arm a force of about a 135 men (too many for the Granma). He enlisted the services of Alberto Bayo, a Spanish Republican and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, to instruct the rebels in guerrilla warfare. He raised funds from various sources, mainly Ortodoxos, but the principal donor was the deposed president of Cuba, Carlos Prío Socarrás, who put up $50,000 for the purchase of the Granma. Although Castro and Guevara became exemplars of the guerrilla movement in Latin America, Castro’s initial plan was in the tradition of Martí—that is, it was to be a conventional strike against the military garrison at Niquero in Oriente Province, coordinated with acts of sabotage and diversionary raids on soft targets in Santiago and other cities, all intended “to spark a general uprising.”9 The invasion was a fiasco. The group landed in the wrong place and two days late. The underground forces on the island had already gone into action and had been crushed, and Batista was lying in wait for Castro’s men. Only sixteen of the eighty-two invaders survived the early hours of the battle. Few could have foreseen that from this ill-fated beginning Castro would triumph in just over two years. He was able to do so by doing everything differently from what he had originally intended. Faced with certain defeat at Niquero, he reverted to his fall-back plan, an escape into the Sierra Maestra mountains to “launch a guerrilla campaign.”10 In the ensuing two years, the only idea that he and Guevara did not change was their conviction that they should not have to wait for the right conditions to begin the Revolution—that they could start first and create the conditions later.11 Castro led the struggle; Guevara wrote the manual. Castro’s first need was to survive, to give himself time to rebuild his force and rearm. Taking a page from Mao’s book, he courted the local peasantry, taking care not to abuse them or to steal from them. He remained relatively mobile, never setting up a permanent camp that could be spotted from the air or become a target for a planned attack. He followed Bayo’s instruction of engaging the enemy only at a time and place of his choosing. “The perfect guerrilla,” Bayo advised, “is one who never invites the enemy to do battle. . . . Every good guerrilla should attack by surprise, in skirmishes and ambushes, and when the enemy least suspects any action.”12 Castro employed these tactics and Guevara obeyed them, observing what worked and what did not. Che Guevara’s experiences, which he recorded meticulously in field diaries and notes, from the time he landed in Cuba in December 1956 until the time he left the island for other adventures in 1965, enabled him to produce a volumi-

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nous body of work that “established [him] as Latin America’s leading advocate of unconventional warfare.”13 Guevara’s first book, Guerrilla Warfare, published in 1960, was essentially an instructor’s manual. Yet, in this basic tract Guevara articulated the central thesis that would be contained in most everything that he later wrote or stated—that guerrilla warfare was the “most effective means” of achieving a revolution. “Other forms of struggle, such as a general strike, could contribute to victory,” he allowed, “but only if coordinated with the guerrilla vanguard and applied at the proper moment of the general insurrection.”14 In Episodes of the Revolutionary War, Guevara continued to express this thesis. That book was a collection of thirty-two of his essays, which, according to Professor Paul Dosal, recalled “the history of the insurrection as he saw it or wanted it to be.”15 Che ignored the contributions of other elements, insisting that it was the guerrillas in the sierra who “deserved exclusive credit for defeating Batista.”16 Guevara’s constant emphasis on the superiority of the guerrilla strategy led to distortions of his argument. In particular, with reference to the foco theory, which proposed that “a well-directed guerrilla nucleus, linked to the people, could serve as the catalyst for a mass political movement.”17 As Dosal has affirmed, it was Régis Debray who “created” foquismo, in his book Revolution in the Revolution? (1967); Guevara “did not contribute to the book nor did he ever endorse it. He actually criticized it and Debray.”18 Despite Guevara’s disclaimers, he remained associated with the popular notion that a mere sixteen survivors of the Granma landing had escaped into the hills and brought down a dictator within twenty-five months. And he appeared to strengthen this perception with the assertion that a principal lesson of the Cuban Revolution was that “popular forces can win a war against the army.”19 From his vantage point in the sierra, it was a reasonable claim. The Cuban Revolution achieved success owing to a multitude of factors that reached a climax with the taking of Santa Clara at the beginning of 1959—the only real battle of the conflict— with Castro as the dominant heroic figure. After the initial engagement, the fighting in the sierra during 1957 had not been very intense. “Batista’s generals, most of them former sergeants [like him] with no comprehension of military strategy [much less counterinsurgency operations], commanded troops with no intention of venturing deep into the mountains.”20 With time to regroup and rebuild his force, Castro settled into a relatively comfortable existence. “Their comrades on the ‘plain’ below—the urban underground in Santiago, Havana, and the other cities and towns across the island— brought them food, . . . weapons, . . . and additional recruits.”21 Celia Sánchez, among the women prominent in the rebel army, wrote about the experience:

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“‘Oh, but those were the best of times, weren’t they? We were all so very happy, then. Really. We will never be so happy again, will we? Never.’”22 Castro’s presence in the sierra inspired resistance on the llano (the plain). Members of the Auténtico and Ortodoxo parties, among others (except for the Communists), formed clandestine cells in the cities and engaged in sabotage, arson, and assassinations and set off bombs. The Revolutionary Directorate (DR), comprised of University of Havana students, stormed the Presidential Palace on March 13, 1957, with the intention of assassinating Batista, but things went awry and thirty-five of the group of fifty men were wiped out by machine-gun fire. Others were slain in the ensuing dragnet for DR suspects. The historian Hugh Thomas has affirmed: “The significance of the Civic Resistance can hardly be exaggerated. . . . These men and women suffered most from the repression.”23 As for the propaganda war, there was no contest. It was the old dictator—a throwback to the avarice, tyranny, and Yankee domination of the old Cuba—against the young paladin, who stood for nationalism, democracy, and socialism. Castro gained the high ground, particularly after his February 1957 interview with New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews was published. Matthews’ report about Castro was an absolute rave: “‘The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him. . . . Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership . . . one got a feeling that he is now invincible.’”24 Matthews created “the legend of Castro, the hero of the mountains, . . . ‘who dealt fairly with the peasants, paying for everything they ate.’”25 Matthews convinced the North Americans that the Revolution was a question of Robin Hood versus the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire. Matthews portrayed Castro as an engaging freedom fighter, and quoted him as proclaiming, “We have no animosity towards the United States and the American people. . . . We are fighting for a democratic Cuba and an end to the dictatorship,”26 which facilitated a change in U.S. policy toward Batista. Accused of coddling dictators during the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration was sensitive to the complaints of influential senators, such as Hubert Humphrey, Wayne Morse, and J. William Fulbright, that it was backing Batista.27 Vigorously opposed to a takeover by Castro, official Washington sought to persuade Batista to step aside, before it was too late, and permit a free election for president in June 1958. They were counting on a moderate and consensus candidate. To this end, the United States applied pressure on Batista, using as leverage arms sales to Cuba through the U.S. Military Assistance Program (MAP), a program that had been designed to enhance hemispheric defense. In September

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1957 Batista used certain MAP weapons to put down an uprising at the Cienfuegos naval base, in violation of the terms of the program. Using this incident as a pretext, the U.S. threatened to cut off arms sales in an effort to induce Batista to agree to an electoral solution. He refused to cooperate. “He harbored his own brand of Cuban nationalism.”28 As a result, the United States suspended arms sales to Cuba in March 1958. With the loss of U.S. materiel and moral support, Batista’s chances of survival were greatly diminished. But as a result of the Nixon riots in Caracas in May, U.S. policy remained ambivalent, despite provocations by rebel forces in Oriente Province. Batista launched a major offensive in the summer of 1958, which failed miserably. In the offensive, Batista’s forces committed atrocities that proved counterproductive. Following Batista’s defeat, the barbudos (bearded ones) descended from the sierra onto the plain, and the demoralized Cuban army provided little resistance. “The active units could not win even a skirmish.”29 The year 1959 was only hours old when Guevara won the battle of Santa Clara and Batista fled the island. Castro entered Havana eight days later, after a triumphal tour of the island, and the socialist impulse had a new model to follow. The collapse of the old Cuba was total, leaving a vacuum that was Castro’s to fill. He was like the sun, radiating a power and energy that warmed the adoring crowds and withered potential opposition. Plus, he had the guns. The catch was that no one was certain what he intended to do, probably not even Castro himself. There was the “History Will Absolve Me” speech, the Matthews interview, and the knowledge that he admired Eddy Chibás and had been an active Ortodoxo. Guevara described the 26th of July Movement “‘as one of the many inspired by the bourgeoisie’s desire to free themselves from the economic chains of imperialism,’”30 and he regarded Castro “‘as an authentic leader of the leftist bourgeoisie.’”31 The so-called leftist bourgeoisie believed that they had obtained a commitment from Castro in July 1958, in the form of the Pact of Caracas, as a condition for money and arms. Castro agreed to terms with leaders of the DR, FEU, Auténticos, and Ortodoxos that provided for “‘a common strategy to defeat the dictatorship by armed insurrection,’ a brief provisional government ‘that will lead . . . to full constitutional and democratic procedures; [and] a scheme to guarantee . . . the rights of workers, . . . as well as the economic and political progress of the Cuban People.’”32 Yet, in a speech delivered on December 2, 1961, Castro asserted that he was already a believer in Marxism when the revolution triumphed, having spent the previous decade learning its “truths.”33 He stood before the crowd and declared dramatically, “‘I say here, with complete satisfac-

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tion and confidence, that I am a Marxist-Leninist, and shall remain so till the last days of my life.’”34 It was more likely that Castro’s conversion to Communism occurred between January 1, 1959, and December 2, 1961, through a combination of will and circumstance. Before 1959, Castro was no orthodox Marxist, much less a member of any Communist party. When the Communist Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, head of the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), went into the sierra in July 1958 in an eleventhhour effort to join the winning side, certain guerrilla chieftains advised Castro to “send him packing.”35 Castro let him stay, “but refused to tolerate him in his headquarters.”36 Until then, the PSP had not approved of Castro’s “adventurism,” and, in fact, the party had a history of cooperation with Batista. At the same time, U.S. interests fared no better in Castro’s estimation. Harking back to Martí and Plattism, anti-American sentiment intensified during 1958, as many Cubans “came to see the United States as the enemy, responsible for sustaining an unpopular dictatorship and for prolonging Cuba’s agony.”37 As Castro responded to the socialist impulse—promulgating the Agrarian Reform Law in May 1959 that eliminated large holdings and prohibited foreign ownership of farm lands—the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union impacted heavily upon the course of the Cuban Revolution. American public opinion in certain quarters turned against Castro, a reaction to the mass trials and executions of Batistianos for war crimes. The liberal Senator Wayne Morse was “horror-stricken,” and suggested cutting off Cuba’s sugar quota in reprisal.38 Moreover, U.S. officials were convinced that Castro was not sincere in his pledge to restore the Constitution of 1940, noting that he had reneged on the Pact of Caracas by forcing out the civic leaders José Miró Cardona (prime minister) and Manuel Urrutía (president) from the provisional government. Castro next installed mechanisms of control, such as the Committees in Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), comprised of block captains who kept tabs on their neighbors and rewarded the faithful with jobs, ration cards, and housing. Castro’s mindset was clear. He reacted to criticism of the war crimes tribunals by saying: “Revolutionary justice is based not on legal precepts, but on moral conviction.”39 He set the standard for intellectual and political freedom, declaring, “everything within the Revolution, nothing against the Revolution.”40 The U.S. vice-president Richard Nixon concluded from his meeting with Castro in April 1959 that the Cuban leader “was either incredibly naïve about Communism or under Communist discipline.”41 Nixon secretly recommended that the U.S. arm “a force of Cuban exiles . . . immediately to overthrow Castro.”42 On

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March 17, 1960, President Eisenhower authorized CIA director Allen Dulles to prepare a Cuban exile force for possible covert military action against Castro. In the meantime, the PSP exploited the growing hostility between official Washington and Castro. Whereas the United States urged Castro to hold free elections and restore constitutional government, the Communists “were perfectly willing to see Fidel Castro continue as Maximum Leader for the rest of his life.”43 In contrast to the “leftist bourgeoisie” who were fleeing to Florida by the thousands by the middle of 1959, the Communists “never criticized or complained, and [they suggested that] if the United States refused to aid the Cubans, perhaps the Soviets might provide both economic and military assistance.”44 Such assistance was forthcoming. The first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, Anastas Mikoyan, visited Cuba in February 1960 and reached an economic agreement with Castro, under which the Soviets pledged to purchase Cuban sugar and provide Cuba with a substantial loan for acquiring Soviet products.45 The trade pact emboldened Castro, who established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in May, and it unleashed the cold warriors in the CIA, who dreamed up all sorts of schemes for getting rid of Castro, including assassination. When the Soviets shipped crude oil to Cuba in June, the U.S.-owned Esso facility refused to process the oil, explaining that the heavy crude would damage its machinery. Castro regarded the refusal as a pretext and a breach of contract, and expropriated the Esso refinery. In retaliation, Eisenhower cancelled Cuba’s sugar quota. Simultaneously, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev declared that Russian “‘artillerymen’ could defend Cuba, if need be with rockets.”46 The United States reacted to this threat by rallying the hemisphere against “extracontinental intervention.” At the OAS Seventh Meeting of Consultation, in San José, Costa Rica, in August, the United States secured a declaration that “condemned the intervention or threat of intervention by an extracontinental power in the affairs of the American Republics, and declared that the acceptance by any American state of such intervention or its threat, endangers American solidarity and security.”47 Khrushchev scoffed at the statement, proclaiming “that the Monroe Doctrine was dead.”48 Guevara was ecstatic, remarking “that Cuba was now defended by ‘the greatest military power in history.’”49 In September, Castro and Khrushchev met in New York at the United Nations and hugged and mugged before the cameras. Eisenhower fumed and ordered an embargo on exports to Cuba, excluding medicines and certain edibles. U.S.-Cuban relations continued to deteriorate for the remainder of the year, but Castro was not deterred in his effort to create a socialist Cuba. On October

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14, one day after Eisenhower imposed the trade embargo, Cuba nationalized 382 private enterprises, “including sugar mills, . . . distilleries, department stores and cinemas.”50 Ten days later, Castro struck at the heart of “U.S. international capitalism,” nationalizing its “proudest names,” such as “Woolworth, Sears Roebuck, General Electric, . . . and Coca Cola.”51 In December, Castro acted “to eliminate or neutralize the key institutions of the former ‘bourgeois’ order.”52 He took total control of the press, judiciary, unions, and even of the University of Havana. The following month, Eisenhower ruptured relations with Cuba, presenting president-elect John F. Kennedy with a fait accompli. In many respects, relations with Cuba defined the Kennedy administration: the Bay of Pigs (April 1961); the missile crisis (October 1962); and the assassination of the U.S. president (November 1963) by an activist in the Fair Play for Cuba movement. The CIA landed a force of 1,543 Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs for the purpose of touching off a popular uprising against Castro. It was an irony that the CIA had adopted a plan so Cuban, one that had been tried so often and failed just as often. The effort of the USSR to construct missile sites in Cuba capable of striking every major U.S. city led the United States and the Soviet Union to the cusp of nuclear war. The Soviet Union backed down, but exacted a pledge on the part of the United States not to invade Cuba. The crisis ended the invasion threat, but not the threat against the life of Castro. During the Kennedy administration, U.S. clandestine operators set in motion a number of covert action programs aimed at, as Attorney General Robert Kennedy demanded, “getting rid of Castro.” AM/LASH was one. It involved CIA officer Desmond Fitzgerald and Cuban agent-in-place Major Rolando Cubela (referred to by the cryptonym AM/LASH) in a plot to assassinate Castro by means of “a ball-point pen rigged with a [poisonous] hypodermic needle . . . so fine that the victim would not notice its insertion.” According to the CIA’s official report of the program, in reference to the rendezvous of the two men in Paris in November 1963, “It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent . . . and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro.”53 The attempts against Castro’s life ended in 1966, when Cubela was unmasked as a CIA agent and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. In the meantime, having lost access to the U.S. market, Castro was compelled to adjust his economic planning to the requirements of trade with the Soviet bloc. Castro was despondent in the aftermath of the missile crisis, having been ignored in the settlement of the matter between Kennedy and Khrushchev, but eventually he overcame his humiliation and reconciled with Khrushchev. Ear-

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lier, in 1961, Guevara, as president of the National Bank and head of the Ministry of Industries, had sought to reduce Cuba’s dependence on sugar through diversification of agriculture and industrialization. He had devised a Four-Year Plan to that end, which introduced the concept of the “New Man,” that is, one who would volunteer his labor as a “joyful contribution” to the betterment of society. “More and more, [he argued,] the revolutionary regime should stress moral incentives and the creation of a new socialist spirit.”54 He insisted that man ought to produce “without being compelled ‘by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.’”55 Moral incentives never quite replaced material rewards in Cuba, and Castro appeared ambivalent about the issue, predicting in 1967, “‘We shall do away with the vile intermediary, money,’”56 thereby contradicting what he said two years earlier: “‘We cannot choose idealistic methods that conceive all men to be guided by duty, because in actual life, that is not so.’”57 Nevertheless, it was the USSR that settled the matter, proving to be as hard-hearted as the stereotypical capitalist banker. Guevara’s plan of putting industry ahead of agriculture was not working, and it caused Cuba to fail to meet its obligations under the Soviet trade pact. “In mid-1963 the Soviets put their foot down.” They insisted that the Cubans “slow down the industrialization drive and . . . recognize Cuba’s comparative advantage: sugar.”58 Castro took the Soviet admonition seriously. He set a target of 10 million tons of sugar to be produced in 1970. Whereas the Revolution had been fought in part to end Cuba’s dependence on sugar, the 10-million-ton zafra (harvest) was to be a measure of the Revolution’s success. He even revived Guevara’s thinking, making participation in the zafra a moral duty. In an extension of this moral incentive, Castro spoke of abolishing money completely, “and indeed by 1969 several things, such as sport, cinemas, and local telephone calls, were . . . free.”59 The year 1970 arrived amid great fanfare, with Castro himself in the cane fields wielding a machete and joined by Venceremos (“We shall overcome”) brigades from all over, including the United States. The zafra produced 8.5 million tons, a record yield, but short of the heralded goal. It was a severe psychological blow to Castro; more devastating was the blow to the economy, which had been “grievously damaged” by the intense effort to produce the 10 million tons.60 The zafra had been intended to liberate the Cuban economy; instead, Cuba became a ward of the Soviet state, dependent on economic assistance from the Soviets that in time amounted to over $4 billion annually. Any assessment of the performance of socialism in Cuba must be given an asterisk, owing to the extraordinary influence the Cold War rivalry between the

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United States and the Soviet Union had on developments in the island nation. The Cuban economy was affected adversely by the U.S. trade embargo in 1960 and by the resolution of the OAS Ninth Meeting of Consultation in 1964, under which the American states broke diplomatic relations with Cuba and severed commercial exchange and maritime shipping with the Castro regime. A visitor to Cuba in the 1980s experienced the sensation of going back in time. Havana, in particular, was unchanged since 1959 and showing signs of neglect and erosion. The relatively few automobiles on the streets were 1950s models, and the bars and clubs of the “jumping days” were boarded up or mere shells of their former selves (except for La Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio). Despite an effort to stimulate tourism, the once up-to-date tourist hotels were relics of the past, badly in need of repair, maintenance, and pest control. The homes in the formerly middle-class Vedado section were rundown and their yards overgrown in weeds. Housing in general was dilapidated. There was little evidence that the Revolution had made any effective use of the housing inventory that had been left behind by the “leftist bourgeoisie.” The shelves of the state stores and shops displayed few consumer goods, and the government markets rationed what foodstuffs were available. Although the Castro regime was disposed to punish “sinful” Havana, it appeared wasteful in permitting the city’s infrastructure to go to ruin and ineffective in marshalling its resources. However, Castro had established a dictatorship, and there was no formal means for questioning his decisions. For example, in the mid-1960s Castro became obsessed with a project to crossbreed cattle to produce a hybrid that would have the “lactation efficiency” of the Holstein and the ability to withstand tropical heat of the zebu. “Though he lacked the practical experience of a cattle grower, . . . no Cuban agronomist . . . would risk a dressing down from the Maximum Leader by suggesting that the opposite might be true.”61 Castro persisted in the experiment until the end of the decade, wasting millions of dollars and endangering the Cuban cattle industry.62 Castro brushed aside this failure, affirming, “It was not an error . . . or a crime to search for solutions to problems. . . . He, as prime minister and head of the revolutionary government, had the right to make decisions, and he had done so.”63 The episode, treated in detail in Robert E. Quirk’s book, Fidel Castro (1993), demonstrated the lack of accountability in the Cuban socialist system. Politically, the Cuban Revolution failed the Cuban people. One group, M-267, and one leader, Fidel Castro, have exercised power for almost a half-century without holding a national election. Dissent has been punished by denial of the right to earn a living or imprisonment. On the other hand, the Revolution did

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make significant strides in education and health care. The Revolution declared 1961 as the “Year of Education” and aimed to attack illiteracy, which stood at 24 percent in 1959; by 1962 it had succeeded in achieving an adult literacy rate of 96 percent.64 Although a high percentage of healthcare providers were among the half a million people who left the island during the 1960s, the Revolution mandated free medical and dental care for the entire population almost from the start.65 The Revolutionary government worked diligently to restore the number of physicians and construct clinics and hospitals, increasing “budgetary appropriations [for health services] . . . from 25 million pesos in 1959 to 236 million in 1969.”66 These accomplishments, achieved in defiance of “Yankee imperialism,” stimulated revolutionary activity throughout Latin America. Militants flocked to the island, which became a base of ideological and logistical support. Che Guevara “supervised Cuba’s clandestine efforts to foment revolution in the Americas.”67 He set up the Liberation Department within the Interior Ministry and sponsored filibustering expeditions against Panama, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic in the summer of 1959. These initial efforts failed, but Cuba continued to “export” revolution during the 1960s, though less overtly. Guevara lost out to the orthodox Communists (PSP) when Castro opted for the 10-million-ton harvest in 1964 and later gravitated toward the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet rift, but “Che” remained the inspiration for those militants who wanted revolution now and who adopted the tactics of Guerrilla War­ fare. A “second wave” of revolutionary activity swept Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, driven by Guevara’s concept of struggle against imperialism on three continents: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. “To crush imperialism,” Guevara had written in 1966, “revolutionaries must create a second or third Vietnam.”68

17

Central America Aflame

The radical 1960s touched off a period of armed insurrection during the ensuing decades, notably in Central America. Although authoritarian regimes dominated the region, the ideas of Augusto César Sandino, Agustín Farabundo Martí, and Juan José Arévalo inspired dissent, and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara provided the means. Nicaragua was the most agitated, having been aroused by Sandino. Ever since the murder of Sandino, Anastasio Somoza (1896–1956) had been a marked man. Despite repeated invasions by exiles from neighboring countries, culminating in the assassination of Somoza in 1956, his sons Luis (1922–1967) and Anastasio (1925–1980) still managed to maintain the dynasty, warding off further revolutionary efforts. Following the ill-fated forays of the summer of 1959, the Somoza brothers attempted to appear democratic and sought to soften the image of the regime. Even José Figueres, a longtime adversary of the elder Somoza, remarked, “We are not conspiring. We are not going to hold the son responsible for what his father did or did not do.”1 However, the Cuban Revolution had created “a sense of the possible”: if Castro could succeed, “then why not here as well?”2 Carlos Fonseca Amador (1936–1976) provided the link between Sandino’s anarchism derived from the thinking of Ricardo Flores Magón and “the new Marxism that emerged from the Cuban Revolution in the works of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.”3 Fonseca, who founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in exile in Honduras in 1961, “rescued Sandino’s ideas from oblivion, reedited them, and trained a new revolutionary vanguard on their foundations.”4 At the same time, he adopted Guevara’s manual on Guerrilla Warfare, which affirmed

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that “irregular forces can defeat a professional military.”5 Fonseca, a dedicated Marxist, had studied Marx and Engels while still a teen, and he “was also guided by the writings of Darío, Gorky, Mao, and Neruda.”6 He had traveled to Moscow in 1957, was “seriously wounded” in guerrilla combat in Nicaragua in 1959, and subsequently convalesced in Cuba. There, he met Guevara and, like Guevara, he concluded that the orthodox Communist position “was not adequately revolutionary.”7 He established the FSLN on the principle that “only armed struggle would free the Nicaraguans.”8 In arguing “that practice may precede theory,” Fonseca relied upon José Carlos Mariátegui, whose writings sought to give Marxism “an ideological dimension grounded in human passion.”9 Moreover, in evoking the name of Sandino the FSLN made nationalism and patriotism an integral part of its quest for a socialist society. During the 1960s the Sandinistas, as the FSLN became known popularly, engaged in guerrilla warfare in remote parts of the country but made little headway. But events beyond its control provided opportunity. The death of the moderate, Luis Somoza Debayle, of a heart attack in 1967 gave absolute control of the country to the junior Anastasio, who was commander of the National Guard. The younger Somoza proved to be a greedy and ruthless ruler. In 1972 the capital, Managua, experienced a devastating earthquake that killed 10,000 people and left 450,000 homeless. President Anastasio Somoza Debayle missed the opportunity to be a hero to his people in the reconstruction effort; instead, he misappropriated millions of dollars and tons of relief supplies that had been provided by the United States and other countries and international agencies. Pedro Joaquín Chamorro (1924–1978), the editor and publisher of La Prensa and the leader of the Conservative Party, exposed Somoza’s scandalous profiteering. Chamorro had been the principal opposition to the Somozas since the early 1950s, and had led an airborne invasion of Nicaragua from Costa Rica in 1959. Following the Managua earthquake, he determined to follow a nonviolent course, believing that Somoza was politically vulnerable. However, the FSLN sensed that the time was ripe for radical action and seized the initiative. In December 1974 a small group of Sandinistas crashed a party in suburban Managua, taking forty-five of society’s elite as hostages. They forced Somoza to pay a ransom of $1 million, release twenty political prisoners (including Daniel Ortega), and provide them with an airplane to fly to Havana. Up to this time, Somoza had considered the FSLN a marginal group, but the raid incensed him and he ordered the National Guard to attack FSLN guerrillas in three rural provinces where they had been active. The Guard carried out operations for two years, during which time it committed acts of “shocking brutality,” according to a

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pastoral letter by the Catholic bishops of Nicaragua. In radicalizing the countryside with its pillaging, the Guard also managed to kill Fonseca in an encounter in November 1976.10 Although the FSLN gained prominence in the process, the death of Fonseca revealed distinctions in ideology and tactics within the movement. The Marxist wing of the party displayed two so-called tendencies: first was the Prolonged Peoples’ War—a lengthy, rural guerrilla warfare designed to socialize the peasants, which was the course that Fonseca had been following; second was the Proletarian tendency favored by Jaime Wheelock (1946– ), an FSLN coman­ dante who “wanted a Marxist-Leninist workers’ party as the vanguard of the revolution and emphasized political education among urban dwellers.”11 A third tendency was the Insurrectional or Tercerista model that emerged among certain Marxist and non-Marxist Sandinista elements led by Daniel and Humberto Ortega and Edén Pastora (“Comandante Cero”). The Terceristas, in alliance with “the bourgeois opposition, . . . combined the strategies of the prolonged peoples’ war in the countryside with the massive popular resistance in the cities.”12 The pluralistic character of the Terceristas enabled the FSLN to overcome its image as “a small Fidelista band of terrorists” and earn a place in the overall antiSomoza movement. In October 1977 twelve respected Nicaraguans in exile in Costa Rica (Los Doce) issued a statement that demanded Somoza’s resignation and recognized the right of the FSLN to participate in the future government of Nicaragua.13 Somoza’s situation continued to deteriorate as he alienated more of the population with his excesses. His problems were compounded by the human rights policy of the Carter administration (1977–81). President Jimmy Carter, adopting a highly moralistic foreign policy, had suspended arms shipments to Nicaragua in 1977, pending a review of Somoza’s human rights performance. Using arms transfers as leverage, Carter sought to create a political climate that would allow the democratic opposition in Nicaragua to achieve an electoral solution. The policy acquired greater urgency with the assassination of Chamorro in January 1978. Although Somoza denied any responsibility, two days of rioting and a seventeen-day general strike ensued, and opposition elements united to form the Broad Opposition Front (FAO), which demanded that Somoza resign. The United States renewed its efforts to broker a political solution, but it proceeded cautiously in order to give the FAO time to organize. In the meantime, the Sandinistas pursued armed struggle, growing in numbers and receiving weapons from Cuba that were shipped via Panama and Costa Rica. They gained the initiative in August 1978 by means of a spectacular sei-

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zure of the National Palace, the site of the Nicaraguan Congress. Pastora, in command of just 14 Sandinistas, held 1,500 people hostage and obtained from Somoza $500,000 in ransom, the release of Sandinista prisoners, and the publication and broadcast of a manifesto denouncing the Somoza regime. With this event, the Sandinistas put their signature on the rebellion. They launched an offensive in September and occupied several cities, but Somoza struck back with aerial bombing and strafing attacks. As the Sandinistas rallied young barrio dwellers barely in their teens (Los Muchachos), Somoza inflicted three thousand casualties and leveled the cities of Chinandega and Estelí. Although the offensive failed, Somoza also lost, by the carnage he caused.14 The United States was determined to remove Somoza, but not at the expense of a Sandinista takeover. After numerous futile attempts to end the fighting and negotiate a political settlement during the spring of 1979, the United States requested the OAS to convoke a meeting of consultation in June to act on a proposal to replace Somoza and create an OAS peacekeeping force. With OAS backing for the former but not the latter, the U.S. acted to replace Somoza with the Junta of National Reconstruction, organized in mid-June in Costa Rica and comprised of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (the widow of Pedro Joaquín), Alfonso Robelo Callejas (FAO), and three Sandinistas: Daniel Ortega, Sergio Ramírez Mercado, and Moisés Hassan Morales. Still endeavoring to prevent the Sandinistas from having a monopoly of arms, the U.S. stipulated in Somoza’s surrender the establishment of a new security force that would be made up of a reformed National Guard and the Sandinista command. The plan came undone when interim president Francisco Urcuyo refused to step down; he had been installed on July 17 solely to facilitate the transfer of power. In the confusion of the handover of power, which lasted only two days, the National Guard ceased to exist, effectively leaving the Sandinistas unchallenged militarily. Although the Junta of National Reconstruction constituted the legal government, real power resided with the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate (DNS), owing to their total control of arms. The Directorate reorganized the former guerrilla elements in order to create the Sandinista Popular Army (EPS), the police and internal security forces, and the Sandinista Popular Militia (MPS), which served as an army reserve and police auxiliary. The Directorate also established a number of “popular” organizations, particularly the neighborhood Sandinista Defense Committees (CDS), patterned after the Cuban CDRs. Having refused a U.S. offer of Peace Corps volunteers, the Sandinistas welcomed more than two thousand Cuban medical, educational, and

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technical personnel, putting a Fidelista face on basic social reforms; moreover, they lowered the voting age to sixteen, a reward to Los Muchachos that also served to bolster their constituency. The Directorate acted as a shadow government, subordinating the junta to its will. Despite intentions to establish a socialist state, the Sandinistas heeded Fidel Castro’s advice to go slow. Their tightrope act was facilitated by the size of the holdings of the Somoza dynasty and its allies. The Somoza properties, “including half the large farms over 500 hectares, a quarter of all industry, large construction firms, hotels, real estate, an airline, a fishing fleet, and more,”15 gave the Sandinistas enough to work with, but they intended to go further, in time. In the interlocking structure that the Sandinistas created, Comandante Jaime Wheelock Román (1945– ), a member of the DNS, served as minister of agricultural development and agrarian reform. In the latter capacity, Wheelock “supervised the redistribution of about 50 percent of the nation’s cultivable farmland (5 million acres) to more than 112,000 peasant families.”16 Wheelock had resided in Chile during the Allende government and was the intellectual author of the Proletarian tendency, which favored the transformation of the FSLN into a Marxist-Leninist party.17 Although he went along with the cautious approach, accepting a mixed economy as a matter of expediency, he “warned that revolutionary power could not live side by side with bourgeois power.”18 He advocated “closing unpatriotic private enterprises [and] . . . supported nationalization of foreign businesses, natural resources, strategic industries, and the banks.”19 Wheelock resented the portrayal of the Sandinistas as atheists, declaring “that [they] carried out the Commandments and adhered to the dictum that blessed are the humble and the poor.”20 This dimension of the Sandinista revolution was underscored by the poet and “hippie priest” Ernesto Cardenal (1925– ). Father Cardenal, a powerful advocate of liberation theology, joined the FSLN in 1973 and became minister of culture in the Sandinista government. During the 1970s Cardenal had established a Christian base community (CEB) on the Solentiname island group at the south end of Lake Nicaragua. There, Cardenal had “prepared the poor peasants and fishermen for revolution,” engaging in dialogue based on the gospels and the writings of Marx, Mao, and Castro.21 Referring to himself as a “Christian Marxist,”22 he preached liberation theology, with its focus being “not the personal longing to eternal life but the collective longing for a new society without exploitation,” which is to say, “not salvation after death, but salvation on earth through revolutionary change.”23 When Somoza’s warplanes destroyed the Solentiname commune in 1978, Cardenal joined the FSLN guerrillas in the field as chaplain. Later, as minister

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of culture, he defied the Vatican’s ban on priests in public office, “wondering why, if the church wanted a more moral regime in Nicaragua, it would oust priests in favor of a totally secular government.”24 He saw his position as a means “to transform reality, to create the new revolutionary person and the equitable society envisioned by Jesus.”25 The actions of Cardenal and other radical priests widened the base of support of the Sandinistas, diminishing the influence of certain elements of the Terceristas and the leftist, or “patriotic,” bourgeoisie. In April 1980 Violeta Chamorro and Robelo Callejas resigned from the junta in frustration, recognizing a de facto situation as entrenched. The ease and speed of the Sandinista takeover encouraged the socialist impulse throughout Central America, with the most radical groups adopting the guerrilla strategy. The opportunity was never more golden. Colonialism and imperialism appeared to be in decline, as witnessed by developments in Algeria, Indochina, Cuba, Iran, and Nicaragua. The United States was in the midst of what would be a twenty-year crisis, marked by such traumatic events as the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; the civil rights and antiwar movements; Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and the Church Committee’s revelations concerning domestic and foreign intelligence activities. Having reduced the size and functions of the CIA’s clandestine services, President Carter was an easy mark in Nicaragua. The English author John Ranelagh criticized Carter’s “neo-isolationist” policy as having produced “some noisy American ‘failures’ [Afghanistan, Iran, and Nicaragua].”26 Ronald Reagan came to the presidency in 1981 determined that the Sandinista Revolution would not spread, particularly to El Salvador, where guerrilla groups were already active. Ever since the stolen election of 1972, the political situation in El Salvador had been unstable. The murder of Archbishop Romero in March 1980 and the formation of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) the following October had edged El Salvador to the brink of civil war. Although leftist insurgency had a lengthy history in El Salvador, the Reagan administration accused the Sandinistas of “exporting” their revolution, and the State Department issued a White Paper on February 23, 1981, alleging that the FMLN was being supplied with weapons from Cuba and other Socialist countries via Nicaragua. According to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the White Paper did not stand up to scrutiny, and a State Department spokesman allowed that it was “possibly misleading” and “overembellished.”27 Nevertheless, Reagan suspended economic assistance to Nicaragua and extended funding to the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionary forces (the Contras), for the purpose of “interdicting” the flow of arms from Nicaragua to El Salvador.

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The Contras were made up of Christian and social democratic elements and remnants of the National Guard; they had been organized as the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) for the purpose of toppling the Sandinista regime. The Reagan administration was determined that they should succeed, using arms interdiction as a cover, and he gave the assignment to William Casey, the U.S. director of central intelligence (DCI) and head of the CIA. The Reagan administration intervened in Central America on two fronts: Nicaragua and El Salvador. The situation in El Salvador was complex. José Napoleón Duarte governed from 1980 to 1989 as provisional and elected president, and the U.S. poured in a total of over $4 billion in economic and military assistance in an attempt to preserve democratic government there. But Duarte was caught in murderous vise. He undertook serious efforts at agrarian reform,28 but could not control rightist elements in the military and security forces. Death squads under the control of the right-wing zealot Major Roberto d’Aubuisson murdered priests and nuns of the CEBs, along with trade-union organizers of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), affiliated with the AFL-CIO and funded covertly by the CIA. D’Aubuisson totally polarized Salvadoran society, causing the social democrat Guillermo Manuel Ungo and the Christian democrat Rubén Zamora to form the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) as the political arm of the FMLN. Consequently, Duarte and the United States were morally and politically crippled in the struggle against the FMLN guerrillas, even though “villagers and peasants [were] fearful of both sides.”29 By 1989 the guerrillas “had footholds in twelve of fourteen provinces,”30 and the U.S. had increased the number of armed forces personnel there from 11,000 to 56,000. At the cost of over 70,000 lives, a military stalemate existed. On the Nicaraguan front, William Casey had to overcome the opposition of the U.S. Congress in his campaign against the Sandinistas. After Watergate, and the investigations into the activities of the U.S. intelligence community that followed, the Congress had approved the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which prohibited the CIA from expending funds on covert operations unless the president had made a “finding” that “each such operation” was important to national security and had informed the appropriate committees of Congress of the expenditures in “a timely fashion.” When it became clear, in December 1982, that Casey was doing more than blocking the flow of arms from Nicaragua to El Salvador, the Congress enacted the first of two amendments, introduced by Representative Edward P. Boland, to appropriations bills then pending. Boland I declared flatly that the CIA could not use funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.” Boland II, passed in October 1984, placed further

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restrictions on CIA and intelligence-community spending that “would have the effect of supporting . . . military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua.”31 Unable to get the job done as director of the CIA, Casey used his authority as DCI to move the operation up a notch to the National Security Council (NSC). As DCI, Casey was able to marshal the resources of the NSC. For the purposes of the Contra operation, he formed a Restricted Interagency Group (RIG) comprised of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the NSC staff, Duane Clarridge of the CIA, and L. Anthony Motley of the Department of State. The RIG, which North dubbed “the Enterprise,” maintained the Contras in the field for over two years, raising funds through private donations, third-country sources, and the proceeds from the secret sale of arms to Iran. The RIG/Enterprise, with the cooperation of Israel, negotiated the secret sale of certain weapons (missiles) to the government of Iran in return for Iran’s help in securing the release of American hostages being held by terrorist groups in Lebanon. This labyrinthine structure was exposed in October 1986, when an Enterprise supply plane was shot down over Nicaragua and an American crew member was captured. The ensuing Iran-Contra scandal raised questions of presidential authority and accountability and control of covert action programs. The congressional committees investigating the affair concluded: “The common ingredients of the Iran and Contra policies were secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law. A small group of senior officials believed that they alone knew what was right.”32 Nevertheless, in the meantime, the Sandinistas had to confront the Contras and make a revolution at the same time. The opportunity for Marxist insurgencies that appeared bright at the end of the 1970s faded during the 1980s, owing to the policies of Ronald Reagan of the United States and Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. Cut off economically by the United States and faced with the unwillingness of the USSR to fill the gap, the Sandinistas followed a pragmatic course in order to maintain trade relations with certain Western European and Latin American nations. As Donald Hodges observed, “The FSLN mistakenly became identified with a noncapitalist, noncommunist, and nonaligned ‘third position’ in domestic and foreign policy. Although it did adopt such a position, its motive for doing so was purely strategical.”33 Strategical or not, the FSLN maintained this stance throughout its twelve years in power. Although the political situation was intimidating, given the professed Marxism of key Sandinistas and the presence of instruments of control such as the neighborhood CDS, there were no mass executions in the manner of the Cuban Revolution, nor large-scale flight of émigrés. Political parties were permitted

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to function, except that all parties were required “to be anti-imperialist and to support the revolution in order to obtain legal standing.”34 When the Contra fighting began in 1982, the junta declared a state of emergency, curtailing political activity and imposing press censorship, but the ban was lifted in time for the election of a president in November 1984. Junta coordinator Daniel Ortega was elected president, with the FSLN receiving 67 percent of the vote cast for National Assembly members. Ortega, the founder and head of the Terceristas, the least radical of the FSLN tendencies, had studied law at the University of Central America in Managua and had been persecuted as a youth because his father rode with Sandino. He represented a “new class of intellectuals” who wished to push vanguardism to the extreme, ruling on the basis of the possession of knowledge rather than on the ownership of the means of production.35 In an interview in 1997 Ortega stated that his idols were Sandino and Christ. He declared that the Sandinistas wanted “profound social change, a socialist change.”36 The Sandinistas indeed established a state-dominated economy, going too fast for them to handle, but Ortega himself displayed caudillo-like qualities and a propensity to live well, favoring designer jeans and Gucci sunglasses. As noted, the Sandinistas nationalized the vast Somoza holdings as well as “key” economic sectors, namely, “the financial system, foreign trade, large-scale (particularly gold) mining, forestry, and fishing.”37 At the same time, they left over half the economy in private hands. The mix did not work well, since the regime provided no legal protection for private property and imposed a strict labor code to govern hours, wages, and working conditions. “The result was a built-in tension between the government and a section of the bourgeoisie. . . . Private businessmen began dropping out of manufacturing or failing to invest.”38 The disincentive for investment existed also in the agricultural sector, where private farms and ranches produced the major share of coffee, cotton, and other commercial crops. On the seized lands, the FSLN favored keeping the former Somoza estates intact, preferring a system of state farms to the distribution of land to individual farmers. For a variety of reasons—the U.S. trade embargo, a drop in commodity prices, bad weather, and mismanagement—agricultural production declined. Above all, the Contra war was a factor, consuming half the nation’s budget and causing the destruction of crop lands.39 By 1988 the Sandinistas were in serious economic trouble, as evidenced by declining productivity and an inflation rate that soared to 43,000 percent, “one of the highest in world history.”40 Although by 1986 the Sandinista army had substantially degraded the military threat of the Contras, the Contras maintained

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the pressure with commando-style raids and acts of sabotage, keeping the entire region on edge. The persistent threat of spreading warfare in Central America caused by gunrunning, associated lawlessness, and the violation of international frontiers led the leaders of the region to meet in Esquipulas, Guatemala, in August 1987, in an effort to restore peace. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sánchez (1942– ) achieved an agreement “that called on the war-torn nations of the region to (1) initiate a cease-fire, (2) engage in dialogue with opposition movements, (3) prevent the use of their territory for aggression against other states, and (4) cease and prohibit aid to irregular forces or insurrectionary movements.”41 The Esquipulas Accords created the circumstances that eventually enabled the FMLN to participate in the political process, and caused the Contras to disarm and adopt a nonviolent strategy in the political arena. In El Salvador, Ungo and Zamora returned from exile and organized the Democratic Convergence (CD), comprised of Christian and social democratic parties. Dismissed by the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) as “a blip on the political screen,” the CD nevertheless was the initial actor in events that induced the FMLN to abandon the guerrilla strategy.42 Between 1988 and 1991 the FMLN underwent a “profound ideological transformation,” whereby it adopted democratic socialism, a recognition, among a number of factors, that “Soviet-style socialism was not the wave of the future.”43 At the end of 1991, although still a viable military force, the FMLN reached an agreement with the government that enabled it to convert to “a purely political organization” and achieve legal status as a political party by December 1992.44 The Esquipulas Accords called upon the Central American nations to provide a democratic order; after a decade of warfare, peace came to El Salvador on the slender hope that one of the most reactionary oligarchies in the hemisphere would honor the commitment. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas appeared ready to abide by the call for democratization. The Ortega government adopted a new constitution in 1987, and an electoral law the following year provided for free elections and political party organization. It set February 25, 1990, as the date for national elections for president and the National Assembly, and invited the UN and OAS, among others, to observe the process. A large number of political parties organized to take part, but the principal opposition came from the National Opposition Union (UNO), a coalition of fourteen mini-parties, which nominated Violeta Chamorro as its presidential candidate. “Owing to its extraordinary ideological mix,” the UNO platform was understandably “vague,” but it did offer hope for the normalization

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of trade relations with the United States and the likelihood of renewed American economic aid.45 Extremely confident that he would win reelection, Ortega was shocked that Chamorro garnered 54.7 percent of the vote to his 40.8 percent. Ortega blamed the U.S. invasion of Panama the preceding December for his defeat, but while the threat of U.S. intervention may have affected popular thinking, a variety of other factors provided stronger explanations. These included the comeuppance for Ortega’s having denied the leftist, or patriotic, bourgeoisie a share of power, the country’s dismal economic performance, and its having been on the wrong side of history. A number of scholars, but principally Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, have pointed out that the Sandinistas succeeded by allying with “more moderate political actors” and by “muting” their revolutionary goals.46 When the FSLN monopolized power and reverted to socialist rhetoric, the “moderate political actors” felt betrayed.47 Given the opportunity in the election of 1990, they got even. In the economic sphere, the “socialist rhetoric” of the Sandinistas created uncertainty, which is to say, it was unrealistic to challenge the right of private property and expect a market economy to function at the same time.48 In the public sector, the FSLN went too far, too fast, resulting in a “vast number of sheer blunders.”49 Likewise, the Sandinistas’ socialistic macroeconomic policies, among them, “monetary expansion, . . . import controls, and multiple exchange rates,” proved harmful.50 Finally, standing above all else was the fact that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Glasnost and perestroika exposed the political vulnerability of socialism, and Gorbachev’s efforts to compete with Reagan’s Strategic Defense (“Star Wars”) Initiative (SDI) drove the Soviet economy into the ground. Deprived of the diplomatic, economic, military, and political support of the Soviet Union, the concept of achieving revolutionary victory through guerrilla warfare appeared no longer feasible. Moreover, the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union created an ideological vacuum. The Sandinistas entered the 1990 election professing a proven failure. Having an impact also was the excessively violent nature of contemporary insurgencies occurring elsewhere in the hemisphere. During the 1970s and 1980s certain extremist guerrilla groups and urban terrorists attacked constitutional—even social democratic—governments, having the effect of discrediting the socialist impulse in the hemisphere in general. These elements overlooked the basis of Castro’s success (and that of the Sandinistas as well), which is to say, they “lost contact with the moderate left—a situation that Castro never allowed.”51

18

Rural Violence and Urban Terror

During the radical 1960s Havana was where it was at. All across Latin America, young people wanted to be like Che. There was a bond between The Motorcycle Diaries and Easy Rider. Che was the spiritual brother of Jack Kerouac. French existentialism was the rage, with humanistic subjectivity breaking the shackles of scientific positivism; yet Albert Camus made the connection with Marxism because of existentialism’s utter disconnect from bourgeois values. In Cuba the struggle in the Sierra Maestra and the taking of Santa Clara represented a triumph over the same forces as those in the “Battle for Algiers.” The film State of Siege, set in Montevideo, was the hemispheric counterpart of the epic movie Z, set in Athens. The Cuban Revolution inspired revolutionary movements throughout Latin America. Emulating Cuba, young people led the insurrections, exhibiting impatience and uncompromising militancy. As noted previously, in Venezuela it was the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) that initiated guerrilla warfare and urban terror against the social democratic government of Rómulo Betancourt. The struggle was between an older generation that promised socialism tomorrow and a younger one that wanted it today. The journalist Fabricio Ojeda (1929–1966), a year younger than Che, had organized the Patriotic Junta that supported the military uprising against Marcos Pérez Jiménez in January 1958. Expecting to play an active role in the new Venezuela, he was profoundly disappointed when he saw that the Democratic Action (AD) leaders, returning from exile, were intent on restoring the old order. Betancourt, bearing the scars of thirty years of political struggle, believed a period of political peace was necessary in order to encourage eco-

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nomic growth and promote social well-being. His policy of “sowing the oil” was one of expediency. The long-range goal was nationalization of the petroleum resource, but in the meantime the foreign oil companies would be permitted to operate, in order to underwrite the policies that would lead to their ultimate extinction. Such gradualism did not please Ojeda, who considered it a stall and preferred the Cuban model. Ojeda, a member of the Democratic Republican Union (URD), was elected to the Chamber of Deputies at the end of 1958, but in 1960 he spent most of his time in Havana. Initially a signatory of the Punto Fijo pact, URD withdrew in November 1960, committing itself “firmly” to the Cuban Revolution.1 That same month, Communist-inspired acts of violence occurred in Caracas, along with efforts, by Domingo Alberto Rangel, to initiate a “full-scale revolt.” Rangel was the erstwhile Adeco and leader of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR). Betancourt declared a state of emergency and suspended certain constitutional guarantees.2 He was not about to play Kerensky to Rangel’s Lenin. While the state of emergency remained in effect, Ojeda, for his part, resigned from Congress on June 30, 1962, making clear his belief that a revolution would be necessary to liberate Venezuela from “international monopolies and the country’s oligarchic caste.”3 On January 1, 1963, Ojeda organized the FALN in collaboration with Rangel (MIR) and five guerrilla bands that had been operating in various parts of the country. Although it had the ability to be destructive and cause anxiety, the FALN and its “urban ‘terror’ wing,”4 the Tactical Combat Units (UTC), demonstrated that Guevara’s theories were not based much on practice. Owing to AD’s agrarian reform, the peasantry remained loyal to the government, “contradicting theoretical claims by the extreme left that the coming revolution would be won in the interior.”5 The FALN, realizing its error, changed its strategy to one of provoking a military golpe. By resorting to “nocturnal bombings, warehouse fires, and bank holdups,” it hoped to force the military to intervene, “after which the leftist extremists might pose as national liberators fighting in the vanguard of an anti-military ‘peoples’ revolution.’”6 That did not work either. The military stood by the government, largely because the FALN and MIR made no effort to camouflage their “Marxist-Leninist colors.”7 Moreover, the violence had an international dimension. Cuba did not want social democracy to succeed in Venezuela. There was a deadly rivalry between Cuba (backed by the Soviet Union) and Venezuela (backed by the United States) for the right to be the model for the future direction of Latin America. The year 1963 was a critical point, with national elec-

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tions in Venezuela scheduled for December. The FALN carried out continuous assaults—assassinations, kidnappings, the hijacking of an airplane—aimed at preventing the elections from taking place, all of which failed to achieve their objective.8 At the end of November, on a beach on the Paraguana Peninsula, the government seized three tons of arms that had been shipped clandestinely from Cuba, which only served to reinforce “military loyalty to the regime.”9 Accusing Cuba of aggression, Venezuela requested that the OAS convoke the Ninth Meeting of Consultation, which occurred in Washington in July 1964 and resulted in a resolution calling on the American states to sever diplomatic relations with Cuba and impose economic sanctions. In the meantime, the FALN was threatening to kill anyone who tried to vote on Sunday, December 1, 1963, Venezuela’s election day, but citizens were not intimidated: approximately 91.33 percent of eligible voters in the country exercised their right.10 Betancourt succeeded in serving out his full constitutional term and delivered the sash of office to his democratically elected successor, Raúl Leoni (1906– 1972). The FALN failed in Venezuela precisely because it represented uncloaked Marxism-Leninism against a social democratic government seriously engaged in economic and social reform.11 It had failed to heed Guevara’s advice, to “never seek to unseat an elected government through guerrilla warfare.”12 Guerrilla movements in the 1960s failed to gain traction in Colombia and Guatemala for similar, and other, reasons. Beginning in the 1960s guerrilla socialism in Colombia, marked by the martyrdom of Camilo Torres, dragged on endlessly, sustained by narco-trafficking and a tradition of localismo (extreme provincialism and distrust of central authority). Exploiting Colombia’s rugged geography, the various guerrilla groups were able to defy the central government regionally, but they were unable to challenge it nationally. Openly committed to Marxism, such elements as the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), following the Soviet Communist line; the National Liberation Army (ELN), Fidelista in nature; and the Popular Army of Liberation (EPL), a Maoist group, failed to appeal to the population at large.13 Moreover, having passed through the period of La Violencia during the 1950s, the nation was weary of bloodshed and longed for the peace that the National Front coalition had promised. In Guatemala, the situation was similarly depressing, with guerrilla bands operating in remote areas but unable to overcome the virulently anticommunist alliance of the military and oligarchy. Terrible human rights abuses occurred as Indian villagers and liberal thinkers were caught in the crossfire among the guerrillas, the army, and right-wing paramilitary groups. The armed action of the

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Marxist Revolutionary Movement 13th November (MR-13), led by Marcos Aurelio Yon Sosa, and the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), led by Luis A. Turcios Lima, was matched by the “right-wing terror organizations,” White Hand (Mano Blanco) and Eye for an Eye (Ojo por Ojo).14 “Political leftists met with assassination, arrest, or exile.”15 The MR-13 and FAR survived the 1960s, but Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio, elected to the presidency in 1970, “staged a highly successful— and brutal—counterinsurgency program. . . . Amnesty International [estimated] that between 1966 and 1974, some 20,000 Guatemalans lost their lives.”16 Fidel Castro was dismayed that, despite the extensive aid he provided, other guerrilla movements appeared unable to repeat his success. In mid-1966 Che Guevara was actively seeking the right place for personally carrying out the American phase of his three continent strategy.17 He surveyed the guerrilla movements in Venezuela, Colombia, and Guatemala, and determined that “none . . . possessed the organizational strength and direction” worthy of his “command.”18 Besides, he had bigger things in mind. He intended to spark a “continental revolution” that would spread and not be limited to a single country. For that reason, he chose Bolivia, squarely in the middle of South America and remote from the United States.19 Moreover, Bolivia was under the rule of the caudillo general René Barrientos (1919–1969), who had overthrown the Aprista-style Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) in 1964. Guevara’s guerilla operation was poorly executed from the beginning to the end. From the time he arrived in Bolivia, in early November 1966, until he was tracked down and killed almost a year later, in October 1967, Guevara broke almost every one of the rules he had laid out in Guerrilla Warfare. According to Paul Dosal, author of Comandante Che, Guevara acted against the will of the Bolivian Communist Party (PCB) and its leader Mario Monje. Guevara concealed his plans from Monje until he was already setting up camp in southeastern Bolivia, causing Monje to protest that he “would not yield to anybody on Bolivian territory, even if Lenin came from the grave to command the guerrillas.”20 Guevara’s advance agents had been in Bolivia for months trying to organize an urban underground capable of providing logistical, intelligence, and fifth-column support for the movement, but the failure to be up front with the PCB about the project led to misunderstanding and rejection. “In a fatal deviation from the Cuban revolutionary model, Che took the field before an urban network had been consolidated.”21 One error created another. Without a local source of supplies, Guevara was dependent upon the materiel he had brought with him, meaning that he would be forced to set up a supply base, and possibly defend it.22 He ignored his own dictum that “the fundamental

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characteristic of a guerrilla band is mobility.”23 Moreover, regarded by Monje and others as an interloper, not a liberator, he failed “utterly” to attract recruits locally.24 His original force of twelve grew to forty-seven in time, but there were only seventeen members remaining at the end. The peasantry supported Barrientos, who although he repressed the miners and the radical unions, was a charismatic leader who spoke Quechua and vigorously maintained the MNR’s agrarian reform programs. Having been elected president in 1966, Barrientos enjoyed sufficient legitimacy that the United States was able to take an active role in crushing Guevara’s foco. Beginning in the early 1960s, the United States had developed a strong counterinsurgency (COIN) capability, and had trained Latin American armies for a new mission, moving from “hemispheric defense . . . to internal security.”25 Only Guevara’s prowess as a field commander enabled him to overcome his organizational blunders and survive in the bush for seven months, but he underestimated the determination of Barrientos and the Bolivian army. He “faced an enemy with higher morale and better training than Batista’s army.”26 Guevara never gained the initiative. The Bolivian army kept him continually on the run, occupying his base camp and depriving him of vital supplies, including his asthma medicine. On October 8, U.S.-trained Bolivian Rangers, aided by Green Beret advisors, hunted down and captured an “unwashed, . . . ragged, . . . emaciated, . . . and wounded” Che Guevara, and executed him the next day.27 If Guevara had not been involved, the Bolivian episode would have been a minor affair. As it was, Che’s martyrdom placed an exclamation point on the desperation and violence of the guerrilla socialists during the 1960s and the following decades. Uruguay, for example, was the site of one of the most extreme urban terrorist groups of this time. During the 1950s Uruguay was almost alone in Latin America as a functioning democracy. In the 1960s its democracy was in jeopardy, as the Left took advantage of a soft target and the Right reacted with repressive measures. The country that José Batlle y Ordóñez had built started to come undone after mid-century. Declining prices for its major exports—wool, hides, and meat—placed an unbearable strain on the extensive cradle-to-grave welfare system. The system worked initially, when there were sufficient producers to sustain the pensioners, but as the population aged and workers retired in their fifties—some in their forties—it buckled under the weight. Moreover, “patronage-intensive politics” had increased the number of employees in the bureaucracy and public sector excessively, contributing to the “economic crisis after 1957.”28 Corruption and inefficiency also entered into the mix, promoted by the same

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political culture, which had become inbred and proved incapable of reforming itself over time. Strikes occurred daily as part of a political dynamic whereby public employees exercised influence within the state-run apparatus. While the regulated economy languished, contraband trade flourished as ranchers ran hundreds of thousands of cattle annually across the northern frontier into Brazil, where a free market prevailed. Smuggling overwhelmed the economy. “As much as one-fourth of all imports came into the country illegally.”29 Oscar Gestido, elected to the presidency in 1966, proclaimed, “This country is in a mess.”30 Contributing to the mess were the activities of the National Liberation Movement–Tupamaro (MLN-T), an urban guerrilla organization partially financed by Fidel Castro that began operations in 1963. Founded by Raúl Sendic (1925– 1989), the Tupamaros took their name from Tupac Amaru II ( José Condorcanqui), a Peruvian rebel who had been executed by the Spanish in 1781. Sendic, the head of the sugar cane workers union and a Socialist, was aware that Uruguay’s geography did not favor a Guevarista-style guerrilla movement, so he adopted the tactic of urban guerrilla warfare that had been developed by the Spaniard Abraham Guillen. William Blum (author of Killing Hope) suggested that the Tupamaros elicited sympathy “with their Robin Hood philosophy.”31 Indeed, the Tupamaros did begin by robbing banks (“expropriating,” they called it) in order to distribute food to the poor, but by the end of the decade they had escalated their actions to kidnapping, assassination, and bomb attacks. In an effort to destabilize and discredit the regime, the Tupamaros raided the offices of state enterprises, seizing documents in the expectation of exposing corrupt practices and venality. Certain public officials were taken hostage and tried in a “People’s Court,” where they were made to give “testimony” about their “crimes.”32 The derring-do took an especially sinister turn in August 1970 with the kidnapping and murder of Dan Mitrione, a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) employee. The Tupamaros charged that Mitrione, a police chief from Richmond, Indiana, and head of the U.S. Public Safety program in Uruguay, was, in fact, training local police forces in the techniques of torture. The “execution” of Mitrione, along with the abduction of several foreign diplomats, aroused the ruling generals in neighboring Brazil, who, under the threat of intervention, urged their counterparts in Uruguay to crack down on the Tupamaros. The growing violence of the Tupamaros was a major issue in the presidential election of November 1971, in which the ruling parties—the Blancos and Colorados—faced a challenge from a third force for the first time. The Broad Front (FA), a coalition made up of the Communist and Socialist parties, the Christian Democrats, and Blanco and

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Colorado splinter groups, caused concern. Brazil and the United States worried that the front might repeat the success that Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition had achieved in Chile in 1970. Amid claims that Brazil, particularly, influenced the election outcome, the Colorado Juan María Bordaberry (1928– ) gained the presidency, and he immediately authorized the police and armed forces to use extreme measures in an effort to wipe out the Tupamaros. During 1972–73, in an intense campaign marked by the growing participation of the armed forces, Sendic was apprehended, 300 Tupamaros were killed, and another 3,000 imprisoned. It appeared that guerrilla socialism had failed again, except that if its strategy had been to provoke a military dictatorship and create the conditions for a popular revolution, it had partially succeeded. Bordaberry assumed dictatorial powers in 1973; three years later, the generals, in turn, removed him and installed a military regime that lasted until 1984. However, “although Uruguayan repression was among the most extended and severe in the region, . . . [according to Karen Remmer] its party system was one of the least transformed by the military interlude.”33 Even the Tupamaros entered the political arena in 1985 as a legal party, the Movement for Popular Participation (MPP), with Raúl Sendic (hijo) as their leader. As will be seen, the Left, in general, had learned that provoking the military was a flawed theory, and during the 1980s and 1990s it adopted a strategy of vigorously promoting “democracy.” The experience of the Tupamaros was repeated across the Río de la Plata in Argentina with the urban guerrilla group the Montoneros. As noted earlier, the Montoneros originated as a faction of Peronista Youth, and they had evolved over time into committed Marxist-Leninists. Led by Mario Firmenich (1948– ), the ringleader in the abduction and “execution” of Pedro Aramburu in 1970, the Montoneros were comprised mainly of middle-class youths and young professionals, having had no success in attracting recruits from the Peronista unions. They were inspired by the “Peronist intellectual” John William Cooke (1920–1968), who had resided in Havana in 1960 and befriended Che Guevara. Cooke envisioned “Peronism as the Argentine counterpart of Castro’s movement in Cuba.”34 The failure of the Juan Perón government in 1973 to achieve socialism had driven the Montoneros to a campaign of murder and mayhem, aimed at achieving a “popular revolution.” When General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power in March 1976 and installed a military dictatorship, the Montoneros already had a reputation as the “mightiest urban guerrilla force ever seen in the whole of Latin America.”35 They were “at least 10,000” strong, and possessed “a war chest of at least $150 million.”36 Videla and his commanders proved more than a match for the Montoneros,

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employing methods that thrust Argentina into the darkest period in its history. The “Dirty War” was “bloody and terrifying.” According to Professor David Rock, “All due process of law was overturned; military patrols infested the country; thousands vanished into the prisons and police torture chambers.”37 These became los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”), their ultimate fates unknown. Moreover, because victims were seized, usually at night, by “armed men who refused to identify themselves,” it’s impossible to know “how many of the ‘disappeared’ were totally innocent” of any guerrilla activity.38 By 1978 the Videla regime had eradicated the Montoneros, although almost thirty years later some survivors were serving in the government of President Néstor Kirchner, a Peronista. In the interim, the socialist impulse in Argentina yielded to neoliberalism. Guerrilla socialism in Peru produced similar results. Guerrilla operations occurred in Peru during the 1980s largely because the regime of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–75) raised expectations that were not met. Although Velasco achieved “the most dramatic changes in a leftist direction made by a Latin American military in the twentieth century,”39 his reforms failed to bridge the historic “divide between the conquering Spaniards and the defeated indigenous population.”40 Still, General Francisco Morales Bermúdez (1921– ) removed Velasco from office in 1975, in order to inaugurate the “Second Phase” of the 1968 Revolution, aimed at scrapping the vestiges of the First. Morales “dropped the term socialism from official governmental rhetoric . . . and agrarian reform was officially declared at an end.”41 With the restoration of civilian rule in 1980, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1912– ) continued the process of economic liberalization, undertaking “to reduce the state role in the economy, strengthen private enterprise, and encourage new foreign investment.”42 Whether the policies were revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, during the 1970s and 1980s the Indian peasants in the southern sierra of Peru appeared to be the losers. The Department of Ayacucho, south of Lima, was the most neglected by the central government. In the late 1960s, in Ayacucho, “illiteracy stood at 68.5 percent; the infant mortality rate was 12.8 percent, the highest in the world; and the average life expectancy was only 51 years, among the lowest.”43 There, in February 1970, Abimael Guzmán Reynoso (1934– ), a philosophy professor at the Universidad Nacional San Cristóbal de Huamanga, founded the Partido Comunista del Perú en el Sendero Luminoso de Mariátegui (the Communist Party of Peru in the Shining Path of Mariátegui). The Shining Path (SL, or Sendero Luminoso) earned a reputation over time as an extremely barbaric guerrilla movement, one that rivaled the Khmer Rouge in violence, yet its founding was firmly grounded in ideas.

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Guzmán was not an Indian peasant, but he had grown up modestly in the region (southeast in Arequipa). He was a high-achieving student at San Agustín University in Arequipa, which earned him admittance into the circles of two guru-like figures: one, “an eccentric, but uncompromisingly rigorous Kantian scholar”; the other, “a social-realist painter and undiluted Stalinist.”44 When he began teaching at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho in 1962, Guzmán was “already a fervent Marxist,” but he kept his own counsel. In the Sino-Soviet split that occurred in December 1963, Guzmán sided with the pro-Chinese faction. He was especially critical of the Guevarista approach to revolution, labeling Hugo Blanco’s short-lived foco in 1965 as “a petit bourgeois militaristic deviation.”45 He had no sympathy for Guevara’s plight in Bolivia in 1967, regarding him as an “exhibitionist.”46 Nor did Guzmán go along with other Peruvian Marxists who favored cooperation with the Velasco regime.47 Guzmán was profoundly influenced by his trips to China in 1964 and 1967, during which he witnessed the effects of the Cultural Revolution and studied Maoist People’s War doctrine.48 Upon his return to Peru in 1968, he resumed his teaching at the University of Huamanga, where he laid the groundwork for what Sendero Luminoso would become: “a fundamentalist, quasi-religious cult of like-minded and goal-oriented individuals” totally controlled by a charismatic leader.49 In line with People’s War doctrine, he undertook party-building in preparation for armed struggle.50 Guzmán took complete control of Huamanga, where his students (disciples) called him “Dr. ‘Puka Inti,’ Quechua for Red Sun,”51 and where he assumed the nom de guerre of “Presidente Gonzalo.” The students at Huamanga came from a deprived region—Ayacucho—and they saw an education as the means of overcoming poverty and inequity. They were receptive to the idea that “upon acceding to the party and its truth, [they] could move from the base to the peak of the social pyramid.”52 However, this appeal promised more than upward social mobility, since converts were also convinced that with Shining Path as “the caretaker of absolute truth, they [could] be certain that their lives [would] not be lived in vain.”53 Guzmán/Gonzalo maintained total control, replacing a form of authoritarianism that enslaved with one of the philosopher-king, who, in possession of “the truth,” exercised “absolute power” over the masses “in order to serve them.” 54 Although not an indigenista, he intended to liberate the Andean peoples from servitude and guide them toward “a single, irreplaceable new society, without exploited or exploiters, without oppressed or oppressors.”55 Sendero Luminoso scorned collaboration with political parties or popular organizations. Instead, its cadres formed “generated organisms” to organize workers and peasants directly,

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or infiltrate existing organizations and displace or absorb them in time, often brutally eliminating rival leaders.56 After more than ten years of preparation, Shining Path would spend the next ten engaged in guerrilla warfare. “In 1978–1979, while the military government was preparing to transfer power back to civilian rule and most Marxist groups were making the transition to elected legitimacy, the Shining Path alone prepared itself for war.”57 Complying with People’s War doctrine, SL dismissed “nonviolent electoral and legislative activities as ‘rotten.’”58 Taking advantage of the economic depression that the Belaúnde government had inherited, Shining Path made “considerable headway” in Ayacucho, gaining control of a major portion of the department by 1982.59 From Ayacucho, Sendero spread out along the Andean ridge from Puno in the south to Pasco in the north, seeking to dominate the countryside and encircle the cities. Believing, like Mao, that “the peasantry must be the principal revolutionary force,”60 SL conducted a “terrorist campaign of assassination and bombing”61 to make it happen, declaring: “The masses have to be taught through overwhelming acts so that ideas can be pounded into them.”62 In the mid-1980s SL moved into the Upper Huallaga Valley, 250 miles northeast of Lima and the site of a booming coca trade (for the production of cocaine). Shining Path tapped into a major source of revenue by protecting growers from Colombian narco-traffickers, on the one hand, and Peruvian authorities, on the other.63 Beginning in 1986, with earnings “upward of $30 million annually,” Shining Path was “arguably the wealthiest guerrilla movement in history.”64 Despite its great wealth, Sendero Luminoso did not endure, owing to its exclusiveness, hierarchical organization, and brutal tactics. The Belaúnde administration did not recognize SL’s threat immediately, permitting it to gain momentum before it acted. In 1982 the president ordered the army into the sierra, which proved counterproductive. Engaging in “dirty war” tactics, the military alienated an otherwise passive peasantry and elicited international criticism for human rights abuses. Belaúnde’s successor in 1985, Alan García (1949– ), removed the offending commanders and tried to replace “dirty war” tactics with civic action programs, but his economic blunders trumped his good intentions. García, a protégé of Haya de la Torre, who died in 1979, pursued economic policies that devastated the Peruvian economy. The resulting social unrest strengthened Sendero Luminoso and even encouraged a Guevarista-style guerrilla movement, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), which SL quickly eliminated. With the economy in free fall and an emboldened Shining Path expanding its terrorist operations to Lima itself, the Peruvian electorate was ready for anything in 1990 that promised relief.

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Alberto Fujimori (1938– ), a total newcomer to the political scene, won an upset victory for president in 1990 by championing the “politics of anti-politics.”65 By disparaging established political parties and democratic institutions as corrupt relics, his jerry-built Cambio 90 (Change 90) Party promised a purge of the political system and a restructuring of the economy. Accordingly, Fujimori pursued a neoliberal economic policy and “carried out an autogolpe (self-coup) on April 5, 1992 . . . [that] suspended the Constitution [and] closed Congress.”66 The authoritarian president also forged a bond with the military to destroy Sendero Luminoso. Guzmán/Gonzalo was captured on September 12, 1992. Foreshadowing the demise of SL during the next two years, he proclaimed meekly, “Now it’s my turn to lose.”67 In truth, Shining Path had been in decline for over a year before Guzmán’s arrest. The key to its collapse was its failure to raise a peasant army. For the most part, SL’s militants were students and recent graduates—“the sons and daughters of highland-born peasants”—usually the first in their families to achieve an education, who decried the lack of opportunity in the bankrupt economic and social order.68 The peasantry itself was not supportive, having become alienated by Shining Path’s “revolutionary justice,” which appeared arbitrary, and by its strategy of “strangling the cities,” which deprived Indian communities of the opportunity to market their goods.69 It was Fujimori who succeeded in winning over the peasants. Fujimori continued the civic action programs, seeking an alliance with the sierra communities by sponsoring “sociopolitical development” and “distributing food and tools.”70 In a bold move, he ordered the expansion of the rondas campesinas (peasant defense patrols), providing more than ten thousand Winchester shotguns to villagers, a policy that overturned a ban on supplying guns to Indians that had been in place since the colonial era.71 The rondas broke the back of the Shining Path insurgency. As a villager near Ayacucho city testified in 1993, “There are no more massacres, not even attacks, nothing.”72 The United States was involved indirectly in the crushing of Sendero Luminoso. In 1991 the U.S. and Fujimori had agreed on an aid package for combating the narcotics trade. Since coca production was concentrated in the Upper Hua­ llaga Valley, where SL provided protection for growers, U.S. funds, in effect, were “used for counterinsurgency operations . . . rather than for the eradication or interdiction of drugs.”73 The defeat of Shining Path was another example of the failure of guerrilla insurgency at the high cost of the democratic order. Guerrilla socialism did great harm to the socialist impulse by exposing its dark side, which strengthened right-wing extremism and undermined the gradualist approaches

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of the social and Christian democrats. Notably, the socialist impulse appeared to gain a foothold where its appeal was general and humanistic; it gained little ground where its program was specific and scientific. Success occurred in three armed revolutions in Latin America: in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. In each instance, the message was muted, having a broad, popular appeal that cut across class lines in opposition to a common enemy, that is to say, a dictatorship (Porfirio Díaz, Fulgencio Batista, and Anastasio Somoza). The revolutions professed in common to be anti-dictatorial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist. Their carefully crafted pronouncements translated these themes into the promise of democratic elections, a determination to liberate the economy from foreign domination, and socialist rhetoric that was understood to mean the nationalization of key sectors of the economy and the redistribution of wealth through agrarian and labor reform and extended social services. When the movements became overtly radical, the cross-class coalitions collapsed and the outcomes varied, as has been seen. The guerrilla movements that failed all professed their radical ideology at the outset, whether Marxism-Leninism or Maoism. These included the FALN (Venezuela), FARC and ELN (Colombia), FMLN (El Salvador), MR-13 and FAR (Guatemala), Che in Bolivia, the Tupamaros (Uruguay), the Montoneros (Argentina), and Sendero Luminoso (Peru). Generally led by university youth and intellectuals, these movements lacked contact with reality and substituted violence for ideas. Apart from the particular case of Colombia, the guerrilla movements failed to rally the peasantry. Those that followed Guevara’s guerrilla warfare doctrine were deceived by a myopic interpretation of the history of the Cuban Revolution. The guerrillas, through their radicalism and terror tactics, did not understand that Castro had succeeded because he “never lost contact with the moderate left.”74 Moreover, conditions changed during the 1960s. With the Cuban missile crisis heating up the Cold War, the United States was determined that there should be “no more Cubas.” The U.S. provided economic and military assistance to Latin American countries for the purpose of promoting and shoring up reform-minded governments. The guerrillas were fighting in a hemisphere in confrontation with the example of Cuba. In the 1970s and 1980s socialist-style governments were in a state of collapse. The guerrilla turmoil contributed to the destabilization of these regimes, but there were other powerful factors as well. These are the subjects of the following chapter.

VII

The End of Socialism

19

The Collapse of Creole Socialism

In the first seven decades of the twentieth century, Latin America experienced varied responses to the socialist impulse; but in the final three decades of the century, the socialist systems that had been put in place in Latin America were systematically deconstructed. Some of the reasons for this reversal were particular to individual countries, but there were sufficient common factors to suggest a systemic failure. Moreover, powerful external events—specifically, the “oil shocks” of the 1970s, the debt crisis of the 1980s, and the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union in 1989—affected all of the countries involved. In any case, it is essential to examine the parts in order to determine the whole. Chile had been traveling the road to socialism slowly since the beginning of the twentieth century, but a sudden burst of speed in 1970 led to a smashup three years later. Salvador Allende had won the presidency in 1970 as the candidate of Popular Unity (UP), a coalition made up principally of the Communist, Socialist, and Radical parties. His margin of victory was extremely thin: he won a plurality of 36.3 percent of the vote, to 35.3 percent for the National Party (conservative) candidate, Jorge Alessandri, and 27.8 percent for the Christian Democrat, Radomiro Tomic. The vote confirmed that “there were no giants in the Chilean political system,” meaning that neither the Right or the Left dominated, and that “coalition-building” had been the rule.1 Despite his narrow win, Allende ignored the nation’s practice of “compromise” and “accommodation”2 and aggressively sought to fulfill his campaign pledge to make “the transition to socialism.”3 In mid-September 1970, just before the Chilean Congress confirmed Allende’s election, U.S. President Richard Nixon “informed CIA Direc-

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tor Richard Helms that an Allende regime in Chile would not be acceptable to the United States.”4 During the campaign, the United States spent one million dollars in a “spoiling” operation, designed to prevent Allende’s election, and afterwards (1970–73) it provided the CIA with another seven million dollars, “to maximize pressures on the Allende government to prevent its consolidation and limit its ability to implement policies contrary to U.S. and hemispheric interests.”5 Hoping to trigger a military intervention, some of the funds had been channeled to the right-wing terrorist group Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty).6 Although much attention had been given to what the Nixon administration spent to topple Allende, just as significant was what it did not spend. The United States exerted tremendous economic pressure—“overt and covert”—on the Allende regime. The Nixon administration “cut off economic aid, denied credits, and made efforts . . . to enlist the cooperation of international financial institutions and private firms in tightening the economic ‘squeeze’ on Chile.”7 Helms noted after meeting with Nixon the U.S. intention to “make the economy scream,” and U.S. ambassador Edward Korry told outgoing president Eduardo Frei that “not a nut or bolt would be allowed to reach Chile under Allende.”8 The threat was not an empty one, given the fact that “United States commercial credits dropped from around $300 million during the Frei years to around $30 million in 1972.”9 And “the World Bank made no new loans to Chile between 1970 and 1973.”10 Nixon’s economic “squeeze” must be factored into any analysis of socialism under the Allende government, even though the economist P. N. Rosenstein-Rodan has avowed, “Salvador Allende died not because he was a socialist, but because he was incompetent.”11 In 1970 Allende had been the president of the Socialist Party for almost thirty years. He had run for president of the republic four times. Now, with the power, he was determined to use it. Although Frei contended that he had made important structural changes in the Chilean economy, Allende described the economy as “monopolistic, (externally) dependent, oligarchic, and capitalistic,”12 and he proposed to change it by placing “the means of production in the hands of the state.”13 He nationalized the copper industry in July 1971, and followed quickly with the coal and steel industries and the national telephone system. Early in 1971 the state took over all foreign banks, and by the end of the year it had extended its reach to include “almost total control over the entire banking system [foreign and domestic].”14 Frei had initiated agrarian reform, but Allende greatly accelerated it, virtually wiping out the country’s latifundia. In less than three years, Allende’s socialization of the economy had been “breathtaking”: the government

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controlled 100 percent of utilities, 85 percent of mining and banking, 70 percent of transportation and communications, and 40 percent of industry.15 Allende attempted to reinforce these structural changes with macroeconomic policies, which proved to be counterproductive. He mandated wage hikes, price controls, and a fixed exchange rate, which gave him a good first year spurred by high consumer demand that grew production and reduced unemployment, but which caused grave problems in the following two years, marked by soaring inflation, shortages of goods, and a thriving black market.16 As the economists Felipe Larraín and Patricio Meller have noted: “By the end of 1971 the signals of disequilibrium were clear. . . . Bottlenecks appeared in strength during 1972, and 1973 witnessed the collapse of the whole experiment. . . . In the end, ideology proved to be a bad substitute for macroeconomic realism.” 17 Contributing to the collapse was uncertainty about property rights, which had a chilling effect on investment and drove capital flight.18 Moreover, the rapid expansion of the public sector created a shortage of competent managers, leading to breakdowns in production and services and the filling of jobs with unqualified political appointees.19 As an economic system, Allende’s socialism did not work, and the economy was described as being “in a shambles.”20 Public reaction was no less forgiving. Faced with shortages of goods and services and with uncontrolled inflation (in excess of 150 percent annually and climbing21), street demonstrations and strikes became widespread. In December 1971 “the Christian Democratic and National parties organized the ‘March of the Empty Pots’ by women to protest food shortages.”22 Disruptions and walkouts occurred across a broad spectrum of the population in protest against the deteriorating economy and designed to destabilize the regime. The actions appeared genuine, although CIA money sustained the lengthy truck owners strike that lasted from July 13 to September 11, 1973, the day Allende was overthrown.23 The goal of provoking a military intervention took time to achieve, as the army maintained its tradition of defending the constitutional order. Allende’s replacement of General Carlos Prats González with the hard-liner General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1915–2006) as army commander on August 23 eventually led to his undoing. It was Pinochet who led the coup that resulted in the overthrow and suicide of Allende. Although there was “no hard evidence” of direct U.S. involvement in the coup,24 the CIA had “penetrated” the Chilean military for the purposes of “information-gathering” and monitoring “coup plotting.”25 Consequently, the U.S. Senate select committee investigating intelligence activities (the Church Committee) conceded that “U.S. officials in the years before 1973 may not always have

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succeeded in walking the thin line between monitoring indigenous coup plotting and actually stimulating it.”26 In any event, Pinochet did not need outside stimulation, having once declared his intention “to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs.”27 In power, he totally reversed Allende’s “way to socialism,” adopting “the most radical version of neoliberal economic innovations in Latin America,”28 marked by trade liberalization and the privatization of over 550 state enterprises.29 Historically, Chileans had favored an expanded role by the state in the economy, but Allende’s headlong style in attempting to impose socialism upon Chile30 had encountered resistance even within the UP coalition and had strengthened the hand of opposition elements. As Professor Victor Bulwer-Thomas observed, “On those rare occasions [in Latin America] when the state was deeply hostile to the private sector or wished to sharply restrict the range of activities left open to private enterprise, the inevitable counterrevolution usually proved triumphant.”31 Allende was but the first of the socialist dominoes to fall, as the region yielded to the surge of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. In Chile, socialism had undergone a lengthy gestation before its sudden ripening under Allende and its abrupt uprooting by Pinochet; whereas in Mexico, socialism had been embedded in the Constitution of 1917 from the beginning, only to wither and die in the ensuing years. Although economists fixed the blame for the collapse of the Mexican economy in 1982 on the policy of import-substitution industrialization (ISI), the general manager of the tire company General Popo (the Mexican affiliate of General Tire, of Akron, Ohio) remarked to this author in 1956, “Anyone who says this isn’t a socialist country, hasn’t tried to do business here.” Essentially, ISI was an adjunct of creole socialism in the post–World War II era. ISI relied on an interventionist state for economic protectionism, multiple exchange rates, and the creation (subsidization) of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Mexico enjoyed steady growth during the 1950s and 1960s, but inwardoriented development could not be sustained, owing to the limited market size and mounting budget and trade deficits. Moreover, manufacturing “became the engine of growth.”32 Despite a tense relationship with the Confederation of Workers of Mexico (CTM) and uncertainty regarding property rights, U.S. and European multinational corporations (MNCs) took advantage of laws that allowed tie-ins with Mexican entrepreneurs to make direct investments in manufacturing, thereby abandoning the export sector (agriculture and mining) and infrastructure enterprises (railroads and communications).33 ISI depended upon Mexico’s socialist policies for support, but the effect was a distortion of the blueprint that had been set forth in the Constitution of 1917. “A gamut of structural

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problems lurked behind the screen of price and exchange rate stability: agricultural stagnation, inward-based industrialization, regional disparities and urban bias, and insufficient attention to income distribution and poverty.”34 Presidents Luis Echeverría and José López Portillo endeavored to correct this situation by getting the Mexican Revolution “back on track.” Declaring that “economic policy should henceforth obey the needs of the government, not those of the private sector,”35 Evchevarría generated a burst of socialization similar to that of Allende, increasing the number of public enterprises ninefold during his term (1970–76), growing them from 86 to 740.36 However, he did it by repeating the mistakes of the past. He continued to borrow, but this time without restraint, seduced by the excess liquidity of foreign banks, stemming from the glut of petrodollars. As we have seen, he and López Portillo ran up a foreign debt amounting to $92.4 billion by 1981. Bankrupt by 1982, Mexico suspended service payments on its debt, in effect defaulting and touching off a debt crisis throughout the hemisphere. The IMF came to the rescue, but in providing emergency loans and a plan for debt rescheduling, it imposed structural reforms, trade liberalization, and privatization.37 Mexico abandoned its protectionist policies and began a process of privatizing. As cited earlier, “By 1991, the number of parastatals [SOEs] had fallen from over 1,000 to 269.”38 Moreover, social spending experienced “severe cuts.”39 Presidents Miguel de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas de Gortari, governing from 1982 to 1994 successively, dismantled the Mexican Revolution virtually unchallenged, owing to the monopoly of power exercised by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). It was this characteristic of socialism to concentrate power into a single party that contributed to its collapse as a system of government. By identifying itself with the principles of the Mexican Revolution, PRI stifled dissent as counterrevolutionary. The party built a political machine that placed a premium on conformity, owing to its exclusive access to public funds and control over the patronage. Lacking accountability at virtually every level, the PRI’s one-party rule created an economic and political system that was overwhelmed in time by inefficiency and corruption. From the ubiquitous mordida to the theft of millions by high-ranking officials—such as Arturo Durazo, the chief of police of Mexico City, whose “luxurious residence . . . was nicknamed ‘The Parthenon,’” which it resembled40—Mexican socialism made a mockery of the impulse to achieve economic and social justice. In Venezuela, the Democratic Action (AD) party displayed failings similar to those of the PRI, providing us with another general finding of the consequences of socialism. Although AD shared power with the Social Christian (COPEI) party under

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the terms of the Pact of Punto Fijo, the close nature of the collaboration had the effect of one-party rule. For almost thirty-five years beginning in 1959, the two parties had monopolized the branches of government at every level and had enjoyed exclusive control over the patronage and the revenue (rent) from petroleum production. During this period, AD occupied the presidency five times and COPEI twice. Professor Michael John Coppedge described the political order as a “partidocracia” (a partyocracy) that provided Venezuelan democracy with “stability” but debased its “quality.”41 The exclusive nature of the political system was compounded by the closed internal organization of the parties themselves, particularly that of AD. Convinced that Pérez Jiménez had been overthrown by a military uprising led by an admiral, and that the military institution remained a threat, Rómulo Betancourt believed in the need to go slow in order to keep the soldiers in the barracks. Although he envisioned a party with “a rural base and strong grassroots organizations,” he relied heavily upon his comrades in the “Generation of ’28,” exercising tight control which evolved over time into an AD that was highly centralized, elitist, and “Leninized.”42 The party became a “rotten machine for peddling influence and patronage.”43 Democratic Action fell into this trap largely owing to Betancourt’s policy of “sowing the oil.” Betancourt had resisted immediate nationalization of the petroleum resource on the premise that Venezuela needed to keep the oil flowing as it strove toward the long-range goal of a socialist society. However, despite the outward signs of gradualism and the effort to maintain consensus with COPEI, AD promoted a spectacular growth of the public sector, relying on the oil rent. Petroleum revenue enabled AD to create an array of SOEs and state agencies that intervened in the economy, “from agriculture and petroleum to electricity, transport, and tourism,”44 and that promoted “a vast expansion in education, health services, and social mobility, including urbanization.”45 Yet, the most dramatic changes took place from 1974 to 1979, during the presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1922– ). The first of the second generation of AD leaders to win the presidency, Pérez reinvigorated the socialist impulse during the radical 1970s. He nationalized bauxite and iron mining and took the long-anticipated step of creating the state oil monopoly, Petróleos de Venezuela (PdVSA), in 1976. The rise in oil prices encouraged Pérez to expand the number of SOEs exponentially and to promote “massive public sector investment in infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric generation and heavy industry.”46 Moreover, in addition to the petroleum rent, Pérez took advantage of the surplus of petrodollars on the international market

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to borrow unconditionally. And he was not alone; state enterprises and autonomous agencies also borrowed on their own authority (floating debt), with hardly any oversight.47 This unhappy situation was compounded by the linking of ISI with the policy of “sowing the oil.” Raúl Prebisch (1901– ), an Argentine economist and head of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) in 1948, had formulated ISI as a means of liberating Latin American economies from dependence upon the export of a limited number of primary commodities. He argued against international trade as the engine of growth, proposing instead what he termed “inward-directed development.”48 In Venezuela, SOEs under the ISI concept invited gross inefficiency and mismanagement, owing not only to protectionism but also to guaranteed subsidies (“sowing the oil”) to keep the enterprises afloat. Even bankrupt companies were nationalized in an effort to save jobs. As Professor Rosemary Thorp has observed, “Venezuela [was] the most exaggerated instance of the combination of the traditional export economy model with stateled industrialization.”49 The result was “hothouse industrialization”50 that “withered in crisis.”51 The crisis was not long in coming. After a second “oil shock” in 1978, it occurred—beginning with “Black Friday” (February 18, 1983), the day when oil prices fell. The collapse of oil prices was not the sole cause of Venezuela’s problems. The Punto Fijo consensus had produced a socialist state that was rigid, patronage-ridden, and undemocratic. As a result, although “Venezuela spent more on health and education than any other country in Latin America, [it] achieved worse results.”52 The state institutions simply failed to deliver “under the weight of mismanagement, corruption, and politically bloated bureaucracies.”53 Nevertheless, the presidents of the 1980s, the Copeyano Luis Herrera Campíns (1925– ), whose term ran from 1979 to 1984, and the Adeco Jaime Lusinchi (1924– ), who held office from 1984 to 1989, both pursued the “politics of postponement,” 54 continuing to borrow and spend while counting on oil prices to rise once again. While the rest of the hemisphere grappled with “Reaganomics” and “Thatcherism,” Lusinchi rejected IMF loans offered conditionally on neoliberal reforms, preferring instead to borrow on petroleum-based IOUs. By 1986, Venezuela was “the fourth-largest debtor in Latin America,”55 with a foreign debt of $35 billion. Pledging to restore the prosperity of the 1970s, Carlos Andrés Pérez won the presidency again in December 1988. The means by which he intended to honor his pledge shocked the nation and sent AD the way of the PRI. On February 16, 1989, Pérez proclaimed “El Gran Viraje” (the Great Turnaround), an “austerity program” involving a “radical neoliberal program of eco-

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nomic stabilization and structural adjustment.”56 Pérez joked about initiating “Pérez-stroika,” but few were amused. He revealed plans for an IMF loan containing conditions of a neoliberal reform package commonly referred to as the “Washington Consensus,” the essential features of which included: “the promotion of fiscal discipline, elimination of subsidies, broad and moderate taxation, market-determined interest and exchange rates, trade and foreign investment liberalization, privatization of state enterprises, deregulation, and respect for private property rights.”57 The reaction was swift and violent. On February 27–28, 1989, just nine days after Pérez’s announcement, rioting and looting broke out in Caracas. The “caracazo” claimed the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.58 The poor were inflamed over the threatened loss of social programs resulting from an economic crisis they perceived to be caused by the corrupt practices of elite politicians.59 Unrest persisted throughout the remainder of Pérez’s term. After repeated calls for his resignation and two abortive military coups (February 4 and November 17, 1992), Congress suspended Pérez, on May 21, 1993, and subsequently charged him with “the crime of misappropriation of public funds and embezzlement,”60 forcing his resignation in August. He had allegedly provided $40 million for Violeta Chamorro’s campaign in Nicaragua. Since the Venezuelan constitution did not provide for impeachment, a “crime” had to be “invented” to justify his removal.61 Yet, although disapproval of Pérez’s neoliberal reforms were behind his ouster, the corruption charges against AD and COPEI were serious. As Professor Julia Buxton has noted, “Corrupt practices had a degenerative effect on the capacity and legitimacy of the Venezuelan state.”62 Indignation over corruption also contributed to the military coups of February and November 1992. The coups were led by Commander Hugo Chávez (1954– ), an ultra-nationalist who vigorously opposed Pérez’s efforts to privatize state enterprises and reduce social spending. Strongly influenced by the policies of Juan Velasco of Peru and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Chávez denounced the Washington Consensus as a new form of imperialism. Chávez had been incubating a coup for almost a decade as the leader of a secret military group, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement (MBR), which was dedicated to the Bolivarian dream of a united South America. Recalling that Bolívar had led an army of Venezuelans in the liberation of South America, MBR disapproved of the Punto Fijo governments “for failing to develop the potential of Bolívar’s independence movement.”63 Going public in the attempted coups of 1992, Chávez accused Pérez of corruption and demanded the “repudiation of the limits on national sovereignty imposed

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by the industrialized countries.”64 Following the unsuccessful coup of November, Chávez was imprisoned, but his flame was far from extinguished, as will be seen. Venezuelans generally resisted Pérez’s efforts at neoliberal reform, apparently unwilling to suffer the pain accompanying the “shift away from statist social democracy to a market economy.”65 At the same time, they refused to face the fact that Venezuelan socialism was exhausted, having reached its limit of growth and ability to provide social services. As Professor Guillermo O’Donnell has observed, it was “a dinosaur incapable even of feeding itself.”66 The social democratic order collapsed because socialism snuffed out democracy, and without democracy the system lost drive and stagnated. Corruption had been kept in check by Betancourt, Leoni, and Caldera, the founding generation, but it had “entered the front door” with Pérez, representing a second generation.67 These circumstances also afflicted the creole socialism of Costa Rica, Bolivia, and Uruguay, albeit in varying degrees. Social democracy in Costa Rica appeared to be going smoothly during the 1960s and 1970s, but it hit a wall in 1980. The cost of oil imports (serving 50 percent of Costa Rica’s energy needs) rose by 28 percent, and the income from coffee exports (accounting for approximately 50 percent of its foreign earnings) went in the other direction, falling by 22 percent. The resulting economic crisis revealed that the system was inefficient, redundant, and mired in debt. The bureaucracy was overstaffed and absorbed too much in “administrative costs,” leaving too little money for the services it was supposed to provide. In supporting a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie,” comprised of three-fourths of the nation’s professionals and four-fifths of the country’s technical personnel,68 the cost of government had increased, from 827 million colones in 1950 to 8 billion colones in 1980 (in 1980, 8.60 colones equaled one U.S. dollar). At the same time, Costa Rica was pursuing ISI, providing trade protection and subsidies to efficient and inefficient Autonomous Institutions (AIs) and private-sector enterprises alike. Generous salaries and benefits to bureaucrats and subsidies and tax breaks to coffee growers and ranchers amounted to “socialism for the rich.”69 Moreover, AIs created by one administration were reproduced in another, and both were left in place. For example, the National Planning Office (OFIPLAN), created by President Daniel Oduber (1921–1991) during his presidency (1974–78), was retained by his successor, Rodrigo Carazo (1926– ), during his own term, in 1978–82, but Carazo then also expanded the Presidential Office of Information, tasking it too with the preparation of planning documents. Before the fall, Oduber, the most radical of the PLN presidents, taking advantage of the

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loose credit of the 1970s, invaded “areas of economic activity [manufacturing] that traditionally had been the exclusive preserve of the private sector.”70 Using the resources of the Costa Rican Development Corporation (CODESA), which included “unlimited access” to state bank funds, Oduber squeezed out private firms by extending 96 percent of CODESA’s credits to newly created AIs.71 By 1983, there were almost two hundred AIs in place, and Tico socialism had accumulated an “international debt [that] reached U.S. $4 billion, one of the largest per capita debts in the world.”72 During the five years prior to then, “underemployment and unemployment increased from 11 percent to 24 percent, inflation rates topped 90 percent, and real disposable income declined by more than 40 percent.”73 The collapse of Tico socialism was slow and never really complete. The PLN had to be careful in deconstructing its own creation, in order not to encounter the same fate as AD and PRI. Nevertheless, the economic crisis was systemic, and drastic reform was essential. The PLN presidents during the 1980s—Luis Alberto Monge (1925– ), from 1982 to 1986, and Oscar Arias (1940– ), from 1986 to 1990—were able to resist the “shock” treatment of neoliberal reform, normally the condition for obtaining IMF and USAID loans, but slowly and incrementally they prepared the way for serious privatization and structural change in the 1990s. Monge began the process by proposing banking and monetary reform in 1983, designed to denationalize the National Banking System (SBN). It took over a decade to complete the task, but the privatization of the banking system “subverted” the very heart of Tico socialism.74 A similarly slow process occurred with the disposal of the “inefficient state-owned companies of CODESA,” a course of action begun in 1984 but not completed until 1997, “almost fourteen years after it started.”75 Arias, for his part, “dragged his feet” regarding privatization,76 but yielded to trade liberalization by abandoning ISI and promoting exports. He was able to relieve the pressure for neoliberal reform and still receive USAID assistance, owing to the Contra war in neighboring Nicaragua. Arias quipped: “As long as there are nine comandantes in Nicaragua, we will receive $200 million [a year from the United States] in aid. Hence, we shall survive. . . . If there were ten comandantes, we would get more.”77 Critics faulted Arias, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, for devoting too much of his time to foreign affairs, but they failed to make the connection, which he had, between the restoration of peace in Central America and the economic recovery of Costa Rica. At the same time, in a more subtle fashion, Arias achieved the same ends as privatization through deregulation.78

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At the price of militarization and clandestine aid to the Contras,79 Costa Rica managed to stave off radical neoliberal reform and continue social spending for a decade longer than other debtor countries of the hemisphere, but during the 1990s it accelerated its compliance with IMF conditionality. José María Figueres Olsen (1954– ), the son of the architect of Tico socialism, held the presidency from 1994 to 1998, and initiated the Structural Adjustment Program that anticipated the “outright sale of the original four state banks that constituted the state-dominated financial sector.”80 At the time he took office in 1994, the 200 AIs had been reduced to 118, but the pace quickened in the ensuing years. The young Figueres completed the “revolutionary redesign” of Costa Rican society that had been started by Monge and Arias; thus, “under neoliberalism, redistributive mechanisms and human capital investment policies were curtailed or dismantled, the economy [was] made more open to foreign competition, and the government [was] reduced in size.”81 Costa Rica had been able to overcome the collapse of creole socialism at its own speed, a respite Bolivia did not enjoy. It would be an exaggeration to describe Bolivia as a socialist country, but the Revolution of 1952 brought about significant structural changes that responded to the socialist impulse. The Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) that governed initially from 1952 to 1964 had nationalized the tin mines—the source of 80 percent of the nation’s foreign earnings—and had enacted extensive land reform that ended the centuries-old latifundia system. Following the fall of the MNR governments, owing to internal schisms, a succession of generals had ruled Bolivia for the next decade and a half, among them: René Barrientos Ortuño (1919–1969), whose term lasted from 1964 to 1969; Alfredo Ovando Candia (1917–1982), from 1969 to 1970; Juan José Torres González (1921–1976), 1970 to 1971; and Hugo Banzer Suárez (1926–2002), 1971 to 1978. The generals were highly nationalistic and left-leaning (except for Banzer), having been influenced by the policies of Juan Perón and Juan Velasco in neighboring Argentina and Peru, respectively. Ovando, in particular, emulated Velasco’s “revolution from above,” nationalizing the Bolivian Gulf Oil Company in 1969 and exchanging ambassadors with the Soviet Union.82 Torres, who has been cited as “one of the most radical” of the general presidents, endeavored to establish close economic ties with Soviet Bloc countries and promoted the “People’s Assembly,” comprised of peasants and workers and endowed with parliamentary power.83 Banzer overthrew Torres in 1971 and sought to reverse his “socialist” policies. He welcomed foreign bankers laden with petrodollars, who were attracted by the potential of the huge deposits of oil and natural gas in Bolivia. Engaging in conspicuous spending on

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unproductive projects, which gained him some popularity, he drove the country into bankruptcy. When the generals returned the country to civilian rule—first to Hernán Siles Zuazo in 1982, and then to Víctor Paz Estenssoro in 1985—the foreign debt was over $3 billion and inflation was out of control. Siles Zuazo tried to revive the nationalist revolution by nationalizing the U.S.- and Canadian-owned electric power company and increasing labor’s representation on the boards of SOEs,84 but with international tin prices falling and inflation continuing to climb, his effort failed badly.85 It was left to Paz Estenssoro to counter his own revolution. Taking office in 1985, marking his fourth presidency, Paz Estenssoro issued Decree 21060, which set forth a New Economic Policy (NPE) as a condition of an IMF rescue loan. The NPE executed the features of neoliberalism, namely, privatization, reduced government spending, trade liberalization, and macroeconomic stabilization. Paz was abetted in his policy by the crash of the international price of tin in October 1985, which enabled him to discharge “more than 75 percent of the miners employed by the state mining corporation (COMIBOL), [crippling] . . . the nation’s . . . most militant labor union.”86 As Bolivia entered the last decade of the century, it appeared to have lost the socialist impulse, having become one of the hemisphere’s most “aggressive” proponents of neoliberalism,87 but given the unstable condition of Bolivian politics little was ever permanent. Moreover, there was an “X” factor in the Bolivian equation: coca production that accounted for $600 million in foreign earnings in 1986, “onethird more than the nation’s legal export earnings of $400 million.”88 While Bolivia struggled to overcome the effects of a failed revolution, a more modern Uruguay, with fewer problems, had greater difficulty reforming an entrenched welfare state. Although it is discussed here last as an example of the collapse of creole socialism, Uruguay was the first to go. In the mid-1950s, when the prices of its agricultural exports tumbled headlong, it became clear that Batlle’s “utopia” was just that—a “no place,” an illusion. Education, health care, public employment, and early retirement were viewed as entitlements, with too few productive workers to bear the expense. The economy crashed in 1957, unable to withstand the advent of synthetic fibers that decimated the wool market. Uruguay attempted in vain to recover by adopting ISI, but the policy put additional strain on the already exhausted ranching sector and served to prolong an inefficient and swollen industrial and urban component. Approximately 50 percent of the population resided in Montevideo, much of it idle. The nation was a specific example of Professor Andrés Solimano’s reflection on socialism in

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general, to wit: “Socialism proved to be an unfeasible form of economic organization in the long run, as it could not stand the test of time.”89 The terrorism of the Tupamaros was the last straw, provoking a military takeover in 1973 and beginning a decade-long dictatorship. During the dictatorship, the generals, acting through civilian puppets, put in place a neoliberal package that included “deregulation, deep cuts in the public budget and employment, and privatization of public enterprises.”90 It took authoritarian rule to make these structural changes, because with the restoration of democracy in Uruguay in the mid-1980s, vestiges of the welfare state reappeared, owing to a “widely shared perception of a social contract between state and society.”91 For the time being (the decade of the 1980s), however, creole socialism lay in ruins in most of the hemisphere, as the economic pendulum swung in the opposite direction, toward domination by neoliberalism.

20

The Neoliberal Onslaught

After nearly a century of anti-imperialist (anti-capitalist) rhetoric, the adoption of neoliberalism (free market) policies was not popular in the Latin American countries. Notions of austerity and sacrifice rang hollow among the 37 percent of the population already living in poverty and the additional others struggling on the margins. Similarly, the public at large resisted giving up its “acquired privileges.”1 The reaction was an emotional one, and it ignored the fact that under the former economies, “inequity and poverty [had] worsened” over the course of the twentieth century.2 It did not help either that one of the first regimes to impose neoliberalism was that of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Following Allende’s overthrow, Pinochet was determined to snuff out Communism, but in the process he snuffed out Communists and other “dissidents” in a campaign of terror. Pinochet’s human rights record was horrific, and it tended to give neoliberalism a bad name from the outset. Professors Kurt von Mettenheim and James Malloy have noted that the Pinochet regime “demonstrated the affinity between neoliberal economic restructuring and authoritarianism.”3 In time, however, free markets and representative democracy proved highly compatible. Pinochet decreed the end of the “interventionist state” and replaced it with a “market ideology.”4 He entrusted economic policy to the “Chicago boys,” economists schooled by Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago. The Chicago school taught that “growth [was] an inherent property of capitalist economies. Governments [had] an important role in providing ‘public goods,’ but beyond that they should not go.”5 In accord with this thinking, Pinochet “dismantled the machinery of state interventionism.”6 He exercised fiscal discipline (budget

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restraint), removed economic controls, liberalized trade, welcomed foreign capital, ceased the manipulation of exchange and interest rates, and disposed of more than 550 SOEs.7 These changes produced the “Chilean miracle,” a twelve-year period of unprecedented growth and low inflation. However, the economic success of the Pinochet government “had as its corollary the poverty of a substantial portion of the population that did not share in the benefits.”8 As will be seen, a serious concern about neoliberalism was its effect in widening the gap between the rich and the poor. Moreover, Pinochet’s “miracle” was sustained by heavy foreign borrowing. Pinochet relied on the same petrodollars for the denationalization of the Chilean economy as Echeverría in Mexico and Pérez in Venezuela did in carrying out a surge of nationalizations in their countries during the 1970s. They all experienced severe economic recession as a result. In order to avert economic disaster, Pinochet seized the nation’s banks, outdoing Allende in “control over the economy” and causing some creative wits to describe the action as “the Chicago road to socialism.”9 Not quite. With recovery by the mid-1980s, Pinochet persisted in his free market approach, albeit with a small gesture to expediency; his was “a long-term model resting on a small state and open economy, but a short-term model that [was] mildly interventionist.”10 Moreover, the restoration of civilian government in 1989 produced no change in the new economic direction of Chile. Pinochet gambled with a plebiscite in 1988, designed to continue him in power, but he lost to a concurrence of political parties (La Concertación) led by the Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin (1918– ). Chileans were prepared to scrap socialism, but not their tradition of democracy. Elected to the presidency in 1989, Aylwin retained “the market-oriented, basically private enterprise economy, which had been established . . . [by] the Pinochet dictatorship.”11 Despite stark evidence of a downside to neoliberalism, Peru followed Chile’s lead aggressively during the 1990s. Alberto Fujimori administered “shock therapy” to Peru’s ailing economy only a few weeks after assuming the presidency in July 1990. There was a debate between the “big bangers” and the “gradualists” as to the better method of implementing the neoliberal package.12 Given that the economic performance of Fujimori’s predecessor, Alan García, has been described as “one of the worst . . . in modern history,”13 and that the nation’s foreign debt had reached $21 billion, Fujimori opted for the “big bang.” Following the advice of economists trained, in this instance, at Oxford University, he attacked, first, hyperinflation (inflation stood at 7,649 percent) by gutting “price subsidies and social spending and [raising] interest rates and taxes.”14 Next, he dismantled the “closed, big-state” structure that had been put in place by Juan Velasco, which was marked by bar-

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riers to free trade and a huge public sector operating at a deficit and choking the nation in “bureaucratic red tape.”15 He reduced tariffs from 66 percent to 15.7 percent,16 eliminated controls on foreign investment, and restored Peru’s “full participation in world financial markets.”17 He privatized 173 of the existing 183 SOEs and cut the size of the public payroll from 470,000 to 210,000.18 Fujimori got inflation under control and started to grow the economy, although at the expense of “the further pauperization of the population.”19 It was characteristic of neoliberalism that proponents promised a bright future but exacted high social costs immediately. Fujimori attempted to remedy this situation by using revenue from the surprisingly lucrative sales of SOEs to fund special social programs. It was an effort of “Fujipopulism” to overcome “Fujishock.” Fujimori set up the Committee for the Promotion of Private Investment (COPRI) in 1991 to oversee the sale of SOEs, which resulted in a “privatization dividend” amounting to over $3 billion by 1995.20 The largest privatization involved the sale of the public telephone and telecommunications companies to Telefónica of Spain for $2 billion in February 1994.21 The sale moved additional foreign investors, already encouraged by the crushing of Sendero Luminoso, to enter the market, and they ended up acquiring “most of the private companies that had been nationalized during the period of military rule from 1968 to 1980.”22 Tapping into the proceeds of these sales, Fujimori created the National Development and Social Compensation Fund (FONCODES), for the purpose of “benefiting the population in poverty.”23 By mid-1994, FONCODES was funding and managing 4,760 social assistance projects and creating 23,000 jobs a month.24 Fujimori had Peru moving again, but it had all been done on his own authority, since he had suspended the constitutional order. Fujimori’s autogolpe in 1992 enabled him to rule by decree, secure a new constitution that concentrated power in the office of the president, and win reelection to the presidency in 1995. Despite his dictatorial behavior, Fujimori remained popular during his first term, largely because he had beaten inflation and ended the violence of the Shining Path insurgency, plus his carefully targeted social programs had earned him support within “the urban shantytowns” and “the poorest departments in the country.”25 He could not sustain this popularity, however. In the midst of improved conditions (probably because of them), his bullying, peculation, and abuse of human rights became issues, and they led to his resignation in 2000, even though he had been elected to a third term. “Compared with the deterioration of the 1980s, the economy . . . functioned much better under economic liberation. . . . Compared . . . with the hopes of the early postwar years for a better society, both less unequal and more self-determined,

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the new strategy [could] be seen as a defeat.”26 Whereas in Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, right-wing movements had initiated neoliberal reform largely by their own will, elsewhere in Latin America, left-wing governments yielded to external pressure to adopt free market principles only as a means of getting their countries out of debt. The debt crisis of the 1980s served as the catalyst for an all-out assault by neoliberalism on the economies of Latin America. The offensive was enhanced by an “ideological shift towards belief in free markets, which gathered force with the governments of Reagan and Thatcher and was strengthened by the fall of Communism.”27 The lending practices by the foreign commercial banks were as much to blame for the debt crisis as the spending policies of the Latin American countries, but the latter took the harder hit. The banks were able to form a “de facto creditors’ cartel” by “communicating” with each other, which was illegal domestically but permissible in the “unregulated international markets,” enabling them to maintain the advantage in dealing with the debtors.28 In effect abetting the private banks, the Washington-based international financial institutions (IFIs)—namely, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank—made funds available to the Latin American countries for the purpose of servicing their debt, but on the condition of “policy reform.” In advocating policy reform, the IFIs had reached a consensus—the “Washington Consensus”—that the Latin American countries had created their own mess by practicing bad economics, meaning, any form of socialism. They had committed the same kinds of errors that had caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, to wit: “excessive bureaucratization, centralization, and corruption,” plus “waste, inefficiency, and irresponsibility.”29 The countries needed to dispose of state-owned enterprises and adopt free market principles unconditionally. To be specific, the Washington Consensus listed ten areas of policy reform, as follows: 1. fiscal discipline (balanced budgets) 2. public expenditure priorities (controlled spending) 3. tax reform (broad-based, with enforcement) 4. financial liberalization (market-driven interest rates) 5. exchange rates (competitive) 6. trade liberalization (tariff reduction) 7. foreign direct investment (positive treatment) 8. privatization (dispose of SOEs) 9. deregulation (remove excessive controls) 10. property rights (protected)30

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Conditionality became the key for the new borrowing regimen among the Latin American countries beginning in mid-1980. Once-revolutionary Mexico, strapped with a $92.4 billion debt, became a model of neoliberal reform in Latin America. Economist John Williamson, a leading proponent of the Washington Consensus, reported in 1990 that Mexico’s macroeconomic policy had been “impressive,” specifically, that it had “joined GATT [the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs], progressively eliminated the near-universal import licensing that prevailed in 1983, . . . reduced tariffs to a maximum of 20 percent, . . . greatly liberalized restrictions on foreign investment, . . . undertaken a substantial privatization program, . . . [and] deregulated trucking and dismantled some entry barriers.”31 Mexico aggressively pursued trade liberalization, deregulation, macroeconomic restructuring, and privatization during the presidencies of Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (1982–88) and Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94). De la Madrid “pursued some of the most consistently orthodox policies in the region”32—that is, an approach that was defined as market-oriented, small-state, and economically liberal—and Salinas conducted a virtual fire sale of SOEs, although he could not overcome the opposition of labor (the CTM) to the divestiture of Pemex. De la Madrid, with a masters degree in public administration from Harvard, was advised by “a generation of young, highly-qualified economists within the PRI,” who rejected the concepts of ISI and state dirigisme (i.e., “planning and state-led development”).33 The PRI lost its ideological edge under the influence of youthful technocrats, schooled for the most part in the United States and persuaded by the economic thinking of the IMF and World Bank. In selecting places to study, their mantra had been “Princeton o nada.”34 Professor Thomas O’Brien takes the process a step further, suggesting that they had been funded by Ford and Rockefeller Foundation grants that sought to create new “technocratic elites . . . [trained] in the principles of free market orthodoxy.”35 In any case, the PRI was fast becoming irrelevant as the Left broke away under Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who almost defeated Salinas in the 1988 election, and organized the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) the following year. An even stronger challenge came from the center-right National Action Party (PAN), which was better attuned to the new economic order and did not carry the baggage of electoral fraud, corruption, and scandal. Moreover, the PRI was committing political suicide with each reform that it made. Echevarría, López Portillo, and Salinas, all bowing to intense pressure for democratization, enacted electoral reforms that opened up the political process and enhanced the chances of the opposition parties for success at the ballot box,

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particularly the PAN. In addition, de la Madrid’s neoliberal reforms had alienated the PRI’s base and emboldened “orthodox hardliners” within the business community, especially in the northern tier of states, where the PAN was strongest.36 His restructuring of the economy favored the Monterrey Group of industrialists in Nuevo León, which had “never depended on government aid and [had] always opposed ‘excessive’ government intervention in the economy,” 37 and it spurred the growth of “assembly (maquiladora) plants along the northern border.”38 Salinas, for his part, made the ultimate concession to free trade, joining Canada and the United States in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), under which “total Mexican-U.S. trade grew at an average of 18.5 percent every year after NAFTA took effect [on January 1, 1994 until the end of the century].”39 The PRI managed to hold onto the presidency for one more term (1994– 2000), electing Ernesto Zedillo (1951– ), another technocrat with a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University, but he was the candidate of an Institutional Revolutionary Party that was fast liquidating its Revolutionary institutions. The PRI was not the only revolutionary party that had been forced by economic collapse in the 1980s to suppress the socialist impulse and adopt neoliberalism. In Bolivia, as previously discussed, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the founder of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR), repudiated virtually everything that he had formerly championed. Upon assuming the presidency in 1985, he declared, “Bolivia is dying,” and he proceeded to try to resuscitate it by means of full compliance with IMF conditionality. He became the “darling” of the Washington Consensus with “a program that combined stabilization and . . . radical liberalization.”40 That is, Paz transformed Bolivia from “an extreme case of policy errors” (e.g., tin nationalization and macroeconomic manipulation) to an ardent proponent of neoliberalism.41 An even more startling reversal occurred in Argentina, where a Peronista president deconstructed Justicialismo. Argentina was a troubled country in the 1980s, endeavoring to heal wounds caused by the disastrous “Dirty War” and the Malvinas/Falklands War and beset with an inflation that reached such ridiculous levels that the treasury had begun issuing one-million-peso notes. With civilian rule restored, the Radical Civic Union (UCR) leader Raúl Alfonsín (1927– ) occupied the presidency from 1983 to 1989 and attempted to reconcile the nation, but the division was deep and his efforts to curb inflation by means of an austerity program undermined his good intentions. Alfonsín’s attempt at neoliberal reform—deregulation, privatization, a small state, reduced government spending42—aroused the enmity of the workers’ confederation (CGT) and sparked the revival of the Justicialist (Peronist)

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Party. Carlos Saúl Menem (1930– ) won the presidency in 1989 in a campaign that was “an exercise in populism, in the traditional Peronist mold.”43 Once in office, Menem broke the promises he had made. Menem eviscerated Peronismo. He went on a privatization binge, offering for sale “almost everything that could be transferred to private hands.”44 Nothing was spared, including railroads, the shipping industry, the postal service, telephones, radio and TV, insurance, meat packing, electricity, and airlines. Even the national oil monopoly (YPF), established by Ydígoras in 1922, went on the “auction block.”45 “Between 1990 and 1993 alone, foreigners invested more than $4.7 billion in public corporations . . . which had been privatized by the [Menem] government.”46 Menem deregulated the economy and “slashed” tariffs, contributing to a “thorough dismantling” of Perón’s socialist impulse.47 His minister of economy Domingo Cavallo urged “market liberalization” and an end to state intervention, criticizing the Peronist approach of “‘socialism without plan and capitalism without market.’”48 Menem’s radical transformation of the economy soon earned his policies the sobriquet “Thatcherismo,” since they seemed in line with “the British prime minister’s policies of privatization, reduced government spending, and a moratorium on income redistribution.”49 According to the economist-scholar Carlos Waisman, the designation was apt, since it implied that Argentina had not been forced by the IFIs or the debt crisis to adopt neoliberalism. Instead, Waisman cited the influence of “international demonstration effects” in Argentina’s transformation—that is to say, “the spectacular crisis of communism, the failure of statist development formulae [creole socialism] throughout Latin America, the prosperity and political stability of advanced capitalist nations, and the apparent success of economic liberalization in neighboring Chile.”50 Menem’s policies reduced inflation from 12,000 percent in 1989 to near zero by the time of his reelection in 1995, and they produced growth, though they also resulted in economic and social inequities. Professor O’Brien, writing in 1999, noted that although “the initial success of neoliberalism in Latin America is undeniable [in terms of growth], . . . unemployment rates have risen during the decade, real wages have fallen, and income distribution has worsened.”51 With the burden of adjustment weighing heaviest on the poor, certain countries, notably the liberal democracies, have found it difficult to implement neoliberal reforms. Uruguay, for example, following the restoration of democracy in 1984, backtracked under its elected presidents in the ensuing years. The nation reacted against the neoliberal reforms imposed previously by the military governments, rejecting a referendum for a privatization law in 1992. Objections to the neolib-

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eral model included the belief that it “facilitated foreign domination, [fostered] uncontrolled privatization, and [promoted] the establishment of a vulnerable service economy.”52 Moreover, decades of Batllismo had imbued Uruguayans with the concept of “a social contract [between state and society] that defined social security, health, educational, and public employment rights and opportunities.”53 Presidents Julio María Sanguinetti (1926– ), who served two terms, in 1985–90 and again in 1995–2000, and Luis Alberto Lacalle (1941– ), from 1990 to 1995, learned that although “market-oriented policies [might be] desirable and beneficial, . . . [they must] also be distributionally acceptable.”54 Likewise, in Costa Rica, the PLN governments were able to “protect” social spending despite being $4 billion in debt.55 Taking their time, presidents Monge, Arias, and Figueres privatized a large number of AIs (SOEs) and opened up the economy, but the “welfare indicators were maintained.”56 They were able to secure rescue loans and grants without harsh conditionality, owing to the unstable political conditions in Central America and the determination of the United States to preserve Costa Rica’s model democracy. However, the extreme case of resistance to neoliberalism was that of Venezuela, where the Washington Consensus experienced a decisive defeat. When Carlos Andrés Pérez announced the “Gran Viraje” (the Great Turnaround) in 1989—a program of austerity and privatization—he encountered fierce opposition that eventually forced him from office. Venezuela had long suffered from “Dutch disease,” an economic condition where income (in Venezuela’s case, oil rents) outstrips productivity, domestic investment loses out to imports, and debt piles up; where a country has the sense of being wealthy, but “actually is not.”57 Believing that their country was rich, Venezuelans blamed their economic problems on the corruption of political leaders and parties rather than on the exhaustion of the social democratic system. Public opinion polls in the 1990s sustained these attitudes. In 1993, two-thirds of those polled listed corruption as “the number one reason” for the nation’s poor economic performance,58 and in a 1995 poll, “only 21 percent favored an open economy.”59 Rafael Caldera won the presidency again in 1993, running on a platform that favored continued state intervention in the economy and opposed “the neoliberal current.”60 Caldera broke with COPEI, the party he had created, which had been taken over by new leadership that favored free market policies. He headed a fusion ticket, Convergencia, comprised of disaffected Adecos, Copeyanos, and the Movement to Socialism (MAS).61 MAS leader Teodoro Petkoff mused, “How

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do you reinvent socialism?”62 While opposing neoliberalism, Caldera had no plan for economic recovery other than postponing the servicing of the debt and continuing to mortgage the economy on the promise of improved oil prices. The economic recession, the undoing of the Punto Fijo consensus, and the discrediting of the AD and COPEI parties created an ideal environment for the emergence of a demagogue. Hugo Chávez, released from prison by Caldera, won the election of 1998 with 56 percent of the vote, although two-thirds of the eligible voters failed to go to the polls. He pledged to defend the nationalized petroleum industry, exercise state control of the economy, and extend social programs. Above all, he denounced the Washington Consensus as a plot to enslave Latin America. Chávez was an ardent nationalist. He was anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-U.S. As noted earlier, he admired the economic and political styles of Juan Velasco and Omar Torrijos. However, he was inspired most by Venezuela’s national hero, Simón Bolívar. Whereas Betancourt had planned to “sow the oil” in order to achieve the overall development of Venezuela, Chávez intended to use Venezuela’s petroleum wealth as the means of fulfilling Bolívar’s dream of a liberated Spanish America united by arms and interests. He was driven by the ideas expressed in Bolívar’s “Letter from Jamaica” (1815), from which Chávez drew a parallel between what he saw as the existing condition of Latin America and the Liberator’s words describing the colonial experience, to wit: “The role of the inhabitants of the American hemisphere has for centuries been purely passive. Politically they were non-existent. We are still in a position lower than slavery, and therefore it is more difficult for us to rise to the enjoyment of freedom.”63 Moreover, Chávez envisioned a future that corresponded with the one imagined by Bolívar, which he had set forth in the letter: “I desire to see America fashioned into the greatest nation in the world, greatest not so much by virtue of her area and wealth as by her freedom and glory. . . . It is a grandiose idea to think of consolidating the New World into a single nation, united by pacts into a single bond, . . . [but] would be to God that some day we may have the good fortune to convene [on the Isthmus of Panama] an august assembly of representatives of [America] to deliberate upon the high interests of peace and war with the nations of the other three-quarters of the globe.”64 Chávez was determined to be a serious opponent of free trade and the global economy, but the social cost of neoliberalism (even if only initially, as argued) was a greater obstacle to its acceptance. Chile, the first country to adopt the neoliberal approach, was a challenging example for its further acceptance. The early evaluations of Pinochet’s “ortho-

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dox economic policies” concluded that they had “produced success in terms of growth and inflation, but they [had] also led to increased inequality and hardship.”65 The Chilean experience gave rise to the notion that, growth and an improved investment environment aside, “market-oriented economic strategies [were] likely to maintain special privileges [and] work adversely for the poor.”66 Professor Bulwer-Thomas observed that by the beginning of the 1990s Chile and Mexico “had laid the basis for sustainable long-term growth . . . as a result of policy reform, [but that] unequal distribution of income and the absence of a safety net for the poor remained a serious cause for concern.”67 Other economist-scholars agreed that the adjustment programs were unequal and that the countries needed “to pursue development-with-equity strategies.”68 Rosemary Thorp, for one, urged consideration of a policy that provided both growth and equity: “a fruitful combination of economic and social development.” 69 Williamson urged the critics to be patient, advising that once policy reforms achieved recovery and initiated growth, Latin America could address “its immense ‘social debt.’”70 That was a hard sell, given that many economists believed there might be a ten-year lag before stabilization produced growth,71 whereas social costs appeared quickly, impacting hardest upon low-income groups.72 As Latin America entered the last decade of the twentieth century, the political movements and parties that had responded to the socialist impulse were in decline and in danger of extinction. The once-dominant PRI (Mexico), PLN (Costa Rica), AD and COPEI (Venezuela), APRA (Peru), and MNR (Bolivia) had lost their drive and abandoned their principles. The second generation of leaders did not measure up to the founders. Marxist, Peronist, Batllist, and social and Christian democratic movements represented failed ideologies. Latin America had run out of ideologies and ideas. A “capitalist revolution” was taking place,73 bringing both hope and despair. “By the early 1990s, 46 percent of the population of the region, or 200 million Latin Americans were living below the poverty line, a figure that was nearly 50 percent higher than that of 1980.”74 Latin America was searching for a pensador to answer the question: “How to achieve a synthesis of the capitalist engine of growth with the socialist concern for the improvement of the oppressed, exploited, and marginalized majorities and minorities?”75

21

Fin del Siglo/End of the Century

At the end of the twentieth century in Latin America, the socialist impulse was exhausted, but the misery that had driven it persisted. After almost a century of socialist action in a variety of ways in a variety of countries, the levels of ignorance and poverty remained appallingly high. The emergence of free market economies in several countries was promising, but progress was slow and the pendulum appeared to have swung too far in the other direction, away from the state’s role in economic and social affairs. Moreover, profound changes that took place in the second half of the century had overwhelmed the capacity of governments to respond. Even before the debt crisis and neoliberal austerity programs, the phenomenal growth of shantytowns in the urban centers had put tremendous strain on infrastructure and public services. In Lima, for example, one-third of the total population of over five million people resided in makeshift pueblos jóvenes (literally, “young towns”—squatter settlements). A “ring of poverty” girding Mexico City had swelled the population of the Federal District to 17.8 million people by 2000. Similar conditions prevailed throughout Latin America as the twentieth century came to a close. Where governments and political parties broke down, grassroots groups sprang up to fill the need. New social movements (NSMs) appeared in the major cities, comprising a “New Left” that was less interested in the ownership of the means of production than in advocating for causes and providing human services. The precursors of these movements were the Christian base communities (CEBs), which changed their emphasis from liberation theology to the setting up of community kitchens, and in Mexico City the civil groups that performed

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heroic services in September 1985 in the wake of a devastating earthquake. Finding its “space,” the New Left helped to establish neighborhood associations in the barriadas, brujas, ranchos, etc., to engage municipal authorities for the provision of water, sewage, electricity, trash pickup, and security,1 and when officials were unresponsive, they rigged up contraband electric lines and formed auxiliary police units. They organized consumer cooperatives, legal-aid societies, health clinics, and artisan workshops.2 In addition to the grassroots organizations, the New Left activists promoted special-interest and protest groups to support human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, indigenous rights, and the environment. The NSMs were a return to the anarchist heritage of the European immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, but they were updated by the new indigenous migrants with the thought of the Italian revisionist Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Gramsci’s thinking fit the NSMs well. Referring to the “traditional division” of the social order into civil and political societies, Gramsci had observed that the establishment of “cultural hegemony” in civil society (schools, the media, churches, etc.) had enabled the bourgeois state (political society: “the forces of law and order”) to resist “catastrophic irruptions.”3 He believed that it was essential to imbue civil society with socialist values, in order to break down this line of defense, in anticipation of crises in political society. “It was not sufficient for the economic preconditions for change to exist,” he asserted, “there must be a general desire [‘a collective will among the people’] for this change and the capacity to engineer it within the nation as a whole.”4 That there were references, beginning in the 1960s, to a “counterculture” lent credibility to Gramsci’s concept of a prevailing cultural hegemony. The post–Cold War Left in Latin America adopted Gramsci’s ideas “with a vengeance,” seeing in grassroots organizations “a substitute for political parties, traditional unions, armed groups, etc.”5 Moreover, after enduring the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left championed democracy in the 1990s as the surest means of carrying out the Gramscian philosophy. Although it condemned neoliberalism for its “devastating social consequences,”6 it “was not opposed to privatization per se,”7 and it accepted “certain economic ‘laws’ about market competition, efficiency, and growth, . . . [resigned] to the idea of politics being subordinate to economics.”8 In this context, the NSMs thrived among the denizens of the shantytowns that made up a vast informal economic sector of hundreds of thousands of the unemployed and underemployed endeavoring to earn a few centavos. The informal sector served as an underground economy in the metropoli-

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tan areas of Latin America, where individual initiative made up for the lack of investment and entrepreneurial will. In Peru, “half [of ] Lima’s citizens lived in informal housing and 80 percent went to work on informal mass transit, while fully half the country’s population was employed in the informal sector.”9 It was the same in Mexico City, Caracas, Santiago, and Buenos Aires, where labor and services ranged from street vendors, domestic servants, and gardeners, to repair shops, market stalls, and outsourcing of all kinds. The work was unregulated and untaxed, creating a vicious cycle: the informal economy paid no taxes, and many of the services that should have been provided by the municipalities were left undone, owing to this lack of revenue. The workers were not protected against abuse and unsanitary and unsafe conditions, nor were they compensated in the event of accident and illness.10 It was as if the reforms and revolutions of the twentieth century had not taken place for these millions of informales. This dire circumstance gave new importance to the office of mayor in the major cities. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was elected Head of Government ( Jefe de Gobierno) of the Federal District in 1997; in effect, he became the mayor of Mexico City. He left the post two years later in order to campaign for the presidency in 2000, but not before he had built a constituency among the informal sector by expanding public works and sponsoring public housing. In 2006, his successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also sought to use the position of jefe as a springboard to the presidency, dispensing “cash pensions to the elderly” and promising “a government-subsidized blitz to build one million homes for the poor.”11 Lima’s mayor, Alfonso Barrantes, elected in 1983, was head of the United Left (IU) coalition; he inaugurated the Glass of Milk (Vaso de Leche) program. The program “guaranteed one glass of milk a day for each child,”12 and was administered by a network of Comités de Vaso de Leche (CVLs). They were augmented by 643 “popular kitchens” in the pueblos jóvenes, which served low-cost meals prepared “communally” by the women of the neighborhoods.13 However, niche politics and grassroots activism barely made a dent in the crushing economic and social problems of Latin America. Economic liberalization was making headway in producing growth, but it proved insufficient as well. The private sector could not do it alone, as demonstrated by the size of the informal sector. Although the informal sector served as a laboratory for entrepreneurship and inventiveness, self-help went only so far, owing to the lack of capital and education. Even more critical, drawing on the experience of Pinochet’s neoliberal policies in Chile, the Latin American nations realized that they could not abdicate responsibility for the well-being of their citizens entirely, particularly if democratic government was to prevail.

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“State regulation [seemed] ‘structurally’ necessary to guarantee adequate levels of investment in areas such as research and development, maintenance of the physical infrastructure, and education, as well as to assure that equity considerations [were] not entirely abandoned.”14 In Chile itself, although the Aylwin government (1990–94) remained committed to free markets “as a mechanism for consumers to articulate their preferences,” and to policies of “a stable high real exchange rate [and] . . . a reasonably low import tariff,” it sought to restore social programs by means of tax reform and legislation that would protect the rights of labor.15 The Socialist Party, participating in the governing coalition, followed a “nationalistic, pragmatic, and democratic” path, accepting “much of the neoliberal model” in the economic sphere, while pursuing grassroots activism in the social arena.16 As a result, throughout the hemisphere, “the extreme pro–free market views common in the 1980s . . . moderated to an increasingly sophisticated view of the role of the state and of the potential in interaction between civil society and government.”17 Even as the socialist impulse faded, governments and political movements recognized the need to find “a balance between state and market.”18 As Professor John Ward wrote in 1997, “Many observers [believed] that better social welfare provisions must play a key role in consolidating democracy with free market reform.”19 Bolivia, for example, devised a “Plan for All” that sought “to build a socially progressive element into the market model” by making the sale of SOEs conditional on investment in education, health care, and pensions.20 Alberto Fujimori in Peru took advantage of the “privatization dividend” to fund scores of social-assistance projects and create thousands of jobs. In Colombia, the Constitution of 1991 endorsed the “economically liberal view that economic activity is to be free,” with the caveat that “this activity can and must be constrained when so required by the broader interests of society.”21 On the other hand, Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez imposed a drastic neoliberal reform without consideration of the social consequences or any effort to smooth the way politically, and he wound up being removed from office.22 After forty years of striving for economic independence, Venezuelans resisted swallowing the bitter IMF pill. Rafael Caldera vacillated between austerity and social-spending-as-usual, with no real plan at all. After a 1999 survey designated Venezuela as the “second most corrupt country in Latin America,”23 the public at large viewed even serious attempts at economic adjustment as a scam. Venezuela decided to avoid reform, placing its future in the hands of Hugo Chávez, who was determined to defy the “triumph of neoliberalism” and use oil as a political weapon, to an extent not practiced by the country before.

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Taking a less defiant stand, but an independent one nevertheless, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in Mexico, comprised of leftist dissidents from the PRI, occupied the middle ground between the Orthodox Left (Marxist hardliners) and the Liberal Left (leftists who were resigned to the global economy, even neoliberal restructuring).24 The PRD brushed off the “simplistic rejection of state in favor of market” and sought an alternative “based on concrete examples in contemporary history where the market was effectively regulated and influenced by strategic state action.”25 Even in socialist Cuba, there was an “acceptance” among intellectuals “of the need to incorporate concepts of market competition and efficiency into their alternative economic programs and . . . [a] recognition of the limitations of the state as economic protagonist.”26 However, Fidel Castro was not persuaded. The efforts of the Latin American countries (excepting Cuba) to ease the sting of neoliberal reform by attending to social needs were aided serendipitously from two sources: windfalls from debt-forgiveness and U.S. economic assistance for the war on drugs. The 1980s in Latin America have been described as the “lost decade,” owing to the outward transfer of resources caused by the servicing of debt, which resulted in retarded economic growth and neglect of the social sector.27 Recognizing the harmful effects of this situation for both creditor and debtor countries, U.S. treasury secretary Nicholas F. Brady devised the Brady Plan in March 1989, which provided for “forgiveness of debt in arrears or coming due of between 28 and 86 percent.”28 The plan carried out by the administration of George H. W. Bush through negotiations with Mexico, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil was later extended to the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru by the Clinton administration. It “forgave between 45 and 79 percent of eligible debt and rolled over payment on the rest to lower and more manageable levels.”29 Implemented in conjunction with private banks and IFIs, the plan also encouraged renewed lending in consideration of guarantees of collectability, assurances of economic reform, and the issuance of tradable bonds.30 The agreements reached under the auspices of the Brady Plan, along with “important trade and market liberalization reforms,” sparked economic recovery in the 1990s and facilitated social spending.31 The U.S. war on drugs mandated substantial economic assistance to the Latin American countries as part of the effort to defeat the drug trade. In implementing his “Andean Initiative,” President Bush met with the presidents of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia in Cartagena, Colombia, in early 1990 and committed $2.2 billion for “drug crop eradication, interdiction, and alternative development, or crop substitution.”32 Although most Latin American countries received funding in the anti-drug campaign, notably Mexico, it was clear that the three southern

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countries at the Cartagena meeting, as the “source of all the cocaine consumed in the United States, as well as a significant proportion of the heroin and marijuana,” would receive much of the money. 33 Bill Clinton continued the effort, particularly during his second term.34 Military and police assistance to the four principal countries (Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia) increased from $98 million in 1996 to $889 million in 2000, whereas economic and social aid grew from $150 million to $497 million in the same period.35 According to the legislation authorizing the war on drugs, economic and social assistance was essentially seen as an incentive package, contingent upon effective action against drug traffickers. Those countries that failed to cooperate would be refused economic assistance (decertified, in compliance with an annual review process). This policy produced unfortunate results. Specifically, the Clinton administration wound up giving aid to the dictator Fujimori, who had successfully reduced coca production (even though he also deceptively diverted funds to wipe out Sendero Luminoso), whereas it decertified Colombia in 1996 and 1997, further destabilizing a democratically elected government that was beset by guerrilla violence and drug-related crime.36 During the 1980s and 1990s, the illicit narcotics industry brought the Colombian nation to the brink of ruin. In the 1980s cocaine overtook coffee as Colombia’s principal export.37 By then, “it probably was contributing 2 to 3 billion dollars annually to the economy.”38 The Cali and Medellín drug cartels replaced Juan Valdez as the image of Colombia. In truth, such a characterization was unfair to the scores of politicians, prosecutors, journalists, and magistrates who had been murdered by leftist guerrillas, drug-cartel assassins, and right-wing death squads for doing their civic duty. Drug money created an extremely convoluted circumstance that undermined the authority of the national government. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the principal guerrilla organization, controlled large areas of the national territory, and it offered sanctuary for coca processing plants in return for the payment of “taxes” (protection money). At the same time, the drug lords sponsored paramilitary death squads that preyed upon liberal and leftist activists, including those of the Patriotic Union (UP), the political wing of FARC. Moreover, the drug cartels killed on their own behalf, slaying Attorney General Carlos Mauro Hoyos Jiménez in 1989 and the Liberal Party candidate for president, Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento, the following year. Drug money was pervasive: “Public officials, including police and members of the judiciary, were bribed and suborned; the uncooperative were threatened or simply eliminated.”39 The stain even reached into the presidential office. The election of Ernesto Samper Pizano (1950– ) in 1994 was tainted by evi-

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dence that the Cali cartel had contributed $6 million to his campaign. Although Samper denied any knowledge of the matter, the Clinton administration was convinced of the need to send “a strong message”; Columbia was “decertified,” which proved counterproductive.40 The result of this humiliation and the loss of economic assistance was “escalating violence, declining state capacity, and the crisis of political legitimacy.”41 As Colombia slid into near collapse toward the end of the 1990s, President Clinton recognized his error and reversed himself, undertaking “a major rescue program.”42 He committed $1.3 billion to Plan Colombia, which had been proposed initially by President Andrés Pastrana Arango (1954– ), newly elected in 1998. Pastrana’s original proposal was intended to be a “Marshall Plan” for economic and social development, but, as finalized, most funds were earmarked for military action against the narcotics industry and for drug-crop eradication.43 Success was elusive as the century ended, particularly since supply was only half of the problem. Colombia’s situation was unique, but the problem of corruption that threatened the nation’s survival was common throughout the hemisphere. Corruption was a significant factor in the collapse of socialism, but it was a problem of capitalism as well. Witness the Jim Fisks, Samuel Insulls, and Ken Lays. However, there is a difference: in a free society, embezzlers go to trial; in a free economy, inefficient enterprises go bankrupt.44 This proved to be the case in the fledging free market economies of Latin America in the 1990s. The transition from state intervention to economic liberalism was especially difficult in Mexico, where old habits were hard to break. President Carlos Salinas (1988–94) sold off choice SOEs at bargain prices to favorites and insiders, which resulted in the creation of “unregulated [private] monopolies.”45 Luis Donaldo Colosio, the PRI candidate for president in 1994, pledged to investigate allegations of corruption in previous administrations, but he was assassinated in Tijuana in March of that year. A lone gunman was arrested and convicted of the crime, but President Salinas, the Tijuana drug cartel, or both, were suspects in theory. Theory acquired certain substance when Salinas’s elder brother Raúl was charged and convicted of the murder that occurred in September 1994 of José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the attorney general in charge of the Colosio assassination investigation. His fifty-year sentence was subsequently reduced substantially, and in 2005 he was acquitted of all murder charges. Raúl nevertheless remained under indictment for money laundering (presumably, drug money) and for “inexplicable enrichment.”46 Carlos Salinas denied any involvement in these affairs, but he generally preferred to reside in Europe after his term expired. Peru’s Fujimori likewise became an expatriate in 2000, amid growing scandals involving his ten years in power.

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Fujimori reshaped the Peruvian economy, substantially reduced the cultivation of coca, and crushed the Shining Path insurgency, but at the cost of democratic institutions and honest government. His efforts to secure a third term led to his flight to Japan in 2000. Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s closest advisor and confidant and the head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN), was the principal cause of Fujimori’s undoing. Totally unscrupulous, Montesinos was on the CIA’s payroll and the main contact in Peru for the U.S. war on drugs,47 while simultaneously extorting protection money from Peruvian drug traffickers (whom he was in charge of policing). He smuggled arms to Colombian guerrillas (FARC) and embezzled millions in the purchase of MiG fighter jets from Belarus. A wheeler-dealer who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to media outlets for favorable reporting, he was exposed by a videotape that showed him paying a paltry $15,000 to a congressman for his vote in lifting the constitutional ban on Fujimori’s bid for a third term.48 Montesinos fled Peru; for his part, Fujimori, on a trip to Japan, decided to remain there, vacating his office. In the decade following the Fujimori era, after democracy had been restored to the country, Montesinos was tried and imprisoned for embezzlement, among other charges; Fujimori remained unrepentant and continued to threaten a comeback. Carlos Menem of Argentina, under similar circumstances, nurtured the same ambition. As president (1989–99), Menem converted Argentina from one of the most protected economies to one of the most open.49 He tamed inflation and turned the Peronista economic structure “upside down.”50 “Between 1990 and 1993 alone, foreigners invested more than $4.7 billion in public corporations . . . which had been privatized by the [Menem] government.”51 Yet, Menem was more an item for the tabloids than for the financial pages. He was “renowned for his love of the high life, driving a red Ferrari and socializing with movie stars, footballers and other celebrities.”52 Suspected of corrupt practices to support his lavish lifestyle, Menem was indicted in 2001 on charges of the illicit export of arms to Ecuador and Croatia during his tenure, and of “controlling two illegal undeclared Swiss bank accounts” amounting to over $10 million.53 Facing multiple counts of corruption, Menem nevertheless made an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2003. Despite these rough beginnings, neoliberalism remained in the ascendancy. The Mexican scholar Jorge G. Castañeda proclaimed in his 1993 book Utopia Unarmed: “The Cold War is over and Communism and the socialist bloc have collapsed. The United States and capitalism have won, and in few areas of the globe is that victory so clear-cut, sweet, and spectacular as in Latin America.”54 And he added: “Socialism is no more.”55 Professor Edward J. McCaughan echoed

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these sentiments: “At the century’s close, antistatism was riding the crest of the wave of capitalism’s triumph over socialism, even within the Latin American lefts.”56 Castañeda warned, however, that the conditions which had given rise to the socialist impulse still existed in Latin America, namely, “poverty, injustice, gaping social disparities, and overwhelming daily violence.”57 This admonition was both a challenge for the twenty-first century and a stark reminder of the failure of socialism in the twentieth. Socialism had failed because in all instances where it achieved power it quickly degenerated into one-party rule that discouraged independence and creativity. Allowing for distinctions between Marxist and non-Marxist approaches, the vanguard party produced a new elite class which concentrated power in a highly centralized and increasingly authoritarian state apparatus. The leadership grew soft and anti-intellectual. It manipulated the bureaucracy and state enterprises as mechanisms for maintaining party discipline and relieving unemployment pressure, wherein loyalty and sycophancy trumped qualifications and rational staffing levels. Under such circumstances, accountability lost meaning, and corruption, cover-up, and red tape stifled efficiency and productivity. The electoral process within the party structure and the nation at large became a sham, blocking reform and causing ossification. Dissidents, mainly leftist intellectuals still clinging to the ideal, blamed an “old guard” for what occurred, failing to recognize that the problem was systemic. Above all, socialism’s failure was economic and social. Without implying that Professor Rosemary Thorp is in agreement with this interpretation, it is appropriate to refer to her overall assessment of the Latin American condition at the century’s end, since there is none other as succinct: What did the Latin American economies achieve in the course of a hundred years? The closest we can come to answers is that per capita income increased fivefold, yet today [1998] it is lower in proportion to the industrialized countries than it was a century ago; modern infrastructure was built and industry grew to 25 percent of GDP [as a result of ISI], but the region’s share of world trade was halved; social indicators such as life expectancy and literacy improved dramatically, but inequity and poverty worsened.58 That many Latin American countries were aware of this state of affairs contributed to the adoption of neoliberalism, in order to alert the international financial community that “the tide had turned.”59 It was time to shelve the worn out, anti-imperialist rhetoric and the association of exports with colonialism.

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There was a “new world order” of “transnationalization, interdependence, and liberal democracy.”60 The global economy was expanding, and Latin America wanted to be a part of it. For too long it had been “swimming upstream”; for example, near mid-century, “just as much of Latin America was turning inward [ISI], the world was about to embark on a remarkable twenty-five year (1948– 73) upswing that reestablished international trade as the engine of growth for most developed countries and many developing ones.”61 Latin America clung to ISI, missing the opportunity for producing manufactured goods for export, which Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea seized.62 Not wishing to be left behind again, the Latin American countries opened up their economies and pursued export promotion in the 1990s, particularly “non- traditional exports in the manufacturing sector.”63 There was general acceptance as the century neared its close, even among the most radical elements in Cuba and Mexico, that there was “only one world economy” and that it was “capitalist.”64 According to Immanuel Wallerstein, a world-systems framework was evolving, consisting of “one capitalist economic system with different sectors performing different functions” within regions categorized as “core, periphery, and semiperiphery.”65 Another way of viewing the world system or global economy is to classify nations according to their principal earnings through international trade—for example, entrepreneurial states, oil states, mineral states, agricultural states, and production states. The classification entrepreneurial state, which includes the United States, Japan, and certain Western European countries, is based upon the availability of investment capital, high-tech capability, and an educated population. Although many Latin American countries continue to export mineral and agricultural commodities, they are at the same time emerging as production states, that is to say, they are exporting manufactured items. In the United States, high-volume retailers such as Wal-Mart and L. L. Bean and popular clothing brands such as Nike, Polo, and Jockey increasingly offer products made either in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, or Chile. “Latin America’s exports of manufactures in 1990 were twenty-five times larger than those of the early 1950s and exports of semi-manufactures five and a half times larger.”66 The challenge is to find a way of transferring export-led growth to the non-export sector of the economy and the domestic needs of education, housing, and jobs.67 Professor Guillermo O’Donnell declared in 1995, “The social situation of Latin America is a scandal.”68 His solution rested on making free markets and democratic society compatible, wherein the state would assume responsibility

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in the “social policy area,” seeking “new and more effective paths of cooperation between the state and private agents.”69 Arguing for what might be termed socialized capitalism, O’Donnell proposed that “social policy regain some autonomy in relation to economic policy.”70 He placed his trust in democracy, believing in its “values of human decency and the dignity of individuals.”71 As the shortcomings of neoliberalism were beginning to sink in, the NAFTA treaty included provisions regarding labor rights and environmental protection. Without undermining the comparative advantage the Latin American countries enjoy in manufacturing for export, namely, “manufacturing exports from low-wage to high-wage economies,”72 a concerned state may exercise regulatory powers to ensure safe and sanitary working conditions and defend workers against abuse. As the economist Carol Wise affirmed, “Even market approaches demand a basic level of capacity, coordination, and will power within the state to be carried out effectively.”73 Professor Thorp has noted that the “appalling human development record of the 1980s” created interest in “integrating social and economic development.”74 Agreeing, Professors Barbara Stallings and Robert Kaufman maintained that “most Latin Americans [had] not given up hope that all can be combined.”75 Indeed, the Radical Left of Latin America had not given up hope, and was prepared to go further, remaining “in the hunt for an antisystemic, counterhegemonic paradigm.”76 Even among the Liberal Left, as Professor Joseph L. Love observed, “the tradition of state intervention in the economies and societies of Latin America—and therefore of an interventionist doctrine of some sort—is not likely to disappear quickly.”77 As long as millions of Latin Americans live in extreme poverty, there will be a role for the state in overcoming their condition, but looking back at the experience of the twentieth century it is evident that socialism is not the answer. Still, not everyone is convinced. Latin America was engulfed by a so-called pink tide at the beginning of the new century, with Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (1945– ) of Brazil and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela riding its crest. Elected president of Brazil in 2002, Lula adopted a mixed-economy approach, but there were hints of the socialist impulse (at long last) in his background as a union leader and in his rhetoric appealing to a mass base that ranged from Trotskyites to social democrats. Although he maintained the macroeconomic policies of the 1990s mandated by the IMF, he inaugurated social programs designed to eliminate hunger in Brazil and rescue families from poverty. Chávez, for his part, took a more decisive stand, proclaiming “socialism for the 21st century.”

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Enjoying the highest oil prices ever, Chávez inaugurated an anti-poverty campaign at home and promoted a “Bolivarian Revolution” abroad. He denounced free trade and economic liberalism as instruments of Yankee imperialism, proposing to unify Latin America as a socialist trading bloc. To that end, he established close ties with Fidel Castro, supporting the Cuban economy with a gift of 100,000 barrels of oil a day, and he purchased $3 billion worth of Argentine bonds in order to assist the government of Néstor Kirchner, who had repudiated the neoliberal policies of Carlos Menem. Moreover, he contributed to the campaigns of leftist candidates for president throughout the hemisphere, namely, Evo Morales in Bolivia; Ollanta Humala in Peru; Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico; Rafael Correa in Ecuador; and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. With success in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, Chávez gained momentum and socialism appeared to be reborn. However, on Sunday, December 2, 2007, Chávez overplayed his hand. The Venezuelan electorate defeated him in a referendum to approve constitutional amendments that were intended to enhance greatly the powers of the presidency and enable Chávez to seek reelection repeatedly. How the governments of Chávez and Lula will evolve remains to be seen, but if “the past is prologue” the outcomes are predictable. Predictable or not, as long as abject poverty persists in Latin America, there will be a socialist impulse, because the impulse to socialism is essentially idealistic (Chávez’s miscalculations notwithstanding). Although free markets and free trade are proven engines of growth, no society is healthy in the midst of ignorance and misery. As Jorge Castañeda has observed, there will always be a left and right on every issue. What the two positions need to do is find common ground that will engage the private and public sectors in social spending and restrain greed and the abuse of the environment without restricting individual freedom, incentive, and initiative. Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru are working on it.

Notes

Introduction: An Overview 1. See Jarrin and Martz, Latin American Political Thought and Ideology, 128. 2. Stabb, In Quest of Identity, 18. 3. Ibid., 18–19; see also Jarrin and Martz, 125. 4. Stabb, 22–23, 31. 5. Jarrin and Martz, 133. 6. O’Brien, The Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin America, 78. 7. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 7. 8. Conniff, “Introduction,” 7. 9. Ibid., 1. 10. Green, Gaitanismo, 6–7. 11. Ibid., 6. 12. Quoted in Cardoso and Helwege, “Populism, Profligacy, and Redistribution,” 50. 13. Kaufman and Stallings, “The Political Economy of Latin American Populism,” 15–16. 14. Canovan, Populism, 3. 15. Ibid., 13. 16. Ibid., 301. 17. McCaughan, Reinventing Revolution, 143. 18. Drake, Comment on “The Political Economy of Latin American Populism,” by Robert R. Kaufman and Barbara Stallings, 38. 19. Jarrin and Martz, 148. 20. Crawford, A Century of Latin American Thought, 139. 21. Walter, The Socialist Party in Argentina, 19. 22. See Vanger, The Model Country, 287. 23. Ibid., 289. 24. Ibid., 102. 25. See DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, xxviii, 94.

274 / Notes to Pages 5–11 26. Ibid., xxvi. 27. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 50. 28. See Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 54. 29. Caviedes, The Politics of Chile, 299. 30. Jobet, Historia del Partido Socialista de Chile, 93. 31. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 144. 32. Caviedes, 233. 33. Stabb, 57. 34. See Davis, Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, and Dictators in Latin America, 46–47; Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, 70, 109–10. 35. Jarrin and Martz, 225. 36. Ibid., 195. 37. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, 107–8. 38. Niemeyer, Revolution at Querétaro, 221; see also 87, 217. 39. Tannenbaum, Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread, 104, 113. 40. See Bazdresch and Levy, “Populism and Economic Policy in Mexico,” 229. 41. Story, Industry, the State, and Public Policy in Mexico, 152. 42. Basurto, “Populism in Mexico,” 82. 43. Jarrin and Martz, 190–91. 44. Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 23. 45. Kantor, The Ideology and Program of the Peruvian Aprista Movement, 26. 46. Ibid., 70. 47. Ibid., 75. 48. Ibid., 36–37. 49. Graham, Peru’s APRA, 48. 50. See Jarrin and Martz, 274–75; see also Davis, Latin American Thought, 183. 51. Jarrin and Martz, 286–87. 52. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America, 26–27. 53. Ibid., 271. 54. Ibid., 213. 55. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, 119. 56. Ibid., 118–19. 57. Devlin, Debt and Crisis in Latin America, 39–47. 58. Ibid., 188. 59. Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence, 369. 60. Fernández, “What Have Populists Learned From Hyperinflation?” 135. 61. Kaufman, “Economic Orthodoxy and Policy Change in Mexico,” 115. 62. Ellner, “Introduction,” 6, 143; Booth, “Costa Rica,” 448–49; Thorpe, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 261. 63. Castañeda, 474. 64. Waisman, “Argentina,” 101. 65. Sunkel, “Contemporary Economic Reform in Historical Perspective,” 334. 66. Carr, “Mexico,” 86–88; Castañeda, 199. 67. Bellamy and Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State, 128–29. 68. Castañeda, 200.

Notes to Pages 11–20 / 275

69. Ibid., 203. 70. Chilcote, “Left Political Ideology and Practice,” 183.

Chapter 1. Argentina: The Socialist Ferment

1. Rock, Argentina, 1516–1987, 136, 164. 2. Whitaker, Argentina, 53–54. 3. Ibid., 61. 4. Romero, A History of Argentine Political Thought, 166. 5. Scobie, Buenos Aires, 209–10. 6. Romero, 183. 7. Whitaker, 60. 8. Rock, 176. 9. Scobie, Buenos Aires, 152–55. 10. Romero, 177. 11. Scobie, Buenos Aires, 228–32. 12. Bailey, Labor, Nationalism, and Politics in Argentina, 11. 13. Whitaker, 58. 14. Bailey, 40. 15. Ibid., 15. 16. Jarrin and Martz, Latin American Political Thought and Ideology, 182–86. 17. Bailey, 31–32. 18. Jarrin and Martz, 186. 19. Ibid., 187. 20. Walter, The Socialist Party in Argentina, 32; Bailey, 19. 21. Jarrin and Martz, 187. 22. Bailey, 23–24; Romero, 196; Walter, Socialist Party, 13. 23. Romero, 196. 24. Walter, Socialist Party, 45. 25. Romero, 200–201. 26. Bailey, 21; Walter, Socialist Party, 50. 27. Walter, Socialist Party, 51. 28. Bailey, 26. 29. Walter, Socialist Party, 45–46. 30. Scobie, Argentina, 204. 31. Walter, Socialist Party, 19. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 20. 34. Ibid. 35. Bailey, 7. 36. Ibid., 17. 37. Romero, 193. 38. Crawford, A Century of Latin American Thought, 139. 39. Walter, Socialist Party, 34. 40. Crawford, 139.

276 / Notes to Pages 20–27

41. Ibid. 42. Walter, Socialist Party, 75. 43. Ibid., 80. 44. Ibid., 88. 45. Scobie, Buenos Aires, 145. 46. Walter, Socialist Party, 90. 47. Romero, 202–3. 48. Walter, Socialist Party, 93. 49. Romero, 205. 50. Crassweller, Perón, 59. 51. Whitaker, 66–67. 52. Conniff, “Epilogue: New Research Directions,” 194–95. 53. Ibid. 54. Bailey, 31–32; Walter, Socialist Party, 149–50. 55. Scobie, Argentina, 213; Walter, Socialist Party, 82. 56. Walter, Student Politics in Argentina, 39. 57. Ibid., 72. 58. Rock, 200. 59. Ibid., 201. 60. Walter, Student Politics, 49–50, 54. 61. Ibid., 55. 62. Ibid., 51, 63. Crawford, 148. 64. Rock, 202. 65. Bailey, 44–45. 66. Walter, Socialist Party, 118. 67. Ibid., 132 68. Ibid., 145, 178–80. 69. Ibid., 189, 193. 70. Bailey, 49. 71. Rock, 207. 72. Scobie, Argentina, 212. 73. Henderson and Pérez, Literature and Politics in Latin America, 457. 74. Walter, Student Politics, 72–73. 75. Rock, 209. 76. Walter, Socialist Party, 209; Romero, 221. 77. Rock, 208–9. 78. Ibid., 207. 79. Romero, 227. 80. Walter, Socialist Party, 225–26. 81. Ibid., 229.

Chapter 2. Uruguay: Batlle’s Way

1. Finch, A Political Economy of Uruguay since 1870, 36–37. 2. Vanger, José Batlle y Ordóñez of Uruguay; the phrase is from the subtitle of the book.

Notes to Pages 27–34 / 277

3. Finch, 10. 4. Ibid., 13. 5. Vanger, Batlle, 20. 6. Ibid., 21. 7. Vanger, The Model Country, 286. 8. Vanger, Batlle, 21–22. 9. Vanger, The Model Country, 285. 10. Ibid., 288. 11. Jarrin and Martz, Latin American Political Thought and Ideology, 155. 12. Vanger, The Model Country, 291. 13. Vanger, Batlle, 28. 14. Ibid., 29. 15. Ibid., 67. 16. Ibid., 68. 17. Vanger, The Model Country, 29. 18. Vanger, Batlle, 68. 19. Finch, 14. 20. Vanger, Batlle, 167. 21. Ibid., 168. 22. Ibid., 246. 23. Ibid., 244, 106. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 245. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 104. 28. Ibid., 194. 29. Ibid., 207. 30. Finch, 58. 31. Vanger, Batlle, 209. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 209–10. 34. Vanger, The Model Country, 285. 35. Ibid., 102. 36. Ibid., 80. 37. Finch, 59. 38. Vanger, The Model Country, 94. 39. Ibid., 101–2. 40. Ibid., 119. 41. Ibid., 127. 42. Ibid., 311. 43. Ibid., 7, 141–43. 44. Ibid., 149. 45. Ibid., 172. 46. Ibid., 313. 47. Ibid., 307. 48. Ibid., 155.

278 / Notes to Pages 34–42

49. Ibid., 174. 50. Ibid., 339. 51. Ibid., 289. 52. Ibid., 318. 53. Jarrin and Martz, 165. 54. Vanger, The Model Country, 243. 55. Ibid., 238–39. 56. Ibid., 259. 57. Ibid., 260. 58. Ibid., 261, 285. 59. Ibid., 160. 60. Ibid., 284.

Chapter 3. Chile: The Road to Socialism

1. Caviedes, The Politics of Chile, 299. 2. Gil, The Political System of Chile, 53. 3. Fagg, Latin America, 503. 4. Alexander, Organized Labor in Latin America, 86. 5. DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, xxv. 6. Jarrin and Martz, Latin American Political Thought and Ideology, 184–85. 7. DeShazo, xxviii, 95–98. 8. Ibid., 92–94. 9. Ibid., xxviii, 94. 10. Ibid., 90. 11. Ibid., 54–55. 12. Ibid., 80. 13. Ibid., 102. 14. Ibid., 104–6. 15. Ibid., 99. 16. Ibid., 126–27. 17. Alexander, Organized Labor in Latin America, 86. 18. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 41. 19. Ibid., 45. 20. DeShazo, 158. 21. Davis, Latin American Thought, 125–27; see also Gil, 56. 22. DeShazo, 154. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 134. 25. Ibid. 26. Keen, A History of Latin America, 2:231. 27. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 50. 28. DeShazo, 146. 29. Ibid., 185. 30. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 49.

Notes to Pages 42–47 / 279

31. DeShazo, 187–88. 32. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 46. 33. Ibid., 50. 34. DeShazo, 241. 35. Ibid., 242. 36. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 60. 37. Jobet, Historia del Partido Socialista de Chile, 32. 38. Ibid., 33, 73. 39. DeShazo, 260. 40. Jobet, 103. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 105. 43. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 140. 44. Ibid., 141. 45. Jobet, 101. 46. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 75. 47. Ibid., 73. 48. Ibid., 75. 49. Jobet, 93–94. 50. Jobet, 96, 93; see also Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 73. 51. Jobet, 87–88. 52. Ibid., 95. 53. Nunn, “Marmaduke Grove,” 52–53. 54. Jobet, 113. 55. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 95. 56. Ibid., 83. 57. Ibid., 148. 58. Ibid., 202. 59. Jobet, 51. 60. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 218. 61. Jobet, 55. 62. Caviedes, 172. 63. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 242. 64. Ibid., 279. 65. Ibid., 291–93. 66. Gil, 179. 67. Ibid., 158. 68. Caviedes, 204. 69. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 306. 70. Gil, 205. 71. Jarrin and Martz, 408–11. 72. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 122. 73. Ibid., 300. 74. Gil, 269. 75. Jarrin and Martz, 415.

280 / Notes to Pages 48–58

76. Caviedes, 223; see also Gil, 303. 77. Caviedes, 221. 78. Ibid., 222. 79. Ibid., 242. 80. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 302.

Chapter 4. Ideas Serving the Mexican Revolution 1. Falcón, “Charisma, Tradition, and Caciquismo,” 417–18; Ruiz, Triumphs and Tragedy, 339 infra; Benjamin, “The Many Mexicos in Revolutionary Historiography,” 334–37. 2. Ross, “The Peace of Porfirio,” 43–44. 3. Quoted in Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 228. 4. Gonzales, The Mexican Revolution, 24. 5. Ibid., 48, 24. 6. Ibid., 8; see also Ruiz, 296–97, for an account of the extent of foreign ownership of lands, mines, and other properties in the states of Chihuahua and Coahuila in 1910. 7. Keen, A History of Latin America, 2:183. 8. Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, 64. 9. Gonzales, 65; Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 1:44. 10. Cockcroft, 5. 11. Ibid., 65. 12. Ibid., 67. 13. Ibid., 70. 14. Ibid., 84. 15. Ibid., 93. 16. Ibid., 95. 17. Regeneración 2, no. 49 (August 7, 1901): 2, available in pdf format from http://www.archivomagon.net/Periodico/Regeneracion/PrimeraEpoca/PrimeraEpoca.html. 18. Cockcroft, 99. 19. Ibid., 103–5. 20. Davis, Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, and Dictators in Latin America, 46–47. 21. Cockcroft, 116. 22. Ibid., 120–21. 23. Davis, Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, and Dictators in Latin America, 50–51. 24. Jarrin and Martz, Latin American Political Thought and Ideology, 195. 25. See Cockcroft, 131–32, 244. 26. Jarrin and Martz, 195. 27. Cockcroft, 126–27. 28. Gonzales, 64–65. 29. Cockcroft, 140. 30. See Davis, Latin American Thought, 151; Stabb, In Quest of Identity, 45–46. 31. Cenovio Ramírez, “El Ateneo de la Juventud, un ejemplo a seguir,” http://www.unidad094. upn.mx/revista/39/ateneo.htm. 32. Jarrin and Martz, 155. 33. Ibid., 156.

Notes to Pages 59–66 / 281 34. Herring, A History of Latin America, 337. 35. Meyer and Sherman, The Course of Mexican History, 492. 36. See ibid., 498–99. 37. See Hodges and Gandy, Mexico, 1910–1982, 5–10, for extended treatment of the volcano metaphor. 38. Hodges and Gandy, 12. 39. Cockcroft, 223–24. 40. Gonzales, 76. 41. Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, 400–404. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Meyer and Sherman, 514. 45. Cockcroft, 176–77. 46. Ibid., 209. 47. Meyer and Sherman, 516–17. 48. Ibid., 524. 49. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, 10. 50. Cockcroft, 216. 51. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, 42. 52. Ibid. 53. Gonzales, 135. 54. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, 65. 55. Ibid., 107–12. 56. Gonzales, 138. 57. Ibid., 126, 139; Knight, 2:125. 58. Meyer and Sherman, 232. 59. Keen, 2:274. 60. Hodges and Gandy, 22. 61. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, 242. 62. Ibid., 243. 63. Ibid., 242. 64. Meyer and Sherman, 542. 65. See Tannenbaum, Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread, 104. 66. Niemeyer, Revolution at Querétaro, 66. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 87. 69. Ibid., 217. 70. Ibid., 64–65. 71. Cockcroft, 146. 72. Niemeyer, 65. 73. Ibid., 67. 74. Ibid., 144. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 138. 77. Ibid., 118–19.

282 / Notes to Pages 67–75

78. Ibid., 107–8. 79. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, 187–88. 80. Tannenbaum, 114. 81. Niemeyer, 133. 82. Ibid., 221.

Chapter 5. Implementing the Constitution of 1917

1. Meyer and Sherman, The Course of Mexican History, 576. 2. Gonzales, The Mexican Revolution, 193. 3. Tannenbaum, Mexico: The Struggle for Peace and Bread, 121. 4. Gonzales, 177. 5. See Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, 71–72. 6. Meyer and Sherman, 572. 7. Crawford, A Century of Latin American Thought, 264. 8. Meyer and Sherman, 583. 9. Ibid., 588. 10. Ibid., 592. 11. Gonzales, 193. 12. Benjamin, “Laboratories of the New States,” 77. 13. Gonzales, 193. 14. Fowler-Salamini, Agrarian Radicalism in Veracruz, 110–11. 15. Gonzales, 225. 16. Fowler-Salamini, 110. 17. Gonzales, 225. 18. Meyer and Sherman, 596. 19. Gonzales, 226. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 169. 22. Niemeyer, Revolution at Querétaro, 181. 23. Fallaw, “Dry Law, Wet Politics,” 40. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 46. 26. Niemeyer, 181. 27. Benjamin, “Laboratories of the New States,” 75. 28. Hodges and Gandy, Mexico, 1910–1982, 38–39. 29. Fallaw, 48. 30. Ibid., 53. 31. Ibid., 51. 32. Fowler-Salamini, 70. 33. Ibid., 35. 34. Ibid., 35, 38 (table 4). 35. Ibid., 55–56. 36. Niemeyer, 159. 37. Fowler-Salamini, 57. 38. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 75–82 / 283

39. Ibid., 95. 40. Ibid., 92–93. 41. Ibid., 92. 42. Ibid., 97–99. 43. Ibid., 92. 44. Ibid., 172. 45. Ibid., 76. 46. Gonzales, 223. 47. Benjamin, “Laboratories of the New States,” 79. 48. Gonzales, 230–31. 49. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico, 665–66. 50. Ibid., 679. 51. Gonzales, 241. 52. Meyer and Sherman, 601–2. 53. Ibid., 602. 54. Gonzales, 245. 55. Ibid. 56. Hodges and Gandy, 62. 57. Meyer and Sherman, 599–600. 58. Ibid., 600. 59. Ibid. 60. Gonzales, 237. 61. Ibid., 235, 258. 62. Meyer and Sherman, 600. 63. Hodges and Gandy, 56. 64. Quoted in Gonzales, 250. 65. Quoted in Hodges and Gandy, 65. 66. Voss, “Nationalizing the Revolution,” 300.

Chapter 6. The Mexican Fallout: Nicaragua

1. Gonzales, The Mexican Revolution, 258. 2. Hodges and Gandy, Mexico, 1910–1982, 130. 3. Liss, Radical Thought in Central America, 176–77. 4. Macaulay, The Sandino Affair, 50. 5. Ibid., 52. 6. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 113, 127. 7. Liss, 177. 8. Macaulay, 51. 9. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 5. 10. Jarrin and Martz, Latin American Political Thought and Ideology, 182–85. 11. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 56. 12. Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, 231. 13. Jarrin and Martz, 194. 14. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 33–34. 15. Ibid., 39–40.

284 / Notes to Pages 82–92

16. Ibid., 7. 17. Macaulay, 54. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 55. 20. Ibid., 56. 21. Ibid., 25. 22. Mecham, A Survey of United States–Latin American Relations, 332–33. 23. Macaulay, 61. 24. Liss, 178. 25. Macaulay, 113. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 112–13. 28. Bartlett, The Record of American Diplomacy, 546–49. 29. Macaulay, 10. 30. Ibid., 148. 31. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 94–95. 32. Ibid., 94. 33. Ibid., 71. 34. Macaulay, 157. 35. Ibid., 158. 36. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 13. 37. Ibid., 24. 38. Ibid., 20–21. 39. Macaulay, 214. 40. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 9. 41. Ibid., 58. 42. Ibid., 43–44. 43. Macaulay, 211. 44. Ibid., 235. 45. Ibid., 246. 46. Ibid., 248. 47. Ibid., 226. 48. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 54–55. 49. Macaulay, 248. 50. Ibid., 250–51. 51. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 172–73.

Chapter 7. The Three: González Prada, Mariátegui, and Haya

1. Stabb, In Quest of Identity, 122. 2. Jarrin and Martz, Latin American Political Thought and Ideology, 190–91. 3. Herring, A History of Latin America, 598. 4. Keen, A History of Latin America, 2:254. 5. Herring, 600. 6. Herring, 600; Crawford, A Century of Latin American Thought, 181. 7. Klarén, Peru, 200.

Notes to Pages 92–97 / 285

8. Ibid., 200. 9. Keen, 2:254. 10. Ibid., 2:255. 11. Davis, Makers of Democracy in Latin America, 82. 12. Klarén, 200. 13. Keen, 2:389. 14. Jarrin and Martz, 188. 15. Klarén, 220–21. 16. Keen, 2:389. 17. Stabb, 112–13. 18. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 180. 19. Ibid., 181. 20. Ibid. 21. Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 92. 22. Crawford, 189. 23. Klarén, 254. 24. Ibid., 256. 25. Jarrin and Martz, 280. 26. Klarén, 256. 27. Ibid., 262. 28. Mariátegui, 28–29. 29. Ibid., 31. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 5. 32. Ibid., 3. 33. Klarén, 257. 34. Mariátegui, 4. 35. Klarén, 261–62. 36. Mariátegui, xxvii. 37. Chang-Rodríguez, “José Carlos Mariátegui,” 285. 38. Crawford, 189. 39. Mariátegui, xxix–xxx. 40. Klarén, 261–62. 41. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 227. 42. Klarén, 243. 43. Ibid., 233. 44. Ibid., 239. 45. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 224. 46. Klarén, 254; Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 224. 47. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 225. 48. Ibid. 49. Hodges and Gandy, Mexico, 1910–1982, 131. 50. Klarén, 260; Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 239. 51. Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 83–84. 52. Kantor, The Ideology and Program of the Peruvian Aprista Movement, 43. 53. Hodges and Gandy, 134.

286 / Notes to Pages 97–103

54. Kantor, 38–39. 55. Hodges and Gandy, 134; see also Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 86–87. 56. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 240. 57. Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 80. 58. Ibid., 83–84. 59. Hodges and Gandy, 135. 60. Kantor, 23–26. 61. Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 82. 62. Kantor, 30. 63. Ibid., 25. 64. Ibid., 31. 65. Ibid., 31–33. 66. Ibid., 33. 67. Mariátegui, 14–17. 68. Kantor, 49. 69. Ibid. 70. Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 76. 71. Klarén, 273–74. 72. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 265. 73. Klarén, 275.

Chapter 8. APRA: The Maximum Program 1. Hodges and Gandy, Mexico, 1910–1982, 134–35. 2. Ibid., 131. 3. Klarén, Peru, 260. 4. Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 89. 5. Klarén, 261. 6. LAS (Lima) to Haya (Germany), 21-XII-30, in Henderson and Pérez, Literature and Politics in Latin America [comprising the annotated and translated version of the correspondence of Luis Alberto Sánchez (herein referred to as LAS), 1919–1980], 178. 7. Seoane (Buenos Aires) to LAS (Santiago), 15-II-[31], in ibid., 395. 8. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 243. 9. Klarén, 277. 10. Henderson and Pérez, 11–13. 11. Pike, The United States and Latin America, 254; Ogorzaly, Waldo Frank, 9. 12. Pike, The United States and Latin America, 250. 13. Ibid., 254. 14. Ogorzaly, 79. 15. Ibid., 34–37. 16. Trachtenberg, Memoirs of Waldo Frank, 144–45. 17. Mariátegui to LAS, 20-X-29, in Henderson and Pérez, 315; Marinello (Havana) to LAS [Lima], 9-XII-29, in ibid., 316. 18. Trachtenberg, 167. 19. Ogorzaly, 164.

Notes to Pages 103–109 / 287 20. Trachtenberg, 166. 21. Ibid., 160–61. 22. Ogorzaly, 83. 23. Ibid., 136. 24. Ogorzaly, 9. 25. Ibid., 96. 26. Ibid., 110. 27. Frank to LAS, 7-I-34, in Henderson and Pérez, 104. 28. Seoane to LAS, 24-IV-30, in ibid., 393. 29. Seoane (Buenos Aires) to LAS (Lima/Santiago?) [15-IX-30], in ibid., 393. 30. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), 10-IV-36, in ibid., 204–5. 31. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), ?-I-35, in ibid., 180. 32. Ibid. 33. LAS (Santiago) to Haya (Lima), 31-I-39, in ibid., 230. 34. Mañach (New York) to LAS, 2-I-36, in ibid., 313. 35. Henderson and Pérez, 166. 36. Picón Salas (Santiago) to LAS (Lima), 6-III-34, in ibid., 355. 37. LAS (Lima) to Picón Salas (Santiago), 21-III-34, in ibid., 355. 38. Diez de Medina to LAS, January and March 1940, in ibid., 85. 39. [Report] to LAS and Seoane, 17-III-[37], in ibid., 404. 40. Alfredo González Prado to LAS, 15-IV-38, in ibid., 151. 41. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), [?-III-37], in ibid., 222. 42. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), 1-X-[35], in ibid., 187–88. 43. LAS (Santiago) to Haya (Lima), 9-XII-[35], in ibid., 192–93. 44. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), 4-XII-[35], in ibid., 192; LAS (Santiago) to Haya (Lima), 9-XII-[35], in ibid., 192–93. 45. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), 8-III-36, in ibid., 201. 46. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), 23-[VIII-36], in ibid., 217. 47. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), [?-X-38], in ibid., 226–27. 48. Kantor, The Ideology and Program of the Peruvian Aprista Movement, 102. 49. Ibid., 103. 50. Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 94–95. 51. Kantor, 107–9. 52. LAS (Santiago) to Haya (Lima), 9-I-43, in Henderson and Pérez, 238–39. 53. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), 29-III-43, in ibid., 240. 54. Klarén, 289. 55. Henderson and Pérez, 13–14. 56. Ibid., 54. 57. Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion, 83. 58. Arciniegas to LAS, 5-III-50, in Henderson and Pérez, 35. 59. Hodges and Gandy, 134. 60. Betancourt to LAS, 9-V-51, in Henderson and Pérez, 50. 61. Henderson and Pérez, 286–87. 62. Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile, 225. 63. Prialé [Lima] to Haya, 1954, in Henderson and Pérez, 360.

288 / Notes to Pages 109–117

64. Haya (Lima) to LAS (Santiago), 25-XI-52, in ibid., 246–47. 65. Haya (Lima) to LAS [San Juan], 8-XI-[52], in ibid., 245.

Chapter 9. APRA: The Minimum Program 1. Kantor, The Ideology and Program of the Peruvian Aprista Movement, 75–76. 2. Ibid., 83. 3. Ibid., 88–89. 4. Ibid., 92. 5. Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 86–87. 6. Hodges and Gandy, Mexico, 1910–1982, 134. 7. Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 21. 8. Ibid., 21. 9. Klarén, Peru, 274. 10. Kantor, 60–62, 122. 11. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 262. 12. Kantor, 49–50. 13. LAS to Jiménez, 8-V-32, in Henderson and Pérez, Literature and Politics in Latin America, 290. 14. Klarén, 287. 15. Seoane to LAS, 1-II-53, in Henderson and Pérez, 23. 16. Kantor, 76–77. 17. Klarén, 291–92. 18. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 286–87. 19. Ibid., 288. 20. Kantor, 209–11. 21. Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile, 53. 22. Klarén, 301–5. 23. Ibid., 312–13. 24. Ibid., 313–14. 25. Ibid., 318–19. 26. Ibid., 329. 27. Ibid., 318. 28. Kantor, 75. In February 1953 Haya wrote to LAS praising Kantor’s work on APRA, in which Kantor repeatedly stated that socialism was APRA’s ultimate goal, as rendering “a great service to APRISMO” (see Haya to LAS, 23-II-1953, in Henderson and Pérez, 248). 29. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 300. 30. Ibid., 301. 31. Klarén, 319. 32. Ibid., 332. 33. Sheahan, Searching for a Better Society, x. 34. Pike, The Modern History of Peru, 306–7. 35. Dosal, Comandante Che, 170. 36. Klarén, 329. 37. Ibid., 330. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 338.

Notes to Pages 117–126 / 289

40. Ibid., 315. 41. Ibid., 305. 42. Ibid., 315. 43. Graham, Peru’s APRA, 48. 44. Klarén, 338. 45. Jarrin and Martz, Latin American Political Thought and Ideology, 421. 46. Klarén, 340. 47. Keen, A History of Latin America, 2:399. 48. Ibid. 49. Klarén, 343. 50. Ibid., 346–47. 51. Ibid., 347. 52. Graham, Peru’s APRA, 48. 53. Keen, 2:398. 54. Klarén, 349. 55. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 216. 56. Keen, 2:399. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Klarén, 355.

Chapter 10. Venezuela: Democratic Action

1. Betancourt, Venezuela, 48. 2. Martz, Acción Democrática, 22. 3. Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile, 24. 4. Martz, Acción Democrática, 23. 5. Betancourt, 43. 6. Ibid., 42. 7. Shaw, Gallegos, 20. 8. Ibid., 55. 9. Betancourt, 48; Alexander, Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela, 78–79. 10. Alexander, Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela, 81. 11. Schwartzberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America during the Truman Years, 132. 12. Ibid., 133. 13. Ibid., 136. 14. Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile, 27. 15. Schwartzberg, 132. 16. Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile, 26. 17. Martz, Acción Democrática, 122–23. 18. Alexander, Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela, 57. 19. Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile, 25–26. 20. Alexander, Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela, 58. 21. Lombardi, Venezuela, 219. 22. Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile, 27. 23. Ibid., 28.

290 / Notes to Pages 127–135 24. Martz, Acción Democrática, 35. 25. Ibid., 36. 26. Ibid., 40. 27. Alexander, Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela, 140–41. 28. Martz, Acción Democrática, 127. 29. Ibid., 126. 30. Alexander, Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela, 155. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 155–57. 33. Betancourt, 96. 34. Ibid., 110. 35. Ibid., 111. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 127. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 134. 40. Ibid., 146. 41. Ibid., 150. 42. Ibid., 140. 43. Ibid., 165. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 197. 46. Ibid., 200. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 184. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 222. 51. Ibid., 210–12. 52. Ibid., 218. 53. Ibid., 220. 54. Ibid., 221. 55. Martz, Acción Democrática, 76. 56. Ibid., 84–85. 57. Ibid., 87–89. 58. “Skipper of the Dream Boat,” Time, February 28, 1955 (cover and cover story). 59. See Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile, 111–60. 60. Betancourt, 349. 61. Ibid. 62. Martz, Acción Democrática, 178. 63. Ibid., 235. 64. Alexander, Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela, 446–47. 65. Betancourt, 395. 66. Stewart, “Public Administration,” 225–26. 67. Ruscoe, “Education Policy in Venezuela,” 255. 68. James A. Hanson, “Cycles of Economic Growth and Structural Change since 1950,” 79.

Notes to Pages 135–147 / 291

69. Ibid., 78. 70. Ameringer, “The Foreign Policy of Venezuelan Democracy,” 342. 71. Ibid. 72. Martz, Acción Democrática, 115–16. 73. Ibid., 116.

Chapter 11. Costa Rica: Tico Socialism

1. Stone, La dinastia de los conquistadores, 189. 2. Ameringer, Democracy in Costa Rica, 20. 3. Ibid., 24. 4. Liss, Radical Thought in Central America, 144. 5. Ibid., 132, 145. 6. Ameringer, Democracy in Costa Rica, 26–27. 7. Ibid., 28. 8. Ibid., 28–29. 9. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 12–13. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 13–14. 12. Araya Pochet, Historia de los partidos políticos, 33. 13. Ibid., 26. 14. Ibid., 33–34. 15. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 24. 16. Ibid., 27. 17. Ibid., 6. 18. Castro Esquivel, José Figueres Ferrer, 18. 19. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 8. 20. Ibid., 9. 21. Ibid., 23. 22. Figueres, Palabras gastadas, 20. 23. Ibid. 24. Araya Pochet, 38. 25. Ibid., 45. 26. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 33. 27. Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion, 66–67. 28. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 70. 29. Ibid., 101. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 103. 32. Ibid., 111. 33. Ibid., 103. 34. Ibid., 96. 35. Ibid., 165. 36. Ibid., 178. 37. Ibid., 172.

292 / Notes to Pages 148–155

Chapter 12. From the Caribbean to the Andes 1. Pérez, Cuba, 145. 2. Thomas, Cuba, 306. 3. Ibid., 302. 4. Kirk, José Martí, 115–16. 5. Pérez, Cuba, 145. 6. Thomas, Cuba, 306. 7. Carrillo, Cuba 1933, 9. 8. Ibid., 55. 9. Ibid., 78. 10. Ibid., 79. 11. Ibid., 80–81. 12. Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Expeience, 9. 13. Pérez, 268. 14. Báez, La Enciclopedia de Cuba, 9:682. 15. Ibid., 739. 16. Ibid., 124. 17. Farber, Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 94. 18. Báez, 593. 19. Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Experience, 18. 20. Ibid., 69. 21. From the PRC-A Programa (November 1951), quoted in Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Experience, 168. 22. Ibid., 169. 23. Ibid., 170. 24. Ibid., 171–72. 25. Miolán, El Perredé desde mi ángulo, 516–17. 26. Ibid., 99. 27. See Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion. 28. U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 1975. S. Rep. 755, 192. 29. See ibid., 191, 200–201, 213. 30. Bosch, The Unfinished Experiment, 39. 31. Martin, Overtaken by Events, 316. 32. Ibid., 325. 33. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 773. 34. Martin, 720. 35. Hodges and Gandy, Mexico, 1910–1982, 162–63. 36. Liss, Radical Thought in Central America, 28. 37. Ibid., 45. 38. Ibid. 39. Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile, 44. 40. Liss, 48. 41. Ibid., 44. 42. Ibid., 36.

Notes to Pages 155–166 / 293

43. Ibid., 39. 44. Crawford, A Century of Latin American Thought, 143–44. 45. Quoted in Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 138. 46. Hodges and Gandy, 153. 47. Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion, 83. 48. Anderson, Politics in Central America, 22. 49. Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence, 253–54. 50. Dunkerley, 145. 51. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 342. 52. Green, Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism, and Popular Mobilization in Colombia, 34–35. 53. Ibid., 30. 54. Ibid., 38. 55. Sharpless, Gaitán of Colombia, 45–47. 56. Ibid., 52. 57. Ibid., 58–59. 58. Ibid., 65. 59. Green, 71. 60. Sharpless, Gaitán of Colombia, 72. 61. Ibid., 77–78. 62. Green, 73. 63. Ibid., 80. 64. Sharpless, Gaitán of Colombia, 83. 65. Ibid., 104. 66. Green, 258. 67. Ibid., 222. 68. Sharpless, Gaitán of Colombia, 132–35. 69. Green, 43. 70. Mitchell, “Bolivia,” 1:137. 71. Hodges and Gandy, 136. 72. Ibid., 137. 73. Alexander, Organized Labor in Latin America, 104. 74. Ibid., 110.

Chapter 13. Juan Perón and Justicialismo

1. Crassweller, Perón, 228. 2. Haya to LAS, 8-XI-[52], in Henderson and Pérez, 245. 3. Wynia, Argentina in the Postwar Era, 64–65. 4. Crassweller, 66. 5. Deiner, “Juan Domingo Perón,” 349. 6. Crassweller, 69, 89, 114. 7. Rock, Argentina, 245. 8. Crassweller, 115. 9. Rock, 263. 10. Bailey, Labor, Nationalism, and Politics in Argentina, 83. 11. Ibid., 82.

294 / Notes to Pages 166–173

12. Rock, 254; Bailey, 98–99. 13. Bailey, 89. 14. Ibid., 91. 15. Crassweller, 187. 16. Rock, 275–76. 17. Ibid., 263. 18. Ibid. 19. Crassweller, 209. 20. Ibid., 211. 21. Bailey, 101. 22. Ibid. 23. Rock, 288. 24. Crassweller, 204. 25. Alexander, Prophets of the Revolution, 257–58. 26. Ibid. 27. Crassweller, 252. 28. Ibid., 229. 29. Rock, 266. 30. Ibid., 307; Wynia, 71. 31. Rock., 265. 32. Scobie, Argentina, 238. 33. Bailey, 127. 34. Crassweller, 255. 35. Ibid., 229. 36. Bailey, 144. 37. Rock, 315. 38. Bailey, 165–66. 39. Ibid., 175. 40. Ibid., 184. 41. Rock, 337. 42. Crassweller, 308. 43. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 94. 44. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 177. 45. Rock, 335. 46. Ibid., 326. 47. Crassweller, 332. 48. Ibid., 334. 49. Ibid., 333. 50. Rock, 354. 51. Dosal, Comandante Che, 22. 52. Crassweller, 348–49. 53. Ibid., 352. 54. Rock, 361. 55. Ibid., 330. 56. Ibid., 320.

Notes to Pages 174–182 / 295

57. Crassweller, 362. 58. Rock, 362. 59. Ibid., 363. 60. Ibid., 371. 61. Rivera, Argentina, 32.

Chapter 14. The Rise of Christian Socialism 1. Quadragesimo Anno, Encyclical of Pope Pius XI: On Reconstruction of the Social Order . . . , May 15, 1931, Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius11/P11QUADR. HTM. 2. Herman, Christian Democracy in Venezuela, 12. 3. Jarrin and Martz, Latin American Political Thought and Ideology, 410–11. 4. Williams, Latin American Christian Democratic Parties, 28. 5. Ibid., 41. 6. Ibid., 72. 7. Ibid., 75. 8. Ibid., 79. 9. Ibid., 112. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 114. 12. Ibid., 116. 13. Ibid., 122. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 119. 16. Caviedes, The Politics of Chile, 221. 17. Burnett, Political Groups in Chile, 258–60. 18. Williams, 114. 19. Ibid., 77. 20. Herman, 11. 21. Ibid., 12–13. 22. Quoted in Williams, 192. 23. Jarrin and Martz, 419. 24. Levine, “Beyond the Exhaustion of the Model,” 190. 25. Buxton, The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela, 217. 26. Ibid., 22. 27. Ferm, Third World Liberation Theologies, 8. 28. Ameringer, “The Foreign Policy of Venezuelan Democracy,” 349. 29. Ferm, 8. 30. Herman, 132. 31. Ibid., 214. 32. Webre, José Napoleón Duarte and the Christian Democratic Party in San Salvadoran Politics, 1960–1972, 78. 33. Ibid., 89. 34. Ibid.

296 / Notes to Pages 182–186 35. Keen, A History of Latin America, 2:469. 36. Ibid., 471. 37. Ferm, 7. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Mater et Magistra, Encyclical of Pope John XXIII: On Christianity and Social Progress, May 15, 1961, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_xxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_ enc_15051961_mater_en.html. 41. Pacem in Terris, Encyclical of Pope John XXIII: On Establishing Universal Peace In Truth, Justice, Charity, and Liberty, April 11, 1963, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_xxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem_en.html. 42. Ferm, 8. 43. Ibid., 9. 44. Ibid., 10. 45. Ibid., 11. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 18. 48. Ibid., 19. 49. Ibid., 12. 50. Keen, 2:469. 51. “Camilo Torres: Priest and Guerrilla Fighter,” Greenleft Weekly, February 14, 1996, at GreenLeft Online, http://www.greenleft.org.au/1996/219/15042. 52. Ibid. 53. Ferm, 13. 54. “Camilo Torres,” GreenLeft Online. 55. Ferm, 14. 56. Ibid. 57. Keen, 2:562. 58. Ferm, 55. 59. Quoted in Keen, 2:563. 60. Laborem Exercens, Encyclical of Pope John Paul II, September 14, 1981, http://www. vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laboremexercens_en.html, chap. 3, sec. 11 (italics in original). 61. Ibid., chap. 3, sec. 14 (italics in original). 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Boff and Boff, Liberation Theology, 44. 65. Ibid., 38. 66. Ibid., 65. 67. Ibid., 66, 68. 68. Ibid., 75–76. 69. Ibid., 76. 70. Ibid., 90. 71. Ibid., 44.

Notes to Pages 187–194 / 297

Chapter 15. “Is the Mexican Revolution Dead?”

1. Hodges and Gandy, Mexico, 1910–1982, 65. 2. Meyer and Sherman, The Course of Mexican History, 636. 3. Paz, Strategy, Security, and Spies, 242. 4. Meyer and Sherman, 640. 5. Ibid., 641. 6. Hodges and Gandy, 109. 7. Story, Industry, the State, and Public Policy in Mexico, 43. 8. Ibid., 132. 9. Ibid., 91. 10. Ibid., 45. 11. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 243. 12. Story, 133. 13. Meyer and Sherman, 649. 14. Lombardo Toledano, “A Democracy of the People,” 165. 15. Alisky, “Adolfo López Mateos,” 262. 16. Story, 51. 17. Alisky, “Adolfo López Mateos,” 263. 18. Meyer and Sherman, 652. 19. French-Davis, Muñoz, and Palma, “The Latin American Economies,” 1:188–91. 20. Meyer and Sherman, 647. 21. Ibid. (see graph on p. 655). 22. Thorp, “The Latin American Economies,” 1:158. 23. Meyer and Sherman, 669. 24. Thorp, “ The Latin American Economies,” 1:116. 25. Story, 106. 26. Bazdresch and Levy, “Populism and Economic Policy in Mexico,” 237. 27. Ibid., 242. 28. Story, 41. 29. French-Davis, Muñoz, and Palma, 1:181. 30. Devlin, Debt and Crisis in Latin America, 47. 31. Ibid., 6, 120–21. 32. Ibid., 112. 33. French-Davis, Muñoz, and Palma, 234. 34. Ibid., 221–22. 35. Meyer and Sherman, 675. 36. Ibid. 37. Devlin, 181. 38. Story, 133. 39. Meyer and Sherman, 676. 40. Thorp, “The Latin American Economies,” 205. 41. Devlin, 39. 42. Skidmore and Smith, 246.

298 / Notes to Pages 194–204

43. Bazdresch and Levy, 247. 44. Story, 166–70. 45. Ibid., 168. 46. Meyer and Sherman, 681. 47. Alisky, “Mexico,” 2:503–4. 48. Meyer and Sherman, 682. 49. Bazdresch and Levy, 249. 50. Story, 184. 51. Bazdresch and Levy, 251. 52. Ibid., 251–52. 53. Meyer and Sherman, 684. 54. Ibid., 685. 55. French-Davis, Muñoz, and Palma, 1:237. 56. Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence, 369. 57. Story, 200–201. 58. Skidmore and Smith, 249. 59. Levy and Bruhn, “Mexico,” 538. 60. Craig, “Mexico,” 405. 61. See Devlin, 122, 138.

Chapter 16. The Cuban Revolution

1. Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Experience, 30–31. 2. Ibid., 44–45. 3. Ibid., 155. 4. Pérez, Cuba, 290. 5. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 42. 6. Ibid., 43. 7. Ibid., 62. 8. Quoted in Quirk, Fidel Castro, 97. 9. Dosal, Comandante Che, 15–16. 10. Ibid., 18–19. 11. This is where most Latin American revolutionaries departed from Marx. 12. Dosal, 65. 13. Ibid., 166. 14. Ibid., 173. 15. Ibid., 176. 16. Ibid., 178. 17. Ibid., 189. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 170. 20. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 128. 21. Ibid., 129. 22. Quoted in ibid., 130. 23. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 262–63.

Notes to Pages 204–211 / 299

24. Quoted in ibid., 133. 25. Ibid.; Quirk, Fidel Castro, 132. 26. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 135. 27. Paterson, Contesting Castro, 135. 28. Ibid., 121. 29. Ibid., 177. 30. Dosal, 48. 31. Ibid. 32. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 221. 33. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 394. 34. Ibid., 395. 35. Ibid., 198. 36. Ibid. 37. Paterson, 150. 38. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 294. 39. Quoted in ibid., 422. 40. Ibid., 689. 41. Ibid., 430. 42. Ibid. 43. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 247. 44. Ibid., 247–48. 45. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 487–88. 46. Ibid., 512. 47. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 168. 48. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 512. 49. Ibid. 50. Pérez, 326. 51. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 519. 52. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 270–71. 53. Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence, 288–89. 54. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 520. 55. Ibid., 521. 56. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 670. 57. Ibid. 58. Skidmore and Smith, 274. 59. Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 671. 60. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 643. 61. Ibid., 623–24. 62. Ibid., 626. 63. Ibid., 628. 64. Pérez, 359. 65. Ibid., 362–63. 66. Ibid., 363. 67. Dosal, 169. 68. Ibid., 215.

300 / Notes to Pages 212–220

Chapter 17. Central America Aflame 1. Ameringer, “Nicaragua,” 144. 2. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America, 32. 3. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 161. 4. Ibid., 164–65. 5. Liss, Radical Thought in Central America, 186. 6. Ibid., 183. 7. Ibid., 184. 8. Ibid., 185. 9. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 180. 10. Ameringer, “Nicaragua,” 146–47. 11. Liss, 168. 12. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 239–40. 13. Ameringer, “Nicaragua,” 147–49. 14. Edmisten, Nicaragua Divided, 70. 15. Keen, A History of Latin America, 2:456. 16. Liss, 200. 17. Ibid., 201. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 200. 20. Ibid., 201. 21. Ibid., 190. 22. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 285. 23. Ibid., 274–75. 24. Liss, 189. 25. Ibid., 193. 26. Ranelagh, The Agency, 642. 27. Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence, 377. 28. Montgomery, “El Salvador,” 283. 29. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 337. 30. Liss, 74. 31. Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence, 379–81. 32. U.S. House and Senate, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, 100th Cong., 1st sess., 1987, H. Rep. 433, S. Rep. 216, 11. 33. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 240. 34. Pearson, “Nicaragua,” 447–48. 35. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 297. 36. Interview with Daniel Ortega, CNN documentary The Cold War, episode 18, “Backyard: 1954-1990,” online at CNN Interactive, http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/18/ interviews/ortega/. 37. Ocampo, “Collapse and (Incomplete) Stabilization of the Nicaraguan Economy,” 336. 38. Keen, 2:456. 39. Ocampo, 343. 40. Ibid., 331.

Notes to Pages 221–227 / 301 41. Skidmore and Smith, 325. 42. Montgomery, “El Salvador,” 284–85, 289–90. 43. Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 215–16. 44. Montgomery, “El Salvador,” 291; Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 249. 45. Pearson, 453. 46. Wickham-Crowley, 271. 47. Ibid., 272; see also Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 242–43. 48. Helwege, Comment on “Collapse and (Incomplete) Stabilization of the Nicaraguan Economy,” by José Antonio Ocampo, 362–63. 49. Harberger, Comment on “Collapse and (Incomplete) Stabilization of the Nicaraguan Economy,” by José Antonio Ocampo, 366. 50. Ibid. 51. Wickham-Crowley, 31.

Chapter 18. Rural Violence and Urban Terror 1. Martz, Acción Democrática, 332. 2. Ibid., 334–35. 3. “Fabricio Ojeda, 1929-1966,” Proyecto Filosofía en Español Website, http://www.filosofia. org/ave/001/a231.htm. 4. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America, 197. 5. Martz, Acción Democrática, 113. 6. Ibid., 113. 7. Wickham-Crowley, 181. 8. Martz, Acción Democrática, 114–15. 9. Bigler, 120. 10. Martz, Acción Democrática, 116. 11. Wickham-Crowley, 197–99. 12. Ibid., 170. 13. Ibid., 182. 14. Woodward, Central America, 242. 15. Ibid., 243. 16. Sánchez, “Guatemala,” 2:419–20. 17. Dosal, Comandante Che, 249. 18. Ibid., 251. 19. Ibid., 253. 20. Ibid., 248. 21. Ibid., 259. 22. Ibid., 260. 23. Ibid., 264. 24. Wickham-Crowley, 204. 25. Dosal, 278. 26. Ibid., 283. 27. Ibid., 296–97.

302 / Notes to Pages 227–233 28. Cited in Diamond et al., Introduction to Democracy in Developing Countries. Latin Amer­ ica, 17. 29. Herring, A History of Latin America, 802. 30. Ibid., 807. 31. Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, 225. 32. Ibid., 226. 33. Gillespie and Handelman, “Uruguay,” 595. 34. Rock, Argentina, 354. 35. Gillespie, Soldiers of Perón, 163. 36. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 103. 37. Rock, 367–68. 38. Skidmore and Smith, 103. 39. McClintock, “Peru,” 322. 40. Ibid., 338. 41. Klarén, Peru, 357. 42. Skidmore and Smith, 218. 43. Klarén, 370. 44. Ibid., 366. 45. Gorriti, “Shining Path’s Stalin and Trotsky,” 156. 46. Klarén, 369. 47. McClintock, 230. 48. Ibid., 229. 49. Klarén, 371. 50. Gorriti, 157. 51. Ibid., 151. 52. Degregori, “The Origins and Logic of Shining Path,” 43. 53. McClintock, 234. 54. Degregori, 40. 55. Ibid., 38. 56. Ibid., 36, 39. 57. Gorriti, 164. 58. McClintock, 230. 59. Klarén, 380. 60. McClintock, 230. 61. Klarén, 382. 62. Degregori, 40. 63. Klarén, 386. 64. Ibid., 386–87. 65. Ibid., 409. 66. Ibid., 413. 67. Ibid., 415. 68. McClintock, 234. 69. Klarén, 410–11. 70. Ibid., 411. 71. Ibid., 410.

Notes to Pages 233–241 / 303

72. Starn, “Villagers at Arms,” 243. 73. Klarén, 412. 74. Wickham-Crowley, 31.

Chapter 19. The Collapse of Creole Socialism 1. Valenzuela, “Chile,” 202. 2. Ibid., 216–17. 3. Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 134. 4. U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, Covert Action in Chile, 1963–1973, 94th Cong. 1st sess., 1975, Committee Print, 23. 5. Ibid., 27. 6. Ibid., 29–31. 7. Ibid., 28. 8. Ibid., 33. 9. Ibid., 32. 10. Ibid., 33. 11. Quoted in Dornbusch and Edwards, “The Macroeconomics of Populism,” 12. 12. Larraín and Miller, “The Socialist-Populist Chilean Experience,” 179. 13. Ibid., 182. 14. Ibid., 187. 15. Ibid., 189–91. 16. Skidmore and Smith, 134–35. 17. Larraín and Miller, 212. 18. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 278. 19. Skidmore and Smith, 135. 20. Ibid., 136. 21. Ibid., 135. 22. U.S. Senate Select Committee, Covert Action in Chile, 60. 23. Ibid., 31. 24. Ibid., 28. 25. Ibid., 38–39. 26. Ibid., 28. 27. Skidmore and Smith, 140. 28. Loveman, “The Political Left in Chile,” 25. 29. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 223. 30. Brian Loveman, 24. 31. Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence, 351. 32. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 159. 33. Ward, Latin America, 37. 34. Bazdresch and Levy, “Populism and Economic Policy in Mexico,” 235. 35. Ibid., 238. 36. Story, Industry, the State, and Public Policy in Mexico, 41. 37. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 228–29. 38. Levy and Bruhn, “Mexico,” 538.

304 / Notes to Pages 241–247

39. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 220. 40. Meyer and Sherman, The Course of Mexican History, 685. 41. Coppedge, Strong Parties and Lame Ducks, 4. 42. Martz, “Deconstruction versus Reconstruction,” 69. 43. Levine and Crisp, “Venezuela,” 414. 44. Ibid., 398. 45. Ibid., 411. 46. McCoy and Smith, “From Deconsolidation to Reequilibration?” 247. 47. Karl, “The Venezuelan Petro-State and the Crisis of ‘Its’ Democracy,” 42. 48. Love, “Economic Ideas and Ideologies in Latin America since 1930,” 1:411–12. 49. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 187. 50. Bulmer-Thomas, 418–19. 51. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 187. 52. Ibid., 261. 53. Levine, “Beyond the Exhaustion of the Model,” 190. 54. Karl, 43. 55. Ibid., 41. 56. Smith and McCoy, “Venezuelan Democracy under Stress,” 6. 57. Vacs, “Convergence and Dissension,” 81–82. 58. McCoy and Smith, 253. 59. Agüero, “Crisis and Decay of Democracy in Venezuela,” 223. 60. Rey, “Corruption and Political Illegitimacy in Venezuelan Democracy,” 130–31. 61. Ibid. 62. Buxton, The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela, 38. 63. Ibid., 187. 64. Kornblith, “Public Sector and Private Sector,” 86. 65. Myers, “Perceptions of Stressed Democracy,” 135. 66. O’Donnell, “The State, Democratization, and Some Conceptual Problems,” 169. 67. Rey, 117. 68. Nelson, “Crisis Management, Economic Reform, and Costa Rican Democracy,” 154. 69. Ibid., 152. 70. Wilson, Costa Rica, 100–101. 71. Ibid., 101. 72. Ibid., 104. 73. Ibid. 74. Dunkerley, The Pacification of Central America, 638; see also Wilson, 127. 75. Wilson, 125–26. 76. Booth, “Costa Rica,” 450. 77. Quoted in Nelson, 159. 78. Wilson, 134. 79. Dunkerley, 640–41. 80. Wilson, 127. 81. Booth, 450, 460. 82. Queiser Morales, “Alfredo Ovando Candia,” 330–31. 83. Queiser Morales, “Juan José Torres González,” 429.

Notes to Pages 248–254 / 305

84. Keen, A History of Latin America, 2:377. 85. Mitchell, “Bolivia,” in Ameringer, 93. 86. Ibid., 94. 87. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 255. 88. Keen, 2:378. 89. Solimano, “Introduction and Synthesis,” 1. 90. Vacs, “Between Restructuring and Impasse,” 143. 91. Ibid., 158.

Chapter 20. The Neoliberal Onslaught 1. Gamarra, “Market-Oriented Reforms and Democratization in Latin America,” 11. 2. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, xi. 3. von Mettenheim and Malloy, Introduction to Deepening Democracy in Latin America, 11. 4. Borzutsky, “Chilean Democracy Before and After Pinochet,” 96–97. 5. Sunkel, “Contemporary Economic Reform in Historical Perspective,” 328. 6. Cavarozzi, “Politics,” 135. 7. Williamson, The Progress of Policy Reform in Latin America, 37; Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 223. 8. Stallings, “Political Economy of Democratic Transition,” 182. 9. Ibid., 187. 10. Ibid., 191. 11. Alexander, “Chile,” 172. 12. Solimano, “After Socialism and Dirigisme,” 343. 13. McClintock, “Peru,” 329. 14. Klarén, Peru, 407. 15. McClintock, “Peru,” 348–50. 16. Klarén, 424. 17. Sheahan, Searching for a Better Society, 160. 18. Klarén, 424. 19. Ibid., 408. 20. Ibid., 418–19. 21. Ibid., 418. 22. Ibid., 418–19. 23. Ibid., 420. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Sheahan, 168. 27. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 202. 28. Devlin, Debt and Crisis in Latin America, 218; see also Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic His­ tory of Latin America since Independence, 370. 29. Vacs, “Convergence and Dissension,” 76. 30. Williamson, 1. 31. Ibid., 46. 32. Kaufman and Stallings, “Debt and Democracy in the 1980s,” 206.

306 / Notes to Pages 254–259 33. Solimano, “After Socialism and Dirigisme,” 348. 34. Glick, “Science and Society in Twentieth-Century Latin America,” 1:533. 35. O’Brien, The Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin America, 165; see also 105, 140–41, 168. 36. Kaufman, “Economic Orthodoxy and Political Change in Mexico,” 123. 37. Story, Industry, the State, and Public Policy in Mexico, 91. 38. Kaufman, 118. 39. Levy and Bruhn, “Mexico,” 566. 40. Williamson, 5–6. 41. Ibid. 42. Vacs, “Between Restructuring and Impasse,” 146. 43. Waisman, “Argentina,” 100. 44. Fernández, “What Have Populists Learned from Hyperinflation?” 135. 45. Vacs, “Between Restructuring and Impasse,” 151. 46. O’Brien, 166. 47. Waisman, 100. 48. Vacs, “Between Restructuring and Impasse,” 151–52. 49. Hodges, “The Argentine Left since Perón,” 166. 50. Waisman, 105. 51. O’Brien, 166. 52. Vacs, “Between Restructuring and Impasse,” 159. 53. Ibid., 159–60. 54. Bazdresch and Levy, “Populism and Economic Policy in Mexico,” 256. 55. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 259. 56. Ibid. 57. Cárdenas, Comment on “Populism and Economic Policy in Mexico, 1970–1982,” by Carlos Bazdresch and Santiago Levy, 262. 58. Martz, “Deconstruction versus Reconstruction,” 74–75. 59. Buxton, The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela, 65. 60. Ibid., 53. 61. Ibid., 54–55. 62. Ibid., 180. 63. Quoted in Herring, A History of Latin America, 256. 64. Ibid., 256–57. 65. Stallings and Kaufman, Introduction to Debt and Democracy in Latin America, 5. 66. Bazdresch and Levy, 227n10. 67. Bulmer-Thomas, 408. 68. French-Davis, Muñoz, and Palma, “The Latin American Economies,” 1:249. 69. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 239. 70. Williamson, 77. 71. Bresser Pereira, Maravale, and Przeworski, “Economic Reforms in New Democracies,” 192. 72. Solimano, “After Socialism and Dirigisme,” 357. 73. Waisman, 104–5, 114. 74. French-Davis, Muñoz, and Palma, 1:244. 75. Sunkel, 334.

Notes to Pages 261–266 / 307

Chapter 21. Fin del Siglo/End of the Century 1. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, 219. 2. Loveman, “The Political Left in Chile,” 32–33. 3. Castañeda, 199; Bellamy and Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State, 119, 129. 4. Forgacs, An Antonio Gramsci Reader, 222; Bellamy and Schecter, 130. 5. Castañeda, 199–200. 6. McCaughan, Reinventing Revolution, 121. 7. Ellner, “The Venezuelan Left,” 144. 8. McCaughan, 116. 9. Klarén, Peru, 372. 10. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 221–22. 11. Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2005, June 29, 2006. 12. Klarén, 378. 13. Ibid. 14. Cavarozzi, “Politics,” 138. 15. “The Return to Democracy, 1990,” in Chile: A Country Study, edited by Rex A. Hudson, http://countrystudies.us/chile/68.htm. 16. Loveman, 32–37. 17. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 280. 18. Cavarozzi, 138. 19. Ward, Latin America, 62. 20. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 253–54. 21. Hartlyn and Dugas, “Colombia,” 272. 22. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 261–62. 23. Buxton, The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela, 31. 24. McCaughan, 127. 25. Ibid., 128. 26. Ibid., 141. 27. Devlin, Debt and Crisis in Latin America, 282. 28. Palmer, U.S. Relations with Latin America during the Clinton Years, 17. 29. Ibid., 29. 30. “The Brady Plan,” . 31. Palmer, U.S. Relations with Latin America during the Clinton Years, 17, 29. 32. Ibid., 18. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 80. 35. Ibid., 78 (table 5.2). 36. Ibid., 39, 68. 37. Chernick and Jiménez, “Popular Liberalism, Radical Democracy, and Marxism,” 71. 38. Sharpless, “Colombia,” 192. 39. Ibid., 192. 40. Palmer, 39. 41. Hartlyn and Dugas, 276. 42. Palmer, 39.

308 / Notes to Pages 266–270 43. S.v. “Plan Colombia,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Colombia. 44. Meller, “Latin American Adjustment and Economic Reforms,” 263. 45. Ward, 27. 46. S.v. “Carlos Salinas de Gortari,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Salinas; s.v. “Raúl Salinas de Gortari,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raul_Salinas. 47. Palmer, 66. 48. S.v. “Vladimiro Montesinos,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimiro_ Montesinos. 49. Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence, 384. 50. Vacs, “Between Restructuring and Impasse,” 152. 51. O’Brien, The Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin America, 166. 52. BBC News, “Profile: Carlos Menem,” April 28, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ americas/1376100.stm. 53. Ibid. 54. Castañeda, 3. 55. Ibid., 474. 56. McCaughan, 108. 57. Castañeda, 4. 58. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, xi. 59. Ibid., 251. 60. Vacs, “Convergence and Dissension,” 71. 61. Bulmer-Thomas, 269. 62. Ibid., 275. 63. Ibid., 384. 64. McCaughan, 155–57. 65. Cited in ibid., 20–21. 66. French-Davis, Muñoz, and Palma, “The Latin American Economies,” 1:205. 67. Bulmer-Thomas, 17. 68. O’Donnell, “Poverty and Inequality in Latin America,” 49. 69. Ibid., 53–54. 70. Ibid., 56. 71. Ibid., 58–59. 72. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 203. 73. Wise, “Democratization, Crisis, and the APRA’s Modernization Project in Peru,” 169. 74. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion, 278. 75. Kaufman and Stallings, “Debt and Democracy in the 1980s,” 221. 76. McCaughan, 23. 77. Love, “Economic Ideas and Ideologies in Latin America since 1930,” 1:460.

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Index

Acción Revolucionaria Socialista, 44 AD. See Democratic Action (AD) (Costa Rica); Democratic Action party (AD) (Venezuela) Agrarian Production Cooperatives (CAPs) (Peru), 118 Agrarian Social Interest Societies (SAISs) (Peru), 118 Aguascalientes Convention, 62–64 Aguirre Cerda, Pedro, 45–46, 127 Ahrens, Heinrich, 4, 28, 34–35 AIs. See Autonomous Institutions (AIs) (Costa Rica) Alberdi, Juan, 16, 19 Alemán Valdés, Miguel, 187–88 Alessandri, Arturo, 5, 42, 45 Alessandri, Jorge, 47, 49, 237 Alfonsín, Raúl, 255 Allende Gossens, Salvador: background of, 5–6, 38, 46–49; presidency of, 237–40, 250 Alliance for Progress, 135, 147, 172, 181 Alvarado, Salvador, 72–73 American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), 218 American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), 8, 259; founding of, 97, 100; program of, 99, 103, 106–7, 109, 113–14, 148 Anarchism: and Argentina, 17–18; and Chile, 40, 42–43; and Mexico, 56–57, 60–61, 63, 82; and Peru, 92, 111; and Uruguay, 31 Andreiev, Leonidas, 124 Anti-Imperialist League, 84, 95 AP. See Popular Action party (AP) (Peru) APRA. See American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) Aprista Rebelde, 115 Aprista Youth ( JAP) (Peru), 116 Aramburu, Pedro E., 170, 173, 229

Arana, Francisco, 155, 157 Arana Osorio, Carlos, 226 Arbenz, Jacobo, 155, 157–58 Arciniegas, Germán, 108 ARDI. See Leftist Revolutionary Group (ARDI) (Venezuela) ARENA. See Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) (El Salvador) Arena, Domingo, 31, 33, 36 Arévalo, Juan José, 107, 169, 212; background of, 155–56; and the Caribbean Legion, 156–57; and spiritual socialism, 156 Argentine Institute for the Promotion of Trade (IAPI), 167–69 Argentine Regional Workers Federation (FORA/ FORA IX), 18–19, 22–23 Argentine Socialist Party (PSA), 23–24 Arguedas, Alcides, 1 Arias Sánchez, Oscar, 221, 246–47, 257 Armando Molina, Arturo, 182 Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) (Venezuela), 134–35, 181, 223–25, 234 Arriaga, Camilio, 6, 55, 59 ARS. See Acción Revolucionaria Socialista (ARS) (Chile) Association of Latin American Trade Union Workers (ATLAS), 169 Ateneo de la Juventud (Athenaeum of Youth) (Mexico), 6, 58 ATLAS. See Association of Latin American Trade Union Workers (ATLAS) Auténticos. See Cuban Revolutionary Party-Auténtico (PRC-A) Authentic Socialist Party (PSA) (Chile), 46 Autonomous Institutions (AIs) (Costa Rica), 143–46, 245–47, 257

322 / Index Ávila Camacho, Manuel, 79, 187 Ayllu, 95, 118 Aylwin, Patricio, 251, 263 Bakunin, Michael, 6, 17–18, 57 Balmaceda, José, 39 Barrantes, Alfonso, 262 Barrientos, René, 162, 226–27, 247 Barrios, Gonzalo, 123, 128 Batista, Fulgencio, 150–52, 199, 234; and the Cuban Revolution, 202, 204–5 Batlle, Lorenzo, 28 Batlle y Ordóñez, José, 227; background of, 28; political thought of, 3–5, 27–28, 30–31; first presidential term of, 29–30, 32; second presidential term of, 33–37 Banzer Suárez, Hugo, 247 Bayo, Alberto, 202 Beals, Carlton, 105 Belaúnde Terry, Francisco, 115–17, 230, 232 Benavides, Oscar, 100–101, 105–6, 112 Bergson, Henri, 3, 6, 28, 58, 93, 98 Betancourt, Rómulo, 105, 108, 153, 245; formative years of, 123–25, 127, 138; oil policy of, 129–30, 134–35, 258; provisional presidency of, 128–31; activity of, in exile, 132; constitutional presidency of, 133–35, 223–24, 242 Bilbao, Francisco, 39 Blanco, Hugo, 115, 231 Blanco/Nationalist party. See Blancos (Uruguay) Blancos (Uruguay), 26–27, 30, 32–33, 35 Blum, William, 228 Boff, Leonardo (Father), 186 Boland amendments, 218–19 Bolivian Communist Party (PCB), 226 Bolivian Labor Central (COB), 161 Bolivian Mining Corporation (COMIBOL), 161, 248 Bordaberry, Juan María, 229 Bosch, Juan, 107, 153–54, 157 Brady, Nicholas F., 264 Broad Front (FA) (Uruguay), 228 Broad Opposition Front (FAO) (Nicaragua), 214 Bucareli agreements, 69, 97 Bulwer-Thomas, Victor, 240, 259 Bunge, Carlos Octavio, 1 Bush, George H. W., 264–65 Bustamante y Rivero, José Luis, 106–7, 112–13 Buxton, Julia, 244

Cabrera, Luis, 62–63 CAEM. See Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM) (Peru) Caldera, Rafael, 179–81, 245, 257–58, 263 Calderón, Esteban B., 65 Calderón Guardia, Rafael, 138–43 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 70–72, 74–76, 80 Cambio 90 (Change 90), 233 Camus, Albert, 9, 223 Canovan, Margaret, 3 CAPs. See Agrarian Production Cooperatives (CAPs) (Peru); Peruvian Aprista Committee of Santiago (CAPS) Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker), 60, 62–63, 67 Caso, Antonio, 6, 58 Cardenal, Ernesto (Father), 216–17 Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc, 196, 254, 262 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 7, 68, 72–73, 187, 190; presidency of, 75–79; and oil nationalization, 77–79, 103 Caribbean Legion, 107, 144 Carranza, Venustiano, 7, 61–65, 68, 73 Carrillo Puerto, Felipe, 72–74 Carter, Jimmy, 214, 217 Carvajal Quesada, María Isabel (pseud. Carmen Lyra), 138 Casey, William, 218–19 Castañeda, Jorge G., 11, 267–68, 271 Castillo Armas, Carlos, 157 Castro, Fidel, 9, 133–35, 147, 212; formative years of, 152, 199–200; clues to political thinking of, 200–201, 205; and the Sierra Maestra campaign, 203–5; and Marxism, 205–6; revolutionary rule of, 207–11, 264 CCTRN. See Costa Rican Confederation of Workers Rerum Novarum CD. See Democratic Convergence (CD) (El Salvador) CDRs. See Committees in Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) (Cuba) CDS. See Sandinista Defense Committees (CDS) CEBs. See Christian Base Communities (CEBs) CELAM II. See Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM II) CELAM III. See Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM III) Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM) (Peru)

Index / 323 Center for the Study of National Problems (CEPN) (Costa Rica), 140, 142 Central American Common Market (CACM), 181 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): and Chile, 48, 237–39; and Costa Rica, 146–47; and Cuba, 207–8; and the Dominican Republic, 153; and Guatemala, 114, 157–58, 201; and Nicaragua, 218; and Peru, 267 Central Única de Trabajadores de Chile (CUTCh), 48 CEPN. See Center for the Study of National Problems (CEPN) (Costa Rica) CGT. See General Confederation of Labor (CGT) (Argentina) Chamorro, Emiliano, 83 Chamorro, Pedro Joaquín, 213–14 Chamorro, Violeta Barrios de, 215, 217, 221–22, 244 Chávez, Carlos, 70 Chávez, Hugo, 11, 244–45, 258, 263, 270–71 Chávez Orozco, Luis, 76 Chibás, Eduardo (“Eddy”), 151–52, 199, 205 Chicago boys, 250–51 Chileanization, 47–48, 179 Chilean Students Federation (FECh), 41–42 Chilean Workers Federation (FOCh), 41–42 Christian Base Communities (CEBs), 184, 216, 218, 260 Christian Democratic movement, 177–79 Christian Democratic Party (PDC) (Chile), 47–48, 179 Christian Democratic Party (PDC) (El Salvador), 181–83 Christians for Socialism, 185 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Científicos, 55, 58 CIs. See Industrial Communities (CIs) (Peru) CIT. See Inter-American Confederation of Workers (CIT) Clark Memorandum, 84–85 Clinton, Bill, 264–66 Club Alemán Vörwarts (German Workers Club) (Argentina), 17 Club Liberal “Ponciano Arriaga,” 55–56 CNC. See National Peasant Confederation (CNC) (Mexico) CNP. See National Council of Production (CNP) (Costa Rica) COB. See Bolivian Labor Central (COB) Cockcroft, James, 65

CODESA. See Costa Rican Development Corporation (CODESA) Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), 225, 234, 265, 267 Colorado Party. See Colorados (Uruguay) Colorados (Uruguay), 26, 36, 108; nature of, 27, 30; and party organization, 28–29, 31–32, 35 COMIBOL. See Bolivian Mining Corporation (COMIBOL) Committee for the Promotion of Private Investment (COPRI) (Peru), 252 Committee of Independent Electoral Political Organization. See Social Christian Party COPEI (Venezuela) Committees in Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), 206, 215 Communist International (Comintern), 84, 94–95, 103 Communist Party of Chile, 41 Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), 134 Comte, Auguste, 1, 3, 53, 55 Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) (Argentina). See General Confederation of Labor (CGT) (Argentina) Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC), 151 Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL), 113 Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), 75, 78, 190, 240, 254 Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CTP), 113–14 Confederation of Workers of Venezuela (CTV), 129 Conniff, Michael, 1 Conservative Party (Colombia), 158–59 Constitutionalists (Mexico), 63 Constitution of 1857 (Mexico), 53, 55 Constitution of 1917 (Mexico), 65–68, 189, 240; Article 3 of, 3, 65, 70; Article 27 of, 65–66, 68–69, 78, 131; Article 123 of, 66–67, 69, 79, 131, 190; Article 130 of, 71 Constitution of 1919 (Uruguay), 36 Constitution of 1925 (Chile), 42–43 Constitution of 1947 (Venezuela), 131 Constitution of 1949 (Argentina), 167–68, 170 Constitution of 1949 (Costa Rica), 144 Constitution of 1991 (Colombia), 263 Contras, 217–21, 246–47 Conventionists. See Aguascalientes Convention Convergencia (Venezuela), 257–58

324 / Index Cooke, John William, 229 COPEI. See Social Christian Party COPEI (Venezuela) Coppedge, Michael John, 242 CORDIPLAN. See Office of Coordination and Planning (CORDIPLAN) (Venezuela) CORFO. See Corporation for the Development of Production (CORFO) (Chile) Corporation for the Development of Production (CORFO) (Chile), 46, 130 Correa, Rafael, 271 Cortés, León, 138, 140, 142 Costa Rican Communist Party (PCC), 137–39 Costa Rican Confederation of Workers Rerum Novarum (CCTRN), 139 Costa Rican Development Corporation (CODESA), 246 CPD. See Exile Postal Exchange (CPD) (Aprista) Cristero Rebellion, 71, 76 CRMDT. See Michoacán Revolutionary Confederation of Labor (CRMDT) (Mexico) CROM. See Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) CTAL. See Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL) CTC. See Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) CTM. See Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) CTP. See Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CTP) CTV. See Confederation of Workers of Venezuela (CTV) Cuban Communist Party (PCC), 151 Cuban Peoples Party-Ortodoxo (PPC-O), 152, 200, 204–5 Cuban Revolutionary Party-Auténtico (PRC-A), 108, 150, 152, 200, 204–5 Cuestas, Juan Lindolfo, 27 CUTCh. See Central Única de Trabajadores de Chile (CUTCh) CVF. See Venezuelan Development Corporation Darwin, Charles, 19, 55 D’Aubisson, Roberto, 218 Debray, Régis, 203 De la Huerta, Adolfo, 74 De la Madrid Hurtado, Miguel, 7, 11, 195–96, 241, 254–55

De la Puente Uceda, Luis, 115–17 Delgado Chalbaud, Carlos, 128, 132 Democratic Action (AD) (Costa Rica), 140–41 Democratic Action party (AD) (Venezuela), 8, 105, 107–8, 223; founding of, 128; and activity in exile, 132; program of, 133–34; decline of, 241–42, 258–59 Democratic Convergence (CD) (El Salvador), 221 Democratic Party (Chile), 39, 41 Democratic Party (PD) (Costa Rica), 140–41 Democratic Republican Union (URD) (Venezuela), 131–33, 224 Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) (El Salvador), 183, 218 De Onis, Federico, 104 Descamisados (shirtless ones), 166–67 DEU. See University Student Directorate (DEU) (Cuba) Díaz, Adolfo, 83 Díaz, Porfirio, 234; and Positivist rule of, 1–2, 53–55, 58; overthrow of, 59–60, 67 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 190–91 Díaz Serrano, Jorge, 195 Díaz Soto y Gama, Antonio, 6, 56–57, 62–64 Dirty War (Argentina), 174, 230, 255 DNS. See Sandinista National Directorate Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), 154 Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), 108, 152–54 Dornbusch, Rudiger, 3 Dosal, Paul, 203, 226 DR. See Revolutionary Directorate (DR) (Cuba) Drake, Paul, 2, 45 Duarte, José Napoleón, 181–82, 218 Dulles, Allen, 157 Dulles, John Foster, 157 Dutch disease, 257 Echevarría, Luis, 7; presidency of, 192–93, 241, 251, 254 Edwards, Sebastian, 3 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 204, 207–8 Ejido, 55, 72, 76–77 ELN. See National Liberation Army (ELN) (Colombia) ERP. See People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) (Argentina) Esquipulas Accords, 221 Estrada, Pedro, 132–33

Index / 325 Exile Postal Exchange (CPD) (Aprista), 107 Existentialism, 9, 223 FA. See Broad Front (FA) (Uruguay) Facio, Gonzalo, 140 Facio, Rodrigo, 140, 144 Fallas, Carlos Luis, 138 FALN. See Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) (Venezuela) FAO. See Broad Opposition Front (FAO) (Nicaragua) FAR. See Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) (Guatemala) Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) (El Salvador), 183, 217, 221, 234 FARC. See Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) FDR. See Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) (El Salvador) FECh. See Chilean Students Federation Ferm, Deane William, 184 FEV. See Venezuelan Students Federation (FEV) Figueres Ferrer, José, 153, 212; background of, 140–42; socialist thought of, 141–42, 145; and the Caribbean Legion, 143, 157; and the War of National Liberation, 143–44; presidency of, 145–46 Figueres Olsen, José María, 247, 257 Finch, M.H.J., 27, 29 Firmenich, Mario, 229 Flores Magón, Enrique, 57 Flores Magón, Jesús, 56 Flores Magón, Ricardo: reformist period of, 6, 56–57; and the embracing of anarchism, 57, 59–61, 82, 212 FMLN. See Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) (El Salvador) FOCh. See Chilean Workers Federation (FOCh) FONCODES. See National Development and Social Compensation Fund (FONCODES) (Peru) Fonseca Amador, Carlos, 212–13 FORA. See Argentine Regional Workers Federation (FORA/FORA IX) FORA IX. See Argentine Regional Workers Federation (FORA/FORA IX) Fortuny, José Manuel, 155, 157 FORU. See Uruguayan Regional Workers Federation (FORU) Fox, Vicente, 196 Frank, Waldo, 102–3, 108

FRAP. See Popular Action Front (Chile) Frei Montalva, Eduardo, 6, 238; and the election of 1964, 48, 179; and Christian Democracy, 47, 178–79 Frondizi, Arturo, 171 Frugoni, Emilio, 31–32, 109 FSLN. See Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) FTRA. See Workers Federation of the Argentine Region Fujimori, Alberto, 10, 233, 251–52, 263, 265–67 Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 158–60 Galich, Manuel, 155 Gallegos, Rómulo, 113, 124, 128, 131–32, 180 García, Alan, 232, 251 García Monge, Joaquín, 84, 104 Garrido Canabal, Tomás, 72, 75 GATT. See General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) Gaudium et Spes, 183 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), 254 General Confederation of Labor (CGT) (Argentina), 25, 166, 170–71, 255 Generation of ‘28 (Venezuela), 123, 126–27, 179, 242 Generation of ‘30 (Cuba), 150 George, Henry, 28, 30, 34 Gestido, Oscar, 228 Ghioldi, Américo, 20 Giap, Vo Nguyen, 9, 115 Glass of Milk (Vaso de Leche) program, 262 Glusberg, Samuel (pseud. Enrique Espinoso), 24, 104 Gómez, Juan Vicente, 123–24 Gómez, Laureano, 159 González Prada, Alfredo, 105 González Prada, Manuel, 3, 7, 96; background of, 91–92; and anarchism, 92–93, 111 González Víquez, Cleto, 136–37 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 219, 222 Gramsci, Antonio, 11, 261 Grant, Frances, 109 Grau San Martín, Ramón, 149–52, 199 Green, W. John, 2 Greene, William E., 54, 57 GRFA. See Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (GRFA) (Peru)

326 / Index Grove Vallejo, Marmaduke, 104–5; political ideas of, 5, 44–46; and the Socialist Party of Chile, 5, 43 Guardia Nacional (Nicaragua), 84–85, 87–88, 213–15 Guerra y Sánchez, Ramiro, 149 Guevara, Ernesto (“Che”), 9, 173, 205–9, 223; background of, 201; and guerrilla warfare, 115–16, 202–3, 211–13, 225; Bolivian campaign of, and death, 226–27, 234 Guillen, Abraham, 228 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 184 Gutiérrez, Víctor Manuel, 157 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 58, 63 Guzmán Reynoso, Abimael, 230–33 Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl, 3, 7, 93, 125, 144, 165; background of, 94–96; political thinking of, 98, 101, 103–4, 106, 112; and university reform, 96, 100, 149; and the APRA program, 7, 97, 99; and the “anti-imperialist state,” 97–98, 111, 113, 126; and the policlasista position, 95, 97–99, 101, 127, 159–60; and PAP, 99, 107, 109–12; and the non-Communist Left, 114, 147; and the election of 1962, 115 Hearst, William Randolph, 54 Hegel, G.W.F., 3 Helms, Richard, 238 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 58 Herrera Campíns, Luis, 180, 243 Herrera y Obes, Julio, 29 Hodges, Donald, 219 Hoover, Herbert, 84–86 Huerta, Victoriano, 61–62 Humala, Ollanta, 271 IADF. See Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom (IADF) IAPI. See Argentine Institute for the Promotion of Trade (IAPI) Ibañez, Bernardo, 46 Ibañez, Carlos, 43, 47 IFIs. See International financial institutions (IFIs) Iglesia Jóven (Young Church) (Chile), 48 IIEP. See Inter-American Institute of Political Education (IIEP) Illia, Arturo, 172 IMF. See International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Import-substitution industrialization (ISI), 8, 116, 134, 166, 168–69, 269; and Costa Rica, 245–46; and Mexico, 188–90, 193, 240, 254; and Uruguay, 248; and Venezuela, 243 Indigenismo: definition of, 58; in Bolivia, 161; in Guatemala, 155; in Mexico, 58, 70; in Peru, 91, 93–95, 101 Industrial Communities (CIs) (Peru), 119 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 5, 41–42, 57, 82 Informal economic sector (informales), 261–62 Ingenieros, José, 4, 20, 24 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) (Mexico), 187, 189, 196, 241, 254–55, 259 Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom (IADF): founding conference of, 108, 146, 152; activities of, 109, 114 Inter-American Confederation of Workers (CIT), 113–14 Inter-American Institute of Political Education (IIEP), 146–47 Inter-American Regional Organization of Labor (ORIT), 107, 114, 152 International financial institutions (IFIs), 192, 253, 256 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 171, 195; and the debt crisis of the 1980s, 241, 243–44, 246–47, 253–55, 270 International Socialist Party (PSI) (Argentina), 24 Iran-Contra affair, 219 ISI. See Import-substitution industrialization (ISI) IWW. See Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Jara, Heriberto, 62, 65, 67, 72, 74 Jáuregui, Arturo, 113 Jiménez Oreamuno, Ricardo, 136–38 John XXIII (pope), 181, 183 John Paul II (pope), 185–86 Johnson, Lyndon, 154 Junta of National Reconstruction (Nicaragua), 215, 217 Justo, Juan B., 4, 19–20, 23–24 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 6, 28, 58 Kaufman, Robert, 270 Kennedy, John F., 135, 147, 208 Khrushchev, Nikita, 207–8 Kirchner, Néstor, 230, 271

Index / 327 Korn, Alejandro, 23, 156 Krause, Karl Christian Frederick, 3, 22, 28, 58 Kropotkin, Peter, 6, 17–18, 57 Laborem Excercens, 185–86 Lacalle, Luis Alberto, 257 Lanusse, Alejandro, 173 La Rosca (Bolivia), 160 LAS. See Sánchez, Luis Alberto (LAS) Latorre, Lorenzo, 28 Lechín, Juan, 161–62 Ledesma Izquieta, Genaro, 114–15 Leftist Revolutionary Group (ARDI) (Venezuela), 125–26 Leguía, Augusto B., 94, 96–97, 100 Leo XIII (pope), 55, 137, 176 Leoni, Raúl, 123, 126, 128–29; presidency of, 135, 225, 245 Lerdo Law (Ley Lerdo), 55 Ley de Defensa Social (Social Defense Law) (Argentina), 19, 21 Ley de Residencia (Residence Law) (Argentina), 18 Ley fuga, 54, 61 Ley Seca (Dry Law), 73 Liberal Party (PL) (Colombia), 108, 158–60 Liberation theology, 183–84, 216 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 75–76, 113, 190 López Contreras, Eleazar, 126–28 López Mateos, Adolfo, 190 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 262, 271 López Portillo, José, 7; presidency of, 194–95, 241, 254 López Pumarejo, Alfonso, 159 Louvain, University of, 137, 139, 177, 184 Love, Joseph L., 270 Lula da Silva, Luis Inácio, 270–71 Lusinchi, Jaime, 243 M-26-7. See 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) (Cuba) Machado, Gerardo, 103, 149, 199 Machado, Gustavo, 84–86 Madero, Francisco I., 59–61 Mao Tse-Tung, 9, 115, 213, 216, 231 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 84, 93, 103; background of, 94; and indigenismo, 93–95; and political activism of, 95–96; and political thought of, 7, 93–95, 98, 111, 213 Marinello, Juan, 151

Marines, U.S.: in Nicaragua, 81–87 Maritaine, Jacques, 177 MAS. See Movement to Socialism (MAS) (Venezuela) Mater et Magistra, 181 Matte Hurtado, Eugenio, 43–44 Matthews, Herbert, 204 Martí, Augustín Farabundo, 85–86, 212 Martí, José, 148, 199 Marx, Karl: and influence of writings of, 3, 6–7, 20, 74, 93, 98, 148, 186, 216 Marxism. See Marx, Karl MBR. See Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement (MBR) (Venezuela) McCaughan, Edward J., 267–68 Medina Angarita, Isías, 128, 131 Menem, Carlos Saúl, 11, 174–75, 256, 267, 271 Mexican Food System (SAM), 194 Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), 56 Mexican Renaissance, 70 Michoacán Revolutionary Confederation of Labor (CRMDT) (Mexico), 72 Mikoyan, Anastas, 207 Miolán, Angel, 153 MIR. See Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) Miró Cardona, José, 206 Mitrione, Dan, 228 MNCs. See Multinational corporations (MNCs) MNR. See Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) (Bolivia); National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) (El Salvador) Molina Enríquez, Andrés, 59, 66 Moncada, José María, 83–85 Monge, Luis Alberto, 246–47, 257 Monge Alfaro, Carlos, 140, 144 Monje, Mario, 226 Montaño, Otilio, 60–61 Monterrey Group, 189, 254 Montesinos, Vladimiro, 267 Montilla, Ricardo, 123, 128 Montoneros, 10, 173–74, 229–30, 234 Monzón, Luis G., 65, 67 Morales, Evo, 271 Morales Bermúdez, Francisco, 230 Mora Valverde, Manuel, 125, 137–39, 142–43 Mordida, 188–89, 241 Morones, Luis, 69, 71, 74, 76 Morrow, Dwight, 71, 85

328 / Index Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR): of Chile, 48; of Peru, 115–16; of Venezuela, 134, 181, 224 Movement of Venezuelan Organization (ORVE), 105, 126 Movement to Socialism (MAS) (Venezuela), 257 MR-13. See Revolutionary Movement 13th November (MR-13) (Guatemala) Múgica, Francisco, 62, 65, 67, 72–73, 79–80, 187 Multinational corporations (MNCs), 189–90, 240 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) NAP. See Nueva Acción Pública (Chile) National Action Party (PAN) (Mexico), 196, 254–55 National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), 188, 191–92 National Council of Production (CNP) (Costa Rica), 143 National Democratic Party (PDN) (Venezuela), 126–27 National Development and Social Compensation Fund (FONCODES) (Peru), 252 National Guard (Nicaragua). See Guardia Nacional (Nicaragua) Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) (El Salvador), 221 Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) (Bolivia), 108, 114, 160, 226, 255, 259; program of, 161–62, 247 National Liberation Army (ELN) (Colombia), 185, 225, 234 National Liberation Movement-Tupamaro (MLNT). See Tupamaros (Uruguay) National Liberation Party (PLN) (Costa Rica), 8, 108, 259; founding of, 144; program of, 144, 246, 257 National Opposition Union (UNO) (Nicaragua), 221–22 National Peasant Confederation (CNC) (Mexico), 76–78 National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) (El Salvador), 182–83 National Revolutionary Party (PNR) (Mexico), 71, 75, 78 National Security Council (NSC) (United States), 219 National Security police (SN) (Venezuela), 132

National System in Support of Social Mobilization (SINAMOS) (Peru), 119 National Union Party (PUN) (Costa Rica), 142, 144 Navarro, Luis, 66 Neruda, Pablo, 104, 213 New Economic Policy (NPE) (Bolivia), 248 New social movements (NSMs), 260–61 Niemeyer, E. V., 65, 67 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6–7, 58, 93 Nixon, Richard, 133, 146, 206, 237–38 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 255, 270 NPE. See New Economic Policy (NPE) (Bolivia) NSC. See National Security Council (NSC) (United States) NSMs. See New social movements (NSMs) Nueva Acción Pública (NAP) (Chile), 43 Núñez, Benjamín, 139, 144 OAS. See Organization of American States (OAS) Obregón, Álvaro, 62–63, 72; presidency of, 68–70, 80; assassination of, 71 O’Brien, Thomas, 254, 256 Ocampo, Victoria, 24–25, 104 O’Donnell, Guillermo, 245, 269–70 Odría, Manuel A., 100, 107–9, 113–15 Oduber, Daniel, 140; presidency of, 145, 245–46 Office of Coordination and Planning (CORDIPLAN) (Venezuela), 134 Office of National Planning and Economic Policy (OFIPLAN) (Costa Rica), 146, 245 OFIPLAN. See Office of National Planning and Economic Policy (OFIPLAN) (Costa Rica) Ojeda, Fabricio, 223–24 Olympic games (Mexico, 1968), 191 Onganía, Juan Carlos, 172–73 OPEC. See Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Organization of American States (OAS), 107, 144, 146, 154; and meetings of consultation, 207, 210, 215, 225 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 10, 134, 192 Orlich, Francisco, 141–42, 144–45 Orozco, Pascual, Jr., 60–61 Ortega Saavedra, Daniel, 213–15, 220–22, 271 ORIT. See Inter-American Regional Organization of Labor (ORIT)

Index / 329 Ortodoxos. See Cuban Peoples Party-Ortodoxo (PPC-O) ORVE. See Movement of Venezuelan Organization (ORVE) Ovando Candia, Alfredo, 247 Pacelli, Eugenio (Pius XII), 179 Pacem in Terris, 183 Palacios, Alfredo L., 20–21, 24, 28, 32, 84; and university reform, 23, 96 PAN. See National Action Party (PAN) (Mexico) PAP. See Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP) Parliamentary Republic (Chile), 39–40, 42 Partido Comunista del Peru en el Sendero Luminoso de Mariátegui. See Sendero Luminoso/ Shining Path (SL) (Peru) Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) (Mexico), 254, 264 Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM), 78, 187 Pastora, Edén, 214–15 Pastrana Arango, Andrés, 266 Paul VI (pope), 181, 183 Pavletich, Esteban, 85 Paz Estenssoro, Víctor, 160–62, 169, 248, 255 PCB. See Bolivian Communist Party (PCB) PCC. See Costa Rican Communist Party (PCC); Cuban Communist Party (PCC) PCV. See Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) PD. See Democratic Party (PD) (Costa Rica) PDC. See Christian Democratic Party (PDC) (Chile); Christian Democratic Party (PDC) (El Salvador) PDN. See National Democratic Party (PDN) (Venezuela) PdVSA. See Petróleos de Venezuela (PdVSA) Pellicer, Carlos Manuel, 157 Pelligrini, Carlos, 21 PEMEX/Pemex. See Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX/Pemex) People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) (Argentina), 173–74 Pérez, Carlos Andrés, 11, 242–45, 251, 257, 263 Pérez Alfonzo, Juan Pablo, 129, 134 Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 132–33, 169, 180, 223 Perón, Eva (“Evita”) Duarte de, 167, 169 Perón, Juan Domingo, 247; background of, 25, 165–66; and first term as president, 167–69; and Justicialismo, 168–69, 170, 172, 175; second term of, 169–70; overthrow and exile

of, 170, 172–73; restoration and third term of, 173–74 Perón, María Estela (“Isabelita”) Martínez de, 174 Peronista Party, 170–72 Peronista Youth, 173, 229 Peruvian Aprista Committee of Santiago (CAPS), 102, 107 Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP), 99, 106–9; program of, 110–11, 115; and electoral politics, 112–15; comeback of, 119 Petkoff, Teodoro, 257–58 Petróleos de Venezuela (PdVSA), 242 Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX/Pemex), 78, 189, 194–95, 254 Petroperú, 118 Picado Michalski, Teodoro, 140 Picón Salas, Mariano, 104–5, 125–26 Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto, 239; presidency of, 240, 250–51, 258–59, 262 Pius XI (pope), 176 PL. See Liberal Party (PL) (Colombia) Plan Colombia, 266 Plan de Ayala, 60–61, 66 Plan de Guadalupe, 61, 64 Plan de San Luis Potosí, 59–61 Plan of Barranquilla, 125–26 Plan Orozquista, 61 Platt Amendment, 149–50 PLD. See Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) PLM. See Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) PLN. See National Liberation Party (PLN) (Costa Rica) PNR. See National Revoluitionary Party (PNR) (Mexico) Popular Action Front (FRAP) (Chile), 47 Popular Action party (AP) (Peru), 116 Popular Democratic Party (PPD) (Puerto Rico), 108 Popular Front movement: in Chile, 45–46, 104; in Peru, 103–4 Popular Socialist Party (PSP) (Chile), 46 Popular Socialist Party (PSP) (Cuba), 206–7, 211 Popular Unity (UP) (Chile), 48–49, 237 Popular Vanguard Party (PVP) (Costa Rica), 139 Populism: definition of, 2–3 Populorum Progressio, 181, 183 Portal, Magda, 105 Portes Gil, Emilio, 85–86 POS. See Socialist Workers Party (POS) (Chile)

330 / Index Positivism: definition of, 1, 58. See also Díaz, Porfirio PPC-O. See Cuban Peoples Party-Ortodoxo (PPC-O) PPD. See Popular Democratic Party (PPD) (Puerto Rico) Prado, Manuel, 114 PRC-A. See Cuban Revolutionary Party-Auténtico (PRC-A) PRD. See Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD); Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) (Mexico) Prebisch, Raúl, 172, 243 PRI. See Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) (Mexico) Prío Socarrás, Carlos, 107, 151–53, 157, 202 PRM. See Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM) Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 6, 57 PSA. See Argentine Socialist Party (PSA); Authentic Socialist Party (PSA) (Chile) PSCh. See Socialist Party of Chile (PSCh) PSD. See Social Democratic Party (PSD) (Costa Rica) PSI. See International Socialist Party (PSI) (Argentina) PSP. See Popular Socialist Party (PSP) (Chile); Popular Socialist Party (PSP) (Cuba) PSP. See Socialist Party of Peru (PSP) PSS. See Socialist Party of the Southeast (PSS) (Mexico) PST. See Socialist Workers Party (PST) (Chile) Pueblos Jóvenes (young towns) (Peru), 260, 262 Puka Inti, Dr. See Guzmán Reynoso, Abimael PUN. See National Union Party (PUN) (Costa Rica) Punto Fijo, Pact of, 133, 180, 224, 242–44, 258 PVP. See Popular Vanguard Party (PVP) (Costa Rica) Quadragesimo Anno, 47, 176–77 Querétaro Convention, 64–67, 70 Quirk, Robert, 61, 67, 210 Radical Civic Union (UCR) (Argentina), 17, 21–22, 24, 171, 255 Radical Party (Argentina). See Radical Civic Union (UCR) (Argentina) Ranelagh, John, 217 Rangel, Domingo Alberto, 134, 224

Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal (Benedict XVI), 186 Ravines, Eudocio, 104 Reagan, Ronald, 11, 195, 217–19, 222, 243, 253 Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) (Guatemala), 226, 234 Recabarren, Luis Emilio, 5, 41–42 Red Battalions, 63, 67 Regeneración, 56 Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM), 69, 71, 76 Rerum Novarum, 47, 55, 137, 176–78 Restricted Interagency Group (RIG) (United States), 219 Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement (MBR) (Venezuela), 244 Revolutionary Directorate (DR) (Cuba), 204–5 Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (GRFA) (Peru), 117 Revolutionary Insurrectional Union (UIR) (Cuba), 199 Revolutionary Movement 13th November (MR-13) (Guatemala), 226, 234 Revolutionary Party (PR) (Guatemala), 108 Reyes, Alfonso, 6, 58 RIG. See Restricted Interagency Group (RIG) (United States) Rivera, Diego, 70 Rivera, Julio A., 181 Rivera, Librado, 56–57 Roca, Julio A., 15, 18, 21 Rock, David, 230 Rodó, José Enrique, 35, 102 Rodríguez, Carlos Rafael, 151, 206 Rodríguez, Valmore, 123 Romero, Oscar (Monsignor), 182–84, 217 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 72, 78, 106, 127 Ross, Stanley R., 187 Rouaix, Pastor, 66 Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo, 189 Ruiz Pineda, Leonardo, 127, 132 Rurales (Mexico), 53 Sabroso, Arturo, 113 Sacasa, Juan B., 83, 87–88 Sáenz Peña, Roque, 21–22, 25 SAISs. See Agrarian Social Interest Societies (SAISs) (Peru) Salinas de Gortari, Carlos: presidency of, 195–96, 241, 254–55, 266 Salinas de Gortari, Raúl, 266

Index / 331 SAM. See Mexican Food System (SAM) Samper Pizano, Ernesto, 265–66 Sampognaro, Virgilio, 36 Sanabría Martínez, Víctor (Monseñor), 139 Sánchez, Celia, 203–4 Sánchez, Luis Alberto (LAS), 101, 106, 108, 112; background of, 96, 102; as Aprista leader in exile, 99, 102, 104 Sánchez Cerro, Luis M., 99, 101, 111–12 Sandinista Defense Committees (CDS), 215, 219 Sandinista National Directorate (DNS), 215–16 Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) (Nicaragua), 9, 88; founding of, 212–13; and overthrow of Somoza, 214–16; rule by, 219–20, 221–22. See also Terceristas Sandino, Augusto César, 212; background of, 80–82; belief system of, 82, 85–86; insurgency of, 84–87; execution of, 88 Sanguinetti, Julio María, 257 Sarabia, Juan, 56–57 Saravia, Aparicio, 27, 29 Sarmiento, Domingo F., 16, 19, 39 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 171 Schnake, Oscar, 43–45, 127 SCOP. See Secretariat of Communications and Public Works (SCOP) (Mexico) Scott, Robert E., 6 Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM II), 184 Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 183–84 Secretariat of Communications and Public Works (SCOP) (Mexico), 77, 188 Semana Trágica (Tragic Week), 23 Sendero Luminoso/Shining Path (SL) (Peru), 10, 230–34, 252, 265, 267 Sendic, Raúl, 228–29 Sendic, Raúl (hijo), 229 Seoane, Manuel, 96, 99, 101–3, 112, 115 Serrato, José, 34 Siles Zauzo, Hernán, 161 SINAMOS. See National System in Support of Social Mobilization (SINAMOS) (Peru) SL. See Sendero Luminoso/Shining Path (SL) (Peru) SN. See National Security police (SN) (Venezuela) Social Christian Party COPEI (Venezuela), 131–33, 180; decline of, 241–42, 258–59 Social Democratic Party (PSD) (Costa Rica), 142

Socialism: definition of, 3–4; varieties of, 42, 259; factors in collapse of, 268 Socialist Party (Argentina), 17, 19–20, 23–25 Socialist Party (Uruguay), 32 Socialist Party of Chile (PSCh), 43, 45–46, 263 Socialist Party of Peru (PSP), 95 Socialist Party of the Southeast (PSS) (Mexico), 73–74 Socialist Republic of Chile, 5, 43 Socialist Workers Party (PST) (Chile), 46 Socialist Workers Party (POS) (Chile), 5, 41 SOEs. See State-owned enterprises (SOEs) Solimano, Andrés, 248–49 Somoza Debayle, Anastasio, 212–13, 215 Somoza Debayle, Luis, 212–13 Somoza García, Anastasio, 88, 144, 212, 234 Sorel, Georges, 18, 93 Spencer, Herbert, 3, 19 Stallings, Barbara, 270 State-owned enterprises (SOEs), 7, 263; in Argentina, 166, 172, 174–75, 256; in Chile, 251; in Mexico, 192, 195, 240–41, 254; in Peru, 118, 252; in Uruguay, 30, 33–34; in Venezuela, 134, 242–43 Stimson, Henry L., 83–84 St. Louis Manifesto (PLM), 57, 61–62, 66 Sugar Coordination Act of 1937 (Cuba), 150–51 Tannenbaum, Frank, 67 Tapia, Primo, 72 Tejeda Olivares, Adalberto, 72, 74–75 10-million ton zafra, 209, 211 Terceristas, 214, 217, 220 Thiel, Bernardo Augusto (Bishop), 137 Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM III), 185 Thomas, Hugh, 204 Thomas, Norman, 108, 146 Thorp, Rosemary, 243, 259, 268, 270 Tlatelolco massacre, 191–92 Tomic, Radomiro, 49 Toriello, Guillermo, 155 Torres, Camilo, 184–85, 225 Torres González, Juan José, 247 Torrijos, Omar, 244, 258 Trincado, Joaquín, 86–87 Trujillo, Rafael, 135, 153 Tupamaros (Uruguay), 10, 228–29, 234, 249 Turcios Lima, Luis A., 226

332 / Index 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) (Cuba), 202, 205, 210 Ubico, Jorge, 155–56 UCR. See Radical Civic Union (UCR) (Argentina) UFCO. See United Fruit Company (UFCO) Ugarte, Manuel, 23, 84 UIR. See Revolutionary Insurrectional Union (UIR) (Cuba) Ulate, Otilio, 142–44 UNAM. See National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) Unamuno, Miguel, 6, 93 Ungo, Guillermo Manuel, 218, 221 Unicato (Argentina), 15, 18–19, 21 United Fruit Company (UFCO), 138, 145, 155, 157–59 University reform movement: origin of, in Argentina, 22–23 University Student Directorate (DEU) (Cuba), 149–50 UNO. See National Opposition Union (UNO) (Nicaragua) UP. See Popular Unity (UP) (Chile) URD. See Democratic Republican Union (URD) (Venezuela) Uribe Uribe, Rafael, 158–59 Uriburu, José F., 25 Uruguayan Regional Workers Federation (FORU), 31, 33 Vanger, Milton I., 27, 29–30, 32–33 Vargas, Mario, 128 Varona, Manuel Antonio, 152 Vasconcelos, José, 3, 6, 58, 87, 103; as Minister of Education, 70, 80 Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) Vázquez y Vega, Prudencio, 28 Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 8, 230, 244, 247, 258; background of, 117; and program of, 118–19, 251

Venezuelan Development Corporation (CVF), 130, 134 Venezuelan Students Federation (FEV), 123, 126, 179 Veracruz decrees, 63 Videla, Jorge Rafael, 174, 229–30 Viera, Feliciano, 36 Villa, Francisco (“Pancho”), 60, 62–64, 69 Villalba, Jóvito, 123, 179 Villarreal, Antonio I., 57, 62 Volio, Jorge, 137 Waisman, Carlos, 256 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 269 Ward, John, 263 War of the Pacific, 39, 91–92 Washington Consensus, 11, 244, 253–55, 257–58 Welles, Sumner, 150 Wheelock Román, Jaime, 214, 216 Wickham-Crowley, Timothy P., 222 Williamson, John, 254, 259 Williman, Claudio, 32 Wilson, Woodrow, 62, 94 Wise, Carol, 270 Wiwilí (Guiguili), 86–87 Workers Federation of the Argentine Region (FTRA), 17 Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) (Argentina), 24, 169, 256 Yon Sosa, Marcos Aurelio, 226 YPF. See Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) (Argentina) Yrigoyen, Hipólito, 21–22, 24–25 Zamora, Rubén, 218, 221 Zapata, Emiliano, 59–61, 63–64, 68 Zedillo, Ernesto, 255 Zepeda, Pedro José, 85–86

Charles D. Ameringer is Professor Emeritus of Latin American History at Penn State University. He is the author of six books prior to this one, among them, The Cuban Democratic Experience: The Auténtico Years, 1944–1952, published by the University Press of Florida in 2000.