Central America: which way to capitalism? (1985-86)

From the Winter 1985-6 issue of the World Socialist

In the 50s and 60s the US moved to counter what it saw as a trend toward the establishment of left-wing "third-world" governments in its own backyard by installing military or client dictatorships (wherever the Marines could invent a pretext for landing), most notoriously in Guatemala where the Arbenz government, backed by an increasingly active popular movement, threatened to reproduce the Labor and Social Democratic backlash that had occurred in postwar Europe.

This preventive action, however, was not purely negative in scope but corresponded to a program of economic development which, it was claimed, would do for Latin America what the Marshall Plan had done for Europe. Since this involved increased regimentation generally, it was thought that creating or backing client dictatorships where necessary would guarantee a suitable environment for investing capital.

The "Marshall Plan" for Central America and the Caribbean had consisted, in consequence, of a series of timely strategic "surgical strikes", so that the unsuspecting workers (as in Guatemala in 1954 for instance, where they were otherwise too weak and isolated even to sustain their own radical reformism at that date) were bloodied up and hunted down before they knew what had hit them. Ever since then, US action in the area has been aimed at extending and developing its forcibly imposed discipline, invented for the sake of depressing the exchange-value of human life to otherwise un-maintainably low levels.

On the face of it, the local capitalists in certain parts of Latin America have become increasingly dissatisfied with what they have come to regard as the dead-end development policy of the multinationals; their position is, in effect, that the latter have "mismanaged" economic growth in somehow caused it to be mismanaged.

As the multinationals extended their investments, local industry nourished within a limited context of import substitution. This worked will enough as far as it went, but the focus of investment was not production: it was rather international exchange, and — like the old Mercantilist System — it was oriented toward increasing local foreign exchange reserves rather than generating new value.

As the heat from the reformist opposition became here and there became gradually more intense, it became necessary in the late 60s and early 70s for the US to fortify the bulwarks with a new variety of dictatorship whose legitimacy was virtually non-existent. The sunbelt investors from the US wanted to make one last effort to plunder the locals (capitalists with the support of workers in "mass organizations") before the wrath of the latter finally boiled over.

It was in fact the period of overhasty expansion in the 50s and 60s that brought on the faltering of growth in the late 60s and the financial crisis of the later 70s. The international debt crisis thus links up with the popular opposition in Central America, since it revolves precisely around the funding of the capitalization process. “Reformists”, in this context, are held to be those who favor minor or even major alterations in the way in which the multinationals should be allowed to do business, while those who seek to restrict they way in which capital is accumulated enjoy a reputation for being “revolutionaries”.

Guatemala and El Salvador: unstable Coffee Republics

Guatemalan capitalism as it emerged from the Fascist Decade in the 20s made its bed mostly on coffee beans (and somewhat on bananas), as in El Salvador. (The Central American states received the sobriquet of "banana republics" primarily through their association with the United Fruit Company, one of the "modernizers".) The greater social backwardness of Guatemala, however, caused it to miss out on the land-oriented paroxysms which savaged the workers and peasants of El Salvador in the 30s. The Arevalo and Arbenz regimes in Guatemala (1945-54) were on the other hand notable for setting a precedent of constitutional democracy in the region; just at the time when Labor and Social Democrats in Europe were capitalizing on working class weariness with wartime hardships. (The Costa Rican capitalist class struck early and thoroughly in the same period, abolishing the army altogether, earning themselves the nickname of "the Latin Switzerland".) Thus, despite its relatively backward social organization, Guatemala did experience an echo of Labor reformism in the postwar decade.

The coffee oligarchy of Guatemala took this very ill. By 1954 it was ready to kick over the traces and "to liberate the nation". With the Dulles boys in Washington masterminding a combined diplomatic, propaganda and military offensive, the reformers were easily outmaneuvred and overthrown in July of that year.

Subsequently, however, the coffee barons discovered they had called in the United States only to leap, by the end of the 60s, from the political frying pan into the economic fire: the US had lent its support, not to promote their tranquility, but the growth of industrial manufactures (thereby serving its own convenience) — an assist which could only finish by leaving coffee production further and further behind in the preoccupations of the state. To accomplish this, the US government pursued a policy of regional "self-enrichment" and diversification, "integrating" the region's economies (the self-styled "Central American Common Market"), encouraging import substitution and blocking the spontaneous upgrading of labor-power throughout the regional economy. This process the coffee barons at first mistook for an identification with their interests. Once the blood of the working-class and peasant corpses was good and congealed, however, Washington unceremoniously thrust them aside and the rightwing "National Liberation Movement" (MLN) — which had done the dirty work and built up a political machine in the eastern part of the country — found itself, by the early 70s, a humiliated opposition party within its own regime. And now Guatemala's generals have cut themselves into a very large slice of the profit pie indeed, to the intense annoyance of their fellow capitalists.

It is this general situation of pell-mell accumulation, rather than a supposed structural dependence of Guatemalan capital on an imperialist metropolis ruled by finance capitalists, that explains the endemic instability of Guatemala's ruling class.

The same thing could also be said for El Salvador. In the post-war years, a "modernizing" sector of the coffee exporters and other commercial interests pulled off a palace revolution and installed its own regime in place of the blood-soaked Martinez dictatorship. In this we have what there was of El Salvador's "social-democratic" period, which in the developed economies was characterized by a surge of working-class opinion in favor of more or less broad reforms. In this case, the initiative came from the capitalist class but was supported by the working-class organizations (tiny and persecuted as they were). The fact that circulating capital was mostly tied up in agriculture, that only an exiguous portion of it went to wages in industry, and that it was still mostly tied to fixed capital invested in agriculture, is what accounts for the focus of this initiative on the reform-minded section of the capitalist class rather than on a European-style labor movement.

In terms of social organization, El Salvador in fact came closer than Guatemala to being already "modernized", in that its capitalist class had systematically created Central America's most proletarianized economy — even if it was only for the sake of coffee.

But recently, since the 1979 coup, it has dawned on the coffee magnates that Washington did not offer to give them a hand out of altruism in their emaciated war against the specter of "communism". By the March 1982 elections, the struggle had clearly ceased to be a mere question of a coffee aristocracy clinging tenaciously to its privileged position. Washington at length had decided that condoning extreme right positions was now a liability and definitely cut the coffee oligarchy adrift to face the rigors of "modernization".

The coffee planters have thus acquired the stigma of the greater evil, from the vantage point of international capital. Big business in the US has not changed its tune and decided that what El Salvador needs is a good dose of old-fashioned moderation. It has on the contrary merely revised its criterion of what kind of economic development it thinks would deliver its investments the most effectively from the immediate threat of expropriation.

The structural instability of the capitalist class in both Guatemala and El Salvador demonstrates in microcosm a formative or transitional stage of economic development; and the opposition's allegation of corruption and mismanagement on the part of the governing section of the ruling class acts itself as a catalyst in bringing that transition about: nationalism will never be more than the handmaiden of profit.

The present crisis — which, in the tradition of all great social revolutions, has degenerated to the point where rival factions are now scrambling to get control of the government's budget and so gain the controlling share in shaping the state's economic policy — can thus be explained entirely in terms of profit. From a socialist point of view, its outcome cannot be a revolution resulting in the introduction of common ownership of the means of production, however democratic its ideology may be.

Nicaragua and the class of latent capitalists

The main capitalist opposition in Central America to corporate dominance over the local economy comes, not as we might naively expect, from the existing capitalist class — the official bourgeoisie (the one which is presently constituted and which acts out its role on the stage of world history). It comes chiefly from the concealed capitalist class — the one which favors state-managed capital accumulation on the pretext that this will actually benefit the working class and (what little may remain of) the peasantry.

This class of latent capitalists is none other than the self-styled revolutionary left, most prominently the Leninists, but not by any means those of them who have served as such excellent bull's-eyes for the Reagan administration's target practice. (Moscow-oriented "Communist" parties in Central America — since the massacres of the 30s — have shown themselves incapable, on the whole, of forming more than a loyal opposition bound hand and foot to the status quo, a sort of left-wing Christian Democracy.) There is, in any case, a very definite tendency for the left to nationalize the accumulation of capital conceptually, before any actual question of a transfer of power arises.

A revolution supposedly carried out on behalf of a working class which does not form even a substantial minority of the population, as in a substantial part of the "third world" today (though not so much in Central America), cannot possibly be anti-capitalist. If the workers (wage earners plus professionals and any others who work for someone else) do not make up the majority, then neither can industrial capitalism form the basis of the state. Since the first order of business of a revolution in a state which is still pre-capitalist is necessarily the establishment of a capitalist economy it is nothing if not a pro-capitalist revolution: in an historical context of undeveloped capitalist production, such movements appear as anti-liberal revolutions. One of the warts of Leninism is precisely its confusion of the concepts of "liberalism" and "capitalism".

Capitalism, regardless of its degree of development, is any social system in which the bulk of social wealth is produced for exchange on the market at a profit, conducted through the payment of wages. So long as it observes this basic condition, it may assume any form or character whatever. If this implies totally reorganizing the personnel roster of the accumulators, then so be it! If the state must step in and directly manage all phases and facets of the economy, then that's how it must be! Capital does not care what its administrators look like: it seeks only to reproduce itself in ever-growing measure through the well-known mechanisms of accumulation.

Who makes such revolutions but those who intend to accumulate capital themselves? A minority political party heading a minority working class is itself the nucleus of a potential stratum of accumulators. Capital is equally well served by either sort of lackey. The full transfer of state power to such jerry-built ruling classes is indeed rare — or more precisely, it is an extremely complex event which does not take place most of the time. It is an example of the fortunes of an ideology, not of revolutionary socialist class consciousness.

The revolution in Nicaragua is an interesting study in Leninist doubletalk. Comparing Nicaragua with Guatemala and El Salvador, we note its relatively lesser degree of advancement at the time of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979. That is to say, Nicaragua was still more backward than El Salvador, where a civil war is now underway, yet its neo-capitalist revolution has already been successfully begun, while in Guatemala class conflict has yet to break out into open civil war. What explains this disparity?

A major factor in favour of the Sandinistas, certainly, was the very identification of primitive accumulation — vested as it was in the coffee barons — with a concrete clique of individuals (the clan of the Somozas backed by the United States). More decisive, however, was the extreme disgruntlement of the Nicaraguan capitalist class as a whole.

The Sandinistas are attempting to displace the original crew of black sheep with a group that will be more interested in keeping surplus value within Nicaragua. However, "limiting the intervention of the bourgeoisie in the government" — which is their self-attributed objective — is nothing but a collection of buzzwords, since none of them is seriously proposing to limit the role of capital accumulation in formulating government policy. The question revolves entirely around who will accumulate capital, and for what reasons. The Sandinistas thus represent the left wing of the capitalist class, itching to get on with the business of totally converting over to pure state capitalism.

A member of the Sandinistas' National Direction is quoted as saying that, now that they have control of the banks, they have "surrounded the bourgeoisie" (quoted by Roger Burbach in "Nicaragua: El Curso de la revolución". Revista Mensuel/Monthly Review, July 1980). This is a highly ironic remark, in view of the fact that one group of capitalists (the nascent state capitalists) is saying that about the other (the official bourgeoisie). It also illustrates the Leninist belief that the concentration of finance capital is somehow different from the accumulation of capital in general. What is definitely not being encircled, however, is the function of capital accumulating itself. A society of continuing wage-slavery is the fatal economic issue of the Sandinista revolution, given that the institution of production for profit remains sacred.

If wages as the basis of capital accumulation (through the production of surplus value) are not abolished, via the introduction of common ownership of the means of production, it is utterly specious to distinguish '"reformism" and "the revolutionary process". It is all reformism until society no longer depends on the possession of money as a prerequisite for obtaining goods and services.

Throughout all the vicissitudes of the "revolutionary process", none of the "revolutionary" parties — even the most radical — apparently would would dream of abandoning commodity exchange and its inevitable consequence, production for profit. They confine themselves without exception to squabbling over the right to direct this process (as in El Salvador), with one position favoring total state capitalism — eventually and an opposite position favoring a minimal state presence in the economy (or so they say). An "authentically socialist perspective" (a widespread demand for common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production) does not figure in any of their programs.

Ron Elbert

Perspective on Guatemala (1954)

From the August 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is called the land of eternal spring and appropriately so, for Guatemala does not know the changes of season such as we have in England. It is a country in which you are almost always in sight of a mountain or a volcano. It is the land of the marimba and the quetzal bird and of ancient intricately ornate architecture. Of dictatorship and malnutrition. Of lemongrass and citronella oil, quinine and cinnamon. Of cotton, chicle, coffee—and bananas. It is also a country regarded by United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as a possible danger to the peace of America.

Guatemala lies on the narrow connection between the land masses of North and South America. It is bordered by Mexico, British Honduras, Honduras and El Salvador. The Caribbean Sea lies to the east and southwards is the Pacific Ocean. It is a country about as large as England with a population of 3½ million—roughly the same as Yorkshire. Over two million of these are the religious, superstitious Maya Indians, who are unable to read or write, and live on maize, kidney beans and dried fish. The climate is agreeable enough to have attracted many American vacationists. The main port is Puerto Barrios, situated on the eastern coast and connected by an important railway to the capital Guatemala City. Through the country runs the Pan American Highway, which ribbons along the entire isthmus of Central America. A fertile plain stretches for about 40 miles inland from the Pacific; here are rich banana farms, cornfields and grazing lands.

The country's chief exports are coffee, bananas, chicle, essential oils and honey, of which coffee is the most valuable. Chicle is a latex which is bled from wild sapota trees and forms the basic ingredient of chewing gum. Guatemala has little mineral resources and so is not an industrial nation. Her principal imports are machinery, textiles, petroleum and vehicles. Most of her trade is with the United States.

The early history of Guatemala has been obscured by the passing centuries and the destruction of records in the Spanish conquest of the 16th century. We do know that by about three thousand years ago an advanced civilisation had cleared the jungle, raised crops and built splendid cities, which have left their ruins as evidence of greater days. Over two thousand years ago the Mayas had developed a calendar as accurate as the Gregorian (adopted by Great Britain in 1752) and were working a mathematical system which was the first to use the concept of zero. Around the year 900 the Indians for some reason emigrated to the Guatemalan highlands and the jungle overgrew the deserted cities. The civilisation declined and the Mayas split into warring tribes.

In 1523 the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez sent a small band of conquistadors under his lieutenant Don Pedro de Alvarado from Mexico into Guatemala. There was little in the divided native tribes to resist the Spaniards’ superior equipment and military technique and by 1524 the country was under Spanish control. With the conquistadors came Roman Catholicism and the Inquisition. The Catholic Church assisted in the suppression of the country. In 1593 Pope Alexander VI issued a bull giving Spain sovereignty over Central America, including Guatemala. When the Spaniards found the resistance of the Rabinal Indians too fierce for them. Padre Bartelome de las Casas and other priests penetrated the Indians and won them over by missionary work. Incidentally, it was agriculturally-inclined Padre Tomas de Berlanga who introduced the first rootstocks of the banana plant from which have grown the huge plantations of the United Fruit Company of Boston, U.S.A.

The story of the Spanish conquest is re-told at the Maya fiestas, when masked Indians perform the Dance of the Conquistadors. The dance, to the music of the marimba—an instrument like an outsize xylophone—is an endurance test lasting for several hours. It represents the 1523 hand-to-hand battle between Alvarado and the Maya chief Tecum Uman, in which the Indian lost his life. This was a crucial victory for Alvarado.

The decline of Spain loosened its hold upon the Americas and in 1821 Guatemala was able, like other South American countries, to declare her independence. Then followed a succession of revolutions and presidencies, each relying upon bloodshed and tyranny for its position. In 1873 Justo Rufina Barrios deposed the ruling president and established a dictatorial government. Barrios did much to develop the resources of Guatemala and when he was killed in 1885 he was a national hero. The port of Puerto Barrios is named after him. His death was followed by more revolutions and a procession into and out of the presidential chair. In 1931 General Jorge Ubico was elected to power.

Ubico led a pitiless dictatorship which dissolved the trade unions and gave power to the landowners, greatest of which is the United Fruit Company. When he was forced to resign in 1944, Ubico left less than two per cent. of the population owning 78 per cent. of the land. For six years Guatemala was ruled by three army officers headed by Dr. Juan Arevalo, until in 1950 Jacob Arbenz was elected president Now, in face of the invasion, Arbenz has fallen and the presidential procession has started again.

The invasion came after several weeks of pressure from the U.S.A. The resolution sponsored by Mr. Dulles at the Caracas conference last March was directed against the Arbenz government and provided a legal weapon for future use. More essentially, America has for some years refused to sell arms to Guatemala, who not unnaturally took her custom elsewhere. The arrival at Puerto Bgrrios of weapons from Poland touched off a fine panic in the State Department and provoked the American request to Britain and other countries to allow the right to search their ships. Thus was quietly buried the traditional American lip-service to the freedom of the seas. When Guatemala was attacked America, tongue in cheek, denied the evidence of an invasion. On the other side of the table Russia forgot about Eastern Europe and came out in defence of the rights of small nations. As The Economist put it, rather neatly, it was “war through the looking glass . . .” with “. . . all the words . . . the wrong way round.” But that is nothing new.

What are the reasons for the conflict in the little Central American state? Well, first there’s the Panama Canal, the vital snip of the scissors which cuts America in two. A glance at a map will show the importance of the canal as the short cut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As the quetzal bird flies, Guatemala is 800 miles from Panama and is separated from it by several countries which are friendly to the United States.

Then there’s the United Fruit Company, which owns most of the banana plantations of Guatemala. The company says that it has lost control of 400,000 acres in the recent land nationalisation; it is in dispute with the government over the scale of compensation. Its local legal representative is Dr. Juan Manuel Galvez, President of Honduras, whence came the invaders of Guatemala. Apart from its landholdings, the United Fruit Company owns the dock and harbour installations at Puerto Barrios. Through International Railways of Central America it has virtual control of the entire Guatemalan railway system, including the busy line from Puerto Barrios to Guatemala City. It is noteworthy that the first warnings about Guatemala came from the State Department at the same time as the early expropriation of United Fruit Company land. Foreign control is also strong in the field of electric power, four-fifths being supplied by a company subsidiary to an American firm.

What about Russian interference? Well, the Arbenz government could not be described as a follower of Moscow, although it did suffer the influence of Guatemalan Communists. There was in Guatemala an active opposition with its own newspapers. The Arbenz regime was crudely nationalist—an outlook bred from its attempts to break the American near-monopoly of the country’s wealth and develop a modern industrial state from a semi-feudal country. In competition with the foreign companies the government was building its own wharves at Puerto Barrios and, with the help of a United Nations Technical Assistance scholarship in highway construction, had commenced work on a heavy-duty road from the port to Guatemala City. A state-controlled power station costing nearly £2 million is also under construction.

It is a story by now familiar enough. Along with the bananas and coffee Guatemala has grown its own exploiting class who aspire to own their country’s wealth free from foreign interference. They expressed themselves in a nationalist party which found the American companies as the first obstacle to its plans. So it ran foul of the U.S. State Department. For Central America has for a long time been dominated' by American investment and influence. And in her conflict with Russia the United States cannot allow this power to be challenged and the security of the Panama Canal threatened. An. unfriendly Guatemala was bound to suffer the attention of Mr. Dulles. The Land of Eternal Spring has felt the first wintry blast of the cold war.

Ivan

Blogger's Note:

The original map from the August Socialist Standard was a bit basic, so I grabbed a replacement. In the 1954 map, Belize was still known as British Honduras.

Che Guevara (1996)

From the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The name of Che Guevara was recently in the news again as an ex-officer of the Bolivian military claimed to know where the dead guerrilla's grave is. Guevara was a heroic revolutionary icon throughout the 1960s and 1970s. A famous poster of him wearing a jaunty beret adorned many radical walls and protest tee-shirts. The popular perception of Guevara is as the idealist or utopian dreamer of the Cuban revolution compared with the more tough-minded and pragmatic figure of Castro. But behind the mythology, who was the man, what did he stand for and what is the socialist view of his life and work?

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was born in Argentina in 1928. Graduating with a degree in medicine from Buenos Aires in 1953 he commenced an extensive tour of Latin America, ending up in Guatemala in 1954. He was there when the leftist, reform-minded Arbenz regime was overthrown in a CIA-organised coup. At this period of the cold war the agrarian programme of Arbenz, which threatened extensive American land-holdings, was viewed as a prelude to "communism” by the suspicious Eisenhower administration. Forced to leave Guatemala from the vindictive new authorities. Guevara moved to Mexico City and continued mixing in radical political circles. Anti-American sentiment was commonplace amongst Argentinean intellectuals at the time and the Guatemala episode must have accentuated it with Guevara. He considered himself a revolutionary Marxist but more accurately could be described as being in the Leninist tradition. While in Mexico he met the exiled Fidel Castro who was organising a rebellion against the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. Che quickly agreed to join Castro’s “army of liberation" known as the July 26th Movement.

Cuban Revolution
The rebellion began in 1956 and was based amongst the peasants in the Sierra Maestra. Guevara’s reputation as a heroic fighter dates from this era of mountain struggle where he was a leading military commander in Castro's forces. The historical context to the conflict was that Cuba did not achieve independence from Spain until 1902 and from then until the eventual success of the rebellion in 1959, it was in effect a US protectorate. American business interests dominated the economy and the US government retained the legal right to intervene in Cuban affairs. This was a major irritant to patriotically-minded Cubans and it meant that amongst left-wing nationalists, capitalism was always erroneously identified as being synonymous with American imperialism. The Cuban Communist Party—with the Soviet Union—regarded the 26th July Movement as radical populists fighting against political dictatorship and excessive American interference, being in favour of vague goals to promote social justice. Castro's regime eventually aligned itself with the Soviet Union more as a reaction to Washington’s paranoia rather than out of intrinsic ideological commitment.

Upon the overthrow of Batista, Guevara became Director of the National Bank and than a de facto Minister for Industry. He was prominent in the nationalisation of the foreign controlled sugar production, oil refining, banking and mining industries. He combined these roles with a roving ambassadorship to developing countries seeking to gain international support for Cuba and investigating opportunities to propagate the Cuban revolution. Gradually however his influence waned in Havana and by 1965 he had become almost irrelevant. He criticised the Soviet Union’s treatment of its allies in the developing world saying that in extracting hard-headed trade concessions, they were acting little better than “capitalist” countries. This outspokenness embarrassed Castro. Furthermore he advocated the paying of an equal wage to all Cubans and the use of "moral incentives" to encourage productivity, as a path that would eventually lead to a moneyless society. These arguments were dismissed by the regime in favour of wage differentials and bonuses. Feeling that his talents as a theorist of guerrilla warfare could be put to better use elsewhere, he left Cuba and by 1967 ended up in Bolivia. There with a tiny band of fighters he tried to emulate the Cuban revolution. Despite his initial optimism, the Bolivian peasantry proved to be indifferent and support was unforthcoming. The Bolivian army tracked down the insurgents and in October 1967, Che Guevara was captured, shot and immediately passed from history into myth.

Dictatorial measures
On one level socialists can sympathise with the life of Guevara; from his travels he became aware of the poverty and oppression of the majority of the people in Latin America. This made him a social critic and he was determined to do his part to change society. Undoubtedly the Cuban revolution in which Guevara played a major role brought some initial benefits to the people of the island. The worst forms of worker exploitation (widespread prostitution, the plight of landless labourers) were ended and advances in health and education were tremendous by comparable standards. But side-by-side with this went political oppression; the independent press was closed down, trade unions became an adjunct to the state, there was imprisonment and sometimes execution of political dissidents. Workers were expected to put in long hours in dangerous conditions to satisfy Castro's various industrialisation schemes. In a further parallel with Stalin these dictatorial measures were always justified by reference to an external threat. More recently over the past ten years with the ending of Soviet aid, the fate of the Cuban workers has worsened considerably under the Beijing-like gerontocracy of the Havana leadership. In the popular mind Che Guevara is never linked with this repressive state apparatus though he was an important element in its construction. Ironically too, while Guevara has always in the west been associated with the libertarian “student counter-culture", the regime of which he was a member carried out a severe and ultimately fruitless campaign against western pop music, “decadence" and homosexuality. In fact gay people have been treated particularly harshly in Cuba.

Confusion about the basis on which society is organised meant that Guevara was destined to become part of a doomed experiment in social change. That this same process has repeatedly happened to so many reformers is of immense frustration to socialists. We have a number of reasons for opposing the politics espoused by Che Guevara. We would point to the mistaken Leninist equating of capitalism with imperialism which as in so many other cases inevitably led down the blind alley of nationalism. A good illustration of this is that for the past thirty years in Cuba the 19th century patriotic figure of Marti has been invoked by the establishment as often as Marx.

Another disagreement lies in seeing military action by the self-chosen few as the force to change society. Socialists are not pacifists and have genuine sympathy for those fighting political dictatorship but we recognise that the only meaningful transformation that can occur in society is when the majority of the people on a world-wide basis make a conscious voluntary decision to re-organise their lives and change the system that they live under. At the heart of our difference with Guevara was his belief that an equal wages society would be the spring to a socialist summer. The essence of socialism is a moneyless society; the break with using a means of exchange must be distinct and irrevocable. Equal wages and labour vouchers must inevitably lead back rather than forward as they are based on, and assume, capitalist consciousness continuing.

Denouncing Che Guevara with the easy benefit of hindsight would be facile. Socialists are keen to analyse and discuss such people's lives for the lessons to be learnt. We understand that historical figures like Guevara, Lenin, Garabaldi and Connolly cannot be wholly held responsible for the societies that arose in their wake. Such an approach overestimates the role of the individual as opposed to the political/economic/cultural factors prevailing at the time. Hindsight does show us though that without a proper understanding of the material basis of society any attempts at social change, no matter how initially laudable they may be, will certainly fail.

Kevin Cronin

Soft Drink, Hard Labour (1987)

Book Review from the December 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Soft Drink Hard Labour: Guatemalan Workers Take on Coca Cola. Mike Gatehouse and Miguel Angel Reyes (Latin American Bureau London. 1987).

Guatemala is a country of violent repression. According to a British Parliamentary Delegation who visited the country in 1984 as many as 100,000 people had been killed and 38,000 had disappeared in the previous thirty years. Guatemala is also a country of poverty in which 63 per cent of the population live below the official poverty line and in which 2 per cent of the population own 65 per cent of the land. Against this background the study examines the industrial dispute that took place over a nine-year period involving Coca Cola workers and their union STEGAC and the owners of the Coca Cola bottling plant in Guatemala City.

Coca Cola does not directly own or manage local companies but allows franchise contracts to bottlers. In this particular case it was Embotelladora Guatemalteca SA (EGSA), owned originally by a Texan family, the Flemings of Houston. In 1975 the workers in the company attempted to re-establish a trade union which had been crushed after the military coup of 1954. The process is complex and involves legal registration of a union followed by recognition and granting of bargaining rights by an employer The factory manager, John C. Trotter, attempted various tactics to stop the union, including physical violence and intimidation. He hired members of the Mobile Military Police to act as armed guards, based on a fixed charge per day per guard payable to the army:

EGSA managers began to make explicit threats to Coke workers active in the union. On 10 February 1977 the personnel manager threatened Angel Villeda and Oscar Humberto Sarti. On 1 March, both were shot and wounded. The following day. the Coke workers' lawyers, the Torres, were seriously injured when their car was deliberately bumped and forced off the road by a jeep driven by a government employee, (p.8)

Worse was to follow. Manual López Balam, STEGAC General Secretary, was killed by a group armed with knives and iron bars while he was delivering crates of Coca Cola. The 16-year-old daughter of a union lawyer was arrested, beaten, raped, tortured and temporarily blinded. Further workers and union officials were killed or disappeared or were violently assaulted, as in the case of Amulfo Gómez Segura whose lips were slashed with a razor, his tongue cut out and placed in his shirt pocket.

Pressure was put on Coca Cola including that by the Interfaith Centre for Corporate Responsibility, a group of shareholders from churches and religious orders. They were responsible for bringing Israel Márquez, a STEGAC General Secretary, to Coca Cola's AGM in 1979. It was Márquez who coined the phrase "in Guatemala, Coca Cola is a name for murder". There was also pressure from the Geneva based International Union of Food and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF). Coca Cola denied responsibility, maintaining that franchisees were independent operators. Nonetheless cooperation between Coca Cola and the licence holders was seen to constitute complicity. The IUF called on its affiliates to put pressure on Coca Cola which controls 44 per cent of the world's soft drinks sales. The effect of that pressure was to give bad publicity to the image of Coca Cola and it was this to which the company responded. The EGSA franchise was transferred to new owners and a new management team was brought in. The backlash for Coca Cola was that they were increasingly criticised by the business world for allowing "the dangerous precedent of multinational trade union intervention (the IUF) in multinational corporation affairs".

Meanwhile the new management at EGSA were gradually undermining the company, a policy which could not have gone unnoticed by Coca Cola as they held overall financial control. Under threatened closure the workers occupied the factory in February 1984. A new policy was adopted to deal with the dispute. Further bloodshed would have looked bad for Coca Cola who were that year major sponsors of the Olympic Games. The Government of General Mejia Victores was looking for foreign aid and loans and was promising elections for a Constituent Assembly so again bad publicity was not desired. The occupation of EGSA is a testimony to working-class self-organisation. There were some unusual elements. There is the ironic detail, quoted from Jim Wilson of the IUF. that "every day a sympathetic priest comes in from the outside to say mass before a makeshift altar surrounded by high stacks of Coca Cola crates". Yet the ability to maintain that occupation for a year in a land of poverty and violent repression cannot be underestimated. Nor should the ability to withstand the economic pressure brought to bear by EGSA/Coca Cola. Again there was multinational trade union support for the Guatemalan workers and finally Coca Cola re-negotiated with STEGAC, although insisting that the IUF must not be involved in any settlement.

There are lessons to be learned from this study. A multinational corporation was pressurised into allowing a victory, although limited, to the Guatemalan workers. The occupation testified to the resilience and persistence of a group of workers in establishing and maintaining a trade union against awesome odds. The discipline of those workers during the occupation ensured a majority support and a willingness to sustain the daily routine of maintenance, cleaning, guard duty, assemblies and education and leisure activity. Yet we ought not to forget that no victory guarantees the future while capitalism is maintained. Guatemala may have an elected government but the military bureaucracy still exists. With more than 50 per cent of Guatemala's workforce without permanent employment many fear that contact with a trade union can only take place at the expense of employment. It may be that the security forces are also biding their time. In the struggle for reforms it is the effects that are tackled and not their causes.

Philip Bentley

Poorest of the poor? (1988)

Book Review from the March 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

James Painter. Guatemala: False Hope, False Freedom. Latin American Bureau (London 1987)

In his preface to this volume Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan peasant leader, writes about the majority of Guatemalan people not having "the opportunity to develop and live like human beings". This study examines the reasons that opportunity does not exist and suggests ways in which it might be achieved. To exist in Guatemala is to live in a country of violent repression, hunger and poverty. The country is a stark contrast between a minority living in luxury amid widespread destitution. The armed forces exist to defend wealth and privilege and aid in the repression which ensures their continuation. The emergence of a democratic government under the presidency of Vinicio Cerezo would appear to offer little comfort to any but the privileged minority.

Painter confronts the failure of the Christian Democratic Party, elected in January 1986. to offer any possibility of change. In a country rich in fertile land, oil and mineral deposits it must be questioned why "only a very small percentage of the Guatemalan population does not suffer from the ravages of poverty". The present government may have inherited a dire set of circumstances in which, according to the Government State Planning Council at the end of 1985, as many as 86 per cent of families lived below the official poverty line, yet not even a modest programme of reforms has been suggested. Guatemala has the worst infant mortality rate in Central America with intestinal infections, influenza, pneumonia, measles and whooping cough being major killers; adequate nutrition, vaccination. a proper sewerage and water system would greatly reduce those figures. That may give little comfort in a nation in which 25 per cent of male deaths occurred as a result of political or common violence in the early 1980s. Guatemala's priorities lie elsewhere with spending on health at a minimum but with ever-increasing spending on defence, security and, more recently, debt repayments. The author sees Guatemala's problems as a

direct result of an unbridled "free market" economic system that puts wealth into the hands of a powerful and privileged few and increases the poverty of the many.

To understand Guatemala's poverty it is necessary to examine the economic system which is its creator. This is a country in which, according to the Ministry of the Economy in the early 1980s, 83 per cent of the rural population received 35 per cent of rural income while two per cent received 40 per cent of it. Agricultural wages are desperately low. Labourers are not the consumers of an agriculture whose products arc exported to the rich industrial nations. Food products for the Guatemalan diet have tended to stagnate causing greater reliance on expensive imported food stuffs. According to USAID there are as many as three million acres of idle land, found mostly in the large private estates: 

Decisions about what to grow were made on the basis of private gain, and enough food was only granted to those who had sufficient income or land to afford it.

At the same time any attempt to organise trade unions or co-operatives among workers and peasants has been met by violent repression.

The author suggests a programme of reforms to combat Guatemala's poverty. These include agrarian reform, nationalisation and a more "equitable" reproportioning of the tax burden. Such reforms would merely tamper with a system which exists to perpetuate privilege at the expense of the majority. Reforms are a limited reaction, nevertheless even a suggestion of reform invites the label of "communist subversive" and risks disappearance or death.

Political and economic control of Guatemala lies in the hands of the Guatemalan elite, the security forces and a number of mainly US transnationals and banks. The involvement of the armed forces as an integral component of the economy has escalated since the 1960s. The army has interests in as many as 40 semi-autonomous state enterprises. It controls the ironically named Military Social Welfare Institute which owns its own bank, El Banco de Ejercito. Painter points out that while army involvement in the economy is not unusual in Central America, in Guatemala the officers have "acquired an unparalleled notoriety for . . . corruption, voracity and entrepreneurial zeal". The military has effective economic and managerial control of AVIATECA. the national airline, TAM, military air transport, the main Aurora international airport, GUATEL, the public telecommunications system INDE, the state-owned electricity company, its own television stations as well as such institutions as BANVI (National Housing Bank). DIGESA (Agricultural Services Agency) and INTECAP (Technical Training Institute).

The Christian Democratic Party advocates a policy of "communitarianism" in which, theoretically. individuals are fulfilled through "personalism and the common good". In practice the party has operated in the interests of the dominant power groups with little consideration for the needs of the majority: the rights of private property are sacred and not to be tampered with. Cerezo is on record as saying that the party would not pursue reforms as this would be "disastrous for the economy and provoke capital flight" and so the Christian Democratic Party maintains the status quo. The party endorses the rights of the dominant trinity of interests, private business, the military and US transnationals and. equally as important, is accepted and tolerated by those interests. This adds poignancy to Eduardo Galeano’s observation that in Guatemala elections are "a joke on the people who have nothing and decide nothing" Repression still continues and during 1986 the Guatemalan Commission for Human Rights based in Mexico said that there were 126 politically related disappearances and 463 extra-judicial assassinations.

Cerezo's policies are not untypical of the 1980s. He has sought to reduce inflation by printing less money. He has sought economic growth through offering incentives to the private sector and stimulating foreign capital investment. He has also sought foreign aid to supplement the need for foreign exchange and to regularise the balance of payments crisis. In this he is consistent with IMF thinking. Meanwhile, wages were cut by 16.7 per cent between January and September of Cerezo's first year in office.

For the majority the future offers little: 

the removal of the structural causes that create the gross inequalities, the wrenching poverty and the horrendous human rights violations seems even more remote.

Painter argues for a programme of giving land to the peasants and reforming the tax system but the call for reforms fails to recognise that the structural causes of poverty must themselves be removed if the majority are to have access to the wealth they have created. Painter argues that what minor reforms have been applied "can be nothing more than palliatives" but does not recognise that his large scale reforms are themselves at best palliatives. This may seem a bleak vision but it is a direct consequence of a nation committed to a system in which the profits of the few are pursued regardless of the consequences for the majority.

Philip Bentley