Contesting Trade in Central America: Market Reform and Resistance.

Quiliconi, Cintia

Contesting Trade in Central America: Market Reform and Resistance. By Rose J. Spalding. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.

Contesting Trade in Central America is a thorough analysis of the policies of market reform in Central America. The book is important given the lack of analysis of those reforms in small countries in the Latin American literature and the scarce literature that analyzes the effect that trade agreements with the United States can have in the Central American region.

The book's comparative approach is compelling, as it analyzes three countries with very different socioeconomic and political structures. The focus on Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua offers good grounds to compare market reforms between the 1980s and early 2000s in diverse countries. Particularly interesting is the analysis of how diverse has been the civil society reaction to campaigns in favor of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in those three countries.

The case of Nicaragua offers an interesting analysis of how a leftist government that was supposed to avoid a trade deal with the United States has pursued a pragmatic attitude, signing CAFTA and overcoming the ideological division of countries in Latin America. Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega has managed to cooperate with Western donors as well as receive financing for social programs from Venezuela. In turn, the analysis of El Salvador also depicts interesting patterns of mining and antimining movements in this country. Finally, the Costa Rican case details how the process of CAFTA ratification split the country in two clear groups and was resolved only by a referendum in 2006.

The book is divided into six comparative chapters. The first analyzes the process of market reform in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua by dividing these processes into three segments: initiation, deepening, and persistence. Chapter 2 focuses particularly on how CAFTA negotiations took place, taking into account the economic and rule asymmetries that the agreement generated. Chapter 3 in turn concentrates on different forms of resistance to CAFTA, using the "insider/outsider" concepts from the social movements literature (p. 110). Chapter 4 assesses the role of formal institutions in the ratification of CAFTA. Chapter 5 turns its attention to the implementation process and analyzes investment conflicts in El Salvador in the mining sector. Finally, Chapter 6 addresses how the erosion of public support for neoliberal reforms has catalyzed in electoral shifts in the three countries. I recommend this book for anyone interested in market reforms and a political economy analysis of them in that region. Reviewed by Cintia Quiliconi