Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador's FMLN and Peru's Shining Path

McClintock, Cynthia. Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El

Salvador's FMLN and Peru's Shining Path. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1998. Maps, tables, bibliography, index, 572 pp.; hardcover $37.50, paperback $19.95.

Longtime student of Peru Cynthia McClintock spent a good part of seven years researching and writing this substantial and impressive volume. She addresses three key questions about revolution in a comparative Latin American context, with occasional forays into the political and economic dynamics of other countries in the region to relate their experiences to those of Peru and El Salvador. The questions are, why did revolution occur? why did revolution fail? and what are the prospects for future revolutions in Latin America?

McClintock marshals a wealth of information and most capably synthesizes the basic theories of revolution literature to answer these fundamental questions. She draws on an impressive number of sources in addition to her own extensive field research in both countries, including sets of interviews with militants in both El Salvador's FMLN and Peru's Shining Path. The latter represents the first such set gathered and analyzed by a U.S. scholar, and it substantially enriches our understanding of the revolutionary context. Her comparative analysis is systematic and always based on substantial data. Her prose is crisp, clear, largely jargon-free, and totally understandable even to the nonspecialist. Having reviewed an early draft of this volume, this reviewer can appreciate more than most the extraordinary effort that went into the final product. Her answers to the key questions, furthermore, are about as straightforward as an academic can get, and will surely help shape subsequent scholarly and policy debate on Latin American revolutions.

For the question of why revolution occurred, McClintock's thesis is crystal clear: the Salvadoran revolution responded fundamentally to political factors; the Peruvian, to economic factors. El Salvador experienced more than 40 years of military regimes before revolution broke out in 1980. Military leaders, after gradually opening the political system to civilian opposition parties at the municipal level from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, lost their nerve in the 1972 national elections when the very civilian parties and leaders they had nurtured appeared to be about to win the presidency. So the military abruptly closed down the process and declared its own candidate the victor. In the repressive cycle that followed, the military government and its puppet party became the natural targets for homegrown revolutionary organizations with coordination, training, and material support from Cuban comrades. With the victory of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, the regional context became extremely favorable for the organization in neighboring El Salvador of a full-scale war of national liberation, formally launched in December 1980 and sustained over the next 12 years.

For Peru, McClintock documents the longstanding failure of both civilian and military governments to address the economic needs of the poor, even in the context of sustained economic growth in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. The "Revolutionary Military Government" of 196880 inadvertently made things worse with reforms that increased popular expectations it could not fulfill; the reforms also, in some cases, turned out to be counterproductive to the government's "development equals national security" goals. Civilian governments in the 1980s, equally well intentioned, compounded the problem with bad, even disastrous economic policies. From the 1960s through the 1980s, only education expenditures rose fairly consistently, particularly in higher education, where the number of universities increased from 8 to more than 40. But a lack of jobs for a large proportion of graduates created a reservoir of resentment.

Ayacucho, where Shining Path began in the 1960s as a radical provincial university movement, remained an economic backwater of endemic poverty. Over some 15 years, Shining Path gradually expanded its activities from the University of Huamanga into the countryside, largely unhindered by the government. It developed a core of support in scores of peasant communities before declaring its own "people's war" in April 1980, initiating actions to coincide with the restoration of civilian democracy in May of that year. For the next 12 years, Shining Path's revolution wreaked havoc, first in the countryside and then in the cities, and brought the government close to collapse by the early 1990s.

Addressing the second question, why revolution failed, McClintock's explanation for the failure of the Salvadoran revolution is both straightforward and convincing. She sees as decisive the massive U.S. support that shored up the government economically, militarily, and politically, particularly the U.S. influence that nudged the regime slowly and sometimes grudgingly toward democracy. As the underlying justification for the rebel cause ebbed, so too did the rebels' capacity to retain support among the population. Faced with this reality and the slacking of their own sources of foreign support-especially Cuban and Nicaraguan, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unexpected Sandinista electoral loss in 1990the revolutionary leadership, with substantial behind-the-scenes U.S. support, chose a negotiated outcome, eventually successful, and turned to electoral politics, by now a real option, as their best alternative.

The explanation for the failure of Shining Path in Peru is never fully developed, however, which is surprising to this reviewer in light of McClintock's important research on Peru over the years. The logic of her argument as to the economic causes of revolution would suggest that failure was related to some set of initiatives, public or private, that alleviated poverty and thereby undercut Shining Path's base of support. McClintock's impressive data, however, demonstrate clearly that this was not the case. The two most important factors relate fundamentally to considerations largely outside her framework: Shining Path's own limitations and a government that finally got its counterrevolutionary act together after years of misguided policies.

Shining Path's dogmatism gradually undermined its support among the presumed beneficiaries of its revolution, the peasants, even as its military capacity expanded in the early 1990s. The government, which had ignored the threat in its early stages and then had responded with extremely counterproductive massive military force and repression, finally began, in late 1989 and 1990, to develop a counterinsurgency approach based on intelligence gathering, with emphasis on tracking down Shining Path's top leadership. This new approach finally brought results in 1992 with the capture of Abimael Guzman Reynoso and many of his party's Central Committee, along with key membership records. This marked the beginning of the dramatic decline in Shining Path activity that has been manifest since mid-1993. The nature of the guerrilla movement itself and the government's policies to deal with revolutionary threats are factors that can contribute to a revolution's failure as well as to its expansion; but they are insufficiently developed in McClintock's framework.

McClintock's discussion of U.S. policy related to Peru is also incomplete. It is true that a coherent U.S. response took several years to put together. It was constrained, from the executive side, by an obsession with the issue of drug production and trafficking in some quarters, and also by specific Congressional restrictions that forced most counterinsurgency initiatives through the legislative filter of antidrug dispositions. In 1991, Congress finally approved significant counterinsurgency assistance (some $86 million) for Peru within these constraints; but only a few months later, in April 1992, the suspension of democracy with President Alberto Fujimori's self-administered coup brought the immediate suspension of this U.S. military support and subsequently its cancellation. Peruvian policy, not a lack of U.S. concern or willingness to support a beleaguered democracy, was the key factor at this critical juncture.

Insufficiently developed as well is the larger context of U.S.-Peruvian relations, particularly a longstanding Peruvian policy to make almost every facet of the relationship difficult and subject to protracted negotiations. This approach applied to a range of issues, from the virtual exclusion of U.S. military relationships since the early 1970s, with the expulsion of the U.S. military mission and Peru's commitment to major Soviet military aid and training, to the refusal of newly elected President Fujimori to accept significant U.S. military aid in 1990. By focusing largely on the U.S. policy dynamic rather than Peru's foreign policy priorities and responses, McClintock underestimates Peru's ability to fend off various U.S. policy initiatives and thereby reduce the range of support it might have obtained. As for the future prospects for revolution, the study's more than satisfactory answer is that revolutions did not necessarily stop with the end of the Cold War and the rise of democracy. Other scholars who have offered likely political scenarios under such changed world conditions, from Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations to Fareed Zakaria's illiberal democracy, tend to emphasize ethnic and religious rivalries and particular historical and cultural dynamics as the likely sources of future conflict. In McClintock's projection, economic factors are key, particularly continued poverty within democracy as both a threat to democracy's future and an opportunity for future revolutions to take root. With the spread of new models of market economies and the reduction, in many cases, of state services in such crucial areas as health, welfare, housing, and education, this prospect is a realistic one. Desperately poor people can be attracted, once again or for the first time, to organize for social and economic justice if their basic needs go unmet. If new liberal market economies and democratic governments cannot find alternatives for such expressions of unrest, revolutionary movements are likely to continue, regenerate, grow, and perhaps even succeed.

Beyond economic factors, however, is the factor of the quality of the democracies now in place, new or established. Most in Latin America have continuing problems of institutionalization and consolidation, if not routinization; their policies are not currently helping those most in need or, in such cases as Colombia and Mexico, are being challenged by competition for access to power at the national level. Both sets of problems have as much to do with the political will of elites as with poverty, if not more so. Therefore the possibility of regenerating revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Peru, and Guatemala, for example, or of seeing them persist and grow, as in Colombia or Mexico, could relate more to political than economic variables.

If this is the current dynamic of Latin American politics, then the challenge for U.S. policy, which is the focus of this volume's final chapter, is to channel its increasingly limited public foreign assistance resources toward improving the quality of democracy in such priority areas as justice, civic education, political leadership training, and corruption control at the national government level; and the fostering of civil society at the local level directly or through nongovernmental organizations. Because this seems to be the current direction of such U.S. official initiatives, and because, in this reviewer's opinion, the key variables are still largely political, those initiatives have a good chance of contributing to Latin American governments' own efforts to consolidate their democracies in a context of growing social peace.

David Scott Palmer Boston University

Copyright Journal of Interamerican Studies Spring 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved