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THIRD EDITION

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THIRTEEN

Making Revolution

In the cold clear morning of the Andean highlands, the peasant partisans

of the Shining Path were drawn up in ranks against an azure sky. Their

faces were brown and weather-beaten, their features and clothing

marked their Indian ancestry. Their weapons were primitive, in many

cases just sickles attached to long sticks. To the historian, they seemed an

evocation of revolutions in China or Russia whose time had come and

gone. Yet, here they were, in April 1992, after the collapse of communism

on other continents, chanting its slogans, talking with confidence and de-

termination about the inevitable triumph of their revolution under the

banner of their Communist party and the Maoist ideology of the leader

they idolized as "President Gonzalo." "The old society was unjust. There

were landlords who oppressed and exploited the people," asserted Com-

missar Francisco. "We have learned much from the Party. With the

People's War we have swept away the landlords, using a broom of steel

as taught to us by President Gonzalo."1 The fire of communism may have

gone out elsewhere, but in the Peruvian Andes the flame of socialist rev-

olution burned brighter than ever.

Viewed from North America, Latin America and the Caribbean seem

lands of social unrest and political turmoil, where bullets are more com-

mon than ballots and revolutionaries are always waiting in the wings. Re-

526 I Americas

hellions have been common in the region, but successful revolutions-

the seizure of power in order to transform politics and values, restructure

economies, and redistribute wealth, status, and opportunity-have been

rare. Between the Haitian revolution of 1791 and the Mexican revolution

of 19rn, more than a century went by without a profound social revolu-

tion shaking the Americas. Another half century would elapse before the

Cuban revolution of 1959 would successfully challenge the hemispheric

status quo, inaugurating three decades of revolutionary upheaval that

would bring the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua and guerrilla move-

ments to much of the region. In the 1990s, with the disintegration of the

Soviet Union, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, the peace processes

in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the economic crisis in Cuba, this cycle

of revolution seemed to be coming to an end. But the rebellions of the

Shining Path in Peru and the Zapatistas in Mexico raised the question :

Is a new revolutionary cycle beginning?

Predictions of imminent revolution have been frequent in Latin

America and the Caribbean during this century, in response to condi-

tions that afford ample justification for rebellion. Certainly, if poverty

and oppression, economic inequality, and unrepresentative government

were sufficient causes for revolution, it would be far more common in the

Americas. But revolutionary upheavals have generally required some-

thing more. Paradoxically, the roots of revolution have often been nour-

ished by economic progress. The integration of the region into the world

order has also generated vulnerable economies, social dislocations, and

political tensions, while raising popular aspirations and democratic ex-

pectations. The costs of this "progress" and the frustration of these ex-

pectations contributed to the success of revolutionary movements in

Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua-and to revolutionary ferment through-

out the region.

In all three successful revolutions, the identification of the old regime

with foreign interests added the flag of nationalism to the banner of re-

bellion. This helped persuade some members of the elite and middle

classes to lead the rebellions and others to support them. Its narrowed

Making Revolution I 5 2 7

base of support weakened the old order, and this weakness was as im-

portant to the rebels' victory as their own strength.

But the overthrow of the old regime and the destruction of its army

did not end the struggle for power. Revolutionary movements are often

coalitions, united in their opposition to the status quo, but divided by

varying visions of the new order to erect in its place. The fall of the old

order has often led to new conflicts over power and policy, which were

won by those who mobilized the greatest military and political support.

In these contests, foreign powers also played a role, as backers of revolu-

tionary factions or as symbols of external interference used by revolu-

tionary leaders to rally popular support. The resolution of these power struggles-and the promises made dur-

ing their course-shaped the character of the revolutions that followed.

Despite their differences, the Mexican, Cuban, and Nicaraguan revolu-

tions all redefined the language of politics and altered their countries'

economic and social policy agendas. Moreover, revolutionary regimes in

all three countries conferred on their citizens an enhanced sense of na-

tional pride and personal self-worth by promoting a nationalistic popu-

lar culture and by standing up to the United States.

Revolutions in the Americas pose special problems for the United

States, the hemisphere's principal power. Challenges to the status quo in

its sphere of influence are unwelcome in Washington, particularly as

U.S. dominance in the region often gives revolutionary nationalism an

anti-American cast. The stirrings of radical unrest in the region have

often led the United States to intervene in defense of its perceived strate-

gic, economic, and political interests. They have also focused the atten-

tions of the United States on a region that it has often taken for granted,

impelling it to rethink its policies and even to recast its hemispheric re-

lations. Viewed from the United States, revolutions in Latin America and

the Caribbean carry the special urgency of revolutions in its sphere.

The Mexican, Cuban, and Nicaraguan revolutions also had a major

impact on the rest of the region. They were viewed as models to emulate

and as symbols to sustain elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean.

528 / Americas

But what did it mean to be a revolutionary in the 1990s? It was a ques-

tion answered differently in El Salvador, where an armed struggle took

an electoral course, in Peru, where a Maoist movement mounted a vio-

lent challenge to the old order, and in Mexico, where Indian peasants

staged a post-Communist revolt.

REVOLUTIONARY ECHOES

"Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees," a dying Mexican

rebel is said to have scrawled with his blood on a Cuernavaca wall. It

might have been the motto for his country's epic revolution. In 1910,

landless peasants, dispossessed ranchers, and ill-paid laborers rose up

against General Porfirio Diaz's oppressive regime, which had forced

them to pay the social costs of Mexico's integration into the global econ-

omy, with its stress on exports and foreign investment, while excluding

them from a fair share of its economic benefits and political participation.

The Mexican revolution was the century's first mass upheaval, and it

would have a major impact on the rest of Latin America.

Viewed from up close, the Mexican revolution seemed an unlikely

model to emulate. Its factions exhibited little social or ideological co-

herence and fought each other with a ruthlessness that belied their once

common cause. Its leaders ranged from dissident oligarchs, frustrated en-

trepreneurs, and provincial teachers to labor organizers, village chiefs,

and cattle rustlers. During the years that followed their military triumph

in 1920, the ruling "northern dynasty" of revolutionary generals seemed

more concerned with consolidating power than with transforming their

society-though Education Minister Jose Vasconcelos did promote rural

literacy and a nationalistic popular culture that reevaluated Mexico's In-

dian heritage. The Depression of the 1930s did bring to power Lazaro

Cardenas, a revolutionary populist who delivered on the revolution's

long-delayed promise ofland reform, backed labor unions in their strug-

gles with foreign-owned corporations, and expropriated U.S. oil compa-

nies and utilities. Cardenas also promoted a "Mexican socialism," a na-

Making Revolution I 529

tionalistic blend of socialist ideas with images of an idealized pre-

Hispanic past such as the ejido, or agrarian reform community, whose

beneficiaries, peasants like Marfa Luz Ojeda in Zacatecas, still venerated

Cardenas half a century later. But after World War II the revolutionary

pendulum swung back to the right, with a corrupt and repressive regime

promoting industry and export agriculture in partnership with Mexican

entrepreneurs and U.S. corporations. By 1991, when President Carlos

Salinas buried its last vestige, the agrarian reform-by allowing ejido

lands to be sold and large estates to be formed-the Mexican revolution

was long dead. In Zacatecas, angry peasants protested that this meant a

"return to the old hacienda system, with a few large landowners" and that

"the peasant will go back to being a slave, like before the revolution."

Yet, for revolutionaries elsewhere in the region, the Mexican revolu-

tion was a source of inspiration. Mexico's labor unions might be corrupt,

but Augusto Cesar Sandino, who worked in the Tampico oil fields dur-

ing the 1920s before returning to Nicaragua to take up arms against U.S.

intervention, came away from Mexico excited by its favoring the rights

of workers in their struggles with foreign companies. Nor was Sandino

alone in seeing solutions to his country's problems in Mexico's revolu-

tionary model. Land reform, the demand of peasant leader Emiliano Za-

pata, and the transformation most associated with the Mexican revolu-

tion, became an obligatory banner of every subsequent revolution in

Latin America and the Caribbean. Mexico's commitment to its Indian

peoples may have been more rhetorical than real, but its ideology of in-

digenismo resonated in countries with large indigenous populations, such

as Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala. Vasconcelos's faith in popular education

as the solution for his country's poor would also find imitators elsewhere,

while the legacy of the nationalist popular culture that he promoted

would be painted on the walls of Allende's Chile and Sandinista

Nicaragua long after Mexico's own revolutionary murals had become

mere tourist attractions.

But it was Cardenas's bold economic nationalism that made the deep-

est impression on the rest of the Americas. After the Mexican revolution,

530 I Americas

neither foreign investment nor private property seemed sacrosanct in

Latin America, and the issue of nationalization was on the political

agenda of the revolutions that followed. Moreover, after World War II,

Mexico's rulers compensated for the freezing of revolution at home by a

prorevolutionary stance in their foreign policy. Fidel Castro was one of

many Latin American revolutionaries who found a refuge in Mexico.

From there he set sail in 1956 for Cuba on a voyage that led to a revolu-

tion whose radicalism, evangelical fervor, and hemispheric impact would

exceed Mexico's own.

REVOLUTIONIZING CUBA

It was 1985 and Fidel Castro's beard was flecked with gray. The once

young guerrilla leader was now pushing sixty and he no longer smoked

his trademark Cohiba cigars, but the Comandante's energy and enthusi-

asm were still unflagging and his charisma was much in evidence. It was

after midnight, the hours in which he read, wrote-and gave interviews.

"Revolutionaries are not born, they are made," he stressed, "by poverty,

inequality, and dictatorship."

Like the Mexican revolution, the Cuban revolution of r 959 was a seis-

mic historical event. It not only transformed the Caribbean's largest is-

land, but also had a major impact on the rest of the Americas, revealing

the new limits of U.S. hegemony and catalyzing a reshaping of hemi-

spheric relations. As in Mexico, the roots of Cuba's revolution were nour-

ished by the island's reincorporation into the world order that began in

the late nineteenth century. A Spanish colony until 1898, Cuba-like

Panama-became a republic under U.S. auspices, which limited its in-

dependence but assured its modernization. With Washington guaran-

teeing political stability and a good investment climate, U.S. capital

poured into the island, ensuring Cuba's position as the world's leading

sugar producer.

Enormous sugar mill complexes were created, factories in the field

that consumed huge quantities of land and labor, converting Cuban

Making Revolution I 5 3 r

landowners into dependent farmers and peasants into proletarians.

Cuba's prosperity came to depend on sugar, which accounted for 80 per-

cent of its export earnings, but was vulnerable to fluctuating world

prices. The result was a dizzying pattern of boom and bust-such as the

"dance of the millions" in 1920-21, when sugar prices soared over

twenty-two cents a pound only to plunge below four cents a pound-in

which fortunes were made and lost, while U.S. control of sugar produc-

tion and processing grew. Cuba's sugar industry never recovered its dy-

namism after the Depression of the 1930s, and by the 1950s depended

on its privileged access to a subsidized U.S. market. At the same time, the

sugar industry's monopolization of land and labor made it difficult for

Cuba to feed itself, creating the paradox of a fertile island living on food-

stuffs imported from Florida at an inflated cost.

This was not the only Cuban paradox. National statistics showed

Cuba to be one of the wealthiest countries in the region-whether the

measure was income, doctors, or telephones-but these benefits were

unevenly distributed socially and geographically, with poor rural Cubans

the most deprived. Fidel Castro was not the only critic to charge that

Cuba was "a rich country with too many poor people."

The overweening U.S. presence in Cuba was another source of re-

sentment. By 1928, U.S. investors controlled three quarters of Cuba's

sugar, as well as strategic sectors from banking to utilities. Three decades

later they accounted for 8 5 percent of all foreign investment, and the

United States for two thirds of Cuba's exports and three quarters of its

imports. It was little wonder that "Cuba for the Cubans" was a cry of re-

formers from the 1930s to the 1950s and would prove a popular revolu-

tionary goal in the 1960s.

This economic dominance was reinforced by a political ascendancy

that had begun with the Spanish-American War, which freed Havana

from Madrid but turned Cuba into a U.S. protectorate. Under the no-

torious Platt Amendment of 1901 that Washington imposed on the new

republic, the United States had the right to intervene in Cuba's internal

affairs. During the two decades that followed, it landed troops four times

5 J2 / Americas

and sent proconsuls on other occasions. A flicker of reform in 1933 was

snuffed out by U.S. opposition. The Platt Amendment was finally re-

nounced in 1934, but U.S. hegemony remained. Earl Smith, the last U.S.

ambassador before Castro's revolution, described himself as "the second

most important man in Cuba"-after the dictator, General Fulgencio Batista.

If Cuba's stagnant economy and unequal society provided the kindling

for Castro's revolution, and U.S. domination the flame of resentment it '

was Batista's dictatorship that sparked the conflagration. The extended

U.S. political tutelage had aroused Cuban expectations of democracy

without laying the foundation for its consolidation. From the 1920s on,

Washington supported pro-U.S. strongmen over nationalistic democ-

rats. Our final man in Havana was General Batista, who seized power for

the last time in 1952 in a military coup that prevented an election he was

sure to lose and reformers were favored to win. This frustration of dem-

ocratic aspirations would ignite the revolt.

Among the leaders of this rebellion was a young lawyer named Fidel

Castro, who led a quixotic attack on the Moncada army barracks, the

country's second largest, on July 26, 1953; it was a military failure but a

political success, capturing the popular imagination and founding a rev-

olutionary movement. At his trial, Castro turned the tables on his ac-

cusers, placing the regime on trial for violating Cuban civil liberties and

political rights in an electrifying courtroom defense that concluded:

"Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me."2 He was

sentenced to prison, but released in a 1955 amnesty and exiled to Mex-

ico. There he prepared the rebel force that landed in eastern Cuba in De-

cember 1956. Plans to coordinate this landing with a popular insurrec-

tion in Santiago, Cuba's second city, went awry, but a few survivors made

their way to the nearby Sierra Maestra, where they began guerrilla war-

fare . Two years later they would enter Havana in triumph.

Castro's victory was based on a growing mastery of guerrilla warfare,

increasing peasant support, and a strong urban underground. But most

of all, Castro's success stemmed from Batista's weakness: his lack of com-

Making Revolution I 533

mitted support. When victory eluded the dictator, his troops deserted,

his civilian backing faded, and the United States abandoned him. As rebel

columns streamed toward Havana in late 1958, Batista's army disinte-

grated and the "strongman" fled the country.

The rebellion was over, but the revolution had just begun. When

Fidel Castro and his bearded young guerrillas descended from the Sierra

Maestra and made their way across Cuba to Havana in January 1959, few

among the millions who cheered their triumphal procession could be

certain what their victory portended. Within the rebel ranks were vary-

ing visions of the path that their "revolution" should take. Many were

middle-class moderates, like Mario Llerena, a rebel emissary abroad,

whose notion of revolution was confined to the establishment of politi-

cal democracy and some mild social reforms, and who believed that

"there was no desire, no expectation, and no need for a radical revolu-

tion."l Others, including some of Castro's closest companions, such as his

brother Raul and the Argentine Ernesto "Che" Guevara, were Marxists

who equated revolution with socialism. Still others, including Castro

himself, were influenced both by the revolutionary humanism of Jose

Marti, Cuba's independence hero, and by their own experience of Cuba's

underdevelopment and inequalities. Their ideology might not be fixed,

but they were determined "to revolutionize Cuba from the bottom up."

The contest among these factions was at once a struggle for power and

a battle between rival revolutionary visions.

It was a struggle that Castro and the radicals won easily, a victory that

reflected Castro's own ascendancy within his movement and control of

the rebel army. It also stemmed from his ability to rally the overwhelm-

ing majority of Cubans to his side. They responded to Castro's charisma

and they identified their revolution with him: "If Fidel is Communist,

then so are we" became the refrain. But they also responded to the rad-

ical thrust of his revolution, which implemented an agrarian reform,

raised real wages, eliminated illiteracy, promoted social programs, and

stood up to the United States, eventually expropriating more than one

billion dollars in U.S. properties. Many Cubans opposed Castro's radi-

534 / Americas

calism. Over ro percent of the population of six million went into exile,

most to the nearby United States, but many to other countries of the

Americas. Their departure eased Castro's path to power.

Castro won the struggle for power in increasingly close alliance with

Cuba's Communist party, which had opposed Castro initially and played

little part in the rebel victory, but which enjoyed sizable support among

organized labor. For the Communists, Castro offered access to power

and the opportunity to make the socialist revolution they themselves had

never been able to win. For Castro, the Communist alliance provided

disciplined working-class support at a time when his radicalism was

alienating his original middle-class political base. It also helped him se-

cure the backing of the Soviet Union, which he needed in order to sur-

vive his growing confrontation with the United States.

For the United States, Castro's increasing Communist ties were as

worrying as his agrarian reform, whose major targets were U.S. sugar

companies. By mid-1959, the Wall Street Journal was warning that "the

Revolution may be like a watermelon. The more they slice it the redder

it gets."4 As actor and as symbol, the United States played a central part

in Cuba's internal power struggle. This reflected the traditional U.S. role

as the ultimate arbiter of Cuban politics, plus Washington's distrust of

Castro and his revolution. Though the United States had pressured

Batista to leave office in late 1958, it had also tried to prevent Castro

from assuming power by arranging a military alternative. When this

failed, Washington threw its support to the moderates within Castro's

own movement, which the Cuban leader used to discredit them. Their

defeat left the United States with the stark choice of accepting Castro's

victory and coming to terms with his radical vision of a new Cuba, or else

trying to overthrow him. Predictably, with a revolution on its doorstep,

Washington chose confrontation over compromise.

But the emergence of the Soviet Union as a rival superpower and al-

ternative patron for Cuba meant that the economic and diplomatic pres-

sures that had persuaded Havana to follow the U.S. lead in the past were

no longer sufficient. Washington's final option was force. Covert inter-

Making Revolution I 5 3 5

vention had undermined the leftist Arbenz government in Guatemala in

1954, and the CIA was given a chance to repeat that success. The CIA

recruited and trained an exile army, confident that its landing would det-

onate a popular rebellion against the man the U.S . viewed as a Commu-

nist dictator. But this strategy came to grief in April 1961 at the Bay of

Pigs, "a perfect failure," which revealed Castro's political support and

military strength to be far greater than Washington had believed.

In the wake of his Bay of Pigs victory, Castro consolidated both his

personal power and his revolution's socialist definition, wrapping both in

the mantle of nationalism. On the eve of the invasion, one million

Cubans gathered in Havana's Revolution Square to hear Fidel declare

their revolution socialist. As a mock coffin of Uncle Sam was passed from

hand to hand, Castro asked the crowd to "vote" for or against socialism.

A thunderous roar of approval gave him the answer he wanted: Cuba was

now in the socialist camp. The missile crisis of the following year only

confirmed that reality. President John F. Kennedy may have faced down

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and forced Moscow to withdraw its

offensive missiles from Cuba, but in return the U.S. gave assurances that

it would not invade the island. At the time, Castro was outraged at

Khrushchev's failure to consult him, but he later admitted that

"Khrushchev was right." The resolution of the missile crisis meant the

consolidation of his revolution.

But revolution is a process that unfolds over time. During the next

three decades, Castro steered his revolution on a gyrating course. A 1961

campaign based on student volunteers that succeeded in virtually wiping

out illiteracy in one year underscored for Castro the power of revolu-

tionary consciousness and mass mobilization to overcome seemingly in-

surmountable obstacles. He followed the same strategy in his drive to de-

velop Cuba economically while creating a heterodox Utopian socialism

based on moral-not material-incentives, which would refute both

U.S. laws of capitalist economics and the Soviet model of socialist stages.

Its proof was to be a ten-million-ton sugar harvest by 1970, almost dou-

ble Cuba's previous record, and Castro mobilized his nation to meet this

536 I Americas

symbolic goal. When that harvest failed to reach ten million tons, and led

to widespread economic dislocation and political disillusionment, Castro

took personal responsibility for the debacle. Years later he excused these

mistakes of his youth as "errors of idealism: We wanted to build com-

munism without first passing through socialism."

For much of the 1960s, Cuban economic strategy followed Fidel Cas-

tro's changing enthusiasms-for and against sugar and industry, cattle

and coffee-and the joke was that "his checkbook was Cuba's budget" in

a system of "unplanned planning" with "more checks than balances." Be-

ginning in the 1970s, Castro embraced Communist orthodoxy, moved

closer to Moscow, and adapted Soviet institutions and models to Cuban

conditions. By 1989, a synthesis of Soviet and Cuban experience seemed

consolidated in Cuba, and a postrevolutionary society had emerged. A

balance of three decades of revolution could be drawn up.

Revolution had created far greater changes in Cuba than in Mexico.

Few private enterprises remained and the economy was guided by cen-

tral planning. A one-party Communist state had been established with

unprecedented power to mobilize resources and reshape society. The old

class structure had been leveled and Cuba claimed the most equal soci-

ety in the Americas, although new status distinctions had emerged, based

on revolutionary roles and political connections. Literacy and education

were universal, medical care was free, and life expectancy approached

U.S. levels.

Rural Cuba had benefited most. Bayamo, the Sierra Maestra province

where Castro had established his guerrilla headquarters, was one of

Cuba's poorest and least developed regions in 1959. Twenty-five years

later, its modest rural homes sprouted television antennas and pastel-

painted schools dotted its hillsides, including innovative coeducational

boarding schools where students worked half the day in the fields. In the provincial capital, where a Nestle dairy had been the sole ind1,1stry,

thirty-five factories provided employment, and local citizens prided

themselves on their medical clinics and cultural centers. Unlike many

rural areas in Latin America and the Caribbean, Bayamo had held its

Making Revolution I 5 3 7

population in the interim, as the revolution's heavy investment in the

countryside stemmed the tide of migration inundating cities in the rest

of the region. People spoke of the difference that the revolution had

made in their lives and in those of their better fed, better dressed, and

better educated children. Yet, for all the dramatic changes, some of the salient features-and

problems-of prerevolutionary Cuba remained, albeit in new guises. In- dustry had made significant strides, but sugar still accounted for the bulk

of the country's exports. The revolution had recorded impressive gains

in education and public health, but their quality was debatable and many

Cubans found their material aspirations unfulfilled. Mass organizations

and local "popular power" institutions gave Cubans greater political par-

ticipation than before the revolution, but not the Western-style democ-

racy and civil liberties that many Cubans desired. The seamy side of the

Cuban revolution was hidden behind the prison walls where political dis-

sidents languished. Social conformity was enforced by revolutionary

block committees and shoddy Soviet goods were part of the price for

Cuba's dependence on Moscow's trade and aid.

Although Castro's Cuba was no longer dependent economically on

the United States in 1989, it seemed to have exchanged that dependency

for a niche in COMECON, the Soviet bloc common market. This was

the source of Cuba's comparative prosperity during the 1980s crisis that

hit other countries in the region, but a far cry from the young guerrillas'

dreams of economic autonomy and industrial development. Since 1989,

moreover, the collapse of communism and disintegration of the Soviet

Union have revealed just how vulnerable revolutionary Cuba remains to

foreign events beyond its control. By mid-1991, COMECON was his-

tory, the Cuban economy was in deep trouble, and even a Cuban Com-

munist who stressed his strong support for the revolution reflected rue-

fully in Havana that "dependency is bad, no matter what side of the river

it's on." The Cuban Revolution survived the century-itself a victory given

the global collapse of Communism and intensified U.S . hostility-but it

538 / Americas

would be a distorted and impoverished revolution, dependent on tourist

dollars and exile remittances, which had compromised its socialist model,

if not its commitment. In 2005, the equality that was the revolution's

proud accomplishment was a thing of the past. By then, however, Cuba's

economy had started to grow again, and the discovery of oil in 2004 led

to predictions that better times lay ahead.

Yet, whatever the current state and ultimate fate of the Cuban revo-

lution, its impact on the Americas is incontrovertible. For some, Cuba

was a model to emulate, for others a threat to combat, but there were few

neutrals where Castro's revolution was concerned.

THE GUERRILLA DECADE

"The duty of revolutionaries is to make revolution," Fidel Castro pro-

claimed in February 1962.5 Throughout the hemisphere and across the

political spectrum there was the hope-or fear-that Latin America was

ripe for revolution, and that the Cuban revolution would sweep over the

region as the French revolution had once swept across Europe, ending

oppressive old regimes and replacing them with a new egalitarian order.

The dream of another Cuba inspired young revolutionaries throughout

the region to exchange their books for rifles and to head for the hills in

the expectation of repeating Fidel Castro's success in their own countries.

None triumphed until the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1979, but

their efforts to do so made the 1960s the "Guerrilla Decade."

It also made "No More Cubas" the priority of U.S. policy in the re-

gion. Within this context, President Kennedy promoted the Alliance for

Progress, a program of ambitious social and economic reforms designed

to deprive Castro's imitators elsewhere in the region of the social base for

revolution. "All people of this hemisphere are entitled to a decent way of

life," he warned. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will

make violent revolution inevitable." But the Alliance soon ran aground

on the rocks of anticommunism and self-interest, and then lost its way as

Washington placed increasing priority on military assistance to counter

t I .

Making Revolution I 539

guerrilla insurgencies. When Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy in the

White House in late 1963, backing for democratic reformers withered in

Washington and support for anticommunist dictatorships grew.

The fear of another Cuba at first motivated some Latin American and

Caribbean elites to carry out economic and social reforms from above in

the hope of forestalling a revolution from below. But it also led the mid-

dle classes-whom the Alliance envisioned as a repository of democratic

values-to support authoritarian regimes and harsh military measures to

deal with real or imagined revolutionary threats. One way or another, the

shadow of Cuba's 1959 revolution shaped the hemispheric history of the

decades that followed as a contest between revolutionary movements and

their opponents. In this continentwide struggle, Venezuela emerged as a key battle-

ground. Fortunate to possess the region's largest oil fields, Venezuela also

had its second largest per capita income. But this wealth was unevenly

distributed, as were its fertile lands. In the democratic wave that followed World War II, a reform movement led by Acci6n Democnitica (AD), a

social democratic party, came to power in 1945. But it was overthrown

by a military coup in 1948, and replaced by the corrupt and repressive

dictatorship of General Marcos Perez Jimenez. He was ousted in 1958

after a popular rebellion spread to the armed forces, bringing AD's R6-

mulo Betancourt to power at roughly the same time as Fidel Castro, on

seemingly similar platforms after the defeat of strikingly similar dicta-

torships. Castro visited Caracas in 1959 and received a warm welcome.

But, as they consolidated power, the two leaders moved in opposite di-

rections, with Betancourt moderating his once radical reform stance,

while Castro radicalized his reformist agenda. By 1962, Castro and Be-

tancourt were sworn enemies and leftist guerrillas had taken up arms

against the Venezuelan president. Many of them were middle-class students, youthful former members

of AD like Moses Moleiro, who had become disillusioned with Betan-

court's declining commitment to radical change and inspired by Castro's

revolutionary example: "We saw that while our leaders had been talking

540 I Americas

about revolution for thirty years, in Cuba the revolution triumphed in

two years of fighting; while R6mulo Betancourt had been talking about

agrarian reform for thirty years, and governed twice without doing any-

thing about it, in Cuba a far-reaching agrarian reform was taking place."6

In response, they left Acci6n Democratica, formed the Movement of the

Revolutionary Left (MIR) in 1960, and began preparing for "armed struggle." Other guerrillas were Venezuelan Communists who had taken

part in the rebellion that ousted Perez Jimenez and were impatient with

their own party's preference for democratic reform in a situation that

they believed was ripe for revolution. In the view of Fabricio Ojeda, a

leader of these revolutionary Communists, "Venezuela was an erupting volcano." 7

Militant strikes and slum riots and a 1962 uprising by sympathetic

army units underscored the possibilities of urban insurrection. But

Venezuelan guerrilla leaders followed Castro's example and headed for

mountainous rural zones to begin rural guerrilla warfare, reducing the

cities to rear bases of support. The Acci6n Democratica government

countered by accelerating its agrarian reform, jailing leftist political

leaders, and intensifying its military counterinsurgency with U .S. assis-

tance. By 1969, when the opposition Christian Democrats elected Rafael

Caldera president, Venezuela's guerrilla movements were no longer a

threat, the left was deeply divided, and some of its most important advo-

cates of armed struggle were now arguing for accepting Caldera's offer

of amnesty and returning to electoral politics. In a democratic Venezuela , the need for "armed struggle" was less clear than in Batista's Cuba.

Moreover, in a country where two out of three people lived in urban

areas, "guerrilla action depends on developments in the town," argued

Teodoro Petkoff, a Communist leader and brother of a rural guerrilla

commander. 8 When Petkoff left the Communist party in 1970, it was to

found the democratic Movement to Socialism (MAS), with the goal of

forming a broad leftist electoral alliance and formulating a "Venezuelan

road to socialism." In 1998, he was a minister and MAS a partner in an- other Caldera government.

Making Revolution I 541

A year later, when Hugo Chavez, a military populist, became presi-

dent, Fidel Castro was a special guest at his inauguration. Chavez had

fought the guerrillas in the 1960s, but had been radicalized by the expe-

rience. With President Chavez echoing leftist critiques of Venezuela's

elitist politics and unequal society it seemed as if the guerrillas had finally

won. Many of them joined his "Bolivarian Revolution," which survived

U.S. hostility, strikes, coup attempts, and a plebiscite to consolidate it-

self by 2005 on a base of high oil prices and strong support from the

urban poor. Ali Rodriguez-formerly known as Comandante Fausto-

became foreign minister.

Although the guerrilla movements in each country had their own his-

tories, and some were more successful than others, the problems experi-

enced in Venezuela-military mistakes, political divisions, and a weak so-

cial base-were common throughout the region. In response to these

defeats, the Cubans published Regis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution?

as a how-to manual of guerrilla revolution based on the Cuban model, and

formed OLAS-the Organization of Latin American Solidarity-as a re-

gional revolutionary international to provide the political support lacking

from local Communist parties and their Moscow patrons.

In 1967, Che Guevara himself-the prototype and theorist of the

rural guerrilla-began guerrilla warfare in Bolivia with the goal of"turn-

ing the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of South America" and aiding the

global revolutionary struggle by creating "two, three, many Vietnams."9

A year later he was dead at the hands of U.S.-trained troops. Guevara was

the victim of the same combination of strategic and tactical errors, feuds

with local Communists, and lack of a sufficient peasant base that had

doomed other Latin American efforts to emulate Cuba's example. In the

wake of Guevara's death, Havana seemed to give up on the possibilities

of Cuban-style revolution in the Americas. Instead, Castro supported the

wide array of "revolutionary" movements that emerged in countries with

differing conditions and traditions-from urban guerrillas such as

Uruguay's Tupamaros to Salvador Allende's "democratic road to social-

ism" in Chile.

542 / Americas

The blocking of these varying revolutionary roads by U.S.-backed

armed forces-and in particular the 1973 military coup in Chile-per-

suaded Castro that Washington would not allow even a democratic rev-

olution to succeed in the Americas. In the mid-197os, Castro redirected

his revolutionary hopes and Cuban efforts to Africa, while seeking a rap-

prochement in the Americas with regimes he had once sought to over-

throw. High on his list was Venezuela, led by Carlos Andres Perez, who

had been a tough interior minister during the counterinsurgency cam-

paign of the mid- 196os. As president from 1974 to 1979, however, Perez

led efforts to reintegrate a more restrained Cuba into the inter-American

system. Although the United States succeeded in blocking these initia-

tives within regional organizations such as the Organization of American

States (OAS), several Latin American and Caribbean nations renewed

diplomatic relations with Cuba. It was a sign of the growing determina-

tion of the region's countries to shape a hemispheric policy independent

of Washington's dictates, which would surface with far greater force with

the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979.

THE REVOLUTION OF THE "MUCHACHOS"

The convoy of jeeps wound its way through the jungle-covered moun-

tains of northern Nicaragua, with soldiers deploying up the hillsides at

turns in areas where Contra guerrillas were active. It was January 1983,

and Sandinista vice president Sergio Ramirez was leading a group of cab-

inet ministers in a whirlwind weekend tour of the provinces.

Each stop revealed another facet of the revolution they led and the

problems it faced . At a Matagalpa farm, committed students spending

their Christmas vacation picking coffee beans worried about recent

Contra attacks that had claimed several lives not far from where they

were gathering the vital harvest, on which Nicaragua depended for

badly needed export income. In another production center, a grimy mi-

grant worker embraced "Comandante Lea" Guido, the minister of

health, and reminded her of the time they fought together against So-

Making Revolution I 543

moza's National Guard. Nearby, teenage teachers at a school empty of

equipment complained of the lack of resources with which to follow up

their successful literacy campaign. At an isolated estate that had once be-

longed to a Somoza general, a group of resettled Miskito Indians ~tood

in stony silence listening to Vice President Ramirez, an accomplished

writer, deliver a speech in elegant Spanish, a language they didn't un-

derstand. The day ended at a rural retreat, but there was no respite for

the weary ministers. Local landowners came to complain about low gov-

ernment prices for agrarian products, which were responsible for de-

clining production levels and the increasing smuggling of cattle across

the border into Honduras. Over glasses of white rum, youthful ministers talked of how they had

left school to join the Sandinista revolution; how they had spent their

college years learning instead how to defeat the Somoza dictatorship.

"We had no time to learn how to govern," explained Comandante

Monica Baltodano, a former guerrilla leader who had become minister

of regional affairs, responsible for an ambitious decentralization pro-

gram. "But we thought that defeating Somoza was the hard part, that the

revolution itself would be easy. Now we know we were wrong."

The Sandinistas were the first to follow Castro's guerrilla path to

power. What made the Sandinista success particularly striking wa~ that

it took place in the Central American country longest under U.S. mflu-

ence, a nation ruled by a second-generation dictator educated at West

Point and commanding a modern U.S .-armed and -trained National

Guard. In Nicaragua, as in Mexico and Cuba, economic modernization and

political dictatorship bred the conditions for social revolution. Coffee ex-

ports had led Nicaragua's integration into the international economy

after 1870, but they had lost their dynamism in the Depression of the

1930s. After World War IT, a cotton boom compensated for ~e stagn_a-

tion of coffee exports, but this economic success came at a high social

cost. Subsistence farming gave way to commercial agriculture and some

two hundred thousand peasants were forced off their newly valuable

544 / Americas

lands. Some joined the ranks of ill-paid migrant laborers. Many more

swelled the tide of migration to Managua, Nicaragua's burgeoning cap-

ital. There they eked out a living in urban shantytowns where most res-

idents were unemployed and most families impoverished. These dis-

placed peasants and desperate slum-dwellers would be prime recruits for

the Sandinista rebellion.

Dictatorship had been a central issue in modem Nicaragua since the

1930s, when National Guard commander Anastasio Somoza arranged

the murder of Augusto Sandino and then took over the government. By

the 1970s, three Somozas-Anastasio (1936-56) and his sons Luis and

Anastasio-had ruled Nicaragua, imposing a corrupt dictatorship more

long-lived than Porfirio Diaz's and more ruthless than Fulgencio Batista's.

By then the Somoza family controlled a quarter of the country's arable land

and twenty-six of its largest corporations. They had also used their power \

to undermine the position of dissident elites, to create a new elite of their

own cronies, and to repress the protests of workers and peasants who had

paid the price of the Somozas' vision of modernity. In imposing a dynastic

dictatorship, the Somozas had personalized Nicaraguan politics. This

made it possible for the rebels to unite a socially diverse alliance against the

regime: The Somoza dictatorship was the central issue in the revolt.

As in Mexico and Cuba, nationalism reinforced the demand for revo-

lutionary change and gave it an anti-U.S. cast. Nicaragua had been the

first Central American country to be invaded by North Americans in

1855-when Tennessee adventurer William Walker made himself

Nicaragua's president-and the first to be occupied by U.S. Marines, in

1908. The United States intervened repeatedly during the early twenti-

eth century in an effort to reshape Nicaraguan politics, and was respon-

sible for both the creation of the National Guard and the selection of So-

moza to command it. Successive U.S. administrations of both parties

backed the Somoza dictatorship and armed the Guard, despite com-

plaints about both. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked "how he

could support that son of a bitch Somoza," he is said to have replied: "So-

moza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." During the

Making Revolution I 545

Cold War, the Somozas' anticommunism was sufficient to assure Wash-

ington's support, and the Somozas played their U.S. cards with skill, cul-

tivating Washington politicians and envoys. North Americans made

large profits as Somoza business partners and the United States domi-

nated Nicaragua's trade and finance. Small wonder that Nicaraguans

identified the United States with the Somoza regime and blamed Wash-

ington for their economic, social, and political ills.

In 1970, few countries in the region seemed as ripe for revolution as

Nicaragua, yet as unlikely to have one. The Sandinista National Liber-

ation Front (FSLN) was inspired by Sandino's example, but it emulated

Castro's. Founded by radicalized students in 1961, it was one of the less

successful of the many Latin American guerrilla groups that followed

Cuba's lead during the 1960s. But new political and military strategies

and tactics-urban organization and peasant mobilization, broader social

alliances at home and support abroad, dramatic armed actions and pop-

ular insurrection-would bring the Sandinistas to power in 1979.

Equally important were the errors and unpopularity of the Somoza

regime. When an earthquake devastated Managua, the nation's capital,

in 1972, Anastasio Somoza profited from the reconstruction, pocketed

relief funds, and used these monies to enter economic sectors previously

reserved for other members of the Nicaraguan elite. Somoza's cynical

corruption in the face of national disaster embarrassed the educated mid-

dle class and alienated business elites whose interests were prejudiced by

his new ventures. His actions also scandalized the Catholic church: In

Nicaragua, unlike Mexico or Cuba, the Church would support the re-

bellion, culminating in 1979 in an unprecedented episcopal endorsement

of armed overthrow of the dictatorship.

In 1977, a group of twelve prominent professionals and clerics was

formed to bridge the gap between the Sandinistas and the elite opposi-

tion to Somoza led by Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a charismatic publisher

and political reformer. Chamorro's assassination in January 1978 re-

leased a national outrage that transcended class and partisan lines and set

the stage for the insurrection that followed.

546 / Americas

During the next eighteen months, strikes by dissident business elites

led by Alfonso Robelo and popular insurrections led by the Sandinistas

brought the Nicaraguan economy to a halt and the dictatorship to its

knees. In this revoluci6n de los muchachos, or Kids' Revolution, sponta-

neous urban rebellion by young slum-dwellers was as important as

planned Sandinista offensives. When Somoza's intransigence under-

mined U.S. efforts to arrange a transfer of power to Robelo's moderates,

and when Latin American opposition in the OAS blocked Washington's

proposal for hemispheric military intervention, the Sandinistas com-

pleted their defeat of Somoza's National Guard, a personal army that dis-

integrated when the dictator fled the country in July 1979.

In Nicaragua, as in Cuba, the course of the rebellion determined the

outcome of the struggle for power that followed, establishing the San-

dinistas as both the people's choice and the sole military force. Their

business allies were relegated to a minority position in the revolutionary

government headed by Sandinista commandante Daniel Ortega, whose

policies they were powerless to influence. In April 1980, Robelo and Vi-

oleta Barrios de Chamorro, Pedro Joaquin's widow, resigned from the

revolutionary junta and joined an opposition that included business

elites and disillusioned Sandinistas and clerics.

As in Mexico and Cuba, the triumph of the Sandinista revolution

meant the transformation of rebels into rulers, the creation of a dominant

revolutionary party, and the extension of state power into new realms. A

literacy "crusade" based on the Cuban model made impressive gains

against great odds, and an increase in political participation through San-

dinista mass organizations occurred as well. Fidel Castro urged the San-

dinistas not to make the same mistakes he had made, and they tried to

shape their revolution in a distinct mold. Unlike Cuba, opposition parties

and newspapers were permitted and competitive elections were held, al-

though opponents complained of restrictions on the press and their po-

litical freedoms. Land reform, a central focus of Nicaragua's revolution,

as it was in Mexico and Cuba, was an eclectic showcase for Sandinista

pragmatism, combining private ownership and state farms with an ex-

Making Revolution I 547

panding cooperative sector. Large landowners remained in control of

most of Nicaragua's export crops, but the country's capitalists lost their

political influence and complained that government policies prejudiced

their interests. They provided strong support for the internal political op-

position to the Sandinistas and to the U.S.-backed Contra guerrillas

whose efforts to overthrow them increasingly dominated Sandinista con-

cerns, along with a tightening U.S . economic squeeze with the same goal.

By January 1983, Health Minister Lea Guido was reduced to handing

out toys donated by U.S. solidarity groups to rural children in the north-

ern border zone, "because the policy of the U.S. government makes it

impossible to give them the medicines that they really need ." Eventually,

over 6o percent of the Sandinista government's expenditures would be

devoted to defense. If the Nicaraguan revolution accomplished less than

its predecessors, it was in large part due to the need to devote a growing

portion of its more limited resources to fighting a Contra force of sixteen

thousand recruited, trained, armed, and directed by the United States. In

the end, perhaps the biggest achievement of the Sandinista revolution

was its survival for a decade in the face of unremitting U.S. hostility that

ranged from a virtual economic embargo to Washington's largest and

most overt covert war. In response, the Sandinistas moved closer to Moscow and radicalized

their revolution, accelerating their agrarian refopn to give Nicaragua's

peasants something to fight for. In the cotton fields of Leon, along the

Pacific Coast, this strategy seemed a success. Looking at his cooperative's

first cotton crop, Luis Mayorga talked in 1983 of how its previously land-

less members had gotten together at a meeting of the local Sandinista

peasant organization and decided to take advantage of the government's

offer ofland by forming a cooperative, which also made them eligible for

government credits, an imported tractor, and technical assistance. A year

later, their cooperative was prospering and its members were talking

about adding livestock and building a school for their children. Many of

the peasants involved had been apolitical before, Mayorga recounted,

"but we are all Sandinistas now."

548 / Americas

But not all Nicaraguan peasants reacted positively to Sandinista at-

tempts to organize them into cooperatives. Many were individualistic

farmers in less populated zones who resented such governmental inter-

ference. So did the Miskito Indians of the Atlantic Coast, who considered

themselves a nation apart from Spanish-speaking Nicaragua and de-

manded both political autonomy and control over the resources in the

third of Nicaraguan territory that they considered their homeland, de-

mands that the Sandinistas, with their nationalist ideology, were unwill-

ing to grant. It was in these regions that the Contras found significant

rural support and recruits.

In the short run, the result of the U .S. covert war was to stiffen San-

dinista resolve and enable them to rally support under the banner of na-

tionalism. Most Nicaraguans, with a new pride at their country's ability

to stand up to the Colossus of the North, viewed the Contras as a con-

tinuation of the Somoza National Guard, complete with U.S. arms and

backing. Over time, however, the costs of the fratricidal conflict in blood

and treasure exhausted Sandinista resources and popularity.

Together with errors born of inexperience and ideology, bureaucratic

mismanagement and political infighting, a heavy debt burden inherited

from Somoza, and Moscow's reluctance to assume the responsibility for

financing "another Cuba," the Contra war and U .S. economic squeeze

restricted the Sandinistas to a struggle for survival that they won on the

battlefield but lost at the polls. In 1990, weary of sacrifice and disillu-

sioned with the Sandinistas' inability to deliver on their promises of a

better life, Nicaraguans voted them out of office. They elected the op-

position leader Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, a conciliatory elite figure

whose family included both Sandinistas and Contras. She promised an

end to the fighting and the hope of U.S. aid in solving the country's eco-

nomic problems. The Sandinista revolution became the first revolution

to be ended by ballots after taking power with bullets. In a way, that was

as much of a revolution as the Sandinistas' partly successful efforts to

transform Nicaragua during a decade of revolutionary rule.

Yet, the fact that some Sandinista initiatives survived their ouster and

Making Revolution I 549

that the Sandinistas themselves remained a strong political force even in

2005-although as social democrats whose policies seem closer to capi-

talism than socialism-owed itself to a far quieter revolution in inter-

American relations, which deprived the United States of the Contra mil-

itary victory that Washington sought. It was a diplomatic revolution

begun by regional powers such as Venezuela and Mexico, but one in

which the tiny Central American nations themselves were the chief pro-

tagonists and the diminutive president of demilitarized Costa Rica was

the conquering hero.

A QUIET REVOLUTION

From the White House, Honduras and Costa Rica may have looked alike

in 1981, small Central American nations whose economies were de-

pendent upon U .S. aid and trade. Seen from Central America, they were

polar opposites, and so were their responses to U.S. efforts to make them

fronts for Washington's war against the Sandinistas.

Honduras, a largely mestizo nation of four million, was the poorest

country in Central America. It was the last of the banana republics, with

a corrupt military, a weak political system, and a fear of its neighbors that

left it open to U.S . blandishments. "La Embajada," as the U.S. embassy

in Tegucigalpa was known, soon became the regional command center

for Washington's covert war, and Honduras's rugged Nicaraguan border

area a sanctuary for the Contras. Costa Rica, on Nicaragua's southern frontier, was a country whose

two million people were largely of European descent, with the highest

levels of income, education, and equality in Central America. It was also

the one nation in the region with a strong democratic tradition, a wel-

fare state, and no army, the result of a post-World War II social demo-

cratic "revolution" led by Jose Figueres and his Liberation party. Con-

vinced that "war is not a natural human condition" and that "poverty and

armies" constituted the "biggest threats to democracy in Latin America,"

Figueres set out to eliminate both from Costa Rica. His success made

550 I Americas

Costa Rica an oasis of peace and democracy in a region notorious for vi-

olence and dictatorship.

Four decades later, falling coffee prices and rising welfare costs had

taken the shine off the Costa Rican model, but the "Ti cos' " pride in their

country and its democracy remained. Costa Rica had supported the San-

dinista struggle against Somoza, a longtime enemy, but turned sour on

Nicaragua 's revolution when it went beyond the bounds of their own so-

cial democracy-and the moderate stance of former Sandinistas and their

allies, men like Eden Pastora and Alfonso Robelo, who found a friendly

exile in Nicaragua's southern neighbor. But Costa Ricans clung to their

neutrality in the middle of the Central American storm and resisted U.S.

pressures to remilitarize their country and turn it into the "southern

front" against the Sandinistas. Yet, without an army of their own the

Ticos were ill-prepared to police their frontiers. They had become a

combat zone between Sandinistas and Contras by 1986, when Oscar

Arias was elected president as the Liberation party standard-bearer, over

a more conservative candidate who favored an active Costa Rican in-

volvement in the U.S.-backed Contra war.

Arias was a political scientist with degrees from U.S. and British uni-

versities and a clear understanding of his country's uniqueness-and vul-

nerability. Even before becoming president, he was convinced that being

dragged into the Contra war would be fatal for Costa Rica's proud

democracy and possibly for its sovereignty as well. His inaugural address

stressed the need for "an alliance for liberty and democracy," language

that he shared with U.S. president Ronald Reagan, but interpreted very

differently. Arias also proclaimed "nonintervention" to be a "sacred

right" of the nations of the Americas. 10

As president he moved decisively to reassert Costa Rican sovereignty

over its own territory, closing down a Contra airstrip and arresting the

reputed head of the CIA operation in his country. But Arias believed that

unless peace was restored in Nicaragua, Costa Rica's neutrality and

democracy remained at risk and its economic prosperity a receding

dream. A December 1986 visit to Washington persuaded him that the

I l t

Making Revolution I 5 5 1

Reagan adininistration would fight until the last Central American to

roll back the Sandinista revolution. It was this conviction that brought

Arias to take the lead in creating a Central American peace process that

transformed even U.S. client states into protagonists of their own des-

tiny. It was the culmination of a long process of change in inter- American relations.

Historically, the United States had been the ultimate arbiter of the re-

gion's affairs. Washington had renounced the right of unilateral inter-

vention in 1936, but was instrumental in the creation of mechanisms for

multilateral intervention through the mutual defense provisions of the

Rio Pact of 1947 and the formation of the Organization of American

States (OAS) the following year. Under heavy U.S. pressure, the OAS in

1954 defined the political control of any American country by "the inter-

national Communist movement" as a threat to hemispheric peace that

justified collective intervention. The resolution was directed against

Guatemala, where a left-leaning coalition that included the small local

Communist party had undertaken a set of land and labor reforms preju-

dicial to important U.S. economic interests, and served to justify the

covert CIA intervention that overthrew the Arbenz government later that

year. Similar considerations would be invoked to justify both the OAS's

expulsion of an avowedly Communist Cuba in 1962, and the 1965 U.S.

intervention in the Dominican Republic to forestall a popular insurrec-

tion aimed at restoring the ousted constitutional president, reformer Juan

Bosch, where the alleged Communist threat was difficult to demonstrate.

During the two decades that followed World War II, the OAS served to

legitimate a U.S. policy of intervening to contain or reverse perceived rev-

olutionary threats in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Fourteen years would pass before another threat of revolution in the

U.S. sphere-in Nicaragua-would lead Washington to turn to the OAS

once again to rubber-stamp U.S. intervention. In 1979, however, the

OAS rejected Washington's appeal to intervene in Nicaragua. Clearly,

much had changed in the interim.

The economic bases of U.S. hegemony had weakened, as Latin Amer-

S S 2 / Americas

ican nations industrialized and Japanese and European rivals cut into the

U.S. share of the region's trade and investment, and the capacity of Latin

American countries for autonomous action had increased. In addition,

the moral authority of the United States had declined with its covert war

against the democratically elected Allende government and U .S. support

of military regimes in the region. The Carter administration had won

credit for its human rights stand, but its insensitivity to Latin America's

economic aspirations and its vacillating Nicaragua policy robbed its

OAS initiative of credibility.

Latin American perceptions of the threat of regional revolution were

also different in 1979 than in the 1960s. Fears that the Cuban revolution

would sweep over the region had faded, and few governments in the OAS

saw a Sandinista Nicaragua as posing a threat of regional revolution,

while many saw the Nicaraguan revolution as a justified response to

decades of oppressive dictatorship and U.S. domination. In opposing

U .S. requests for an OAS "peacekeeping force" in Nicaragua, moreover,

Latin American nations were expressing their defense of national self-

determination against the Colossus of the North. As a consequence,

when the Carter administration asked the OAS to sanction the creation

of a peacekeeping force, it was decisively defeated. For the first time in

history, the OAS had served to block a U .S. intervention, not to legiti-

mate one. The Nicaraguan revolution not only challenged U.S . hege-

mony in its own backyard; it also provided an opportunity for other

American republics to assert their autonomy.

In the wake of the U .S. defeat in the OAS, Washington discounted it

as a policy instrument and looked instead to more malleable subregional

groupings. In 1983 , when an internecine struggle in Grenada provided

an excuse for the United States to intervene and put an end to that is-

land's socialist revolution, the Reagan administration turned not to the

OAS, but to an association of eastern Caribbean ministates for endorse-

ment. Similar considerations governed U.S. strategy in Central America,

where Washington bypassed the OAS and presented the other Central

American states as the regional judge of any Nicaraguan peace accord. It

Making Revolution I S S 3

was a strategy that reflected U .S. distrust of the Latin American major-

ity in the OAS and dismay at the emergence in 1982 of informal but

highly visible Latin American efforts to broker a compromise peace

agreement that would deprive the U.S.-backed Contra war of legiti-

macy-and leave the Sandinistas in power.

Beginning in 1982, the Contadora group-Colombia, Mexico, Panama,

and Venezuela---of regional powers pressed for a negotiated solution to the

linked Central American conflicts, an approach which Washington could

not openly oppose. Instead, it used its influence with Central American

client states such as Honduras and El Salvador to block successive Conta-

dora initiatives. In 1986, the Contadora group was strengthened by the cre-

ation of a South American support group, but continued U.S. opposition

stalemated their efforts to broker a peace. Still, a meeting of the region's for-

eign ministers reaffirmed that the overwhelming majority of Latin Amer-

ican nations opposed U.S. intervention and favored a negotiated settlement.

Oscar Arias built on these Latin American initiatives, but launched his

own Central American peace plan, in which its leaders would themselves

resolve the conflicts plaguing their region through a linked process of ne-

gotiations and elections. "Only democracy," he affirmed, "can end wars

between brothers." 11 Washington still wanted a military victory in

Nicaragua, not a negotiated settlement that left the Sandinistas super-

vising their own elections, and Reagan deemed the Arias plan to be "fa-

tally flawed." 12 But his ability to block Arias was now weakened by the

Iran-Contra scandal and the congressional opposition to continued

funding of the Contras that had provoked Colonel Oliver North's illegal

efforts to secure Asian financing for the U.S. covert war against the San-

dinistas. When the Costa Rican president persuaded his fellow Central

American heads of state-including Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega-that

peace and elections were in their best interests, the road was open to the

Esquipulas accords of August 1987, which provided for a peace process

centered around negotiated settlements of the region's conflicts and re-

spect for democracy and human rights, including amnesties for insur-

gents and new elections in which all parties could participate.

554 I Americas

It was with justice that Oscar Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, and it was significant that it was a Central American-not

a United States-initiative that ended Nicaragua's long and bitter civil

war. "Let Central Americans decide the future of Central America," Arias

used his Nobel award ceremony to tell the United States, urging it to

"support the efforts for peace instead of the forces of war in our region."

The goal, he stressed, was not "peace alone" but "peace and democracy,

together, indivisible, an end to the shedding ofhuman blood, which is in-

separable from an end to the suppression of human rights." 13 Although

Washington remained fixated on Nicaragua until the Sandinista defeat in

February 1990, Arias's words seemed equally applicable to El Salvador,

where a revolution of similar longevity was also entering its final phases,

although in radically different circumstances.

WAR WITHOUT END

"In the case of El Salvador, ideology was not the principal generator of

armed conflict," argued Ruben Zamora, a democratic reformer with a de-

gree in political science and two decades' experience of Salvadoran pol-

itics. "Here the civil war began because there was no political space. First

we tried the electoral route, but all the elections were marred by fraud

and repression. We also tried the so-called extra-parliamentary politics

route of demonstrations. But the response to these street demonstrations

was to shoot people, and each demonstration became a massacre," he re-

counted. "People like myself who were opposed to armed struggle even

tried something that was against our principles-an alliance with the mil-

itary-participating in the '79 junta with the young officers. But all those

roads were systematically blocked and closed." The other cause of the

Salvadoran conflict, he asserted, was "the problem of social injustice. In

economic and social terms, El Salvador may be the most polarized coun-

try in Latin America." This combination of "great polarization and con-

stant repression," concluded Zamora, was "the recipe for civil war."

It was a conflict of incredible ferocity, which claimed some seventy-

Making Revolution I 555

five thousand lives and one million displaced persons and lasted for

twelve years. The 1980s may have been a decade of revolutionary change

in Nicaragua, but for revolutionaries in nearby El Salvador, they were

years of endless war.

El Salvador has the second smallest territory in Central America, but

the region's second largest population. In 1979, its high population den-

sity was compounded by an unequal distribution of land that gave 2 per-

cent of its people 60 percent of its land, and left hundreds of thousands

with no land at all. Many eked out a living as tenants or migrant labor-

ers; others crossed into Honduras in search of land or a living; still oth-

ers swelled the slums of San Salvador and sought urban jobs.

It was the coffee boom of 1870-1930 that prompted this concentra-

tion of landholdings and people. During this era, an entrepreneurial elite

composed of ladino landowners and foreign merchants-the so-called

"fourteen families," although their number was closer to two hundred-

coalesced, and a polarized class structure emerged, along with Central

America's most radical labor movement and most dynamic Communist

party.

The Depression of the 1930s brought the coffee boom to an end,

along with the oligarchic democracy that had given El Salvador political

stability during the preceding decades. In 1932, a rural rebellion was or-

ganized by the Communists, led by Farabundo Marti, whose memory

and cause would be invoked by the rebels of the 1980s, who named their

"national liberation front" the FMLN in his honor. The revolt was

crushed by the army, which massacred thousands of peasants and Indi-

ans, a model of social control that has appealed to sectors of the Sal-

vadoran elite and military ever since: One of the most notorious death

squads of the 1980s was named after the general who ordered the mas-

sacre. In El Salvador, both sides saw the civil war of the 1980s as the con-

tinuation of a conflict that stretched back to the 1930s.

For most of the next half century, the military ruled El Salvador in

close alliance with the country's elite, which expanded its activities from

coffee to cotton after World War II and then into industry with the for-

5 56 I Americas

mation of the Central American Common Market in 1960. This eco-

nomic growth, however, did little to ameliorate the poverty in which

most Salvadorans lived, or modify the rigid class structure into which the

country was divided. "The fourteen families were practically the owners

of El Salvador," emphasized peasant leader Miguel Aleman, "the owners

of the governments, of all the money and all the production. This is what

generated great poverty in the middle of great wealth in our country, and

that has been the fundamental problem of us peasants, who have been de-

nied education, health, housing, and the respect that we deserve as

human beings." Efforts at reform, even when led by Christian Democ-

ratic moderates, were systematically repressed by the military in the

name of anticommunism, while the United States ignored these viola-

tions of human rights.

In El Salvador there was no Somoza against whom a coalition that

crossed class lines could unite. Instead, there was the rigidity of a society

divided by class, whose inequalities were sustained by an intransigent

elite and a repressive military. As a result, Salvador's civil war would be a

class war, waged with a brutality that reflected the country's social ten-

sions-and political polarization.

In 1972, reformers Jose Napoleon Duarte and Guillermo Ungo were

running mates on a Christian Democrat-Social Democrat reform ticket

that was winning decisively until the military intervened to stop their

electoral triumph. When Duarte protested, he was jailed, tortured, and

sent into exile, along with Ungo. A decade later, Duarte would rule El

Salvador in alliance with its armed forces, while Ungo headed the De-

mocratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) in alliance with leftist guerrillas.

During the 1970s, five revolutionary movements were formed, re-

flecting a broad spectrum of leftist views, from orthodox Communists

and Trotskyists to those influenced by liberation theology or Castro's

Cuba. They mobilized peasants and urban workers into popular organ-

izations of increasing strength in the face of a fierce repression that pre-

vented them from opening up the political system before 1979.

The Sandinista victory in nearby Nicaragua in July of that year altered

f

Making Revolution I 5 5 7

Salvadoran politics as well. In its wake, a Washington that had taken

Central America for granted worried that it was ripe for revolution. El

Salvador's repressive politics and social inequities marked it as a target of

opportunity for leftist revolutionaries, and the United States believed

that it was next on their list. These concerns led the Carter administra-

tion to back the ouster of the hardline president, General Carlos

Romero, in October 1979 by a group of reforming younger officers anx-

ious to avoid Somoza's fate, and the formation of a civil-military junta

pledged to agrarian, banking, and political reforms. At bottom, Wash-

ington opted to support reform from above out of fear of revolution from

below.

But the political space created by the junta was soon filled by leftist

popular organizations, which jammed the streets of the capital with tens

of thousands of demonstrators. The reaction of Washington was to shift

its support to the more conservative military officers in the governing

junta and to the right-wing Christian Democrats under Duarte. The re-

sponse of the Salvadoran elite and their security forces and death squads

was murder: the cold-blooded massacre of demonstrators, the killing of

thousands suspected of leftist sympathies, and the assassination of their

civil and political leaders. Among the most prominent victims were San

Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero, an advocate for the poor and

human rights who was assassinated after saying mass, and Ruben

Zamora's brother Mario, a Christian Democrat who as Attorney General

for the Poor in the new government sought to promote social reform.

Increasingly, the reformers-who united in April 1980 to form the

FDR, which allied itself with the FMLN the following year-were

forced underground by an unremitting repression that made it impossi-

ble to engage in politics openly in the cities of El Salvador. By 1981, the

Salvadoran left had come to the conclusion that armed struggle was their

only option and that the countryside was their best bet. The repressive

response of an intransigent elite had transformed reformers into revolu-

tionaries and political cadres into guerrillas. "We were left with only one

choice," explained Ruben Zamora, who had been the junta's civilian chief

558 / Americas

of staff, "go home and cry--or armed struggle." Zamora, who left the

Christian Democrats out of disillusionment, became the FDR's chief

spokesperson abroad, but many in the Salvadoran left exchanged the city

streets for the country's jungle-covered mountains and the mass meeting

for the guerrilla ambush. By 1981, the FMLN felt strong enough to call

for a "final offensive" that they believed would bring them to power be-

fore Ronald Reagan became U.S. president on January 20.

Reagan had campaigned on a platform blaming the advance of "Com-

munist" revolution in Central America on the liberal policies of the

Carter administration, and advocating an interventionist U.S. policy that

would roll back the revolutionary tide in El Salvador and Nicaragua be-

fore it reached the borders of the United States. "The government of El

Salvador," asserted Reagan, "is on the front line in a battle that is really

aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere, and eventually us." 14

Top Reagan officials also saw El Salvador as the place to put an end to

the "Vietnam syndrome" by demonstrating that the United States could

defeat leftist guerrillas at an acceptable cost. The Salvadoran army halted

the FMLN "final offensive," and during the decade that followed, over

five billion dollars in U.S. aid allowed the armed forces to modernize

their weapons and tactics and quadruple in size. Washington was less suc-

cessful in getting them to change their repressive ways.

With a rightist government in Washington willing to ignore abuses in

El Salvador in its war against communism, violations of human rights mul-

tiplied. Rightist leader Roberto D' Aubuisson-whom U.S. Ambassador

Robert White held responsible for the assassination of Archbishop

Romero-vowed to stop communism in El Salvador no matter what the

cost in lives, and the nation's security forces seemed to take the former mil-

itary officer at his word. North Americans were shocked by the coldblooded

murder of four U.S. women missionaries one month after Reagan's election

and angered at the inability or unwillingness of the Salvadoran military to

bring their killers to justice. But viewed from El Salvador, the U.S. mis-

sionaries were just four of the thousands of victims of its bitter civil war,

most of whom were civilians, many of them women and children.

r

r

Making Revolution I 559

The same was true of two U.S. agrarian reform advisers shot in San

Salvador a fortnight before Ronald Reagan's inauguration, whose fate

symbolized that of the land reform they had promoted. In the Reagan

years, agrarian reform made little progress in the face of the fierce op-

position of rightist landowners like Oscar Calvo, who considered the

U.S. advisers "socialists" and the agrarian reform "robbery," which ille-

gally "confiscated" lands "that ought to be in the hands of those who

know how to make them produce," one of "the three reforms" -together

with the nationalization of banking and foreign trade-"that destroyed

the Salvadoran economy." Landowners backed D'Aubuisson, and their

death squads joined the security forces in terrorizing the countryside,

making membership in an agrarian reform cooperative hazardous and

election as a peasant leader a death sentence.

The exception was in the territories controlled by the FMLN, where

"peasants supported the FMLN's struggle as just and necessary," ac-

cording to Miguel Aleman, "because there was no other way to solve the

social problem." By 1983, the FMLN had consolidated strongholds in El

Salvador's mountainous northern regions and begun to expand its area of

influence toward the coast. As the combatants on both sides grew in

numbers and their weapons in firepower, the fighting escalated. The Sal-

vadoran military pursued a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, complete

with U.S. helicopters and advisers. The guerrillas countered with a "war

of movement" and attacks on provincial towns and military barracks. Al-

though the tide of battle seesawed throughout the decade, by late 1989-

when a powerful FMLN offensive in the nation's capital shocked San Sal-

vador but failed to ignite a popular insurrection-it was clear that neither

side could win El Salvador's endless war. It was a realization that led both

government and guerrillas to the peace table called for by the Esquipu-

las accords of 1987.

By 1990, much else had changed as well, both in El Salvador and in

the world outside. By then, the Salvadoran right, united in the National

Republican Alliance (ARENA) founded by D'Aubuisson, had won polit-

ical power by defeating the Christian Democrats in both presidential and

560 I Americas

legislative elections, converting many in its ranks to the gospel of democ-

racy now being preached by Washington. President Alfredo Cristiani,

moreover, represented the country's business elites, who were convinced

that El Salvador's crippled economy could not be cured so long as the

fighting continued, and that the war could not be won on the battlefield.

The United States was also growing weary of El Salvador's interminable

war and the U.S. Congress was increasingly reluctant to bankroll a Sal-

vadoran military whose continued violations of human rights were un-

derscored by the murder of six Jesuit priests in November 1989.

There was also less reason for Washington to support a costly war in

El Salvador. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the ac-

celerating disintegration of the Soviet Union heralded the end of the

Cold War that had framed U .S. policy toward El Salvador. The Sandin-

ista defeat at the polls meant that there was no longer a credible revolu-

tionary threat in Central America and persuaded many in Washington

that ballots-not bullets-were the best way to counter leftist advances.

Within this context, the United States was willing to accept the princi-

ple of a negotiated settlement in El Salvador.

By then, moreover, the Salvadoran left had also shifted its stance. The

civilian reformers of the FDR, such as Ruben Zamora, had always been

in favor of a negotiated settlement, and in 1987 had formed the Demo-

cratic Convergence to participate in elections "and plant the idea of a po-

litical solution." By January 1990, the revolutionary movements that

formed the FMLN had come to a similar conclusion, after an internal de-

bate over the implications of changes in the "socialist world" for El Sal-

vador's revolution between Marxist-Leninists, who believed in a broad-

based revolution led by a political vanguard that would transform their

society from above, and less ideological leftists, who saw force as a way

of opening up the political space for popular movements to change Sal-

vadoran society from within. The debate was won by the more pragmatic

faction headed by Joaquin Villalobos, commander of the People's Revo-

lutionary Army (ERP), militarily the strongest of the FMLN's five guer-

rilla movements. Villalobos, a brilliant if ruthless tactician with a dis-

Making Revolution I 561

arming baby face, had been influenced by liberation theology as an eco-

nomics student at university and contrasted his own views with "the dog-

matic ideological elements who dominated the FMLN when it started."

The ERP, he stressed, had been founded by radicalized "university stu-

dents and Christian groups" who had never been Communists, and in-

fluenced by the Sandinistas, with their "open model of revolution."

The Sandinista electoral defeat in February 1990 was a shock to the

FMLN, increasing their sense of isolation-and bringing home the im-

permanence of military victory. Latin American leaders in Mexico and

elsewhere urged the FMLN to seek a political settlement. President

Cristiani signaled the ARENA government's readiness to negotiate when

he "offered a process of dialogue with clear objectives, such as to promote

democracy and respect for human rights and reconciliation within Sal-

vadoran society, and then to put an end to the conflict itself," asserted

Oscar Santa Marfa, the president's cabinet chief. The FMLN accepted Cristiani's offer.

After two years of difficult negotiations between deadly enemies who

had little reason to trust each other, the United Nations helped broker

the accord signed at the beginning of 1992 . It was a political compromise

that allowed both sides to claim victory, while leaving the future in doubt.

The FMLN secured a promise that human rights and the land reform

carried out in its areas of influence would be respected, but few concrete

commitments. It also won agreement on proposals for "purifying" a re-

duced armed forces, for a new police force under civilian control into

which its fighters could be integrated, and for democratic reforms that

might open up the political system and give the left a better chance of

winning power through elections. In return, the government got the

FMLN to agree to end the twelve-year insurgency, to recognize its le- gitimacy, and to accept its constitution.

For Santa Marfa, the minister closest to President Cristiani, this

meant that "the FMLN would now submit itself to the democratic sys-

tem" and transform itself from "a guerrilla force into a political force."

For Ruben Zamora, the significance of the accords was that "for the first

562 I Americas

time since 1930 there is a real chance to demilitarize and democratize the

country." On February 1, 1992, FMLN guerrillas joined their support-

ers in a peace celebration in the main square of San Salvador. This was

the revolutionary left's first public demonstration in the country's capi-

tal in more than a decade. "When we went into the plaza, it was like a tri-

umph," one guerrilla fighter affirmed. For the FMLN, claimed Villalo-

bos, "this is a revolution."

Not all Salvadorans were as pleased with the peace accords or as sat-

isfied with their outcome. Ultrarightists like Oscar Calvo viewed the ac-

cords as the equivalent of "a pact between the police and a thief," which

robbed the government of its "legitimacy" and "authority, ... lowering

it to the level of the guerrillas .. . the new Attilas," whom the government

had now allowed to shoot their way into the parliament. Landowners like

himself were organizing to oppose the accords, he claimed, because "our

governments have been too soft."

Peasant leaders like Miguel Aleman were supportive of the peace

process in principle, but remained skeptical of them in practice. For him,

the accords had changed little: "The shooting war may have ended, but

in a nation where eighty percent of the population is now below the

poverty line, the war of hunger, misery and exploitation continues," he

asserted. In the countryside, "the only change was that with the ceasefire there are no longer military operations and forced recruitment. But the

government has still not given the peasants so much as a flea! So the fruits

of the accords have been minimal."

In San Salvador, a shopkeeper in a food cooperative was also skeptical. He talked about continued insecurity and his "fear of speaking openly . . . .

There has been so much blood spilled, but the people are even poorer

than before," he lamented. "The people have hope with the peace process,

but we still have the same problems and the same fear," he stressed. "This

could be an even more dangerous time bomb than before."

Clearly, the peace accords had not resolved El Salvador's social in-

equities or transformed its basic institutions. "All we have done," argued

Ruben Zamora, "is bought some time."

Making Revolution / 563

. . As the ~ew century began, El Salvador's social and economic inequal- 1t1es remamed, but the peace held and political conflict was centered

around election-not military-campaigns. Zamora finished second as

the left's candidate in the 1994 presidential elections, and leftist candi-

dates gained ground in congressional and local elections during the

decade that followed. But divisions within the left and the insistence of

aging FMLN leaders on being the candidate allowed the right to win

presidential elections in 1999 and 2004. Yet the FMLN has remained the

principal political opposition force, with democratic control of many of

the municipalities it once contested by force and strength in the con-

gress. It was only one good candidate away from winning the presidency.

The democratic political space whose absence had led the FMLN to take up arms in the 1980s was now theirs to contest.

Equally important, both sides in the civil war now regarded democ-

racy as an important end in itself. "The principal problem is not to fight

to take power," stressed FMLN military chief Villalobos, "but to fight for

the structural changes that establish new rules of the game." On the other

~ide, army general Ernesto Vargas affirmed that "the democratic system

1s the best one for this society-and that the authoritarianism within our society has to totally disappear."

Only time will tell whether this new commitment to democracy will

last and whether the Salvadoran left can secure through the ballot box the

revolutionary changes that they failed to win on the battlefield. As a new

century dawned, what was clear was that one phase of their struggle was over and a new one had begun.

B~ 2_005, with the Soviet bloc consigned to the dustbin of history, the

Sandinistas transformed into a parliamentary opposition, the Salvadoran

civil war ending in a negotiated settlement, and most of the once revo-

lutionary left in South America sounding like social democrats, the cycle

of rev~lution in Latin America and the Caribbean that had begun in

Cuba m 1 959 was corning to an end. It was an issue with which the Cubans themselves were trying to grapple. "It may be that a small cycle

of revolution is ending, but that had happened before, with the death of

564 / Americas

Che Guevara, only for a new cycle to start with the Sandinistas," argued

Luis Suarez, a leading Cuban analyst of the region's revolutionary move-

ments. "So long as the conditions that require revolution-poverty, op-

pression, exploitation, inequality, injustice-exist, revolutionaries will

appear to challenge them. Those conditions are more acute in most of

Latin America and the Caribbean now than a decade ago," he claimed,

"and today's neoliberal policies will make them even worse."

In Peru, Hernando de Soto, a noted advocate of free market policies,

agreed, because neoliberal policies "created opportunities for the upper

crust of the population-probably no more than ten to twenty percent-

but the situation remains the same for the lower eighty to ninety per-

cent." For Peru's Shining Path, it was a recipe for revolution.

PERU'S SHINING PATH

"We are in the decade of triumph of 'People's War' in Peru," a diminu-

tive guerrilla affirmed in April 1992, with a conviction that belied her im-

prisonment in a Lima cellblock. 15 In the men's part of the prison, her

comrades were equally emphatic. The crisis of Communism in other

parts of the world did not deter them from insisting that "We will take

power in the entire country this decade and then continue the socialist

revolution with successive cultural revolutions to reach communism,

which is the goal of all humanity." 16

The cycle of socialist revolution might be coming to a close in Cen-

tral America, but in Peru, the heartland of the ancient Inca empire, a tiny

provincial faction of a small Maoist party had transformed itself into the

biggest revolutionary threat in the Americas. By 1992, Sendero Lumi-

noso, the Shining Path, was making front pages around the globe with

its bombing campaign in the country's capital and alleged control of the

world's largest coca-growing region. ·

Elsewhere, Sendero might be a new headline, but in Peru it was an old

story. OnJune 24, 1969, the "revolutionary" military regime of General

Juan Velasco proclaimed a sweeping land reform and the transformation

Making Revolution I 565

of "Indians" into "peasants." In the national furor that followed, few in

Peru noticed that three days before in the departmental capital of Ay-

acucho, peasants, high school students, and shantytown dwellers had

protested government plans to end free education in a militant demon-

stration that left at least four dead and thirty-seven arrested. Among the

detained was Abimael Guzman, a philosophy teacher from Ayacucho's

University of Huamanga. A few months later, Guzman formed his own

"Communist Party of Peru," better known as "the Shining Path," which

would transform these young demonstrators into fanatical soldiers of a millenarian revolution.

The Shining Path-the name refers to Jose Carlos Mariategui's term

for the proletariat's role in the Communist revolution-emerged out of

successive splits in the Peruvian Communist party that Mariategui

founded in 192 8 that produced several Maoist factions during the 1960s.

Guzman was trained in Mao's China during its radical 1960s Cultural

Revolution, an experience decisive in his political formation. He would

remain an unrepentant Maoist long after Maoism had lost power in China itself.

By 1970, Guzman had lost the battle for national leadership of Peru's

Maoist party but had consolidated control over its organization in high-

land Ayacucho, one of Peru's poorest and most neglected departments. It

was also a region whose society and values were shaped in a hierarchical

and authoritarian mold by centuries of semi-feudal relations. "Ayacucho,"

Guzman would later affirm, "helped me understand the peasantry." 17

The social conflict out of which Sendero emerged in Ayacucho was

not over land-which the economic decline of the region's elite and the

Guevarist guerrillas of the mid-196os had helped peasants acquire by

purchase or seizure-but over access to freeeducation. In this struggle,

the Indian peasantry and rural migrants to the shantytowns of the re-

gion's capital were often led by mestizo advisers, provincial intellectuals

of lower middle class origin resentful of their own exclusion from power by the creole elite.

One was Abimael Guzman, who began to accumulate power within

566 I Americas

the self-governing provincial university as its personnel chief. By 1970,

Guzman and his comrades controlled the university's basic education

curriculum. They transformed it into a course of indoctrination in their

party's Maoist ideology and a recruiting ground for its cadres among ~e

new generation of students from rural communities who entered the uru-

versity in growing numbers after 1969. After graduation, these cadres re-

turned to their rural communities as teachers and recruited their own

students for Sendero's revolutionary cause. This stress on hierarchical

organization, ideological indoctrination, and the recruitment of edu-

cated mestizo youth as cadres shaped the Shining Path.

When Sendero was bested in the competition for control of Ayacu-

cho's mass organizations and university by political rivals-many of

them the heirs of the revolutionary New Left of the 196os., who became

leaders of the new social movements of the 1970s and would form the

United Left of the 198os-it withdrew into itself, stressing internal co-

hesion and ideological purity. Sendero defined itself not as a mass party,

but as a revolutionary vanguard for the "masses," who, Guzman stressed, "have to be taught through overwhelming actions so that ideas can be

pounded into them." 18

With the defeat of Maoism in China in 1976, Sendero claimed its

mantle and Guzman-who took the nom-de-guerre "President Gon-

zalo" -was transformed into "the fourth sword of Marxism," the succes-

sor to Marx, Lenin and Mao, with a cult of personality to match. His

"Gonzalo-Thought"-"the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism

to our concrete conditions"-became increasingly schematic and mil-

lenarian, defining Communism as "the society of 'great harmony' .. . to-

ward which 1 5 billion years of matter in motion ... has necessarily and

uncontainably been heading." 19 Sendero projected itself as the leader of

global revolution in an age of violence that would culminate in "world-

wide People's War."20

On the eve of the 1980 elections that signalled Peru's restoration of

democracy after twelve years of military rule, Guzman went under-

ground and launched his "People's War." During the decade that fol-

I (

Making Revolutim I 567

lowed, Sendero grew into a revolutionary movement that dominated

much of Peru's Andean highlands and extended its reach to the coca-

producing valleys above the Amazon rainforest and the coastal shanty-

towns of Lima.

Part of the explanation for Sendero's surprising success was its stress

on efficient organization and the careful recruitment and indoctrination

of disciplined young cadres, who accepted Guzman's simplified view of

Peru's complex realities as "scientific" truth and were totally dedicated to

Sendero's cause, vowing not only to die for it, but also to kill for it-pay-

ing what Guzman called "the quota of blood" needed to win his revolu-

tion. The unquestioning obedience and self-sacrifice of his young fol-

lowers was one of Sendero's greatest sources of strength.

For the most part, however, Sendero's success reflected Peru's failures,

as well as the Shining Path's capacity to understand and exploit the fault-

lines within Andean society. Particularly important was Sendero's ability

to manipulate the resentments and aspirations of Peru's poor, largely In-

dian majority.

Although the military "revolution" led by General Juan Velasco pro-

claimed a sweeping agrarian reform in 1969, its implementation was un-

even, its administration was authoritarian, and it failed to solve the prob-

lem oflandlessness in the highlands or to resolve the land claims of many

indigenous communities. During the decade that followed the restora-

tion of democracy, moreover, much of the land belonging to the agrar-

ian reform cooperatives was reprivatized.

In areas where the military's agrarian reform had not restored lands

taken from indigenous communities in the past or where the breakup of

cooperatives had created new resentments, Sendero organized land in-

vasions to win the local peasantry to its cause. But even within indigenous

communities where private landholdings had generated lesser inequali-

ties, Sendero attacked "the landlords" and appealed to the poor peasants

who owned no land and had to work the fields and tend the flocks of their

richer neighbors. Aided by its informants within rural communities,

Sendero also utilized ancient rivalries between villages and valleys and

568 I Americas

old enmities within rural communities to establish a base and undermine

local leaders.

In regions where land was not an issue, as in its original base in Ay-

acucho, Sendero focused instead on the failure of the Peruvian state to

deliver social services such as education, or to remedy the poverty of the

local population. In striking this note, it played on the longstanding dis-

satisfaction of highland regions with their neglect by the governments in

Lima. Throughout the Peruvian Sierra, moreover, Sendero was able to

· take advantage of what U .S. Ambassador Anthony Quainton called "the

sense of profound cultural grievance in the Indian peoples of the high-

lands."21 In a region that the creole elite still refers to as la mancha india,

the Indian Stain, racism is pervasive-and resented. An unequal social hi-

erarchy based upon color and ethnicity was a colonial legacy reinforced

after independence by Peru's creole elites and sustained by Velasco 's

agrarian reform administrators . Sendero's rigidly Maoist ideology, with

its stress on class, left little room for ethnic nationalism, and its own hi-

erarchy-with light-skinned leaders, mestiz o cadres, and dark-skinned

soldiers-replicated Peru's. But Sendero cadres appealed to the Indians

of the highlands in Quechua and exploited their resentment at centuries

of discrimination, oppression, and neglect by the country's creole elites

and mestizo middlemen. Moreover, there was sufficient ambiguity in its

critiques for alienated Indians to imagine that Sendero might offer Peru

policies "that would have its roots in our ancestors," as one Indian mi-

grant put it. 22

In extending its influence to zones that were both distant and different

from its original highland base, Sendero also demonstrated a political

pragmatism that softened its ideological rigidity. In the Huallaga Valley,

a zone of recent colonization above the Amazon rain forest in northern

Peru that became the world's largest producer of coca leaves, Sendero

dropped its moralistic anti-drug stance to offer protection to local grow-

ers against both the Colombian cocaine cartels and the corrupt Peruvian

military and U.S. drug agents sent to combat the illegal narcotics traffic.

In return, the Shining Path received over $2 50 million in "taxes."

Making Revolution I 569

Sendero itself attributed its advances to "the support of the masses."

Sendero's opponents, who ranged from right to left, ascribed them to the

Shining Path's "terrorism," the "revolutionary violence" that Abimael

Guzman defended as "a universal law" and glorified as "the river of

blood" across which he would lead Peru's people to the Maoist promised

land. Sendero used violence as both a political strategy and a military tac-

tic. Where its appeals proved unpersuasive and rural communities re-

mained loyal to political rivals or their own autonomy, Sendero re-

sponded with an intimidation that ranged from peasant massacres to the

"selective liquidation" of local leaders-whether they were associated

with the government, other leftist parties, or the rotational grassroots

democracy that has ruled Andean communities for centuries.

The response of Peru's civilian governments to Sendero's challenge to

their authority was to militarize the affected regions, declaring a state of

emergency and bringing in the armed forces to conduct a counter-

insurgency campaign. But the military shared the racism of Peru's elites

and its massacres, disappearances, and strip searches claimed many in-

nocent Indian victims. In classic guerrilla fashion, Sendero provoked a

governmental repression that proved its political points and created the

polarized situation it sought. Youths whose families had suffered military

abuses were ripe for recruitment by the Shining Path.

Moreover, the government security forces sent to combat Sendero

often attacked the leftist grassroots organizations best able to accomplish

that task. The result was that Sendero emerged as the only alternative to

a repressive and racist military, explained Juan Rojas, a national peasant

leader opposed to Sendero, and was able to appear as the "protector of

the people against the abuses of the soldiers."

Caught in a crossfire between repressive state security forces and a

ruthless revolutionary army, many in the highlands voted with their feet.

Entire areas of rural Ayacucho were virtually depopulated. It was an ex-

odus of desperate refugees fleeing the violence that had killed their kin

and destroyed their communities, "leaving [behind] only orphaned chil-

dren and the aged who have no relatives left."23 By 1992, some 250,000

5 70 I Americas

Peruvians had fled their rural homes for the comparative safety of garri-

son towns or coastal cities. By then, the conflict had followed them, as the

Shining Path expanded its operations in Lima.

Although Sendero had long had a presence in Lima, announced by pe-

riodic electricity blackouts or other "propaganda in action," its initial

focus was on recruiting and training cadres, with a stress on poor students

similar to its initial recruits in Ayacucho. San Marcos, Peru's oldest uni-

versity, was one target; Lima's teachers college, whose graduates were

sent to staff the new schools created in its rapidly expanding shanty-

towns, was another.

During the late 1980s, Sendero began to expand its bases from the rural

communities and provincial towns of the highlands to the Lima shanty-

towns peopled by migrants from those provincial communities and towns.

Sendero did not participate in the leftist-led social movements that made

these shantytowns bastions of grassroots democracy, preferring "generated

organisms" subservient to party orders. But Sendero penetrated neigh-

borhood assemblies, intimidated opponents, and established its "People's

Committees" and web of informants. When grassroots leaders blocked its

path to power, Sendero assassinated the most famous, Maria Elena Moy-

ano, the "Mother Courage" of Lima's slums, as a warning to the rest.

Sendero's advance was facilitated by the failures of Peru's democratic

political system, the collapse of its economy and the shrinking power of

its state. The restoration of democracy in 1980 raised popular expecta-

tions that Peru's civilian leaders were unable to fulfill. They inherited a

heavy foreign debt burden from the military regime, which was soon

compounded by rising international interest rates and a severe global re-

cession. Populist policies and a debt default deepened the crisis, which

culminated in the collapse of the economy under President Alan Garcia

(1985-90), in which inflation soared to an incredible 3500 percent, while

the economy contracted and living standards plunged.

To the failure of Peru's elected governments was added the failings of

Sendero's rivals within the democratic left. The left had begun the 1980s

Making Revolution I 571

with optimism as leaders of the new social movements-from unions to

women's groups-that played a prominent role in the restoration of

democracy. But the "United Left" ended the decade in disarray, a med-

ley of squabbling personalist parties, with no answers to Peru's deepen-

ing crisis and with declining popular support. By 1990, Peruvians were

disillusioned with the entire spectrum of parties and politicians, whom

they regarded as both corrupt and incompetent.

This anti-party sentiment enabled Alberto Fujimori, a political novice

without strong party backing or a detailed program, to win an upset vic-

tory ove_r Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru's most famous writer, in the 1990

presidential elections. This anti-politics mood also allowed Fujimori to

win public approval in March 1992 for closing a Congress he accused of

corruption and obstruction. Fujimori's neoliberal austerity plan curtailed

inflation but caused increasing unemployment and destitution in a coun-

try where a majority of the population lived below the poverty line. His

executive coup eliminated democratic alternatives to an authoritarian

government-or an authoritarian revolution.

The main target ofFujimori's coup was not a do-nothing Congress, but

an all-too-effective Shining Path, which also tapped into this deep vein of

discontent and despair of alternatives, expanding its support and activities

into labor unions and urban shantytowns, recruiting workers and migrants

with its disciplined organization and self-sacrificing cadres, its simplified

analyses of Peru's problems and confident assertion that Communism was

the answer, along with its image of efficacy in a country where nothing else

seemed to work. As in the region's other revolutions, Sendero's greatest

strength was the weakness of the old order it wanted to overthrow.

By 1992, an estimated 40 percent of Peru's territory and a third of its

population was beyond the control of its elected government. Sendero's

leaders spoke of preparing the urban encirclement and insurrection that

would bring Lima to its knees and Sendero to power. "We are con-

vinced," affirmed a Lima guerrilla leader, "that victory is already ours."24

He spoke too soon. In much of the highlands, Sendero's rigidity, ruth-

572 I Americas

lessness, and disrespect for local custom had undermined its initial peas-

ant support: In many indigenous communities peasant militias kept

Sendero at bay. In Lima, Sendero's violence may have cowed rivals, but

the "support" this produced depended on Sendero's power to coerce it.

Then, in December 1992, Abimael Guzman was captured along with

much of Sendero's political leadership, and the tide turned. With a jailed

President Gonzalo negotiating a peace with the government in exchange

for conjugal visits, Sendero paid the price for its cult of personality in di-

visions and desertions. Suddenly, history was no longer on its side. By

1994, Sendero had been reduced to a mostly military movement cen-

tered on the coca-growing Huallaga Valley, which could still inflict dam-

age but was no longer a political threat.

By then, another revolutionary movement, which also claimed in-

digenous support, but was otherwise dramatically different from Sendero

in its character, methods and goals, had seized the world's attention. The

Zapatistas' sudden emergence in Mexico meant that the nation that had

experienced the first Latin American revolution of the century would

also witness the last.

"ZAPATA LIVES!" 2s

On New Year's Day, 1994, while the Mexican government was celebrat-

ing the country's economic union with the United States in the North

American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), a rejection of the country's

revolutionary heritage and embrace of a globalized modernity, Indian

rebels were taking control of San Cristobal de las Casas, colonial capital

of Chiapas, Mexico's poorest and least modern state.

The rebels' brown faces might reveal Maya ancestry, but the ski-

masks that covered them and the slogans they shouted reflected a mod-

ern peasant rebellion. They had not taken up arms as Indians to reclaim

the stolen legacy of their ethnic past, but as peasants fighting to defend

the frontier lands and political autonomy they had won through their

own initiative and efforts.

Making Revolution I 573

During the preceding decades, some 200,000 migrants had left the

overpopulated highlands, with their inequality, limited lands, and political

bosses, to seek their future in the tropical frontier lands of the Lacand6n

jungle, the harsh wilderness on the border with Guatemala known as "the

desert of solitude." There they had carved farms and ranches out of the

jungle, formed self-governing communities, and fought for the titling of

their lands as ejido cooperatives by the PRI government, whose presidents

and policies increasingly threatened their modest success. During the

1970s, Mexican governments first made half the Lacand6n into a reserve

for its tiny tribal population ( that corrupt PRI politicians would "manage")

and then declared two-thirds of the jungle to be a protected "biosphere"

(from which all migrants were to be evicted). Many communities resisted

and armed themselves. During the 1980s, political bossism entered the pic-

ture, as state governors granted ejidos to communities willing to adhere to

the PRI. Political autonomy seemed a dream of the past. So did economic

prosperity, as coffee prices fell 60 percent beginning in 1989, followed by

a 1992 ban on cattle exports from the Lacand6n because of screw-worm

and an end of ranching credits to its communities on ecological grounds

(that the governor did not apply when it came to credits for wealthy pri-

vate ranchers). Chiapas' small farmers, heavily dependent on coffee and

beef exports, were now threatened with bankruptcy.

Then, in the 1990s, President Salinas made two major policy shifts

that signalled the end of the Mexican Revolution and the need to start a

new one. In 1991, Salinas "reformed" the constitution to end its prom-

ise of agrarian reform. The landless youth of the highlands and the com-

munities of the Lacand6n without legal title to their lands now felt be-

trayed by their government. Then, Salinas abandoned the historic

nationalism of the Mexican revolution and agreed to integrate Mexico's

economy with that of the United States in the North American Free

Trade Association. In the future, Chiapas' maize farmers, who numbered

half a million in 1993, would have to compete with Iowa's modern corn

farmers, who could produce maize at half the price. On the day in which

the NAFTA treaty took effect, the Zapatista revolt began.

574 / Americas

It was a rebellion that other actors helped stimulate. One was a radi-

calized Catholic Church, led by a remarkable bishop, Samuel Ruiz, in-

fluenced by liberation theology and empowered by the Vatican II and

Medellin conclaves. Ruiz believed that his Church's goal was "to insert

ourselves into the culture of our people, to take on ourselves the social

Utopia hidden there, and to accompany them on their historic path."26

Under his inspired leadership, Chiapas Indians came to "question their

oppression" and organize to combat it. By 1993, they had become, in

Bishop Ruiz's words: "the subjects of their lives."27

To help them organize, Ruiz made alliances with two secular groups

that the pre-Vatican II Church would have viewed as enemies. The first

was the Maoist Proletarian Line (LP), which had begun organizing in

Chiapas. When it proved more of a rival than an ally, the Chiapas

Church promoted as a counterweight a group of social workers who

turned out to be cadres of the Guevarist Forces of National Liberation.

The FLN was a 1960s guerrilla movement from the north of Mexico that

had regrouped and, encouraged by the Sandinista success, begun to or-

ganize the poor peasants of Chia pas in the 1980s. By 1990, it had re-

placed the LP as the major force in the Lacand6n and begun organizing

an armed guerrilla force, the Zapatista National Liberation Army

(EZLN), under its regional head, Sub-Comandante Marcos, a former

student of philosophy and pedagogy in Mexico City.

By then, there were eight organizations competing for the loyalties of

Chiapas' poor peasants, including the Salinas government and rival peas-

ant unions. This intensified competition was diluting the EZLN's sup-

port base. The economic crisis was deepening, as was discontent with the

government's land, credit and trade policies. An October 1992 demon-

stration revealed the depth of Indian rage. Private soundings persuaded

Marcos that his followers were ready to take up arms and twenty-five

communities voted for war in 1993. Marcos only had 2000 rifles for 9000

soldiers. Most would have to fight with shotguns, pistols or even lances.

Yet, on New Year's Day 1994, when the whole world would be watching

Mexico, they would begin their new Zapatista revolution.

Making Revolution I 575

The Zapatista rebellion was a military failure, but a political success.

Surprise favored the rebels on New Year's Day, when they seized control

of San Cristobal and three other highland cities. But once the Mexican

government mobilized its forces, it became clear that the EZLN's ill-

armed irregulars were no match for a modern army. By the time Presi-

dent Salinas declared a ceasefire on January 12th, the army had retaken

the highlands and the EZLN had retreated back to the Lacand6n jungle

from where it had emerged to astonish the world two weeks before.

But the EZLN's political broadsides triumphed everywhere. Its first

"Declaration from the Lacand6nJungle"-beginning with its ringing

opening: "Today We Say ENOUGH!"-was a clarion call to an in-

creasingly discontented Mexico. Mexicans responded to its litany of

grievances-"We have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a decent

roof over our heads; no land, no work, no health care, no food, no ed-

ucation; without the right to freely and democratically elect our au-

thorities; without independence from foreigners, without peace or jus-

tice for ourselves and our children."28-with a sense of recognition.

The radical egalitarianism of the EZLN's "Revolutionary Laws"-

from the Labor Law's demand that foreign companies pay Mexican

workers what they pay their foreign workers to the Urban Reform

Law's limiting urban rents to 10 percent of the household head's in-

come and abolishing them after fifteen years residence-also struck a

chord in Mexicans weary of the institutionalized inequalities of the

PRI's "institutional revolution."

The EZLN's call for democracy-and practice of direct democracy-

resonated in a country tired of corrupt and authoritarian government,

the longest-lived, one-party regime in the world. Whatever their feelings

about the EZLN's strategy and ideology, most Mexicans sympathized

with the struggle of poor Indians for "democracy, no more inequality,"

as one young Zapatista put it, "a life worth living, liberation, just like God

says."29

President Salinas realized that the Zapatistas had won the battle for

the hearts and minds of Mexicans, and knew that in a presidential elec-

576 I Americas

tion year, a repressive policy could cause problems for his plans to elect

a hand-picked successor. He was also aware that his NAFTA gamble to

join the First World could go up in the smoke of his soldiers' guns in Chi-

apas. Moreover, although only a minority of Chia pas' Indians had taken

up arms, most shared the Zapatistas' grievances and goals. Highland In-

dians were seizing the lands Salinas' policies had denied them, and there

was a risk that other impoverished Indian areas, such as Oaxaca, might

join the rebellion.

So, Salinas reined in the military and his party's "dinosaurs," declared

a unilateral ceasefire and created a commission to negotiate a peaceful

settlement, with Bishop Ruiz as the mediator. By then, hundreds had

died in Chiapas, including some 70 Zapatista soldiers and more than 50

from Mexican security forces.

During that same fortnight, Sub-Comandante Marcos emerged as the

leader and spokesperson for the Zapatistas. He was perfect for. that role,

a master of modern media and political public relations, a postmodern

internet revolutionary for a global village, a guerrilla philosopher with an

ability to engage and enchant his international audience. It made a ski-

masked Marcos a posterboy for a European and U.S. left looking for he-

roes and causes in a post-Communist age. "We did not go to war . .. to

kill or to have them kill us." Marcos declared. "We went to make our-

selves heard."30 In this, the Zapatistas succeeded.

What followed were years of intermittent negotiations, which ran

aground on the government's unwillingness or inability to implement the

structural reforms that the EZLN demanded to secure their goals: "In-

dian rights, democracy and justice, decent living standards and economic

development, women's rights ."31

In response, Marcos and the EZLN demonstrated both creativity and

flexibility. With its plans for armed revolution in ruins, the Zapatistas

turned to reform and placed their hopes in Mexico's emerging civil soci-

ety. In August 1994, two weeks before national elections, it convoked a

meeting of 6000 representatives of Mexico's social movements in the La-

cand6n jungle, where they formed a new umbrella group and talked

Making Revolution I 5 77

about a new constitution. A year later, with Mexico mired in economic

crisis, the Zapatistas conducted an electronic referendum in which more

than one million Mexican supporters voted overwhelmingly in support

of the EZLN's disarming and transforming itself into a political force.

OnJ anuary 1, 1996, two years after its armed seizure of San Cristobal de

las Casas, the Zapatistas embraced the creation of the FZLN, a "civil and

non-violent organization, independent and democratic, Mexican and na-

tional." It was not to be a political party, but rather "a political force

whose members would not hold or aspire to take power," but rather to

struggle for "democracy, liberty and justice in Mexico." 32

In support of this goal, the EZLN convened "The International En-

counter for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism," which drew some

3500 leftists from three continents to the jungle community of La Real-

idad in the summer of 1996. It was an international public relations suc-

cess, in which Marcos argued that the creation of a new kind of political

force would be "revolutionary."

But it was the guerrilla attacks outside Chiapas in August 1996 -by

another leftist group, the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR)-that per-

suaded President Ernesto Zedillo that a law on Indian rights was needed.

By December, Zapatista and government negotiators had agreed on a

draft law on Indian rights, only to have it rejected by Zedillo, now anx-

ious to placate his party bosses. A negotiated settlement would have to

wait for the next century.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the Zapatista New Millen-

nium seemed to recede, with Chia pas itself divided by ethnicity, religion,

class, and politics-divisions that the government exploited to avoid the

concessions that the Zapatistas sought. By 1998, there was virtual civil

war between rival Indian groups in the highlands.

The election in 2000 of Vicente Fox as president, with his campaign

promise of solving the Zapatista problem "in fifteen minutes," created

new hope of a peace accord. One of Fox's first acts as president was to

send the COCOPA agreement on Indian rights to the congress. In sup-

port of this initiative, Marcos led an epic march to Mexico City, where

578 / Americas

indigenous Zapatista leaders addressed the congress. But the version of

the accords eventually passed by the congress was shorn of the autonomy

provision that was central to the Zapatistas. Fox's withdrawal of the army

from Zapatista areas, however, eased tensions in Chiapas. By 2005, Za-

patista grievances were not a major political concern in Mexico as a

whole, although that year saw the creation, in the heavily indigenous

northern state of Michoacan, of the first Zapatista "autonomous munic-

ipality" outside Chiapas.

By then, it was clear that the Zapatistas had survived as a revolution-

ary group and civic movement with local power and national influence.

But it was also evident that their hopes of sparking a national transfor-

mation had faded. Still, their political impact in Mexico was far greater

than their limited military success suggested, and they remained an

evocative symbol of the relevance of revolution in a post-Communist

age.

At the start of the twenty-first century it was clear that revolutionary

movements had failed to bring a new millenium to Latin America and the

Caribbean. Yet, the persistence of poverty and increase in inequality

under neoliberalism, together with widespread feelings of powerlessness

and low participation in the region's flawed democracies, means that the

conditions that bred revolutionary movements in the past century will

continue to exist. As a result, the collapse of communism elsewhere may

not mean the end of revolution in the Americas.

The appeal of the Zapatistas and the Shining Path in the 1990s and

the continued strength of older revolutionary movements such as

Colombia's FARC bear witness to the continued attraction of armed rev-

olution where people despair of democratic reform. But the examples of

the Zapatistas and the Shining Path also suggest that the revolutions of

the future are likely to be different from those of the past. "There are no

paradigms anymore," stressed Arturo Alape, an analyst of Colombia's

FARC, the region's oldest guerrilla group. "Each country has to create a

model of revolution that reflects its own history and conditions."

Mexican-Americans are the oldest and largest community of Latin American and Caribbean origin in the United States. But it was only in the r96os, when the strug- gles of Chicano farmworkers such as these demonstrators captured national atten- tion, that they began to raise their political

profile.

During the last few decades Mexican- Americans have become increasingly urban, by 1990 constituting more than a third of the population of Los Angeles. Only recently have they begun to translate their numbers into political power, as in the r 990 election of Gloria Molina (left) to the Los Angeles County Board of Su- pervisors.

The arrival of over half a million exiles from Castro's Cuba turned much of Miami into a "Little Havana," where life resembled the prerevolutionary original. Their concentration in Miami helped Cubans retain their identity, while incorporating elements of North American popular culture.

U.S. popular culture has been enriched by the presence of Latin American and Caribbean communities. Gloria Estefan, "the Latin Madonna," became a crossover pop- music star, as have Cristina Aguilera, Ricky Martin, and Jennifer Lopez.

La~ ~erican and Caribbean communities in the United States are trying to exert in- ~reasmg mfluence over Washington's policies toward their homelands. In 1991, Haitians m Boston protested the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in a military coup and demande~ _U.S. action to restore him to power, which occurred in 1994. A decade later, other Haman-Americans pressed Washington to remove Aristide.

The 1980s and 1990s saw big waves of immigtants to the United States, most of them from Latin America and the Caribbean. At P.S. 19 in Queens, New York, half the kinder- garten classes are bilingual in Spanish and students come from all over the Americas to

live in the "New New York" and become "Americans."