absolute violence in revolutionary latin america

8/6/2019 Absolute Violence in Revolutionary Latin America

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Nathaniel Whittemore

Latin American Revolutions Final Paper

6/06/2005

Absolute Violence: The Renegotiation of Political Action in Revolutionary Latin America

This paper attempts to understand the role of violence in Latin American revolutions.

Using a comparative framework, it examines how different types of violence were used to

achieve different ends. Rather than view violence as a monolithic entity, it attempts to

understand the varying symbolisms and significances of different groups violent actions and to

understand how the popularly understood intention of violence and the force of the group from

which it emanated affected its effectiveness in achieving its intended ends. It is my assertion

that revolutionary groups who employed violence often unintentionally subverted their own

cause by contributing to the renegotiation of a political landscape in which capacity for violentaction was both the primary determinant of political power and in which violence was the only

means by which common people could contribute to the political process. By participating in

and conflagrating the culture of political violence, groups whose ultimate objective was

popular political participation under a system of political, social and economic rights

undermined their own cause. Moreover, their own violence, while often much less vicious,

brutal, or indiscriminant than that of powers attempting to maintain or restore an oligarchy or

dictatorial status quo, was used as justification for third party intervention on the side of that

status quo. As part of this process, different groups appropriated part of the culture of political

violence for their own ends. These appropriations tended to be rooted in a) the needs (social,

identity, economic, or other wise) of the group and b) the understood ends of that violence

(personal gain, community ascendancy, etc). The legitimacy of this violence tended to rest in

the common understanding of its place in the dominant order of the time, and the understood

capacity of the group from which it emanated to inflict further violence. Especially recently,

then, the most effective opposition groups have tended to be those for whom violence

functioned as a clearly delimited means to a non-violent and popularly understood end. It was

only when revolutionary opposition groups offered within their own structural frameworks

immediate or long-term alternatives to violence that they were able to survive in the long run.

Indeed, the history of Latin America is often one in which the violence of revolutionary

movements (both that which comes from their members and that which is justified in response)

obliterates the idealism animating their members. In many of these situations, the only radical

upheaval achieved through revolutionary violence is the creation or bolstering of a situation in

which violent acts are the route to political agency. This paper attempts to explore these

patterns by looking at Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru. Structurally, it follows one


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relatively common pattern of violent political renegotiation. I begin by exploring the United

States special relationship with Latin America, and the practical training for autocrats that

that often entailed. I then move to the period of frustration when opposition groups take up

arms, the response of powerful third party actors, and finally to the situation in which violence

is the dominant political currency. In each situation I have attempted to ask relevant andenlightening questions for those circumstances in which the pattern is broken or disrupted. I

conclude with a discussion of 1990s world opposition movements and the way they may reflect

changing dynamics of resistance.

Section One

The United States has long maintained that its relationship with Latin America holds a

special significance. This relationship is curious in that it has been continuously defined by a

violence justified as necessary for the maintenance of that relationship. This significance has

at times been economic: for decades Latin American agricultural markets have supplied UScitizens with fruit, vegetables, and important crops like coffee. Additionally, specific

circumstances, such as the need for a canal for shipments between coasts, reaffirmed this

special economic importance.

Simultaneously, Latin America has held a specific ideological significance. On the one

hand, it has always been a place to test the idea of United States as a benevolent power. As

early as the Monroe Doctine, America formally conceptualized its foreign relations with less

powerful (militarily or economically) nations in a way fundamentally different than old-world

colonialism. The United States, as a former colony itself, had the privilege of understanding

the value of tutelage and exchange, while also recognizing the incredible importance of self-

determination. In practice, the distinction between the exploitation of colonialism and the

benevolence has often been hard to distinguish. Despite this tense and often hypocritically

reality, American rhetoric has tended to hold Latin America as an important testing ground for

its sense of projected self.

Walter LaFeber discusses this very tension in the first chapter of his Inevitable Revolutions. On

page 22, he writes:

Thus was struck the continuing contradiction in North American Policy betweenthe principle of self-determination, whose value has been self-evident to the

US mind, and the expansion of their own nations power, whose value has alsobeen self-evident to Americans.1

Latin and Central America have also been important testing grounds for another

American ideology; that of economic liberalism and free trade. Americas liberal foreign

economic notions have continuously pushed for open access to markets, low or non existent

tariffs to agriculture exports, and developing economies based on exchange of agricultural and

1 La Feber, 22


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raw materials of industry for foreign capitol. Interestingly, these economic goals have produced

the most direct contravention of the other espoused goal of hemispheric self-determination.

Indeed, it is this goal which has tended to produce the most direct and indirect United States

violence in the southern arena.

As many scholars have noted, despite the rhetorical significance of self-determinationand American benevolence, the overwhelming goal of the United States in Latin America has

been stability. This has meant geostrategic stability in the face of global communism and

ostensibly domino-like third world revolution. In both cases, this stability has been in the

service of political order, and perhaps even more, maintained and un-threatened economic

relationships. Indeed, for the United States, Latin American politics have tended to seem

important specifically in their ramifications for the maintenance of an economic status quo

which continues to benefit US producers and consumers, even at the cost of average Southern

citizens.

Discussing the support and training of the Nicaragua National Guard that became a partof Roosevelts Good Neighbor policy, La Feber discusses the importance of the shift from US

direct military intervention in Latin America, which had been common policy since the elder

Roosevelts presidency, to a new, more indirect but just as relevant involvement in Latin

American affairs. On page 71, he writes that FDR and Co had found in the National Guard the

answer to the perplexing problem of how to maintain an orderly, profitable system without

having constantly to send in the marines.2 Even more directly, La Feber asserts that [no

priority] ranked higher for Washington officials than order.3

It is within this context that US violence must be understood. Be it direct military

intervention, training for future autocrats in the School of the Americas, or CIA advising and

destabilizing in covert operations, the United States violent involvement in that part of the

world has tended to understand itself in the service of stability. In this situation, violence has

functioned as a fundamentally demobilizing force. Counter to all our ostensible goals of self-

determination and the employment of the citizen participation governing models we pride

ourselves on, the type of violence that the United States has engaged in or supported in Latin

America has been fundamentally about maintaining relationships of dominance and status quos

in which politics are in the service of international economic exchange. Violence was used to

demobilize restless populations and to eliminate their senses of political autonomy.

Additionally, it is clear that violence was the political currency to which the US paid

the most attention and accorded the most respect. For example, when agolpe in 1931 El

Salvador brought General Maximiliano Martinez to power, the United States refused to open

relations. The next year, however, disorganized communist uprising was met with

2 La Feber, 713 La Feber, 76


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overwhelming force, and Martinezs forces slaughtered thousands of others in a kind of

preemptive strike that set a bloody precedent for later Latin American military dictators who

faced mass uprisings.4 Within a few weeks, he was given informal US recognition.

Especially after WWII, strategic support for and sometimes even preemptive investment

in Latin America became part of official Cold War policy. La Feber suggests that access to rawmaterials became a security asset in the post-1945 Washington mind, and that in fact, US

support for dictators was a rational choice calculation which determined that given

Washingtons needs and reliance on military means, the dictators were its best bet to maintain

the system.5 Indeed, summarizing a 1967 US Senate sponsored analysis or El Salvador,

Nicaragua and Honduras, military force apparently equaled political peace.6

This is not to say that the United States has followed a policy designed to deny the

rights of voting to average Latin American citizens. Indeed, to the contrary, elections

themselves have been a top priority of policymakers. The March 1982 Salvadoran election was

given an important place in Reagan rhetoric.US officials brandished the election turnout as if they were waving a talismanto drive off the forces of darkness.7

These elections however, demonstrate a US support for an incredibly shallow popular

participation. Continuing the previous quote:

[The US officials] overlooked the absence of an opposition press, free speech,or freedom of assembly, not to mention the militarys close watch on individualvoting in the ballot places.Above self-determination has been the goal of maintaining a clearly defined set of

relationships. If elections did or could produce the results which would affirm that order, then

they were championed. If not, they were, overtly or covertly, overturned. This was the case

with the US sponsored coup of Guatemalas popular Arbenz, Chiles Salvador Allende, and

numerous others. In this way, whatever the stated goals of US policy, violence came to

undercut non-violent political landscapes and peaceful transitions of power.

The most important, unexpected, and often misunderstood ramification of American

violence in Latin America was that through it and the responsive violence it inspired, the entire

political system was renegotiated. Violence, in cyclical pattern, became unrestricted, and an

end in of itself. It became an end rather than a mean in that force became the dominant

currency of political transaction. As violence and violent upheaval became common place,

space for political maneuvering had increasingly to be cleaved. To engage in politics, citizenshad to engage in violence. In some ways, Perus Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path was the

embodiment of this shift. Some governments became so vicious and uncontrollable that even

4 La Feber, 755 La Feber, 1126 La Feber, 1747 La Feber, 317


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the United States government balked. In 1980, a Reagan official said What wed give to have

an Arbenz (the Guatemalan leader overthrown in a US engineered coup in 1954) now.8

Yet throughout the second half of the 20th century, American money and training

supported the transition to a violent political environment. Often this process started before

revolutionary upheaval. Trying to hedge their bets, so to speak, the United States would investin leaders whom it believed either capable of maintaining order or at least willing to follow

American directives in a majority of situations. This investment might be educational,

economic, advising based, or something even more direct.

Section Two

Demobilizing the Latin American electorate was a task that proved extremely difficult.

Especially in the first quarter of the 20th century, Latin America was often defined by upheaval.

The 20s and 30s saw waves of popular rebellions. It is interesting to note however, that while

these were not simply peaceful little gatherings of the disenchanted, the sorts of brutality,indiscriminant terror and symbolic violence that characterized certain countries a few decades

later had yet to come to fruition. These movements tended to produce moderate reformists

who promise gradual land redistribution and greater inclusion of average citizens in the

political process. By the late 1940s and 1950s, however, those once promising governments had

decayed and the new systems had become old. The combination of disillusionment associated

with these disappointments and the new third world revolutionary discourse circling after

World War II, as well as the example of nascent Latin American revolutions created situations

in which more and more groups were looking to armed struggle for liberation.

Speaking of Guatemala, La Feber reminds us that the generation coming of age after

WWII had matured in a world shaped by global revolution, FDRs Four Freedoms, and a new

awareness of the horrible social conditions within the country, especially among the Indians

who comprised more than half the population.

Indeed, the continued inability of reformers to affect change through systemic means

led increasing numbers of groups to begin to claim political space through violence. Just as

terrorist groups seek to remedy military power imbalances through strategic strikes which

make those organizations appear more powerful than they are, so too did armed revolutionary

movements begin to use violence to extend their influence much beyond the size of their

constituency.

Unbeknownst to them, their appropriation of violence would involve them in a

renegotiated political sphere in which force was the ultimate determinant of power and

influence, and in which their own violence would give justification and leverage not simply to

8 La Feber, 261


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their own ends, but to powerful outside actors whos primary goal was to ensure that they

would not disrupt the status quo they rejected.

Within this framework were some groups who, like the state, attempted to use

violence to demobilize the population. Most notably, Perus Shining Path distinguished itself

from other Peruvian leftist movements by rejecting ambivalence of purpose.

9

Its purpose wasto inspire and wage a cleansing popular war which would situate all participants on one of two

sides: that of the Shining Path or that of the state. It believed that a total destruction of the

system was required. In their minds this was, to appropriate Schumpters term, creative

destruction: the total replacement of an old order with something new and better. This ironic

utopian appropriation of violence represented an extreme end of the course of Latin American

revolutionary movements. Its success in Peruvian society is nevertheless enlightening in its

demonstration of the disturbing bounds of the renegotiated political landscape.

Section ThreeAs early as 1943, thinkers in the United States had begun to formulate visions for post-

war international order. These visions tended to create spectrums of progress which, of course,

found the United States at a polar end. They suggested that an America awakened to its own

power and obligation in a new world could be used as a mighty force of good. In these

imaginations, American leadership would be the benevolent leader that created a half century

of peace and prosperity out of a half century of terrible catastrophe and war. These grand

visions soon gave way, however, to fears of rising communist menace. The intensity of feeling

that a world behind America was posed for greatness was matched only by the intensity of fear

that global communism could destroy everything in that dream. The sense of common destiny

animating immediate post war thinkers quickly gave way to a sense of common threat. There

arose a strange situation in which America looked outward to bolster its turning inward.

In this climate, the goals of stability in Latin America became even more prescient in

the minds of Washington policymakers. As La Feber noted, after WWII, access to Latin

American goods and general political stability became security issues. Preserving stability now

meant the protection of an entire system of economic and political order. To an even greater

degree, official Washington thinking reflected the overwhelmingly dominant goal of ensuring

the power of partners willing to tow the American line in all situations. The United States

government became a fundamentally counter-revolutionary force. Domestic fears of communist

penetration seeped into foreign policy and any reformism which might start the slippery slope

to communism was intolerable. From 1949 to 1964, The US School of the Americas, located in

the Panama Canal Zone churned out hundreds of would-be leaders, newly trained in counter

9 Stern, 19


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insurgency techniques. 358 graduates returned to El Salvador, 958 to Guatemala, and no less

than 2,969 came back to work with the Nicaragua military or National Guard.10

American officials were explicit in their fears, and made reference of other nations

that had been lost to communism. Secretary of State John Dulles told Congress that if we

dont look out, we will wake up some morning and read in the newspapers that there happenedin South America the same kind of thing that happened in China in 1949.11

In this context, opposition violence came to be the necessary justifying factor for

American direct or indirect interference in Latin American politics. As more and more

opposition groups (organized and disorganized) took up arms, or threatened violence, it

became increasingly commonplace for the state (supported by international allies) to respond

with overwhelming demonstrations of force, brutality or both. In 1960 the president of El

Salvador declared a month long state of siege after uncovering ostensibly student communist

threats. In response, military officers jailed the students, invadedthe library to tear it apart,

rape female students, and kill a librarian. This would only get worse over the next twodecades. By the 1980s, violence had become an almost singular factor in political relationships.

Section Four

Just as popular civic participation in nonviolent politics is characterized by a variety of

motivations for and manifestations of participation, so too did a Latin American political

system defined by violence find different individuals and groups employing violence to very

different ends.

For some groups, violence, as political participation, was means and ends. These

groups were typically the most disenfranchised and most bereft of political voice. For them

violence was a way to communicate a specific and historical set of grievances, and to be

engaged as political actors in a way denied them in nonviolent movements. In many cases,

government violence was a triggering factor in the revolutionary process. In the northern

Guatemalan town of Panzos, soldiers massacred a group of Qechi Indians when they met on

town square to request help protecting their land from local authorities. This triggered an

incredible response. As La Feber wrote: Indians who had been passive for centuries became

revolutionaries.12

In Peru, the senderistas provided disenfranchised rural youths with a chance for social

ascendancy, an outlet for their potential radicalism, and a new medium for exerting their own

individual power. One youth from Rumi remembered

10 La Feber, 11111 La Feber, 11112 La Feber, 258


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A famous illusionthey created among the muchachos was, way back in 1981,that by 85 there would be an independent republic. Wouldnt you like to beminister? Wouldnt you like to be a military chief? Be something, no?13

For some, violence was a means to an individual end. One unintended consequence of

the corruption of violent autocratic regimes was that its bolstering forces, the police and the

army, were often subject to the same corruption and shifting alliances as its leadership.Corruption, like violence, came to define entire systems.

Nicaraguas National Guard provides a perfect example of the way that violence for individual

gain could both bolster and be the undoing of a system of repression. As the FSLN came closer

and closer to victory, the Guards toughness, which had been proved by the murder and

brutalizing of women, children, and unarmed men, crumbled. A foreign mercenary fighting for

Somoza was similarly disgusted: There was nothing gutsy about those guysThey ran like

rats.14When their personal incentives to be violent dried up and it became clear that they

were working for the losing team, their resolve evaporated.

For certain individuals, violence simply became the way that political and socialfrustrations were resolved. As the Carter administration tried to implement a military

government that both broke the power of the Salvadoran oligarchy and gained massive peasant

support by moderate land redistribution, they ran into the effects of a new culture of violence

first hand. Those oligarchs whose power would be broken by the reforms tended to hire

former ORDEN (death squad) members of DAubuissons killers to eliminate peasant groups that

tried to take the land. In a sick irony,

Between January and August 1980, peasant deaths accounted for more thanhalf of all civilians murdered. The death rate ran highest in areas where landreformers were most active.

The lower classes were engaged in similar violence. In 1983, The Economist joked that

it cost $100 or less to have your wifes lover or business rival killed in Guatemala City.15 By

1982, even the Guatemalan military was awash in personal power struggles and mob violence.

Both military and leading civil society members fought each other like rival mafias.16

In El Salvador too, violence for personal gain or personal connections became the

norm. In the 1980s, Salvadoran officers first allegiance was to protecting members of their

tanda (their military school graduating class), rather than to the nation, and in many cases

they were equally interested in getting rich. Salvadorans believed that their armys ranks were

captain, major, colonel, and millionaire.17

As the system of violent participation strengthened, contests to demonstrate power

often ensured that the particular style of violence was increasingly brutal and visual. Priests

13 Stern Ed., 13014 La Feber, 23615 La Feber, 32216 La Feber, 26017 La Feber, 314


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testifying about Somoza and the National Guard in Nicaragua told Congress that torture

included not only rape and electric shock, but innovative devices such as forcing a prisoner to

swallow a button on a string while a Somoza official kept tugging it up.18 Moreover, as the

FSLN guerilla army strengthened its forces in 1978, Somozas Guard was given free reign.

It leveled parts of towns and massacred thousands of people. One survivor latertestified, I could see what they did to my Mother after they killed her theyslit her stomach open with a bayonet. They cut off the genitals of my brother-in-law and stuffed them in his mouth.19

By this point, the Frankenstein of US-backed Latin American force had completely left

its creators control. Scrambling to determine the best course of action, the woeful Carter

government could do nothing other than have a spokesman suggest that the Guard had to be

kept to preserve order. La Feber cynically suggests that

At that moment Somozas troops were dive-bombing slums, murdering unarmedpeople in the streets, and looting the cities.20

Similarly, the newly elected but incredibly weak president of Guatemala in 1980,

Duarte, admitted to the US ambassador that the military had been responsible for the killing ofa moderate revolutionary leader and implicitly admitted that neither he nor any other civilian

could control the forces.21 Even earlier, as La Feber notes in the 1960s, [the Guatemalan

officer corps]with a single voicetold the United States to provide supplies and training but

no advice, as its troops killed thousands of peasants and political opponents in the name of

counterinsurgency.22

One fascinating result of the gradual build up of the Latin American culture of political

violence was that through their actions, actors became basically indistinguishable. Ideology

increasingly gave way to ability and willingness to use force. With no revolutionary organization

was this process more embraced and glorified than with the Shining Path. Hinojosa writes that

No other organizationstayed so exclusively aloof from the electoral politicalscene and concentrated so completely on its popular war. Nor could anyonecompete with Shining Path on the terrain of war neither in the rhetoric ofwar, nor in the cult of death as a welcome blood sacrifice, in short in the ideaof violence as a permanent and legitimate political resource that transcendedany social cost.23

Section Five

The Shining Path is not only a telling example of violence in Latin American revolutions

in its successes. There are important lessons contained within its eventual defeat and the

popular resistance it inspired as well. As Stern writes in his introduction to Part II of Shining

18 La Feber, 22819 La Feber, 23220 La Feber, 23321 La Feber, 25422 La Feber, 25623 Stern Ed., 76


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and Other Paths, Sendero squandered all of its political advantages in its inability to look

beyond violence as both means and ends.

It came to rely ever more exclusively on violence and coercion to exert a directpolitical presence, and it would end up facing organized resistance bypeasantmilitary patrols determined to defend communities against incursions

and intimidation.

24

In truth, Senderos greatest strength was also its greatest undoing. Its ability to employ

brutal and unfeeling violence throughout Peruvian society, and through this violence attract

young constituents from historically disenfranchised populations gave it an incredible

advantage in a climate where force was the most respected political currency. Yet at the same

time, the violence was so that it existed outside the bounds of comfort and acceptance even

for the most calloused peasant populations. Its brutal indifference to the sufferings and

deaths of youths drawn into the war effort25 would eventually bankrupt its political and social

capital and indeed, inspire a turn away from violence. Degregori noted that the Path had an

ideology that made violence an absolute value rather than a relative or proportionate

instrument.26

As time passed, the root and emanating force of that violence began to change. The

internal repression and terror tactics Sendero began to employ against its own population

reflected not only a continued belief in violence as political currency but a weakening of

internal organization. No longer was violence a symbol of strength; it had become a stop gap

measure implemented to delay an ensuing chaos.27

Conclusion

Three examples of 1990s opposition movements, one of them from Latin America, provide afinal context for thinking about revolutionary violence in the modern era. In 1994, a rebellion

in the Mexico state of Chiapas, designed to coincide with the entry of Mexico into the North

American Free Trade Association exploded in bloody siege. Within a few days, it had become

clear that the Zapatista movement was ill-equipped to combat the Mexican government

militarily. The intelligent organization quickly shifted its focus. Over the course of the next few

months, strictly delimited and strategic violence was used as part of a more general strategy of

marketing and publicity, utilizing the internet and other creative means to disseminate writings

on (largely legitimate) grievances. Over the next few years, the group took on cult status in a

number of circles and was able to influence political discourse to an incredible degree,

considering its overall real size and strength.

24 Stern Ed., 12225 Stern Ed., 12326 Stern Ed., 13527 Stern Ed., 168


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In 1987, the Islamic Resistance Movement was founded in the Palestinian Territories as

an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that would deal directly with the first Intifada. At first,

that organization was unsuccessful in differentiating itself from other resistance movements. It

soon employed an ideology of violence, however, which defined its struggle in terms that were

culturally, historically, and religiously relevant to a large part of the Palestinian public. Overthe course of the next five years, HAMAS was able to build a presence in the Palestinian

political space through its use of strategic terrorist violence. In 1993, however, the promise of

the Oslo Accords quickly undercut the Palestinian publics willingness to see violence as the

preferred means of political exchange. HAMAS had quickly to adopt to the changed climate.

Since then, they have employed a multipart strategy in which violence is an important part but

never moves from means to end. It has sold itself as a malleable yet firm organization capable

of responding to the demands of an oppressed population.

In 1998, a number of university students in Belgrade founded OTPOR, or Resistance

to attempt to bring down the Milosevic regime through citizen action. It was decided extremelyearly that there would be no violence. Firstly, they recognized that Milosevic had more

capacity for force than they ever would. Secondly, they recognized that this use of repressive

force as political exchange was trademark of Milosevic, and that by taking violent action,

they would be, ironically, supporting the system which kept him in power. Instead, they

formed an extensive grass roots network of individual actors and used symbols and humor to

erode the sense that Milosevic was the dominant and singular political actor. They were able to

unhinge those police and military forces who were working for the regime because they that

that was the most expedient political decision. As stickers saying Times up, stencils of the

Otpor resistance hand symbol, and demonstrations sprouted up around the country, the seeds

of doubts were planted in the very foundation of the regime.

So what do these movements have to do with theories of violence and Latin America? It

is my assertion that a dominant intended role of violence in Revolutionary Latin America was to

demonstrate an ability to operate politically on the same level as the state. Violence was

strategic as a means to the end of target destruction, but it was also a symbol of the potential

for greater violence to come. To some degree, displays of violence were meant to make an

organization seem bigger, more organized and better able to operate than it actually was. This

strategy was inevitably bankrupt because it aided a transition towards a politics in which

violence was the only currency. The state, with backing from outside allies, was in all cases

more able to inflict violence. At the same time, this transition unleashed single action, chaotic

and disorganized individualistic and citizen violence which fundamentally shifted the

individualism and sensibility of Latin American countries. Even when violence was able to

inspire (as with early Sendero youth recruits), its singular application and glorification

eventually inspired rejection and a turning away.


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In the 1990s, successful revolutionary movements tended to be those that were best

able to adapt to changing climates and sentiments within support bases and to create an

appearance of being bigger than reality would display. In a strange way, media began to usurp

some of the former role of violence. Whether this suggests a total shift in the way opposition

movements are carried out remains to be seen, but it seems clear that just as the second halfof the 20th century saw a new role of violence in Latin American guerilla movements, so too

with this new era witnessed a change in strategies of resistance.

absolute violence in revolutionary latin america

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