Social Struggle in Neoliberal Central America

This special issue will address changes in the formations and strategies of Central American social movements in a context that is very different from that faced by their much-studied counterparts four decades ago. Neoliberal models of development and structural reforms have promoted privatization, free-market economics, deregulation, and government austerity in Latin America and around the world since the late 1970s. This transformation began in Central America through a potpourri of Structural Adjustment Programs, Free Trade Zones and related policies inseparable from U.S.-funded wars, death squads, and other technologies of repression aimed at squelching a diversity of resistance movements in the 1980s.

These ongoing histories of struggle and repression, with their very different outcomes at national and local levels, shape the context of Central American neoliberalisms and social struggles today. Nicaraguan neoliberalism, for example, followed the end of the Contra War but exists in tension with a lexicon and popular ideology rooted in Sandinismo; in Honduras, targeted death squad repression in the 1980s left the country without an organized base capable of resisting the ravages of the 2009 neoliberal coup, though Hondurans enthusiastically and valiantly fought it. In Guatemala and El Salvador, highly-publicized projects of restorative justice and historical memory are deeply intertwined with current struggles against other forms of ongoing violence. Throughout the region, the 1990s “peace” saw the heightened implementation of World Bank and IMF-driven restructuring. With the passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) in 2005, corporate power reached new levels of control over national economies and policy, threatening sovereignty on numerous fronts. Neoliberal policies have dramatically impacted national economies; prompted massive rural-to-urban migration as well as international migration; increased resource extraction; weakened labor and environmental protections; caused major shifts in agriculture; reconfigured (and in some cases re-entrenched) hierarchies of gender and sexuality; and increased wealth disparities.

Recent social science has analyzed neoliberalism in ways that go beyond state-level economic reforms and trade policies. Increasingly, researchers are seeing how sub-state spaces of neoliberalism are carved out regionally and locally, and how neoliberal reforms have lead to fragmentation and segregation. In Latin America, sub-state spaces of neoliberalization are taking on new forms. Free Trade Zones are giving way to more radical experiments with self-governing corporate enclaves. In Honduras, government plans to build “charter cities” emerged with force after the military 2009 coup d’état, financed by the most powerful proponents of unfettered free trade in that nation. These enclaves (now called ZEDEs—Zonas de empleo y desarrollo económico) could carve Honduran national territory into a series of island-experiments in corporate governance. A growing discourse on “start-up cities” promises to launch city-scale neoliberal zones throughout the Central American region as a new model for economic growth, violently displacing organized campesino, indigenous, afro-indigenous and other majority poor populations in the process.

As Teresa Caldeira has examined in Brazil (2000), burgeoning gated communities and similar experiments in privatization throughout Central America are not only redefining urban, suburban and rural landscapes, but are raising important questions about the segregation and control of space. These questions arise in Guatemala’s first walled private city “Paseo Cayalá”; Honduran “barrios seguros”; increasingly formalized spatial segregation of Nicaraguan migrant workers, U.S. “ex-pat” migrants, and the middle class in Costa Rica; highly exclusionary private hospitals and schools; in the growth of malls, etc. With growing crime and violence in the Northern Triangle, security narratives are increasingly used in conjunction with neoliberal projects of spatial segregation that aim to protect economic investment and the bodies of wealthier citizens.

Numerous forms of resistance to neoliberalism in Central America add important elements to this discussion. For example, the declaration of “mining-free zones” by indigenous communities in the Western Highlands of Guatemala have revived linguistic and identity-based concepts of territory to exempt geographic areas from state efforts to push through mega development projects under neoliberal extraction and investment laws. In El Salvador, the current FMLN government has defended citizens’ territorial fights against neoliberal impositions by Canadian mining companies and a U.S. government seed program that threatens farmers with landlessness. Nicaraguan indigenous and campesino groups are fighting the Ortega government’s plan to build a canal (funded privately by Chinese capital) that would displace them and cause untold environmental damage. In Honduras campesino and indigenous groups have valiantly fought against World Bank-funded projects that would dispossess them of their land, using a wide variety of strategies that draw upon international and national legislation, multiple identities, and new discourses and practices of sovereignty and collectivity.

The deregulation and corruption that accompany militarized neoliberalism (especially in the Northern Triangle) has created an ideal environment for drug traffickers and gangs to contest control of territory at the local level, strengthening transnational trafficking networks whose power penetrates and in some instances can become indistinguishable with state power.  The resulting atmosphere of daily terror in many parts of Central America is one of the primary “push” factors driving migration. Central Americans have also organized against these “security” threats to everyday survival in ways that challenge neoliberal state narratives relying on cultural and moral, rather than structural, interpretations of everyday violence.

Neoliberal attacks against institutions that disproportionately affect women as workers, parents, and caregivers (e.g., healthcare and education) leave women in positions of increasing structural vulnerability. These processes, combined with a rise in vehemently anti-woman and anti-LGBT actors in the state political arena (including Opus-Dei-affiliated cardinals and bishops, and powerful televangelists advising presidents) have corresponded with increases in femicide and other forms of gendered, homophobic and transphobic violence. These processes have made the right to public space a key issue for women and members of LGBT communities. Feminist and LGBT-rights focused groups have powerfully challenged the gendered violence of neoliberalism in Central America, at the same time calling into question the normative expectations of international funders that such groups focus on limited (and fundamentally neoliberal) education-based solutions to sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

In sum, this special issue will examine the contemporary context of social struggle in neoliberalizing Central America. Articles may address these or other relevant topics:

• Fights to reclaim public spaces and institutions in the face of privatization
• The intersections of localized Central American sovereignty struggles confronting national governments, U.S. and other foreign State interventions, and national and international corporations
• Movements challenging militarized policing and surveillance aimed largely at the criminalization of dissent
• The impacts and logics of the generalized shift from large-scale collective political armed resistance to movements relying on “non-violent” tactics
• Processes by which new identity formations and community histories (including changing indigeneities, sexualities and nationalisms) are created and/or harnessed as part of ongoing struggles
• The roles of organized labor and the limitations it faces in the struggle against corporate capitalism in Central America
• Social movements’ efforts at regional and/or cross-border mobilization
• Continuities and ruptures between past and present struggles
• Struggles for territorial autonomy as resistance to neoliberalism

SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS

To avoid duplication of content, please contact the issue editors to let them know of your interest in submitting and your proposed topic. Review will begin immediately and we encourage submission as soon as possible, preferably by Jan. 15, 2017, but this call will remain open as long as it is posted on the LAP web site.

Manuscripts should be no longer than 8,000 words of paginated, double-spaced 12 point text with 1 inch margins, including notes and references, using the LAP Style Guidelines available at  www.latinamericanperspectives.com under the “Submit” tab where the review process is also described.   Manuscripts should be consistent with the LAP Mission Statement available on the web site under the “About” tab.

Manucripts may be submitted in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. If you do not write in English with near native fluency, please submit in your first language.  LAP will translate manuscripts accepted in languages other than English. If you are not submitting in English, please indicate if you will have difficulty reading reviews and/or correspondence from the LAP office in English.

Please feel free to contact the issue editors with questions pertaining to the issue but  all manuscripts should be submitted directly to the LAP office, not to issue editors. A manuscript is not considered submitted until it has been received by the LAP office.  You should receive acknowledgment of receipt of your manuscript within a few days.  f you do not receive an acknowledgment from LAP after one week, please send a follow-up inquiry to be sure your submission arrived.

E-mail Submissions: send to lap@ucr.edu

Subject Line: Author name – Manuscript for Central America issue

Please attach your manuscript as a Word Document (doc or docx)

Include: Abstract (100 words), 5 Keywords, and a separate cover page with short author affiliations (less than 130 words) and complete contact information (e-mail, postal address, telephone).

Postal correspondence may be sent to:
Managing Editor, Latin American Perspectives
P.O. Box 5703,
Riverside, California 92517-5703.

For an article with more than one author, provide contact information for all authors but designate one person as the Corresponding Author who will receive correspondence from the LAP office.  If any contact information changes while your manuscript is under consideration, please send the updated information to LAP promptly.

Submission of a manuscript implies commitment to publish in the journal. Authors should not submit a manuscript that has been previously published in English in identical or substantially similar form nor should they simultaneously submit it or a substantially similar manuscript to another journal in English.  LAP will consider manuscripts that have been published in another language, usually with updating.  Prior publication should be noted, along with the publication information.

Issue editor contact information:

Adrienne Pine – pine@american.edu

Elizabeth Geglia – bgeglia@gmail.com