Introduction: Social Struggle in Neoliberal Central America

• Author: Adrienne Pine
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221131506
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022
• Subject Matter: Introduction

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221131506

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 247, Vol. 49 No. 6, November 2022, 3–15

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221131506

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

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Introduction

Social Struggle in Neoliberal Central America

by

Adrienne Pine

This issue explores examples of changes in the formations and strategies

of Central American social movements in a context that is very different

from the one faced by their much-studied counterparts four decades ago.

Since the late 1970s, neoliberal models of development and structural reforms

have promoted privatization, free-market economics, deregulation, and gov-

ernment austerity in Latin America and around the world. This transforma-

tion began in Central America in the 1980s with 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 variety of resistance movements. Ongoing histories of struggle

and repression, with their very different outcomes at national and local lev-

els, shape the context of Central American neoliberalisms and social strug-

gles 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 val-

iantly fought it. In Guatemala and El Salvador, highly publicized projects of

restorative justice and historical memory are deeply intertwined with cur-

rent struggles against ongoing violence.

Throughout the region, the 1990s “peace” saw the heightened implemen-

tation of World Bank– and International Monetary Fund (IMF)–driven

restructuring. With the passage of the Dominican Republic–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 affected national

economies, prompted massive rural-to-urban and international migration,

increased resource extraction, weakened labor and environmental protec-

tions, caused major shifts in agriculture, reconfigured (and in some cases

reentrenched) hierarchies of gender and sexuality, and increased wealth dis-

parities. Yet the shape of neoliberalism in any given context is determined by

dialectical processes of struggle, and, as several of the papers in this issue

show, even local community action can have a profound impact on national

and international policies.

Adrienne Pine is a medical anthropologist and the author of Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On

Violence and Survival in Honduras (2008) and coeditor (with Siobhán McGuirk) of Asylum for Sale

(2020). The collective thanks her for organizing this issue.

1131506LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221131506Pine/INTRODUCTION

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