The Soft War: The Uses and Abuses of U.S. Economic Aid in Central America.

• Author: Rosenberg, Tina

The Soft War: The Uses and Abuses of U.S. Economic Aid in Central America.

While U.S. military aid to Central America makes headlines, there is little controversy about U.S. economic aid. Aid is good, says conventional liberal wisdom. Not so fast, say Barry and Preusch: not only does U.S. aid not help the poor, it strengthens the very sectors of society that block development. They argue that Central America would be better off without it.

Take Low Intensity Conflict, the Reagan administration's policy to deal with left-wing guerrillas, which combines military action with massive development programs to win the proverbial hearts and minds. It may be low intensity from the Pentagon's point of view; in Central America it seems awfully high intensity. In Costa Rica and Honduras, economic aid buys government toleration of the contras. Development is just one more part of the military campaign; politics has become the continuation of war by other means. Hence the Agency for International Development (AID) builds roads eight kilometers from the Nicaraguan border in contra-controlled northern Costa Rica, rebuilds bridges almost as fast as the Salvadoran guerrillas can blow them up, and sets up model villages in the Guatemalan highlands where that country's guerrillas find their support.

Where AID used to at least talk about helping peasants get land to grow their own food, it now encourages the opposite: large, privately owned plantations for efficiency in growing strawberries or snow peas for export. The problem is that while such trickle-down...