The pace of neoliberal globalization: a comparison of three popular movement campaigns in Central America.

• Date: 22 September 2006
• Author: Almeida, Paul,Walker, Erica
• Published date: 22 September 2006
• Author: Almeida, Paul

Introduction

IN THE LATE 1990s AND EARLY 2000S, THE POPULAR SECTORS IN CENTRAL AMERICA were embroiled in the largest acts of mass defiance since the national liberal .liberation struggles of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras, a series of battles over government austerity and neoliberal restructuring are contributing to ongoing, heightened social conflict. The political turmoil derives from a new round of the region's integration into the capitalist world economy along free-market lines (Robinson, 2003). As the countries of the isthmus entered a foreign debt crisis in the 1980s, their respective governments initiated phase one structural adjustment policies such as currency devaluations, subsidy cuts to basic consumption goods and services, and economic deregulation (Stahler-Sholk, 1994). As these policies curbed inflation and led to short-term spurts in economic growth, the republics of Central America continued to accrue foreign debts in the billions of U.S. dollars through the 1990s, while maintaining sizable internal budget deficits. In the mid-1990s, in response to this ongoing fiscal crisis, international financial institutes (IFIs) encouraged a second phase of structural reforms that involved the privatization of publicly administered services and infrastructure, deeper reductions in the state sector, and the implementation of regressive sales taxes to overcome budget shortages and secure loan repayments (Green, 2003). Since the late 1990s, these second-stage reforms appear to be shaping some of the key mass struggles in the region.

Indeed, in 2005, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador experienced national days of protest against the signing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFFA)--a key measure seeking to further integrate the region in a neoliberal fashion. The anti-CAFTA mobilizations in Guatemala in March 2005 alone brought Mayan peasant associations into coalition with university students, schoolteachers, state-sector unions, and a variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in a month-long series of nationally coordinated demonstrations and roadblocks. In Panama, between May and July of 2005, in another type of neoliberal policy conflict, construction workers, state employees, schoolteachers, university students, health care employees, and social security workers coalesced into an oppositional coalition that demanded the repeal of a newly imposed national pension law that increased the age of retirement by five years. In the end, the anti-CAFTA forces failed to prevent their respective governments from signing free-trade accords, while the campaign in Panama forced the Torrijos government to postpone the pension reform and negotiate with the most affected social sectors. What accounts for the varying outcomes of popular struggles such as these that continue to contest the character and content of neoliberal reforms throughout the developing world? Below, we examine three campaigns against the implementation of second-phase neoliberal policies in Central America to better assess the kinds of situations in which movements challenging globalization-induced reforms influence the pace and character of the policy implementation process (see Table 1).

The campaigns represent some of the larger mass mobilizations in Central American in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We specifically examine the role of public opinion, the breadth of mobilization, and alignment with oppositional political parties as key dimensions conditioning the impact of the campaigns. While several studies demonstrate an upsurge of anti-neoliberal globalization protests in Latin America in the 1980s (Walton and Shefner, 1994), 1990s (Lopez Maya, 1999), and early 2000s (Almeida, 2002; Auyero, 2002), we know less about the relative successes (or failures) of specific campaigns to prevent unwanted economic policies (Rhodes, 2006).

Defensive Collective Action and Social Movement Outcomes

Economic restructuring in Central America since the mid- 1980s has increasingly placed pressure on national governments to scale back on federal budgets and open public industries and services to market forces. The changes commenced in the face of the international debt crisis of the early 1980s. International financial institutions (IFIs) stepped in to broker the crisis for Northern banks. In the mid-1980s, IFIs such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, the International Development Bank (IDB), and the U.S. Agency for International Development negotiated the first wave of structural adjustment agreements with the republics of Central America. In exchange for loan reductions, new lines of credit, and favorable credit ratings, Central American states implemented stabilization policies; this often included currency devaluations, fiscal austerity, and wage freezes. As the debt crisis dragged on into the 1990s, neoliberal state managers initiated a second wave of reforms that often involved privatization of government infrastructure and services, deeper cuts in the public sector, and increasing value added taxes (i.e., a sales tax). Both waves of structural adjustment have led to several episodes of defensive collective action in the region. That is, civil society groups affected by the reforms have launched protest campaigns to prevent unwanted changes that are perceived as making them worse off if the policies were to be implemented. In other words, avoidance of "collective bads" (as opposed to collective goods) provides the threat incentives that drive these mass mobilizations. Some of the earlier campaigns against first-phase reforms included mass protests by neighborhood groups in Costa Rica in 1983 against rapidly rising electricity prices (from subsidy cuts) and labor marches in El Salvador in 1986 against new fiscal reforms, including the devaluation of the national currency advised by the IMF.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, several dozen mass protest campaigns emerged throughout Central America over new state reforms and privatization programs. Indeed, without exaggeration, some of these campaigns against economic austerity register as the largest acts of civil disobedience witnessed in the recent history of several countries on the isthmus, and are definitely the largest demonstrations in the 1990s and early 2000s. Whereas for most of the 20th century (with the possible exception of Costa Rica), popular movement struggles oscillated between reform and revolution to remove firmly entrenched dictatorships and military rulers, along with the feudal structure of agro-export economies (Paige, 1997; Robinson, 2003), in the 1990s and early 2000s, the popular classes organized the largest demonstrations against unwanted economic changes linked to the process of neoliberal globalization.

In Costa Rica, the 1995 teachers' strike and a protest campaign in 2000 against telecommunications and electricity privatization each involved over 100,000 participants--serving as the largest protest demonstrations in the country's recent history. The campaign against a sales tax hike in Guatemala in 2001 also mobilized tens of thousands of people nationwide and served as a precursor to larger mobilizations against another sales tax hike in 2004, as well as mobilizations against a free trade agreement in 2005. Thus, the level of popular participation alone makes these cases worthy of analysis. Our purpose, however, is not to explain the level of mobilization that these various economic reforms trigger, but rather their outcomes. In short, arguably the most important question in research on collective action is, under what conditions do movements succeed or fail? Here we examine the circumstances under which national governments facing popular opposition implement neoliberal reforms and when they are obstructed or even reversed. Such a study advances our understanding of the pace of global economic restructuring throughout the developing world and the closely related issues of social and economic distribution. Indeed, the rate of neoliberal reform may be the more appropriate means to study such movement outcomes of this variety, since a victory against a particular policy at one moment may still lead to the measure's implementation at a later date. Most Central and South America countries remain on a neoliberal policymaking trajectory, so our observations of movement outcomes must be tempered by the reality that governments, for reasons of economic dependency, economic strategy, and/or ideological commitments, usually pass most neoliberal measures. (1)

The Impact of Public Opinion, Mobilization Breadth, and Opposition Parties

Even into the late 1990s and early 2000s, several notable empirical and theoretical articles on movement consequences contended that research on movement impacts remains less developed than are studies focusing on movement recruitment, emergence, and ideological framing processes (Giugni, 1998, 1999; Amenta and Young, 1999; Cress and Snow, 2000; Meyer, 2002; Stearns and Almeida, 2004; Jenkins and Form, 2005). One avenue into redressing this shortcoming in the literature involves focusing on policy outcomes of social movement struggles. Social conflicts over specific neoliberal policies offer a particularly useful means to study movement outcomes because of their bounded nature and more easily identifiable properties. For example, either the privatization of a public utility passes through the legislature or it doesn't. A new sales-tax hike either goes into effect or it doesn't. Such specific outcomes are much more empirically tractable than are larger movement-related outcomes such as greater economic equity or environmental justice. Nonetheless, every austerity measure adds up to a larger trajectory of neoliberal globalization, and understanding the conditions associated with the implementation or non-implementation of...