Political Movements and Violence in Central America

Journal of Third World Studies, Fall 2007 by Perla, Hector Jr

Brockett, Charles D. Political Movements and Violence in Central America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 380 pp.

The civil wars and revolutionary movements in Central America are among the most studied Latin American sociopolitical phenomena. While the conflicts themselves generated tremendous human suffering, they have also provided fertile grounds for the development of human understanding. They have been especially insightful for exploring how marginalized and oppressed political actors challenge powerful ones, sometimes with great success. In this sense, these struggles and the scholarship that has documented them often provide inspiring lessons for how ordinary people can improve our beautiful world still full of so many injustices. In Political Movements and Violence in Central America Charles Brocket! adds to this scholarship masterfully.

Political Movements is a massive undertaking both theoretically and empirically. It provides case studies on the rise of unarmed social movements and armed revolutionary movements in Guatemala and El Salvador. The book is divided into two sections. In the first section, Dr. Brocket! begins by analyzing the role of socio-economic and political grievances in the rise of these movements, while attempting to understand their complex interrelationship. The section also provides extremely rich descriptions of the primary urban and rural groups that led the mobilization of Central American civil society. Theoretically, the section's main contribution is its answer to the question posed by scholars over which type of peasant is most likely to become contentious: it depends. He points out that this debate has occurred primarily because previous scholars have focused on "subsistence" as the key analytic variable. By problematizing this approach and instead focusing on "economic security" Brocket! (p. 48) can convincingly assert, "In some cases, the type of peasant whose economic security is most threatened might be smallholders, in others it might be sharecroppers, and migratory laborers or the latter two plus squatters."

Yet, the section also raised a few concerns. The empirical issues are minor and I list these quickly. First, there is some unevenness between chapters. For example the Guatemalan chapter had an explicit section on the guerrillas, while the Salvadoran chapter did not. Second, overall the book does a better job on Guatemala than on El Salvador. For instance, too much information on El Salvador is based on Miguel Castellanos' book (edited by Courtney Prisk). Castellanos was the highest-ranking defector from the Salvadoran guerrillas. His testimony, on which his book is based, was the Salvadoran government's biggest propaganda piece of the war. So. while some or even most of his information may be true, it is difficult to distinguish fact from propaganda and raises red flags about the source's credibility.

More substantively, Brockett (p. 95) argues that in the Salvadoran case it is inaccurate to claim that non-violent popular movement activists joined the armed struggle because of state repression. Rather he contends that some were already clandestine guerrilla members. However, this creates a false dichotomy, which results because the author begins tracking the Salvadoran cycle of contention in 1976 rather than earlier. Simply because some movement leaders were clandestine guerrilla members before the intense repression of the late 1970s does not necessarily mean that state violence was not what led them to take up arms. Indeed, it is likely that these leaders had been affected by state repression occurring before 1976. a possibility that Brockett never rules out.

The book's second section provides a historical account of both countries' cycles of contention and documents the impact that the configuration of political opportunities had on the social and revolutionary movements' success. It makes two major contributions to our general understanding of these movements. First, Professor Brockett puts together an impressive dataset of al 1 contentious acts and state repression in both countries. The Guatemalan set documents from 1955 to 1984 and the Salvadoran set captures the period between 1976 and 1991. It is probably the best collection of information on Central American social movements available to date. Next, he uses the dataset to answer the study's primary research question: when does increased repression crush a movement and under what conditions does it lead to increased mobilization? The author argues that state violence generally deters contention when the level of social mobilization is low, but is more likely to intensify contentious activism (nonviolent and violent) if repression is increased when a cycle of contention is already ongoing. This provides a parsimonious, dynamic, and powerful explanation for one of the central theoretical questions on contentious movements.

I have only two methodological comments on this section. The first is regarding the dataset's construction. The author created it using content analysis, but does not provide any measures of reliability or validity for his variables and no explicit guide for how he systematically distinguished between ambiguous and complex events. These are fundamental to this type of study, because they allow us to be confident that the coding procedure would generate similar results if someone else receded the same data independently using the author's instructions, and that the coding procedure accurately measures the concepts it is intended to capture. Moreover, the author could have easily overcome these issues. To test for reliability the author could have had a small percentage (10%) of the dataset coded concurrently but independently by one of his research assistants, and provided an appendix of his coding instructions to allow readers to assess the validity of his variables' construction.