Think Global, Act Local

1993

It is easy to pontificate simple solutions from above the border. Few Gringos would have the courage of Elvia Alvarado to risk their lives to stand up against evil that might oppress them.i

How shall we proceed with our analysis to measure "quality of life" in our hypothetical planning program aimed at improving life in Honduras? Shall we speak of the demise of a rural economy, the invasion of capital, of units of happiness, pleasure, or infant mortality rate or birth rate, longevity, per capita income, education, literacy, family planning, economic self-sufficiency, freedom from foreign political economic dependency, the absence of fear and terror, the relative abundance of material possessions or the collective achievement of a full spiritual life? No such planning program can escape the political ramifications of the ideological self-legitimization of its own definitions of progress, prosperity or "the quality of life." We are faced with the dilemma of the "ugly American" imposing our own values upon a different way of life--the same contradictions between democracy and capitalist development that underlie the dynamics of our own society also underlie, albeit in a structurally different way, the motivations and "aid" we seek to give to "needy" foreign peoples in chronically underdeveloped regions.

Three interrelated sets of factors underlying the political-economic and social problems of Honduras must be "planned:" 1) a violent political culture that Honduras shares with most other Latin American countries; 2) a pernicious, endemic patterning of a "culture of poverty" marking the no-human's-land in the rural-urban transition; 3) the context of Honduras' and Hondurans' positions in a Capitalist World System, especially in relation to the relative position of the United States, largely as a consequence of the Monroe Doctrine and its corollaries.

These three sets of interrelated factors define the main focal points of long-term historical patterns that have endured in Central America and that have served to structurally characterize this region for the last century especially:

1. Honduras shares with Latin America a political culture of "corporate-praetorian authoritarianism," marked by social authoritarianism, polarized stratification between a few very rich land owners and many very poor landless peasants, forcible repression of dissent, bureaucratic corruption and inefficiency, and a "feudal" latifundian political economic exploitation of the peasant and the countryside in the production of primary resources. In Honduras, as in most Latin American countries, political organization is characterized as invested in an elitest oligarchy in which state authority is centered in and represents the interests of a number of semi-autonomous corporate groups--the church, the military (and para-military organizations), state administration, a business elite, people's organizations, and technocrats.ii The police become an instrument of the control of the military and the administration. Populist political parties that aim at agrarian style reform mainly or social revolution tend to be relatively non-autonomous corporate groups at the periphery of power. Ultimate power is frequently vested in the hands of a few individuals of the controlling elite. The real power is maintained behind the scenes while a façade of business as usual bureaucracy and populist democracy is maintained. Political repression, terrorism and persecution become standard operating procedures in protecting the interests of the controlling elite.

The history of Honduras reveals, from the beginning of Spanish colonialism, a feudal system of encomiendas that served to ruthlessly exploit the indigenous peasants and resources of the countryside for the sake of the aggrandizement of an hispanicized elite. Exploitation of the land and the people of the land are the main modes of production of this kind of latifundian and feudal-colonial economics. When coupled with agrarian capitalism it led to the redefinition of land as a means of production and to the eventual alienation and displacement of the peasant from the land--"the problem of the commons."iii Land is a source of profit for the exclusive control and manipulation by the powerful elite--the peasant becomes redefined as a landless plantation laborer.

By themselves, the elite cannot be expected to change their attitudes or to promote democratic institutions with the countries, and country-sides, that they control. Those who follow them into power after a revolution cannot be expected either to dramatically alter the structure of social authoritarianism if they themselves share in the basic political culture in which this kind of paternalistic authoritarianism is rooted and if other corporate institutions serve to legitimate the status quo in an implicit, business as usual manner.

The question is to what extent the "political culture" may be embedded in the Honduran ethos, values and worldview of a traditional or national society, and if so, then how is this orientation to be characterized at the level of the individual, the family or the local community?iv If we are to seek the source of change, then it seems that we must begin elsewhere than in the dominant ethos of Hispanic political culture.

2. We may legitimately ask whether Honduras shares with other Latin American countries a "culture of poverty" syndrome, involving the socialization and transmission of a complex pattern of behaviors, values, beliefs, predicaments and social relations that result in the perpetuation of cultural values rooted in the adaptation to chronic poverty. Oscar Lewis identified the culture of poverty as an adaptation of the peripheral, "provincial" and locally oriented poor to their positions of marginality in a "class-stratified, highly individualized, capitalistic society. It represents an effort to cope with feelings of hopelessness and despair that arises from the realization by members of the marginal communities in these societies of the impossibility of their achieving success in terms of the prevailing values and goals…."v

We might refer to a "structure of poverty" underlying and giving rise to this culture, as being caught in the anti-structural regions of the transition between a rural and an urban economy, and the transference of the peasant worldview of "limited good" and relative deprivation to supra-local contexts of group reference and identity.vi The finite prosperity of the local Indio or mestizo caught up within a traditional system of customary reciprocities and proprieties cannot compare to the power and conspicuous wealth of the nouveau rich of the national and international levels.

The culture of poverty becomes translated into a "poverty of national culture" in terms of the lack of human development that such patterning of poverty signify--the mestizo is regarded as backward, incompetent, ignorant, illiterate and ill-mannered. Racial and social prejudice and stigmatization that is rooted in Christian ideology of a frozen Great Chain of Being, accompany these stereotypes and serve to symbolically legitimate the practices and inequities that perpetuate them.vii

The church as a corporate force in the lives of the peasantry of Latin America has long been situated in an ambivalent position in relation to the power-elite and the peasant. Orthodoxy conservative, it promotes practices and beliefs that preserve and legitimate the status quo of structural inequality, though many individual priests have been martyred to the cause of radical agrarian reform, equality and social justice.viii But the Church has also planted the seeds of emancipation and social justice in ideals of the spiritual equality of humankind, and has frequently provided the motivational, symbolic and organizational substrate for social reform movements by the oppressed.ix Revitalization movements around the world have been stimulated and structured by the Millennarian doctrines of Christianity.x

Though we may lay the Dharma for change at the doorstep of the poor peasant, finding in his machismo, his drunkenness, his social irresponsibility to his children, his sexual exploits, or in her marianismo, her spoiling of the son, her promiscuity, her high birth rates, the sources of all their problems and poverty, we might also acknowledge that poverty, and the joblessness, landlessness, fatherlessness, homelessness, drunkenness and moneylessness that accompanies all this, may be the cause as much as the consequence of these cultural patterns of behavior. "I've seen what happens when campesinos organize and have a plot of land to farm. They don't have time for drinking any more, except on special occasions."xi

We cannot expect to find the source of change in the poor mestizo if s/he remains bound within a structurally reinforced cultural orientation that perpetuates his/her own impoverishment and powerlessness. We must seek a source of change external to the predicament of the poor peasant and we are only left with the high visibility of the Gringo. In this entangled international world, endogenous change is a dependent factor and exogenous change an independent factor in our equations of development.

3. Many would claim that the Global Culture of Capitalism and its development ethos has grown increasingly hegemonic from the standpoint of Western acculturation. By its standards we can gauge the success of our reform and relief programs by the Coca Cola policies of the USAID, by the Levi's that peasant teenagers wear, by the soda they drink, and by the walkman radio's they listen to. The poverty and authoritarianism of Latin American is structurally the "subculture" of the culture of prosperity of the First World. If we are to agree with Karl Polanyi, we might forestall but cannot prevent the developmental processes of capitalism from occurring once they are set in motion in a region. We can only learn to cope with and hopefully adjust to its historically transformational consequences when we realize that empires were made and peoples' backs broken over the tea and sugar with sip.xii

The "Fear" that always grips, immobilizes and frequently encourages the poor mestizo peasant as well as El Presidente,xiii is strongly conditioned by the omnipresent and ambivalent relationship of reference to that curious and foreign superhuman--the Gringo.

Being a gringo myself I cannot hope to fathom all that the "Gringado" means to Latinos. It is something like John Wayne, Teddy Roosevel, Jerry Lewis, Spencer Tracy, Graham Greene's "Quiet American," President Monroe, Rambo and Ronal Reagan all rolled into one.

A political culture of paternal authoritarianism and a culture of poverty are complementary sides of the same coin of what it means to have been born a poor Latinized mestizo in a world south of the US border that measures success and progress in terms of per capita income, degree of industrial development, national debt and international corporations. Our min-max optimizing for the future may be their pessimism and Chayanov's law of diminishing returns; our development may be their underdevelopment;xiv our modernity, their backwardness; our prosperity, their poverty.

Ultimately, Central America has long been construed as strategically vital to the national interest and security of the United States. It has also long been integral to a national strategy built upon the political economy of global capitalism. Latin America has always been a central location and linkage point between Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern halves of the world. Central America, including Mexico, remains permanently fixed in US geographical imagination as situated structurally, culturally and historically "south of the border." It is the backyard and backdoor of our own Great Society, the vulnerable underbelly through which corruption, communism, drugs, coffee, bananas, beer, sugar, cattle and cheap labor must ebb and flow and which therefore requires continuous political supervision or at least social apprehension, economic control, political double-standards, and frequent military intervention.xv

Hooking the poor Honduran peasant onto the mainline of western goods and money is not necessarily the solution to their problems.xvi We have stigmatized poverty because we fail to see in it any humanity, human dignity or the virtue of its humility. Greening Honduras begins with the greening of the United States--modern capitalists must take into increasing account in their formulas for political-economic development the social and environmental impacts locally of such policies, and the reverberations of these impacts regionally and globally.xvii Like land, people and their labor are a vital national, and global resource to be reckoned with in a global and increasingly globalized context.

In conclusion, if we wish to understand or seek to change the por and problematic "subculture" of Honduras, then we must seek to understand and change the values that we share in this global culture of capitalism, and the contradictions with democracy that our own culture encompasses. If we are next door to nothing, then we cannot help but being something, no matter how small or singular this something really is.