Chapter seven of William Stanley’s The Protection Racket State tackles the breakdown of the protection racket state throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. While I don’t disagree, it would have been helpful for Stanley to provide greater detail about the interactions between the civilian right and the military right between 1932 and 1981. There’s a great amount of hard-line military- reformist military relations, but not as much between the hard-line military right and civilian right. While there wasn’t as much as I would have wanted given the focus of the book, it is clear that their relationship suffered during the 1980s.
The military failed to defeat the FMLN and, at times, seemed more interested in profiting from the war than winning it. According to Stanley, the military’s inability to defeat the FMLN “stemmed from internal factionalism, the propensity for indiscriminate violence, and the corruption and short-term vision” (221). Since the elite could no longer rely upon the military to defend their interests (as evidenced by the military alliance with the PDC and the US, support for land reform, and continued kidnapping for ransom of those same elites the military was their to extort protect), they created their own political party, ARENA.
While ARENA had its roots in ORDEN, FAN, former military, and elites, “moderates” came to control the organization in the mid- and late-eighties. They were younger (their formative experience was not the 1932 matanza), more diversified economically (not tied to the land), and not as off the rails anti-communists. The military’s inability to defend elite interests in 1979/80, to defeat the FMLN , and the successful performance of ARENA as a political party, meant that “the upper classes and their political allies no longer needed the military to act as a political guarantor and interlocutor.” While changing elite political and economic interests was part of the story for why the right eventually supported liberalization and a democratic opening, it was only part of the story.
This literal protection racket, combined with the failure to provide protection at the national level, made the military seem less and less useful to the upper classes. As ARENA developed confidence in its abilities to garner and maintain mass political support, and as international events made the left seem less threatening, it became less important to preserve the military institution in its current form.
The Protection Racket State still stands as an excellent book to understand El Salvador during the 20th century, specifically to understand the dynamics on the right with a focus on the military. As part of a seminar on El Salvador, it might help to couple with Wood’s Forging Democracy From Below and Paige’s Coffee and Power, which (off the top of my head) go into greater detail on the transformation of the civilian right. Works by Hugh Byrne and Tommie Sue Montgomery do better at explaining the dynamics on the left.
In terms of the role of the US in El Salvador during the 1970s and 1980s, the US comes off looking relatively positive. Following the departure of Ambassador Devine from El Salvador, US Ambassador’s played a greater role for moderation. They often didn’t win for a variety of reasons both having to do with the fact that those in the US were not always supportive of their efforts and that they were up against a military and economic elite who had little patience for their human rights conditions.
A more complete picture of the US role in El Salvador would have been helpful. The activities of the US military and CIA are mentioned in the text, but under covered. Civilian academics haven’t tackled this topic as much as military and former US military have. That would put the US in a different, more comprehensive light. The Embassy might not have gotten along with D’Aubuisson and the hard-right but many other US officials had no problems with them. It also would have been helpful to add some of the ways in which the executive branch (Reagan) and its allies outside of government (D’Aubuisson’s fans on religious right in the US) engaged with their allies in El Salvador and more on executive-legislative relations (Carothers’ In the Name of Democracy perhaps).
Some of the important takeaways from the book:
- Do not treat Salvadoran actors on the right as a single entity;
- Know that there were shifting coalitions throughout the 1970s and 1980s that made pace both possible but, at the same time, extremely difficult;
- Don’t assume that what the US says publicly is what it believes or is what it is saying privately;
- The US might have prevent a victory by the left but its also prevented the right from carrying out its preferred Guatemala option
- The right in El Salvador was as frustrated with US policy as was the left in the US
One book can’t do everything, but this one does very well nonetheless and stands the test of time (if that is what we can call twenty years).
[Other posts in the series – Liberal reform and conservative counter-reaction in El Salvador, El Salvador’s failed October 1979 coup, and Could El Salvador have avoided civil war in 1980?]
