Alan Angell

Can Social Sector Reform Make Adjustment Sustainable and Equitable? Lessons from Chile and Venezuela-p *

Adjustment in Latin America has largely been analysed in terms of macroeconomic policy. However, for reforms to be sustainable in the long term, there needs to be accompanying change in the social sectors. Such reform is difficult and costly. It is necessary, however, not simply to sustain the economic reforms, but also for an effective long-term strategy of poverty alleviation and for the consolidation of democracy. There are lessons to be learnt from successful and unsuccessful social sector reform.

The Chilean Elections of 1989 and the PoUtics of the Transition to Democracy

The elections held in Chile on 14 December 1989 to choose a President and Congress were surely one ofthe most remarkable ways in which a democratic government has replaced an authoritarian regime. Less than two years before the election, President Pinochet enjoyed virtually unchallenged authority, while the opposition was in disarray. The economy had recovered from the slump of 1982-1983, and in comparison with most other economies in Latin America, the Chilean one was a success story. Why did Pinochet allow free elections, and accept the result? In a sense, Pinochet was the victim of his own cunning. Chile is a very constitutionally minded country. Pinochet accepted this tradition, and sought to legitimise his own government when in 1980 he presented a new constitution to the electorate for ratification in a plebiscite. The plebiscite was far from a perfect test of opinion, for there were no electoral registers, the opposition was barely able to campaign, and there was widespread suspicion of fraud. Nevertheless, the constitution was ratified in the plebiscite, and became the cornerstone of the governments claim to legitimacy. One of the pro visions of that constitution was that a single candidate would be chosen by the legislative junta (consisting of the commanders-in-chief of the armed forces) to be elected for an eight-year term of office. If that candidate were to be rejected, then there would be a free and competitive election for the presidency one year later. At the time ofthe ratification ofthe Constitution in 1980, this looked like a thinly disguised veil for a further eight years for Pinochet. But things went wrong. The economic collapse of 1982 led to massive social protests. At last the opposition parties, after several false starts, began to form a convincing coalition. Finally, the commanders-inchief of the air force, the police, and the navy made it clear that they would prefer a civilian candidate to Pinochet. However, Pinochet was able to impose himself as the single candidate of the regime, and offered himself for an eight-year presidency in a plebiscite in October 1988. He expected to win, but a briUiant opposition campaign and a lacklustre government campaign led to a decisive rejection of the General by

Classroom Maoists: The Politics of Peruvian Schoolteachers under Military Government

Peru has witnessed many and profound changes in her political, economic and social system since the advent of a military government in 1968 determined to reform rather than maintain the status quo. The sight of a poor dependent country attempting a reform programme of some originality attracted a great deal of scholarly interest both nationally and abroad. A series of important, thorough and well known studies examined the economic history of the country, its political economy, especially its agrarian structure, and the behaviour of the military. Other aspects, especially in the realm of politics, remain neglected. We still lack an adequate study of the Apra party for example. Another area of neglect lies in the investigation of union and popular movements. Studying labour movements in countries like Peru is not easy if one intends to go beyond a recital of dates of formation of unions and of early strikes. There is often a temptation to assume, rather than demonstrate, the existence of a working class with clearly defined political ideas and behaviour. There is an even stronger temptation to ascribe to that small minority who are organized a vanguard role in popular struggles. But that can be very misleading in a country like Peru where popular struggles simply cannot be reduced to industrial or work conflict. Any real understanding of the political activities of the urban and rural poor must consider such actions in their cultural and economic context, broadly defined. We need to know a great deal more about where workers come from, how they are recruited into employment, how mobile they are, how they relate to their often rural backgrounds, how the family economy is organized, how they see themselves and their society, and what form of political action they find most appropriate. Such questions are not difficult to pose, but they are difficult to answer. Attempts to answer them come from studies of the mining and sugar sectors, and there are some impressive studies of these groups as there are of shanty towns.l But urban workers in the service sector, especially in the public sector, tend to be ignored. Given the importance of public sector unions since 1968 and given the associated growth of the Maoist left, it is important to try to evaluate the aims and activities of such groups. Amongst the public sector unions by far the most important were the schoolteachers, organized in the Sindicato Unico de los Trabajadores de la Educacion Peruana (SUTEP).

Inflation, stabilization and attempted redemocratization in Peru, 1975–1979

Abstract This paper discusses the acute stabilization crisis of 1975–1978 and attempts to explain why, for so long, it proved difficult to handle both in economic and in political terms. The role of external creditors, in particular the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is discussed. We examine the response of the entrepreneurial and labour sectors to the policy of the government, and attempt to explain why a coup along Chilean lines would have been very difficult to impose in Peru. Finally we analyse the implications of the recovery of 1979, when suddenly IMF targets were easily fulfilled, but with a proposed return to democracy and not, as in the southern-cone countries, a repressive authoritarianism. The development of 1979 do not qualify the earlier analysis of the unsuitability of abrupt and orthodox stabilization to an economy such as Perus.

Some Problems in the Interpretation of Recent Chilean History

It is necessary to begin this article by explaining the motives for writing it. I have recently completed a draft of a long chapter on Chile from 1958 to the present day, for the final volume of the Cambridge History of Latin America. There is no shortage of material available for writing such a chapter, either on the economy of Chile in that period, or on poUtical development, or on changes in the social structure. There is also no shortage of rival or conflicting interpretations. On reading this material, and on trying to organise it into a coherent narrative, there were certain key themes that seemed to me to be unresolved. Of course, some of these puzzles will be resolved by further research, or by research of a different style. Moreover, some of the questions will perhaps seem obvious to another student of Chile. One of the few positive products of the prolonged period of dictatorial rule since 1973 has been a remarkable increase in the quantity and quality of pubUshed research by Chileans on their own country. Ejeeted from the world of Chilean universities, with their time-consuming involvement in poUtical activities and bureaucratic struggles, Chilean academics in independent research centres, now funded largely from abroad, have had to pubUsh or perish. Underlying a great deal of this research has been a common question: how could a society Uke Chile, with soUd political traditions and wellorganised poUtical parties, witness an unprecedented breakdown of social relationships and political order, and give rise to an extremely personaUsed authoritarian dictatorship with a capacity to survive second only to the Paraguay of Stroessner.1 There have undoubtedly been important advances in unraveUing the complexities of aspects of Chilean society, the poUtical system and the economy. Nevertheless, there are questions that still need to be investigated, connections that still need to be made, or assumptions that still need to be questioned. For example, although aU commentators stress the centrality of parties in Chilean poUtical life, most work on parties tends to concentrate on the ideological level: very few look at how parties were organised, how decisions were taken inside the parties, or what the balance of power was between the various sectors of the parties.2 The intention of this article is to draw attention to some of the debates taking place in Chile.3 It is organised around three major questions?the role

Dilemmas of Political Change in Mexico

This volume groups together a number of papers, from a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, that in broad terms deal with syntactic variation. The first three papers examine the relevance of the linguistics corpus to the study of syntax, with two more or less diametrically opposed views espoused in contributions from Guido Mensching and Josse De Kock (the latter of course well known as one of the pioneers in corpus linguistics). Mensching puts the case for the Chomskyan assumption that the primary object of study is a putative system of internalized knowledge rather than actual examples of used language (although he does concede that linguistic corpora can have a diagnostic value, particularly in relation to diachronic studies). In complete contrast, De Kock presents a corpus-based study of fifteen syntactic variables, contending that the spectrum of frequencies thus identified provides a calibrated scale of (relative) grammaticality, although remarking that grammaticality is ultimately a normative preoccupation. Following an interesting self-critique from Nicole Delbecque, the rest of the volume is concerned with individual studies of specific aspects of variable Spanish syntax. Alicia González de Sarralde’s study of the placement of the subject is quite striking both in terms of the ingeniousness of the methodology and the originality of the conclusions. Valeriano Bellosta von Colbe applies Van Valin’s Role and Reference Grammar to the study of direct and indirect object placement. Pedro Martı́n Butragueño examines the prosody of focus in Spanish and suggests a number of refinements to current thinking on the subject. The null subject parameter is addressed in a paper by Amparo Morales, who examines its acquisition by Puerto Rican children and concludes that her data support the view that pragmatic competence is acquired more slowly than syntax. In his paper on the prepositional accusative in Ibero-Romance, Ulrich Detges assembles a persuasive mixture of historical and information structure-related data to provide an intriguing hypothesis as to the causality underlying the grammaticalization of this phenomenon. There are also two contributions on le(s), in both of which the respective authors manage to cast new light on a much studied area of Spanish grammar: Eugeen Roegiest’s quantitative and qualitative analysis of leı́smo highlights previously unnoticed factors in the pattern of variation, while Rena Torres Cacoullos identifies and accounts for non-argumental occurrences of le and les in Mexican and New Mexican Spanish. Finally, a suggestive study by Irania Malaver links certain aspects of variation in the use of ser/estar to the distinction between foreground and background, and Dexy Galué provides an excellent variationist analysis of the presence/absence of de before the complementizer que. As this very brief summary suggests, Variación sintáctica en español provides a wealth of new empirical data on a wide range of important phenomena. Many of the contributors highlight discourse and variation, but often as a complement to syntactic analysis rather than as a substitute. This provides for a thought-provoking reading experience that should be capable of being enjoyed by most specialists in Spanish linguistics, regardless of their own theoretical presuppositions.

Decentralization and Democracy in Latin America

Decentralization and Democracy in Latin America. Edited by Alfred P. Montero and David J Samuels. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 320p.

Modern Chile 1970-1989: A Critical History

47.50 cloth,

The Difficulties of Policy Making and Implementation in Peru

27.50 paper. The study of decentralization has become something of a fashion, not least because it seems to encapsulate the process of democratization in Latin America and the shift to a neoliberal policy framework, and because it has been adopted by the political Left in sharp contrast to the state-centered policies of previous decades. Decentralization has been seen as the answer to improving the quality of popular participation in Latin America, to improving the quality of public services, and to improving the efficiency in the allocation of public resources.

Decentralizing Development: The Political Economy of Institutional Change in Colombia and Chile

Few dispute that a major turning point in the history of present-day Chile commenced with the election in 1970 of a Marxist physician, Salvador Allende. What followed were three years that shook South America, if not the world. Land reform, factory expropriation, the politicization of a sector of the armed forces, curriculum reform in education, each in their turn led to a hardening of political fault lines, and created the basis for the overthrow of the Allende regime. This work, by one of the foremost analysts of modern Chile, features an interview with an earlier president of that beleaguered country, Eduardo Frei. In what is likely to be viewed as the most authoritative statement to date on U.S.Chile relationships during this stormy period, Falcoff debunks the myth of a CIA-inspired overthrow of the democratic forces, placing responsibility on Allendes failure to obtain or even seek a decisive electoral mandate, on a governing coalition internally inconsistent and frequently at war with its constituent elements, on an economic policy that polarized supporters and enemies, and ultimately on the need to turn to the military for the stability that its policy failures could not achieve. The final chapter, on the assumption to power and political changes rendered by the present ruler, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, indicates that the problems of Chile are not attributable to any single ruler or party. Falcoff indicates that core problems in Chile, from capital formation to the search for diversification, were exemplified in cultural, moral, and spiritual values between the Frei and Allende epochs. The prolonged Pinochet regime, for Falcoff, has postponed settlement of the major issues raised by the democratic era: equality and growth, legality and legitimacy. The costs of democratic order remain for Chileans to confront and resolve.