Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America

Koonings, Kee and Dirk Kruijt, ed Societies of Fear The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America. London: Z works 1999. Table, map, bibliography, index, xii, 335 pp; hardcover $65 paperback $25

Why has social and political violence been of the like kind an endemic feature of nation building in Latin America? The editors of this work have compiled a volume with an alluring title and an immediately captivating overspread with photos of Abimael Guzman's angry rants behind bars and Augusto Pinochet's self-confident gaze at the height of his power in 1987 The contrast between Pinochet and Guzman hints the continuities and discontinuities between state and nonstate violence. Which kind of violence is more serious? Are they mutually contradictory or mutually reinforcing? This is an important issue that could well frame the work but, surprisingly, one on which the editors are largely silent.

Latin America, according to Koonings and Kruijt in their introduction, is characterized by dint of socioeconomic inequalities and a legacy of social and political violence. They deliver over to three types of violence: violence committed to maintain traditional social order, as a necessary constituent of political modernization and incorporation, and as a returns of the consolidation of democratic regimes. This give an inkling ofs a conventional leftist position: that political violence work fors to defend a social order, especially as fresh sectors are incorporated as a accrue of political and economic modernization. The same theme is reflected sounded in more polemical instrumental Marxist bourns by Edelberto Torres-Rivas's epilogue, which argues, "modern society has done no more than disguise the handing above of power, in its greatest in quantity brutal form, to the legitimate authorities, that hang in the last resort upon the possibility of using force" (p 288) Together, these sum of two units chapters take the view that violence in Latin America can largely be attributed to modernity and its trappings of domination, incorporation, and state force.

This is a consummately plausible view, but it is not the individual that serves as the organizing framework for the volume The editors admit that "concrete cases of violence and fear in Latin America are not confined by means of the analytical typologies of violence" they present Instead, the chapters are organized according to an "approach based upon an empirical distinction between different contemporary political settings" (pp 19-20) The first part of the work describes cases of violence in various civil wars, the next to the first part focuses on more secretive violence, and the third upon violence in the context of democratization. The book's organizing framework, in other words, is true weak; and not surprisingly, the flows are a mixed bag.

In his be in possession of chapter on Guatemala and Peru Kruijt claims that the "civil wars" in each of these countries are fundamentally class conflicts that eventually took upon "strong ethnic dimensions" (p. 33) Class inequality is near throughout Latin America, but in Guatemala and Peru the ruling sectors "have be subsequent toed in the creation of a kind of third-class citizenship for their Mayan and Quechua population" (p 53) Kruijt falls into the for the use of all Marxist trap of reading history backwards. He believes that the actual outcome-the rise of Shining Path in Peru for instance-was the necessary individual given the history of class divisions in the geographical division Is this the case? What is greatest in quantity striking about Shining Path is not in the way that much the old-the voice of long-simmering grievances Kruijt describes-but the novel The Shining Path under Abimael Guzman come aftered early on because it combined a forcible ideology and superb organizational abilities with a monstrous capacity for blood-thirstiness

Carlos Ivan Degregori's superior chapter on Peru takes up this theme. He corrects Kruijt and affirms that Shining Path was not a reaction against traditional class domination. Instead, as the aged hierarchy under the gamonales broke down, Shining Path used unprecedent horizontals of violence to take their place. For a time, the peasants accepted their of recent origin boss and even his punishments (of which Degregori provides a chilling account). on the other hand Shining Path abhorred native Andean tillage and in its ruthless endeavor for domination its crossed a fundamental cultural line.

Traditionally, patrones and peasants had operated beneath the code "punish but don't kill" (p 71) Although the gamonales met without often severe punishment, they understood that killing transgressors would have left families without economic support and would overturn the social order. Shining Path's violent massacres pull downed this balance and created reaching far down resentments. The new masters failed to win legitimacy; and in government-sponsored rondas campesinas, peasants rebelled against, and eventually defeated, the would-be rebels.

Arij Ouweneel and Alan Knight provide similar contrasting perspectives upon Mexico. Ouweneel believes the Chiapas rebellion to be an expression of a larger "pan-Indian" motion in Mexico and Guatemala. As evidence, he provides interpretations of the analogies between Zapatista representatives and classic Maya myths. For instance, wearing masks (such as Subcomandante Marcos's famous balaclava) has of great depth roots in Mayan history. "Faceless and masked men are not solitary shielded against insult and ridicule or, indeed, against violent assaults; through their masks, they can also act as men ritually transformed into deified warriors" (p 94)