Political Economy of Central America from 1840 to 2019

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Williams
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Strategic Alliances ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Business Elites ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Peasant Communities ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
National Governments ◽  
Us Intervention

Central American history is a tale of two economies: one founded on food security and community; the other on amassing private fortunes. Peasant prosperity depends on access to land, forests, and local markets; business prosperity depends on land, labor, capital, and global markets. State institutions mediate between acquisitive business elites and peasant communities, which defend territory. From 1840 to 1900, elites fought between themselves and peasant communities as they built national governments and a coffee export economy. From 1900 to 1929, the United States formed strategic alliances supporting militaries and big business, including US fruit companies. Global Depression and World War II shocked the system. US Cold War strategies fed militaries and business at the expense of peasant economies, provoking peasant uprisings (1970s) and US intervention (1979–1989). Peace Accords (1990s) reduced militaries, but private security forces increased (1990s–2019), especially in the Northern Triangle, where business expansion produced caravans of migrants fleeing violence.

The American Review of Public Administration: A Biography

2021 ◽  
pp. 027507402110182
Author(s):  
Laurie N. DiPadova-Stocks ◽  
H. George Frederickson ◽  
John Clayton Thomas
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
American Review ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Manuscript Review ◽  
National Governments

This article is an intellectual history of the noble endeavors and challenges involved in the creation and evolution of the American Review of Public Administration. It traces the journal’s development from its beginning as the Midwest Review of Public Administration ( MRPA) under the leadership of Park College professor Jerzy Hauptmann, a Polish intellectual who entered the United States at the end of World War II. Hauptmann launched MRPA with a regional focus, welcoming contributions from a variety of voices in public service–related occupations. A political scientist suspicious of the power of national governments, Hauptmann favored a less top-down regional approach. The article provides insights from the late 1960s into the growing field of public administration. Behind the scenes, the article chronicles the financial challenges, details of manuscript review processes, and more in an initially low-technology world. This history is also multi-institutional, detailing the journal’s transfer from a small college to a team of scholars, including coauthor John Clayton Thomas, at the three public administration programs of the University of Missouri—in Columbia, Kansas City, and St. Louis. We are indebted to our now-departed colleague and coauthor, George Frederickson, for the idea of writing this article.

Honduran Social Movements: Then and Now

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suyapa Portillo ◽  
Cristian Padilla Romero
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Military Rule ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
The Public

Honduran social movements have historically organized around three important pillars: political parties constituted by both traditional and more radical parties, labor organizing efforts, and campesino-based land struggles. Work and land took formidable shape from the 1900s to the 1930s as workers began pushing back against the unyielding exploitation of U.S.-based banana and mining corporations and resisting. The end of the Tiburcio Carías Andino dictatorship in 1949 gave rise to a militant labor movement and political opposition to the ruling National Party, which came with an uneasy alliance between leftists and the Liberal Party. Workers efforts, bottom up, paved the way for progressive labor and agrarian laws. After World War II (WWII), Hondurans become ensnared by U.S.-led Cold War politics and anti-communism, leading to the 1963 coup d’état against the Liberal president Ramon Villeda Morales and decades-long military rule, rendering the country one of the closest allies of the United States. Military rule and proximity to the United States crushed progressive movements that dared to organize, co-opted the once radical labor movement, and criminalized landless campesinos. In the 1990s, after the peace accords were signed in the Central American region, the Honduran state, following orders by international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), implemented neoliberal policies that rolled back many of the hard-fought gains of the 1950s and 1960s by eroding the public sector. As a result of the corroding democratic nature of the neoliberal governments, culminating in the 2009 coup d’état against progressive president Manuel Zelaya, Hondurans from virtually every sector of society, including Indigenous, Black, and feminists, began mobilizing against state policies and demanding a more participatory democracy in La Resistencia, which has transformed into a vibrant, creative, youthful, and widespread movement.

Asian Americans and the Cold War

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Strategic Alliances ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
The Cold War

The global political divides of the Cold War propelled the dismantling of Asian exclusion in ways that provided greater, if conditional, integration for Asian Americans, in a central aspect of the reworking of racial inequality in the United States after World War II. The forging of strategic alliances with Asian nations and peoples in that conflict mandated at least token gestures of greater acceptance and equity, in the form of changes to immigration and citizenship laws that had previously barred Asians as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”1 During the Cold War, shared politics and economic considerations continued to trump racial difference as the United States sought leadership of the “free” capitalist world and competed with Soviet-led communism for the affiliation and cooperation of emerging, postcolonial Third World nations. U.S. courtship of once-scorned peoples required the end of Jim Crow systems of segregation through the repeal of discriminatory laws, although actual practices and institutions proved far more resistant to change. Politically and ideologically, culture and values came to dominate explanations for categories and inequalities once attributed to differences in biological race. Mainstream media and cultural productions celebrated America’s newfound embrace of its ethnic populations, even as the liberatory aspirations inflamed by World War II set in motion the civil rights movement and increasingly confrontational mobilizations for greater access and equality. These contestations transformed the character of America as a multiracial democracy, with Asian Americans advancing more than any other racial group to become widely perceived as a “model minority” by the 1980s with the popularization of a racial trope first articulated during the 1960s. Asian American gains were attained in part through the diminishing of barriers in immigration, employment, residence, education, and miscegenation, but also because their successes affirmed U.S. claims regarding its multiracial democracy and because reforms of immigration law admitted growing numbers of Asians who had been screened for family connections, refugee status, and especially their capacity to contribute economically. The 1965 Immigration Act cemented these preferences for educated and skilled Asian workers, with employers assuming great powers as routes to immigration and permanent status. The United States became the chief beneficiary of “brain drain” from Asian countries. Geometric rates of Asian American population growth since 1965, disproportionately screened through this economic preference system, have sharply reduced the ranks of Asian Americans linked to the exclusion era and set them apart from Latino, black, and Native Americans who remain much more entrenched in the systems of inequality rooted in the era of sanctioned racial segregation.

Central American Refugees Reveal the Crisis of the State

2018 ◽  
pp. 212-228
Author(s):  
Leisy J. Abrego
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Detention Centers ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Us Intervention

This chapter analyzes President Obama and his Administration’s construction of Central American migrants as a crisis. Based on a close reading of letters to Congress, governmental Fact Sheets, speeches, and other written documents of the administration, the chapter argues that the language that initially established violence against migrants as the crux of the crisis simultaneously erased the role of the United States in supporting the conditions that are expelling migrants from their homelands. The faulty logic during a purported moment of crisis, moreover, made it possible to propose family detention centers and ramped-up enforcement as the main solutions. Central American refugees, therefore, are left with only their bodies to resist and to draw attention to the true crises: US intervention and nation-states’ long-term unwillingness to enforce human rights protections in the region.

A relational approach to unaccompanied minor migration, detention and legal protection in Mexico and the US

2019 ◽  
pp. 211-234
Author(s):  
Mario Bruzzone ◽  
Luis Enrique González-Araiza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Unaccompanied Minors ◽  
System Failures ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Us ◽  
Legal Texts

The chapter considers the state systems of protection for unaccompanied migrant minors in Mexico and the United States. The transits and arrivals of Central American minors – from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras – offer important opportunities for scholars to consider the sociolegal practices of migrant care, especially how legally-accepted but institutionally-unfulfilled claims might signify something more than system failures. Instead this chapter takes the law and state institutions as sites for power relations to play out, rather than as outcomes of legislative power struggles or as resources for mutual claims by states and individuals. The aim of the chapter is to analyse the distinctive – and perhaps constitutive – tensions that govern state systems of protection for unaccompanied minors, looking to both legal texts and the empirical realities of state activities in Mexico and the United States.

US Central Americans in Art and Visual Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kency Cornejo
Keyword(s):  
Central America ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Central Americans ◽  
Visual Narratives ◽  
Visual Discourse ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Us Intervention

After a long void in scholarship, literature on US/Central American art began to emerge in the decade of the 2010s. As this new body of literature emerges it is important to consider the politics of visuality and visibility as it informs production and reception of contemporary art by US Central Americans. During the years of US intervention that fueled Central American conflicts (1970s–1990s), the United States produced a visual discourse on Central Americans for US audiences, especially evident in photography, political posters, and Hollywood films. This visual discourse relied on a what I call a “solidarity aesthetics” for Central America, in which images and representations of Central Americans were made, selected, disseminated, and framed to produce empathy and encourage action with the region across the globe. Yet, this solidarity aesthetics entailed optical codes—imagery on poverty, violence, and tropical landscapes—that subsequently established a reductive visual trope about Central America still used today. This visual discourse not only objectifies a Central American subject, but further enables the erasure of US/Central American creative practices as it implies the region produces violence and not art. In the context of such visual discourse, art by Alma Leiva, Muriel Hasbun, Beatriz Cortez, Jessica Lagunas, and Óscar Moisés Díaz exemplifies a disruption of dominant visual discourse by US Central Americans artists. They create art and images that counter historical erasure and the visual tropes that propagate violence while offering alternative visual narratives that reflect on the legacies of war, US intervention, and the consequential displacement and mass migration of thousands of Central Americans.

B1. PALESTINIAN PM MAHMUD ABBAS, LETTER OF RESIGNATION TO PA HEAD YASIR ARAFAT, RAMALLAH, 6 SEPTEMBER 2003.

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-165
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
Security Forces

By late August, the crisis that had been brewing between the prime minister and president came to a head; Abbas's government, though backed by the United States, had been undermined during its four months in office by deterioration on the ground and continuing tensions with Arafat, which centered in particular on control of the Palestinian security forces. Abbas's letter of resignation, published in al-Hayat on 9 September, was translated in Mideast Mirror the same day.

Confluencia geopolítica entre Cárdenas y Roosevelt:

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-254
Author(s):  
Andreu Espasa
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Alliance ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The New Deal

De forma un tanto paradójica, a finales de los años treinta, las relaciones entre México y Estados Unidos sufrieron uno de los momentos de máxima tensión, para pasar, a continuación, a experimentar una notable mejoría, alcanzando el cénit en la alianza política y militar sellada durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El episodio catalizador de la tensión y posterior reconciliación fue, sin duda, el conflicto diplomático planteado tras la nacionalización petrolera de 1938. De entre los factores que propiciaron la solución pacífica y negociada al conflicto petrolero, el presente artículo se centra en analizar dos fenómenos del momento. En primer lugar, siguiendo un orden de relevancia, se examina el papel que tuvo la Guerra Civil Española. Aunque las posturas de ambos gobiernos ante el conflicto español fueron sustancialmente distintas, las interpretaciones y las lecciones sobre sus posibles consecuencias permitieron un mayor entendimiento entre los dos países vecinos. En segundo lugar, también se analizarán las afinidades ideológicas entre el New Deal y el cardenismo en el contexto de la crisis mundial económica y política de los años treinta, con el fin de entender su papel lubricante en las relaciones bilaterales de la época. Somewhat paradoxically, at the end of the 1930s, the relationship between Mexico and the United States experienced one of its tensest moments, after which it dramatically improved, reaching its zenith in the political and military alliance cemented during World War II. The catalyst for this tension and subsequent reconciliation was, without doubt, the diplomatic conflict that arose after the oil nationalization of 1938. Of the various factors that led to a peaceful negotiated solution to the oil conflict, this article focuses on analyzing two phenomena. Firstly—in order of importance—this article examines the role that the Spanish Civil War played. Although the positions of both governments in relation to the Spanish war were significantly different, the interpretations and lessons concerning potential consequences enabled a greater understanding between the two neighboring countries. Secondly, this article also analyzes the ideological affinities between the New Deal and Cardenismo in the context of the global economic and political crisis of the thirties, seeking to understand their role in facilitating bilateral relations during that period.

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