Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador's FMLN and Peru's Shining Path

McClintock, Cynthia. Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador's FMLN and Peru's Shining Path. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998, pp. 492.

With the end of the Cold War and the rise of democratic governments throughout Latin America, conventional wisdom has led many scholars and policy makers to believe that revolutionary groups will no longer pose a threat in Latin America. According to Cynthia McClintock, however, post-Cold War revolutionary movements are not mere throwbacks to the Cold War era, but rather attest to other long-standing problems in the region, such as hunger, poverty, and corruption. McClintock, a professor of political science at George Washington University, also contends that although "liberal democracy is the historical current and a major factor deterring revolution in Latin America, significant attempts to struggle against the current will continue" (p. 7).

Although Revolutionary Movements in Latin America has been heralded as a study of revolution in Latin America, it is (as the subtitle suggests) essentially a first-rate study of two revolutionary movements in Latin America that seriously challenged incumbent governments at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s: the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberaci6n Nacional, FMLN) in El Salvador and the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) in Peru. McClintock's book is meticulously researched and documented-over one fifth of the pages are dedicated to endnotes. She has sifted through an enormous amount of data to arrive at what are probably the most reliable figures available on such controversial subjects as the death tolls inflicted by rebels and government forces. The author has also conducted extensive field research. Especially impressive were the numerous interviews with Shining Path guerrillas.

McClintock tests the well-known theory that revolution occurs when a certain type of authoritarian regime denies its political opponents the space to compete for political power. She finds the theory persuasive in the case of El Salvador, but not for Peru. According to McClintock, it was not regime type that precipitated the emergence of Peru's brutal Shining Path, but rather an economic structure that devastated the peasants of the rural highlands and dashed the middle class expectations of new university graduates who became revolutionary leaders. As the author eloquently states, "The Peruvian experience contradicts the prevailing scholarly wisdom that the ballot box is the coffin of guerrilla movements" (p. 94).

The reasons for the emergence, expansion, and ultimate fate of the two revolutionary movements were different. The pattern of variables that made up the revolutionary trajectory in El Salvador were similar to those in other countries during the Cold War. The FMLN was a fractious group of five movements that adhered to a variety of Marxist and social democratic views, did not regard terror as a primary tactic, and looked to reform El Salvador's political and economic system. The FMLN posed probably the most severe military threat faced by any Latin American regime in last two decades, yet because of massive US economic and military aid to the government, conditioned on moving along the path toward democracy, the Salvadoran regime survived.

By contrast, the pattern of variables in the Peruvian case "may be a harbinger of new revolutionary patterns during the post-cold War era-and does contradict recent scholarly theories of revolution" (p. 17). The Shining Path was a highly authoritarian and rigidly Maoist organization that extolled the use of violence and sought to sweep away Peru's existing social and political systems. Whereas the Salvadoran FMLN resembled previous Latin American revolutionary movements, the Shining Path resembled Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.

McClintock succinctly explains that the US government did not view Sendero Luminoso insurgents as Soviet proteges. The US government, therefore, believing that the Sendero Luminoso posed no serious threat to containment, failed to bolster the Peruvian government's counterinsurgency efforts. US policy toward Peru, which stressed anti-drug efforts, actually hurt the Peruvian government while simultaneously strengthening the Shining Path's position. Only when Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman was captured in late 1992 did the threat to Peru's government end.

The demonstration of causality is difficult for social scientists. Obviously, evidence of correlation is easier to advance than evidence of cause. Although many political scientists and historians imply cause much more frequently than they attempt to empirically prove causality, McClintock has successfully tested the prevailing theories of revolution against the empirical evidence of the 1980s and early 1990s. In these two case studies she has demonstrated that the prevailing theory holds true for El Salvador, but not for Peru. Further study needs to be done on the Peruvian case to understand the cause and effect relationship of revolution.