In the last decade, policies against workers established by imperialism, and applied by its puppet governments, are facing resistance from the peoples of Central America. Such policies were introduced to bring a solution to the economic crisis and colonization of natural resources by foreign companies.
By: PT-Costa Rica
Central American governments have faced the growing strength of such resistance with growing use of Armed forces and repression by the State.
This change has occurred with imperialism’s approval. It occurred in Honduras, where Juan Orlando Hernández has imposed the result of an electoral fraud, which ensured his reelection under the mobilization of the army, with approval of the Embassy and Department of State from the United States.
We believe that the increase of this struggle among the people of Central America and their servile governments are generating changes on the political regimes of this region.
Nowadays, bourgeois ruling sectors have started to use Armed Forces (army and police) and paramilitary to prevail in class struggle conflicts.
A Bonapartist move in the Central American regimes is involved in the emergence of dictatorships. For example, in Nicaragua and Honduras, or the increase of the political persecution and repression in Guatemala, El Salvador and Costa Rica.
Guatemala and Nicaragua, Two Examples
Jimmy Morales, elected in 2015 President of Guatemala. Investigations by the Public Ministry and the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), bounded to the United Nations exposed him as a puppet backed by a military staff bounded to the bloodbaths of the eighties. Giant Guatemalan companies also illegally financed him.
Before the rejection of the Guatemalan Congress, the solicitation from the Public Ministry to remove his immunity and the realization of demonstrations of the people demanding his removal, the President is upholding on the Army to remain in office.
He has progressively used the elite corps known as Kaibil, which are in charge of the bloody massacres in the eighties, to repress demonstrations. They even performed a military parade in front of the CICIG head office on August 31, last year, joining the efforts to expel it from Guatemala.
On the other side, in Nicaragua, Ortega keeps promoting murdering and kidnapping against the Nicaraguan people, who raised against him. After a brutal repression in the last months, the government is again pushing measures such as the pension reform and budget cuts demanded by the International Monetary Fund, with the purpose of paying external debt and maintaining the big businesses of entrepreneurs.
Both governments are corrupt. They have been maintaining a policy of attacking the people for years to keep paying the public debt. At the same time, they have handed over the land and natural resources.
Even though none of these governments is publicly praised by imperialist governments, they can massacre and repress the people freely to ensure the interests of their companies.
Bonapartism: what does Trotsky say?
For Trotsky the intensification of conflicts between the working class and bourgeoisie, in a context of crisis and social confrontation, makes it impossible to solve class struggle under the rules of bourgeois democracy (elections, parliament, etc.).
Facing such paralysis, the bourgeoisie has to protect itself under an intermediary regime, between socialism (proletarian revolution) and fascism (bourgeois counter-revolution). This regime is called Bonapartism.
“Bonapartism a regime in which the economically dominant class, though it has the means to rule through democratic methods, finds itself obliged to tolerate – in order to preserve its property – the uncontrolled domination of the government by a military/police apparatus (…) its objective is to prevent explosions”. (Otra vez sobre la cuestión del bonapartismo, Trotsky, 1925; our translation).
In regions that are economically submitted to foreign capitalists, such as Central America, Bonapartism usually tends to serve as a tool to dominate the working class and submit it to exploitation.
Translation: Chico
Imperialism upholds itself through dictatorships and more repression in Central America
