Venezuela Is Not Alone.

       Over the years the people of Central America have suffered immensely at the hands of Western imperialist capitalism. They have had American puppet governments imposed on them with savage ruthlessness, bloodshed was the building bricks of the new globalisation regime in that part of the world. At the moment Venezuela is in the news, creating the impression that all else is fine, just this nasty Maduro to sort out, and peace and tranquility will return to cover the land.
       However, far from it, the entire surface of Central America is in turmoil as global capitalism hits another of its recurring "crises". The power elites fight ruthlessly and savagely to hold on to their wealth and power, while the ordinary people face ever deeper spiraling poverty and the realities of violent repression. Venezuela is not alone, the whole region is in the midst of bloody turmoil.
      An extract from a well researched and informative article by William I. Robinson posted on NACLA:

"My neighborhood backs me...my neighborhood is Nicaragua." Student protester at an SOS Nicaragua protest against Daniel Ortega in Managua in May 2018 (Flickr/Jorge Mejía Peralta).

      Some three decades after the wars of revolution and counterinsurgency came to an end in Central America, the region is once again on the brink of implosion. The Isthmus has been gripped by renewed mass struggle and state repression, the cracking of fragile political systems, unprecedented corruption, drug violence, and the displacement and forced migration of millions of workers and peasants. The backdrop to this second implosion of Central America, reflecting the spiraling crisis of global capitalism itself, is the exhaustion of a new round of capitalist development in recent years to the same drumbeat as the globalization that took place in the wake of the 1980s upheavals.
         Lost in the headlines on Central American refugees fleeing to the United States is both the historical context that has sparked the exodus and the structural transformations through capitalist globalization that has brought the region to where it is today. The mass revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s did manage to dislodge entrenched military-civilian dictatorships and open up political systems to electoral competition, but they were unable to achieve any substantial social justice or democratization of the socioeconomic order.
      Capitalist globalization in the Isthmus in the wake of pacification unleashed a new cycle of modernization and accumulation. It transformed the old oligarchic class structures, generated new transnationally oriented elites and capitalists and high-consumption middle classes even as it displaced millions, aggravated poverty, inequality, and social exclusion, and wreaked havoc on the environment, triggering waves of outmigration and new rounds of mass mobilization among those who stayed behind. Hence the very conditions that gave rise to the conflict in the first place were aggravated by capitalist globalization.
       Despite the illusion of “peace and democracy” so touted by the transnational elite in the wake of pacification, the roots of the regional conflict have persisted: the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of elite minorities alongside the pauperization and powerlessness of a dispossessed majority. With the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras, the massacre of peaceful protesters in Nicaragua in 2018, and the return of death squads in Guatemala, this illusion has been definitively shattered. The Central American regimes now face mounting crises of legitimacy, economic stagnation, and the collapse of the social fabric.

Well worth reading the full article HERE:

 

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