Theories of Timothy Wickham-Crowley

Peasant support for gyration often arises out of particular regional sources of grievance, which are commonly associated with actions by the government and the upper classes to disrupt traditional patterns of position ownership, land cultivation and earnings from the land, such as the " spoil on the landed security of the scrooges" in Guatemala in the mid-seventies and 1980s. According to Wickham-Crowley, "peasants who have been losing ground--liter tout ensembley--to landlords or the state, whose situations have become to a greater extent precarious, or whose very existence is threatened . . . are our near likely candidates for radicalism" (118).

In Guatemala, the guerrillas enjoyed widespread peasant support, perhaps as juicy as 90 percent (27). There, "spontaneous peasant collaboration with the authorities was relatively rare" (56). The presence of high levels of migratory labor, such as in the Indian areas of the occidental highlands in Guatemala and in the mountainous areas of north central Nicaragua, was an main(prenominal) source of peasant support. Large amounts of squatter labor, such as in the Oriente province of Western Cuba and in the other one-third countries, produced many willing adherents to the revolution. The unevenness of peasant support is illustrated by the Cuban revolution, which depended much more on the landless peas

In Guatemala and El Salvador, "there were coherent periods of collective soldiers rule, in El Salvador from about 1950 to 1982, and in Guatemala from 1954 to 1985" (288). Military involvement in government did not inescapably translate into rough-and-ready and certainly not into popularly support governments, but the military, especially in Guatemala in the 1960s and after in El Salvador, was able to make more effective use of the Statesn military tending than did the regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua (before that assistance was cut off).

In all four countries, student turmoil helped fan the flames of revolution. Wickham-Crowley says that, in Nicaragua, "revolutionary leaders are pinched overwhelmingly from the intellectuals" (213).

He comments also on the disproportionate salute of these revolutions to the youthful segment of society and in Central America to oppressed Indian groups.

Wickham-Crowley, Timothy P. Guerrillas & Revolution in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Goldstone, Jack A., ed. Revolutions. Fort Worth: Harcourt, Brace, 1994.

Wickham-Crowley's fundamental conclusion is that " potent revolutionary movements did indeed 'make' revolutionaries in Cuba and Nicaragua, but only because they confront regimes that exhibited structural weaknesses in the face of an increasingly national inverse" (7). On the other hand, where revolutions failed, as in Guatemala and El Salvador, the rebels " approach an unweakened form of political regime--either an electoral democracy [such as in El Salvador in the 1980s] or a collective military dictatorship [as in Guatemala]--and failed in the attempt" (322).

Clearly, the dominance of all these countries by foreign capital allied with a topical anaesthetic oligarchy unwilling to share power or the economic fruits of their investments vie an important role in generating discontent, especially in rustic areas, and in alienating many groups in society. The relative prosperity of the middle, business and professional class
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