CENTRAL AMERICANS

redefining the borders

Jos Luis Rocha

CENTRAL AMERICANS

redefining the borders

Jos Luis Rocha

Jos Luis Rocha CENTRAL AMERICANS: Redefining the Borders 1st. ed. -- Managua, 2008 376 pages. ISBN:

Texts: Jos Luis Rocha Cover photo: Jos Luis Rocha Inside photos: Jos Luis Rocha Editor: Mara Lpez Vigil Design and layout: Jamileth Treminio Printer: Impresiones Helios English translation: Judy Butler and Gareth Richards Texts published in envo magazine Central American University (UCA) Managua, Nicaragua Telephone: (505) 278-2557 Fax: (505) 278-1402 Email: envio@ns.uca.edu.ni; www.envio.org.ni With the support of Norwegian Church Aid Offices in Managua, Nicaragua Telephones: (505) 270 2650 270 8222 Fax: (505) 277 0214 Email: ain-nic@casasol.org ; www.nca.no

INDEX
Remittances Are Far More Than A Development Panacea
March 2008 /3

Whose Money Is It Anyway?

April 2008 / 31

Strawberry Fields and Undocumented Workers Forever?

June 2008 / 75

Ticaraguans: Bi-national Identities on the Liquid Border

November 2007 / 103

Deportees Have no Papers or Rights, Only Borders

November 2008 / 133

Preface

t was a pleasure and an honor to be asked by Jos Luis Rocha to write the preface to this book about different migratory issues in Nicaragua, the rest of Central America

and the world in general. He is younger than I, but more of an expert in this area. Although he said only read them diagonally and write me something, I have read all the articles, some of which I had already read, and have studied them. I did this not only to give my all to an old friendship, but because once I got started, I was bitten by the bug, pulling out things that would serve for a more micro investigation Im doing on these same topics. The final article on deportations particularly captivated me. I wrote him months agowe frequently correspond and he has given me a sense of directionasking for a bibliography on this issue. He didnt answer me at the time, but this article is exactly what I needed: a theoretical orientationor actually, a choice of many to frame the close-up analysis of cases of young deportees, both men and women, and the villages that have received a good number of them. Why read this book? Why waste two, three or more hours, depending on whether you only read it or actually study it? Im going to give you several reasons. First of all, if you want to sit back with some good literature for a little while, then open the pages of this book. Just look at the subtitles, which demonstrate not only the authors sparkle, but also the selective eye of editor Mara Lpez Vigil, who turns witty phrases into subtitles. Good literature is esthetic recreation. The themes are very serious, but theres humor at every turn. The texts are sprinkled with Nicaraguan irony and catch words to perfume the dry statistical figures or the most abstract apothegms.

To quote just a few of the subtitles, we have The big bang of consumption, Taca takes off, fueled by remittances and Between dream peddlers and gurus of developmentalism; while the humorous phrases found in the furrows of the text include: ever more Central Americans are being thrown away than are being recycled, or The physiognomy of tattoos advertises ones trade. The book is also informative. It brings you up to date on whats happening in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, including an analysis of the current economic, social and political dynamics in Central America, and on very similar events in Malaysia, India or Iraq. And in addition to this dispersed information from around the world, it offers its readers a bibliography. Jos Luis is an extremely erudite author. He not only wields a tireless, restless and prolific pen, but is an insatiable reader. I had a famous professor of theology in Innsbruck, whose name is best left unmentioned, who only wrote, creating furiously, but no longer read anything, and if he quoted anything it was from his own previous works, leaving the bibliography with which he closed his articles to library minions. But Jos Luis writes and reads at the same time, in a crossing of wakes like the ones speedboats leave. So if someone wants to learn about recent authors and important facts so they can explore them on their own, then read this book with care. Third, the book is profound, a theoretical aid. It would be a mistake to assume that all he does is toss around images (the strawberries), coin phrases (Ticaraguans) or come up with clever metaphors (Who eats remittances?). That colorful style could trick us into thinking that Jos Luis doesnt have a deeper theoretical capacity. The policy of the magazine envo is to cut all bibliographic paraphernalia and it eschews an academic tone, which could leave us with the image of an author who is fast on his feet, ironic, iconoclastic

and blustering against all international gurus, but not a profound thinker. I had the opportunity to read both the article on deportations published in envo and the original and in the latter I discovered some gems that had perhaps been considered too esoteric or at least too academic for the magazines non-specialist audience. But even they were presented in a masterly, comparative, summary and even playful way. His theoretical capacity is precisely what allows him his humorous style, because its no big deal for him to deal with abstractions. They dont emerge from lengthy study, but rather flourish in his mind as if he were playing in a garden and comparing one flower with another, laughing at the fake colors some have. Theories of interpretation areor should bevery sought after by people like myself who do micro analyses, and can lose their vision of the forest for their examination of the bark, trunk, roots and leaves of a single tree. Jos Luiss are critical theories, which neither dazzle us with the consumerism unleashed by remittances nor drown us in the list of cases of violence suffered by migrants, as happens to many authors who see only the dark side of migration. Jos Luis has a broad enough mental spectrum for all colors. Its true that some of his conclusions could be improved, their factors dissected in greater detail, but they are in themselves a referent that helps one think and advance. This book is hardly a closed concept. Its a trampoline for jumping even higher. Fourth, the articles in this book are proactive, which means they reject erroneous proposals for action and policies, strengthen the perhaps incipient and hidden actions of the myriad migrants that could end up becoming flows and movements. They advocate for the subject, defending the thesis that migrants are assets who think and reason and elude the panoptic vision (the all-seeing eye) of the most powerful states on earth. They admire these people. In sum,

Jos Luis defends human rights more than remittances, but doesnt victimize or passifize the migrant, as so frequently happens in sensationalist press articles that support the US policy of sending out a frightful message through their roundups in hopes of putting a halt to the migratory wave. Thats why the author sees the prompt leap back to the North of thousands of deportees as a kind of resistance movement. We might as easily say they dont learn; theyre rash; they dont know what theyre risking; theyre blinded by the bright lights of the American dream But the logic of Jos Luis and the French author he follows (Touraine) is that they know perfectly well what theyre doing; theyve learned about the system from within the detention centers; they know what labor market is most protected from the roundups and, as we have been able to learn, they even rely on investigation networks that can warn them when their workplace is about to be hit by a migration roundup, which uses the element of surprise and counterinsurgency methods (covert agents). The hidden resistance, not only the open resistance of the thousands and thousands of demonstrators in the streets of Los Angeles, seems to be fine-tuning and strengthening itself. Nothing is yet known of allies of migrants who may have gotten jobs in the all-powerful Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, but it wouldnt be surprising if such people were acting as undercover agents to alert the workers when these not-at-all natural disasters are about to hit. A news article appeared in Guatemalas Prensa Libre about the Potsville roundup of May 2008, and when I mentioned it to a California professor who follows the US media step by step she hadnt heard about it. An example of AGENCY, as they say in English. An example of ACTIVE SUBJECT, not of mere victim, which is the image Prensa Libre is such a fan of using to dissuade deportees from returning to the US and all migrants from heading north. Perhaps the newspaper published it by mistake, because it was about a man who

outwitted the migra roundup. It was an incredible thing, given the tight circle of cars and helicopters. He locked himself in a refrigeration room with raw meat hanging everywhere, enduring the ordeal for three or four days until the agent of the natural disaster had long passed, leaving the factory a cemetery. Incredible but true, and eerily similar to the survivors of the 1982 massacres in Guatemala, who recounted that the only way you escaped death was if you were covered with blood among the dead bodies and the soldiers assumed you werent still alive (the San Francisco massacre, July 17, 1982.) Worthy examples that could occupy a place in this book. The author somberly follows Zygmunt Baumans analysis, but leaves niches for paradigmatic examples of active subjects, which is why his book is proactive and reading it leaves us energized. Finally, the book is provocative, subversive. It uses two weapons, one of which, his irony, cuts fine, while the other, his logic, is like a tractor. But it doesnt mow you down. He would be a poor defender of the active subject if he left the reader crushed. Certainly one ends up feeling a bit small seeing everything that Jos Luis has in his grip and the ease with which he cites and orders his data. But he also encourages one to dissect and even criticize him and continue the work of collectively creating knowledge in favor of that unreachable utopia of the liberation of the poor and oppressed, the human discards no one wants, the refuse of Guatemalas urban ravines or the shanty towns of other countries.

Ricardo Falla Guatemalan anthropologist and Jesuit priest

Remittances Are Far More Than A Development Panacea

REMITTANCES 1

Remittances Are Far More Than A Development Panacea

hat and whom are remittances good for? After being silenced, scorned or utterly ignored,

they now occupy a major place among regional analyses. But they are examined and valued from a financial

perspective that ignores the social and patriarcal relationships they destroy or build, the family micro-policy they determine and the state reduction they encourage. They need to be examined with less ingenuosness and more responsibility.

Pisto, plata, lapas, tucanes, tejas, tostones, gevo, chichimosca, palos, tucos, fichas, hojas de repollo, barbas, luz verde, reales, bfalos, daimes, meruza, chelines, chambulines, coyoles, chilca, marmaja, morlacos, maracandacas, harina, tablas, bollos, bolas, billuyos, verdes In addition to his six official names in Central America (crdoba, quetzal, lempira, dollar, balboa and colon) and his thousands of nicknames like those above and many more in the world as a whole, this powerful gentleman has also acquired a special alias: remittances. The polymorphous monster commonly presented to us in the form of coins and bills, as apparently frozen certificates of deposit, as advances on itself through a credit card, or launched onto the stock exchange trapeze dressed up as bonds or simulating ghostly presences in spurious
REMITTANCES 3

accounting operations, has now materialized universally with a new moniker: remittances. In common parlance, this is the money sent by international migrants to their families back home.

Why so much interest in remittances?

A Sibylline aura surrounds this new identity of money. Remittances are attributed almost magical virtues, the miracles of a panacea, and, through the catchphrase productive use of remittances, are proclaimed with great pomp and circumstance to be the new cornerstone of local and national development. Why not talk about the productive use of bar earnings? Or about the savings of consultants to recycle part of the foreign aid that never trickles down to the poorest? Why not redirect the considerable spending on luxury vehicles and imported beers towards ecotourism? Nobody even considers giving a special name to income received from selling alcoholic beverages or suggests reinvesting it in community parks. Whats so special about these gifts from relatives abroad that isnt shared by gifts from relatives living inside the country? Are the US$70, $100 or $200 that a family gets from abroad automatically more productive than the $300 earned by a small-scale coffee farmer? In short, why so much fuss about remittances? It would appear that the money labeled remittances is more public, more manipulable, so everyone wants a say about its current or potential uses. It happens that money transmuted into remittances has two characteristics that incite its special treatment. First, most of the people receiving remittances are poor. Theyre probably not the poorest, but their ordinary income is low and they therefore require help from relatives living abroad. As the poor have the bad fortune to be more public than the middle or upper classes, the periscope and precepts of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), NGOs and the state all butt into their finances to tell them what to do with their migradollars in much the same way as the TV cameras come barging into their homes to turn their private
4 REMITTANCES

life into mass entertainment. And second, the volume of money in the form of remittancesits national aggregate tracked through money-transfer companies and the balance of paymentsleaves no doubt about their enormous power to jump-start the consumption capacity of a broad sector of inhabitants.

Fast-growing and increasingly important

The remittances sent by Central American migrants to their home country predominantly from the United States, but often from other countries in the isthmusamounted to US$12.16 billion in 2007, according to the IDB: $4.1 billion to Guatemala, $3.5 billion to El Salvador, $2.7 billion in Honduras, $990 million in Nicaragua, $590 million in Costa Rica and $320 million in Panama. Whether because the capacity to register them has increased or because their volume really is greater, remittances appear to growing at an astonishing rate. According to the Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the remittances received in Latin America as a whole increased from $1.12 billion in 1980 to over $40 billion in 2004. With small fluctuations, they have doubled every five years. The amounts received in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador increased over tenfold between 1980 and 1990, rising from $55 million to $649 million, displaying truly amazing productiveness considering that the number of citizens who migrated from those countries to the United States only multiplied fourfold during that decade. For different reasons, those enormous flows of money went unnoticed. For one thing, remittances move in small amounts of between $100 and $200 a month and circulate outside of the countrys formal financial systemin international money transfer companies like Western Union and others, or in the pockets of the migrants, their relatives or other trusted couriers. In addition, those who generate these flows and those who receive them are poor; people who didnt count as movers of capital. For many years the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the main body responsible for monitoring financial flows, threw billions of dollars in remittances into the errors and omissions column in its accounting books. But
REMITTANCES 5

2006
Volume of remittances (millions of dollars)

Guatemala El Salvador Honduras Nicaragua Costa Rica 3,610 9.4 60 30.3 61.2 88.7 3,316 17.8 173.5 51.6 67.6 126.5 2,359 25.5 122.3 43.5 67.6 126.5 950 18 92.47 34.5 55 153.5 520 2.34 6.3 4.5 15.5 23.2

Remittances as % of GDP % of exports % of imports % of trade deficit % of trade deficit with the USA

Source: Authors calculations based on data from the IDB and the Central American central banks

the macroeconomic importance of remittances has been so overwhelming that they couldnt remain invisible for very long. Combining the IDB estimates with statistics from the Central American central banks we can conclude that in 2006 remittances were worth more than the value of exports in El Salvador and Honduras, and fell just short of it in Nicaragua. They represented half the value of imports in El Salvador and a quarter of the entire gross domestic product (GDP) in Honduras. With the exception of Costa Rica and Panama, the indisputable and growing weight of remittances in the national accounts of Central American countries has given them a place of honor. As the table on the previous page shows, they are worth between 9.4% and 25.5% of the GDP; between 60% and 173.5% of the value of exports; between 30.3% and 51.6% of the value of imports; between 55% and 67.6% of the value of the total trade deficit; and between 88.7% and 153.5% of the trade deficit with the United States. In Guatemala and El Salvador, remittances respectively account for over six and seven times the amount of foreign direct investment in those countries. In Honduras they triple the value of such investment and in Nicaragua they double it. According to estimates by sociologist Eduardo Baumeister based on the 2001 living standards measurement survey, families that receive remittances in Nicaragua accounted for around 30% of the countrys families, for a total of some 300,000
6 REMITTANCES

families and 970,000 people. ECLAC calculates that remittances reach 17% of Salvadoran families and 11% of Guatemalan and Honduran families. The Salvadoran Ministry of the Economy says that 28% of the countrys adults and 21.4% of its households receive remittances. The salary mass corresponding to Salvadorans residing in the United States was valued at 127% of El Salvadors GDP in 2004. Salvadoran labor paid abroad generates a per-capita income that is six times higher than the per-capita GDP of those paid back home, while their poverty rate is almost half the rate of their compatriots in El Salvador. Transmuted into remittances, their savings reach over 30% of the households in the departments of La Unin, Cabaas, Morazn and San Miguel. In La Unin, remittances reach 63% of the households in the municipality of Concepcin de Oriente and 61% in the municipalities of Anamors and Meanguera del Golfo. These savings entered almost 358,000 households, representing 34% of their income.

El Salvador is the remittance pioneer

The Central American nations are starting to behave more and more like many of remittance-receiving households: waiting for that hard-earned manna to drop from heaven; beholden to those relatives who went off to seek their fortune; and praying to their patron saint to bless and keep them in good health. Such attitudes are most evident in El Salvador, where the state now has a very active lobby with US senatorswho are patron saints, if ever there were. This lobbying policy has achieved residency status for many Salvadoran citizens living in the United States and gotten the Temporary Protection Status (TPS) there renewed repeatedly. The veneration of the remittance senders has now been symbolized in the eloquent decision to build a monument to the Faraway Brother at the entryway into San Salvador. While this attitude has started to spread
REMITTANCES 7

sometimes very lazilyto other Central American countries, El Salvador is the pioneer blazing the trail. The fact is that in this chapter of Central American historywhich we could title Central America Remit-tancedEl Salvadors elites are cleverer than those of other Central American countries at recognizing then riding the wave of certain structural opportunities; they took the lead in the remittance market just as they did in the Central American Common Market of the sixties. The tertiary service sector also has a greater weight in El Salvadors economy than in the other countries that also receive remittances, accounting for almost 60% of the working population in 2005 and 64.8% of economic growth in 1990-2004. Moreover, the urban population growth (from 44% to 55% between 1980 and 2000) is only bettered by Honduras, with the difference that El Salvador already had a very high urbanization rate in the eighties. In fact, agricultural work in rural areas there is even being displaced, dropping from 61% to 44% of total employment between 1980 and 2004. In the absence of a strong and competitive export sector and of substantial productivity and profitability increases, El Salvadors tertiarization-urbanization miracle is only possible thanks to the maquiladora operations (free trade assembly plants for re-export) and, to a far greater extent, to the ever-growing flow of remittances. The tiny but populous country known as the Thumbelina of the Americas appears to be again showing the way for various countries in the region, with some lagging ever further behind and others striding ahead more purposefully. Salvadoran emigrants are more profitable for their country than any others in Central America, and have been for some time. ECLAC figures show that the number of Salvadoran emigrants increased by 306% between 1980 and 1989, while the amount of remittances they sent home increased by three times more in that same period, a situation unparalleled in other countries in the region. In 1989, Salvadoran emigrants sent home an average $92 from their monthly savings, Guatemalans an average $41 and Nicaraguans $20. In 2005, the World Bank
8 REMITTANCES

El Salvador
Emigrants (thousands of people) Remittances (millions of dollars)

Guatemala
Emigrants (thousands of people) Remittances (millions of dollars)

Nicaragua
Emigrants Remittances (thousands (millions of people) of dollars)

1980 1989
% increase

170 690.2 306

73.8 759.4 929

212.5 500 135

107.6 248.1 131

46.7 255 446

11 59.8 444

Source: ECLAC

calculated that Salvadoran remittances contributed $411 per capita to their compatriots in El Salvador. The per-capita contribution is $245 in Honduras, $238 in Guatemala, $155 in Nicaragua, $92 in Costa Rica and $62 in Panama.

Segundo Montes groundbreaking study

This growing relative weight of remittancesthe economic power of the poor has brought them to the attention of journalists, bankers, social scientists and public policy makers. In Silk, Alessandro Baricco describes Baldabiou as the man who, twenty years earlier, had come to town, headed straight for the mayors office, entered without being announced, placed on the desk a silk scarf the colour of sunset, and asked him Do you know what this is? Womens stuff. Wrong. Mens stuff: money. Something similar happened with remittances. When in 1989 Jesuit martyr Segundo Montes became the first person to study Salvadorans remittances with a team of researchers from El Salvadors Central American University, they were womens stuff; womenthe migrants wives and motherswere the main receivers. While more women have since joined the migratory stream, it is still predomin-antly masculine. At the time of Montes study, those apparently miniscule and pedestrian amounts of money were light years away from becoming a field of
REMITTANCES 9

interest to the great analysts. Just after he had finished writing up his significant pioneering contribution, Montes, five brother Jesuits and two cherished women were assassinated on November 16, 1989, by a squadron of the US-financed Salvadoran Army. A tragic ending to the firstand little knownchapter of the study of remittances in Central America.

Poor people go, poordollars come

Another Jesuit, Javier Ibisate, an economist trained in Lovaina, then took up the torch and in his macroeconomics courses in the early the nineties nicknamed remittances poordollars to highlight their powerful function as determinant monetary flows in the postwar economy. He insisted that his students correctly interpret the soporific national accounts in which remittances were camouflaged as transfers and omissions, submerged in an ignominious anonymity that did not do justice to their unrivalled expansion of the consumption capacity. Although the total amount of remittances in El Salvador in 1990 only totaled $322.7 million 6.7% of the GDPIbisate had the vision to notice that they were feeding the construction boom and the unbridled purchase of electrical appliances. In 1991, Jesuit Peter Marchetti was one of the first to mention Central Americans in-kind remittances and pioneered in highlighting the reciprocal nature of that exchange, perceptible in the double channeling of the dispatches: On the one hand the emigrants send money and goods, and on the other the national residents send products abroad, generally handicrafts. ECLAC sponsored the studies of both Montes and Marchetti. Then came an avalanche of studies, and now remittances are mens stuff as well as the subject of lofty analysts. There is still a gender division in the academic coverage of migratory issues: remittances are predominantly studied by men, while family disintegration is the concern of women researchers. Its a case of pure, hard capital versus social capital, one with its male scholars and the other with its female scholars, in a thematic monosexuality in which few cross the gender-based divide.
10 REMITTANCES

The financial approach takes the lead

Some scholars charged early on that remittances helped sustain socially unviable economic models. Others have sounded the alarm about the dependent attitude they spread and the inversely proportional relationship between the size of remittances and benevolent migratory policies. But the enthusiastic apologists have proved more numerous and loquacious. They sustain that the interrelation between remittances and development contains a potential as yet unexplored. The IDB emphatically advocates channeling remittances toward the creation of small and medium businesses, and the IMF agrees. They extol the role of remittances in substituting for institutional credit systems and view them as financial fuel with a vast potential to activate development, on the condition that they are bankized. They have great esteem for the impact remittances would have if they entered the financial system. Private business and the state are invited to design the appropriate incentives, reformulate financial regulatory frameworks, reduce transfer costs, train credit cooperatives, improve transparency, promote free compe-tition, extend financial services and stimulate the adoption of new technologies among the poor. Those strategies would smooth the way toward the productive use of remittances and turn them into a development instrument. This predominantly monetarizing and instrumental-izing bias has had an impact on the production of knowledge about remittances, concentrating the research agenda both within and outside of academia on purely financial aspects linked to development proposals that dont clearly state their budget or course of action. They also sidestep any mention of the political and socioeconomic conflicts of the societies where the remittances end up.

Exceptions to the irresponsible optimism

Certain issues have become predominant, delimiting what is legitimate to analyze, how and for what reason. In Central America, a decade of addressing the issue has not led to any noticeable enrichment of the perspective. In Nicaraguas case,
REMITTANCES 11

from Edward Funkhousers work in 1995 to that of Allen Jennings and Matthew Clarke in 2005, attention has focused on the amount, macroeconomic weight and profile of the senders and receivers. Those studies display an irresponsible optimism crystallized in statements that are debatable to say the very least. The UNDPs 2005 Human Development Report on El Salvador, which cast a more comprehensive look, is one of the most sophisticated and complete studies on the issue. But urged by the requirements of its format, even it did not examine many aspects in depth or highlight their numerous interrelations. Some academics have widened the perspective, looking at the links among remittances, power and the gender problem. Diana Santilln and Mara Eugenia Ulfe even used in-depth interviews, which provided them detailed and graphic information on the crossover between receivers of remittances and the exercise of power. Guatemalan Jesuit anthropologist Ricardo Falla monitored the management of remittances in a Honduran village for seven years. While his valuable findings have not yet been fully developed, they do offer ideas for a research agenda that could break the straightjacketing financial approach. These studies have been the exceptions. The predominant trend distills remittances to their most ethereal quintessence, abstracting them from the socio-cultural interrelations in which they are generated, transferred and consumed.

Weak calculations
In his book El mito del desarrollo [The Development Myth], former Peruvian ambassador to the United Nations and the World Trade Organization Oswaldo de Rivero states that the gurus of that myth, who fanatically measure almost everything, have a virtually quantitative view of the world and fail to examine the qualitative cultural and historical processes, societys non-linear progress and the ethical vision. The obsession with figures has turned into a kind of idolatry and a desire to reduce the whole dynamic of remittances to ups and downs in their volume and changes in the profile of the senders and receivers. It amounts to an adoration of
12 REMITTANCES

clay-footed gods, because the diverse nature of remittance data is based on limited investigation. First of all, theres the problem of the varying forms of calculation. Different methodsand sometimes even a single methodcan throw up very different figures. In 2004, the IDB estimated that Nicaragua had received a total of $850 million in remittances, while the Nicaraguan Central Bank put the figure at $519 million. Using the IDBs method, the World Bank came up with $600 million the following year. The IDB and World Bank base their calculations on gathering information almost exclusively through surveys, applied in Nicaragua to get an average remittance, then multiplying that by the number of Nicaraguans living abroad. The problem is that not all migrants send remittances, because some have only just arrived and others have already broken their connections with the country and family they left behind. Even the calculation of the number of Nicaraguan migrants on which the central banks, IDB and the Inter-American Dialogue studies base their figures are built on quicksand. Theres a difference of hundreds of thousands between the estimates of the US national census and those of the Pew Hispanic Center. And in the country of origin, the Nicaraguan national censuses only ask about emigrants who have left existing households, so theres no record of entire households that emigrated leaving no one behind to tell of those who left. The Nicaraguan Central Bank, whose method is given very little credibility by the IDB, bases 80% of its own estimate of the total value of remittances on formal financial intermediaries, such as banks and money transfer companies. The remaining 20% comes from two factors: the total number of households receiving remittances and the figure obtained by calculating the average amount each household receives. Both methods are fallible and suffer from serious conceptual imprecisions, which underestimate the poly-faceted nature of remittances. Remittances can
REMITTANCES 13

come both in currency and in kind. Should only the hard cash be measured, as the IDB, World Bank and Nicaraguan Central Bank do? Cash remittances are also very diverse. They might come in monthly installments of $150, which is the kind the surveys ask after. But migrants who spent four years in the United States can also come back with $17,000 in their pockets to build a house in San Vicente, Santa Mara Chiquimula, Tocoa or Managua. Or they can come back in packets of $700 with the migrants who go to Costa Rica for three months for the coffee or melon harvests, then return to take a vacation in Posoltega, El Arenal or Santa Rosa del Pen, where theres little or no work. So what should we define as a remittance? The savings that migrants generate abroad and either send or bring back with them, or just the money sent home from abroad through certain channels? Even if the surveys on remittances overcame the conceptual imprecision and were more inclusiveor at least less explicitly exclusionaryin their calculations, they would still run up against the modesty or caution that imposes secrecy around income, and perhaps a tendency to declare less income than is really coming in. This is either not mentioned or is only whispered about, but it does demonstrate the unadmitted fragilities undermining the credibility of any calculations or statements.

A fetish of magical results

The predilection for cash remittances alerts us to one characteristic of the dominant studies on remittances: a fetishism that establishes money as a pure form of universal wealth, abstracted from its context and mutilated of its nature as an intersection of social relations. Fetishism implies ignoring the underlying social relations to attribute supposedly intrinsic properties to money. In Grundrisse, Marx points out that the same financial necromancy that threw men and commodities into the alchemistical still to make gold, at the same time
14 REMITTANCES

evaporated all of the relations and illusions that were holding back the bourgeois mode of production, leaving a precipitate of simple monetary relations based on exchange value. The same occurs with that form of moneyand not only moneyknown as remittances. The figure on the overall volume of remittanceseven with its dubious historyexercises a hypnotic power. The result is the simple equation that more remittances equal more development oppor-tunities and more possibilities for productive investment. The fetishism of numerous studies consists of taking remittances to be some kind of magical object whose amounts in themselves generate a beneficial effect on those who receive them. Thus, as Marx commented, rather than being a unit of measure, moneyin this case monetary remittances represents itself, becoming the price realized in it and therefore also the material representative of universal wealth. The height of fetishism is interest-bearing capital. In his description of how it works, Marx takes his sarcasm to the extreme, arguing that capital appears as a mysterious and self-creating source of interestthe source of its own increase.... In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money are brought out in their pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birthmarks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself.... Money as money is potentially selfexpanding value and is loaned out as such which is the form of sale for this singular commodity. It becomes a property of money to generate value and yield interest, much as it is an attribute of pear trees to bear pears.

What the fetishism omits

Marx denounced the deceit of this dramatization that presents capital as capable of self-expanding value independent of reproduction, a trick that in his judgment constituted capitalist mystification in its most brazen form. The source of profit and the whole production process are hidden and capital takes on an independent existence; in other words, it dresses up in its purest fetishistic form.
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Hence the appearance of money that is impersonal property and not locally determined. It is impersonal because it is universal social power and universal social link. It doesnt matter who has it, in what conditions they obtained it or how they spend it. And its not locally determined because all of the particular characteristics of the relations that determine itthe political, social, patriarchal conditions, etcare extinguished. The social beings with their products and idiosyncrasies apparently stop confronting each other and let their money do the confronting. Relationships remain hidden because the formulation by the great analysts makes them adopt that undifferentiated/average form called money. But money is neither universal nor undifferentiated: it is affected by the lurches of different accumulation strategies, including the global casino, among others. Unfortunately, that fetishistic formin this case of remittances as average volume, as universal undifferentiated wealth with magical powersimpregnates the insipid discourse of the IDB and World Bank, which is interested in hiding the dominant groups financial and political strategies. The fetishistic simplification dodges the effort involved in conceiving people as a sum of social transactions. The characterization of the households that receive and send remittances has focused on the volume of income; geographical distribution; the sex of those involved; economic activities; how long the migrant has been away; the level of schooling; the rates of irregular migratory status; the frequency, means and costs involved in sending remittances; the degree of kinship between receivers and senders; their position in the national distribution of income; their relationship with the banks and their financial knowledge. The findings mention whether there was investment in the house, but not what that investment specifically consisted of or what it meant for those people. They dont tell us about how the remittances were administrated, the interpersonal tensions their flows generate or the political role they play in a given conception of the social contract and the welfare state. Nor do the findings speak of the role of remittances in the processes of world accumulation or of the remittances that
16 REMITTANCES

come in the form of objects. And they certainly dont examine their meaning in todays cultural context.

Cornerstone of the Liberal project

Studies that contemplate the contribution of remittancesexpressed merely in monetary volumescontribute to a mystification of remittances similar to the mystification of commodities described by Marx, who presented them as endowed with a social quality as if the social relationship that mediates between producers and societys collective work were a social relationship established among the objects themselves, removed from their producers. The proposals to bankize remittances dont take into account their meaning, as if moneys meaning were entirely detached from how it circulates, how the social setting demands given forms of consumption, the social position occupied by those who receive it, the political-economic setting and the power relations between those who receive them and those who send them. The phenomena conceived of as purely economic are presented as being closer to technical solutions than dirty politics. That non-conflictive vision is a cornerstone of the ideology that perpetuates the system. Fetishism is at the service of the Liberal project of gradual changes and reforms. At least four conceptual reductionisms are at work in these simplifications: the concept of money/remittance as a monetary volume rather than an expression of interrelations; remittances as money alone; the exchange of goods as an activity that only occurs within the market, and the sending-receiving flow as a unidirectional dynamic (the migrant sends remittances out of altruism and egoism and the family member in the country of origin receives them passively). Like merchandise, work and consumption, remittances are presented abstracted from the overall social scheme.

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17

The ideological trap of hiding the conflict

These reductionisms lead to a candid, non-conflictive vision of society that attributes a messianic role to remittances. Jennings and Clarke wind up an article in Development in practice with the joyful conclusion that emigration and remittances, or better still, the free flow of Nicaraguan workers, must be considered a powerful catalyst of economic development and perhaps one of the rare human faces of globalization. Exactly what kind of development are these authors talking about? Where is the freedom they attribute to the flow of migrants? Their article is an example of the kind of thinking that presents remittances as capable of creating their own value and assuming a redeeming mission, offering a non-conflictive vision of society. That article could quite easily be included in an issue of the Central American business magazine Estrategia & Negocios, alongside the following declarations by Ricardo Poma, the leader of Metrocentro y Multiplaza Escaz, better known as the Poma group, which also owns vehicle dealerships, hotels, banks, factories and urban housing developments: For us, it has been essential to operate in a framework based on values that have been transmitted from generation to generation: integrity, the ongoing search for excellence, love of work, perpetual renewal, respect for people, solidarity and service. Ive always said that people are the most important thing. People are the raison dtre of our business and social work; theyre the ones who build, who turn ideas into reality. These words also sound like one of the rare human faces of globalization and could be inserted into a Sunday sermon by any priest or archbishop, or uttered by university officials, rectors, ministers, analysts and the whole cohort of cloying people who talk aboutand live inthe promised, conflictfree land. In his forthcoming book Post-Marxism and Liberation Theology: An ethical humanist perspective for social change (an envo publication), Andrs Prez Baltodano insists on the need to avoid the theoretical trap represented by the
18 REMITTANCES

non-conflictive vision of politics, because it leads to paralysis and acceptance of the hegemony of capital as the natural framework within which order and social peace should be sought. He goes on to propose that the Latin American and Nicaraguan Left must avoid falling into the ideological trap hidden beneath the visions of harmony and peace, unity and reconciliation that are offered by the conceptual vocabulary and theoretical explanations promoted by neoliberalism and its institutions. It must recover the spirit of classical sociology, which recognized conflict as a social phenomenon indispensable for reflecting on order.

Reflecting on this conflict in three areas

Breaking with this vision of the management of remittances implies overcoming the fetishism that consecrates them as an instrument of development and overlooks their socioeconomic, political and cultural incarnation. After all, in order to reflect on development, one has to problematize and, as Bourdieu put it, reach beyond the initial abstraction that consists of dissociating a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of any given practice, from the social order in which all human practices are immersed. It implies addressing conflict in at least three areas. The first is the role played by remittances and migratory movements in the great global, regional and national processes of capital accumulation, characterized economically by the alliances between national elites and transna-tional capital and culturally by that ideological artifact of long duration and pernicious influence known as the development myth. The second is the conception of the state, the welfare state, employment policy and citizenship. There is evidence that remittances are reinforcing the reduction of the state and fostering a society-state relationship in which citizens selfconception is above all one of clients. And the third area is family micro-policy, in which remittances are part of a bidirectional and sometimes multidirectional exchange of goods and services that transcend the markets jurisdiction.
REMITTANCES 19

Penetrating these areas would bring us close to what Marcel Mauss called total social events, an approach that allows us to focus on many facets of remittances and the transformations they produce that remain concealed in the fetish-based approaches. Addressing these three areas leads us to question what that movement of money means to the capitalist system of accumulation and its global interrelations. What does it mean for the state-society relationship? And what does it mean locally? Is the money sent home by migrants really just omnipresent merchandise not determined locally? The rest of this article concentrates on the second area, leaving the other two for a later occasion.

Drawing back the veil to understand the social function of remittances

The hypnotic power of the term remittances concentrates on their direct uses and effects: what they are spent on, how much is converted into taxes and how much is saved... But it tends to place a veil over their various social functions. We have to draw back that veil to reveal the faces and metamorphoses of those remittances. Popular wisdom rechristens money to demonstrate its different functions, origins and social features through the expressive force of metaphors. Coins are called reales (royals) because the crown minted them; plata (silver) because that metal was used as a means and measure for exchange; harina and bollos (flour and rolls) because its exchanged for daily bread; fichas (chips) because before the global casino there were national and local casinos where fortune was decided by chance and rigged arrangements; and chambulines because it is earned through chambas, those jack-of-all-trades tasks without which the poor would have no money at all. The nickname lapas (macaws) is perhaps linked to moneys volatility. Remittances should also be renamed to tease out the different social functions they perform.
20 REMITTANCES

Like money in general, its appearance in the form of remittances has many functions, which are only revealed if we chip away at the plaster of fetishism. There is a need to name these functions and then explain their links with the agreements and disagreements of the social contract that shapes them and tells them what to be and how. Remittances have many simultaneous personalities. They are savings gathered by migrants in the countries where they live that become income/donations in the countries where they are received. They are part of the salary mass of emigrants that without officially being considered taxes are transformed into indemnification against natural disasters, compensation for poverty and insurance against unemployment, old age, disability and death in the countries of destination. Structural conditioners mean that remittances come with a label defining the function of each portion and their overall origin and destination: taxes, insurance, old age pension, donations, subsidy, health investment, etc. Remittances arent what they want to be, but rather what they can be. One of their most applauded facets is their effect on reducing poverty and inequality. The UNDPs 2005 report on El Salvador highlights that among the households that receive remittances, 74.2% obtained enough income to put them above the poverty line (non-poor); while the percentage of non-poor households among those families that dont receive remittances was lower (63%). Meanwhile, just 5.7% of households receiving remittances were in extreme poverty, less than half the percentage of families that dont receive them (14.5%).

Proof that they reduce poverty

Given that remittances represent a third of the income in the homes that receive them, in a hypothetical scenario in which remittances were eliminated, the percentage of receiving households in extreme poverty would leap from 5.7% to 37.3% overall and from 7.6% to 48.5% in the rural sector. Households with remittances report a notable superiority over those without them with respect to
REMITTANCES 21

housing materials and access to public services (90.2 % versus 76.5% connected to the electricity grid; 65.5% versus 55.8% with piped water inside or outside the house). As we dont know the original situation of these households but do know that the poorest dont migrate because it costs at least US$5,000 to pay the coyote, its preferable to have a dynamic vision of the phenomenon. In this sense its significant that Baumeister found that 48% of the Nicaraguan households that went from being poor to non-poor between the 1998 and 2001 household living standard surveys received remittances. Also from a dynamic perspective it is significant that some authors highlight the fact that poverty dropped from affecting over 50% of Salvadoran households in 1996 to 34.5% in 2004, and that the percentage of people suffering extreme poverty dropped from 26.3% to 15.2%. An analysis of Guatemala by the International Organization for Migrations (IOM) shows that the volume of remittances as a percentage of the GDP rose from 6.8% to 9.5% between 2002 and 2005, a 40% increase leading to the conclusion that the effect of remittances alone helped reduce poverty by 6.4% in just four years. The UNDPs 2005 report on El Salvador sustains that the Gini coefficient the most creditable indicator of inequity on a scale of zero to oneis 0.44% in Salvadoran households with remittances and 0.52% in those without. In a hypothetical scenario in which remittances were eliminated from the total income of households that receive them, the Gini coefficient would increase to 0.61 in those households and from 0.50 to 0.54 on the national level.

Atomized, individual solutions

A pessimistic note needs to be sounded among all the fanfare and dithyrambs, however. These magical effects of remittances occur without a finger being laid on big capital, and therefore with no pressure on the state from a citizenry seeking
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NICARAGUA
Remittances as percentage of the GDP Public spending on health as percentage of the GDP No. of inhabitants per doctor Average real agricultural wage (% compared to 1990-1992)

1990-1992 2001-2002 2005-2007 4.6 5.1 1,800 100 8 4.3 2,400 78 18 3.4 2,500 55

Source: Authors calculations based on ECLAC and Nicaraguan Central Bank figures

to reverse inequity through political channels. This occurs in a context in which, according to Le Monde Diplomatique director Ignacio Ramonet, the central characteristics of our societies is the production of inequality; after having had a project of equality, we now have a silent project of inequality. As a counterweight to this project, thousands of individual and family reactions mitigate the inequity. These thousands of projects dispense with the state as an instrument and resort to the market as liniment. While this is a generalized reaction, it is extremely pronounced among the nations traditionally administered by racketeer and gangster states in the hands of one or various cleptocracies, nations that are collapsing from the inefficiency and weakness of failed states or nations and are turning into chaotic, ungovernable entities, to quote Oswaldo de Rivero. The atomized reactions are multiplying, manifested in vain attempts to tame the chaos: youth gangs govern micro-territories; migrants go off in search of less chaotic scenarios; and those who stay seek a migration of their status and a window of opportunity to obtain the American dream through remittances. None of them seeks to transform the state. Are they even seeking new ways of doing politics? Although most of the solutions are individual, we can also identify group solutions, but they dont spark our optimism. In the words of US sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, if states (and the inter-state system) come to be seen as losing efficacy, who will the people turn to for protection? The answer is already
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clear: groups. The groups can have many labels: ethnic/religious/linguistic, based on gender or sexual preference; in other words minorities of diverse characterizations. Again theres nothing new here, argues Wallerstein. What is new, he goes on to explain, is the degree to which such groups are seen as an alternative to citizenship and participation in a state that by definition harbors many groups, while ordering them in an unequal way. Following this logic with respect to remittances, some initiatives have awakened an enthusiasm that merits suspicion, such as the associations of Salvadoran migrants negotiating 2-for-1 projects with the central and municipal governments, in which the central government and municipal government put in a dollar each for each dollar sent by the migrants association. Analysts from the UCA in San Salvador were quick to applaud this way of doing politics, underestimating the tentacles this sends out to direct the state-society relationship on a path towards more of the same philosophy of every man for himself, at the expense of those with very few resources to save themselves and the consequent condemnation of people with no resources to contribute to their own survival.

Contributing to the collapse of state responsibility

We can see the tendencies of this model in Nicaragua in the following table, which shows a simultaneous increase in the weight of remittances in the GDP and in the number of inhabitants per doctor and relative decreases in public spending on health and in the average real agricultural wage. Spending on health and education, both per capita and with respect to the GDP, doesnt necessarily indicate any state political will to invest in health or education, much less real effects in these two sectors. Public investment can increaseas has occurred in the education sectoronly to be swallowed up by the mega-salaries of the upper echelons of the parties that win the big prize in the electoral lottery.
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The limited effect of state investment in education can be seen in the reduced school enrollment and the increases in illiteracy and school desertion. On a scale of zero (inefficient) to one (efficient), the efficiency rates for public spending on education relative to the net enrollment in secondary schools are pitiful throughout the region, running from 0.46 in El Salvador to 0.26 in Honduras. The coexistence of all of the elements indicated in the table is really a form of parasitism in which some of the elements feed off the others: the depression of real wages encourages migration and the sending of remittances to rescue those who stay behind. The remittances compensateone might argue, even make possiblethe inefficiency and state withdrawal of social investment. In the model assumed since the nineties, remittances have played the part of unemployment benefit, risk mitigator, old-age pension, harvest insurance and education and health funding. According to an estimate of 19% of the total remittances received being invested in education in Nicaragua, those households that receive remittances spent $154 million of them on education in 2004 (using the IDB figure on remittances) or $114 million (using the World Bank figures). A 2006 study by the Nicaraguan Civil Society Network for Migrations estimated that another 13% of remittances are earmarked for health. According to the IDB calculations, this amounts to almost $124 million in 2006, which is the equivalent of over 30% of the total health spending and 75% of family health spending. Remittances are thus stopping the coverage of health and education services from dropping even further. In other words, the model is sustained by an expulsionattraction mechanism: expulsion of migrants, attraction of remittances. In El Salvador, 4.8% and 6.6% of total remittances were invested in health and education, respectively, in 2004, equivalent to $122 million and $168 million, or almost 50% and 36% of the total invested by the state in these two categories. In Guatemala, 11% and 15.4% were invested in education and health in 2004 and 2005, equivalent to $288 million and nearly $463 million. The nearly $196 million that Guatemalan migrants invested in their compatriots education were the
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equivalent of some 33% of state investment in education, including loans and donations. The situation is even more dramatic in Nicaragua, where in 2006 remittances contributed $124 million and $181 million to national spending on health and education, respectively, which is equal to the total investment by the Education Ministry and 66% of the Health Ministry budget. Wallerstein insists that states are inundated by demands for security and welfare that politically they cant fulfill. The result is the gradual privatization of security and welfare, which leads us in a direction we had previously moving away from for five hundred years. Remittancesrenamed as investment in health, education, pensions, etc.reveal the tendency to privatize social welfare, which implies both backtracking along a path that cost a lot of blood and time to leave behind, and depoliticizing through giving up on demanding these services from the state. At the end of the day, remittances are both symptom and effect of, as well as contribution to, the capitalist withering away of the state. The redistributive effect of remittances is, therefore, a poisoned gift, because they benefit many families, but represent a dislocated, de-ideologized and atomized strategy, making them more likely to be coopted in a strategy of the elites, a consequence I will examine in more detail in the next installment.

Changing countries, not their country

Given that the concentration of wealth creates social problems, remittances also become instruments of redistribution with no cost to state finances or taxpayers pockets. They represent a social safety valve, a renouncing of political redistribution and a depoliticizing of poverty reduction. They also have a perverse effect on the mechanisms of social mobility, because by replacing the welfare state, remittances separate income from employment. Ones position as a worker thus becomes
26 REMITTANCES

increasingly removed from class position, which reinforces the depoliticization and evasion of conflict: the improved quality of life is rooted in a great beyond that may be earthly but is still a great beyond. Nothing done in the here and now has a positive repercussion on family welfare, except the cultivation of frequent and friendly relations with those who manage to make it to the other side. Wallerstein remains optimistic that urbanization and increased education and communications the world over have generated a degree of political awareness that facilitates political mobili-zation. That political aware-ness, he argues, is reinforced by the de-legitimization of any irrational source of authority. In short, more people than ever are demanding equalization of remuneration and refusing to tolerate a basic condition of capital accumulation: the low remuneration of work. Remittances contain the systemic antidotes that can extinguish the antisystemic virulence of these social transformations. The remittances are inserted into an ideological fracture: the migrants refusal to seek the development of a given country, be it in a socialist, conservative or liberal framework. That refusal is concretely expressed in their decision to change countries rather than change their country; and in the remittance receivers giving up on defending fundamental workers conquests.

Remittances dont build a binational state

Some people talk of a binational state to refer to this transfer from the North to the South and from the relatively solvent South to the unviable South. There is no binational state. The states are being dismantled. There is, however, a virtual binationality that has become an instrument to channel the savings of poor people in the industrialized countries toward the third world. The underdeveloped countries now receive help for atomized development, help thats shouldered by the poorest, most marginalized sector in the industrialized countries.

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27

There are two ways to transfer donations from the industrialized countries. The first is in small blocks, which are extracted from all tax contributors and pass through the state coffers as binational cooperationor come from philanthropists and pass through NGOs. These donations represent an insignificant part of the income of both the taxpayers and the philanthropists. The other way is more voluminous and atomized and is extracted only from a select group of contributors the most marginalized. It represents a significant part of their income and often all of their savings. Both ways help expand the markets that the transnational companies need and exempt the state from what have been its obligations for decades now. Reversing this growing trend will take a great deal of time, sweat and imagination, because it requires a cultural rebellion against the markets siren seducers, hard work to demystify the hypnotic power of the ideologies that turn remittances into a fetish and the recovery of political struggle. These tasks are not at all easy in a setting dominated by workers demobilized by unemployment, depressed by low salaries and disappointed by the failures of revolutionary struggles, who have embarked on a search for atomized solutions in the role as clients allotted to them by the market.

28

REMITTANCES

Whose Money Is It Anyway?

WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY?

29

Whose Money Is It Anyway?

capitals voracity. The remittances are expanding markets and skyrocketing consumption. Theyre triggering a rapid urbanization with no corresponding productive support and massively reclassifying the poor from non-citizens to clients and consumers. Telephone companies, airlines, urban developers and money transfer companies are all lapping it up. But how long will this banquet last?

emittances play a key role in this thin strip of the globalized world know as Central America. The US$ 12 billion flowing in each year have attracted

Remittances dont come vacuum packed and cant be isolated in a test tube. They are conditioned by a socio-political environment and come with a cultural remittance attachedlike a remora. Theyre tugged at by consumption patterns introduced through publicity tactics that massage fine psychological threads.

Pieces of economic imperialism

The cosmetic manufacturers arent selling lanolin, said the head of a publicity agency to US sociologist Vance Packard fifty years ago, theyre selling hope. We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. Remittances dont escape the influences of publicity that turned the miniscule Apple into one of IBMs major
WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY? 31

competitors and Marlboro from an unsuccessful cigarette into a symbol of masculinity. Objects indicate status, compensate for frustrations and satisfy very diverse needs. This is particularly true in these times of new information technologies, video cameras, iPods, cell phones Through the long labyrinths of consumption, remittancesjust like any other form of incomeare conditioned by the strategies of great transnationals and local capital, and by the supply gaps in state services. All the glorious projects seeking to bunk a ride with the remittances must bear in mind their political, cultural and economic mortgage. This point of view is not so obvious. Remittances are immersed in what David Harvey calls economic imperialism, differentiable from but in a dialectic relationship with political imperialism. While political imperialism has a territorial base and acts through state apparatuses and political groups, the dynamic of economic imperialism is more diffuse and more embracing. Economic power flows and crosses a continuous space to propel itself towardsand beyondterritorial entities through the daily practices of production, commerce, capital flows, monetary transfers, labor migration, technological transfers, monetary speculation, information flows and cultural impulses. This dynamic isnt always explicitly linkable to specific policies. Its molecular form is made up of many forces that sometimes clash and sometimes reinforce certain added tendencies. One tendency stands out above all others: exploitation of the asymmetries manifested in the spatial exchange relations. This is a constant of capitalism. To get beyond remittances as an epiphenomenon, they have to be seen in this context and we need to ask what role they play in the scheme of unequal exchange, which in turn involves asking about this particular point in capitalisms development. Conceiving the study of remittances this way will help us discover whats happening beyond the subjects intention-ality. It attempts a long-term and broad-scoped view. One thoughtprovoking instrument for achieving such a view is whats known as Kondratieffs long cycles.
32 WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY?

From prosperity to depression: Capitalisms recurring highs and lows

Seeking to develop a dynamic economic theory that could overcome the inadequacy of those based mainly on a static vision, Nikolai Dimitrievich Kondratieff set about in 1920 to discover the tendencies, variations and interrelationship of economic elements over time. It was clear to all scholars that economic phenomena appeared in a perpetual state of flux. Some even admitted that they were cyclical, subject to perceptible repetitions or reversions in prices, interest rates, the percentage of unemployed, salaries, foreign trade, etc. But they only admitted the existence of medium-sized cycles that were seven to eleven years long and lesser cycles of three to four years. Kondratieff discovered larger cycles of forty to sixty years. He found that velocity, not trends, was the key piece in tracking the path of the long cycles. Kondratieff postulated that cycles are inherent to the essence of the capitalist economy and present two counterpoised phases: years of prosperity predominate during a growth period and years of depression during a stagnant one. The most disastrous and extensive wars and revolutions usually come during growth periods, which are periods of great tension among the economic forces. During the stagnant phase, on the other hand, there are numerous discoveries and inventions in production and communication techniques, but they end up being applied on a large scale only at the beginning of the following growth phase. If the seventies and eighties were a phase of stagnation, then Kondratieffs theory coincides with the optimistic forecasts of anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Keith Hart, as well as Internet expert Nicholas Negroponte, who state that weve only had meager returns from the development of information technology so far and that changes waiting just around the corner will skyrocket productivity and reconfigure societies and cultures. Analyzing statistics for the United States, France and England, Kondratieff found a first 60-year wave (1789-1849), with a growth phase and stagnation phase
WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY? 33

whose turning point was 1814. He discovered a second 47-year wave (18491896), which peaked in 1873. The first phase of the third cycle ran from 1896 to 1914-20, when he concluded his study. Subsequent studies agree that 1945 marked the close of that cycle and the start of a new growth phase, which in turn began to stagnate in 1970-73. Kondratieff was extremely cautious about his theory and didnt postulate any interpretations about its causalities. Nor was he given much time to do so. He launched his conclusions in the Anglo-Saxon world in 1925 and 1935, with an eight-year stint in Siberia in between despite his outstanding contribution to the first Five-Year Plan of 1920 and his considerable influence on the New Economic Policy. In 1938 he was gunned down by Stalins henchmen.

Some other forecasts are now being fulfilled

Liberal economist Joseph Schumpeter and Marxist economist Ernest Mandel developed their theories on cycles from very different perspectives. They agreed that no bi-polar syndrome was involved in the economy and the strategies of capitalists, but rather that the cycles are generated by the dynamic of capitalism. Mandel believed that capitalisms self-destructive tendency was unavoidable, but that its upward turns were artificially produced by exogenous counter-cyclical factors. US sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, meanwhile, made quite daring interpretations in the framework of his world system theory. The processes he identified as typical of a declining phase are those that preceded the phase were currently in: a declining growth of production, an increased unemployment rate of active wage earners, the relative displacement of the points of benefit from productive activity to profits derived from financial manipulations, an increase in state indebtedness, the relocation of the old industries to zones with lower salaries, an increase in military spendingwith the justification that its not really of a military nature, but rather to create a counter-cyclical demanda fall in real salaries in the
34 WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY?

formal economy, expansion of the informal economy and the growing illegalization of inter-zone migration. Mandel forecasted that capitalism would have a hard time surviving the last depressive cycle. He was dubious that a new inflection pointsimilar to that of the 1890s and the 1940scould reverse the depression triggered in the mid-seventies. But his description of the conditions of a potential new growth phase was alarmingly lucid; he spoke of chronic mass unemployment aimed, in the long term, at eroding real wages and workers self-confidence, com-bativeness and level of organization, as well as of significantly increased intensity of work leading to a pronounced rise in the rate of surplus value. And in fact, combativeness and confidence were indeed undermined by the failure of the revolutionary struggles of the seventies and eighties; unionization levels have plummeted globally; the maquiladora (assembly plants for re-export) is currently the bestalthough not onlylabor intensification model; unemployment has grown and has been disguised as the informal sector to maintain the consumption capacity and apply labor flexibility. Mandel also mentioned the massive devaluation of capital through the growing elimination of inefficient companies of all sizes, including many multinational ones, in a new leap towards the concentration and centralization of capital on the national scale and especially on the international one. And indeed we have witnessed the multiplying collapse and merger of companies everywhere. Other conditions mentioned by Mandel included new radical forms of reducing the cost of equipment, raw materials and energy, at least in relative terms (the outsourcing of costs is its most ominous example); the mass application of new technological innovations (Internet, micro-processors and biotechnology); and the new revolutionary acceleration of the rate of capital circulation (capital and consumption flows moving at supersonic speed).

WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY?

35

Were in a long expansive wave with enormous migratory waves

The innovations now being massively applied were relatively predictable components of the new growth phase. The flexibilizing, instability and intensification of employment and the outsourcing of costs have attracted the attention of scholars for over a decade now. In many industrialized countries it seemed very hard to roll back everything conquered over the centuries. Mandel wondered how the workers combativeness and resistance could be decisively broken without violently repressing the right to strike, which implied a no less serious attack on freedom of the press, the right to association and protest, etc. An initial answer was the reduction in employment rates, while another, more dramatic one has been illegal migration. The current migratory dynamicextensive flow and repressive controlsrecreates two enormous social groups: citizens and undocu-mented migrants. This recalls the master-slave binomial, an ideal culture medium for knocking out any possibilities of anti-systemic protest. Mandel detected that the working class generally enters into the long new expansive wave scarred by the dearth of employment, reduced negotiating capacity and, in many cases, deteriorated self-confidence from the previous period. He predicted that a new expansive wave would multiply migration, arguing that the generally expansionist climate attracts enormous migratory waves of underemployed labor and impoverished small-scale producers of merchandise from the peripheries of industrial capitalism to the metropolitan centers. This, in turn, regularly supplies the industrial army with labor reserves and keeps the increase in real wages within reasonable limitsfrom the bourgeoisies point of view.

The poor ride into the realm of consumption on the back of US$12 billion in remittances
This new long wave is characterized by the fact that migration is providing a reserve army of people in the industrialized countries who have deteriorated citizenship
36 WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY?

and are willing to accept the lowest wages and no pay rises in an inflationary context. The undocumented migrants generally dont unionize and have no possibility of asserting their rights. Capital thus obtains the high profit levelsa key element in the Marxist interpretation of the long wavesit needs for a new economic acceleration. Mandels supposition came to pass because the capitalists took measures to make it happen: the introduction of new technologies lowered the wage bill because relatively fewer workers were needed, although this meant less spending power. Meanwhile, capitalisms automatic dynamic produced an element not previously present in such a massive form or with such a forceful impact in previous migratory waves: family remittances. The US$12 billion in remittances are an essential element in the expansion of the Central American markets. The Wall-Mart retail sales empire, the not so friendly wings of TACA airlines and the propagators of the cellular communication fever all welcome remittances with open arms, exponentially extending their operations in the region. A growing preference for the dollar in deposits and creditswith the official dollarizing of El Salvador the extreme casehas shored up the dollar while dragging Central America toward the most somber episodes of its destiny. The icing on the cake is the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the United States. Oswaldo de Rivero sustains that in the 21st century big capital is sprinting towards the mass of consumers opening up to it through the best-off groups in China and India: around 500 million clients, a market equivalent to the United States and Europe put together. But capitals appetite knows no bounds and rejects nothing, however trivial it might seem. The elites arent the only ones entering the realm of the market. You dont need a huge income to buy a McDonalds hamburger, a pair of Nikes, an iPod, a pair of Levis or even a Toyota (if you buy it on time, of course). In Nicaragua and Honduras many poor people visit the malls to window shop and in El Salvador theyve already acquired citizenship in the market. They studied in Pollo Campero, did a post-grad at Pizza Hut and got their doctorate in Wall-Mart. And many others will follow.
WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY? 37

If in the 19th century the capital circulation rate was speeded up by revolutions in transportation and telecommunications (the steam boat, telegraph, railways), a much more spectacular acceleration is currently being produced via the Internet, supersonic trains and cellular and satellite phones. And now remittances are contributing to that acceleration. A lot can be achieved by many people contributing a little bit and then a little bit more. Drop by drop, Central American migrants have filled up a tank of $12 billion, and the steady drip continues. Remittances provide a consumer power that would languish in their absence. Thanks to remittances, Central America has again caught the attention of foreign investment, that new totem to which everything must be sacrificed.

The golden age of foreign investment

As an expression of the world economys previous expansive phase, the fifties and sixties were a golden age of foreign investment in Central America. The national banks made alliances with international banks and received copious investments. During the sixties, the Nicaraguan financial systems foreign resources rose from 5% to 49% of the total. That dependency on foreign capital strongly affected the countrys two most important banks: the Pellas groups Banco de Amrica, in alliance with Wells Fargo Bank and First National Bank of Boston, and the Nicaraguan Bankof Montealegre and the cotton producerswith a catheter to Chase Manhattan and Morgan Guaranty Trust. US capital did nothing more than strengthen a partner. Starting in 1944the opening of the new expansive phase91% of Nicaraguan exports were sent to the United States, compared to 67% six years earlier. And with the initiation of the import substitution model in that same period, the manufacture of footwear and clothing came to depend on imports for 47% of its inputs, a figure that hit 96% for the pharmaceutical industry. The rest of Central America had a similar experience. The affluence of foreign capital tripled from 1960 to 1968 and North American investment in the region reached $5 billion. New firms were set up and soon monopolized the new factories and controlled many of the traditional industries. Some
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scholars went so far as to talk about the transnationalization of the Central American economy in that period. In fact, the regions countries developed a dangerous dependence on international capital, figuring among the worlds comparatively most indebted countries and allowing their territories to serve as a legal base for the multinationals that wanted to exploit Central Americas free trade common market system. In addition to the transnationals, other groups, mainly from the US south, came in search of lucrative and easy investments. In the United States they were known as Sunbelt capitalists to distinguish them from the traditional investors in the grey, industrial northeast. These upstarts represented an aggressive and unscrupulous capitalism whose strong investment tentacles included electronics, aviation, military goods, casinos, drugs, cabarets, hotels and tourism. In Central America, they associated with the military regimes and jelled in the form of the fabulous businesses of Somoza and the Florida meat importers, joint investments by Howard Hughes and Anastasio Somoza, the Vesco-Figueres society and the businesses of Guatemalan dictator Arana Osorio with his alliance partners in Alabama, Florida, Texas and New Orleans. And so it came to be that a buoyant faction of national capital crystallized, linked to the distant small and medium non-internationalized capital to which it subordinated itself through the monopoly of credit and shifting of investments.

The foreign hands and pockets return

The crisis of the seventies and the warring conflicts it unleashed led foreign capitaland some of its Central American associatesto pack up and leave. The depressive wave devastated the isthmus like a tsunami. The banks and other transnationals that had a growing presence in the sixties withdrew in the seventies and eighties and started to return again only in the nineties. The Holiday Inn hotel chain waited out the whole depressive phaseover 20 yearsto install the hotels it had planned in the early seventies.
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There is abundant evidence that the nineties witnessed the kind of foreign capital flow-back symptomatic of a growth phase. Various transnational banks, including Citibank, Westrust Bank International, HSBC and Banco Santander, opened operations in the region. And that wave is continuing. Larry Solberg, manager of the US Dairy Export Council, whose members annually produce over 85% of US dairy exports, forecasts that they will quadruple the $25 million worth of dairy products they sell in the region. In 2005 alone, 28 US companies established themselves in Costa Rica. That same year, 334 foreign companies were recorded in El Salvador, their 28 nationalities ranging from the United States to Singapore. Excluding franchises, their investments accounted for 21% of its GDP in 2005. In 2007, Banco Industrial de Guatemala received a $300 million credit from Citigroup. The picture has been the same all over Central America, from Guatemala to Costa Rica. Having averaged $633.5 million annually in 1990-95, foreign investment exceeded $2.29 billion in 2005. For all that, this figure is still well below the nearly $8.27 billion in remittances sent home in 2005 by migrants who are investing their dreams in the region far more than big capital.

The already globalized elites and an explosion of franchises

The regionalization of financial markets and the prosperity of bankers both point to the existence of an expansive wave. Banks such as Banco Amrica Central (BAC), Banco Uno, Cuscatln and Mercantil Agrcola operate in more than one country in the region and Banco Uno has branches in all Central American countries. Judging from the intra-regional trade, Central American economic integration is also symptomatic of expansion. According to data from the Secretariat for Central American Integration (SIECA), it increased from $671.2 million to nearly $3.44 billion between 1990 and 2004. Costa Ricas Dos Pinos dairy company and Honduras Lcteos Hondureos S.A.which owns the Sula trademarkare expanding across the region. Guatemala buys 40%, El Salvador 30%, Honduras 15% and
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Nicaragua 6% of Dos Pinos $28 million in exports. The company also plans to expand in El Salvador, where the annual per-capita milk consumption of 70 liters is a powerful magnet for its products. In 1994, the Guatemalan company Pollo Campero became the first Central American company to franchise, marking the beginning of an explosion in regional franchising, albeit with no accompanying legislation: the absence of franchising laws is a common denominator throughout the isthmus. According to the Central American Franchise Association (ACAF), 99% of the franchises operating in Central America had extra-regional franchisers in 2001. By 2005, 24% of the 156 franchises in the region were generated in Central American countries. These include trademarks such as Quick Photo, Los Cebollines and El Chinito Veloz from Guatemala; Expresso Americano of Honduras and the Nicaraguan Tip Top company. Guatemala leads the regional way, with a total of 25 franchisers. Salvadoran economist Alexander Segovia holds that the Central American business elites are already globalized and are no longer confined to the national market as a single arena of accumulation; they are now involved in regional and international markets. Some of these Central American groups are investing in 15 or more countries. But their independent peak is proving not to be of such long duration. Some of their businesses are starting to be absorbed by the transnationals. A large part of intra-regional trade is conducted by and benefits transnationals like the British-Dutch company Unilever, which owns brand names like Naturas, Lizano, Dove, Axe, Continental, Sedal, Ponds, Lipton, Close-Up, Rexona, Knorr, Lux, Vinolia, Maizena, Margarina Mirasol, Rinso and Vasenol.

Better to be a lions tail than a mouses head...

In the 1960s, transnationals acquired Nicaraguan companieslike Metasa, Aceitera Corona, Nabisco Cristaland established joint investments with national capitalists to create Plywood, Imusa, Fabritex, Cerisa. In the new expansive wave,
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however, their buyouts, mergers and co-investments considerably exceed their previous adventures, because they include a more vigorous market, natural monopolies (electricity and telecommunications) and social security. The latter has previously been exclusively state-run, but is now being cultivated by pension fund administrators (AFPs). To reduce risks, the transnationals enter hand in hand with native investors. Thus the Spanish transnational Unin Fenosa entered Nicaragua as a co-investment with the Pellas, CALSA (Lacayo family) and Montealegre groups. This guarantees it stability, while at the same time providing the local groups with a Spanish scapegoat for any grassroots discontent. PriceSmart entered holding hands with Banpros Ortiz Gurdin group. Nicaraguan businessman Manuel Ignacio Lacayo met strong criticism for selling the MILCA bottling company, including its Coca-Cola franchise, to Panamerican Beverages Inc., a transnational that owns bottling plants in 12 countries including Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. His response probably reflects the current feelings of many of his brothers: Its better to be a lions tail than a mouses head. Many imitated him, activating a chain of sales or mergers of Central Americas most significant companies: Caf Soluble went to Nestl; La Perfecta to Parmalat; Banco Uno and Banco Cuscatln to CitiGroup; the Hiper-Paiz, La Unin and Pal supermarkets to Wall-Mart; the Solas CODISA and Facusss Cressida group to Unilever; half of the BAC to General Electric Consumer Finance; FINARCA to Nova Scotia Bank; the Lacayos NICACEL to Bellsouth and then Telefnica de Espaa (Movistar); Nicaraguas Tip-Top and Honduras ALCON to Cargill Corporation; and Banco Salvadoreo to HSBC and Banco de Comercio to the Canadian ScotiaBank. The hail of mergers includes the Granai Thompson and Continental banks with Industrial y Occidente; the Facuss businesses with Dole (Standard Fruit Company); the Panamanian Copa Airlines alliance with Continental Airlines; and on it goes. We passed from the industrialization model through import substitution to the transnationalization model with the sale of industries and a few other shaky
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companies.

The destiny of a great part of national capital is once again to be

absorbed by global capital. Central Americas businesspeople become minority shareholders in the transnationals that gobbled up their businesses. Alexander Segovia surmises that they will end up subordinated to transnational interests. Put another way, transnational interests will be their interests. Thats their way of bathing in globality, a strategy not exclusive to the elites, although they can achieve more striking expressions than other social groups.

The agriculture sector is shrinking and consumption is skyrocketing

Today, national businesspeople are turning into pure capitalists, ever less interested in the events taking place within their borders. The elites are relocating their interests and tossing their hats into a transnational ring that is less tangible, but possibly with fewer risks. In a risk-filled society, the elites find many opportunities to reduce it. They not only expand markets and become a partner to transnational capital, but also look to move into less vulnerable economic areas. The industrialized countries use increasingly fewer raw materials in their merchandise. The percentage has fallen by 40% in automobiles and 50% in medicines in just a century. The case of Japan is illustrative and extreme. It currently uses 40% fewer raw materials than in 1973. Dessert economies are being especially affected by new chemical technologies that are producing substitutes for coffee, palm oil and sugar, products on which five of the most powerful Central American familiesHerrera in Guatemala, Cristiani and Dueas in El Salvador, Facuss in Honduras and Pellas in Nicaraguamade their fortunes. They have thus switched their attentions to other rich veins, such as shopping malls, banking, tourism and hotels. The Dueas and Palomo families passed from coffee and cotton to TACA, shopping malls and finance. This shift has had repercussions on the economic structure and on land use and prices.

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43

Between 1980 and 2000, the participation of the agricultural sector in the GDP has fallen in all of the regions countries, from 2% in Panama to 16% in El Salvador. The portion of the area dedicated to coffee growing in El Salvador dropped from 188,000 to 162,000 hectares between 1985 and 2002. Santa Elena, the enormous coffee hacienda located between Antiguo Cuscatln and Santa Tecla, was transformed at the speed of light into a complex of urban developments and shopping malls. In Nicaragua, the most powerful elites switched from sugar cane and cotton to the sale of vehicles and provision of financial services. There are clients for their new range of businesses thanks to the growing weight of domestic consumption in the GDP. In 1994, private consumption already represented almost 90% of the GDP in El Salvadorthe leading Central American country in the tertiary fieldcompared to 58.9%, 55.2% and 40.2% in Costa Rica, Germany and Singapore, respectively. El Salvador is proving to have a market as tempting as it is dangerous, and Nicaragua is reaching similar danger levels, with private consumption representing 81.4% of the GDP in 2006.

An unsupported shift: Not even in the regions Little tigers

The tertiarization of the economy, demographic urbanization and growing weight of consumption mark the end of the agroexport model, but not the end of the traditional elites as some suppose. These elites they have been able to insert themselves into the new model, investing in the service sector and trading their companies for share options in transnational companies. The problem is that these shifts have no productive backing and lack a long-term development vision that considers, among other things, the physical problem of the relation between inhabitants and availability of water, or the capacity to provide food and energy services to the rapidly growing urban masses. Other countries that are moving out of agriculture and into accelerated urbanization and consumption have made intensive investments in education and insertion into the global markets, first with industrialization and later the export of
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high technology. This has enabled them to lay the foundations for the expansion of consumption, imports and the service infrastructure required by megalopolises. With the exception of Costa Ricawith its new high-tech enclaveno steps have been taken in that direction in Central America. Our little tigersEl Salvador and Guatemalamay have a rate of 654 telephones per thousand inhabitants, close to Uruguays rate, but fall well short of its secondary education coverage, which is total, and its 41% university education coverage. The net secondary schooling rate is around 66% in most Central American countries. The weight of high-tech exports is roughly 5% of the value of exports in most of the regions countries. In comparison, it is 34% in Hong Kong, 33% in South Korea, 30% in China, 24% in Japan, 20% in Mexico and 16% in Indonesia. Countries located in or seeking to insert themselves into the international markets have experienced changes that the urbanized and consumerist Central American nations come nowhere near.

The Wall-Martization of the poor

Given this situation, remittances are called upon to play a key role in this thin strip of the world. Taking the cases of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, migrants sent $5.50 for every dollar that flowed in from big foreign capital in 2005. In Guatemala the proportion was 14:1. Remittances are enabling market expansion, urbanization without productive backing and the massive graduation of consumers, as opposed to citizens. The elites and the state havent made any transforming effort. Theyve simply ridden the wave of opportunities opened up to them by the $12 billion produced by the expulsion of migrants. These transnationalized savings have allowed the formation of transnationalized elites as much as if not more than big globalized capital. The transnationals became interested in Central America again when its markets began to expand and the remittances turned them from exclusionary to inclusive, providing the working class with a purchasing power it previously lacked.
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Whats new about the current model, according to Segovia, is its underpinning: unlike the agroexport model, in which exchange rate stability and low or moderate inflation depended on the foreign currency generated by the primary export products, it is now sustained by the availability of dollars from the new sources of foreign currency, particularly the new nontraditional exports and family remittances. Remittances turn the previously excluded into a market and the companies prepare products specifically for them. Just as the elites incorporate themselves into the market in India and China, the remittances introduce the poor to the market of Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut and McDonalds. In El Salvador, fast-food restaurants such as Pollo Campero and Pizza Hut are full of working class remittance receivers. Pizza Hut was able to increase its motorcycle fleet in that country from 16 to 500 in 16 years thanks to looking beyond the middle classes to the power of remittances. Social mobility on the exclusive plane of consumption is an opportunity that opens up for those who manage to place family members in other countries. Consumption in Wall-Mart, Pizza Hut and shopping malls is part of the effect of that ideological artifact known as development, in which a kind of Wall-Mart development is disseminated, a sensation of having entered the middle classes through a Wall-Martization of consumption. In the social race, Wall-Mart and the products of Unilever and Adidas are the universities that graduate people from poor into middle class. After all, McDonalds came to us to remove our loincloth according to former Nicaraguan President Bolaos. There are two sides to the remittance coin because remittances are a passport providing the poor with access to the expanding world markets. They satisfy both the businessperson and the apprentice client.

The place of credit cards in the big bang of consumption

Exporting people to increase consumption is becoming a national strategy that operates alongside a certain systematic automation. From a territorial perspective,
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migration has become the main way to increase exports: Honduras sells to Hondurans living in the United States. The products are hybrid exports, because they dont have to leave the country. They are acquired and used in Honduras, while the effective buyerthe person who generated the money that pays for themis in another country. Looked at this way, migrations and remittances are increasing Central American exportsfree of transport costsmuch more than CAFTA. From the perspective of globalized labor markets, the Central American countries have obtained a substantial increase in the payment of their labor force with a double advantage for the regional elites: the consumption capacity has substantially expanded without them having to increase wages by so much as a cent. The local elites and their international allies have only taken on the work of adjusting their products to the emerging market segments, to put it in the metallic slang thats music to their ears. The field of credit cards is one example of how previously excluded population sectors have become spoilt by big capital. With its 1.2 billion credit cards, VISA controlled 60% of the world credit and debit card market, 50% of Internet purchases and already offered remittance reception services through its VISA Giro card in 2005. In Central America it had 6.7 million cards, over 200 million transactions and a movement of over $11 billion a year. In Banco Cuscatln alone it placed 65,000 VISA Giro cards between January and September 2005. Credit cards used to be a service aimed at recognized sectors of proven solvency, but now that bankers well-known discretion and cautiousness has been eroded by their appetite for galloping consumerism they are targeting the remittance-receiving masses. The role of remittances in this new market big bang can also be measured in other spheres examined below, although the conclusive evidence that can be gathered so far is extremely unequal.

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Mini-housing for mini-salaries and for remittance receivers

The housing market in El Salvador and Nicaragua is adapting to the remittances. Given the saturation and deceleration of the housing market in the upper-class segment, Nicaraguas urban developers have moved into houses selling for around $12,000 aimed at medium- and low-income families, which are also the sectors most affected by the countrys 400,000-unit housing deficit. In the city of Granada, Sun Real Estates Praderas del Mombacho will have paved streets, sidewalks, 24-hour security, public lighting and drinking water. It was planned for merchants, teachers and police officers, but its price tags and the dosage of the monthly payments make it appropriate for remittance receivers as well. The Lacayo Fiallos construction company has also moved into that market with houses selling for $12,000 targeting families with a monthly income of around $400. The Sandinista business elite backing Daniel Ortega also has interests in this sector. Tourism Minister Mario Salinas Pasos presides over Desarrollo Sooner, which is currently constructing 1,182 houses in Ciudad San Sebastin in Managua priced at about $25,000. The same is true for Prados de San Jernimo in Masaya, whose houses are valued at $14,500, Conchagua in Corinto ($18,500) and Colinas de Verona and Praderas del Doral in Managua ($16,750). Some solvent migrants are investing in the new houses for speculative purposes. Such is the case of Manuel Salazar, a US citizen of Nicaraguan origin who lives in California. Salazar bought a house in Valle Santa Rosa, Ciudad Sandino, for $18,000. The $80 monthly mortgage cost for the cheapest houses are conveniently below the average amount of remittances sent back. We find a descending intensification of the market: it is expanding to capture a sector that, judging from the 1995 and 2005 censuses, is making significant changes to its housing, generally on its own. In Chinandega, a department that has sent off masses of migrants, the percentage of concrete houses rose from 79% to 86.5% between the two censuses, while the proportion of houses with
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piped water increased from 29% to 41%. Such transformations are signs that the urban developers have slowly but cleverly picked up on. In El Salvador, the Social Housing Fund, estimating a deficit of half a million houses, plans to expand its credit lines, which currently top out at under $22,000. The new lineof over $40,000is said to be aimed at financing the middle classes. This new orientation is probably based on two factors: 1) the fact that the demand for land and housing, stimulated largely by remittances, has pushed up the prices of lots and construction; and 2) the discovery of a new market segment that is growing on its own initiative, without construction companies, and is made up of remittance receivers with a consumption capacity far higher than that of their Nicaraguan counterparts. A study by San Salvadors Central American University revealed that 80% of people building homes with remittances are doing so on their own; the remaining 20% are modifying houses built by private builders. Thus the insistence on running the remittances through the banks: only if they are linked to banks can they dovetail with the strategies of urban developers, with minimum risks for that sector.

TACA takes off, fueled by remittances

The take-off and expansion of TACA Airline, based on Salvadoran capital, is another example of the power of remittances and migrations in expanding the markets and their profit rates. In 1979, TACAs assets were limited to three passenger planes, two cargo planes, a few limited travel routes within Central America and 300 employees. Twenty years on TACA had expanded its routes to the United States and South America and had 5,600 employees and a fleet of 81 airplanes, 33 with the capacity to carry between 110 and 150 passengers. By then it had acquired Guatemalas AVIATECA (1989), Costa Ricas LACSA and Nicaraguas LANICA (1992). One determining element in its expansion was the growing demand for flights from the United States as a result of the migratory flow of Central Americans to
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that country. In the 1990-2004 period alone, air traffic between the United States and El Salvador multiplied tenfold, from 123,000 to over 1.3 million people. The destinies with the highest demand are the states and cities with the greatest presence of Salvadorans: Los Angeles, Houston, Washington D.C., New York and San Francisco. Although TACAs routes to the United States are relatively new, it has 21 daily flights to El Salvador from different US cities, and 70% of its passengers are Central American, despite the fact that American Airlines, Continental, Delta and United have all established daily operations in the regions countries. In 2004, TACA absorbed 63% of the traffic between El Salvador and the United States. In 2005, it carried almost 2,500 passengers entering or leaving El Salvador every day. This was close to 56% of the total passengers from San Salvador, leaving just 14.6% to Continental, 13.3% to American Airlines and 2.8% to Copa.

The power of the distant brothers

In 2008, TACA became the fifth largest airline in terms of passenger volume in the agglomerated Miami airport. TACAs expansion is based on opening routes to the United States and Canada, which move an enormous number of migrants and their family members. This is visible in the social sector that now predominates in the Salvadoran airport: peasants shouldering their bundles or balancing them on their heads cross the waiting rooms to the amazement of neophytes. Over 40% of the tourists coming into El Salvador are Salvadorans living abroad. According to Nicaraguan researcher Manuel Orozco, from the Inter-American Dialogue, visiting the country of origin means more than staying with the family. The immigrants who come home to visit are also tourists and spend considerable amounts on enjoying themselves with their families, typically at least $1,000 per stay. With them in mind, TACA created the Visit Friends and Relatives (VFR) service, which accounted for 40% of its income in 2004. It captured that segment by offering unconventional services, including excess baggage, special attention
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for children and old people, special ticket prices for important Central American datesMothers Day is a particular biggieand sponsorship of religious festivities, beauty pageants and sports tournaments. Given that flow and its economic contribution, its not surprising that El Salvador is the only Central American country that pays homage to its migrants in the form of the monument to the Distant Brother at the gates of San Salvador, along the route from the airport to the city. The Kriete, Baldocchi, Dueas, Palomo and Benecke families, together with many others, have increased their fortunes thanks to the direct effects of the migratory dynamics of their now distant brothers, whom they never looked upon fondly before.

Cell phones: another baited hook

The German transnational Siemens used to sponsor Real Madrid. Every time Ronaldo scored, it was reflected in Siemens sales graph. In just one year of sponsorship (2003) Siemens mobile phone account increased from 17% to 24% of the market. Some 62% of Spaniards interviewed in one survey said they had heard of Siemens thanks to Real Madrid. The Taiwanese BenQ company went running after such success and just before declaring bankruptcy acquired Siemens mobile phone division and paid Real Madrid over $117 million to have its brand name appear on players shirts until 2010. Before collapsing, BenQ possessed 5.2% of the world cell phone market, placing sixth in the world and third in Latin America. Transnationals have known how to bait their hooks to go after the consumer appetite for image and words. The sale of communication services is expanding and has a very active market among migrants and their families. Central America is Nokia and Motorola territory; together they are responsible for 65% of the 27.4 million cell phones sold in Latin America during the second quarter of 2005. According to experts, the key to these sales is the boom in demand in the emerging markets. Are they talking about migrants?

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The Amrica Mvil telecommunications companyknown in some countries as Claro or Telecomis number five in the world and number one in Latin America. It started with 12 million clients and now has 110 million, all but 2 million of which are cell phone customers. In 2006, it invested over $3 billion in the 14 countries where it has a presence, something that seems nothing short of reckless. In 2005, it invested $68 million in El Salvador for a total of $614 million since it set up shop there in 1998. Its investments in Honduras and Nicaragua cant be far behind, as the clients from those two countries registered the companys highest increase in 2005-2006, with growth rates of 90% and 80%, respectively. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the World Bank and certain other bewildered institutions say that these countries have the lowest human development indices, the most scandalous poverty levels and national accounts that most resemble a business going under. But with a very different vision, Amrica Mvils executive director in El Salvador, Alberto Davidson, applauds the favorable economic conditions that each of the nations presents. Such settled conditions are the basis of an accelerated expansion that led it to almost 5 million clients in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Thats the equivalent of one in every seven Central Americans. In El Salvador alone, Amrica Mvil has 936,000 mobile users and 986,000 conventional lines. In other words, one in every three Salvadorans purchases his or her telephone services from the Mexican transnational. By 2005 there were nearly 2.5 million cell phones in that country. Just eight years earlier, there were only 20,122. The current proportion is five cell phones for each conventional line in a household. The Spanish transnational Movistar is hoping to increase its penetration rate from 30% to 50%, increasing its meager 15% in Nicaragua and reaching 70% in Panama. Even so, conventional lines continue being very profitable, with Amrica Mvil obtaining over $130 million in profits in El Salvador alone in 2005. The hunger for communications skyrocketed telephone consumption from 55 million minutes to 4.7 billion for national calls in El Salvador and from 262 million to 2 billion for international calls between 1997 and
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2004. Other companies could extend their operations. Telemvil, the owner of Tigo cell phones will surely make a big effort, having already introduced the Internet wireless technology WiMax, which has a range of up to 70 kilometers between the station and users.

Man cannot live by bread alone...

According to the Superintendence of Electricity and Telecommunications, 46 out of every 100 Salvadorans have a mobile phone. So how have sales been able to multiply by 1,000 in a region in which over a third of the population lives on less than a dollar a day? Remittances and the priorities of migrants and their relatives are a key factor here. Man does not live by bread alone: he also needs words. The telephone is the main means of communication between migrants and their families. The impossibility of communicating with rural areas where conventional telephone lines dont reach has spurred the introduction of cell phones. Some families of migrants have three active phones, one for every two household members, including prepubescents and babies. According to an UCA study in the region of Nonualcos, average monthly spending on cell phones is five times greater by people receiving remittances than by people who dont receive them. In El Salvador, 94% of those who receive remittances communicate with their generous relatives by telephone. A third of the countrys telephone traffic is international calls, of which 87% are to or from the United States. According to UNDP calculations, charges for outgoing international callswhich are only 10% of the total traffic in El Salvador, as incoming calls have a much greater weight may have totaled $28.6 million in 2002, of which $22 million corresponded to calls placed to the United States. The US Federal Communications Commission reported 35.5 million calls to El Salvador in 2000. That amounted to 300 million minutes and represented $180 million in income for the telephone companies.

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How can so many poor people do so much...?

A Rafael Landvar University study of Guatemalans living in West Palm Beach, Florida, revealed that the migrants and their families back home invest between $80 and $160 a month in communication, meaning that Guatemalans in that county alone spend nearly $222,000 a week and almost $12 million a year on communicating. Given that 37.5% of migrants relatives use cell phones to communicate, the companies offering that service pocket around $4.5 million a year. The growth of cell phone sales and the thousand-fold multiplication of telecommunication minutes are more evidence that were in another long expansive wave, as the capitalists have passed from the renting of technology to mass sales, something only possible through a disproportionate expansion of the markets. It was never thought that so many poor people could do so much. The remittances appeared and the technocrats at the service of the system lost no time sharpening their fangs: how to channel them from the marginal streams into the dominant current? It was a no-brainer: through the offer of irresistible services. The telephone companies, for example, offer special plans with extremely reduced rates, family plans for Salvadorans abroad and additional reductions on weekends and special days like Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Christmas and New Year.

Western Union: guest of honor at the remittance banquet

The telephone companies, airlines and urban developers are lapping it up. But those really ruling the roostwith minimum costsare the remittance transfer companies. According to information from the US Transnational Institute for Grassroots Research and Action (TIGRA), a network of 158 immigrant groups, Western Union conducted 128 million transactions in 2006 that generated it a billion dollars in profits. The official figures are somewhat less spectacular, but still incredible.
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The opening paragraph of Western Unions 2006 annual report, posted on its web page, reads, The words Thank You have always been synonymous with Western Union. Throughout our 150-year history, our business has been centered on making peoples lives easier and more productive. Without Western Union, people all over the world would not be able to work, travel or provide for their families in the way that they currently do. There follows a significant set of photographs that show Latin children and Indian and African women explaining how the transfer of remittances made it possible for them to study, while Caucasian married couples comment on how convenient the opening hours and location of Western Unions branches are for paying their bills or exercising philanthropy. The cold, hard financial indicators are preceded by sugary slogans like With each transaction comes a feeling of thankfulness and pride, Sending so much more than money and Connecting families around the world. Once the reader has been softened up with 32 pages of such affectation, the figures appear. Between 2002 and 2006, Western Union obtained $17.9 billion in gross receipts, a 63% increase, and $3.72 million in net income, an 85% in-crease. Income from individual client-to-client transactionsthe category covering remittancesrepresented 84% of the total. Un 2006, Western Union shares were valued at between $18.58 and $24.12. To obtain such profits and position itself in the market, Western Union charges 11.99% interest for transfers of $200 from certain locations in the United States to Central America. To this is added the earnings for changing dollars into national currencies. In 2006, revenue from transaction fees was just under $3.7 billion, while the income from changing currency was nearly $654 million, almost 15% of the total. All Central American migrants who sent remittances back to their home countries contribute to Western Unions exchange rate treasure chest, except Salvadorans and Panamanians, which have dollar economies. That explains why the cost of an average transfer to El Salvador is the lowest in the region (4.45%), in marked contrast with the cost of sending money to Nicaragua (6.93%) and Honduras (7.13%).
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Western Union is omnipresent. Billboards announce it in Condega and San Carlos, Zacatecoluca and San Miguel, Chichicastenango and Antigua, Tocoa and Siguatepeque, Cartago and San Jos. According to very recent calculations (February 2008) by analyst Manuel Orozco, $600 million of Nicaraguan remittances are transferred through agencies such as Western Union and Money Gram. The latter made 250 million monetary transfers in 2005 and earned around 12% of what it transferred. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) calculated that in 2004 Western Union transferred 43% of the total remittances in Honduras, 33% in Guatemala and 26% in El Salvador.

A river of dollars with able anglers

Even if the money transfer agencies only earned a net 10% of the amount transferred in the whole of Central Americaa lot circulates outside their channels and the dollarization in El Salvador deprives them of income from currency exchangetheir revenues in 2007 would be close to $1.2 billion. If we take the estimates of the total remittances transferred through Western Union and combine them with the average transfer costs and Western Unions gross profit percentage relative to revenue (21%), then Western Union made a minimum clear profit of $43.7 million from the remittances to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador alone, after deducting investment costs to expand operations, depreciation, amortization and taxes. These rivers have been very profitable for certain anglers. The fortune of Nicaraguan businessman Piero Cohen Montealegre catapulted after he founded the Airpak group, a holding company that acquired Western Unions exclusive franchise in Central America. The insistence of NGOs, analysts and migrants associations on reducing the rates runs up against a particular interest of political imperialism: the US Treasury received over $1.8 billion in income tax from Western Union between 2002 and 2006. In 2006 alone, Western Union contributed over $421 million in tax.

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WHOSE MONEY IS IT ANYWAY?

The development myth: Catch up with the rest

Theres no room for doubt that remittances are transforming the Central American economy. To all the evidence piled up here, we have to add an explosion of tourism among migrants who visit their country of origin, a land market energized by migrants investments, the adoption of Americanized urban consumption patterns aiming at middle-class status among rural families, a growing appetite for goods made in the USAor imperial brand names even if theyre made in Bangladeshand many other signs that while some choose where to live, others want to decide how to consume. As these transformations have significantly contributed to market expansion, the prophets of optimism are springing up everywhere. The pernicious myth of development has been rewritten various times, but this time with a greater print run and a flashier dust jacket. By way of minimum precaution, its worth taking a quick look at the previous editions and their Sirens songs. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, development on the operational level was defined everywhere as catching up with the rest or eliminating the lag. Naturally everyone involved took for granted that it would be a long, difficult task, but also took for granted that it was possible, as long as the right state policies were applied. In the Cold War context, each bloc of countriessegmented by their ideological predilectionsobtained resources from the dominant power in their faction to apply a range of policies that promoted either a capitalist or a communist paradise. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were enthusiastic proponents of this creed, while Lenin did something similar from the USSR. According to Wallerstein, When Lenin launched the slogan Communism equals the Soviets plus electricity he was putting forward national (economic) development as the prime objective of state policy. And when Khrushchev, decades later, said that the Soviet Union would bury the United States by the year 2000, he was venting supreme optimism about catching up.
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Development never came to these lands

The underdeveloped countries lined up behind one or the other of the two creeds. Both promised development: catching up with the industrialized countries. The significant expression of Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added unto you..., was interpreted by many social movements as Seek ye first socialism, and all else shall be added unto you. Similarly thinking the rest would be added unto them, others sought capitalismsavage or domesticated. As Wallerstein saw it, The possibility of the (economic) development of all countries came to be a universal faith, shared alike by conservatives, liberals and Marxists. The formulas each put forward to achieve such development were fiercely debated, but the possibility itself was not. In this sense, the concept of development became a basic element of the geo-cultural underpinning of the world-system, embodied in the unanimous UN decision to designate the 1970s the decade of development. But development did not come to Central America during that decade. What came instead was the energy crisis and a chain of civil wars plagued with bloody massacres. In Central America between 1950 and 1979, developmentalism adopted the form of industrialization by import substitution. In that post-World War period, the boom in the prices of the regions export products brought juicy profits that were invested in diversifying and technifying exports. Cotton, meat and sugar were added to coffee and bananas, while a substantial increase in perhectare yields thanks to the short-term effect of the green revolution allowed optimism to soar. The industrialization process accompanied the creation in 1960 of the Central American Common Market, which provided fiscal incentives to new industries. Through the Central American Bank of Economic Integration, an important financial injection from the United Statesthe power also sponsoring Central Americas
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military regimeswas channeled towards private productive infrastructure. Thanks to the growth phase, the Central American countries saw inter-regional trade multiply sevenfold.

A spectacular failure
But the experience took on water at several points. As the industries were not installed according to any regional plan, despite the initial suggestion of the UNs Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, they started competing among themselves. The winners were Guatemala and El Salvador, the countries with the greatest population density and lowest salaries. The industries substituted the importation of non-durable goods, but increased the importation of raw materials and semi-finished capital goods to build the new factories; on top of that the crisis of the seventies ruined the experience by upsetting the balance of payments. Industrialization was a spectacular failure. The weight of imports as a percentage of the GDP increased in 1980 between 26% in Guatemala and 51% in Honduras. Meanwhile, job creation was meager; between 1958 and 1972 the economic integration only created around 150,000 new direct and indirect jobs 3% of total employment and 14% of the overall increase in the work force of all five Central American countries that joined the treaty. Historian Hctor Prez Brignoli summed up the situation like this: To put it more simply, it could be said that the bill for development was increasingly hard to pay.

El Salvador: From paradise to hell

Were there any winners in this whole adventure? Sure there were. As usual, the population bore the cost and the local businesspeople and foreign investors reaped the benefits. That period was the origin or the take-off of several individual fortunes. The creditors and suppliers of the inputs demanded by these always embryonic Central American industries also won. A principle of casinos everywhere began to impose itself at that time: even those who dont bet can end up losers. Only in
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Costa Rica were the tragic effects attenuated, but at the price of an increase in public spending, growing external indebtedness and a mounting deficit in the trade balance. The Salvadorans, who have situated themselves at the apex of several models, set the pace. Just as El Salvador is the model country in the productive use of remittances and family remittances, it was the model and most mimicked country in the Alliance for Progress. US Presidents Kennedy and Johnson saw to it that El Salvador received more funds than any other country of the isthmus: US$63 million just between 1962 and 1963. The next year, when the country was governed by Colonel Julio A. Rivera, the winner of fraudulent elections, the CIA baptized El Salvador as one of the hemispheres most stable and progressive republics. In 1969, wrote historian Walter LaFeber, 300,000 Salvadoransone in every eight citizensfled this model nation of the Alliance for Progress to seek food and work in neighboring Honduras. Ten years later, the five organizations in the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front (FMLN) had erupted like the five volcanoes symbolizing Central America, transforming the country into a world model of guerrilla warfare. Hlderlins depressing but right-on conclusion resounds through this experience: What has transformed the state into a hell on earth has always been precisely mans effort to convert it into a paradise.

A major scam with a misfortunate legacy

The most serious part was the debt that was barely embryonic before the developmentalist escapade but left deep and long-term after-effects. It was a very simple capitalist mechanism: the countries of the Organization of PetroleumExporting Countries increased the price of oil, the banks into which the surplus had been deposited looked for clients, the energy crisis created clients and the Development myth provided the ideological justification. Worse yet, the interest rates on loans taken out with abandon before the energy crisis suddenly shot up, creating Latin Americas foreign debt crisis almost overnight.
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Anyone who thinks the Development chimera wasnt a great swindle should take a look at the most significant figure of that huge adventure: the foreign debt. In his book, Los nuevos amos del mundo y aquellos que se les resisten (The worlds new owners and those who resist them), Swiss economist Jean Ziegler reminds us that during the 1970s, Latin Americas debt reached nearly US$60 billion. By 1980, it had more than tripled to US$204 billion and a decade later it had reached $443 billion. By 2003, the year his book was published, it was around $750 billion. This debt, Ziegler explains, meant a transfer of a mean $25 billion to the creditors each year for the past three decades. Put differently, during these thirty years, between 30% and 35% of the income obtained from the export of the continents goods and services had to go to service the debt each year. In 2001, each Latin American owed an average of $2,550. In 2005 each Central American owed an average of $770. Honduras foreign debt had its most rapid growth in the sixties and seventies thanks to the developmentalist-inspired state intervention in services, some industries and credit dedicated to industrial and agroindustrial development, according to social scientist Marvin Barahona: The construction of infrastructure works like the Yojoa-Ro Linda and El Cajn hydroelectric projects, which were fundamental for national industrialization, constituted a significant weight in the state investments and in the overall value of the foreign debt. The illusory promise of development had a cost that Central Americans are still paying. Meanwhile, the leftist develop-mentalists announced that the dollar was about to plunge and that US imperialism was about to collapse. And for that, we Central Americans are still waiting.

Between dream peddlers and gurus of developmentalism

The Central American countries have been bouncing from panacea to panacea. Forty years ago we had the Alliance for Progress, and now the catchwords are holdings and clusters, according to a vision popularized by economist Michael
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Porter in the nineties. And of course ideologies and ideologues always accompany certain economic trends: the creed of growth optimism and guaranteed full employment was widespread during the accelerated postwar growth period of 194868. Then, once we had come out of the wave of depression that followed, we had the prophets of the final judgment and zero growth, as well as the rise of monetarist prescriptions to fight the inflation attributed to the previous Keynesian policies. Now the development banners are emblazoned with the word clusters. Capitalist strategies lace the discourse of academics turned guru. This new wave made it possible for Carlos Alberto Montanersvisit to Nicaragua to give a talk pompously and dishonestly titled How to overcome underdevelopment and become a first world country in only two generations. He wont be the last development guru, but hes certainly the closest one so far to Gabriel Garca Mrquezs character in Blacamn el bueno vendedor de milagros, standing up on a table between jars of specifics and herbs of consolation that he himself prepared and hawked at the top of his lungs. Miracle sellers like Blacamn and optimistic gurus have multiplied in this growth phase. Clinging to their manuals and recipes, they refuse to bow to all the evidence of infernos and bogs that their projects generate. In El Salvador, the model country, the institution that has most influenced the states economic policy in the past twenty years is the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUSADES). Following its proposals to the letter, the country achieved an economic growth rate of 5.9% for 1989-1994. But it then fell to 3.9% over the next five years and 1.9% in the next. The policies that sought a revival of agricultural and industrial exports also failed. El Salvadors cumulative economic growth in 1990-2004 was basically provided by the service sector (64.8%) followed by the products assembled for re-export in the maquila industry (31.1%); only the remaining 4.1% came from agriculture, according to the UNDP. Given the emigration of so many Salvadorans, the possibility of catapulting the agricultural sector into any kind of major role
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increasingly depends on the immigrant labor force of Nicaraguans and Hondurans. But can that option really turn into a continual movement?

Selling soap bubbles in dwarf economies

The reform of El Salvadors pension systemanother new World Bank and IMF development myth recipe echoed by FUSADESleft a $10 billion actuarial deficit. The national budget has assumed the financing of that deficit, which represents 2% of the GDP each year. Meanwhile, the trade gap quintupled, from $666 million (13.8% of the 1990 GDP) to just under $3 billion (nearly 20% of the 2004 GDP) in those same 14 years. Finally, to seal the economys dependence on remittances, the imports/GDP ratio has been rising incessantly, from 27.7% en 1990 to 42% in 2004. FUSADES dream sellers not only couldnt pull the appropriate reforms out of their hat, they couldnt even achieve their own anticipated results. Their policies ended up submerging the country in a round-robin state of dependence: the precarious economic situation induces migration; the migrants send remittances and the remittances sustain the growth of imports, replace the pension system, make possible the expansion of the service sector without corresponding productive growth, atomize solutions and consequently impede the required radical reform. If thats going on in the small but robust Salvadoran economy, what can we expect from the shrunken, fragile and dried up economies of Honduras and Nicaragua? It is a question optimists refuse to entertain, turning a blind eye to the evidence and continuing to hawk their rainbow-colored soap bubbles. Jesuit academic Ignacio Ellacura was always fond of distinguishing between small and dwarf universities. The first could grow over time, he would say, but the second were genetically destined to stay as they were. The development myth was the best orchestrated fallacy to veil the reality that in the world capitalist systems distribution of economic power Central America has dwarf economies, not small ones.
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The dangers of the current model

Now we have a new recipe. The new fairy tale is based on the pompous bankizing of remittances and development policies based on their inexhaustible flow. Remittances arent the only link between migration and development, but they are the most heralded, and the one that the policy makers, sellers and imposers of the IDB, IMF and some binational cooperation agencies think about most. Many of them want to turn remittances into the cornerstone of that promise of progress and development. To avoid being lulled by that tune, lets remember the distinction between development and Development. The first alludes to the geographically unequal and profoundly contradictory processes that underlie capitalist accumulation. The second refers to the projects of intervention in the Third World that emerged in a context of decolonization and cold war. Remittances were already contracted for development well before it occurred to anyone to mention their possibilities in Development. Any recruiting of remittances for the latter without bearing in mind their role in the former is fetishistic because it takes them to be the mere accumulation of transferable and bankable wealth, isolated from the conditions of their production, transfer and consumption. And it hides a monumental irony: the new development myth tells the story of those expelled by the system who rescue and perpetuate the worst of that very systemrecycling them and making them into heroes for sending money home to their relatives. The new take-offlets call it that to return to the now discarded metaphor of W.W. Rostowis called productive use of remittances. Admittedly US$12 billion annually injected into such small economies is nothing to sneeze at. But those who think its manna from heaven that will fall for all of eternity are sadly mistaken. Theres a ticking clock that needs to be explored. The fact that the growth of commerce and services are increasingly underpinned not by solid productive
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development but by the import of goods made possible by remittances is both important and threatening. But there are no signs that either the state or the private sector has any intention of correcting that skew. Meanwhile, the banks are financing production ever less. Segovia warns about this danger in the current model, noting that in the previous agroexport model, the banks heavily financed the agroexport groups. Today, the Central American banks have cut loose from the local sectors and from real production. Their logic is to make a profit in any sector that offers the greatest income. For that reason, those who are studying this evolution predict that in the next five to ten years 70% of all loans from Central American banks will be for personal consumption and not for companies. This trend is already obvious in Nicaragua, where personal loans increased from 4% of the national financial systems portfolio in 1992 to 33% in 2007.

The model is rife with contradictions

The problem of the multiple contradictions running through a model dependent on remittances is yet another danger. Given that the Central American governments havent been able to pull off the longed-for transformation of the economic structure, the system will depend on the flows continuing to grow as they have so far. But this butts up against diverse systemic tendencies of economic imperialism, political capitalisms territorial interests and group initiatives. First off is the eternal contradiction of capital: technologies reduce labor to reduce costs, but the system has an imperious need to increase demand. In the case of remittances, this means that capital needs more people receiving remittances but at the same time restricts the opportunities to offer employment to those who have to send them. Technology and re-tooling reduce employment opportunities and are therefore adopted as strategies by businesses that want to be competitive. Its hard to picture a world with more remittance receivers and fewer remittance senders. Central American remittances depend on the United
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States maintaining or even increasing wages as well as increasing the demand for labor, but the demand for labor is inversely related to technological advances and wage increases go against US competitiveness. The second factor is the strategy of the migrants and the churches and NGOs that support them. One of their main objectives is family reunification. Remittances in the reunified family simply turn into family income. The sending of money, telephone calls and holiday trips home necessarily tend to drop with family reunification.

Territorial logic v. economic logic

And in the third place are the restrictions based on a territorial logic, which are sometimes at cross purposes with economic logic: the migrant-receiving countries tend to multiply the legal, physical and police barriers to the migratory wave. But if the number of migrants doesnt increase, there will be no rise in remittances. In the short run, this contradiction can be put off by countries with a conscious interest in remittancesEl Salvador for onenegotiating residency permits and amnesties for its expatriated nationals. Territorial and economic logic can join together through a moderate deportation policy, which maintains a growing group of remittance senders but doesnt permit family reunification. A benevolent migratory policy that allows family reunification would be catastrophic for the current model, as would be cutting off the migrant flow altogether. This explains the ambivalence of the current migratory policies: moderate amnesties and Temporary Protection Status with deportations. Thats why states negotiate residency but not naturalization, which would help dissolve the emigrants national links and, of course, the remittances. On this point the logics of territory and capital complement each other. Both producealthough by apparently contradictory routes and very different means the perfect subject: a worker with deteriorated citizenship and with a group of relatives in the country of origin that depend on his or her savings.
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The win-win-win strategy is a fallacy

The proclaimed win-win-win strategyin which the migrants escape unemployment, the host country receives the temporary labor force it urgently needs and the country of origin receives remittances and at least temporarily decompresses the demand for public servicesdoesnt actually exist. The way it really works is loose-loose-win. The country of origin loses because it develops a dangerous and over time catastrophic dependence on remittances and the migrants lose because they are ripped out of their own culture and can never belong to the new one; their citizenship withers. The only winner is big capital, which obtains the ideal merchandise: cheap workers and aggressive consumers, the equivalent of DINKS (Double Income No Kids), considered consumption kings because they are entirely dedicated to generating and consuming income. Migrants, as an equally stereotypical category, are dedicated to working and beefing up their relatives consumption. Producing aborted citizenships is an attempt to resolve another contradiction in the system, but like the ones mentioned above it requires a continual injection of migrants to keep working class wages low. When migrants start considering themselves citizens with rights, when they stop having a deteriorated citizenship, the system needs more migrants, or sub-citizens, to avoid an inflationary domino effect on salaries. It needs that dual society that harks back to slavery, only now the division is citizens and non-citizens. The new slaves dont need shackles and chains. They simply are denied a paper that accredits them as citizens or as legally established residents.

Time implacably moves on

It is essential for those who want to perpetuate this model, or at least do nothing to change it, that the remittances continue to grow, as they are the fuel that powers the economic motor. And this can only happen by continuing to export more Central Americans.
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Over time, family reunification or the death of remittance receivers reduces the flow, but emotional distancing can have the same effect. In 1991, USNicaraguan researcher Peter Marchetti was the first to note a tendency for remittance amounts to slack off. His research showed an inverse relationship between the time since the migrants left and the amount of money they sent back to Nicaragua. Families whose relatives had migrated abroad less than a year before were receiving a monthly average of $84.95. The monthly average for families whose relative had left between 1 and 5 years earlier dropped to $73.19, while families whose relatives had been away for over 5 years received an average of just $65.72. Marchetti hypothesized that subsidies such as free lodging and food offered to the migrant during the first year by kinship networks abroad permit more generous remittances, which decrease as the migrant assumes more personal economic responsibilities. Fifteen years after Marchettis findings, researcher Eduardo Baumeister found that the proportion of Latinos who send remittances appears to have the form of an inverted U, a model that holds true for Nicaraguans. Baumeister suggested that the smaller proportion of remittances sent by those who migrated a long time ago could be explained by a loss of ties to the original household, and the similarly small proportion sent by very recent arrivals by the cost of adapting to the new context and the economic limitations to immediately generating stable remittances, particularly in the case of undocumented migrants.

How many must migrate in the future to maintain todays remittance rate?
Both academics agree that the time factor has a declining effect on remittances in the medium or long run. Both Marchettis downward slant and Baumeisters
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inverted U indicate that a continuous growth of remittances requires an ongoing increase in migrants. A pending task is to investigate what flow of migrants would be required in the next 20 years to maintain the growth of remittances weve seen in the past 10 years. Following the norms of the current economic model, this merchandise called migrants has to be produced on a larger scale. Exporting Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans stokes the fire of development. But not all Central Americans are exportable. Those between 18 and 25 years old are the most valued. And unfortunately, this merchandise, like all others, has its vicissitudes. Not all products function alike. The migrants that are todays Economically Active Population will eventually retire. If they manage to legalize their residency, they will demand social assistance and pensions. Will the flow of young migrants continue to maintain the volume of active contributors for the pension system to function? Will they always behave as submissively? Will the same mass always want to leave the country they were born in? The price of these migrants could vary.

Remittances are the rich gourmands crumbs with which the wealthy make more bread
Remittances are the crumbs from the table of the wealthy gourmand that the migrants surreptitiously sweep up. But the wealthy gourmands greed knows no bounds. He knows that all those crumbs can be made into many new loaves. So he comes back for them, offering cell phones and other tempting goods in exchange. The paradigm of the rational subject who makes the wisest decisionthe epistemological pivot of the productive use of remittancesis used as the basis for constructing the tall tale of the likelihood of choosing a wise end use for the remittances.
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In the story hatched by this paradigm, the characters are as flat as those of a Dickens novel. The 19th-century novel, with its one-dimensional characters, has certain advantages: it shows some facets of reality in black and white, with such accentuated features that they are easily recognizable, ideal types. But it also reduces the reality of other facets, creating a caricature. In daily life, remittances are only what theyre allowed to be. They dont come in a single package: they come as financial remittances and as cultural remittances, i.e. as money and as the appetite for things made in the USA. And that appetite expands faster than the remittances. The strategy of the poor is thus co-opted by the powerful. Everybody wants to sit at that opulent material banquet, drinking and eating more than is good for them, devouring rights and the environment as they go. But even at that, a certain amount of the income generated in the industrialized countries ends up relocated back home, so the companies multiply their investments where this income ends up. The corporations, their mergers and their franchises follow the remittances. Economic filibusterism prefers the McDonald model over the Vanderbilt model, but its no less aggressive. In this growth phase, the big transnational companies are in a better position than ever to extract the benefits even of the most perverse effects of their race for accumulation: the need to have a segment of the population migrate and support those who stayed behind by providing 20-35% of their income. The psychotropic and stupefacient ideologies of development that now talk about productive remittances ignore all the serious problems such as environmental deteriorationwaste management, deforestation, water scarcity Some countries are already experiencing a serious physical and social imbalance whose solution cannot be bought with remittances. The proportion between population and sources of drinking water in El Salvador is perhaps the most dramatic example in the region and will be the first to explode. Nicaragua currently sells meat and cheese to El Salvador at the cost of reducing the animal protein consumption of its own citizens. Will Salvadoran remittances end up buying water and leaving the poor of Nicaragua and Honduras to go thirsty?
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Obstacle, opportunity or on the verge of collapse?

It is often asked whether remittances are an obstacle to growth or an opportunity for greater growth. The fact is that they are being used by certain economic groups to expand their markets and insofar as they sustain the trade deficits with the United States theyre a key element of the free trade agreement. Its these economic groups that are getting fat off of this situation. These facts help determine the function and end use of the remittances and show how the strategy of the poor has been co-opted by transnationalized elites. But the question doesnt go far enough. A more incisive one would be: if El Salvador is breaking a new path, will it collapse before everyone emulating it catches up? Or: if remittances are an unexpected element in Kondratieffs cycles, for how long and with what consequences can they modify its duration, mitigate its effects or even reverse its direction? As the receivers of these remittances, the Central American nations havent planned for a possible shift of circumstances that could leave us facing a very dark future in which they start drying up like our rivers are doing.

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71

Strawberry Fields and Undocumented Workers Forever?

UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS FOREVER? 73

Strawberry Fields and Undocumented Workers Forever?

hen I got to Californias Salinas Valley, my eyes swam in a sea of strawberries. Looking closer, I discovered the numbers in

an economy hungry for fresh strawberries and reliant on a cheap and docile labor force. Visiting the homes of several pickers, I found struggle, clarity and change. This is the story.

Salinas Valley was catapulted to universal fame by Nobel Prize winner in literature John Steinbeck, admirer of the original Californians, those who conserved their Hispano-Mexican traditions even after the United States annexed that region in 1848.

California is the strawberry queen

In East of Eden, Steinbeck describes Salinas Valleys topsoil as deep and fertile, needing only a rainy summer to carpet it with vegetables and flowers. Much earlier it had been a redwood forest. Today this soil is scarred with long rows of strawberry plants, waves of strawberries that imitate the nearby waves of the Pacific Ocean and extend like gigantic juxtaposed zippers, without a single tree to break the view or offer escape from the lashes of the summer sun. Thousands of Latin American immigrants, the majority of them Mexicans, work these vast fields.
UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS FOREVER? 75

Some are well settled into the population centers of Salinas and Watsonville, districts that absorb 38% of Californias strawberry plantations and produce half of all the strawberries consumed in the United States. Others come only for short periods to plant or harvest. They are paid by the hour and by the box: $4.75 an hour and $0.99 a box. They work at least ten hours a day bent over in the rows between the squat plants. They are fully aware that theyre producing wealth for California, a state to which the National Agricultural Statistics Service attributed 67% of all US strawberry fields and 88% of their production in 2006, thanks to an annual yield of 59,000 pounds per acre. This was double the average 28,000 pounds of Florida, its closest rival. California has achieved this productivity thanks to the blessings of its geography and geology. Its sandy coastal soils ensure good drainage and thus avoid the concentration of salt and dampness. Given its fresh climate, the fields arent subjected to extreme temperatures. California seldom gets the blazing summer heat that literally nips the plants in the bud and deteriorates the fruits quality or the winter frost that delays the harvest and stimulates unproductive leafiness; when it does experience such weather conditions its for much briefer periods than in other states. Furthermore, the absence of torrential rainthe kiss of death at harvest timeis another feature that virtually guarantees a prosperous production, perhaps the best in the world. Californias climate allows strawberries to be grown from February to December, while in Florida the growing season is only three months long, in Oregon a maximum of seven weeks and in the other parts of the country where it is even possible to grow them, four weeks tops.

The waves of strawberries require waves of immigrants

Its proximity to Mexico offers California a continuous flow of immigrantsi.e., cheap and docile workers. The strawberry industry requires abundant labor because the focus is increasingly on fresh berries. In 1970, fresh fruit was already 64% of the total and by 2006 nearly 80% of all strawberries grown in the United
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States were sold fresh because they bring a better price: $0.72 vs. $0.28 a pound for processed ones. But fresh strawberries have to look appealing and to have been treated well, requirements that limit the possibilities of mechanization, which has shoved aside human labor in the vineyards and tomato fields. Fresh strawberries also have better quality if they come from young plants, which requires hiring workers to replant every year. In the sixties, plants were replaced every four years and in the seventies every two. And as strawberries have to be at a very precise point to be picked, teams of pickers are needed to go back over the rows almost daily. A strawberry that remains one day longer than needed wont have the appearance and flavor the market demands. Continual picking is also necessary to keep productivity high: harvested plants keep on flowering. Because of this, the number of agricultural workers in California doubles in the peak harvest periods from 225,000 to 450,000. At harvest time a small farm with 14 acres of strawberries needs to hire over 28 pickers, a medium one of 32 acres needs 64 and a large farm of 100 acres needs 200. The combination of all these advantages expanded Californias participation in the total national strawberry production from 9% in 1946 to 36% in 1953, 74% in 1988 and 88% in 2006. But all these advantages have their downside: if the farmers want to conserve them, they have no choice but to negotiate with the workers, as they did in the seventies. Alternatively, as they have done more often over time, they can take advantage of the blessing of the migratory wave.

The labor system is all about profit

US anthropologist Miriam Wells talks about the labor market regime when alluding to the configuration of policy restrictions in a labor market at a given moment. A labor market regime reflects and affects the class interests, resources and strategies at each productive level, significantly shaping the relative advantages of each class in a particular labor process.
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At times two regimes can coexist in the same country, or one can shift to the other at meteoric speed. The coexistence of different regimes was documented by Eric Wolf in Czarist Russia. The serf system predominated in its southern provinces, where the black soil guaranteed a generous and lucrative production. There the feudal lords preferred to have vassals under their control to cultivate their land their way. In the northern provinces, where the soil fertility was depressing, a system of in-kind or money payment was applied for use of their land. In those provinces, work in small-scale manufacturing or industry in the cities made these monetary or in-kind payments possible. The definition of the system is determined by what best suits the elites. In Russias case, the segmentation was spatial. In Californias case, we can trace a pendular and temporal differentiation. Before World War II, especially during the Great Depression, a system of sharing the harvest with the workers reigned. A decided shift to a salary system was imposed when the strawberry industry became uncommonly profitable and the Bracero Program provided numerous cheap and disciplined workers contracted on a short-term basis. That program was the best antidote to strikes and other forms of union pressure.

The key to profit: Control the labor force

Between the mid-sixties and the end of the seventies, the peak period of the farm worker unions strength, the harvest-sharing regime expanded again: the business delegated its plantation, maintenance and harvest to families that thus earned participation in the final benefits. The results of the harvest and commercialization imposed limits on their demands. In that period, up to half of the producers and lands were under the harvest-sharing regime. When the migrations of undocumented workers became much greater, weakening the unions, the salary regime recovered its near-total coverage.
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These regime changes have confirmed that strawberry cultivation depends greatly on the labor supply. Control of the labor force during harvests is critical to profits because labor is the main cost component. Its price, synchronization and careful execution have become the main determinants of the profit rate. Modifying other factors remains outside the farmers control. Strawberries and agricultural products in general have relatively inelastic demand: it grows very little even when prices drop or consumer incomes increase. Moreover, product differentiation is a barely accessible way to increase demand and growers are typically unable to control input prices or to increase the price of the strawberries by restricting their supply. This inability to raise prices in a highly competitive market or reduce the cost of inputs whose sale is in the hands of powerful agrochemical and credit suppliers will continue increasing their interest in productivity-raising technological innovations and the manipulation of labor costs.

Strawberries need green thumbs

Such technological innovations have reduced the need for skilled labor in US agriculture in general, allowing farmers to do without the workers best situated to make their demands felt. But peoples predilection for fresh strawberries and increasingly expanding markets has meant that, unlike other crops, strawberries keep demanding more and more workers. The fruits fragilityit bruises easily as well as its sequential point of maturity, the length of the picking season, the difficulty removing the layer of leaves and the stem from the fruit have all discouraged the adoption of plant-destroying mechanical harvesters. To preserve the points of green color, fresh strawberries are picked by twisting the stem, not pulling it. The berries must be selected by appropriate size, firmness, form and color. This pampering requires loving gardeners hands rather than rough cultivators hands. As a result of all these needs for human rather than mechanized labor, California absorbs more agricultural workers than the rest of the United States combined.
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California strawberries in the world and Latinos in California

Any agricultural labor market regime in California is characterized by a voracious appetite for workers. In 2000-2006, Californias Latino population went from 11 million (32% of the states total) to 13 million (35.5%). In little Salinas it leaped from just under 97,000 (64%) to 100,000 (71.3%). California currently has 30% of all Latinos living in the United States, followed by Texas with 19%, Florida with 8% and New York with 7%. Only New Mexicos 44% population of Latino origin exceeds Californias percentage. This increase in the Latino labor force has helped consolidate the US position as the largest strawberry grower in the world. It is followed by Spain, with a production three times lower. Italy occupies eighth place, and California alone produces more strawberries than Spain and Italy together. Between 1970 and 2006, strawberry production in the United States rose from 496 million pounds to over 2.4 billion, an increase that together with a $0.41 rise in the per-pound price meant that the value of the production went from US$106.6 million to $1.515 billion in that same period. In the past 10 years the land dedicated to strawberries increased by over 10,000 acres in California2,463 in Salinas and Watsonville alone. The predominately undocumented immigrant labor force has made this feat possible, yet the area under cultivation has grown much more than the population in those two districts. How was that magic possible?

The Bracero Program lasted over 20 years

The story beginsand has yet to endwith immigrants. To get a better perspective, we need to go back to the forties. To have more hands at the task that then disappearthe ideal migrants needed by the systemthe US government made use of one of its typical ambivalent policies: a bilateral negotiation with Mexico to import its nearest neighbors to the south. The offer was that the United States would accept the migrants, but only in a controlled way and only if needed;
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they werent allowed to stay. That negotiation jelled in a hiring program in the country of origin called the Bracero Program, which was implemented between 1942 and 1964. It was originally pushed by the Southern California farmers in league with the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation. When native workers laid down their farm tools to enlist in the Army in the early forties, these organizations explicitly pressured for a federal labor supply program. They presented their particular interests as a national defense issue for reasons of food security. But while it was assumed to be a program linked to the war, its coming on the scene proved so profitable that the farmers assured its continuation for 23 years after the war ended. During that period, the program imported nearly five million workers, at 450,000 per year in the peak period at the end of the fifties; California absorbed up to 90% of them. The bracerosdefined as temporary workers imported from Mexicocame to represent over two-thirds of all California strawberry pickers and 100% of those in the states central coast area around Salinas Valley. Those who agreed to participate in this program were brought to enormous enclosures on the border where they would wait until they were assigned to work posts. Huge signs were hung around their necks and they were stripped and sprayed with an agent that killed parasites before being allowed to cross into the United States. That certified them to work for a given period in a given place. They were provided permits for between six weeks and two months and assigned the jobs least appealing to US citizens. They werent sent to pick apples, for example, but rather strawberries, where they had to work bent over for long hours. Once inside the country, the workers were at the mercy of their employer. Many denounced the abuse and were decertified and immediately deported, together with all those who got involved in union activities or tried to negotiate wages and labor conditions. The Bracero Program directly involved the government in negotiating the labor force, making it possible for the farmers to defray the bulk of the recruitment costs and headaches.
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The farmers satisfaction with this program is more than obvious in this declaration by one of their spokespeople: Braceros were here to make a living, not to make trouble. They were family men, not juvenile delinquents like you get today. We knew we could send them back if they complained, but we rarely had to. The Bracero Program helped everyone. Mexicans supported their families and Americans made money. It was the finest Peace Corps activity in reverse. Instead of us going to their country to teach them, they came up here to learn from us.

The legendary Csar Chvez and the empowering United Farm Workers
Everything was working perfectly for the farmers until the United Farm Workers burst onto the scene, becoming the strongest farm worker union in US history. Founded by the legendary Csar Chvez and Dolores Huerta in 1962, it chalked up victories that included wage increases and improved working conditions. Csar Chvez was born in 1927 and died in 1993 in his native Arizona. At the time of his death, he was fighting the application of toxic pesticides, a banner the United Farm Workers, Lderes Campesinas and other organizations have recently taken up again. As a child Chvez had chafed at the many racist comments and warning notices that read, For Whites Only. He attended 37 different schools but felt the education they offered had nothing to do with his life as a farm worker. In 1962 he founded the Asociacin Nacional de Campesinos, which later changed its name to Campesinos Unidos, or United Farm Workers (UFW). At the beginning, few members paid their union dues, making it very difficult to finance the organizations activities. After arduous work, the UFW got the grape growers to accept collective contracts and certain labor improvements, thus winning the sympathy and affiliation of the majority of workers in that industry. By the seventies, the UFW had over 50,000 workers protected by its contracts. The grape strike in Delano, the 1966 farm worker march from Delano to Sacramento, Californias capital, and Chvezs
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water-only hunger strikes inspired by Ghandi25 days in 1968 and 1972 and 36 days in 1988focused national attention on the problems of rural workers and forced the government to approve highly unusual laws in the agricultural sector.

Strikes, marches, demands, laws, collective bargaining...

Different organizing efforts had preceded the UFW but were blocked by the growers manipulation of the braceros. Chvez skirted that by working with churches, the Senate and consumers and making an alliance with the civil rights movement. In 1964 he exercised a lot of pressure to put an end to the Bracero Program, arguing that it depressed salaries, displaced US workers and used public funds to benefit private interests. The UFW got a law pushed through according to which no bracero could replace a worker already within the country. In the fields there was no portable lavatory and workers had to drink water from the same cup, which was a beer can. They would sell that cup of water on the farms at $0.25 apiece. The temporary shelters for workers were segmented by race and a metal lean-to, often infested with mosquitoes and with no water or sanitation service or means for cooking cost over $2 a day. Added to all that, many workers were injured or died due to easily preventable accidents. The UFW got laws passed that established substantial improvements for the workers, although the bosses systematically ignored them. Every time the UFW would call a strike, the farmers brought in Chicano scabs from the neighboring area, a function the braceros had previously filled to a tee. But the work of the Catholic Church, especially the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Delano, started creating ethnic solidarity and Chicanos began to form a common front to back the UFW. Thousands of workers left the farms in the late sixties and early seventies. Fifteen or twenty cars full of UFW picketers would tour the farms and persuade or
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confront the scabs and police. Schenley Industries reacted by spraying the striking farm workers with highly toxic pesticides. As a counter-blow, the UFW organized a march in 1966 in which 70 strikers walked the nearly 340 miles from Delano to Sacramento in 25 days. Many employers folded and signed collective bargaining agreements with the UFW. The key to its success was to present the discrimination against farm workers as similar to the racism African Americans were experiencing. Californias farm workers had finally created a union that has survived over time.

Grape boycott followed by tomatoes, lettuce, strawberries

The farmers discovered to their dismay that this time the strikers wouldnt be mollified with small wage concessions; they aspired to more. And they moved to another battlefields: Chvez called on consumers to boycott grapes not bearing the UFW label. Groups of volunteers toured the big cities to organize sympathizersunions, churches, community organizations and othersto join the boycott. The UFW pinched where it hurt most: millions of consumers stopped buying grapes altogether. In 1969 alone, the losses caused by the boycott reached $20 million. Soon their fight extended to the tomato, lettuce and strawberry crops. The 1970 strike just in the strawberry fields cost $2.2 million in crop losses. All this jelled into a new awareness of the workers rights and possibilities. They began to believe change was possible, winning benefits that the workers still enjoy. Farm workers had been excluded from the benefits of many laws that strengthened urban workers. Farmers had successfully argued that these labor protections were unjust in agriculture; that farmers were already too vulnerable to workers demands given that their products were perishable. Whats more, said the farmers, they were superfluous laws because labor relations on their farms were commonly harmoniouslike family relations. Californias farm workers had to wait until 1975 to get the rights that workers in the city had won 40 years earlier. The California agricultural labor relations act
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of that year granted workers the right to organize, have union elections and collectively bargain without interference by the employer. The collective agreements guaranteed by law restricted the farmers control over the price and management of the labor force; imposed the recording of a labor file and medical plan at the employers expense; stipulated hiring and firing procedures as well as the payment of minimum wage, vacations and overtime; and established occupational conditionshealth and safety standards, including the handling of pesticides.

From guest workers to undocumented non-citizens

Even before Chvezs death, the UFW has lost many of its historic activists who were unhappy with the abandonment of the original forms of strugglestrikes and worker organizingto dedicate more emphasis to the consumer boycotts. Today, some of the UFW victories have been rolled back. Others are taking up the struggle, no less enthusiastically, but less numerously: the UFW had 27,000 affiliates in 2003. The main Achilles Heel in the new period is the migrant stream, together with the pyramid of rights in the US system. Anthropologist Miriam Wells notes ironically that the success of the civil rights and anti-poverty movement in getting recognition of citizens rights also had the effect of strengthening the relative vulnerability of non-citizens and increasing their usefulness to employers. Only a very small fraction of farm workers are US citizens. As in many other countries, agriculture is the oldest industry in the United States. The 1790 National Census reported that 90% of the countrys 4 million residents at the time were located in rural areas. That figure and its ethnic composition have varied over the past 200 years, with relatively few citizens and residents currently living in rural areas. In 2002, the Pew Hispanic Center found
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that 1.2 million (47%) of the 2.5 million wage workers who earn their living on US farms are undocumented. The number of these unauthorized or uncertified people, as they are called in many official and academic documents, increases in the peak harvest periods. The Pew Hispanic Center calculated in 2004 that of the 35.7% of the population born abroad, 10.3 million (29%) are undocumented. Of those, 2.4 million (24%) reside in California, 8.4 million (81%) came from Latin America and 6.7 million (65%) came to the United States between 1995 and 2004. According to Santos Quintero, whom we interviewed in the UFW offices in Watsonville, 90% of the workers in Californias strawberry fields today are undocumented. We also learned from Quintero that strawberry farmers put bombs in those offices in 1970, a year in which bombs and the threat of them had become a daily event for the unions. The labor regime is now characterized by an incessant flow of undocumented workers. Businesses no longer have to shape the hiring scheme and other aspects of the labor policy. They focus instead on migratory policies, knowing that this will have an oblique but immediate effect on workers vulnerability and malleability. In California, as in other states and countries, hiring immigrants helps employers maintain and increase the profit rate. Undocumented immigrants can be employed more flexibly than the braceros, legal residents or citizens. They are less inclined to make demands, and can be manipulated more easily because their employment alternatives are more limited and the threat of deportation deflates their resistance to the farmers impositions. Wells, author of Strawberry Fields. Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture, notes that the government no longer directly negotiates farm labor: its migratory policies do the negotiating by indirectly classifying workers, creating different citizenry statuses that institute an unequal access to political and economic resources.
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The farmers depend on undocumented workers

The immigrant wave has an effect similar to the Bracero Program that the UFW fought to eliminate. Established workers have fewer opportunities to exercise pressure when theres a continual supply of workers whose deteriorated citizenship gives the bosses the additional benefit of avoiding certain employer obligations. The UFW has handled the migration issue very delicately. During its opposition to the Bracero Program, it advocated greater control of the border with Mexico, but didnt exclude undocumented workers or oppose their presence in the fields. Many of its affiliates have undocumented relatives and friends. While the UFW didnt bring up the citizenship issue and proposed to involve all workers, divisions over the issue of citizenship and documents occasionally became such a sizable drag on its efforts that the UFW had to take a position. In 1974 and 1979, during the renewal of the contracts with the lettuce growers, the UFW launched a vigorous campaign against the undocumented workers on the central coast. At the time it emphasized the loss of jobs that undocumented workers were causing documented immigrants and national workers, but its main concern was the use of undocumented immigrants as strikebreakers. In part as a result of its pressures, the border control increased its captures and doubled deportations to 2,652 just in May 1979. The UFW no longer asks about the migratory status of the workers in its ranks, but the danger continues and is more threatening than the Bracero Program. That program and those that succeeded itfumigating and certifying temporary workerstipped the balance to the point that certified guest workers exceeded undocumented workers: 37% vs. 8% in 1989 and 30% vs. 17% in 1990. But by the early nineties that proportion had switched: (23% vs. 33% in 1992, widening to 15% vs. 52% in 1998). The farmers depended greatly on undocumented labor.
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A continual supply of undocumented workers is their guarantee that the UFWs pressures will never again reach the point they had in 1970 and wont be able to have substantial effects.

With a past, in the present and with a future

Another Achilles Heel was and still is that many workers obtain the benefits of the UFWs struggles without paying the price. Even at the peak period of its struggles, the UFW barely affiliated 10% of the farm workers, but many received the benefits of their sacrifices and risks without paying dues or participating in the strikes and marches, or even in the collective bargaining contracts. The companies located in areas where the UFW operated increased the wages and multiplied the work benefits to avoid their laborers joining the union. The UFW thus had a carom effect on those who werent active members. Today UFW members must pay dues of 2% of their salary, not a very attractive policy in todays every man for himself world. The particularity that workers on the farms have to unionize in blocs imposes certain limits on the advance of unionism. United Farm Worker affiliates go out to the fields, do awareness-raising work and then call for elections. Only if over 50% of the workers on a farm vote the union in can the UFW sign them up and negotiate a collective agreement with the owner. The vulnerability of the workers under the agreement is substantially reduced: they cant be fired or abused and the union intervenes to defend them if anyone tries. The UFW recently won a new victory: a law that obliges employers to keep the workers drinking water in the shade and supply a tent for the rest period to protect them from the sun. Its one more achievement that shows that the UFW has a past, a present and a future.

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Farmer and contractor: two different people, one real boss

The contractor is a figure in the current labor market system who, while not new, now appears in more vibrant colors and blown-up size. According to Santos Quintero, the contractor is usually a relatively young man or women with work experience in the field and commonly of Latino originyet more proof that servants make the worst masters. To do this job well, the most important things contractors need are connections and a vehicle to transport their recruits. They are the wizards of the system, responsible for recruiting temporary, undocumented, cheap, frequently indigenous laborers: hands applied to the task who then leave. Contactors are the liaison point, the middlemen, between the farm owners and migrants. They offer multiple services: representing the workers to the farmers, food, overcrowded housing of 10 migrants per room, transport, and money changing and other banking transactions. They receive the workers pay from the farmers and, as in the commissariats of the old Latin American haciendas, deduct the high costs of their numerous services and do whatever they can to reduce the number of validly recognized work hours and days. Not infrequently they even keep the wages and sic the police on their unsuspecting tenants, who are summarily deported before receiving so much as a dollar for their grueling period of work. Contractors are key figures for defraying farmers costs, doing it even better and more pitilessly than the government did in its time with the Bracero Program. They do the recruiting at no cost to the farmers and shoulder part of the authority functions and accompanying stigma the boss used to have. In short, theyre a hybrid between capitalist and pre-capitalist relations. They move in the capitalist world because they make possible the impersonal connection with the owner, but they also establish personalalthough ephemeralrelations
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with the workers not unlike those of the pre-capitalist hacienda foreman. The role of the employer appears split, which makes the system work beautifully: two different people but only one real boss. The contractor is a diffuse figure on the legal plane but a key player on the informal one. For the immigrants, the contractor is the real figure, their door to the US labor market. He/she is boss and commissariat rolled into one, selling recruitment, financial transactions, food, housingsuch as it isand transport. The contractor is one of those political-social institutions that determines the balance of power between workers and bosses and in this particular case guarantees the employers advantageous position. The contractor is a symptom, an effect and a cause all rolled into one: among other things a symptom of the deteriorated relations between immigrants of various generations; an effect of todays constant migratory flows of undocumented workers which make possible the contractors existence and the concomitant traps that accompany it; and a factor that allows both the boss and the state to evade their responsibilities.

Farm workers are still the worst paid

The current migratory flow and the proliferation of contractors are helping farm workers retain their status among the poorest paid workers in the United States. The US Department of Labors Bureau of Labor Statistics lists their 1988 weekly wage as averaging $202. By 2000 it had reached $304, only slightly higher than the $286 of waiters, $296 of domestic workers and $302 of cooks, but slightly below the $324 of cleaning staff. It was well below the $400 of butchers, $414 of construction workers, $467 of roof installers and $507 of carpet layers. The massive presence of Latinosa very marginalized group in the US labor marketcontributed to this situation. Latinos are more inclined to accept poorly paid work because theyre more affected by the unemployment rates. Traditional methods of measuring unemployment resulted in an 8% Latino unemployment
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rate in 2004. An alternative unemployment measurementused by the Pew Hispanic Center to include not only the unemployed included in the traditional measurement but also workers employed part time for economic reasons and workers in marginal jobs who have sought work recentlynearly doubled that rate to 15.5%. Thats below the 17.1% of non-Latin African-Americans, but much higher than non-Latin whites. This difficulty of breaking into the labor market, combined with their massive condition as undocumented workers, explains why Latinos are the poorest paid group, as the table below shows. According to Department of Labor statistics, the average weekly wage of Latinos in general is $504, the lowest of all major population categories in the United States. But as do all averages, this one hides groups that are hit even harder: first-generation migrants, who earn an average $465; women, whose average salary is just under $436; those who entered the United States after 2000, who only earn an average $381; and those who didnt go to high school, who receive $369. The agricultural wage is well below the worst of these. The average weekly wage paid in the agricultural sector is $200 below the average Latino wage. So Latinos who work in agricultureand they make up the majority in this sector are among the worst paid in a country that measures success by income, venerates the accumulation of wealth and has a movie industry that habitually lauds fairy stories about upward social mobility.

WEEKLY WAGES (MEAN AND AVERAGE) IN 2004 Latinos Average wage Mean wage 504 395 Whites 728 593 African-Americans 562 474 Others 738 581 All workers 681 550

Source: Tabulations of the Pew Hispanic Center

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The most exploited are Mixtecs, Triquis and Zapotecos

Not only the general labor market but also the labor market of US farms, and above all of California farms, are very subdivided by region and industry, and the workers are stratified along citizenship lines. There are white citizens, Asian citizens, Latino citizens, African-American citizens Legal residents are stratified into these same groups. Below them are undocumented workers, and on the bottom rung undocumented indigenous workers. The most appealing in the labor marketand in the market for tall storiesare the Mixtec, Trique and Zapotec peoples from western Oaxaca. The Mixtec family is one of the largest and most diverse of the Otomangue trunk and is divided into three groups: the Mixtec, Cuicatec and Trique. Many of them speak neither English nor Spanish, and thus end up particularly exposed to the wiles of the more unscrupulous contractors. Some activists in the Lderes Campesinas group relate the case of a young Trique woman who was paid barely $40 for two days of work from 6 am to 6 pm because the contractor assured her it was the wage in that area. Graciela Vega, who works in the strawberry fields, knows all about that danger: Some of the new ones dont know how much theyre going to earn and end up with contractors who only pay them $2 a hour. Mixtec men are ideal workers and Mixtec women are even better: they have no documents, put up no fuss, dont talk, earn little and pay a lot. They are laborers in the strictest sense of the term. They have a mouth but dont use it. They have hands that plant and pick the strawberries, for which they receive a paltry wage. And they pay what is asked of themwhich is almost always inflatedfor services that are almost always bad. This is the lowest rung of citizenship. Their rights are neither heard nor stated. In the US caste system, they are the inaudible pariahs. Indigenous migrants are also ignored in the union world. Lacking union experience and more terrorized than most by the threats of repressive bosses,
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they tend not to join unions and are more exposed to abuses. Taking this into account, the UFW has a Mixtec among its promoters, who concentrates on helping his compatriots who speak no other language.

Pesticides prohibited but used in the strawberry fields

Low wages arent the only pest plaguing immigrants who work in agriculture. They also suffer the pesticides. The sale and application of certain pesticides are controlled in the United States due to their toxicity. Methyl bromide, diazinon and abamectin are insecticides whose use is restricted, but they are nonetheless commonly applied in the strawberry fields. The Montreal Protocol, signed by 182 countries in 1992, declared that methyl destroys the ozone layer. Despite a severe reduction in its use, 35 million pounds of this insecticide were applied in US fields in 1999, half of it in California and just over half of that in its strawberry fields. Whether or not by intention, the US government has not provided more recent data. Many farmers are reluctant to stop using it, arguing that it avoids losses that could hit $150-200 million for all growers combined. The workers are suffering that reluctance. Farmers typically dont respect the lapse of time legally stipulated between fumigation and the entry of workers onto a plantation. Worse yet, given that many strawberry fields are close to schools, children end up affected by the fumigation. Farm worker leaders in Salinas are actively denouncing this disrespect for the law, which prohibits fumigating less than 500 feet away from homes and educational centers. According to their investigations, children are suffering respiratory diseases, allergy, loss of memory and irritation of the eyes and skin. It sometimes seems like the children arrive having been smoking marihuana, Lupita Miranda commented to me.
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The farm worker leaders are a light in a vale of tears and strawberries
Many US organizations work with farm workers in general. The United Farm Workers is the most powerful, but not the only one. There are also organizations headed by women that work predominately with women workers, such as the Dolores Huerta Foundation; Lderes Campesinas; Esperanza, which is the UFWs Womens Legal Initiative; the UFWs Womens Institute, Latinas Unidas por un Nuevo Amanecer; and Las Amigas. Lderes Campesinas is the organization with the greatest draw among the women who work in Salinas Valleys strawberry fields and packing plants. It was born in the late eighties as a movement of Mexican women workers and was formally founded in 1992 by Mily Trevio-Sauceda with an $8,000 donation provided by Ms. Foundation, an offshoot of the womens magazine. Its permanent team is made up of 30 women who usually were farm workers and now work in capacitybuilding, democratic decision-making, peer trainingin the style of Latin Americas Peasant to Peasant programand leadership development. It employs a mixture of traditional and innovative education and organizational methods such as home meetings and theater presentations at community events. I met with them at one of these homes, ringed by children and toys. My contact, Paula Placencia, who has been in the United States 26 years, had invited eight lively members of Lderes Campesinas to talk about their impressive work. Accompanying the chat with juice, coffee and cookies, they explained how the components on which their work is focused respond to the needs and recommendations of the female farm workers and their families: labor conditions (sexual harassment in the workplace, pesticides, occupational health and safety, wages and the workday, organic agriculture), family violence (domestic violence, sexual attacks and abuse of children and the elderly), womens health (HIV/AIDS, breast and cervical cancer, nutrition, diabetes and hypertension), development of youth leadership (adolescent pregnancy, sexual harassment, violence and date
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rape, family violence, child labor and labor conditions), a third-age program (abuse, leadership development, health and others), an Institute for Women Workers (training of female farm workers to receive credit as professionals) and the Economic Development Program, which provides job skills to female farm workers. As it matured and became more inclusive, the group got closer to Trique and Mixtec women, Central Americans and migrants from other nationalities, expanding the presence of their committees to Coachella Valley, Santa Cruz and Fresno counties and the towns of Ventura, Kern, Tulare, Madera and Merced. It has now extended its support to organizations and immigrant women as far away as Texas, Arizona, Iowa, Washington and Mexico to help them replicate its work and thus establish a southwest and binational network. It has more than 550 members, over 300 of them women and around 200 girls between 10 and 18 years old.

Other pests in the strawberry fields: Sexual harrassment and abuse

Combating sexual harassment has been one of Lderes Campesinas principal causes from the outset. Many supervisors demand sexual favors in exchange for assigning fewer hard tasks or simply in exchange for keeping their job. We just thought it was normal to have sex to keep your job in the United States, a group of women farm workers told their lawyer. The Salinas workers referred to one of the strawberry fields as the underwear field, alluding to the large number of rapes that took place there. For the same reason, the women in Florida have baptized the plantations there as the green motel. The most terrifying threat undocumented immigrants are subject to, however, is deportation. Virginia Bautista had to deal with a lot of harassment and subsequent depression given the threat of deportation or at least of losing her job for the second time with four children to raise. But then she made contact with Lderes Campesinas and became one of the 3,000 women this organization educates annually in their homes or among the strawberries they pick or pack.
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In one of these house meetings in 1999, as they snacked on burritos, nopales and tacos, they learned of the case of a female worker abused by her supervisor in Fresno county. In 2006, the jury issued a verdict obliging Harris Farms, one of the largest agricultural companies in the country, to pay $994,000 in damages. That same year a law was passed obliging all California farms with 50 or more employees to provide preventive training against sexual harassment. As a result of these struggles, forms of sexual harassment are very finely typified by California laws. Among others they include undesired sexual advances; the offer of labor benefits in exchange for sexual favors; making sexual gestures; displaying sexually suggestive objects, paintings, drawings or posters; the use of ignominious or defamatory comments, jokes or epithets; sexual comments including graphic comments about a persons body, sexually degrading descriptions of an individual or suggestive or obscene letters, notes and invitations; and physical touching or attacks as well as the blocking of movements. Despite the fervor with which they have embarked on this struggle, the active promoters of Lderes Campesinas do not see or explain things in a flat, stereotypical black and white way, even though the role of the bad guys in the movie almost always corresponds to men with power. They recognize that laws easily lead to entrapment. Ramona Barajas, who has lived in the United States 35 years, relates that her hus-band, a supervisor on a farm, was harassed by a female worker. Despite his steadfast resistance, she sued him, but after an embarrassing process, he was able to show his innocence.

The womens agenda is more complex and complete

These women go beyond the social movements traditional agenda. New problems appear in the new circumstances. Diabetes is appearing, related to the Coca Cola they drink everyday. Hypertension is appearing, associated with the excessive consumption of junk food. Gangs are appearing, related to the neglect of children, who are left in the hands of babysitters who sometimes abuse them.
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Looking into where class interests lie and into the structural dynamic of capitalism isnt enough to grasp all the changes taking place. Many things are breaking down on a day-to-day level: community, family ties, religious conceptions Care of children is a major challenge, a service that must be bought from people they dont always know well. This new situation is a source of tensions in the community. The work rhythm and the markets absorption of all interchanges have changed the situation they had in their countries of origin. Full-time remunerated work has transformed all the nooks and crannies of their life style.

Contractors and babysitters: Incarnations of evil

Although more urban and less superstitious, the migrants imagery still needs incarnations of evil to help them explain the new world and what it has in store. The new demons are secular: the contactor and the babysitter. They are at the crux of the ruptures with the traditional world. Contractors embody the bossemployee rupture. Their most profound perversity consists of intervening in that relationship and disguising the mechanisms of domination. They express the impersonal nature of capitalist relations: theres no contact with the boss, or sometimes even with his money, since he pays with a check. A middleman steps in to charge for everything that previously, on the big hacienda, was part of the wage: bed, food and transport. Babysitters embody the merchandising of human relations and the cohort of services associated with them. The babysitter charges for a service that previously formed part of non-monetarized interchanges, usurping the functions of absent aunts, grandmothers, nieces and daughters who are now far away or busy earning their own living. Her existence proclaims the disappearance of the bank of supportive exchanges through which family services were once reciprocated in either an immediate or deferred way. For that reason, her appearance and the abuse she sometimes inflicts on the children in her care become associated with the appearance of youth gangs and drug addiction.
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Social movement, informal school and community organization

These two demonizations express a central point: the community is threatened. The contractors and the malevolent babysitters express the struggle of Latinos against Latinos. Relocating or reconstructing a community is an arduous task. Redesigning it, reweaving it or imagining it takes time, creativity and sweat. How does one de-commercialize things in a society pushing steadfastly in that direction? How does one avoid opportunism in a culture that legitimizes the paid provision of every kind of service? Lderes Campesinas has before it a gigantic challenge, but its nature as a social movement, an informal school and a community organization is the ideal mix for assuming it. Lderes Campesinas is present in very diverse spheres: labor conditions, pesticides, sexual harassment, domestic abuse and violence in the streets. Its socio-dramas have become famous all over the country and its appearance in the media is frequent. Its affiliates know, however, that they still have a long row to how. Many struggles lie ahead in a region where one only begins to calculate overtime after 10 hours of agricultural work and where strawberry pickers are only upright when theyre carrying a box of fresh-picked strawberries the 25 meters to then double over again until the next box.

Why the fear of legalizing them?

To satisfy the colossal appetite for strawberries in the United States, 248 million pounds of Mexican strawberries were imported in 2006, an amount that exceeds the total export of US strawberries. For all that, however, it is still more profitable to import Latin Americans for the US strawberry market. Why not legalize those who are already there? The argument is that legalization programs only keep workers in agricultural occupations for a while: as soon as theyre happily legalized theyre very likely to leave agriculture for better paying jobs and be supplanted by new migrant workers. Experts on the issue hold that, in such a case, between 180,000 and 500,000 workers will be needed every year to replace those who move to other work.
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The solution is to stick with the current system: a good supply of workers who are undocumented keeps them captive in the lowest paying activities and those in which theyre less susceptible to being detected. To avoid an avalanche, the governments of Mexico and the United States try to reissue pendular programs of well-behaved migrants: those who come, work and return without a fuss. Such a position forgets the social security systems growing dependency on Latino workers. Latinos, a young and growing population, currently represent 14% of the US population and 13% of its labor force. Over a third of the 40 million Latinos in the US are under 18 years old. The Pew Hispanic Center calculates that by 2050 Latinos will have doubled their demographic weight and their weight in the labor force, coming to represent a quarter of the labor force around the country even if the migratory flow is reduced. The growth of the Latino population will increase its role in the economy and in financing social security. It is estimated that between 2006 and 2050, the US labor force will grow from 143 million to 182 million: 39 million more. During this same time, the Latino labor force will rise from 19 million to 46 million, a growth of 27 million. As the elderly population will grow from 35 million to 77 million, the dependency rate will rise. The 4.1 workers for every retired person could drop to 2.7 by 2025 and 2.4 by 2050. The number of Latino workers supporting a growing elderly population is rising and the social security systemunless severely reformedwill need them far more than now. Why fear them and close the doors to them?

Strawberries of wrath
Fumigated and badly paid, migrant workers live on the margins of the citizenry, but with a growing awareness of their rights and of the ways to get them respected. Xochitl Martnez, of Lderes Campesinas, gave a last bit of advice to her compaeras when our group interview concluded: You should know that John Steinbeck, whose museum is at the entry to the town, wrote Red Pony. His books deal with our rights as workers. Im now reading Grapes of Wrath. I recommend that you all read it if you want to know what the struggles of the workers here in California have been like.
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Ticaraguans: Bi-national Identities on the Liquid Border

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Ticaraguans: Bi-national Identities on the Liquid Border

he nations old wineskins can no longer hold the new wine of population dynamics, information flows and social strategies. Those living along

borders always have a foot in each country with ties that bind strong and fast on both sides. This is happening on the banks of the Ro San Juan, essence of Nicaraguan-ness, object of absurd rivalries, but also the birthplace of bi-national identities and, with more time and volition, a bi-national citizenry.

Feet run across the line. Theres no reason to feart heir murmur. What are they taking, what are they bringing? I dont know. Whats important is that they take and bring. That they intermix. That they change. That they not stop the worlds movement. It is said to be an old, immovable world. But its not blind. Let them mix, and change. Thats what I defended. The right to change. I brought something that couldnt be gotten on one side of the border or the other, only on both sides. These were hard things to understand on the two sides. (Carlos Fuentes, The Crystal Frontier*)

Patriotic furor rises again

Suddenly this October, Nicaragua ceased being a country fragmented by every man for himself to become a compact nation that knows and defends its interests.
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It was catalyzed by the media-fabricated consensus about the decision of the International Court of The Hague regarding the maritime limits between Honduras and Nicaragua. And it was harvested by three rival Presidents: Alemn, who filed the suit in 1999, Bolaos who stuck with it throughout his wobbly administration, and Ortega who is applauding the verdict with furor. The three set aside their bitter differences to welcome a verdict that culminated eight years of deliberations. The neoliberal Right, the traditional Conservative elite and a Sandinista Left in name only melded into a tress that exhibits the countrys psychedelic hairdo and celebrates the nationalist deed. The talent squandered, the efforts consumed and the taxes drainedall worthy of greater causesare spared a severe cost-benefit analysis. The homeland, as metaphor for mother, deserves our all. From their four-color top-of-the-folds and their strident, obsessively repeated extra, the media insisted that this was an affair of capital importance for the country. To dissipate any lingering doubts, the political elites spoke with one voice, philharmonic heralds of a national sentiment. Nobody mentioned the real costs of eight years of negotiations in The Hague, or its benefitsbeyond finally putting an end to a Byzantine disputebecause they always hide the fact that the elites invent fevers that those below have to sweat out and pay the bill for. With what bewitching sorcery does this imaginary hurdle get five million Nicaraguans to applaud? What if anything does it have to do with migrations, and, finally, what does it say about the possibility or impossibility of building citizenships that transcend borders?

Building nations and borders in Europe and in America

Those imaginary walls called borders delimit nations, which are themselves nothing more than administrative units. Borders are the form the state takes in so-called modern societies. But they are also spatial substrata used by those who hunger for identity to activate that self-constituting oneself/others relationship. British historian Benedict Anderson looked at the emergence of nations and nationalism
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in Unimagined Communities, a classic about the personal and cultural sensation of belonging to a nation, i.e., about that device that, according to Anderson, makes the nation conceive itself always as a profound, horizontal brotherhood, independent of the inequality and exploitation that could effectively prevail in each case. In the final analysis, he argues, it is this fraternity that has allowed so many millions of people to kill and, even more impressively, be disposed to die for such limited imaginations over the past two centuries. Europes national communities sank their roots in the semi-fortuitous interaction of different factors: the development of new ideas about how to organize themselves, the emergence of a new system of production, linguistic diversity and new communication technologies. The Enlightenment and its rationalist secularism broke down the feeling of religious community and the basis of dynastic kingdoms, both of which were global in the imagination and local in the daily practical aspects. They were succeeded by territorialized entities that at times coincided with the predominance of certain languages. Adopting some of these as official and excluding others, the state administrations undertook a selection process that meant the triumph of some languages over others: English over Gaelic, French over Breton, Castilian over Catalonian... Newspapers and books reinforced this process. The newspapers created imaginary communities of readers interested in certain ships, weddings, bishops and prices, so that readers who didnt know each other directly felt part of a collectivity with a certain range of common interests. And so it was that the press and the state apparatuses created linguistic communities that endowed the politicaladministrative delimitations with meaning. In America, and later in Africa and Asia, the colonial administrative units arbitrary and fortuitous, because they often only marked the spatial limits of particular military conquestswere the germ of realities that acquired firmness over time, influenced by geographic, political and economic factors. The diversity of soils and climates and the communication difficulties in the pre-industrial period
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laid the groundwork for a growing autonomy that the colonizing powers substantiated by establishing economic norms that buttressed the autonomous nature of the administrative fragments: the administrative entities of the great Spanish Colony in America couldnt trade with each other, but only with the metropolis. To this autonomy was added the duality of service to the Crown. The kingdom, the viceroyalty and the captaincy offered the Spanish a professional career with a lot of mobility: they could work first in Peru, then in Guatemala and later in Florida. But constrained to a small region, the colony-born creoles developed a sense of identity reduced to the administrative divisions that demarcated the limits of their own professional horizons. A spatial-group sentiment began to be generated in them that today coincides with nations. The colonial divisions threw a long shadow, as the repeatedly failed attempts at Central American integration have later shown. The only integrationist initiatives that have achieved some duration are those that multiply honorific posts and open the doors to fat paychecks for the elites, such as the Central American Parliament and the Central American Integration System.

One nation: One imagined community

Based on his historical investigations, Anderson proposes the following definition of nation: an imagined political community that is inherently limited and sovereign. It is still imagined because while members of even the smallest nation never know the majority of its compatriots, will never see them or even hear them spoken of, the image of their communion lives in the mind of each one. Nations are territorial delimitations that seem to acquire a life of their own. Despite their origins, at times neatly traceable, nations presume to have an immemorial past and look forward to an unlimited future. Nationalism converts chance into destiny. Citizens assume that the fragment of the world in which they were born was reserved for them since the big bang. And not even cosmopolitan
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skeptics such as Regis Debray step back very far from this position. Even he recognized that it is entirely accidental that I was born in France, but after all France is eternal. Conventional administrative divisions become naturalized and are perpetuated because they constitute instruments for the dominant groups. But how do so many people come to feel themselves part of a unit, to assume that they share certain features and interests? How are events unleashed in a bit of land packaged in such a way that a selection of canonic narratives and heterogeneous groups is produced that embraces certain experiences as life in common? The construction of historythat past built from the presentas a path made by a clearly identifiable collectivity is arduous work. It is partly done spontaneously, but also has its official moments and its priestly caste. Fabrication of the collective memory by historians is a key moment. Certain authors and versions are discarded and only a very select group gets a glimpse at eternity in the national bibles.

National bibles, heroic legends and the Ro San Juan

La Historia de Nicaragua and La Historia Moderna de Nicaragua by Jos Dolores Gmez, Obras histricas completas by Jernimo Prez, the three volumes of Historia de Nicaragua by Toms Ayn and the works of Po Bolaos and Carlos Cuadra Pasos have been consecrated in hardbound publications by financial entities and extensive citations by the authors of textbooks on Nicaragua. The majority of these works were written at the request of Presidents or in favor of them and their nation-building project. Certain events permitted these authors to pen heroic national legends such the hacienda peon Andrs Castro who brought down a well trained and better armed US mercenary of filibusterer William Walker with a stone, slaps to the nationalist ego such as Walkers fleeting adventure and presidency, delusions of grandeur such as the Ro San Juan as a perfect location for an inter-oceanic
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canal, and much more. In the relationship with Costa Rica, the loss of the territory of Guanacaste was and still is an open wound that bleeds into the Ro San Juan. Disputes with Costa Rica over possession and use of that river are a recurring nightmare in the Nicaraguan collective. Their reappearance are a call to unity that dissolves class differences, breaks down ideological barriers, paves common routes, stitches together dispersed initiatives and, should it come to that, disparages economic considerations and annuls the fraternity between nations. We saw all this in September 2005, when the foreign minister of a government with such little control over the state apparatus and minimum political play as Enrique Bolaos achieved surprising consensus for his chauvinist slams against the Costa Rican government. The treaties, judicial findings and agreements regarding the Ro San Juan have been so obsessively annotated in all periods of Nicaraguan history that they could be presented as our own Torah and their commentary as our Talmud. The profusion of decals claiming The Ro San Juan is Nica and the re-editions of these treaties show that the umbilical cord of Nicaraguan nationalism is buried in the Ro San Juan. In addition to the avatars of the Ro San Juan, other events, routines, habits, texts, rites and traditions also found nationality. La Pursima, the celebration of the Immaculate Conception as the redistributive value of Nicaraguan society, characterizes a certain national ethic: religious, gregarious and hospitable. Teachers have been the most tiresomely faithful organic intellectuals of nationalism, with their determination to turn the independence celebrations and all their nationalist-militarist symbology into the nucleus of their students civic education. In a country where improvisation reigns, the patriotic drummers and skinny baton twirlers in miniskirts start training nearly six months before the annually repeated event. The Gegensenow declared the cultural heritage of humanity by UNESCOis frequently presented as a compendium of Nicaraguans virtues and vices: he bamboozles the oppressor and is mischievous and affronting.
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We imagined the nation for the first time in 1980

The 1980 National Literacy Crusade was an instrument at the service of an ideological program whose scope transcended the mere lowering of the illiteracy rate and even the consciousness-building process that Paulo Freires pedagogy proposed. So Luciano Baracco analyzes it in an article that presents that massive mobilization as a nation-building project. It was the first time in the countrys history that emissaries of the state apparatus went to the furthest inch of national territory with a mission of public benefit. Generally the police and military corps are the most visible and omnipresent branches of the state, but this mission wasnt a coercive one even though the 60,000 young volunteers were referred to as an educational army, following the propensity of the time for military metaphors. The experiences of the urban high school and college students who lived for five months with illiterate peasant families often a days travel by burro past the last dirt road went well beyond teaching people to read and write. The Crusade made it possible to imagine a nation, not only in terms of a delimited community, but also a political community with a defined identity. If Anderson identified the dissemination of capitalism as an essential mechanism to link together as a national community people who are dispersed over a given territory, Baracco argues that the Literacy Crusade performed this role in a context of a weak state and scant development of capitalist relations because the massive participation generated a sense of at least temporary coincidence that had never before existed. In 1980 we imagined the nation. In other words, we imagined simultaneous events contained within a territory. Newspapers, radio programs and the Education Ministrys semi-monthly bulletin La Cruzada en marcha were instruments employed to create that unique time. In a country of illiterates, radio played the role that
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Anderson attributes to the press in European countries: it created the feeling of belonging to a place. The literacy primers, which taught about national history, generated a new cultural awareness. And in fact, the literacy effort itself laid the basis for newspapers to become a medium for relating the collective experience that founds a nation. The exchange between inhabitants of the countryside and the city and contact between social groups at different income levels cultivated a knowledge of the others to create a national community whose hegemonic discourse proclaimed an inclusive society.

Nationalist ideological packages: xenophobia, rivalry, exclusion...

The contents of nationality can be quite varied. In his indispensable book Otros amenazantes (Threatening Others), Costa Rican researcher Carlos Sandoval states that nationalism and national identities can assume diverse manifestations: on occasions they can be part of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles, but they can also be a source of exclusion and racial discrimination. We cant apply the same yardstick to the narrative of nationality that presents a nations exclusiveness based on being an ecological paradise to one that appeals to a presumed racial purity. I prefer to speak of ideological packages, where the narratives of nationality can be associated with diverse contents not intrinsic to them and can have a greater or lesser profile. As an instrument of nationality, the National Literacy Crusade was an attempt to construct an inclusive nation open to cultural diversity. New men and women were to emerge out of the consciousness-raising process. But not all ideological packages containing instruments and contents of nationality are so socially therapeutic. The majority of those with strong nationality contents foster rivalry, competitiveness and exclusion of the others, deforming reality and stirring up
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xenophobia. They exclude certain social and ethnic groupsare ethnically totalitarianand construct a false community of interests that serves as a smoke screen for the oppression of some groups by others. Many instruments of nationalism serve sinister intentions and embody dangers. Finally, the dominant groups are the ones that get the most out of nationalist consensuses.

Nationalism: With the force of religious belief

The myths, rites, practices and texts of nationality make use of certain literary techniques and rhetorical figures, as well as instruments we could consider Freudian mechanisms of that narcissistic national I. The use and abuse of these mechanisms become common sense, as Gramsci understood it: traditional grassroots conceptions of the average man, spontaneous philosophy imposed by the environment and configured by the uncritical absorption of residues of multiple cultural currents that came before. Its the ideology of the masses, configured by cultural conditions and characterized by being ingenuous, disarticulated, dogmatic, conservative and favoring passivity and acceptance of the existing social order. They are perceptions that assume the compact, granite-like, fanatic force of popular beliefs. Pierre Bourdieu would say that they not only turn into thinking, but are the very categories of what is thinkable. They grab hold like cultural trichinas and are disseminated, reproducing themselves in daily small talk, made sacred in proverbs, fossilizing into labels and vaccinating their carriers against dissent. They become impermeable to autonomous thinking. Nationalism and its instruments participate in all these characteristics, which is why nationalism has the force of religious belief. Gramsci observed that ideologies that have convinced the masses are like a faith, accepted and reproduced because they reinforce the groups cohesion and express its experiences.
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The most dramatic Central American event that exemplifies such a nationalist smoke screen and had a persuasive power comparable to religion was the socalled Soccer War of 1969 between Honduras and El Salvador, in which the masses assumed the elites nationalist interest, seeing it as common sense. The social malaise disguised its true nature, acquiring a nationalist formulation that blew up during a soccer game. The elites of both countries succeeded in giving the social convulsion the identity spin of a foreign otherin this case an entire nationas the scapegoat for all their own complaints. In Honduras, the unavailability of land wasnt attributed to the extensions of native large landholders, but to the immigrant Salvadoran smallholders. The children of Morazn didnt distinguish among different classes of Salvadorans. They didnt see their enemies as the prosperous Salvadoran industrialists who were able to take the best cut of the Central American Common Market for themselves, far outstripping the barely industrialized Honduras. The enemies they pitted themselves against were the Salvadoran peasants who had gone to Honduras in search of land denied them in their own country. Gramsci concluded that the production of common sense is the job of intellectuals linked to the dominant classes, who assume the task of seeing to it that the ideology of the most powerful becomes a common and evident grassroots cultural artifact, assumed by the masses uncritically and mechanically.

The mechanisms used by Cuadras Nicaragense

The first edition of El costarricense, by Constantino Lscaris, appeared in 1962. The first of many versions of El nicaragense by Pablo Antonio Cuadra, an intellectual of the Granada aristocracy, was released five years later on the centennial celebration of Nicaraguan poet Rubn Daros birthan emblematic date for Nicaraguan nationalism, if there is such a thing. His book was a collection of articles previously published in the pages of the conservative newspaper La Prensa.
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Only five years difference between the two: a tacit common cause? Both came out during the apogee of the Central American Common Market, perhaps to elucidate who was putting what into that market. Or to emphasize that neither Costa Rican-ness nor Nicaraguan-ness could be annulled or diluted into Central American-ness. Or possibly even to explain the disagreements, bottlenecks and opportunisms of that market, which had sunk its roots in the unequal development of the national industries as manifest destinies of the cultural heterogeneity contained within such a miniscule region. These two works, like many others, whether literary, musical, plastic, common sense, etc., are and also make use of national identity-building mechanisms. Pablo Antonio Cuadras El nicaragense is ideal for illustrating the use of certain mechanisms, not because its the only or even the most aggressive exponent of our nationality, but because its title, the attractive way its arguments are presented and its authors prominence in nationaland nationalistliterature make it emblematic. In the first place, we have the mechanism of reductionist generalization, which consists of attributing the features of a specific group to the whole population, pooh-poohing differences of class, ethnicity, gender and religion, among others. Sandoval notes that the differences among members of the same category are minimized and the differences between categories are exaggerated. This mechanism serves to distill an average, prototype Nicaraguan. Cuadra confessed that aim of offering a cultural mean: I am not trying to find Nicaraguans physiognomic middle ground, but their cultural type. But it might be advisable to follow an analogous process to that of Frobenius: take x-rays of their collective personality, mount them and see which features of this physiognomy are drawn in all of us who are participating.

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Generalization results in ethnic totalitarianism

Cuadras Nicaraguan is basically masculine and resides in the Pacific, particularly Granada and Len. Nicaragua, he says, is geographically and with respect to its population three distinct countries: the country of the Pacific (which has been the lead country, the one that has given our nationality its flavor), the country of the North and the country of the Atlantic. The country of the Atlantic, today recognized as the Caribbean, is a region whose wealth should be conquered: We are the nation of America that could put the Atlantic in our pocket. Because it is so enormous, we have forgotten that wealth or let it go to waste. According to Cuadra, the Caribbean isnt a niche of different cultures with which we should dialogue and with which weve had an exchange, most frequently one that has been pernicious for them and very advantageous for the Pacific. By definition, generalizing reduces; it constrains richness, shrinking regions and groups. Sandoval shows us how nationality narratives expel from the ideal nation regions of the country that do not coincide with its desired representation. For Cuadra, Len and Granada are the whole package. They are west, east, north and south. The houses he described and the materials they are built of are those of the Pacific, in fact characteristic of certain zones and social classes. For him, Nicaragua is a country of mestizos, and indigenous Nicaragua is relegated to a remote past and made up only of Maribios, Chorotegas, Nahuas and Aztecs. There are no Miskitus, Mayangnas or Garfunas. He explains class differences as differences of time: Nicaragua is an encounter of distinct ages. If the Caribbean cultures are expelled from the ideal geography, the poor are expelled from the present. The poor arent a group or groups struggling in the present against their exploitation; they are people who live in a backward Nicaragua, a cultural yesterday together with portions who live today and come, according to the depth of their cultural distance, from the time of the Colony, or of the last century. Exploitation is the inevitable consequence of the encounter
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between those who are backwardingenuous and trusting, made for a slower rhythmand those who are evolved, skilled in modern commercial aggressiveness. The builders of homogeneity find it preferable to talk about coexistence with different periods than about divergent interests, leaving the reader to wonder who that Nicaraguan is. The Mayangnas? The Garifunas? The inhabitants of Open 3, now known as Ciudad Sandino? The architect of nationality disguises the heterogeneity of homogeneity so that what emerges is common and community. But the result is ethnic totalitarianism and much more, because reductionist generalization isnt just a kind of literary mechanism or rhetorical recourse. It jells into a political and socioeconomic strategy with exclusionary objective concreteness.

Features, geography, history: Were unique, were exclusive

A second mechanism consists of the presumption of a monopoly on certain features: those that the population of a nation often shares with other nations are presented as if they were exclusive. Sandoval observes that images of being unique are among the most frequent elements in nationality narratives. Like many other nationophiles, Cuadra starts by laying out the cultural particularities about presumed geographic exceptionalities so theyll seem solider and more natural: Nicaraguas very geological formation already tells us that the future inhabitant of such a place will be a transient man. He then notes another unique feature: Nicaragua is discovered and formed, now not between the two Americas as in prehistoric times, but between the two oceans. But dont the other Central American countries, save El Salvador and Belize, share that feature? Feeding the myth of the doubtful strait, the construction of the canal through Panama appears as an unfortunate historical luck of the draw that snatched away Nicaraguas natural destiny.
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The particularities are explained through climate and geography: We are a country with only two seasons: winterthe realm of mudand summerthe realm of dust. A dual setting aggravated by a landscape of lakes and volcanoes. And this, of course, engenders a dual man. The particularities of the surroundings mold character: The Nicaraguan is born in the angle of a Y, in a mediterranean apex that obliges the incessant enterprise of uniting, fusing and dialoguing. After geography, history is the other determinant factor: in Nicaragua two colonizing currents from the north and south united, producing the quite original phenomenon in Americas history of a country under the bicephalous leadership of two cities. As Sandoval points out, it is common to present identities as profoundly rooted in the colonial past, but this appeal to the past contains a selection of constituting and founding determinant historical benchmarks of the national essence.

Using lyrical exaggerations

These conditioners are assumed to have given origin to unique features that arent that at all: the successive refounding of a city in different locations, our adventurous nature, the Nicaraguan as a man of illegitimate wives, a peasant whose machete is always unsheathed and an imaginative, conceited type who very often reaches a baroque extravagance of boasting. Are only Nicaraguans like that? He does it again with his claim that Nicaraguans are called the Chinese of Central America and the Jews of the isthmus, an observation that recalls Roque Daltons Love Poem, where Salvadoran migrants, scattered everywhere, are the do-anything, sell-anything, eat-anything... To highlight what is characteristic of a nation, its own thing, its uniqueness, the narrator of nationality doesnt hesitate in monopolizing Latin American and even universal features, confiscating characteristics that other nations have deployed with greater notoriety. Can we really compete with the Salvadorans over the epithet of being the Chinese of Central America, when in the sixties we
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already had them picking oranges by the thousands in Nicaragua and passing for Hondurans in Honduras? A third mechanism, closely linked to the second, is his use of hyperbole: certain features are exaggerated to the point of producing a super-endowed caricature of a national prototype. Cuadra praises Nicaraguans profuse eloquence to the extreme: If he is given the floor or gets close to a microphone, he will bathe us in flowery and exuberant oratory. He celebrates the Nicaraguans handicraft genius without restraint: The artisans are admirable for their ability to solve any problem or repair any damaged artifact with the most unexpected resources. And he eulogizes the national cuisine with disproportionate praise: We reviewed the number of plates Nicaraguans prepare based on maize and discover that just in this category our cuisine is as broad and vain as Mexicos. (I personally love indio viejo, but it will never have the gourmet sophistication or the pictorial exuberance of a good mole poblano). Not even when he wants to underscore the sobriety of the Nicaraguan household does he paint a Spartan image: Its kitchen is little more than three Paleolithic stones used to rest cooking pots on. Its chair is a stool, a box or a chicken foot: schemes of a chair. At the same time he declares that Nicaragua has the best and most natural ports in Central America. There are no limits to his effort to construct a unique type that stands out in the Central and Latin American surroundings. The maker of the nations self-identity allows himself to be swept away by his own disproportionate lyrical paroxysm.

The Costa Rican: Antipode of the Nicaraguan

Finally, we have the mechanism of ostracism and projection of the abject, which consists of expelling undesired features and projecting them onto the other. Cuadra talks about the introvertedness of Costa Ricans in contrast with Nicaraguan sociability. He characterizes the introvert as a reserved type, amorous with or
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rooted in his world environment; a type who builds to last and whose character is usually moody toward the outsider, localist, tending to impermeability and not very communicative by nature. He then states that the Nicaraguan is the opposite type, extroverted, communicative, effusive, who builds and lives on the wing or like a transient, who easily reacts with sullenness toward what is his own. The Costa Rican says Pure life while the Nicaraguan exclaims this shitty country! With the Costa Ricans the eternal antipodes of the Nicaraguan, Cuadra ensures that the latter exalts sobriety and rejects adornment: In Costa Rica, a few steps from us, the floor is painted with lime when its made of dirt, the straw hut or wood shack is painted, the home adorned to the point of artificiality. The Nicaraguan, in contrast, maintains his house or his shackIm speaking of the majoritywith its original structural nudity. All these mechanisms produce meanings, as Sandoval comments, that are not natural, but can be socially naturalized and assumed as givens, as they are imagined by specific social groups of diverse practices. They are meanings that stir up the feeling of exceptionality for building community. In a country where parties and politics dont espouse programs with any substantial differences, nationalist ideology plays the role of a hegemonic cultural factor, the only vertex to which everything flows and everything appeals to unify the popular will. Nationalism is the only secular ideology of monumental appeal that has been dressed in various garbs and continues to play a very pernicious role in relations between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, aborting interesting, mutually beneficial initiatives.

Along the Ro San Juan: National umbilical, liquid frontier

The Nicaraguan population that lives along the Ro San Juan among otters and an array of other local forest and river animals, far from all the nationalist fever, resolves its daily issues in a very different way. These people live in a liquid frontier, a demarcation that establishes a legal and political limit, but not so much a socio118 TICARAGUANS

cultural one. What do the people living along that limit say? How do they envision their country? What does it mean for those living on the geographic periphery of nationality to be Nicaraguan and relate to Costa Rica? Sandoval insists that the history of limits is a key component in geopolitical imaginations. Theres no doubt that it is for the inhabitants of the Pacific and center of the country, but is it to the same degree for the border populations? Coexistence and daily conversations with the populations on the border are a continual exercise of what Sandoval calls altercations over the nationality narratives. Border Nicaraguans live in contact with border Costa Ricans, which leads to two experiences. On the one side, as Sandoval states about the coexistence of Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans in San Jos neighborhoods, proximity seems to be a source of positive representations or, at least tends to neutralize negative images. And on the other, given that the two border populations have many interests in common, they articulate their identity not based on belonging to a nation, but on any other identification-making device: gender, religion, social class, cultural affinities and, frequently, ethnic group.

Nicaraguans of Bartola and San Juan del Norte

The altercation over nationalism is fed by a particular history. The people now living in Bartola, a district of the municipality of El Castillo, located in the western buffer zone of the Indio-Maiz Reserve, left Nueva Guinea during the war of the eighties and lived between six and nine years as refugees in Costa Rica. Many of their children and grandchildren were born there, acquiring a residency they now carefully renew every year to keep their access to Costa Ricas excellent health services. Their children study there and they themselves go there to work, some for three months, others for six and some only return to Nicaragua once in a while to keep an eye on their farm here. During the months of certain harvests oranges, bananas, coffeeBartola is nearly deserted. No one from Bartola speaks ill of Costa Rica much less of its inhabitants.
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On the eastern extreme of the Indio-Maz lies San Juan del Norte, which President Arnoldo Alemn rebaptized with its colonial name but whose inhabitants prefer to call by its other historical name, Greytown, given it by a Miskitu king to honor Sir Charles Edgard Grey, the British governor of Jamaica between 1847 and 1853. The original San Juan del Norte was actually located a bit further north along the coast, at the mouth of the Ro Indio, and was first destroyed on July 13, 1854, by US Marines then given the coup de grace a couple of decades ago by the confrontation between Sandinistas and contras. All that remains of that old site are some pivots of the ancient houses and four historical cemeteries: those of the Spanish, the British, the natives and the freemasons. The new San Juan del Norte was born in 1990, when 30 families settled 15 minutes by outboard motorboat southeast of its original setting. The majority of its residents, especially those founders, had lived for several years in Costa Rica and have close and active links with many of their relatives who remained there. Barely 1,307 people live in the 1,762 square kilometers belonging to San Juan del Norte, giving it the lowest population and the lowest population density of any municipality in Nicaragua. But its cultural diversity is impressive, a not always discernible mix of Costa Ricans, Nicaraguan mestizos, Creoles and Miskitus, and even a relatively sizable group of Ramas.

The customs, words and currency are Costa Rican

These peoples life and discourse are an ongoing rebuttal to the nationality narratives, in the first place because of their spontaneous adoption of customs, words, food and currency. Between San Juan del Norte and a little past Boca de Sbalos, over three quarters of the length of the Ro San Juan, Costa Ricas coln circulates more commonly than Nicaraguas crdoba. All prices are in colons because it makes more sense: the most vigorous trade is with Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqu and Barra del Colorado and with some shops along the riverfront, all on Costa Ricas side of the river.
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Getting from San Juan del Norte over to these towns can take an hour or so, whereas traveling upriver to San Carlos, the closest Nicaraguan city, takes twelve hours and a lot of money, because it is against the current and fuel is upwards of $4 a gallon now. In fact, its easier to get from Managua to San Juan del Norte via Costa Rica than through Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan route is complex: one hour by road to Granada then twelve by boat across Lake Nicaragua to San Carlosor nine around the lake by vehicleand finally the twelve downriver in an outboard motorboat. This time can be cut considerably taking a small plane. Its only an hour from Managua to San Carlos, but then theres a one-night layover before setting out on the inescapable day-long trip downriver. The Costa Rican route by land is seven hours from Managua to San Jos, two to Sarapiqu and one more to San Juan del Norte, and all in the same day.

A ministers patriotic shock in El Zapotal

That national isolation is a symptom of how grotesque it is to speak of national sovereignty in Nicaragua. How can you claim sovereignty over an area you can barely get to? Or over something you barely know anything about? In a recent conference offered at Managuas Central American University, environmental expert Jaime Incer Barquero observed how little we know about our countrys geological structure, its soils, its biodiversity and the potential of its lakes and other bodies of water. The most scandalous example of this micro-sapience was the discovery of the Somoto canyon by a team of Czech geologists in 2004. This canyon is less than 15 kilometers from the city of Somoto and has presumably been there for millions of years! Nonetheless, some foreign geologists had to cross half the planet in the 21st century to discover a marvel that is a little hard to miss being only 15 kilometers from the local office of the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment and 230 kilometers from the headquarters of the scholars in the Nicaraguan Institute of Territorial Studies. I guess they were too busy fighting with Honduras over steerage-ways in the ocean!
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The use of expressions and words considered strictly Costa Rican also disputes the notion of nationalisma salacious and unfair wound, in the view of many. The walkways of San Juan del Norte ring with the latest Costa Rican slang, such as Pure life to denote that things are going well. They order patacones not tostones when they want fried plantain rounds, and refer to coconuts as pipas. They listen to Costa Rican radio stations and watch Costa Rican TV channels, in part because they cant get Nicaraguan ones. The customs of these supposed others penetrate on all flanks, but especially in the institution that officially transmits culture: the students of many border towns attend Costa Rican schools and their mothers are very proud of the bilingual Spanish-English education they receive there. The school at El Zapotal is fairly new, and its ribbon-cutting was done by a high-level official of the Nicaraguan government. They arent sure whether he was the minister of education or defense, and dont much care. As God and the nation require, the event opened with the patriotic notes of the national anthem, and the children had been instructed that they should sing. The ministers jaw gaped when the children opened their mouths and out came the words to the Costa Rican anthem in perfect unison! These cross-river neighbors and their customs arent other to the people of San Juan del Norte. Their children had been attending classes in the Costa Rican school of El Jobo and to boot were awakened every morning to the radio program Panorama, which kicks off with the Costa Rican anthem. Singing it at the inauguration of their new school was one of the most natural, spontaneous and consistent ways to give the lie to the nationalist hypocrisy of those Nicaraguan elites who reserve control of the state for themselves.

My mother is Nicaragua and my adoptive mother is Costa Rica

They answer back to the narratives of nationality with their own narratives, rationalizations and mechanisms. Outstanding among them is the construction of
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a duality, a kind of compromise solution formulated succinctly by a member of the Rama community in a play on nationalisms favorite metaphor, Nicaragua is our mother, by adding, and Costa Rica is our adoptive mother. One soon discovers what hides behind the maternal dualism of these builders of bi-nationality. Enrique Gutirrez, proprietor of a pleasant hotel in San Juan, unpacks the Ramas statement for me: Our mother is Nicaragua and thus lays down the rules. But she only tells us what we cant do, without giving us a way to live. One government minister even said that helping San Juan would be like helping drug trafficking. They pay no attention to our mayor in Managua. They say, Why bother if its for San Juan? Nothings being developed here. Its Costa Rica that helps us survive. Everything comes from there. Its our adoptive mother because thats where we get meat, sausages, coffee, milk, rice, beans and all the tourists who manage to get here. Everything I have comes from there. This towns entire life depends on Costa Rica. In the next breath he tells me that the set of lounge chairs were sitting in cost him the equivalent of 5,600 crdobas in Costa Rica. In Nicaragua they were asking 14,000 crdobas and 4,000 for this television, which I bought for less than 2,000 in Costa Rica. The altercations over nationality endow its resources and concepts with new and defiant contents. Along these lines, Gutirrez repeated what he had been told by a member of the river transport commission: National sovereignty? The sovereignty of a people isnt defended with the army, but by fomenting the economy of these sites that are so remote to you all. Remote from what? From whom? Were only remote from Managuas point of view. The final game point is won by simply dissolving Costa Ricans otherness: My cousin, my aunt and uncle and my grandmother live in La Barra del Colorado. Were all the same. We dont have those tiffs here. Here we say Long live Nicaragua and Costa Rica! or Im pure tico-nica! Here its as if people first think in
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Costa Rican and then translate it into Nicaraguan. Enrique Gutirrez thus moves beyond the omnipresent nationalist temptation to draw a map with statistical differences. The border identity embraces its bi-national identity, without complexes or guilt trips.

Ticaraguans, children of Nica Ricans

It couldnt be any other way, and it never will be. The next generation will be even more bi-national, with papers and everything. The children in San Juan del Norte have to be born in the hospital in Gupiles, since the closest Nicaraguan hospital is in San Carlos, and weve already described what that trip entails. The Ticaraguan children of San Juan Nicaraguans are born in Gupiles. These infants are vaccinated against the most outrageous and pernicious collective narcissism: nationalism. And thus the daily mechanisms that dispute orthodox nationalism and its xenophobic stereotypes start to engage: the grandmother proud of her grandson who learned English thanks to Costa Ricas public bilingual school system, the migrants who have been in Costa Rica and value their experience, breaking the lenses of stereotypes into smithereens, and the border residents who live their Ticaraguan-ness and conclude, as did Marta Obregn, recognized as the best cook in the whole department of Ro San Juan: Everything here from soup to nuts is Tica. Even the currency that circulates is the coln. The day Costa Rica doesnt let us in, well die of hunger.

The bi-nationals mission is to bond; nation-states are a thing of the past

In his book In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf refers to border peoplethose with bi-national or transnational, bicultural or multicultural identitiesas crisscrossed by ethnic, religious or other fracture lines. Due precisely to that situation, he explains, such people have a mission: to weave bonds of union, dissipate misunderstandings, get some people to see reason, others to moderate their views, to make peace, to reconcile Their vocation is to be
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liaisons, bridges, mediators among the diverse communities and diverse cultures. For that reason their dilemma is laden with significance: if these people arent allowed to embrace their multiple belonging, but are continually urged to choose one side or the other, threatened to rejoin the ranks of their tribe, then, Maalouf argues, it is proper that we become concerned for the functioning of their world. Perhaps this healthy view of border people is the start of a reconfiguring process that will modernize the way our countries, fruit of ethnic mixing, religious syncretism and other jumbles, were formed. In other regions transnational identities are being rebuilt. The kind of Spanglish in which enchilada has become an English word and software a Spanish one, in which the lyrics of a song go Today you tell me something y maana otra cosa, is one of hundreds of proofs of the mixtures that strain the national wineskins and announce a world in which the political formation called the nation-state isnt up to dealing with globalization. The old wineskins of nationalism are about to burst, unable to contain the new wine of bi-national or transnational identities, global self-identities, corporate macro-mergers and much more evidence of transnationality. Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai holds that the script for the nation-state is deteriorating and that the nation-state as a political form of modernity is on its way out. Nation-states make sense as parts of a system. This systemincluding when seen as a system of differences because there is a huge gap between the state of Sri Lanka and that of Great Britainappears poorly equipped to deal with the interlinked diaspora of people and images that marks the here and now. Nationstates as units of a complex interactive system will very probably not be long-term arbiters of the relationship between globality and modernity. Modernity is at its limit, as Appadurais famous title suggests.

Could bi-national citizenries be a utopia?

In the case of those living on the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border, were talking about bi-nationalism, a phenomenon that still travels in the channels of nationalism, though it splits up its dogmas, pulverizes its certainties and mutes its choruses.
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The next step would be to construct a bi-national citizenship that corresponds to that bi-national identity. Policies can give these bi-national identities a formal expression in bi-national citizenship. German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote that the border isnt a matter of space with sociological effects, but a sociological fact formed in the space. Given that the experience of being bi-national is now a sociological facteven if not a right in San Juan del Norte and other border towns, we might ask whether the inhabitants of the border can make the cultural, social and economic transformations of their small society influence the political conception of space to the point of relativizing the border and gaining recognition from the nation-states of Costa Rica and Nicaragua of that role of bonders and peacemakers that Maalouf grants them? Its hard to imagine a dual citizenship when referring to Nicaraguans within one country but outside of both nations, who live from contraband in the Nicaraguan nation and enter as contraband into the Costa Rican one and havent been able to exercise their Nicaraguan citizenshipfor example, they dont pay into social security or ever make use of the Ministry of Labor. Conditions in Nicaragua have accustomed them not to exercise their rights. They could have a bi-national citizenship, but are developing their Costa Rican citizenship more than their Nicaraguan one. Their incipient bi-national citizenship as contraband in both countriesis hindered in Nicaragua. The Supreme Electoral Council is innately lazy about issuing identity cards and thus keeps many Nicaraguans in legal limbo. Moreover, the Nicaraguan government has put the brake on interesting initiatives, as a livewire resident of San Juan del Norte recalls: We were going to hook into the electricity grid with Costa Rica, she laments; the ISE had offered it, but the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry said no. We would now have light, good light, instead of spending so much gas on individual generators. Wed be better off annexing ourselves to Costa Rica. Whats so bad about that idea? Nicaraguas politicians never remember this forgotten place. They only come to eat and spend money, and never solve anything.
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We want to belong to Costa Rica

Many residents of Papaturro say: We want to belong to Costa Rica. The mayors office doesnt do anything through Nicaragua. If they cant get anything here, they make agreements with the other side to get it there, because the poor people here dont have anything. The near sister relations with the Costa Rican municipality of Upala saved the students from losing this school year; Upala wants to connect them to its electricity grid; and it sends them dentists with free medications. This makes it very understandable when a mother in Papaturro protests: How can we believe they consider us part of the country if they take away our doctor and teacher, who in any event passed the time in San Carlos. Now our children are going to Costa Rica and were never going to enroll in a Nicaraguan school again. They only use us when theres an electoral campaign do they use us; the rest of the time were out of sight and mind. Its quite possible that a referendum in the area would choose to leave the entire department of Ro San Juan and other extensive areas of Nicaraguan territory on the Costa Rican side. In these areas Daniel Ortega is nothing more than a face smiling from a poster taped to a post without electricity. The President even suddenly postponed his only visit to San Carlos, programmed for Saturday, October 13.

The new world citizenship

German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has been arguing for more encompassing citizenships for the past 10 years: only a democratic citizenship that doesnt close off in particularist terms can prepare the way for what he calls world citizenship status or cosmo-citizenship, which is now beginning to take shape in political communications of a world scope. The cosmopolitan state, he adds, is no longer pure fantasy, although we are still far away from it. Being a citizen of a state and being a citizen of the world is a continuum whose outline is beginning to be drawn.
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Nicaragua has the legal figure of an association of municipalities. Its not farfetched to think about establishing some sort of association between the border municipalities of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, or even among municipalities that send and receive migrants, based on diverse areas of common interest: environmental protection, establishment of a bi-national development zone with a cross-border labor market, etc. In this regard, the municipalities of both countries could be a valuable point of support for their Labor Ministries in implementing and monitoring temporary labor migration programs. One elementary task that crops up is to supply useful information about consequences, risks and rights of migrants and about institutions to which they can turn if their rights are trampled. What future lies in store for Greytown, Papaturro and El Zapotal? Will they move in this direction?

The frontier is crystal

Benedict Anderson explained how he imagines national communities. In these pages Ive tried to explain how people on the border imagine their bi-national community or bi-national identity. They have many elements to help them. The flows of mixed families and people are what Appadurai calls an ethnic landscape, which in this case is markedly bi-national. Currency, merchandise and language are weaving together a bi-national daily life, while radio and television are portraying bi-national media landscapes. But it is a conflictive bi-nationality, bristling with obstacles and lashed by tensions. The possibility of substituting the energy that doesnt come from INE with that which would come from ISE reveals the crisis of the nation-state. Obtaining identity documents in both countries involves a dual nationality denied by law but contrabanded by necessity. Life lived with a foot in each country exhibits their condition as liaison, as people who have something that can only be gotten on both sides of the border. All this shows that the nations old wineskins arent up to the task of containing the new wine of population dynamics, information flows and social strategies.
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The bi-national narratives have a collective troubadour who isnt as conspicuous as Pablo Antonio Cuadra but is more spare, realistic and effective; a disturbing, iconoclastic troubadour of nationalism who doesnt hesitate in taking up its classic images and evaluating them in the light of subversive personal experiences and who encourages us to think bi-nationally, which for now still means thinking with the nation as a political frame of reference. Thinking post-nationally takes it a step further, but thats for another day. Given that we very probably still dont have the right concepts to explain whats happening, I turn to literature, to a text by Carlos Fuentes from The Crystal Frontier, which is so full of meaning about the reification of the border: I see a line at my feet. A luminous line, painted a phosphorescent color. It shines at night. Its the only thing that shines. What is it? What does it separate? What does it divide? I have no other signs to guide me than that line. Yet I dont know what it means. The florescent line laughs at me. It stops the land from being land. Land has no divisions. The line says it does. The line says the land has been divided. The line makes the land into some other thing. What thing? It became world. I was taken out of the land and put in the world. The world summoned me. The world wanted me. But now it rejects me. It is abandoning me, forgetting me. It hurls me back to the land. But the land doesnt want me either. Instead of opening into a protective abyss, it plants me on a line. At least the abyss would embrace me. I would enter into genuine, total darkness, with no beginning or end. Now I look at the land and an indecent line divides it. The line has its own light, a painted, obscene light. Totally indifferent to my presence

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Deportees Have no Papers or Rights, Only Borders

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Deportees Have no Papers or Rights, Only Borders

xcluded in the countries of the South, rejected in those of the North, deportees are excess population, the globalized systems discards

While they may have no papers, they do have life projects. Denied their rights, such migrants are developing a form of resistance that allows them to defend those rights with a new awareness. How long will borders be used to try to block South-North migration?

When workers leave their municipality, departdepartment or province of birth for another in their same country where they have greater opportunities of getting work, politicians, economists, sociologists and development experts applaud vigorously. They call it reducing frictional unemployment. But if it occurs to workers to keep going, beyond those imaginary lines called borders, they become fugitives and are accused of blemishing sovereignty and undermining governance. Thats how Mauricio Antonio Lpez, a 31-year-old deportee from the poor Managuan neighborhood of San Judas sees it: Many of us left the country with hope, thinking things would go better for us outside our own land. But thats a mistake because once you touch foreign land, particularly if its in Mexico, you become a fugitive of justice without even committing a crime, just for having crossed a border.
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Do borders still make sense?

Borders still have an emotional charge that becomes high voltage at certain historical moments. They are extremely sensitive political nerves that surround imaginary communities governed by nation-states and delimit the scope of those states power to control populations and impose norms on their interactions. Communities demarcated by border lines must function as a whole that is comprehensible in and of itself. For methodological purposes an attempt is still made to calculate productive, commercial and intellectual activities within a territory. Every egg laid in a national henhouse is treated as a unit of analysis. Thats why notions such as gross national product, national exports, foreign investment and many others still underpin the categories that Central Banks doggedly use in estimates that ignore the reality of financial systems, industries and telecommunications dominated by transnational corporations. Methodological nationalism resists recognizing that many companies break down their productive, administrative, commercial and publicity processes to distribute them in countries with lower costs and risks. The message inviting passengers in Berlin airport to board their midnight flight is sent by a secretary in a New York office. Avoiding overtime costs knows no borders. Unscrupulous businesspeople have designed borderless businesses that cleanly elude certain labor legislation requirements and defy the calculation of added value, distribution of benefits and payment of taxes. In The Age of Access, Jeremy Rifkin speaks of the challenge of what he describes as the transition from an economy in which success is measured in physical capital to one in which it is increasingly measured in terms of control over ideas in the form of intangible intellectual capital that is already undermining consensual accounting practices. Traditional accounting procedures, designed as part of the methodological nationalism model, worked better in economies that mainly
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produced and traded physical products that were exchanged between buyers and sellers and crossed borders. They dont make as much sense in economies where the exchange of goods is less important than sharing access to services whose invention, distribution, billing and enjoyment over-fly borders.

Massive migratory flows across ever more porous borders

Many businesses operate largely in electronic spaces that levitate above any jurisdiction. The porosity of borders isnt totally new. Culturally it has led to hilarious disputes, such as the attempt to establish whether that combination of rice and beans known as gallopinto is Nicaraguan or Costa Rican, or whether the song El pitero is Honduran, Salvadoran or Nicaraguan. Among other things, globalization consists of an increase in porosity, making society less easy to regulate and less nationally comprehensible. Migrations are inscribed within this dynamic of porous borders, transnationalism and the decline of the national perspective. So where do we situate the strict migratory controls and deportations that some governments are enforcing so massively as their most visible migratory policy? More than any other factor, deportations have added two new categories to the condition nations acquire through their relationship to migratory flows. Mechanically repeating formulas coined with bureaucratic neatness, the references until now have been to countries of origin, transit and destination. Deportations have added countries of expulsion and return. And given that voluntary returns are presumed insignificant compared to forced expulsions, the countries of origin are turning into national prisons in which millions of disqualified workers are confined. Just in the past 17 years (1990-2007) the US government sent more than 24 million immigrants back to their countries of origin. How do we understand this blockade of migratory labor flows in the age of border porosity for capital?

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When migrants are seen as stubborn, irrational people

There are various visions of deportees and deportations, three of which express contrasting viewpoints based on what are assumed to be the same facts. But given that facts are never the same if addressed from distinct conceptual frameworks, analyzing these theoretical proposals obliges us to reveal the system of values underlying their version of the facts. In the first place we have the viewpoint that could be called decaffeinated, well-disposed toward the system, an epistemological debtor of that conceptualization of individual rational choices that saturates neoclassic economics and liberal philosophy. Its version of the facts might go so far as to speak of regionalized and globalized labor markets, but banks above all on a secure, ordered mobility to which all migrants, men and women, must adapt. Those who see things this way can recognize a minimum amount of human rights, but resist embracing an absolute universality. The more open-minded variant of this vision insists on equal rights between citizens and non-citizens, but would never defend a global vision that encompasses the meaning of this segregation, its systemic economic causes and socio-cultural consequences. Its most repressive variant puts national sovereignty as the ultimate principle and govern-ability of migrations as its maximum concession. These currents reached a compromise solution in the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the United Nations most important legal instrument on migrant human rights. It recognizes very significant rights for all migrants, but establishes a clear distinction between documented and undocumented migrants and the rights applied to each category. Its language tends to be very official and thus avoids any conflictive edges, or expresses them in terms of administrative dysfunctions. Its solutions, perfectly coupled to what is politically possible and correct, are thus
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expressed in commissions, visa system reforms, forums and more commissions, temporary migration programs, inter-state dialogues, networks of commissions, amnesties by quota, regional commissions, temporary protection status, logical frameworks, annual operating programs, strategic planning and follow-up systems for the commissions. All this seeks to influence rational individual choices. To those with this vision, undocumented migrants are unsubmissive and not very rational workers who, with their exaggerated flow and silly mania of not carrying documents, promote disorder and increase the migratory flow beyond the capacity of the labor market of the countries of destination to absorb in a socially governable and recyclable way. According to them, the flow of migrants must be moderate and must be channeled through temporary worker programs, temporary protection statutes and amnesties with thought-through quotas. From this perspective, rebels suffer and will continue suffering the anathema of deportation due to their own obstinacy, ignorance and economic difficulties, as well as their governments inefficiency. Receiving and emitting governmentsthe latter in the hands of foolish, insensitive elitesas well as some United Nations officials, many analysts and the vast majority of policy designers invent, repeat or keep adding chapters to this version of the facts. They are trying to produce ideal migrants who go, then work where, when and as long as they are needed, and ultimately return. Deportees are the product of disorder, hasty actors who end up in ruin. Ordering migrations implies regulating the number and fabricating temporary or circular migrations.

Ideal migrants = circular migrants with a supposedly win-win-win dynamic

Circular migration is a strategy that the United Nations has attempted to sell to civil society. On July 9, 2007, a day granted to civil society during the Global Forum on Migration and Development in Brussels, Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute in the United States presented a paper titled, Can
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migrants, countries of origin and countries of destination all win from circular migration? She proposed to define general parameters and present this proposal: circular migration is the main form of migration, especially in West Africa, where it has existed for 50 years. Civil society has many possibilities in this terrain. The practical point is to propose how people can return to their countries of origin. The key question, then, is What conditions are conducive to permanent, sustainable return of migrants to their countries of origin? If the migratory process is conducted adequately, a triple-win dynamic can be generated: the emitting countries win, the receiving countries win and the migrants win. With circular migration, the countries of destination benefit from more available labor, coverage of jobs that are unattractive to the natives and reduction of bosses labor obligations, not to mention the fact that the workers wont claim their social security as they wont be staying until retirement. The migrants win from circular migration because they maintain family contacts, satisfy financial needs and take advantage of the links between the two countries.

Babel is this visions nightmare

Although Newland favored stressing incentives for migrants to return voluntarily rather than forcing that return as a punitive measure, her pernicious candor authentic or fakedincited furious reactions from migrants and their organizations participating in the forum. A French union representative pointed out the absurdity of imposing the language of the country of destiny on the one hand and not allowing them to receive education in their native language on the other. How can we expect these migrants to feel a desire to return? he queried. A migrant added, Why would migrants who have studied, graduated as doctors and worked in well-supplied hospitals with all the equipment you need want to return to their country of origin?
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Can they imagine themselves back in Mali, where hospitals have no recourses or equipment? In general, migrants dont have the right conditions to return and establish themselves in their country of origin, so they keep migrating and tend to stay in the countries of destination. Xavier Segura, who works for a Spanish confederation of unions whose 400 offices work with and legally advise migrants, argued in the forum that circular migration seems more like a new system for getting rid of migrants when we dont need them. This suspicion was hammered home by members of the Caribbean Association of Peasants and Agricultural Workers: We tend to debate globally, but these debates dont take place in many of our countries. Furthermore, migrants dont appear as people in those debates, but as consumer goods, merchandise. Thats why you can say here: Are workers needed in such a country or region? Fine, well send them. When theres too many, we propose circular migration. And indeed Newlands concept of circularity is very static. She traces a single circle. A single round trip, then the circle freezes with a presumed definitive return to the country of origin. A more dynamic concept would imply many trips forth and back over the course of the workers life. Her proposal is symptomatic of the strategy that predominates in this version of migrations: migrants have to be created who move in moderate flows so their volume doesnt freak out the natives and whose innate programming leads them to return to their countries before they become an excess labor force that unravels the social fabric, saturates the labor market and provokes outbursts of xenophobia. This visions nightmare is Babel and its paradise the world as an accounting ledger with neatly defined assets and liabilities.

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When migrants are pieces of the economic internationalization

There is a second vision. Economic internationalization as an object of analysis has thrown new light on the meaning of deportations. Its perspective is a methodological cosmopolitanism sketched out some time ago by the authors of a prophetic text: The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere and establish connections everywhere. Through its exploitation of the world market, the bourgeoisie has given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible. This text, which so well describes todays situation, wasnt written by Arjun Appadurai, Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Ulrich Beck, Nstor Garca Canclini or any other expert on globalization, capitalist expansion or second modernity. It is an excerpt from the Manifesto of the Communist Party, written by Marx and Engels in 1848, but it describes many of the bases of the thesis sustained by US sociologist Saskia Sassen in her book Globalization and Its Discontents. Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money.
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Old controls and regulations in the new global city

Sassen starts with the evident expansive mobility of capital to reveal the sociocultural transformations that accompany it. Businesses move, but so do populations. Sassen seeks what Ulrich Beck calls the cosmopolitan perspective and methodological cosmopolitanism. But she does so avoiding the national/ global dualism, turning instead for her unit of analysis to what she calls the global citythat space transformed by the interaction of diverse ethnic groups that transnationalize themselves, but where the infrastructure available for large movements of capital continues to be vital. The huge corporations that locate their operational centers in the global cities need buildings, fiber optics, a specialized labor force, highways and workers with very diverse skills. Important components of globalization are neatly congregated in particular institutional locations linked to national territories, which is why local norms and the states action continue to play a role. Although these corporations are now trying to rule over the internationalized i.e. globalized, transnationalized, de-nationalizedspaces, local governments maintain an important regulatory role. Without adequate legal systems there wouldnt be any transnationalism. These global cities attract immigrants. Its no coincidence that the major economic nodesNew York, Frankfurt, Londonare focal points for immigrants who perform services so the headquarters of capital and their professional elites can operate to the full. The global city becomes a space of growing and brutal contrasts between globalized elites and globalized workers. The contradiction of the new globalized model resides in the fact that while the governments and economic actors of the highly developed countries are producing and implementing new conditions for the transnational economies, the migratory policy in those same countries remains focused on old conceptions of
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control and regulation. The national state is experiencing globalization as serious restrictions on its authority with respect to universal rights and the regulation of supra-national bodies. The judicial courts and offices of human rights ombudsperson have frequently encouraged family reunification and brought down the barriers erected by the migration departments against those requesting asylum. Stirred up by the lobbying of certain groups in which anti-immigrant sentiments prevail, certain sectors of the state put their energies into re-nationalizing the policies. The result of this contradiction is migratory policies that lack a cosmopolitan perspective and are infected with lethal ambiguity. Even the international legislation on refugees establishes the right to leave as a universal right but remains culpably silent about the right to enter. National migration policies are shaped by an under-standing that immigration is the consequence of a series of individual actions by the immigrants and pay no attention to the fact that migratory flows have patterns: the majority of the immigration to powerful countries comes from countries under their sphere of influence. This fact has been underscored by New York-Puerto Rican journalist Juan Gonzlez in his book Harvest of Empire. A History of Latinos in America: US immigration is the harvest of decades of imperialism.

Localisms and nationalisms against economic globalization

Migratory policies havent managed to understand migratory flows in the context of the globalization of economic activity, cultural activity and identity formation. Sassen proposes understanding migrations and ethnicity as a gamut of processes in which the global elements are localized, international labor markets are being created and everyones culture is being de-territorialized and re-territorialized.

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Globalization engenders new notions of community, identity formation and membership. Policies that ignore these processes, attributing all responsibility for migration to the immigrants as individuals, focus on the latter. Encouraged by a reaction against economic globalization, they opt for localism, nationalism and the protection of original identities. In the case of the United States, this renationalization of migration policies has been expressed with particular crudeness since the nineties as a tension between state governments and the federal government. In 1994 six statesArizona, California, Florida, New Jersey, New York and Texassued the federal government in federal courts, demanding a reimbursement of the costs implied by its failure to apply migration policies and protect the national borders. This failure had increased these states costs due to their obligation to provide education and health services even to undocumented migrants with no fiscal compensation. In a context of fiscal cost reductions, the immigrants have been tagged as the cause of increased investment in health, education and penal centers. Following this line of argument, we can state that deportations and certain limitations on immigrants rightsto bring over more relatives, for exampleare a federal government reaction to put its house in order. They aim to mitigate the social discontent and pressure by the states by re-nationalizing policies and retreating from a globalization that is distributing the benefits in a hardly satisfactory way. As individuals, the immigrants are paying the cost of systemic attacks resulting from the migration policies methodological nationalism.

When migrants are seen as human discards

The third vision, a rather apocalyptic one held by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, argues that precisely the success of modernity taken to the extreme is beginning to massively produce human discards: But a hundred years later, he writes, it seems that a fatal, possibly the most fatal result of modernitys global
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triumph, is the acute crisis of the human waste disposal industry, as each new outpost conquered by capitalist markets adds new thousands or millions to the mass of men and women already deprived of their lands, workshops and community safety nets. The production of human waste is an inseparable companion of modernity and an inescapable secondary effect of the construction of order and economic progress. Baumans position is in marked contrast with that of Sassen: labor markets and the cohort of consumers can dispense with a growing mass of people. He believes that the new planetary plenitude, the global reach of modernity, produces human surplus, a superfluous, supernumerary or excessive population, an excess of discards from the labor market and those rejected by the market economy, out of place, unapt or undesired people to a degree that exceeds the capacity of the recycling systems. These human dregs become people with no consumption capacity, unable to lead a normal life, much less a happy existence. In our society, that limitation defines them as failed consumers: defective or frustrated consumers expelled from the market. In a consumer society, their condition couldnt be worse. The essential insecurity of our times is that we all run the risk of becoming undesirable, unapt human dregs.

Many called, few chosen

Liberation theology and other visions about poverty confer a certain dignity on the poor and promise them a leading role as historical subjects in the construction of a better world. But Baumans vision of the production of human rejects gives a new and gloomy sense to the gospel statement, Many are called and few are chosen. The media invite everyone to the opulent consumer banquet, but very few are privileged enough to enjoy its succulent dishes. Bauman insists that for the consumer stimulus to be effective, it has to be transmitted in all directions, indiscriminately aimed at all those willing to hear it. But, he adds, many more
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people can hear it than can respond to the seductive message. And those who cannot are subjected daily to the dazzling spectacle of those who can. Consumption without what he calls restrictions is a sign of success, the road to fame and the applause of others. Bauman adds that even the admittedly economic migrants (that is people who follow the precept of rational choice eulogized by the neoliberal chorus, and so try to find a livelihood where it can be found, rather than staying where there is none) are openly condemned by the same governments that try hard to make flexibility of labor the prime virtue of their electorate and that exhort their native unemployed to get on their bikes and go where the buyers of labor are. As they no longer need these people, who thus become a drain on public finances, governments end up dedicating most of their time and their brain capacity in designing ever more sophisticated ways of fortifying borders and the most expedient procedures for getting rid of seekers after bread and shelter who have managed to cross the borders nevertheless. To this end borders have been created that function as asymmetrical membranes. As Bauman puts it, they let elements out, but protect against undesired entrance of elements from the other side.

Expelled from the South, rejected in the North

Migrants go in pursuit of the consumer ethic and find the absurdity of deportation. They look for the loudly proclaimed market opening and receive anathema. They are human residue in their countries of origin and then, as deportees, become residue in the countries of destination. The countries of origin will increasingly become nations of deportees, dumping grounds for the throwaways the North doesnt want to assimilate. Thats why deportation represents the physicalgeographical updating of labor, political and social non-inclusion. Just as the Mexican tomatoes blamed by the United States for the transmission of salmonella were cut from the free trade agreement, so non-certified migrants are prevented from entering the United States. It is very significant that the term
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certified is applied to vegetables, slabs of beef and migrants. Excess migrants wont enter the land of Coca Cola and ketchup. Migrants who cant find their way into Newlands circular migration agreements are those Bauman identifies as the systems discards. The preceding systemsthe first modernitycould get rid of their discards by sending them to other places: the Spanish poor of the Renaissancefrequently dubbed criminalsand the 19th-century Irish poor could be recycled in the new world. Local problems had global solutions, but they are outside the reach of the late modernity. Bauman insists that once modernity became the universal condition of humanity the effects of its planetary dominion have turned against it. With progress having reached the most remote corners of the planetwith its mercantilization, commercialization and monetarization of human subsistence there are now no local solutions to global excesses: The planets new plenitude means, essentially, an acute crisis of elimination of human waste. There are few dumping grounds or instruments for recycling the residue. As globalization involves enormous population displacements, it has become an assembly line producing residual human beings. The immigrants are throwaways in their countries of origin. If they are deported, they are totally certified throwaways. Bauman agrees with Sassen that the immigrants dont have individual responsibility. They are moved by systemic forces. Sassen sees them as predominately centripetal forces: the great metropolises attract. Bauman, on the other hand, views them as centrifugal forces: cities and rural towns of the North and South have an expelling effect. Deportees face doubly negative forces: expelled in the South, rejected in the North. Modernity has a very different sense in the versions of these two authors. Sassen believes that modernitythe global cityneeds the immigrants abundant labor and low salaries, but that this clashes with the nationalist sense of the migration policies, which respond to re-nationalizing reactions unleashed by
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globalization and generate a movement to block the flow of migrants. Bauman and Appadurai, who will be quoted later, allow us to go deeper into Sassens thesis, whose consistency invites complemen-tation. Baumans dramatic narrative insists that a growing number of human beings arent needed anywhere. His penetrating analysis could be nuanced with a more open, non-defeatist ending. Attention needs to be paid to the growing volume of these human discards and to the place that Latin Americans in general, and Central Americans in particular, occupy in that legion.

Hispanics are its panic

Between 1892 and 2007 the US government returned or removed nearly 50 million immigrants, almost a sixth of its current population, not including those who failed to enter or werent captured. And as mentioned above, almost exactly half of that number was deported in the last 17 years. Latin Americans nearly monopolize the deportees, accounting for 98.56% of all deportations in 2007. Mexicans made up 88.92% of that total, Central Americans 7.76%, and those from the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean the remaining 1.9%. Among those who obtained permanent residence in the United States in that same year, Central Americans represented 5%, compared to 19% for Mexicans and 39% for all other Latin Americans. The migra officials were not so generous in handing out residency as they were in packing up migrants and returning them to their countries of origin. This adverse skew in the US migratory policies confirms that fear of Latinos is gaining strength in that country: Hispanics are its panic. The increased deportation of Central Americans in the past eight years confirms this panic. This is demonstrated in the chart below, which shows that 2005 was the most productive year for deportations.

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Mexico: The vertical border

Mexico, that long filter with its vertical border, has been even more forceful in deporting people than the United States. One measure of the efficient service it has provided to US migration can be calibrated in the following figures: while the US National Security Department deported 472,956 Central Americans Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans and Nicaraguansbetween 2001 and 2007, the Mexican migration police detained and deported 1,128,256 citizens of the same four countries. For each Guatemalan deported by la migra gringa, its Aztec partner deported 4.6. So far in 2008, 45.3% of all deportees from Mexico were Guatemalans, 34.4% were Hondurans, 15.4% Salva-dorans and only 1.7% Nicaraguans. As was true for the United States, 2005 was also the peak year for the deportation of Central Americans from Mexico: more than 226,000 Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans and Nicaraguans. The migrant flow has very probably diminished in recent years due to the application of restrictive measures in the United States and the serious threats faced in Mexico: the Zetasformer military and now mercenaries working for the Gulf Cartelas well as extortion, rape, murder, poisoning, etc. In general, the United States has been very effective in blocking migration each time it has set out to do so. Honduras is the country most affected by deportations, followed by El Salvador and Guatemala. But deportations shouldnt be viewed in isolation: attention must be paid to other figures that are also the fallout of migration policies. Salvadorans have benefited most from the concession of permanent residence and citizenship, partly because of their enormous migratory flow and partly because of the Salvadoran governments more proactive migration policy: lobbying of the US government, the ubiquity of its consulates, the informational services provided as part of its consular attention and a deputy foreign relations minister who dedicates all her time to Salvadorans residing abroad. Relatively speaking, Panamanians are the most pampered of all Central Americans. So far this century, for every
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Panamanian deported, fourteen obtained US citizen-ship and another fourteen permanent residence. They are followed by Nicaraguans, with Costa Ricans in third place. Honduras, meanwhile, has the worst deportations to residency or citizenship ratio, with nearly four of its citizens deported for every one who obtains permanent residence and six deported for every citizenship granted. All countries experienced a drop in the naturalized/deported ratio in 20002007 compared to 1992-1996: twelve versus four naturalized for every one deported in Nicaraguas case. Several countries have seen an actual reverse in their situation: El Salvador, for example, had six naturalized for every one deported in the first period, and now has 1.58 deported for every one who gets citizenship. Guatemala had three naturalized for every one deported, and now has to sacrifice two Guatemalans on the altar of deportations just to get one recycled as a US citizen. Two Hondurans obtained citizenship for every one deported before and now six are deported for every Honduran naturalized. Bauman would say that ever more Central Americans are being thrown away than are being recycled. These figures show that the policies have become harsher and the flows (NorthSouth and vice versa) are increasing along with an increase in non-recyclable people.
CENTRAL AMERICANS DEPORTED FROM THE UNITED STATES (2000-2007) 2000 El Salvador 11,845 Guatemala Honduras Nicaragua Costa Rica Panama 7,748 12,075 1,005 328 134 2001 11,688 7,434 2002 9,209 8,344 2003 11,757 10,355 16,632 1,055 481 126 2004 19,180 14,288 26,555 1,664 571 97 2005 42,884 25,908 55,775 4,273 1,321 131 2006 46,329 25,135 33,365 3,228 803 131 2007 19,699 23,907 28,263 2,118 377 112

10,803 11,295 990 352 143 823 334 123

Source: Homeland Security Department

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When Central America took in immigrants

Central Americas migration policies are not and have not historically been much more benevolent than the US ones. Cubans were stigmatized almost throughout the region during the Cold War, while Afro-Caribbeans are still second-class citizens in Nicaragua. In El Salvador the policies had a marked European bias; in a study of the migratory movements of 1862, Jules Duval noted that while not actually offering free passage to emigrants, Salvadoran government representatives in Europe were certainly willing to facilitate it. As in other countries, those migrants were offered land and loans. At the opposite extreme was the recruitment of Chinese immigrants. The Salvadoran government authorized Poncio Darnaculleta to traffic Chinese,

CENTRAL AMERICANS DEPORTED FROM MEXICO (2001-AUGUST 2008) Guatemala 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 august Total 60,583 54,620 83,572 93,667 100,630 84,657 54,356 31,113 563,198 Honduras 37,546 33,350 59,952 73,046 79,006 59,013 38,166 23,648 403,727 El Salvador 31,464 16,802 28,979 35,270 42,952 26,930 16,753 10,592 209,742 Nicaragua 1,582 1,396 2,075 2,224 3,617 3,666 2,382 1,151 18,093 Total 131,175 106,168 174,578 204,207 226,205 174,266 111,657 66,504 1,194,760

Source: National Migrations Institute of Mexicos Government Secretariat

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CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES (2000-2007) Residence Costa Rica El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Nicaragua Panama 16,732 212,958 129,320 50,834 62,500 14,536 Citizenship 9,653 109,395 53,756 31,942 41,765 13,974 Deportation 4,567 172,591 123,119 194,763 15,156 997

Source: Homeland Security Department

according to Rodolfo Barn Castro: The businessman promised to freely contract a thousand Chinese, take them from their native land to El Salvador, and deliver them to the hacienda owners, with whom the Asians would sign a contract for an agreed number of years. The Europeans were given incentives to stay while the Chinese were supposed to insert themselves into the circular migration scheme that Newland proposes as a win-win-win strategy. There is no greater contrast than the history of the Chinese immigrants in Nicaragua and that of their German and US counterparts. Influential people in national politics were convinced that European or US immigration was needed to develop the country. As German traveler Julius Frebel described it, around 1855 General Trinidad Muoz knew that his country, and Central America in general, could only be saved by introducing human elements from the United States and Europe. Donating national land to the immigrants, facilitating the naturalization of foreigners, granting them freedom of religion were a few of the main points of the governmental program he had in mind.

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The 30 years of Conservative government and Zelayas Liberal revolution brought that program to fruition. In 1889 Nicaraguan President Evaristo Carazo offered five cents per plant and gave away 350 hectares of uncultivated national landactually indigenous communal landsto any foreigner willing to plant over 25,000 coffee shrubs. This triggered a fever to proclaim huge extensions of land as uncultivated. From 1890-1892 alone, around 17,500 hectares were proclaimed uncultivated, of which 27.54% was acquired by foreign citizens: 12.13% specifically assigned to Americans and 6.5% acquired by Germans.

The Chinese were too ugly

The attitude toward the Chinese was the extreme opposite. In 1867 the Nicaraguan government decided to take up migratory issues seriously, creating consultative com-missions of the most competent citizens in the depart-mental capitals so that Nicaragua would ultimately acquire the population size it needs and establish a judicious immigration system. Each commission issued a report. The one in Len held that the immigrants must be few and of a very good class. Rivas recommended introducing coolies, a pejorative term for Asian, particularly Chinese and Indian, workers. In the United States of the 19th century, the coolie stereotype was self-employed Chinese launderers and cooks. One citizen went to the extreme of protesting this suggestion in the Gaceta Oficial, arguing that the government should not authorize the introduction of Chinese because they are too ugly and cause horror. A moral condemnation followed this esthetic one. In 1881, in the October issue of El Ateneo, a magazine published in Len, Dr. Salvador Caldern urged the government to block Chinese immigration because the Chinese worker will always be a stranger to your language, your beliefs, your customs: once the Mongolian population is introduced into a country there is no easy way to root it out. Years later, General Duarte, then governor of the Caribbean Coast, issued Decree 31 of June 4, 1895, based on Article 17 of the 1893 Constitution, prohibiting the disembarking of Chinese immigrants in what is called the Atlantic Coast. Chinese immigrants could only evade this prohibition by paying for entry into the country.
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Servile policies with a racist face

The situation was very similar in Costa Rica. In 1916 a Blue Book was published, aimed at attracting European immigrants. Its objective, in its own words, was to inform the capitalists, tourists and businessmen abroad of Costa Ricas excellent opportunities for employment that profitably remunerates their money and their work. In contrast, scientist Clorito Picado denounced the danger of the presence of blacks: Our blood is turning black, and if this continues, no grain of gold will come out of the crucible but rather a piece of coal. There may still be time to rescue our European blood heritage, which is what has possibly saved us up to now from falling into systems with a nasty African aspect. As late as 1940, Costa Rican intellectual Yolanda Oreamuno observed that blacks are coarse of thought and slow of imagination, as passionate as an animal in heat, but guided in this by instinct. Africans and Chinese were shunned by migration policies that were extremely selective and slaves to public opinion, which associated European features with superiority and those of Africans and Chinese with moral baseness. They were servile policies with a racist face.

Carriers of physiognomy, poverty, wars and what else?

In Anthropology, Kant defines physiognomy as the art of judging what lies within a man, whether in terms of his way of thinking or his way of sensing, from his visible form and so from his exterior. Kant denies that moral and physical features have any correlation and insists that as a rule, people who never leave their own country jeer at the unfamiliar faces native to foreigners. Does a hump on the nose indicate a scoffer? Does the peculiarity of the Chinese facial structure, in which the lower jaw is said to project slightly beyond the upper, hint at their obstinacy
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or is that of the American Indian, whose forehead is overgrown with hair from both sides, a sign of innate mental deficiency? These are conjectures that permit only an uncertain interpretation. But many ideas about physiognomy have become common sense. Many citizens speak of slant-eyed Chinese and of Arabs whose frowning features reflect their killer instinct. The physiognomy of tattoos advertises ones trade: posters at border posts between Mexico and Central America warn of the tattoos presumed to be those of the mareros, members of the most fearful youth gangs. They are the latest skin color identifying the undesirables. There is also political and economic physiognomy: coming from countries where there was war, is a lot of poverty or the governing groups challenge US hegemony casts doubt on the moral rectitude of their citizens, which in turn blocks their admission into many countries. Nicaragua requires visas of citizens from 40 of the nearly 200 nations into which the planet is divided. Nations explicitly damned by the empire through declarations of war, economic embargoes and Hollywood-like interdictionsAfghanistan, China, North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine and Vietnam, among othersfigure on Nicaraguas list of nations handled with the bureaucratic caution of the consulted visa: category C according to its official nomenclature. Also on that list are countries condemned by the world economic system: Albania, Angola, Armenia, Bangladesh, Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Laos, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan. The Nicaraguan Foreign Ministrys web page admits the possibility of redemption for the citizens of countries named on these lists when they hold residence of the United States of America, England or Canada in their passports. In these cases the Consulate will issue the visa without major fuss. Nicaragua is a country of transit toward the United States and Canada, two of the globes blessed countries. Although it has no stake in doing so, Nicaragua
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detains migrants in transit in a Migratory Retention Center. In the three cellstwo for men and one for womenone can usually find undocumented travelers from China, Japan, Somalia, Guinea, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. At times they are accompanied by Guatemalans, Hondurans or Canadians who work as coyotes. They also often share cells with drug traffickers and suspected murderers.

Uncertainty and fear of small numbers

Why do restrictive migratory policies sell so well? In his book Fear of Small Numbers, Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues that the problem is rooted in the idea of predominant and representative national ethnicity that underpins the modern idea of nation-state. No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion, is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius. The idea of a singular national ethnicity is not spontaneous. It has been produced and naturalized at a very high cost, through rhetoric, wars and sacrifice, punitive disciplines of linguistic and educational uniformity and the subordination of myriad local and regional traditions to produce what we call Indians, French, Indonesians, Costa Ricans. The path from a predominant and representative ethnicity to the cosmology of a sacred nation and ethnic purity is flat and direct. Nonetheless, this isnt enough to lead to wars of ethnic cleansing or restrictive migratory policies. Another element needs to come into play: uncertainty. In our times, uncertainty is associated with the globalization processes: the speed at which material and ideological elements now circulate across national borders has generated a growing feeling of uncertainty about who can be labeled them/theirs or us/ours. Globalization volatilizes the old certainties about a stable and sovereign territory, a population that can be measured and contained within a circumscription, a realistic census and a few stable and transparent categories. The reaction is to segregate, reject and attack.
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Rejection and violence can create macabre forms of certainty and turn into brutal techniques to determine who are ours and who the others are. Bauman observes that throwing a certain class of outsiders from their homes and stores is a way of exorcising for some time the terrifying specter of uncertainty and insecurity. Border barriers, apparently carefully erected to impede access to false asylum seekers and purely economic immigrants, serve to bolster the unstable, erratic and unpredictable existence of those within. Thats why globalization produces new incentives for cultural purification. Although Latinos may seem a minority, they endanger the ethnic, religious and social purity of the United States. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) are stained by olive-skinned Latin American Catholic indigenous people. They are feared because it only takes small numbers to jeopardize purity.

Multicultural or mixophobic times?

That fear is expressed in mixophobia, a feature that Bauman says shows up in a marked form in current societies: Mixophobia is manifested in an impulse to find islands of similarity and equality in the middle of the sea of diversity and difference. This trend seeks to ensurefor oneself and those close to oneterritories free from the disorder and confusion being imposed. A community of like-minded people functions as an insurance policy against the dangers of daily life in a multilingual world and the continual friction with different ethnic groups and their multicolored customs. In this way it is possible to avoid the effort of opening up and understanding the different moral codes, bodily and verbal linguistic codes and the like. Mixophobia occurs at the very center of the new Babels. Reverend Rolf Pearson worked some eight years in Lutheran Church missions in the Middle East. He notes that 85% of the population in the Persian Gulf is foreign: 15 million immigrants from Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland, Armenia, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Kazajstan and China, among others. The labor camps to which they are confined are highly controlled Babels where the inhabitants earn $100 a month,
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while the minimum salary for natives is $1,500. The migrations have drastically disrupted the ethnic composition of many localities. Rumanians migrate to Italy, Spain and Germany, while Moravians and Chinese populate empty villages in that no-mans land where the foreign companies come to establish their own labor legislation. Chinatowns proliferate under the impatient gaze of natives who have not yet left. Mixophobia blossoms in that context. There are no NGOs or other vestige of civil society in the Persian Gulf. Even the churches find it very difficult to operate and lobby. Their leaders fear the loss of their privileges, with the consequence that no one speaks for the immigrants and deportations climb, spreading throughout the world. According to Vivi Akakpo of the Kenya-based All Africa Conference of Churches, just in the first half of 2006, South Africa deported 50,000 Zimbabwean immigrants. Each African deported from Europe is escorted by three police officers. Thousands of African and Asian immigrants have died trying to get to Europe. Mixophobia doesnt measure costs. According to Sonia Lokku, of the prestigious French NGO CIMADE, each deportee from France costs 27,000 euros.

Anti-immigrant CPCs in Malaysia

In some regions and countries the mixophobia is manifested with brutal violence. Malaysia has become one of the most xenophobic societies in the world. In 2005, through an amendment to Malaysias essential regulations, the government conferred on the Ikatan Relawan Rakyat (RELA), which translates to Peoples Volunteer Corps, the faculty of demanding documents, carrying arms, making arrests and raiding public and private premises with no need for arrest or search warrants. Since that time it has deployed excessive force and implemented numerous illegal detentions and distortions. RELA dates back to 1972, when it was given the same functions that Daniel Ortegas Councils of Citizens Power (CPCs) have in Nicaragua: to be the governments vigilant eyes and ears. RELA is now made up of nearly half a
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million volunteers who enjoy legal immunity and busy themselves maintaining order by apprehending undocu-mented migrants coming mainly from Myanmar, India and Nepal. They are fully uniformed, armed paramilitary bodies prepared to invade migrants houses at midnight, treat them brutally, destroy ID cards, burn work permits, demand bribes and confiscate cell phones, jewelry, clothing and household goods before cuffing the migrants and taking them to the detention camps for illegal migrants. They are indifferent to denunciations from Human Rights Watch because the 2005 amendment has granted them unprecedented and unrivalled power.

When five cant be six

Mixophobia is brilliantly described in the one-paragraph short story titled Community by Franz Kafka: We are five friends. Once we came out of a house one after the other Finally we all stood in a row. People began to notice us, pointed to us, and said: Those five just came out of that house. Since then we have lived together. It would be a peaceful life if a sixth one were not always trying to mix in. He does nothing to us, but he gets on our nerves, that is enough. Why does he butt in where hes not wanted? We dont know him and dont want to accept him. To be sure, we five also did not know each other before, and if you will, we dont really know each other now either; but what is possible and tolerated with the five of us is not possible and not tolerated with that sixth one. Moreover, we are five and we dont want to be six. And whats the point of this continual being together, anyway? Even with the five of us it doesnt have any point, but now were together, after all, and we will stay that way, but we dont want a new association, indeed because of our experience. But how are we supposed to make all that clear to the sixth one? Long explanations already would almost signify an acceptance into our group. It is better to explain nothing and not accept him. Let him pout as much as he likes, we will elbow him away; but however much we shove him away, he comes back.
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The United States is diametrically opposed to Sweden

This exclusion-based community building has reached alarming levels in some societies, in manifest contradiction with the ideals they profess. The refugee flows have put many societies hospitality, solidarity and willingness to expand the sense of community to the test. That refugee test situates Sweden and the United States at opposing poles. The majority of Iraqs two million refugeesthe fastest growing refugee group in the worldare living in Syria, Jordan and Iran, but a large number is in Europe. Sweden has accepted over half of all Iraqi applications for asylum in Europe. In 2007, over 9,000 Iraqis left their country to live in Sweden, a country that approves between 80 and 90% of all asylum requests. It is estimated that around 79,000 Iraqis now call Sweden home, having started arriving in the nineties. At the other extreme is the United States, where barely 5,316 Iraqis were accepted as refugees between 2001 and 2007. The National Security Department claims security reasons for such a meager figure in a country that supposedly started the war to help those to whom it is now closing its borders. The tiny city of Sodertalje on the outskirts of Stockholm welcomed 5,500 Iraqis in the past five years. If Sodertaljes 80,000 residents could find room for 5,500 Iraqis, are we to understand that the roughly 300 million residents of the United States find it extremely uncom-fortable to live with an even smaller number? The few Iraqis admitted to the United States are subjected to an enhanced process that includes additional interviews, biometric selection and matching their file against employers data bases. None of these procedures is necessarily required in the case of non-Iraqi refugees. In the same 2001-2007 period, the United States admitted 22,516 Iranians, 20,573 Cubans and 11,864 Vietnamese, all from countries that are not facing a situation remotely similar to Iraqs. The United States, which together with Israel is responsible for several of the wars that have produced the most refugees, has reduced its annual acceptance of refugees from nearly 98,000 in
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the eighties and nineties to 49,000 so far in this century. And the refugees and asylum seekers, in Baumans judgment, have now replaced the evil-eyed witches and other unrepentant evil-doers, the malignant spooks and hobgoblins of former urban legends. The new and rapidly swelling urban folklore puts the victims of the planetary outcasting in the role of the principal villains of the piece.

Central America: The unfair 2006 memorandum

Governments have sealed agreements to allow these evil refugees or migrants to be expeditiously packed up and returned to their country of origin. The United States picks up indigestible migrants and sends them to Mexico, which in turn exports them to Central America. In the 19th century, New Yorks Ellis Island was the selection processing site. The film Nuevo Mondo by Italian Emanuele Crialese tells the story in magnificent sequences. The doctors sometimes observed for only seconds before discarding people who had made the grueling journey by boat to reside in the United States. The current process is closer to a form of natural selection. Walls, border patrols, roundups and cameras are the devices of migratory depredation. Only the most adept can avoid them. Most are discarded due to their own inexpertness. The governments of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua signed a Memorandum on May 5, 2006, to repatriate migrants in a dignified, orderly, streamlined and safe way from Mexico to Central America. The Guatemalan and Salvadoran governments had already signed agreements with Mexico the previous year. Nicaragua received the first group of repatriates through this agreement on March 5, 2008. There is no question that putting into practice what was agreed to in the 2006 memorandum has streamlined deportation, although it has not dignified it. Deportation is impossible to dignify because it is a process that truncates a project of improved living conditions and family reunification, and consists of applying the
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state violence of entities that abduct people and oblige them to retrace their steps against their will. The vestiges of good will that may have laced the 2006 Memorandum are annulled by the vices, deficiencies, negligence, bottlenecks and abuses of authority that taint its application: the list of those sent from Mexico doesnt even coincide with the number who arrive back in the Central American countries; there is no personalized attention; those without documents arent even provided them for the deportation process; many deportees come directly from the United States rather than Mexico; there is no limit to the number of days they can be detained and no efficient human rights monitoring during their capture and detention in Mexico. Nicaraguans get the worst deal. As theres no Nicaraguan consulate in Tapachula, they receive no consular accompaniment, which worsens their treatment as garbage, en masse with no rights, papers or name.

They treat you like a dog

There are many complaints of abuse. Mario Noel Sandoval shows where they beat him as he tells his story: The migration authorities in the United States detained me. They just threw me onto the bridge, and from there I got to Mexico, to Reynosa, at two in the morning, and went to the Guadalupe shelter. I finally decided to turn myself into Migration to come back home because it was difficult wandering around there. I did that for two and a half years. I dont want any more of that. Another 30-year-old migrant recalls: I was entering the city of Puebla and the state police officers wanted to take my money, abusing their uniform. As I didnt have much money, they beat me and sent me to Tapachula. I spent twelve days there, until today. Id left Nicaragua about two weeks earlier and was in that migration center nearly two weeks more. During those two weeks he was incommunicado. All they do there is grab you and send you via satellite. They dont tell you anything. The place where they send you and detain you only has a wall with some numbers, but the migration people dont tell you anything. There were some broke Salvadorans there. When you dont have any money, they ask you the phone number where youre going to be staying in the United States and
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whos going to pay for you. Then they grab you and take you to a house, kidnapped. These abducters work with migration and are inserted in local mafias: They control territories. Theres a mafia with collection agents, former army officials known as the Zetas. Mauricio Lpez recalls how he was extorted by a migration official: A Mexican state police officer detained me in Hidalgo and asked for my documents. But as I wasnt carrying any, he proceeded to ask me for moneythey call it a bite. I wasnt carrying much money but he took the little I had. As I protested, he came and proceeded to arrest me, charging me with homicide. I didnt even know who the person who had died was. Just like that. After it was demonstrated that I was innocent, they sent me to Chiapas, Tapachula. They treat you just like a dog. They violate peoples human rights because there are people theyve grabbed unjustly and they stick them in the drains, where the sewage comes out. The police themselves authorize the representatives of each module to do that Another migrant says that the mistreatment is both verbal and physical: I was on my way to the United States to look for my dad and a better life. But I didnt stay long. Only about three months. Id had some tattoos done here in Nicaragua so the federal police came and for some simple tattoos that dont mean anything they grabbed me and threw me in the slammer. They sentenced me for being a gang member and for criminal association. In jail youre all alone. Theres nobody to support you. Not even the consulate. I didnt have a lawyer. The authorities didnt give me access to communicate with my family. I tried to get in touch with them from jail. Their treatment of us was bad. They mistreated us because they said we were jerks and bastards. One of them told us, I dont care if you die; were going to throw you in the river. I dont care if you die; youre not my family. If you try to say anything to the people from the migra, they give you a kicking. They tell us we shouldnt have left our own country. You have to be careful not to say anything because youre in a foreign country.
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Jos Gonzlez from Somotillo observes that they fall into more dangerous categories in the United States. They viewed us as terrorists. And because they say were terrorists, they had us under investigation. In the United States there are people whove been detained for five, six months and the consul never shows up nobody comes. We Nicaraguans suffer in the United States because were alone. The diplomatic corps in the United States doesnt do anything. You call the consul and he never comes. Basically we dont have any support.

Defiant and rebellious masses

The defenselessness of being a foreignera form of awareness of being waste stands out in some of the stories. The migrants are thrown in the same sack as other social groups whose residual condition and pernicious aspect appear unquestionable: gang members and terrorists are lethal, poisonous and explosive waste. But this awareness of their condition as dominated castaways doesnt synthesize all the attitudes of the migrants. These and other migrants have a rebellious streak that explodes and defies the stratagems and discourses of the nationalist panopticon. The 19th century panopticon studied by Michel Foucault was a very different creature. Jails, reformatories, asylums and poor houses were designed in such a way that it was possible to have visual control of their totality from a single point. It was Argos all-seeing eye constructed architectonically. Todays system doesnt rely exclusively on what can be seen. Credit cards, cell phones, store invoices all leave a paper trail. The nationalist panopticon cultivated out of the fear of small numbersseeks vision and control within a whole national territory, not just a small retention center. Undocumented migrants seek to elude all visual, electronic, consular and other forms of detection, to outwit and defy the nationalist panopticon. Its what Immanuel Wallerstein calls individual resistance by physical relocation, a resistance of immense magnitude. In a world of increasing North-South polarization with demographic decline in the North and demographic expansion in the South, he asks how it will be politically possible to stem the massive and unauthorized
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migration from the South to the North. His answer is that he sees no way to do it, and that such South-North migration will add to the authorized and unauthorized migration from Russia and China to a far more significant degree than is already happening, transforming the structure of social life in the North. He predicts that the South within the North will represent between 30% and 50% of the population by 2025. It is the challenge of the barbarians and dangerous classes, who according to Wallerstein are saying Thank you very much. Forget about civilizing us; just let us have some human rights, like, say, the right to move about freely and take jobs where we can find them.

The movement of those without papers

Unlike Bauman, whose penetrating analysis digs deep but leaves a feeling of powerlessness in the face of the destructive and exclusionary dominant forces that threaten to do away with all that remains of community in societies, French sociologist Alain Touraine stresses the demobilizing and inoperative aspect of taking refuge at that level: the capacity for action of the dominated is weakened when defined only by the identity they are deprived of. Its no use talking only of jobless, undocumented, disregarded people. In Beyond Neo-Liberalism, Touraine asks whether collective actions, or even better social movements, can be constructed based on deprivation, dependence or simply misery? Some say evidently yes, adding, what else could they base themselves on? Wasnt labor exploitation the origin of the working class movement, colonial domination what triggered the national liberation movements, the empire of the masculine world what incited the feminist movement? But, Touraine reminds us, postures that base themselves only on evidence dont hold up to the least analysis. For these movements to have emerged it wasnt enough that they opposed a given form of domination. They also had to stand for given positive attributes. Touraine praises the concretizing of the undocumented migrants struggle, although he recognizes that its objective is not the transformation of society. It is about nothing more than regularizing their legal situation. The very use of the
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term undocumented, which has replaced that of clande-stine, shows us that theres nothing revolutionary in their desire for social integration. Nonetheless, it has sparked a reflective fear in the government and a segment of public opinion thats afraid of the migratory pressure caused by the world economic situation.

Dont call me foreigner

That concretizing frees them from being co-opted and manipulated by presumed ideological vanguards. During the seventies, Touraine recalls, what he called the new social movements at the time wore out precisely because they presented themselves as inspired by Lenin. They were like new wine in old bottles, which soon turned to vinegar. The same thing shouldnt happen again, he anticipates, as the spirit of May 68 is being reborn with greater energy, now having shunt off the old political vocabulary and archaic ways of thinking. He particularly refers to those without papers and those in Aides, an association fighting discrimination against people with AIDS. He sees both as particularly imbued with a creative and liberating response. Homo-sexuals, feminists, people living with AIDS and undocu-mented migrants could federate, feeding their transforming mass even more. Touraine sees them as attacking problems linked to capitalist modernity and mass culture, questioning the main forms of power. Those without papers challenge the distinction between citizens and noncitizens. They seek to abolish it because it violates equality before the law, an elementary principle that Kant based on the common possession of the earth and called hospitality: Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility. It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth.
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Trying again: those who refuse to be discards

The migrants arent alone in their struggle. The solidarity of churcheswhich are multiplying their shelters for migrantsas well as NGOs and the population in general is praiseworthy and growing. In the Mexican town of Las Grajales, a crowd helped dozens of undocumented immigrants escape on October 13 of this year by burning vehicles and attacking the police. The townspeople were outraged when they discovered that the police agents had detained the immigrants to then sell them to contrabandists. They rescued them from their kidnappers and took them to the mayors office and waited outside in the plaza. Other residents joined them to show their support. The challenge of the nationalist panopticon will spark outbreaks of rebellion of an increasingly collective nature. Nstor Garca Canclini asks: What stories neither just epic nor melodramaticcan demonstrate the readjustments taking place between the local and the global? This author invites us to explore what stories persist about the othershindering new paths for integrationand what new ones are forming in the recent migratory, commercial and tourist exchanges. The tales told by undocumented migrants and their troubadours are defying nationalist policies and views, as demonstrated by the songs of Los Tigres del Norte, Calle 13, Manu Chao, Molotov and many others. The damage done by the nationalist perspective and panopticon has very prolific troubadours. The Mexican folk song La Migra is a good example of how the rejects dont resign themselves to that role or the role of victim: La Migra grabbed me/ fifty times, lets say,/ but never broke me,/ I didnt give a damn./ Ill make its compatriots pay/ for the blows it gave me./ I came in through Mexicali/ and San Luis, Ro Colorado,/ I crossed all the lines/ of contraband and wetback/ but I never cracked and got to the other side. In this same vein, a deported Nicaraguan getting off the bus in the Huembes market bid farewell to the Foreign Ministry officials who escorted her back to Managua and said with a smile, Tomorrow Im off again for Chinandega and from there, you know where!
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Danilo, a Kich from Guatemala, was detained for over four months in a US penal center before being deported. It was a hard and anguishing process. He was interviewed by Guatemalan anthropologist Ricardo Falla, who wrote that Nothing would change his mind, even knowing he could get 10 to 20 years in prison if they catch him again. A few months after talking to me, Danilo set off again and made it back to the United States... That trip is part of his dream of getting ahead. Danilo has managed to avoid the nationalist panopticon and is working. The following persistent defiance was expressed by a young Nicaraguan who has also been deported: Ive crossed several times. Ive been in the United States several times. I tried it in January and saw a lot of Nicaraguans. When I see people from my country, I help them cross so they can fulfill their dreams. They catch some of them and kill them. Thank God, God protects you. My goal is to get to the United States to work. Once when I went they caught me. If they grab you twice they give you more jail time. They grabbed me because I was alone on the road. But Im going right back. There are several of us here who are going back. Asked if he would go back, another responded: Of course Im going to try again. Im going to try as many times as I can until I make it. For some, not trying again amounts to resigning oneself to being a discard.

Enforcing their rights

Those who already lived in the United States have developed a better awareness that they have rights and can get them enforced. In this regard, the empirical appreciations of the Jesuit Service for Migrants team agree with Touraines statement that, as Frantz Fanon demonstrated, it wont be the colonized who are furthest from the metropolis, the ones most strongly anchored in their culture, who will initiate the national liberation movements, but those who have been educated, generally in the colonizing country itself, and are now conscious of their rights.
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Such is the case of 46-year-old Jos Gonzlez from Somotillo: I asked for an interview with the director. Im going to talk with human rights, I told him. And whats missing, what do you all need? he asks. To be treated as people, I tell him, but I dont want to say anything to you; its with the human rights person. So they authorized us to bathe inside, they gave us a toothbrush and toothpaste, a little bar of soap From then on they allowed us more time in the bathroom and gave us medical services because we were all full of fungus, all of us, because we were right out in the open air. These comments indicate how throwaways can become agents of change if they know how to get their rights respected in societies accustomed to reduced, low-intensity citizenships. It is paradoxical that those deprived of their rights by the citizen/foreigner dichotomy and the even more pernicious distinction between people with papers and those without are aware of their rights. Its a hopeful sign that there are ever more migrants whose lack of papers does not submerge them in the trashcan of human garbage without fighting for their rights. The number of migrants aware of their rights was made evident during the protest marches in the United States against the Sensenbrenner bill in 2005. The dimensions of the evasion of the nationalist panopticon can be calibrated in the half-million undocumented migrants who have managed to enter the United States annually since 2000.

Mischievous and malicious language games

The worst implications of best practices could be the title of a yet-to-be-written report to cure us of the most mischievous and perverse language games. The supposed best practices are associated with euphemisms that pervert the sense of language. Imprisoning migrants and forcing them to go back to a country where they cant live is called safe and orderly repatriation. According to Mexican migration, migrants are not captured and deported but rather secured and returned. The
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ideal migrants are certified workers, like chicken breasts that have passed the hygiene inspections. Migrants cant aspire to the rank of globalized workers. They have to be clear that they are visiting workers. And the countries that expel migrants continue to be called countries of destination and reception. All these terms are incubated in forums, conferences and symposia that are called in the name of the migrants and build a false consensus. Language is also perverted in another direction in these forums, defaming it. Trafficking in people is, in Baumans opinion, the new term designed to replace, and defame, the once noble concept of passage. In the era of politically correct vocabularies they continue referring to lessskilled workers. Its a wonder they dont say skill-challenged. We speak of people with special capacities to refer to blind people, but carpenters and farmers are unskilled workers. Diatribes and dithy-rambs: some trades are denigrated, while attempts are made to dignify processes that cover those suffering them with opprobrium.

Risk and fascination with those who are different

These language games fit very well with Newlands complacent viewpoint. Bauman and Sassen are antidotes to such superficial concepts accompanied by innocuous and contemporizing proposals. But to stop ourselves becoming submerged in the sterile and bitter disconsolation of the macro-forces that constrain us and lead the world to futures in which the correlation of forces will continue beating down the dominated sectors with uncertain or apocalyptic blows, the most worrying analyses must be complemented by others that focus attention on the actors who are demonstrating Touraines growing protagonism and novel strategies. These actors are challenging assumptions of our legal systems and taking the postulates of the French revolution upon which modernity was founded toward
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certain routes not foreseen by friends of the convenient order that gives more to those who already have more and keeps the majority happy and undocumented. The idea of community underlies that of nation. What really makes a community function? This burning question persists because the answer is formulated along the way. Nonetheless, from this vantage point we can confidently state that closed and excluding communities, inclined to selective assimilation, only generate endogamies that biologically and culturally impoverish. Society as community has to be saved. And that can only be achieved by dialoguing, at risk and in fascination, with those who are different.

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Jos Luis Rocha Gmez, is Senior Researcher at the Central American University (UCA) in Managua, Nicaragua and associate Researcher with the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester. His work focuses on issues relating to youth gangs, local government, disaster prevention and management, the coffee industry, and migration. He is a member of the editorial committees of the academic journals Envo and Encuentro, and is also the Research Coordinator of the Central American Jesuit Refugee Service. His publications include the bilingual Spanish/English book Una Regin Desgarrada: Dinmicas Migratorias en Centroamrica/A Region Torn Apart: The Dynamics of Migration in Central America, San Jos: Lara Segura, 2006; Mapping the labyrinth from within: The political economy of Nicaraguan youth policy concerning violence, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 27(4): 533-549, 2007; (with Ian Christoplos) Disaster mitigation and preparedness on the Nicaraguan post-Mitch agenda, Disasters, 25(3): 240-250, 2001; Lanzando piedras, fumando piedras. Evolucin de las pandillas en Nicaragua 1997-2006", UCA Cuaderno de Investigacin no. 23, December 2007; Anlisis de percepciones y aportes para una poltica de migraciones internacionales en Nicaragua, Centro Latinoamericano y Caribeo de Demografa (CELADE)-Divisin de Poblacin de la CEPAL, Fondo de Poblacin de las Naciones Unidas, Oficina de Nicaragua, Serie Poblacin y Desarrollo, No.68, Santiago de Chile, January 2006.