
          Southerners and Central America. The Ideology of
Domination
          By Kirkpatrick, DowDow Kirkpatrick
          Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 1-3, 5-6
          
          
            Southerners, of all US citizens, should be best equipped to
understand the peoples' rebellion in Central America. The forces which
impoverished the South for a hundred years are the same which produce
oppression in Latin America.
            The primary issue is the ideology of domination versus dependency,
not East versus West, capitalism versus
communism. The application of the ideology of domination has produced
dependency in Central America and the US South. Dependency results in
the oppression of poverty.
            Born a Yankee, Georgia is my home. Almost fifty years ago I made
that choice. Native born Southerners have affirmed my decision by
accepting me as something other than a carpetbagger. This personal
history may give a perspective on the history of our region not seen
so clearly by others.
            Another factor sharpens my perceptions. I am a member of The
Century Club, persons who have traveled in one hundred countries. I
prefer to think of myself as at home in the world--not a Southerner,
nor a Yankee, not even an American. I resent passports and
visas. National boundaries are anachronisms in today's world.
            For nine years I have served The United Methodist Church as a
missionary-in-reverse. Based on the conviction that God is speaking a
special word today among the oppressed poor of the world--a word North
Americans need 

to hear--have lived a substantial portion of each year
somewhere in Latin America. During these periods of residence I have
not preached to them, nor taught, nor been associated with a project
which did something for them. Just the reverse, I have sought to live
in Peru, Central America, Cuba and Brazil in a listening, learning
mode.
            The balance of each year is spent in the United States (my mission
field) trying to preach and teach to North Americans. The implications
for us of what Latin Americans know about religious faith--that we
don't seem to know--is my message.
            From such experiences I expect Southerners to be aware of the
parallels between their impoverishments and the plight of the Latin
American poor.
            In February 1982 I was invited to debate, in Atlanta, Lawrence
Pezzullo, US Ambassador to Nicaragua during the end of the Somoza
dictatorship. In preparation for this event I clarified my memory of
one of the dramatic examples of this domination/dependency
syndrome.
            Former Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall has documented his role in
helping to liberate the South from the disparity of freight rates kept
in place by a conspiracy of northern railroads. "As a boy in Newnan I
learned about the poverty of a great segment of our Georgia
people. . .As I grew older. . . I realized that the south was merely a
colonial appendage of the imperial domain called the north."
            Let me set next to Arnall's image, "a colonial appendage of the
imperial domain," a conversation with the chief economist of the
Sandinista Government of Nicaragua in November 1983.
            Xabier Gorostiaga, Jesuit priest, Cambridge-trained economist,
heads the Central American Institute for Economic and Social
Research. The Institute has recently issued An Alternative
Policy for Central America and the Caribbean (June
1983. Summary and Conclusions of a Policy Workshop held in The Hague),
which includes the observation that "The United States' commitment to
preserving its hegemony in the region has given the struggle for
social justice in Central America an anti-imperialist character."
            To return to former Governor Arnall: "The people of the south had
reason to know that he who controls the means of production has a
vehicle for tyranny."
            During his terms as Attorney General (1939-43) and Governor
(1943-47) of the state of Georgia, Ellis Arnall carried the case of
the South against "the imperial domain" to the US Supreme Court, won
freedom from "the North's stangle-hold," and helped break the
"shackles." Until then it cost thirty-nine percent more to send a
freight shipment from Atlanta to New York than the same shipment
coming from north to south. This was only one of many repressive
economic, social and political factors operating against the
development of the South.

            Governor Arnall's description of his homeland in the 1920s and '30s
sounds like El Salvador and Guatemala today:
            
              I found that the only way the few textile mills in the South
could stay in business competitively with their Northern counterparts
was by paying low wages, requiring the workers to live in mill
villages owned by the companies, requiring the workers to trade with
the mill commissaries on credit terms which were much higher than
offered by non-company stores, to use child labor and other devices
which the mill owners did not want to employ but which were required
for them to stay in business.
            
            He continues with a description which accurately parallels what I
have heard from economists in Nicaragua and Cuba concerning the state
of the economies they inherited from US--supported Somoza and Batista
domination:
            
              The end of the Civil War intensified the North's strangle
hold, since the exhausted South was left entirely without capital with
which to develop its own manufacturing. The North concentrated on the
exploitation of the Southern natural resources which were so
plentiful. The Northern owners of Southern plants confined their
efforts to crude processing of these raw materials, shipping them
north for final fabrication into usable articles....As each carload of
raw materials moved north, that much less wealth was left in the
South.
            
            This should help us understand what Latin Americans mean when they
say, capitalists decapitalize dependent
nations.
            The turning point in Governor Arnall's struggle came in 1942 when
he won a decision (Georgia vs. Evans) in which the US Supreme Court
held that Georgia was a "person" and could sue as a person under the
antitrust law.
            Southerners with a strong streak of humanity should be expected to
regard Central America as a "person." This perspective would challenge
the Reagan Administration's insistence upon seeing the Central America
revolution as a battleground between the forces of "communism" and
those of "freedom."
            The only way to understand correctly the Sandinista Government and
the rebellions in El Salvador and Guatemala is to know the
revolutionary significance of regarding the people of those nations as
"persons." This is the definitive difference between US policy and the
Central American Alternative:
            
              
                The politics of counter-insurgency and containment adopted by
the United States over a decade ago, but applied with renewed zeal
under the Reagan administration, is essentially defensive.
                It
proposes no alternative other than that of repressing popular
demands.
              
            
            I have added the emphasis, because that sentence clearly
distinguishes the differences between US and Sandinista regard for
persons.
            What kind of alternative results from a commitment to people as
persons?
            
              
                The first proposition is that no Regional Alternative can be
implemented successfully unless it conforms to what we have called the
'logic of the majority', that is to say, any solution must, above all,
conform to the interests of the Region's poor who constitute the vast
majority of the population. If a Regional Alternative is to be
genuinely democratic, its fundamental characteristic must be to give
the common people not merely a voice, but the leading voice, in
constructing their own society.
              
            
            This contrasts with other models based on the logic of profit,
capital and growth for growth's sake.
            
              
                Ordinary men and women have come to see themselves as agents
of social change and have begun to recover their identity both as
individuals and as citizens of a nation.
              
            
            While US observers focus on our fetish for 'elections' as a sign of
democracy, we easily overlook the democratic pluralism, more extensive
than a two party electoral process, in the emergence of popular
organizations. These grass roots organizations, pluralistic in their
political positions and multi-class in composition, provide a more
representative presence in the Council of State in Nicaragua than the
Congress of the US.
            I recently spent some time with the Council of State which is
composed of elected representatives of thirty-six different
organizations, only six or seven of which are political parties. The
diversity there makes the Senate of the United States look like a
collection of clones. Again, quoting from the Central American
Institute's Alternative Policy:
            
              
                The formal political institutions of El Salvador and
Guatemala have collapsed ... Given this situation, popular struggles
are opening up new space for a political alternative based on a mixed
economy, non-alignment and new forms of participatory
democracy.
              
            
            A second fundamental of this Alternative is nonalignment. Xabier
Gorostiaga defines what this means--diversifying the dependency. "We
intend to build an economy," he said in private conversation, "which
rests on four equal legs: one-fourth with the US, one-fourth with
Latin American countries, one-fourth with Europe, and one-fourth with
Africa and the socialist countries, including Russia. In the past our
national economy rested very unevenly on two legs--one very big one
with the US and a much smaller one with the rest of the world. This is
no way to stabilize a society. We must diversify our dependency."

            
              
                As we approach the end of the twentieth century, it is clear
that national sovereignty and self-respect cannot be attained by
living in anyone's 'backyard.' In failing to concede political and
economic space for non-alignment, the United States, far from
guaranteeing its security, jeopardizes it. This, above all, must be
the message of all those, including friends of the United States in
Western Europe, who wish to promote peace.
              
            
            The third proposition is that any alternative must be regional in
character. "For the many small (in some cases island) economies of the
area, the only alternative to economic dependence on the United States
is the construction of a regional market. . ."
            This is the truth behind the falsehood which accuses Nicaragua of
supplying the El Salvador revolution. "One must remember that the
Region has a shared colonial history, and, today, an increasingly
shared experience of oppression and violence against which so many
common people of the Region are united in different forms of
struggle."
            Governor Ellis Arnall rightly tried to lay Southern oppression on
the consciences of Northern states as a national concern. The same
lesson is being clearly spoken from Central America to the United
States' South, North and to the entire world.
            In a 1943 address to the National Governors' Conference in
Columbus, Ohio, Arnall said:
            
              
                We (in the South) have seen, for eighty years, our land
despoiled and exploited in an effort to turn it into a colonial empire
whose riches others might enjoy. We have seen our section isolated
from the rest of America by economic barriers that impoverished our
people. We have seen the leadership of other sections of America turn
away from our urgent pleas for justice with blind eyes and deaf ears
... We ask but one thing: Equality and full fellowship within that
union which we helped to create. We ask no more. We will compromise
for no less.
              
            
            The same plea comes from Latin America to North America in this
moment. We cannot talk of our affluence without including their
poverty. They are poor because the poor subsidize the rich. We could
not be what we are without making them what they are. As north and
south must be seen as one unit in the US, so the south and north of
the American hemisphere must be regarded as a single unit.
            There is a more fundamental factor in Central America which
explains the present social, economic and political ferment. It is an
actuality with which Southerners should be easily 'simpatico'--the
religious factor.
          
          
            II
            Central America is engaged in a twentieth century biblical
reformation. Failure to see this is to misread everything else going
on there.
            "The Bible Belt" is a characterization of the South meant to be
derisive. The label could be appropriated positively, if allegiance to
the Bible links us to a profound understanding of Central America
revolution as biblical reformation.
            A new Christian faith, born in struggle, lived biblically, is as
radically different from the conventional religion practiced in US
churches as Luther's Reformation differed from the theology of Pope
Leo X in the sixteenth century.
            This is not just a "religious" phenomenon. Believer or not, the
person who ignores the social, economic and political results of this
biblical reformation flaws the entire analysis. The reading then is as
shallow as a social, economic, and political history of the past four
centuries would be with Luther omitted.
            The modern day reformation covers all of Latin America. Central
America is simply the place where, in this moment, it is most
dramatically available to our understanding.
            The Regional Alternative referred to above is the social, economic
and political outcome of reading the Bible from the perspective of the
oppressed poor. If the 'good news' is that God has taken an option for
the poor (as Jesus says when annoucing his reason for coming), then
the mission of the church must be to opt for the poor. When the church
lives faithfully this option, a social, economic and political
revolution, based on the logic of the majority, may be expected.
            I'm tired of hearing Marx given all the credit for what Jesus
initiated.
            Who can estimate, for example, the impact on the future of this
hemisphere of a hundred-thousand small organizations of the poor in
the slums of Brazil--communities which fight political battles for
justice and read the scriptures together in the light of their
struggles?
            The rich, who study the Bible and accept its call to conversion,
discover the same truth, so obvious to the poor. Don Emilio Baltodano
is the Comptroller General of Nicaragua. Before the revolution he was
a wealthy coffee exporter. He asked his fourteen children and
children-in-law what they wanted of his estate before he gave his
wealth to the Sandinistas. They wanted nothing. Several of them are
Ministers in the present government.
            Let me report some observations made at a weekly Bible study I
attended in Don Emilio's home in November 1983. A young mother, who
was described to me as from perhaps the richest family of anyone
present that night, said, "Thank God I don't have the security and
isolation I previously had. Then we went to the beach as a family. Now
all my children, except the five year old, are in the mountains. We go
as a 

family to pick coffee. Then we had no understanding of our
people. Now we don't have privileges above others, but we are close to
the people."
            Another responded to Luke 12:32. "According to the gospel the poor
are giving the most, not the rich. They give everything. The gospel is
demanding more of us. We have not given enough yet. We must change our
idea of family. These crucified people are our family. They are our
hope."
            The dean of the law faculty reminded the group that their social
class were descendants of historical figures of the nation. "We have
not only our own sins, but the historical injustices. Our past
privileged position was a bad privilege. Now it is a good privilege to
be a servant of the poor."
            Ricardo Chavarria, Vice-Minister of Energy, recalls the scripture
of the evening's study saying, of those who have much, much will be
expected. "But historically much was demanded of the poor. To live in
Nicaragua today is a privilege far greater than to be rich. The rest
of Latin America will be expecting a testimony of Christians. If we
fail, it will affect all of Latin America."
          
          
            III
            Of all the conflicting interpretations, what can we believe about
Central America? It is not oversimplification to summarize the truth
in four points:
            The revolution of the poor is happening.
            It is a revolution we can't stop. The only impact the US is having
and seems intent on having is to make the victory of the oppressed
more costly--for them and for ourselves.
            It's a revolution we shouldn't want to stop. To be true to our own
idealism we should be on the side of the people, instead of against
them.
            The Latin American revolution is a biblical reformation which will
shape every aspect of the future of this hemisphere.
          
          
            Dow Kirkpatrick is a missionary-in-reverse of The United
Methodist Church, bringing the Christian Faith as believed and
practiced in Latin America to North Americans. A substantial portion
of each year is spent in residence somewhere in Latin America,
listening and learning From January to June he holds
Encuentros throughout the US. In these spiritual life
retreats he helps persons re-examine their own faith in the light of
Latin American realities. Most recently (fall of 1983) he travelled to
Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua and Cuba--his sixth visit to Nicaragua
and seventh to Cuba.
          
        