With a strong economic focus, the historical narrative of this work is synthesized from the major period histories, especially those of MacLeod, Wortman, Pérez-Brignoli, McCreery, Bulmer-Thomas, and Dunkerley, and from the Central American chapters of the Cambridge History of Latin America. Frederick Stirton Weaver warns at the outset, “This history is highly interpretive. . . . Many of my arguments are presented in a deliberately provocative manner to stimulate thought and debate. There is a lot to argue about here, and the book demands an active, critical reading” (p. 4).
His first two chapters contain an introduction to the geography and archaeology of the region and a rather breezy survey of Central American history to about 1850. His preconquest background is a little suspect, not well documented; and the historical survey is not always precisely accurate. Minor errors are annoying, but they do not seriously damage the work’s arguments. An example is Weaver’s reference to the Spanish Constitutionalists of 1812 as “Republicans” (pp. 48-49).
Chapters 3 through 6 provide a “historical and comparative framework for organizing and analyzing contemporary Central American issues” (p. 227). Discussion of the export economy that developed from the late nineteenth century forward is splendid. Weaver rejects both neoclassical liberalism and dependency theory as inadequate explanations for Central America’s failure to enjoy more general prosperity from its expansion of exports. He offers an enlightening, plausible alternative that links exports to other domestic economic activity and to the social structure, concluding that the greedy native elites were more responsible than foreign investors for Central America’s poverty of progress or, as he puts it, “economic growth without development” (p. 102). In the process, he identifies significant differences in how the economies of the several Central American states evolved.
Weaver recognizes that producers often failed to reduce costs efficiently and instead maintained their competitiveness in world markets by depending on the state to keep labor costs low. He offers convincing explanations of how most Central Americans not only failed to gain from the economic expansion but suffered political repression and declining real wages. At the same time, the power of the elites increased through the creation of more centralized states, often with U.S. military and economic assistance.
Weaver explains why economic progress, by either classical liberal or Marxist indicators, has failed to raise significantly the living standard of most Central Americans. He frequently relates Central American history to the rest of Latin America and the world. At times, however, this practice leads him off on tangents that leave Central America in the shadows. And it repeatedly tends to force Central American history into patterns the author developed in his earlier work on South America.
Drawing heavily from Bulmer-Thomas and Dunkerley, Weaver provides a remarkably comprehensive overview of post-World War II political and economic history. He emphasizes the far-reaching effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, where workers suffer “significant declines in their living standards as a result of international competition, lower wages, less job security, higher rates of unemployment, the loss of health and other social services previously provided by the state, [and] acknowledgment of lower class status” (pp. 247-48). This paves the way for the excellent analysis in his final chapter of why the remarkable export diversification and agricultural and industrial growth in the postwar period led to such severe social and political failure. Weaver illustrates clearly how the excessive borrowings of the 1970s benefited the few and burdened the majority, because they facilitated “large-scale transfers of income from the poorest to the richest within nations as well as among nations” (p. 188). In Weaver’s view, “the pattern of modern capitalist growth accumulates wealth and power at one pole and poverty, anger, and despair at the other,” as Central America demonstrates admirably (p. 191).
This work, as the author promised, provides considerable grounds for controversy, but it is effective in showing the close relationship between political, economic, and social history and in identifying the most important issues in contemporary Central America. While it is not a work of original research, and while the author has almost entirely ignored Spanish-Ianguage sources, it is a provocative and useful economic history of the Central American states.
