Between revolution and democracy: Business elites and the state in El Salvador during the 1980s
Description
The Salvadoran business elite has been historically identified as the most powerful and reactionary of political actors in the region due to its unbridled opposition to social and political reform. At the beginning of the 1980s it faced the twin threats of marxist revolution and democratic reform. Yet at the close of the decade, it was the principal beneficiary of a 12-year-long civil war costing 70,000 lives, and an electoral reform process, both of which were aimed at reducing its political power. This study explains how the business elite was transformed by the political and economic upheavals of the 1980s to re-emerge as the dominant political actor within this country in the 1990s Three questions guide the organization of this study: (1) what role did the business elite play in the emergence of revolutionary threat in the 1970s? (2) How did the political crisis reshape the interests and behavior of the business elite? and (3) What role has the business elite played in the long transition to democracy currently underway? To answer these questions, I focus on three dimensions of state-society relations: (1) the articulation of a state hegemonic project that attempts to overcome class differences by embodying national-popular goals and rhetoric in establishing legitimacy and a national economic plan; (2) the forms and degree of state intervention in the national economy; and (3) patterns of interest representation The emergence of a revolutionary threat is explained by showing how the hegemonic project, forms of state intervention, and patterns of representation that defined the traditional relationship between state and society each underwent a crisis before the emergence of broad-based lower class revolts. During the 1980s, these crises produced the political fragmentation of the traditional agrarian-based business elite and forced a redefinition of its relationship to the state. The traditional business elite was superseded politically by a neoliberal elite based in retail manufacturing and trade by the mid-1980s, as this latter group attained institutional and ideological autonomy through the creation of the Fundacion Salvadorena de Desarrollo Economico y Social. The ascendancy of the neoliberal elite was crucial in reducing the threat of revolution, ending the civil war, and giving the business elite a stake in perpetuating democratic institutions. Thus, whereas at the beginning of the 1980s, the business elite opposed democracy, by the end of the decade they fully supported it