The Political Response to the Crisis

Abstract

Just as it was the García government’s hope in 1985 that economic reactivation would help atenuate social conflict by enabling some much-needed income redistribution to take place, so too it was its fear that the sort of recessionary economic shock treatment forced upon it in 1988 would create a new level of social polarisation and violence which it would be hard pressed to contain. The notion of desborde, described back in 1984 by one of Garcia’s mentors, the anthropologist José Matos Mar¹ looked like becoming a reality in an all too dramatic way, as living standards collapsed and hopes of a better future were dashed. It was this political calculation which lay behind García’s repeated last-minute interventions to cushion the social impact of the succession of economic paquetes announced during the course of 1988. Though such palliatives as increases in the minimum wage might detract from the economic ‘coherence’ of a set of measures in technical terms, the risk was that the social response might bring with it much higher costs. In a country with a relatively strong Marxist left, an uncompromising and increasingly ubiquitous guerrilla movement, high indices of social violence and a state machine ill-equipped to maintain control, such fears were not altogether misplaced.