The Dominican Republic Your March/April report, "The Dominican Republic After the Caudillos," nicely conveys the complexity of contemporary life in that country. Several of the authors seem to suggest that personalism and patronage in Dominican poli- tics can be attributed to the legacy of Trujillo and the personal style of Balaguer, but these prob- lems are common in other Caribbean nations. Thus they might be usefully analyzed as a function of a regional political economy and political culture. The peoples of the Caribbean have long oscillated between regional fragmentation and uneasy movements toward regional inte- gration, often under foreign pres- sure. If competing colonial powers pulled the region apart in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries, contemporary trends promise to unify it within a "globalized" econ- omy structured by the Caribbean Basin Initiative. Then too, many pressing problems such as drug trafficking and environmental regu- lation call for region-wide respons- es. The Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) and the recently formed Association of Caribbean States (ACS) are poten- tially counterweights to foreign influences in the region, fora for discussing shared problems, and bridges to wider links with other Latin American countries. Yet these organizations have had difficulty in establishing a common ground from which the Caribbean can confront other hemispheric and world powers. The Dominican Republic's recent conflict with CARICOM over relative advan- tages in the European banana mar- ket shows that if the Caribbean is to speak with a common voice, it will have to develop a more complex understanding of how its regional identity has emerged in historical, cultural and geopolitical terms. Julie Franks Dominican Studies Institute CUNY-City College New York, New York Mexico's "Other" Guerrillas B y using code words to describe the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), such as the group's "penchant for hard-line Leninist rhetoric," "The EPR: Mexico's 'Other' Guerrillas" [January/ Febru- ary 1997] only obfuscates the underlying ideological and strate- gic differences with the Zapatista Army (EZLN). The EPR has a socialist vision and believes that the ruling class of Mexico, a dependent capitalist state, must be overthrown as a pre- requisite to end the oppression and exploitation of the masses, particu- larly the indigenous population. The EZLN, on the other hand, is guided by the mistaken belief that local changes within the state of Chiapas, such as land reform and "democratization" of the political process, will solve their problems. The EZLN's rejection of solidar- ity with the EPR represents a strate- gic vision not unlike the Sandinistas or the FMLN whose leadership has been infected by what I like to call the "new thinking virus," which replaces class strug- gle with "universal human values." I once asked the FMLN's Arnaldo Ramos whether any model acceptable to U.S. imperialism could be good for the people of El Salvador. His answer: "We are not Cuba." This response is indicative of one of several anti-communist currents in leftist disguise that have proliferated since the counterrevo- lution triumphed in the former USSR. David Silver New York, New York
