Understanding Central America

Global Forces and Political Change

John A. Booth, Christine J. Wade, Thomas W. Walker

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000768916
• Édition: 7
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: Global Politics

In this seventh edition, John A. Booth, Christine J. Wade, and Thomas W. Walker update a classic in the field which invites students to explore the histories, economies, and politics of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Covering the region's political and economic development from the early 1800s onward, the authors bring the Central American story up to date.

New to the 7th Edition:

• Analysis of trends in human rights performance, political violence, and evolution of regime types;

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• Updated findings from surveys to examine levels of political participation and support for democratic norms among Central Americans;

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• Historical and current-era material on indigenous peoples and other racial minorities;

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• Discussion of popular attitudes toward political rights for homosexuals, and LGBTQ access to public services;

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• Discussion of women's rights and access to reproductive health services, and women's integration into elective offices;

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• Tracing evolving party systems, national elections, and US policy toward the region under the Obama and Trump administrations;

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• Central America's international concerns including Venezuela's shrinking role as an alternative source of foreign aid and antagonist to US policy in the region, and migration among and through Central American nations.

Understanding Central America is an ideal text for all students of Latin American politics and is highly recommended for courses on Central American politics, social systems, and history.

1

CRISIS AND TRANSFORMATION

CENTRAL AMERICAN COUNTRIES OCCUPY SMALL SPACES IN A big, challenging world. The region lies so close to the United States that from Miami or Houston one can fly to Managua or Guatemala City more quickly than to Chicago or Boston. Amid its rugged scenery, beautiful beaches, and Mayan ruins, however, political and economic turmoil have tormented much of the region most of two centuries.

For two decades after World War II, the area’s mostly poor and despotic regimes remained friendly to US interests. In the 1960s the isthmus developed a regionally planned common market that sought to insulate governments from political challengers by promoting rapid economic growth. Yet in the 1960s governments’ missteps spawned pushback from workers, civil society, and opposition parties. Rebel groups appeared, imitating Cuba’s revolutionaries. Within a decade the region’s five countries and roughly 20 million citizens experienced a tsunami of political and economic turmoil. Central America captured worldwide headlines as some regimes, aided by the United States, cracked down hard on multiplying opposition. The intensifying repression brought ever more demands for change. By 1980 revolutionary insurrection, counterrevolution, state terror, and external meddling engulfed the region. These forces eventually took more than 300,000 lives, turned millions into refugees, and devastated economies and infrastructures.

Regional and global actors struggled in the 1990s to manage this turmoil. By the first decade of the twenty-first century the area temporarily appeared to calm after Central American countries all adopted constitutional, elected civilian governments. US policymakers’ geopolitical concerns turned elsewhere, and political news from the region ebbed in the US media. But poor economic performance still plagued several countries. Many Central Americans evaluated their new governments poorly, and new political freedoms and increased participation rates pointed toward new political instability. In 2009 the region had its first democratic breakdown of the new century when the Honduran military and Congress overthrew President Manuel Zelaya. Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega began sliding back into authoritarianism. Since then a panoply of other problems has risen—corruption, criminal violence by gangs, and international drug smuggling. Waves of emigrants, including many children, have fled Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador seeking refuge in the United States.

The first two editions of Understanding Central America focused on political violence during the 1970s and 1980s and why revolutionary movements emerged in three Central American countries while two others remained relatively stable.¹ We argued that grievances arose from region-wide economic problems and from the political repression of demands for reform. When Nicaragua’s, Guatemala’s, and El Salvador’s regimes violently resisted these demands, their opponents coalesced and radicalized into revolutionary opposition. Nicaragua’s victorious insurrection brought 11 years of social revolution under the Sandinistas. El Salvador’s and Guatemala’s civil wars led to protracted stalemates eventually followed by negotiated peace and significant political changes. Meanwhile Honduras and Costa Rica undertook modest economic and political reforms and kept repression at moderate levels. They remained stable while rebellion and war raged nearby.

External actors, especially the United States, struggled to shape these events by providing resources to some political actors and denying them to others. Fearing leftist revolutionaries, the United States expended enormous diplomatic and political energy and several billion dollars to determine winners and losers. This outside manipulation mostly intensified and prolonged Central America’s conflicts, but eventually also affected institutions and policies. By the late 1990s each Central American nation, from different starting points and by divergent paths, had adopted a common regime type—­minimalist electoral democracy. Global pressures had encouraged local elites to adopt this regime type rather than revert to the region’s traditional military or personalistic authoritarianism. The Cold War had waned and with it fears of Communist expansion in the hemisphere. This allowed grudging tolerance among local elites and the United States of leftist parties’ openly participating in governance. Human rights performance improved over previous decades.

Subsequent editions of Understanding Central America have increasingly focused on how global forces continue to shape the region in the new century. Neoliberalism, a new strategy of economic development pushed by the United States, has exposed Central America to the world economy more openly than ever. It reduced barriers to trade and foreign investment and shrank the size and role of governments. With more democratic politics, liberalized economies, and the anti-Communist geopolitical imperative receding, unexpected global forces exerted severe new pressures on wobbly new Central American regimes. The international narcotics trade, destined to the voracious demand in the United States, prompted strong US and Mexican anti-narcotics efforts. International smugglers shifted transshipment routes from Mexico into Central America. Independently, gang violence appeared and escalated to horrific levels in Honduras and El Salvador because the United States deported thousands of Central American-origin gang members to the region. Local gangs spread organized crime and violent territorial competition. On the local level, fractious Honduran elites mounted the coup that shocked regional and hemi­spheric governments. Nicaragua and El Salvador elected leftist presidents. Corruption scandals roiled several countries. Democratization had clearly not solved Central America’s problems.

This seventh revised and updated edition tracks how such evolving global forces continue affecting Central America. Powerful political and economic pressures from abroad assail Central America’s small countries, but their poli­tical institutions and scant resources cannot always cope. Crisis has gripped the region’s so-called Northern Triangle countries—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—as criminal violence has surged and governments have failed to provide citizen security or political stability. Costa Rica has fared better, but Nicaragua has both controlled crime and reverted to pre-revolutionary strongman traditions.

Why Study Central America?

Central American countries interact with the evolving forces from the larger economic and political world. Despite their proximity and many similarities, their differences have produced intriguing variations in social and economic outcomes. Why, for example, have Costa Rica and Nicaragua had such divergent political, economic, and social conditions despite being poor neighbors similarly situated in the world economy? Why, when operating in the same world economy, has Costa Rica’s output grown seven times faster than Nicaragua’s since 1960, and two to three times faster than the other three economies? What events, leadership, public policy, political culture, and international factors pushed some nations forward and left others behind? Why, despite international encouragement, has democracy prospered in Costa Rica yet failed to gain sure footing in the other nations?

The region merits our attention because it remains mostly poor despite patchy economic and human progress. An estimate for 2017 put the number of direly poor Central Americans (as defined by their governments) at around 20.1 million of the region’s then 42 million people.² Despite some improvement of the region’s economies since 2000, millions remain in grinding poverty. Older sources of poverty persist, and new ones have developed as Central America’s economies opened to the world and as climate change occurs.

Another reason to examine Central America is its population growth and migration. The region’s combined population had risen above 43 million by 2019, with half its citizens facing limited economic opportunity and many plagued by violent crime. Many Central Americans have fled the region, seeking economic opportunity as migrant workers or as residents of Mexico and Costa Rica. Indeed, the 2010 US Census revealed that approximately 4 million Central Americans lived in the United States.³ Since then hundreds of thousands of Central Americans, especially youths, from the Northern Triangle countries have emigrated toward or to the United States. They have become a hotly contested issue in US national politics.

Central America warrants careful examination of how big forces act upon small countries. Globalization refers to compelling systemic forces that penetrate local affairs from beyond the nation-state. What are these global forces? World-scale economic forces generate markets, price cycles, and crises that shape domestic economies and subpopulations. Changes in the structure of the global economy, licit and illicit trade, and class systems realign domestic economic organizations and reshape classes. New ways of organizing the world economic and political arenas produce new ideologies and operating policies for institutions. These constrain local actors by favoring some, weakening others, and reshaping institutions to fit global needs and preferences. We believe Central America’s revolutions, regime changes, economic development strategies, evolving classes, social problems, persistent poverty, and migration flows reveal the impact of the global upon the local.

The “Central America” upon which we focus in this book consists of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.⁴ We do not address Belize and Panama individually. Although Belize is geographically Central American, that English-speaking microstate only became independent from Great Britain in 1981; its history is distinct from the region’s other countries. Panama lies outside Central America historically. Its pre-Columbian indigenous cultures were South American. From 1821 until 1903, Panama formed part of the South American republic of Colombia. “The five” share a common political heritage from the colonial period, during which Spain administered them as a unit. During the national period (1823 to 1838) they formed a single state called the United Provinces of Central America. In the late nineteenth century, several attempts to reunify failed. In the 1960s the five formed a common market, and more recent unification efforts include a common regional parliament and shared trade agreements with the United States. Out of this history comes a sense of Central American national identity.

As defined above, Central America’s small combined land mass of 431,812 square kilometers is barely larger than that of California (404,975 square kilometers). Its estimated total 2019 estimated population of around 43 million was 10 percent larger than California’s. The country with the smallest surface area, El Salvador, is smaller than Maryland. The largest, Nicaragua, is barely larger than Iowa. In 2019 population, the five varied between Costa Rica’s low of 5 million (similar to the population of South Carolina) and Guatemala’s high of 16.9 million (similar to New York).⁵ Central America’s population has more than doubled since the 1970s, but the rates of population growth have slowed in recent decades due to rapid urban growth and out-migration (see Appendix, Table A.2).

Central America’s natural resources are modest. However, had different political systems and economic models prevailed across Central America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there certainly would have been enough arable land to provide adequate sustenance for the population and some primary products for export. Yet responses to international market demands by the region’s elites led to land-ownership concentration, an overemphasis on exports, and inadequate production of consumer food staples. Instead of growing beans, corn, rice, plantain, and cassava for local consumption, big landholders normally concentrated on lucrative exports such as coffee, cotton, sugar, and beef.

Central America has varied but scant mineral resources. Guatemala has modest nickel and oil reserves. Nicaragua has long been viewed as a promising site for a future trans-isthmian waterway, but a recent Chinese-led project has foundered. Three nations now rely heavily on imported oil for electricity generation. Costa Rica produces over 90 percent of its electricity with a combination of hydroelectric, wind, and solar power, while Nicaragua generates over half of its electricity through renewables. In Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua mining and other extractive activities, ...