Central America

The term "Central America" is often used to designate the region stretching southeastward from the isthmus of Tehuantepec, in Mexico, to the boundary between Panama and Colombia. Historically, however, it has more often been used with reference to the five states that once made up the Central American federation—Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica—but also including Belize, which has long been claimed by Guatemala. The Spanish colonial Kingdom of Guatemala also included the area occupied by the present-day Mexican state of Chiapas; that state is sometimes included in considerations of Central America. And since its independence from Colombia in 1903, Panama has increasingly been thought of politically as well as geographically as a part of Central America.

Before the arrival of the Europeans, Central America, an archaeological bridge between North and South America, was home to a variety of nomadic and sedentary peoples. Mayan civilization occupied much of the isthmus, from Chiapas and Yucatán through Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, and into Nicaragua. Various tribes of Nahuatl origin had moved along the Pacific watershed from central Mexico as far as Nicaragua. Chibcha and other South American Indians occupied lower Central America into Nicaragua. Although the Maya were the most advanced pre-Columbian civilization, they were neither unified nor cohesive. Unlike the Aztecs or Incas, their autonomous city-states remained independent, presaging the political fragmentation that would characterize modern Central America. What unity existed was cultural rather than political.

These Indian peoples suffered greatly under the Spanish military conquest. Efforts to enslave the natives decimated their numbers, but far more destructive were the biological consequences of the conquest. Epidemics of smallpox, plague, syphilis, and other diseases killed millions, perhaps 80 to 90 percent of the population. The population continued to decline until about 1750, then began to grow slightly through the nineteenth century and to rise at a surprising pace in the twentieth century.

Much of the contemporary writing on Central America focuses on individual states, offering rather myopic analyses with little sense of the larger regional issues. Even most of the growing number of works concentrating on the contemporary crises in Central America for the most part deal with the region on a state-by-state basis. This is not, of course, altogether unjustified or unwelcome, for there has been a need for more careful studies of individual states and most of these works contribute to understanding the dynamics of Central American development. At the same time, there is a Central American regional cohesiveness across a broad spectrum of activity. The concept of Central American nationality is deeply ingrained in isthmian history, and although the period since the 1870s has fostered the nationalism of the separate city-states, Central American reunification remains a possibility many Central Americans desire.

THE COLONIAL PERIOD

Central American history reveals a strong thread of unity. Although political union was not a feature of pre-Columbian Central America, there was considerable cultural similarity among the peoples occupying the present-day states of Central America, with extensive commercial relations among them and some sense of common enemies from without. In the early sixteenth century, however, the Spanish imposed political, economic, social, and cultural unity. As the Kingdom of Guatemala, for three centuries the region evolved as a single political unit, governed from Santiago de Guatemala (present-day Antigua). Moved occasionally because of natural disasters, that city became the home of a patrician creole elite and the peninsular bureaucrats who ruled these provinces. Their progeny extended into the provinces and formed the nucleus of the local aristocracy in each provincial capital.

While varying degrees of allegiance and amounts of colonial tribute were paid to the viceregal capital at Mexico City and to Spain, the immediate and real center of the Central American universe was Santiago de Guatemala. Until the very last years of Spanish rule, it contained the only university in the kingdom (the University of San Carlos, founded in 1681), and was the headquarters for every religious order on the isthmus, the center for overseas trade and finance, and, of course, the administrative capital of the kingdom. The cream of the local creole stock came from the provinces to be educated, to enter commerce, to join the bureaucracy, and to establish closer ties with the families at the center of the kingdom.

To be sure, there were centrifugal forces as well. Inadequate transportation facilities caused much of the region to be remote from the capital and its advantages. The kingdom often represented an intrusion on local subsistence, a burden in the form of taxes and service to crown or cross. There was the conflict between the two great socioeconomic systems that have characterized Central America since 1524: feudalism and capitalism. The conquistadores established a kingdom with feudal concepts, institutions, and customs. The vestiges of that kingdom can still be seen in institutions and attitudes in modern Central America, but there also was a Renaissance capitalism carried to Central America that emphasized mineral exploitation, agroexport production, development of infrastructure, and greater unity among the provinces of the kingdom. This capitalist trend slowed during the seventeenth century and, if anything, feudal institutions became stronger then. But as Spain declined economically, her rivals gained strength and the industrial revolution caused them to probe the isthmus for trade and plunder, which contributed ultimately to greater overseas trade. The eighteenth-century Bourbons especially promoted increased agricultural export production in the backwater regions of the Spanish Empire that had been predominantly subsistence-oriented.

In Central America this produced some very substantial changes. Provinces formerly subservient to Guatemala began to gain importance in their own right. Honduras exploited silver mines and, as in Nicaragua, a flourishing ranching community emerged that drove large herds to markets in El Salvador and Guatemala. Costa Rica exported cacao and tobacco. And, most of all, El Salvador's indigo became the major export of the isthmus. This greater economic importance of the provinces contributed to their resentment against the persistent economic and political dominance of Guatemala City, but it also caused some severe economic dislocations. During the final half-century of Hispanic rule, strong divisions began to emerge among the colonial elite regarding economic development, the role of the Roman Catholic Church, provincial representation, and, ultimately, the question of independence from Spain.

INDEPENDENCE TO 1850

All the various issues crystallized the educated creole class into two factions that emerged after independence as the conservative and liberal parties. The liberals advocated a continuation of Bourbon policies that promoted liberal capitalism, while the conservatives looked back to the perceived harmony of Hapsburg times, with strong feudal overtones. This would have major consequences for the future of Central American nationalism.

Conservatives looked toward maintenance of the two-class society that had so long characterized Spain and Central America. They favored policies that would preserve the landholding elites in their traditional, dominant roles but also, in noblesse oblige fashion, they assured the peasants of some protection against exploitation by the liberal modernizers. Overcoming initial liberal gains at the outset of independence, these conservatives and their caudillos controlled most of Central America in the mid-nineteenth century. They preserved traditional Hispanic values and institutions, especially the Roman Catholic Church, and they rewarded loyal Indian and mestizo peasants with paternalism and respect for their communal lands. They made real, if limited, demands on the peasants, for most of whom subsistence agriculture continued to be the principal activity. In feudal style, they relied on the clergy and local caudillos and landowners for social control, peace, and security. They thus defended states' rights against national unity and were xenophobic toward foreigners who threatened their traditional society with Protestantism, democracy, and modernization.

While the conservatives welcomed expansion of agroexports, they were sensitive to the danger of upsetting native labor and land tenure patterns, and they were forcefully opposed to granting the nation's land and resources to foreigners who generally did not share their religion, language, or social and cultural values, and who might threaten the preeminent place that the conservatives held in the social structure of the provinces. Peasant insurgency against liberal innovators in the 1830s, sometimes instigated by small landlords, was instrumental in the conservative accession to power.

Liberals, by contrast, represented the segment of the Creole elite and an incipient bourgeoisie that wished to modernize Central America by imitating the economic and political success of western Europe and the United States. These "modernizers" rejected traditional Hispanic values and institutions, especially the church. They espoused classical economic liberalism, opposing monopolies while encouraging private foreign trade, immigration, and investment. They emphasized exports and treated the rural masses and their land as the principal resources to be exploited in this effort. Although republican and democratic in political theory, they became much influenced first by utilitarianism and later by positivist materialism, and were contemptuous of, even embarrassed by, the indigenous heritage of their countries. Once in power they often resorted to dictatorship to accomplish their economic goals and to defend their gains.

Thus the professionalization of the military, which became their power base, was an important trend in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The absence of stronger middle sectors in the traditional two-class Central American society and the persistence of elitist attitudes toward the masses meant, however, that in practice the liberals proceeded very differently than did the industrialized nations. Instead, there emerged elite oligarchies of planters and capitalists who cynically, and without the noblesse oblige of their conservative predecessors, continued to live off the labor of an oppressed rural population that shared little if any of the benefits of the expanded export production. On the contrary, they found their subsistence threatened by encroachment on their lands for production of export commodities.

Few Central Americans at the beginning of the nineteenth century envisioned or favored independence for the separate city-states of the Kingdom of Guatemala. But the peculiar circumstances, which Mario Rodríguez has described brilliantly in his Cádiz Experiment (1978), brought together both provincial resentment toward Guatemala City and greater local autonomy through the reforms of the Cádiz government in 1810 to 1814. Independence from Spain came through endorsement of Agustín Iturbide's "Plan of Iguala" on 15 September 1821, by a council of notables in Guatemala City. Following the brief continuation of the Kingdom of Guatemala within Iturbide's Mexican Empire (1822–1823), an elected assembly dominated by liberals met in Guatemala City and on 1 July 1823 declared independence from Mexico and organized the United Provinces of the Center of America (Provincias Unidas del Centro de América). In 1824 it adopted a republican constitution providing for a loose federation of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Chiapas had elected to stay with Mexico in 1823, and Panama had become part of Gran Colombia in 1821.

From the outset, the failure of federal leaders to enforce the constitutional provisions led to fragmentation of the union. Provincial jealousies and ideological differences that had emerged in the late colonial period had already sown the seeds of disunion. In the first presidential election (1825) Manuel José Arce, a liberal Salvadoran army officer, won a disputed election over a moderate Honduran attorney and prominent intellectual, José Cecilio del Valle. The intrigue connected with the electoral process alienated not only conservatives supporting Valle but also extreme liberals, who accused Arce of selling out to conservatives in the congress. Arce did, in fact, ally himself with conservative interests in Guatemala City, and when the liberal Guatemalan state government became hostile toward him, he deposed Governor Juan Barrundia and replaced him with the staunchly conservative Mariano Aycinena. This act prompted the Salvadoran state government to rebel, touching off a civil war in 1826 that produced animosities throughout the federation that would last beyond the brief life of the United Provinces.

Liberal victory in 1829, under the leadership of Honduran general Francisco Morazán, resulted in a sweeping reform program that included strong anti-clericalism, promotion of infrastructure and agroexports, integration of the Indian population, and approval of new judicial and penal codes, notably including trial by jury and, in Guatemala, the illadvised adoption of the Livingston Codes. Under Morazán's presidency (1831–1839), the liberals exiled prominent conservatives, including the archbishop and other clergy. Morazán also moved the federal capital from Guatemala City to San Salvador in 1834.

This disintegration of the old kingdom is of crucial importance to Central America's subsequent history. Struggles emerged between conservative and liberal creole elites in every province, as well as between provinces. Fighting was especially bitter between Guatemala City and San Salvador and between the Nicaraguan cities of Granada and León. But nearly as serious were conflicts between Comayagua and Tegucigalpa in Honduras and among the four towns of the Costa Rican central valley, where liberal San José ultimately emerged victorious over traditional Cartago. Quetzaltenango and other towns of western Guatemala also harbored separatist sentiments that surfaced in unsuccessful secession movements in 1839 and in 1848.

Resistance to the liberal reforms arose among the rural masses in El Salvador in the rebellion of the Indian leader Anastasio Aquino, beginning in 1833, but Morazán suppressed this insurrection. Disenchantment with the liberal reforms was also evident in the presidential election at the end of 1833, when opposition candidate José Cecilio del Valle defeated Morazán, but died before taking office. Morazán, as the runner-up, remained constitutionally in office, confirmed by a new election in February 1835. In Guatemala, opposition to the liberal policies of Governor Mariano Gálvez—including anticlericalism, land grants to foreigners, judicial reform, and imposition of a general head tax—combined with panic caused by a serious cholera epidemic ignited a peasant revolt beginning in 1837. Encouraged by the rural clergy and led by the charismatic Rafael Carrera, the peasants toppled Gálvez and sharply divided the liberals in Guatemala, allowing the conservatives to gain control.

Meanwhile, western Guatemala, under liberal leadership, seceded and formed a sixth state, called Los Altos. Carrera quickly reconquered these departments in January 1840, however, and when Morazán brought federal troops into the conflict, Carrera defeated him decisively at Guatemala City in March 1840. The federation was already in disarray, as Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica had seceded in 1838. Morazán fled to Chiriquí in Colombian Panama. He returned two years later and briefly took over the government of Costa Rica, but in this action he not only failed to reunite the states but also inspired a Costa Rican reaction that ended in his own execution before a firing squad on 15 September 1842.

Even at that, conservatives as well as liberals were reluctant to abandon national union. The states formed a conservative alliance in 1842, which served to prevent the liberals from regaining control. Despite their declared preference for reunion, however, the conservative caudillos of the mid-nineteenth century laid the foundations for the modern city-state republics of Central America. Guatemala in 1847 and Costa Rica in 1848, in their fervor to prevent a return of the Morazanistas, declared their states to be republics, and the other states followed their lead within a decade.

1850 TO 1945

Even in the symbolic declarations of independence from the defunct federation, the countries reiterated their hopes for reunion at "a more propitious time." Carrera's stunning defeat of a liberal National Army at Arada, Guatemala, in February 1851 destroyed whatever chances a reunification effort organized by José Francisco Barrundia and other liberals might have had, and a conservative "National Campaign" under the leadership of Costa Rica's Juan Rafael Mora defeated William Walker's unionist aspirations in 1857. Walker had come to the aid of Nicaraguan liberals and then established himself as president of that state. A strong Costa Rican—Guatemalan axis throughout the mid-nineteenth century, both before and after the Walker episode, prevented the middle states from returning to liberalism.

That "more propitious time" has come and gone frequently, with more than a hundred attempts at reunification between 1824 and 1965. The liberal resurgence that recovered control of all the states before 1900 appeared propitious to some, especially to liberal caudillos Justo Rufino Barrios (1873–1885) of Guatemala and José Santos Zelaya of Nicaragua (1893–1909), who sought to reunite the isthmus under their respective military leadership.

In reality, the liberal caudillos brought a different kind of unity to the isthmus in their common policies of welcoming foreign, especially United States, capital to the region. In a very real sense, the United States provided the kind of external unity over the region in the twentieth century that Spain had lost at the beginning of the nineteenth century and that Great Britain had only partially achieved in the mid-nineteenth century.

In the early twentieth century, Nicaraguan writer Salvador Mendieta spearheaded another unionist movement that, although it failed, helped to generate interstate cooperative agencies and laid a foundation for the later integration movement. A Mendieta-inspired Unionist Party won the Guatemalan presidency briefly in 1920, but traditional liberals displaced it a year later.

Central Americans have often charged that foreign nations—Britain in the nineteenth century, the United States in the twentieth—have sabotaged unity, following a divide-and-conquer policy. Certainly there is some truth to the charge with regard to the activities of nationals and diplomats of both English-speaking countries. It was, for example, easier for the giant fruit companies to deal with small, weak states than with a larger, united republic. Yet had there not been substantial internal causes of disunity for foreigners to exploit, Central Americans might still have achieved union.

After World War II foreign aid programs, particularly from the United States but also from international organizations, focused on the need for Central American unity and engendered a spirit of cooperation. Working with the United States Agency for International Development (formerly International Cooperation Administration) and United Nations organizations, the Central American states launched multilateral programs that promoted a spirit of unity at least among the technocrats and politicians associated with them. Cultural and ideological unity came more gradually with programs to eliminate unnecessary duplication in Central American universities and vocational schools.

These foreign assistance programs imposed a kind of unity over the region. Studies made by private corporations and foundations, by national and international governmental agencies, and by academicians in several disciplines encouraged the five states to collaborate in facing common problems. Movement toward economic integration and its accompanying interstate organizations promoted cooperation and unity on the isthmus, as did a rise in interstate investment and the advent of better transportation and communication among the states. Symbolically, the printing of "Centro-América" on the automobile license tags in all five states reflected the new spirit of unity.

Unfortunately, aide programs were often ill conceived and not applicable to the particular problems of Central America. The failure of the United States to support the socioeconomic reforms of Juan José Arévalo, the Sandinistas, and other progressive forces attached an aura of reaction to United States programs that made them suspect to many Central Americans. At the same time, the military grew and often became the principal beneficiary of aid programs. The refusal of most U.S. aid programs to recognize the need for basic restructuring of the society and economy of the region was at the heart of the failure of the programs to achieve greater change. Many Central Americans saw the programs simply as devices to maintain the region in economic dependence on the capitalists.

FROM 1945 TO 1994

With more progressive governments in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador following World War II—and even some spirit of the benefits of cooperation evidence in Honduras and Nicaragua—the movement for unity picked up. Guatemalan and Salvadoran initiatives led to a general meeting of Central American foreign ministers in October 1951, from which came plans for the formation of the Organization of Central American States (ODECA), formally founded in 1955. In 1952 economic ministers of the five states met in Tegucigalpa with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, leading eventually to a 1958 treaty for Central American economic integration that included the Central American Common Market (CACM), a series of trade agreements, and planned industries, which expanded through the 1960s. Costa Rica, the most prosperous state, was reluctant to cooperate fully, fearing competition from countries with cheap labor and especially distrustful of Nicaragua. Thus, a full common market was never achieved, but substantial advances were made, particularly in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, where new industrial establishments blossomed. Panama also was a limited member of the CACM. Other results of the cooperation included an acceleration in road building and completion of the Pan-American Highway to Panama in 1964. These improvements promoted interstate trade, industry, and tourism, although political instability limited these advances.

The two-week Football War between El Salvador and Honduras in the summer of 1969 brought a halt to the growth of the CACM and emphasized that without stronger political cooperation, economic union was precarious. The Central American states had settled most disputes amicably since World War II, but the outbreak of this war brought back memories of the frequent civil wars and the meddling in each other's affairs so common earlier. It abruptly interrupted a decade of growth and economic diversification. Although interstate trade soon reached pre-1969 levels and there was modest commercial growth throughout most of the 1970s, in the aftermath of that clash careful analysis revealed not only that economic union could go only so far without closer political confederation but also that the CACM had not been uniformly beneficial for all five states. The Permanent Secretariat for Economic Integration of Central America (SIECA) concluded that if it was truly to benefit the entire region, there would have to be provision for redistribution of the generated wealth that flowed from one region to another as a result of trade patterns.

The worsening economic and social conditions stimulated by rampant inflation and the worldwide oil crisis led to the formation of the High-Level Committee, which drafted a treaty in 1976 that, if adopted, would have extended the integration movement to total trade liberalization, standardization of foreign investment rules, tax harmonization, free movement of labor and capital, a common agricultural policy, a coordinated system of basic industries, and a unified social policy that promoted health, nutrition, housing, support of labor unions, and harmonization of social security and minimum wages. This progressive proposal, however, was rejected by all five states, and the integration movement lost its earlier momentum. The failure of the Central American elites to seize this opportunity was far more damaging than the Football War, reflecting selfish concerns to protect privileged positions within their respective city-states.

The economic problems and political turmoil of the late 1970s fragmented the isthmus and made integration seem remote. The rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the guerrilla warfare in El Salvador and Guatemala curtailed traffic on the Pan-American Highway, meanwhile the real value of exports fell for all of the states. Yet hope did not die, and the violence and economic decline of the 1980s once again emphasized the desirability of unity. Encouraged especially by Presidents Vinicio Cerezo of Guatemala, Oscar Arias Sánchez of Costa Rica, and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, this new interest in unity resulted by 1990 in renewed plans for integration and a Central American parliament modeled on that of the European community. Although Costa Rica's legislature kept that state aloof from this initiative, the other four states proceeded to hold elections and organize the Central American Parliament with guarded optimism.

By 1980 political and economic crisis in Central America had made it the focus of an East-West confrontation that brought new manifestations of U.S. hegemony over the region. The pattern of military dictatorship in all of the states except Costa Rica had intensified in reaction to the rise of Fidel Castro after 1959. A military phase of the Central American integration movement was the formation, beginning in 1963, by Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua of the Central American Defense Council (CONDECA) with strong U.S. support. The 1969 war weakened this organization when Honduras pulled out, and in the 1970s it faded into near obscurity, with greater emphasis being placed on economic and social development. After the 1968 Medellín Episcopal Conference, the Roman Catholic church began to promote, with some success, greater attention to the plight of the poor and oppressed, contributing to a new international awareness of the problem of human rights violations and social injustice in Central America. International organizations began to focus on Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and they often scored the United States for its support of repressive regimes in those countries. When Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Costa Rica and Guatemala in February 1976, he was greeted with riots and outcries against U.S. support of reactionary regimes in Latin America.

President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) sought to establish a more humanitarian United States policy, but his pro-human rights policy brought stiff opposition from elites in Guatemala and El Salvador, especially after the 1979 overthrow of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Carter also pushed through treaties under which the United States agreed to turn over the Panama Canal to Panama by the year 2000, ending severely strained relations between the United States and Panama, and helping the government of strongman Omar Torrijos to reverse the unfavorable economic trends in his country. Although the Carter government opposed the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, it accepted their victory gracefully, and in late September 1979 the U.S. Congress approved a Nicaraguan aid package.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, however, brought a sharp reversal of these policies. Reagan had opposed transfer of the Canal Zone, and his administration obstructed implementation of the 1977 treaties, risking deteriorating relations with Panama in a period when that state was undergoing political adjustments following the 1981 death of Torrijos in a plane crash. Reagan cultivated better relations with the Central American armies, however. Soon after taking office he resumed sales of military items to Guatemala, sent military advisers to El Salvador, and suspended aid to Nicaragua. By November 1981 Reagan had begun support of covert operations against the Nicaraguan government, and soon afterward the Nicaraguan Contras emerged to launch a civil war aimed at overthrowing the Sandinistas. He also increased U.S. support against guerrilla opposition forces in El Salvador.

From the outset of his administration, it was clear that Reagan intended to roll back the revolutionary tide in Central America and to make the isthmus a theater in the escalating confrontation with Soviet power. The U.S. presence was most obvious in Honduras, where a massive U.S. military and naval buildup supported the militarization of Honduras and aid to the Nicaraguan contras in an effort to intimidate both the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran guerrillas. In 1983, with the strong backing of the Reagan administration, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Panama resurrected CONDECA, with Nicaragua excluded and Costa Rica, emphasizing its neutrality, declining participation. But the Reagan administration played on traditional Costa Rican fear of Nicaragua to encourage a military buildup in that country as well.

As debate over U.S. policy heightened, Reagan named Henry Kissinger in 1983 to head a bipartisan commission to study Central America. The committee's report, although providing considerable evidence that the basic problems on the isthmus were socioeconomic, concluded with an endorsement of the military policies of the Reagan government. It also called, however, for a massive economic and social aid program, which the Reagan government began to implement. A rapidly deteriorating economic crisis in Nicaragua accompanied continued United States support of the contras after 1985. After much negotiation a peace initiative by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sánchez finally succeeded in 1989. The United States agreed to disband the contras and the Sandinistas agreed to hold free elections, which in 1990 brought to power an anti-Sandinista coalition strongly linked to the old Conservative Party and United States interests under the presidency of Violeta Barrios De Chamorro, widow of the slain La Prensa editor who had opposed the Somoza dynasty.

Reagan's successor, George Bush (1989–1993), continued the military approach to Central American problems, however. In Panama, General Manuel Noriega challenged American interests there after having collaborated with the CIA for years. President Bush cited Noriega's role in drug trafficking as justification for a U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989 but was obviously concerned about Noriega's ties to Cuba. Noriega was captured and brought to the United States, where he was convicted of violating U.S. drug laws. A successor government under Guillermo Endara, widely regarded as a U.S. puppet government, however, appeared to allow continuation of the drug trafficking at an even higher level than under Noriega. Meanwhile, the collapse of the Eastern bloc, beginning in 1989, ended the perceived Soviet threat in Central America, and U.S. direct interest in the region dropped sharply.

As the twentieth century closed, the middle and working classes were continuing to challenge the power of creole oligarchies that had inherited power at independence. Yet while the Reagan-Bush Central American policy had verbalized a great deal about its support of the democratization of Central America, much of the progress was superficial and limited to the supervision of free elections. A 1991 poll of Latin American academic specialists in the United States (the 1991 Fitzgibbon-Johnson Image-Index on Latin American Democracy, conducted by Phil Kelly of Emporia State University) rated Costa Rica as the most democratic of the twenty Latin American republics; Nicaragua placed tenth, and Honduras (seventeenth), Guatemala (eighteenth), and El Salvador (nineteenth) ranked above only Haiti in the poll. While some of the more visible manifestations of military rule in those states have been camouflaged, the serious social and economic obstacles to democracy remain strong.

Chances of Central American reunion as of 2007 seem more unlikely than at any time since 1839, but the appeal of union remains irresistible. If governments representing a broader segment of the population gain power and can check the self-serving policies of the elites, then the hopes of Francisco Morazán and Salvador Mendieta for a single Central American republic may yet come to fruition. Steve Ropp has written an article entitled "Central America in Search of a Cavour," which notes striking similarities between nineteenth-century Italy and contemporary Central America. Once initiated, a progress toward a rejuvenated Central American republic could come rapidly, and the new Central American Parliament may well be a step in that direction. But for the early twenty-first century, while cooperation at many levels will probably resume, it is just as likely that Central America will remain divided into five sovereign states with strong nationalistic elements that emphasize their unique differences rather than their common problems.

See alsoCentral America, Independence of; Indigenous Peoples; Organization of Central American States (ODECA); United States-Latin American Relations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are useful bibliographical volumes on each Central American country in Clio Press's World Bibliographical Series. Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Central America, a Nation Divided, 3d ed. (1993), is a general history of Central America in English; for the post-Independence period James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (1988), is much more detailed. Héctor Pérez Brignoli, A Brief History of Central America, translated by Ricardo B. Sawrey and Susana Stettri de Sawrey, 2d ed. (1989), and Rodolfo Pastor, Historia de Centroamérica (1988), offer Central American interpretations. Leslie Bethell, ed., Central America Since Independence (1991), conveniently provides the pertinent chapters from The Cambridge History of Latin America, 10 vols. (1984–1994). Although over a century old, Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Central America, 3 vols. (1883–1887), still has much utility, especially in its presentation of the liberal interpretation. Mary W. Helms, Middle America: A Culture History of Heartlands and Frontiers (1975), surveys isthmian history from an anthropological perspective from pre-Columbian to modern times. For the colonial period, see Murdo J. Macleod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (1973), and Miles Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840 (1982). Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo (1971), is an extended interpretive essay by a leading Guatemalan historian that offers a detailed description of the colonial social structure and the formation of the creole mentality. Mario Rodríguez, The Cádiz Experiment in Central America, 1808 to 1826 (1978), is a superb study on the independence period and the influence of the Spanish Constitution of 1812 in Central America; Thomas L. Karnes, The Failure of Union: Central America, 1824–1975, rev. ed. (1976), describes the failure of the Central American federation and surveys attempts to revive it throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871 (1993), deals with the first half-century of independence, with particular attention to Guatemala.

Lowell Gudmundson, Costa Rica Before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Export Boom (1986), provides an excellent reevaluation of the early development of Costa Rica, including considerable discussion of the myths of Costa Rican history and its historiography. David Browing, El Salvador, Landscape and Society (1971), is an excellent description of land use and tenure in El Salvador, with relevance for understanding the relation between land and history throughout the region. E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (1980), pays considerable attention to Central America and calls attention to the damage done to folk culture by the liberal economic policies of the nineteenth century. E. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798–1858 (1991), interprets nineteenth-century Nicaragua within that framework. The early-twentieth-century problems of Central America are described in excruciating detail in Salvador Mendieta, Alrededor del problema unionista de Centro-América, 2 vols. (1934), and La enfermedad de Centro-América, 3 vols. (1910–1934).

Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Political Economy of Central America Since 1920 (1987), stresses the difficulties created by Central American emphasis on export-led economic development. Robert G. Williams, Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America (1986), focuses on the cotton and beef industries since World War II, explaining their impact on the social and political crises of the 1980s. William Durham, Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological Origins of the Soccer War (1979), is a superb study that pursues the underlying causes of the 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras and exposes many of the socioeconomic problems of Central America and their long-term historical consequences. A number of anthologies focus on the crises of the 1980s, but from a historical perspective the most useful include Steve C. Ropp and James A. Morris, eds., Central America: Crisis and Adaptation (1984), and Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., ed., Central America: Historical Perspectives on the Contemporary Crises (1988). See also Steve C. Ropp, "Waiting for Cavour: The Current Central America Crisis and Unification," in Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies 12 (1985–1986): 109-118.

Additional Bibliography

Dym, Irene, and Christophe Belaubre, eds. Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759–1821. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007.

Gambone, Michael D. Capturing the Revolution: The United States, Central America, and Nicaragua, 1961–1972. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Leiva Vivas, Rafael. La unión centroamericana: Utopía, lirismo y desafío. Tegucigalpa, Honduras: ENAG, Empresa Nacional Artes Gráficas, 2004.

                                Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.