In the 1980s, revolution, civil war and the anticommunist drive of the US in the Western hemisphere turned world attention to Central America. The year 1990 marked a turning point in these bloody Central American conflicts. The civil war in Nicaragua ended. After a fair election the Marxist Sandinista regime stepped down and handed the government peacefully over to the opposition.
There are six states wholly in Central America: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama and Guatemala. Their combined population was only about 26 million in 1989, though population growth had been very high in the region, as it had been throughout Latin America.
Indeed, population growth in the early 1990s threatened to prevent any increase in the standard of living and to condemn the masses to deprivation and poverty. In addition, the resources that were available were not shared fairly. The continuing inequalities were most marked in the unjust distribution of the available land. The wildly fluctuating prices for the agricultural exports of coffee, bananas and cotton, on which these nations were still dependent, created a severe economic crisis, because the prices of manufactured imports did not move in unison, while the cost of oil imports reached dizzying heights before falling back and rising again in 1990.
An attempt was made in the 1970s to create more balanced economies that would rely less on manufactured imports and develop import-substituting industries. Ten years later this only added to the general economic calamities of the majority of Latin American nations. In common with the rest of Latin America the Central American states borrowed heavily from bankers flush with Middle Eastern oil money. The result was that a crushing debt burden, getting ever larger with high interest rates, turned the apparently temporary difficulties of the 1970s into permanent crises. Of course, the difficulties never were just temporary. Political and social reforms, including a redistribution of land, were indispensable preconditions of better economic and social health. The causes of Central America’s problems required radical remedies, regional as well as international. Nothing short of a massive effort could stabilise the region - an effort of will on the part of the developed world to cease protecting its own markets and to pay higher prices for Central America’s agricultural exports, as well as to guarantee these prices against wild fluctuations. International bankers would also need to write down their investments realistically, while wealthy Latin Americans would have to invest in their own economies instead of sending their money abroad.
In 1961 hopes and expectations had been raised by President Kennedy when he launched the Alliance for Progress. His aim was to transform Latin America’s economic and social ills by peaceful means. This was to be the free world’s democratic answer to the Marxist revolutionary challenge. But enough aid to meet the enormous economic problems was not forthcoming; much
Of what was given was diverted to military security against social revolution in the 1960s. Social revolution and a more equitable distribution of wealth and land was condemned by the powerful elites in Latin America, who claimed these measures would open the way for communism. Just as fearful of far-reaching reforms were the Latin American middle classes. Thus there was no will for political and social change among the ruling and influential groups. Yet this lay at the very heart of what the Alliance for Progress was supposed to be about. With the death of Kennedy, and Johnson’s growing preoccupation with Vietnam, the Alliance petered out as more democratic and socially responsible regimes failed to evolve. The Alliance for Progress did not achieve for Latin America what the Marshall Plan had done for Europe. The cycle of violence, deprivation and revolution was not broken; the answer given to Marxist revolution was military suppression.
However, in some of the Central American states a certain amount of progress was achieved, especially in Costa Rica and Honduras; but even here it was too little; in the others - Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala - repression and the murder of peasants and of the urban opposition goaded into armed terrorist resistance created a thirty-year cycle of bloodshed and violence. Despite Washington’s good intentions in pushing for democratic and economic improvements and for an end to the abuse of the most fundamental human rights, the image of the US was marred, especially during the two Reagan administrations (1981-9) by the priority given to security and to efforts to halt the spread of Marxism in the Caribbean and South and Central America. The misery and destruction borne by the people through the years of revolution, civil wars and conflict were a terrible price to pay. Even after they were settled in the mid-1990s corruption blighted the region.
World History
