|
|
|
|
Foreign Affairs
The New Battle for Central America
By Ana Arana
Ana Arana is an investigative journalist who specializes in Latin America. She has covered Colombia and the Central American civil wars for The Miami Herald, The Baltimore Sun, and other publications.
Cold War, Hot War
The last time Central America received much play in the American news media was during the 1980s, when the region, one of the Cold War's hot zones, was plagued by civil war. For much of the decade, Soviet- and Cuban-backed Marxist insurgencies (and, in one case, a Soviet-backed government) fought long and bloody battles against American-supported right-wing forces. Once the Cold War ended, however, the superpowers withdrew much of their support from the region. The civil wars there sputtered out, ending in a series of peace accords: first in Nicaragua in 1990, then in El Salvador in 1992, and finally in Guatemala in 1996.
Despite high hopes, however, Central America has seen few improvements in the five years since the fighting stopped. Today the region's seven small republics, rather than exhibiting the new harmony and prosperity that were expected to come with peace, bear only the scars and open wounds of traumatized societies: rampant corruption, gang warfare, drug smuggling, intense urban poverty and overpopulation, and neglect from the international community.
And yet despite these problems, while the United States is focusing ever more attention on Colombia and the two-front war that Bogota is waging against leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries linked to the drug trade, few in Washington seem concerned with Central America. This oversight is short-sighted in the extreme. Not only do the region's many maladies and its proximity to the United States make it a major source of potential instability on America's borders, but Central America has also become a key pipeline for drug shipments from Colombia northward. According to U.S. law enforcement officials, 60 percent of the cocaine that entered the United States last year passed through Central America, concealed in small aircraft, fast boats, and trucks. This represents a threefoldincrease since 1993, and the chaos that the burgeoning drug trade has wreaked on the region has given rise to a new fear, the potential "Colombianization" of Central America.
As the drug trade has moved north, the opportunities for profit and power it provides have been rapidly exploited by many of the same groups that fought the civil wars of the 1980s. In Central America's new conflicts, profit has displaced politics as the governing ideology. The cocaine trade has created a dangerous synergy between political terror and drug trafficking, and especially in Guatemala — the region's largest country — the line between criminal and political violence has begun to blur. In El Salvador, where kidnapping, bank robbery, and murder have become rampant, crime experts now blame many of these offenses on former combatants. Their evidence is compelling: criminals use weapons of war (such as AK-47 assault rifles) for the simplest of crimes, and they wield them too skillfully to be mere civilians. In Nicaragua, meanwhile, many of those recently arrested for gun-running have turned out to be either former contras or members of the Sandinista army.
Crime rates have jumped throughout the region. In El Salvador, the murder rate is now 120 per 100,000 inhabitants (compared to 8 . . .