Central American peace accord celebrates 25 years, but has it brought peace?

Former President Arias said in a Los Angeles Times interview in 2000, when asked how he was able to get leaders to agree to a peaceful solution: “I appealed to their sense of history, to their responsibility of transferring to our children a peaceful Central America, to their dignity, not accepting what Washington was recommending.

"And I believed I touched their hearts when I said, ‘We need to choose between life and death. The superpowers are providing the arms. We are providing the death.’”

He was also helped by international events, including the Iran contra scandal, the murder of Jesuit priests in El Salvador, and the fall of the Berlin Wall – all of which fractured US views about what was at stake in Central America, says Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin America Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center and editor of “In the Wake of War: Democratization and Internal Armed Conflict in Latin America.”

“The end of the wars in Central America was a confluence of changes in the US that created an opening... and the region's leaders coming together around an alternative proposal,” Ms. Arnson says.

Polarization has 'not been overcome'

The wars didn't end immediately, and some of the worst fighting happened afterwards in El Salvador. Peace came there in 1992, after the death toll reached 75,000; in Nicaragua it reached 80,000. In 36 years of civil war in Guatemala, some 200,000 were killed from 1960 to 1996.

But the agreement paved the way for national accords that followed, and since militaries have been downsized – even though they have been increasingly called upon, particularly in Guatemala, to fight powerful drug trafficking organizations – and put under civilian control, elections are fair and democratic transitions have been peaceful.

But even if the military crisis ended, the roots of conflict have kept a stubborn hold on the region.

“One thing that has happened is that the polarization and cleavages of the political system during the war have not been overcome,” says Arnson. “Peace accords were not able to overcome that polarization. As a consequence it has been very difficult in places like El Salvador [and] Guatemala to come together around a social pact to address the enormous problems of exclusion, poverty, and inequality.”

The World Bank, in a 2011 report about Central America, considered the drivers of present-day violence in the region, including its history of civil strife – which can mean a surplus of guns among other factors– weak institutions, exclusion, and the prevalence of youth gangs.

Since the signing of the agreement, economic crisis has led to mass migration, mostly to the urban US, where gangs were formed and sent back home among tougher immigration laws in the US. Today, drug organizations have used Central America as its principal route for cocaine into the US. Honduras ranked as the deadliest country in the world, according to the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2011 report.

In a recent Gallup poll, Latin Americans reported feeling the least safe of any region of the world. Of the countries listed, four are in the top ten of feeling least safe, including Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

“It was easier to end the wars than construct institutions that perform their function of protecting people and delivering justice and law enforcement,” says Mr. Shifter. “This anniversary is very odd in that there was a hope to have this celebration be about how far the region has come, [yet] Central America is in the midst of this tremendous insecurity.”

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