ABSTRACT
Political violence wracked Central America from the 1970s through the mid-1990s and took hundreds of thousands of lives. Five of six nations entered the 1970s with authoritarian governments. Only Costa Rica practiced constitutional electoral democracy and consistently respected human rights. Three countries experienced civil wars driven by a combination of economic crisis and increasing political mobilization against authoritarian rule, and political unrest spread across most of the region. In 1979 Nicaraguan rebels led by the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime and began an 11-year revolution that ended when Nicaraguans voted out the revolutionary government in 1990. US intervention and financing nourished Nicaraguan counterinsurgents who fought the revolutionary government throughout the 1980s. In El Salvador, a military coup overthrew a military government in late 1979, spawning a leftist rebellion and extensive US involvement on behalf of the government. This war lasted until 1992, eventually ending in a negotiated settlement after a slow transition to formal electoral democracy. Guatemala’s military regimes fought a counterinsurgency war against leftist rebels from the 1960’s through 1996. Until the mid-1980s the military repressed civilian opposition, but then slowly liberalized the regime and transferred power to civilians; negotiations ended the war in 1996. Honduras’s military regime began liberalizing in the early 1980s; this shift of power toward civilians likely averted civil war. Panama’s military-dominated government suppressed opposition parties until an invasion by the United States in 1989 ousted Manuel Noriega from power and ushered in electoral democracy.
