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During the 1980s the global refugee population expanded rapidly as a result of regional conflicts and refugee crises in Indochina, Afghanistan, Central America, Horn of Africa, and southern Africa. Huge care and maintenance programmes were established in nearby asylum countries under the auspices of the fifth High Commissioner, Poul Hartling. The global refugee total tripled and the UNHCR's budgets and programmes quintupled. The emphasis on aid delivery also reflected Western governments’ desire to assist refugee warrior communities fighting Soviet‐backed regimes, resulting in most refugee problems in regions of superpower conflict becoming protracted. At the same time asylum crises arose in Western Europe and North America.

This chapter considers the role of ‘memory politics’ – understood as the combination of official and unofficial attempts to deal with the legacy of past violations – in the struggle for democratization in Central America: official initiatives can include truth commissions, amnesty dispensations, criminal investigations and prosecutions, and a range of institutional reforms aimed at redressing the previous failure of the state to guarantee human rights; unofficial initiatives developed by civil society actors to confront the past can include investigations of violations, legal actions, and different kinds of commemorative acts and exercises in collective memory. Memory politics operates at multiple levels and involves a diversity of agents, including local communities, national and international non-governmental human rights organizations (HROs), governments, the media, and, in the case of Central America, the UN; however, it is suggested here that its long-term effects in any national context depend on the interaction between official and unofficial efforts to address the legacies of the past. The experiences of memory politics analysed in this chapter are those of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the three Central American countries that during the 1990s undertook official processes of investigating past violations of human rights. The precise nature of memory politics and the impact it has had varied considerably in these three countries, and it is suggested that four interrelated factors are central to explaining differences between the respective national experiences: the first is the specific political and social legacies of human rights abuse in each country; the second concerns the circumstances of the transition from war to peace, specifically the prevailing balance of forces and the trade-off between truth and justice that this engendered in each case; the third is the role of local HROs and civil society in general in the politics of memory; and the fourth is the role of international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in efforts to uncover the truth about the past and to address the consequences of violations. The first three sections of the chapter compare the legacies of human rights abuses, the transitional trade-offs between truth and justice, and the role of civil society organizations and international actors in the memory politics of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; the final section considers the impact of memory politics on the prospects for democracy in these countries.

This chapter examines the leadership ability of missionaries in the Central American solidarity movement. Missionaries were entrepreneurial in their ability to use their organizing skills, cultural knowledge, and institutional connections to bring together people from various regions and social strata. They were effective leaders in the movement because they were bilingual and bicultural, had moral credibility, and had ties to networks in both North America and Central America.

The general aim of this book is to shed light on how countries deal with legacies of repression during a transition from authoritarian or totalitarian rule to democratic rule. Two broad kinds of transition are covered: those that occur as a result of the collapse of the old regimes or regime forces, as in Portugal, Argentina, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Germany after reunification, where collapse was followed by absorption into another state; and those that are negotiated between an incoming democratic elite and an old regime, as in Spain, the southern cone of Latin America, Central America and South Africa. Because of this range of transitional situations, it is possible to see how varying degrees of political, social and institutional constraints affect the solutions adopted or limit opportunities to deal with the past, and to permit a comparative analysis of the variety of policies adopted, establishing links between one and the other. The book concentrates on the presence (or absence) of three kinds of official or government-sponsored efforts to come to terms with the past: truth commissions, trials and amnesties, and purges; to a lesser extent, it also looks at policies of compensation, restitution or reparation. At the same time, it focuses on unofficial and private initiatives emerging from within society to deal with the past – usually promoted by human rights organizations (HROs), churches, political parties and other civil society organizations; in doing this, the book examines a ‘politics of memory’ whereby societies rework the past in a wider cultural arena, both during the transitions and after official transitional policies have been implemented and even forgotten. The different sections of the Introduction are: Truth and Justice in Periods of Political Change: An Overview; What Can be Done about an Authoritarian Past? Limits and Possibilities of Transition Types and Other Variables; Beyond the Transitional Period: Authoritarian and Long-Term Historical Legacies; Truth, Justice and Democracy; and Memory Making and Democratization.

The transnational nature of the Central American solidarity movement required missionaries to use different techniques to make the region’s problems visible and relevant to North Americans. One way was to provide people with firsthand experience by taking them to Central America. Solidarity leaders also arranged face-to-face meetings between Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees and faith communities in the U.S.

When Mexico declared independence in September 1821, Chiapas, along with the rest of Central America, joined the new nation. Then, in 1823, precipitated by the collapse of Iturbide's Mexican Empire, the other former Central American provinces broke away to form the Central American Union. Chiapas, though, chose permanent annexation to the Mexican republic the following year. This chapter is organized as follows. The first section reviews the historiography of other regions of Mexico and Central America during these years in order better to understand the way that history and geography may have influenced political and agrarian relations in Chiapas during the half-century after independence. The second section looks at politics and state-building in Chiapas between 1824 and 1855, focusing on the relationship between regional elites in the central valley and the central highlands, national governments, and Indian communities. The third section provides an overview of commercial agriculture, population, and labour, and analyzes the agrarian laws which were passed in the state in the post-independence period. The fourth section examines the process of land privatization in different regions of Chiapas and the relationship between the alienation of public and communal lands and the spread of agrarian servitude — both labour tenancy (known as baldiaje) and debt peonage. The fifth section addresses the question of why, despite the growing dispossession of communal land, no peasant rebellion emerged in Chiapas during these years, while the next section examines the Labour Tenancy Law of 1849, a short-lived attempt to regulate baldiaje and limit the role of servile labour in commercial agriculture. Finally, the last section looks at the impact in Chiapas of the laws of the Reform and civil conflict between liberals and conservatives in the period 1855–67, and highlights the way in which local political factionalism contributed to Chiapas's Caste War of 1869–70.

This chapter explores the roots of the U.S.-Central America solidarity movement. It discusses a cultural-agency approach to social movements, and highlights the important role played by religion. An overview of the chapters included in this volume is then presented.

This chapter discusses the origins of civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and U.S. involvement in Central America. The Spanish conquest in the early 16th century established a feudal economic system that led to widespread inequality, poverty, and conflict between wealthy landowners and the poor masses. These conditions erupted into civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The US, fearing the spread of communism, backed a series of military regimes and dictatorships in these countries.

This chapter explores the biographies of some missionaries who joined the Central American solidarity movement. Part of the success of these missionaries in building a solidarity movement was attributed to the fact that a segment of the North American churchgoing population was open and amenable to their appeals. These Christians were receptive because religious values made them subjectively engageable. Those who were highly responsive had similar biographical experiences that created a moral focus on peace and justice concerns.

The story of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador in 1980 became a powerful recruitment tool for missionaries, and helped mobilize efforts to stop American support for the military regime responsible for his death. This chapter explores how the archbishop’s story helped build a solidarity movement. Martyr stories provided missionaries with an effective means to educate audiences about Central America’s socio-economic and political problems, enabled them to politicise familiar Christian themes to elicit solidarity and support for the movement, and provided emotional and moral resources that gave people the courage and motivation to embark on risky forms of activism.

This chapter uses newly declassified documents to examine how the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala turned a blind eye to the excesses of the Ríos Montt regime in order to help advance U.S. strategic goals in the region. Then it examines the support that Ríos Montt enjoyed from conservative evangelicals in Reagan‐era America, who saw the general as a “Christian soldier” and ally in the Central American Cold War. Last, this chapter analyzes foreign and domestic media coverage of Guatemala in the early 1980s. The chapter suggests that because this coverage was nearly nonexistent, particularly compared to coverage of El Salvador and Nicaragua, it allowed policymakers, foreign evangelicals, and urban Guatemalans to ignore or claim willful ignorance of the events that were taking place in their name in the countryside. This chapter is based primarily on declassified State Department and U.S. Embassy documents made available through the National Security Archives.

A sociological understanding of agency requires an assessment of the structural factors and cultural expectations that shape the ability to form movements and foster change. There is a need to understand the constraints and opportunities afforded by activists’ social traits, structural location, and the historical context in which they operate. This chapter discusses how these factors conditioned the ability of church workers to organize, build, and sustain the Central American solidarity movement.

The Central American solidarity movement began to subside in the late 1980s as the countries in the region signed peace accords and military regimes lost power. However, there often remains a group of activists who continue to organize. Their biggest challenge is sustaining commitment to a movement that has lost momentum, with the prevailing view that protest is no longer necessary or effective. In the early 1990s, Father Roy Bourgeois successfully launched a campaign that kept solidarity activism alive.

This chapter examines fish biogeography within the Nuclear Central America (NCA). It reviews the geologic history of the region to contextualize the processes that have generated pathways and barriers to fish diversification across this geologically complex region and summarize the forces that structured the distribution of rivers and lakes across the dynamic NCA landscape. It describes how climactic variation may have influenced the distribution of freshwater fishes across the many elevational gradients and environmentally distinct regions of NCA.

This chapter reviews evidence from research on the phylogenetics and phylogeography of Central American freshwater fishes, particularly in the Isthmus of Panama. It aims to address the question of the timing of the origins of the major taxonomic components of the fauna. It explains that the traditional interpretation of The Great American Biotic Interchange is inconsistent with the newly available phylogenetic and paleogeographic information on freshwater fishes and suggests that the prevailing view of a predominantly south-to-north faunal exchange starting about three million years ago that was the source of much of the current Central American ichthyofauna is an overly simplistic interpretation.

This chapter discusses the sense of affinity that the United States felt with rulers whose authority derived from popular consent and helped bring Somoza's government to an end. This was not simply an end result; it was the State Department's specific intention. The changed global outlook, as the Allies continued their successes against the Axis, coincided with shifting political conditions throughout Central America. Those circumstances were prompting a gradual reorientation of good neighbourism towards pre-war patterns just as the internal opposition in Nicaragua began to cohere, and as the external opposition began to emerge as an armed resistance.