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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.

The history of US human rights policy in Latin America provides useful case studies of the interplay between ‘control’ and ‘consent’ aspects of democratization. It presents a preliminary analysis of the influence of US human rights policy on human rights practices and democratization in Argentina, Guatemala, and Uruguay in the 1970s and early 1980s, focusing primarily on the Carter period. In each of these cases, the US policy attempted to influence the domestic human rights situation by linking the improvement of human rights practices to the provision of military or economic aid. But, the nature of the pressures applied and the responses thereto were quite different in the three countries, reflecting the importance of ‘consent’ issues, determined by the state of democratic transition achieved within the country concerned, in modifying the effects of ‘control’ pressures.

This chapter examines the efficacy of justice reform in creating effective mechanisms of horizontal accountability in El Salvador and Guatemala. There is little evidence to suggest that reforms have instilled in judges, prosecutors and the police a commitment to horizontal accountability. Moreover, the public remains skeptical about the impact of reform in promoting horizontal accountability.

This chapter concerns the concept of ‘remoteness’ in early Mesoamerican archaeology as a factor in site preservation. Throughout the nineteenth century, Maya sites were academically and popularly conceived of as beyond ‘preservation’ in any realistic sense. However, the late nineteenth-century emergence of archaeology as a science and the growth of North American academic interest in Central America forced a situation where ‘preservation’ was incorporated into professional archaeological identity. Using the Guatemalan site of Holmul as a case study, the chapter presents publication as a form of preservation for logistically challenging archaeological sites in the early twentieth century. Publication is conceived of as an obligatory process that not only produced a textual ‘preserved site’, but served as an homage to advances in the development of North American-style archaeology as a scientific enquiry.

This chapter examines the language, images, and discourses that General Ríos Montt employed to promote his war of counterinsurgency. While the military’s war of counterinsurgency forcibly pacified the largely indigenous highlands (a campaign that some sources claim produced nearly 50 percent of the civilian deaths that occurred over the course of Guatemala’s thirty‐six‐year armed struggle), Ríos Montt captivated much of Guatemala’s urban and nonindigenous population through his anticorruption campaign and his Sunday sermons — weekly broadcast messages that stressed anticommunism and government loyalty against a backdrop of evangelical language and imagery. This chapter provides an analysis of the sermons and offers an attempt to explain and contextualize Ríos Montt’s political popularity, as he sought to establish order and a fresh ideology for what he called the New Guatemala. This chapter is based almost exclusively on transcripts of Ríos Montt’s Sunday sermons and on newspaper clippings from the period.

The link between child labour and health is difficult to disentangle because of problems due to two-way causality, household and individual level unobservables. Aims to establish whether there is a negative health impact of work during childhood controlling for observable and unobservable confounding factors. As far as we are aware, we are the first to take account these confounding factors in a study of the health effects of child work. That is made possible by the use of a particularly rich two-wave panel data set, the 1992/3 and 1997/8 Vietnam Living Standards Surveys, and of the retrospective information contained in the 2000 Guatemalan National Survey on Living Conditions (NSLC).

This chapter develops three interrelated claims about the politics of governing social difference through religious rights and freedoms. First, conceiving and governing social difference through religious rights singles out individuals and groups for legal protection as religious individuals and collectivities. Second, governing through religious rights shapes how states and other political authorities distinguish groups from each other, often in law. Third, contemporary international religious freedom advocacy emphasizes belief as the core of religion. The chapter unfolds in three parts, each elaborating on various aspects of these claims through a combination of empirical illustrations and theoretical discussion. The first section on the global political production of religious difference draws on an extended discussion of the Rohingya in Myanmar. The second section on the creation of a landscape populated by faith communities and the effects on those excluded from such designations incorporates examples from the Central African Republic, Guatemala, India, and South Sudan. A final section on the mutually supportive relations between religious freedom advocacy, the creation of a believing religious subject, and the ideology of the free religious marketplace builds on the work of anthropologists and religious studies scholars who complicate the notion of belief as the core of religion.

This chapter examines Dwight D. Eisenhower's legacy in the area of liberal democratic internationalism during the period 1953–1977. Until 1947, the American foreign policy choice had been between a Wilsonian advocacy of democracy and a Rooseveltian preference for nonintervention. A third option had emerged since then: intervention for dictatorships, even against indigenous political forces that might be seeking to create constitutional, democratic regimes. The chapter first provides an overview of American realism and mass politics in the twentieth century, with emphasis on the modernity of fascism, communism, and democracy, before discussing American foreign policy during the Eisenhower years. In particular, it considers the Eisenhower administration's policy decisions with respect to Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam. It also explores the geopolitical realism of American support for democratic governments abroad.

This chapter argues that the repeated interaction between banks and clients allows borrowers to establish a credit record, which they can use to insure themselves from temporary liquidity shocks. It discusses microcredit contracts, and the importance of insurance for borrowers based on a survey in Guatemala. It presents a model that captures the features of microcredit contracts, i.e., the joint liability of members for individual loans and group loans. The model shows the incentive mechanisms behind microfinance contracts, and how insurance is an important by-product of liability loans.

This chapter describes the politics following Argentina's and Chile's last bout with authoritarianism. In spite of some important similarities between Argentina and Chile, military rule and the subsequent democratization process have been dissimilar. The chapter argues that the disparate performance of the Argentine and Chilean praetorian elites yielded for them different bargains with the opposition. These different deals led to vastly different outcomes, that is, profound disparities between military politics in contemporary Chile and Argentina. In Chile, democratizers have succeeded in gradually reducing the military's political autonomy to a level acceptable by democratic standards. On the other hand, their Argentine colleagues have gone too far in what has amounted to a virtual vendetta against the military as an institution and, in the process, seriously impaired its ability to protect and project Argentine national interests. The chapter's secondary case is Guatemala, a Central American state ruled for most of the Cold War by unusually brutal military dictators.

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 argues that a stronger capacity for international assistance, in conjunction with a sound strategy for economic reconstruction at the country level, would greatly improve a country's chances of success in consolidating peace and in fully devoting its resources and energies to the normal challenge of development and poverty alleviation. The chapter argues in favor of greater flexibility and more aid on concessional terms from the international financial institutions (IFIs) and other donors on the one hand, and on the other, for post-conflict countries to assume greater responsibility and accountability for dealing with aid and reconstruction issues. The chapter discusses issues of aid (official flows, tied aid, post-conflict vs development aid); budgets; external debt; conditionality; concessionality; technical assistance; and governance related to economic reconstruction. It also proposes measures to improve the mechanisms and capabilities of the international community as a whole to carry out effective reconstruction in the future.

This book aims to provide an understanding of the transnational dynamics of Central America. This is a region that includes Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. These countries share a close geographical relationship and historical background, a geopolitical interdependence, and challenges in the international arena. In tracing the transnational dynamics of Central America, the book analyzes the connected history, close and dynamic interrelations, crossings and mutual impact of the countries of the isthmus on one another, in addition to their geopolitical interdependence and a series of common challenges they have faced in the international arena. This book is an attempt to make sense of these and other regional trends by indicating that one needs to approach Central America with a Janus-faced perspective: trying to understand the process of fragmentation into separate nation-states along with lingering transnational dynamics.

This is a review of evidence on the relationship of women’s school attainment to child survival and fertility, with an examination of long-term studies in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Guatemala, an empirically based theory of social and economic causes of child survival, and a summary of previous studies of literacy and health in developing countries. The evidence that women’s schooling acts to reduce child mortality and fertility is strong, and the studies involving literacy are suggestive.

Why would a pistol-packing, tattoo-bearing “homie” trade in his gun for a Bible and the buttoned-down lifestyle of an evangelical hermano? Why is evangelical religion attractive to gang members? This chapter introduces the main questions of the book through the story of JJ, a converted Guatemalan ex-gang member and leader of a cell of the White Fence gang. One of JJ’s tattoos reads, “Why should I fall in love with life, when I’m already married to death?”