Summary

With the exception of Costa Rica, Central America was governed by long-term dictatorships or repressive military governments for many decades in the 20th century. Between the late 1950s and the mid-1990s, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras, a confrontation between the dictatorships and guerrilla movements became theaters of profound political violence with distinctive military and political environments and different outcomes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Resistance movements and armed guerrilla organizations, initiated and led by urban young professionals and students, attempted to overthrow dictatorships to be replaced by socialist societies.

The guerrilla movements included dissidents of communist and other leftist parties, urban workers, and (generally) forbidden peasants organizations. Other contributors to the guerrilla movements included Latin American intellectuals and students at universities who used dependency theory as a conceptual framework to explain poverty and underdevelopment. Most Central American insurgency movements paid homage to Marxism (the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was a source of inspiration). The student movements at universities and secondary educational institutions became a source of recruitment. However, the most important influence on the radicalization of the general population—working-class neighborhoods and the peasant associations—was the liberation theology of Catholic-based communities and small groups of lay preachers who interpreted the Bible on matters of justice and injustice. The guerrilla movements in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua were clearly influenced by these leftist-Catholic organizations. In Guatemala, indigenous movements sympathized with the guerrillas and sometimes joined their ranks.

The bitter conflicts between the insurgents and the counterinsurgents (they army, paramilitary forces, and death squads) became proxy wars between the then military superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, in the context of the Cold War. Finally, peace negotiations ended the armed conflicts, restored parliamentary democracy, and transformed the guerrilla movements into political parties. Organizations of the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) facilitated the transition.