following on the oil-price rise in 1973–4 led to
increased guerrilla activities as more and more
Salvadorans became desperate. It also led to
another ‘dirty war’. Brief efforts at reform were
superseded by military regimes that paid no regard
to human rights. Worldwide attention was dir-
ected to the methods of the hated regime when
Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken critic of
these abuses, was murdered in 1980. Right-wing
death squads set about murdering whomever
earned their disapproval. In 1980 alone there were
close to 10,000 political murders. The civil war
rages on and the US has aided and trained the
Salvadoran army to crush the guerrillas, who ter-
rorise the countryside. Under pressure from the
Reagan administration, internationally supervised
elections were held in 1982, but the guerrillas
refused to lay down their arms and participate.
The extreme right won, but in 1984 the more
moderate Christian Democrat José Duarte was
finally elected president.
Under heavy US pressure, civilian rule and reg-
ular elections appeared to change El Salvador’s
politics for the better. But the government was
hardly in control: guerrillas dominated regions of
the countryside, and the army remained a law unto
itself. The activities of right-wing death squads
lessened – the US could claim an improvement in
the human-rights position – but so many thou-
sands had fallen victim that the urban population
was cowed. The Reagan administration in the
1980s gave $6 billion in aid and by lobbying for
land reform hoped to undercut support for the
guerrillas and to promote democracy. But Duarte
did not solve the political or economic problems of
El Salvador and the Marxist-led guerrillas provided
evidence of their ability to strike by knocking out
nearly all the electricity supplies on the eve of the
congressional elections in 1988. People who
bothered to vote turned to the right. The small
country was ravaged by civil war, which by the
early 1990s had claimed at least 70,000 lives, and
by left-wing and right-wing terror. Almost half the
population was unemployed. Duarte, on whom
Washington’s hopes rested, was terminally ill from
cancer and his influence weakened. He was
replaced in the election of June 1989 by Alfredo
Cristiani, the candidate of the extreme right-wing
party. Guerrilla terrorism and right-wing death
squads continued to abuse human rights. Despite
substantial US economic and military aid, the
future for El Salvador remained as uncertain as
ever, though the outgoing UN secretary general
Javier Pérez de Cuellar brokered a peace plan in
December 1991. On 1 February 1992, a peace
agreement was concluded that promised reforms
and UN-supervised elections in 1994. Peace, trade
and democracy have changed El Salvador’s for-
tunes. The free-market reforms of the conservative
Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) and the
pegging of the local currency to the US dollar have
led to steady growth and low inflation, though
austerity and readjustment, too, have been painful.
Unlike in Argentina, these reform policies have
worked and democratic government in the early
twenty-first century is more secure, a stabilising
influence in Central America.NicaraguaIn Nicaragua Washington saw the greatest chal-
lenge to US interests in the 1980s and to Latin
American progress towards constitutional demo-
cratic governments. The Marxist state that
emerged after 1979, which was hostile to private
enterprise and nationalised foreign-owned inter-
ests, also faced severe economic problems. They
were in part due to the economic embargoes of
the US, which could not be fully compensated for
by trade with Europe or loans from sources not
under the control of the US; they were also due
to the inefficiency of planned socialist economies,
as evidenced, for example, in Cuba.
Nicaragua is the most thinly populated state in
Central America, with the lowest per-capita
income after Honduras, at $830 in 1987. Here,
too, can be found the link between the domin-
ance of coffee and bananas as Nicaragua’s princi-
pal exports, until disease in the 1930s devastated
the crop, and the gross disparity of wealth
between the few plantation owners and merchants
and a landless peasantry, the largest in Central
America. Diversification into beef, cotton and
sugar in the 1960s could not compensate for the
low income from agricultural exports and the