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Sliding towards a Balkans in Central America


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By Claudio Campuzano
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

May 9, 2000

One look at the map of Central America, with several small countries packed together in a thin sliver of territory, and you might rightly wonder why the region has not turned into a sort of Balkans. After all, just as the present boundaries of the countries in the real Balkans are mostly the result of centuries of disputes, occupations and armed conflicts in which powers foreign to the region carved out nations according to their desires —and the strength with which they could impose them— Central America’s seven states had their borders defined by Spain when it conquered the region almost 500 years ago, basically for administrative purposes and with little or no regard for how the various indigenous populations, which had were in conflict with each other, were being divided by the arbitrary frontiers.

The saving grace, the fundamental reason why conflict among the countries in the region over the centuries has been minimal, is that, in addition to drawing arbitrary frontiers, Spain imposed upon the area one language, Spanish, and one religion, Roman Catholicism. Indigenous tongues and ancestral cults have remained around the region but, while in the Balkans the centrifugal forces embodied in its various languages and religions were empowered by foreign actions, in Central America they have been moderated by the strength of this shared past enforced upon it. However, recent developments suggest that this shared past is not as strong as it was in fending off conflict.

All Central American governments still claim to honor the dream of Central American unity. But a dispute between Central American neighbors grew hotter last December when Nicaragua’s president announced a “patriotic tax” on imports from Honduras in reprisal for a controversial treaty on Caribbean sea territories. In addition to this dispute, frontier quarrels between Guatemala and Belize and Costa Rica and Nicaragua have flared up in the last few months, sometimes coming to violent confrontations, and immigration and border disputes provoked a war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969.

Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Aleman had threatened before to completely break commercial relations with Honduras. What he did was to impose a 35 percent tax on Honduran goods after Honduras signed a maritime accord with Colombia that recognizes Colombian claims to large areas of the Caribbean that are also claimed by Nicaragua.

Honduras’s Congress unanimously ratified the treaty, and also announced it was moving 2,000 troops to areas near the Nicaraguan border in order to prevent timber smuggling. Honduras denied the two moves were related. Aleman said that his country’s military was responding with “routine measures” to the Honduran troop movements.

The tax imposed by Aleman broke with regional free market agreements and slapped the same 35 percent rate on Honduran products as applies to Colombian goods. “We are treating all goods coming from Honduras as if they came from Colombia, which it united with to wound this country,” Aleman said.

The two countries disagree over where to draw the maritime boundary from their border at Cabo Gracias a Dios (ironically, Cape Thank God). Nicaragua also claims rights over islands east to the 78th meridian. Colombia claims its own rights extend west to the 82nd meridian, based on a 1928 treaty, which Nicaragua alleges was forced upon it by U.S. occupation at the time.

The spat threatened to damage Central American efforts to coordinate dealings with the United States and other countries, as well as attempts to strengthen a local free_trade zone.

It was hoped that the meeting of Central American foreign ministers scheduled for last week in Panama City would serve to defuse the confrontation, but it appears to have grown even stronger when it became known, at the meeting itself, that three of the participating countries had signed an integration pact without telling the others.

Presidents Arnoldo Alemán of Nicaragua, Alfonso Portillo of Guatemala and Francisco Flores of El Salvador signed the treaty which surprised the others, a pact that calls for greater economic and security co_operation and integration.

The three countries have no border disputes with each other, and Nicaragua has no land link to its new partners. Franklin Barret, of the Panamanian foreign ministry, who organized the meeting of the six_member Central American Integration System, known as Sica, said the parties first heard the news on television. “Obviously, there needs to be better communication,” he said. Sica, which was established in 1991, is modeled on the early European Community, with a central court and parliament.

Honduras said it would demand an explanation from its partners in the free_trade area called The Northern Triangle. Roberto Bermudez, Honduran foreign minister, said: “We will be expecting an explanation before we talk about anything else.”

These disputes and the new pact have upset the process of integration that analysts and many politicians agree is essential for the region’s development. The six countries are all small but have a combined population of 35 million and Gross Domestic Product of more than $50 billion.

Jose Miguel Aleman, Panama’s foreign minister, opened the conference by calling for the setting aside of disputes that endanger the process. Wise words; what Central America surely does not need is to turn into a Latin American Balkans.

Claudio Campuzano (claudio_campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com

May 9, 2000


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