El Pueblo Unido: A Central America Retrospective
UnpublishedDecember
1992
Volume:
26
Number:
3
Report
ON JULY 19, 1979, THE SANDINISTA NA- tional Liberation FrontTHE(FSLN)SANDINISTAtook power(NA-)in O N JULY Nicaragua, ending nearly half a century of U.S.
Article
Karen Robert & Rodrigo Gutierrez Hermelo
While ruling officials distance themselves from the fray, a disturbing pattern of police violence against young people plagues Argentina.
Margaret E. Keck
The constitutional removal of a president augurs well for Brazilian democracy. But the opportunity for broad-based reform may not be seized.
Daniel Alder & Thomas Long
From the outbreak of war to the peace accords, Salvadorans fought for a new vision of the country's future. Some of these men and women remember the decade.
Jim Handy
A QUICHE WOMAN FROM AN ALDEA OF SAN Miguel Uspantan, Rigoberta Menchu lived a harsh, peasant life until a little over a decade ago. Then her father burned to death in the Spanish Embassy when the police stormed it.
Jim Handy
When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Quiché human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum this October 16, the awful history of Guatemala's past decade was suddenly and brutally illuminated. Rigoberta Menchú embodies Guatemala's long struggle--grown murderous in the 1980s--against military violence and impunity.
Lisa Haugaard
Fifty thousand Nicaraguans died in the late 1970s overthrowing the brutal dictatorship that had ruled the country for half a century. Cities were reduced to rubble by Somoza's air force; factories and farms were destroyed.
Alison Gardy
The absolute power of the PRI is being chipped away at the local level by strong grassroots movements like the COCEI in Oaxaca.
An intelligence source says the plan, during the 15 days that the Peruvian police have to interrogate the leader of Shining Path, Abimael Guzman, is to present an increasingly humiliated figure (he has already been shown flabbily buttoning up his trousers, without his shirt) every few days to the public in an attempt to break the myth of the unbeatable leader. The Economist September 19, 1992 Let Them Eat Cake! "Brazil has 140 million inhabitants," First Lady Rosane Collor told the newspaper Folha de SIo Paulo as her husband teetered on the verge of being impeached.
DM
A Question of Solidarity HIS SUMMER I ATTENDED A SMALL GATHering of leftist journalists to listen to an FMLN comandante. He was defensive and on edge as he discussed the FMLN's participation in the peace process.
Lisa Haugaard
A HISTORIAN LOOKING BACK ON TIlE SANDI- nists period many years hence may see it not just as the upheaval of a revolution, but also as a transition period nation-building and modernization.The revolution displaced the obgarhy of' Somoza family and friends who controlled sizeable chunks of the national economy, and put land in the hands ofprcducthepeasanisratherthanlarge landowners often left it idle.
Jim Handy
AN IMPORTANT CASE IN DETERMINING TO what extent Guatemala will be ruled by law in the 1990s is that of Myrna Mack chang. Mk.
Elizabeth Dore & John Weeks
An interpretation of events: Despite their Marxist ideology, the revolutions in Nicaragua and (perhaps) El Salvador completed a long transition from despotic feudalism to liberal capitalism.
Lisa Haugaard
IN THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF VIOLETA CHA- morro's term. the United States intervened quietly, pri marily as the most important of several international aid donors, pushing privatization.