It's been more than a decade since the war ended in Nicaragua, yet early this year three people died in clashes which have roots in the war of the 1980s. In one incident, a former contra rebel died when a protest against government policies was met with police repression. In another case, two former Sandinista leaders were assassinated, and when a human rights activist suggested government complicity in the killings, she was warned by government insiders that she would be killed if she didn't keep quiet. 
     Throughout the region, residual tensions from past conflicts continue to inflame passions and violence. In recent weeks, Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú received death threats after she filed legal charges in Spain against former dictator Efrain Rios Montt and other military officials in Guatemala. In Honduras, Catholic rights activists sponsored a Lenten procession that originated outside a military facility where some believe the head of a disappeared Jesuit priest is buried. In El Salvador, forensic anthropologists finally resumed exhumations at the site of a 1981 massacre of 800 people. 
     Throughout Central America, however, lingering issues from political conflicts of the past are not usually front page news. More common concerns include spiraling violence, citizen insecurity, economic stagnation, and the growing chasm between the region's majority poor and small economic elite. 
     If some relative postwar stability has been achieved, it likely has causes other than successfully implemented peace agreements. In Nicaragua, for example, the economy stays afloat in part because more than half a million Nicaraguans have crossed into Costa Rica and send money home. Family remittances, which have risen as emigration from the region accelerated after Hurricane Mitch, have done more for many poor families than years of structural adjustments dictated by international lenders. 
     Such artificial stimulation of the economy masks the fact that much of the injustice that gave rise to insurrection is still present, and in some cases worse than in the 1960s and 1970s. Racism against Guatemala's indigenous majority, one factor that fueled the 36-year long war, has far from come to an end, despite sweeping legal and economic reforms dictated by the 1996 accords. And many of those reforms were rejected in a referendum last year after the political right threatened their passage would lead to a violent Balkanization of the country. Furthermore, in a country with one of the world's most unfair patterns of income distribution, the rich still pay few taxes, despite the requirement of the accords that tax collection be stepped up dramatically. 
     “Far from reconciliation between two parties who were enemies and have now come together, what we have is a growing gap between people who have nothing and other people who have everything,” said Mario Higueros, a Mennonite seminary professor in Guatemala City. “The structures of economic power have not changed.” 
     According to Maria Lopez Vigil, editor of the Jesuit's regional magazine Envio, war-ending agreements always faced difficulties because regional elites “are not interested in redistributive or equitable processes.” 
     Yet some things have changed. “The landowning oligarchies that have controlled economic and political power in our countries are in the process of transmutation into financial oligarchies. They are transnationalizing, globalizing. This will take some time, but they're the same people as always, the same last names, with the same vision of seeing the state as their loot. And globalization allows them to accumulate tremendous riches.” Lopez said. 
     Guatemala–the last nation to put an end to war–should heed the lessons of Nicaragua, where failure to keep promises made at war's end in 1990 has led to today's violence, in which combatants from both sides of the 1980s conflict are pressuring the government for land, technical assistance with farming, and other benefits. 
     At least the former combatants usually aren't fighting each other. As a sign of the changing political topography, they've found common cause in facing off against President Arnoldo Aleman, whose tenure has been plagued by rampant corruption and a fanatic disregard for the welfare of the poor. By not keeping war-ending promises made by predecessor Violeta Chamorro and by handing economic control over to international lenders, Aleman has exacerbated class tensions in Nicaragua. 
     “We've overcome a lot of the political polarization in Nicaragua, as communities unite around a common challenge of confronting the growing violence and poverty that have come as a result of the programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” said Gustavo Parajon, president of the Nicaraguan Council of Evangelical Churches. Parajon advises more than 200 local peace commissions in the countryside, groups formed to make peace during the war but whose mandate has expanded in the last decade as rural communities wrestle with the impact of reduced government presence in the countryside. 
     Ironically, one of the factors undermining any lingering 80s-style polarization has been last year's pact between Aleman's Partido Liberal and the leaders of the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN). “Ideologically, there's no split, everyone has opted for capitalism at its rawest expression,” complained Norman Bent, a Moravian pastor and indigenous activist in Nicaragua. 
     If leaders of Nicaragua's political left have sold out and Guatemala's recently disarmed left is still trying to find its way through postwar confusion, former guerrillas in El Salvador have had more success in transforming protest into proposal, in building a viable progressive alliance that is politically appealing and functional. The performance of the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN) in March 12 elections, where it won 31 of the 84 seats in the Asamblea Nacional–two more than the ruling Alianza Republicana (ARENA) and four seats more than it previously held–is not a sign of approval for how the former guerrillas fought the war, but rather for their capability as relatively honest and efficient politicians in a country facing serious problems. The reelection of San Salvador's Mayor Hector Silva, in particular, is a sign that “where old ideological messages failed, in their place has triumphed an honest administration pushing for popular participation,” said Lopez. 
     Yet Mirna Perla, a rights activist and children's judge in Santa Tecla, just outside San Salvador, says the causes of the war haven't been discussed sufficiently. “There are many Salvadorans who remain excluded from the benefits of globalization,” Perla said. “Our political, juridical, and ideological structures haven't changed, they remain the same as they were before and during the war. We've got to have that discussion if we're ever going to overcome the confrontation that remains pending. 
     Some church activists in El Salvador tried to “have that discussion” around the recent 20th anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of San Salvador. Yet President Francisco Flores made it clear that such talk made the country's elite uncomfortable. “To single out the case of Romero could open the hundreds of thousands of cases of persons who suffered violence, and lead us to get involved anew in war, instead of working for reconciliation,” Flores stated in rejecting a report from the Comision Interamericana de Derechos Humanos that blamed the Salvadoran government for Romero's murder. 
     Many believe that such ostrich-like behavior works against peace in the long run, however. “The biggest obstacle to peace in Guatemala is the failure to recognize that there were killings, assassinations, kidnappings, that there is responsibility for this, a sin,” stated Victor Hugo Martinez, Catholic archbishop of Los Altos. “But they haven't wanted to recognize this nor publicly ask for forgiveness.” 
     According to Guatemalan poet Julia Esquivel, peace will take some time. “This is going to be a long process. A part of the population wants to ignore what happened. Part knows well what happened, but they don't want to feel responsible. And another part is very hurt, and very frustrated because the previous government [of President Alvaro Arzu] did nothing in response to the recommendations of the Historical Clarification Commission,” Esquivel said. Recently inaugurated President Alfonso Portillo “has recognized some of this responsibility, but it remains to be seen whether this is just talk or will translate into concrete actions in favor of the families of the victims.” 
     Guatemala's Project to Recover the Historical Memory, the Catholic project designed by martyred Bishop Juan Gerardi, has continued chipping away at this impunity at a local level in several war-torn dioceses, sponsoring projects, for example, to exhume the graves of massacre victims so that their relatives can rebury them with dignity. “It's difficult to talk about immediate effects of this work, but bit by bit we are finding the road to peace,” said Martinez. 
     Churches in Central America continue wrestling with their mission in the context of lingering injustice and impunity, discovering new forms of bringing the Gospel to bear on the problems of real people. “There are many initiatives with new perspectives on local work, smaller but with more participation than in the past,” said Lopez. “You'll find innumerable pastoral agents, lay and religious, doing what they can, beginning again, discovering a consciousness that's different from that of the seventies, when we imagined that change could be more immediate, that by taking state power we were going to change things. We've learned a lot. We've got to change many other things, create institutions and laws that allow citizens to control their own governments. There are many in the church with this new vision, struggling to increase participation from the grassroots, so that people will think differently. Hope is something we're always going to find from below, where there's less noise, where things are covered less by the media. But there's a change of mentality happening there. People have learned a lot from the pain of the wars of the eighties, and we're going to learn even more.”

               - From Tegucigalpa, Paul Jeffrey