Medical personnel treat a patient infected with covid-19 at the San Juan de Dios hospital in Guatemala City, on June 8, 2020JOHAN ORDONEZ
Central America in 2020 was a region with serious problems that barely managed to register small and specific progress in the years prior to the commemoration of the bicentennial of independence, but the pandemic was missing with its more than 37,000 deaths and the misfortunes on the lives of millions of people .
The small reduction in poverty in recent years and the decrease in high murder rates were significant steps, but they do not prevent that now, at the gates of the date that governments envisioned as a celebration for two centuries since the break with Spain, the narrow region of Central America is home to a cocktail of problems.
Lags and new social, environmental, economic and political distresses result in the greatest crisis since the wars in the last shock of the Cold War.
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The moment is “extremely complex,” concludes the State of the Region 2021 Report, a compendium of research that each four-year period portrays the eight member countries of the Central American Integration System (SICA) coordinated from San José by a think tank called Programa Estado of the Nation, with public financing and international cooperation. It was presented less than two months before the date of independence and at times of additional signs of "significant setback in political stability," as the document indicates.
With more than 37,000 deaths from covid-19, even considering the lack of data in Nicaragua, the region has received the pandemic as the last straw full of more or less common problems for the territories that belonged to the Spanish empire until 1821 They are Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, to which are added Panama in the extreme south of the isthmus and the Caribbean Dominican Republic, a full member of SICA. There are eight countries that are home to 60 million inhabitants, 33% more than the population when this century began, with a current advantage in terms of the number of people of productive age.
Three decades after the Peace Accords and the emergence of the Central American integration system, the diagnosis indicates that democratic institutions are collapsing in several countries and there are cracks in others, making it difficult to attack the social problems now aggravated by the pandemic.
Four out of ten Central Americans report having sacrificed a meal after the virus hit and the sanitary restrictions on poorly diversified economies.
Some 10 million jobs were lost in 2020 and in general poverty reaches at least 20% of Central America, although it had been reducing;
in Honduras seven out of 10 people were poor before the pandemic and in Nicaragua, half.
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"These are historical lags that keep the region in a chronic weakness," said Alberto Mora, coordinator of the Report, noting that Costa Rica and Panama register less serious indicators, but they are not exempt from a severe socioeconomic blow on their own and due to the effect of intraregional trade dynamics and migratory movements.
In March 2020, when the first covid infections arrived in Central America, the region was already taking care of it. About 40% of the workforce never attended secondary education and the strength of their jobs was negligible. The pandemic damage fell the hardest on the most vulnerable and the effect is not unknown for Central America either: social inequality. The 20% with the most resources receive almost 15 times the income received by the poorest 20%, without even showing public policies capable of reversing the wealth gap that originated in part from colonial times.
Towards the future, the problems have already started. The report warns of low enrollment rates in formal education. Although 85% attend primary school, almost half of preschool-age children have never attended classrooms and in secondary school the percentages of exclusion are higher, with special cases such as Guatemala, where only 30% attend schools. . The worsening of the economies and the difficulties of connectivity to attend virtual classes could have exacerbated the weaknesses of the educational systems that in July 2021 had not resumed the normal course. Costa Rica, which is often considered an educational model on the continent, has also failed to normalize the calendar or keep thousands of students in contact.
With health systems compromised by the pandemic, education lagging and battered, and increased basic needs of families, governments also do not have the ability to raise social investment significantly. Social spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is even lower than that of South America and several Caribbean countries, the report warns. In addition, the generation of global wealth was already almost stagnant, since in 2019 the GDP registered an average growth of 1.6%, almost three points less than the figure of 2015. The pandemic ended up hurting the economies of the region in 2020 , even the most diversified, as Costa Rica faced the largest contraction in 40 years, with 4.5% and Panama fell 18% after leading growth in this century in the Isthmus.
Different is the trend of military spending, which has increased strongly since 2010 as a regional average.
In El Salvador, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, annual per capita spending on the armed forces is $ 45 or more.
Although there are no wars anymore, the States have directed them to the repression of violence and organized crime, with relative success, since the murder rate fell in almost all countries and the regional average went from 30 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019 to 21 in 2020.
The pandemic aggravates the situation
This decrease in homicides, however, is not enough to offset the factors that push thousands of Central Americans to move in their country, flee to other nations in the region or to the United States, with all the obstacles on the way and the destination. Economic and gang-forced migrations in the “northern triangle” have been joined by new trends in recent years: mass mobilization in so-called “caravans”, the increase in migrant women greater than that of men, and the resurgence of the Forced population displacement for political reasons, the researchers noted. The total number of refugee requests made by Central Americans in 2019 was 52% higher than in 2000, an increase that Nicaraguans can witness especially after the outbreak of protests and repression in 2018.
To these factors are added disasters related to natural causes, especially climatic changes, such as hurricanes ETA and Iota in 2020, which in Guatemala left more than 200 deaths and a humanitarian crisis from which they have not yet recovered and that it has also forced families to emigrate. The Report points out that in the last 30 years there has been an abrupt increase in these types of disasters in Central America and that more than 90% are consequences of meteorological events in an area that experts point out as especially vulnerable to climate change.
Like an umbrella that covers the social and the economic, political stability also shows a deterioration as the advances promoted since the peace accords have stopped in the last decade. “The rule of law has historically been the weakest component of the process of building democratic institutions that began with the end of the war. It is the worst evaluated component in Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua ”, reports the State of the Region. It also points to the crisis triggered in 2018 on Nicaraguan soil as a sign of the "significant setback in the component of political stability and absence of violence", in addition to the deterioration in the quality of electoral processes, such as the one scheduled for November with all the advantages for that Daniel Ortega be reelected.
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