Introduction
Taken together, these Journal of Democracy articles offer a remarkably useful archive of how scholars understood Central America and Latin America’s democratic troubles at different moments: the optimism of postwar alternation, the anxieties over weak institutions and crime, the warnings about military remnants and party decay, and the more recent focus on populism, organized crime, democratic stagnation, and competitive authoritarianism. But the readings that follow are not simply summaries of what the authors argued at the time. They are contemporary summaries in retrospect — interpretations shaped by what has happened since: Bukele’s consolidation in El Salvador, Ortega’s dynastic dictatorship in Nicaragua, Guatemala’s struggle against criminal-oligarchic lawfare, Honduras’s post-coup trajectory into narco-politics and fragile alternation, and Costa Rica and Panama’s more subtle forms of democratic strain.
A recurring pattern across the articles is that many earlier analyses were right about the symptoms but sometimes too cautious about the diagnosis. They identified weak parties, corruption, insecurity, poverty, distrust, shallow rule of law, and incomplete democratic consolidation. What has become clearer in hindsight is that these were not merely deficits within otherwise stable democratic systems. In several Central American cases, they became the raw material for new regime forms: popular authoritarianism in El Salvador, family dictatorship in Nicaragua, criminalized state capture in Honduras, legalistic oligarchic obstruction in Guatemala, and thinner but still significant democratic stress in Costa Rica and Panama.
One useful way to organize the articles is by country. The El Salvador pieces trace the arc from postwar democratic optimism to party-system exhaustion and then to Bukele’s security-authoritarian project. Earlier articles tended to view alternation between ARENA and the FMLN as evidence of democratic consolidation; later readings show that alternation without renewal produced a legitimacy vacuum. Bukele filled that vacuum by making democratic institutions — parties, courts, journalists, NGOs, human-rights defenders, and electoral rules — appear not as safeguards, but as obstacles to security and national rebirth.
The Honduras articles are best read around the 2009 coup and its aftermath. Ruhl’s account of Honduras “unraveling” remains powerful because it shows that the coup was not simply a military adventure but an elite-institutional breakdown involving courts, Congress, parties, business elites, and the armed forces. Yet in retrospect, the coup looks less like a temporary interruption than a hinge moment: it normalized the idea that democratic rupture could be laundered through legality and elections. The later Hernández-era narco-state shows how far that post-coup order could decay.
The Guatemala articles cluster around a different problem: not personalist dictatorship, but criminal oligarchy and captured legality. Guatemala’s democracy has not primarily been dismantled by one charismatic president. Rather, prosecutors, judges, congressional blocs, local machines, contractors, military-linked actors, and illicit networks have worked to preserve impunity through law. Arévalo’s victory, therefore, was not simply a democratic spring; it was an electoral rupture inside a system still capable of absorbing, obstructing, and criminalizing reform.
Nicaragua represents the clearest endpoint of personalist authoritarianism. The earlier articles on Ortega and the FSLN are useful because they saw that Sandinismo had become less a revolutionary project than a personalist machine. But current reality makes the conclusion darker: Ortega’s personalism did not merely weaken democracy; it became the architecture of a dynastic family-state. The old language of left versus right is therefore inadequate. Nicaragua is better understood as the conversion of revolutionary legitimacy, patronage, repression, and institutional capture into closed authoritarian rule.
The Costa Rica and Panama articles serve as important counterpoints. They remind us that not all Central American cases follow the same trajectory. Costa Rica remains a much stronger democracy, and Panama has achieved real electoral stability and economic success. But both cases also show that democratic survival is not the same as democratic renewal. Party decay, corruption, fiscal stress, insecurity, inequality, and anti-institutional rhetoric can hollow democracy even where outright authoritarian rupture remains unlikely.
The articles can also be grouped thematically. One cluster concerns party-system decay and populism. Weyland’s argument that populism corrodes parties is especially useful for understanding Bukele, but the Central American cases suggest an even broader point: populism does not only destroy parties; it often emerges because parties have already lost their representative and moral authority.
A second theme is organized crime and democratic delinquency. Whitehead, Corrales, and Freeman help explain why crime cannot be treated merely as a security issue. In Central America, organized crime corrodes democracy by financing parties, intimidating citizens, capturing local territories, corrupting police and courts, and creating public demand for mano dura. But the region also shows something more severe: crime can become embedded inside state power, as in Honduras, or can provide the justification for authoritarian state-building, as in El Salvador.
A third theme is democratic stagnation and hybrid states. Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán’s concept of democracies being “stuck” is useful, but Central America suggests that stagnation is not static. Low-quality democracy can become a pre-crisis environment in which discredited institutions, poor services, insecurity, and corruption create openings for actors who promise to solve democracy’s failures by hollowing democracy out.
Finally, the article on social media helps explain the communicative side of this transformation. Social media does not simply spread misinformation; it helps convert mistrust into a political infrastructure. In El Salvador especially, Bukele used social media not merely to campaign but to build a direct relationship with citizens, bypassing parties, journalists, and institutional mediation.
The retrospective lesson from this collection is therefore sobering. Central America’s democratic crises did not emerge from nowhere. They grew out of weaknesses that many of these authors identified early: shallow rule of law, unresolved authoritarian legacies, weak parties, corruption, inequality, crime, and public disillusionment.
What hindsight adds is a clearer understanding of how those weaknesses can be reorganized into durable authoritarian or semi-authoritarian projects. The problem was not only that democracy failed to deepen. It was that democracy’s failures became politically useful to those who learned how to rule through insecurity, resentment, legality, spectacle, and impunity.
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"Honduras's Missed Opportunity," Lucas Perelló & Rachel Schwartz, April 2026
Perelló and Schwartz offer a valuable account of Libre’s democratic failures, but their “missed opportunity” frame grants the Castro government too much democratic plausibility. The evidence they present points less to a reform project that lost its way than to an opposition movement that used democratic language to displace one predatory network and install another. Libre’s collapse was not simply the result of poor coalition management, ideological overreach, or the difficulty of governing after competitive authoritarianism. It reflected deeper features of the Zelaya-led project: family power, plebiscitary refoundation rhetoric, partisan capture of institutions, tolerance of coercive colectivos, and an anti-corruption discourse belied by the party’s own alleged links to illicit financing. The Honduran case may therefore be less a story of democratic resilience failing than of authoritarian alternation: the old regime was voted out, but the logic of governing through patronage, intimidation, and institutional manipulation survived.
"Why Honduras Is Facing Election Chaos," Rachel Schwartz, December 2025
Schwartz offers a persuasive account of the immediate drivers of Honduras’s 2025 election crisis, especially Libre’s democratic deterioration, the CNE’s partisan paralysis, preemptive fraud narratives, Trump’s intervention, and the absence of any clearly democratic alternative. But the article’s “election chaos” frame may be too narrow. Honduras’s problem is not merely a failed count or a toxic postelection environment; it is a deeper regime crisis in which elections still rotate power but no longer generate democratic legitimacy. Libre’s defeat did not necessarily mark democratic correction, because the likely alternatives were themselves embedded in the same patronage, corruption, and criminalized political order. Nor was Libre’s authoritarian turn simply a disappointing deterioration after a democratic breakthrough; many of its practices revealed the thinness of its democratic commitments from the start. The Honduran case therefore points less to a temporary electoral crisis than to a system of authoritarian alternation: parties compete fiercely to control the state, but none has shown a serious willingness to rebuild democratic institutions, constrain executive power, confront organized crime, or submit to genuine accountability.
"Is Costa Rica's Democracy Failing?" Forrest D. Colburn & Andrea M. Prado, October 2025
Colburn and Prado offer a persuasive account of Costa Rica’s party-system decay, bureaucratic overload, fiscal stress, and Rodrigo Chaves’s confrontational presidency. But their conclusion may be too reassured by Costa Rican exceptionalism. The danger is not necessarily that Costa Rica will experience a dramatic authoritarian rupture; it is that democratic mediation will continue to hollow out. Parties have become unstable vehicles, presidents lack durable legislative coalitions, public administration struggles to deliver, and citizens increasingly see institutions as self-protective obstacles rather than democratic safeguards. Chaves may not be a dictator-in-waiting, but his popularity shows that anti-institutional rhetoric has found an audience in a country long thought immune to that style of politics. Costa Rica’s democracy may survive, but survival is not the same as renewal.
"How Organized Crime Threatens Latin America," Javier Corrales & Will Freeman, October 2024
Corrales and Freeman offer a powerful account of organized crime as Latin America’s new nonelected threat to democracy, replacing the older dangers posed by militaries, guerrillas, and oligarchic elites. Their argument is especially relevant to Central America, where gangs, cartels, corrupt security forces, illicit campaign finance, and weak justice systems have repeatedly hollowed out democratic rule. But the article still frames organized crime too much as a threat confronting the state, rather than as something that can become embedded inside state power itself. Honduras under Juan Orlando Hernández was not merely a democracy pressured by organized crime; it was a political-criminal regime. Guatemala’s problem is not only mafia power but a legal and oligarchic architecture of impunity. El Salvador shows a different danger: public fear of gangs allowed Bukele to build an authoritarian security state in the name of restoring order. The Central American lesson is that organized crime threatens democracy both directly and through the political responses it enables.
"The Bukele Model: Will It Spread?" Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez and Alberto Vergara, July 2024
Meléndez-Sánchez and Vergara offer one of the most persuasive accounts of why Bukele’s crackdown succeeded where earlier mano dura policies failed: the gangs had been weakened and disoriented by prior negotiations, while Bukele had already dismantled the institutional checks that might have constrained a massive state response. But the article’s policy-diffusion frame may be too narrow. The Bukele model is not merely a crime-control formula whose replicability depends on gang structure, territorial scale, and executive capacity. It is a regime-building narrative in which security success legitimates permanent exception, judicial subordination, mass incarceration, self-censorship, and the moral demotion of rights. Other leaders may fail to reproduce Bukele’s security results while still successfully importing his political grammar: order over legality, punishment over due process, sovereignty over scrutiny, and popular will over constitutional restraint.
"How the World’s Most Popular Dictator Wins," Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez, February 2024
Meléndez-Sánchez is right that Bukele’s 2024 reelection was not a normal democratic landslide but a competitive-authoritarian ratification engineered through court-packing, rule changes, gerrymandering, state-resource abuse, electoral-authority capture, opposition harassment, and suspended liberties. But the article’s emphasis on rigging the playing field risks understating why the rigging was so politically effective: Bukele’s authoritarianism rests on genuine mass consent. Many Salvadorans did not experience the erosion of checks and balances as democratic loss, but as the necessary destruction of a failed postwar order that had left them exposed to gangs, corruption, and humiliation. The deeper danger is not simply that Bukele manipulates elections; it is that he has made institutional manipulation appear morally justified by security success and popular will.
"Is Central America Doomed?" Mateo Jarquín, Rachel A. Schwartz, and Kai M. Thaler, March 2024
Jarquín, Schwartz, and Thaler offer a compelling regional account of Central America’s democratic deterioration, but their structural-historical frame risks making contemporary authoritarianism appear too inevitable. By emphasizing shallow transitions, elite bargains, impunity, crime, inequality, and U.S. inconsistency, the article explains the conditions that made democratic erosion possible. But it gives less attention to the political creativity of today’s authoritarian actors, who have learned to convert democratic disappointment into new forms of legitimacy. Bukele, Ortega, Honduras’s rival patronage networks, and Guatemala’s corrupt coalition are not merely products of unfinished democratization; they are strategic actors who manipulate institutional weakness, public insecurity, sovereignty rhetoric, and geopolitical competition to consolidate power. The problem, then, is not only that Central America’s democracies were born fragile. It is that authoritarian projects have become more agile, emotionally resonant, and electorally effective than the democratic alternatives.
"How Guatemala Defied the Odds," Rachel A. Schwartz & Anita Isaacs, October 2023
Schwartz and Isaacs offer one of the most compelling accounts of Guatemala’s authoritarian system by naming it a “criminal oligarchy”: a coalition of political, economic, military, judicial, and criminal actors organized around impunity and state capture. But the article’s “defied the odds” framing risks overstating the democratic significance of Arévalo’s electoral breakthrough. The 2023 result did not dismantle criminal oligarchy; it exposed a momentary failure of authoritarian coordination. Semilla survived because the regime underestimated it, because more threatening anti-system candidates were filtered out, because the first-round result was difficult to reverse without blatant rupture, and because international pressure raised the cost of cancellation. That is a remarkable democratic opening, but also a fragile and contingent one. The deeper structure — captured prosecutors, compromised courts, clientelist congressional blocs, local machines, private-sector leverage, and criminalized political finance — remained largely intact.
"How Guatemalans Are Defending Their Democracy," Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez and Laura Gamboa, October 2023
Meléndez-Sánchez and Gamboa rightly emphasize the extraordinary discipline, scale, and strategic intelligence of Guatemala’s Indigenous-led prodemocracy protests. But their framing risks converting a historically specific mobilization into a general script for democratic defense. The protests helped protect Arévalo’s electoral victory, but they also revealed the fragility and narrowness of Guatemala’s formal democracy: the institutions responsible for defending the vote were either captured, intimidated, or unable to act decisively, while the decisive democratic legitimacy came from Indigenous authorities and communities long excluded from state power. The article celebrates these movements as defenders of democracy, but it could go further by asking what kind of democracy they were being asked to defend — and whether a system that depends on Indigenous mobilization in moments of crisis is prepared to incorporate Indigenous demands in ordinary governance.
"A Shock to Guatemala's System," Will Freeman & Lucas Perelló, August 2023
Freeman and Perelló rightly capture the extraordinary nature of Arévalo’s victory, but their “democratic spring” framing risks overstating the transformative meaning of an electoral breakthrough inside a still-captured state. Semilla’s moderation, legalism, and refusal to bargain with corrupt factions are real democratic assets, but they are also sources of vulnerability. The party won without the clientelist machinery that normally structures Guatemalan politics; now it must govern against that machinery with only limited congressional power, hostile prosecutors, entrenched courts, resistant business interests, and territorial brokers who still control much of the state. The article’s contrast between clean reformers and corrupt machines is broadly persuasive, but it underplays the extent to which corruption in Guatemala is not merely a pathology to be prosecuted or administered away. It is a governing structure, linking Congress, courts, contracts, local power, private capital, and organized crime. Arévalo’s victory shocked that structure, but did not displace it.
"Why Latin America's Democracies are Stuck," Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, January 2023
Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán offer a valuable framework for understanding why Latin American democracies so often remain trapped at low or middle levels of quality: powerful antidemocratic actors block reform, poor governance discredits democratic institutions, and hybrid states provide rights and services unevenly. But for Central America, the language of democratic stagnation may be too mild. Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua show that stagnation can mutate into more aggressive regime forms: criminalized state capture, legal-authoritarian obstruction, security-based personalism, and closed dictatorship. The problem is not only that democracy fails to deepen. It is that accumulated failures of security, accountability, representation, and state capacity create openings for actors who promise to solve democracy’s problems by hollowing democracy out.
"The Puzzle of Panamanian Exceptionalism," James Loxton, January 2022
Loxton makes a persuasive case that Panama deserves far more attention as a democratic and economic success story. Its post-1989 trajectory defies expectations: democracy survived after U.S. invasion, the PRD regenerated as an authoritarian successor party, the Canal was managed with remarkable competence, and growth continued despite pervasive corruption. But the “exceptionalism” frame risks overstating the breadth of Panama’s achievement. Panama may be less a model of democratic development than a case of enclave success: one extraordinary asset, the Canal, has been insulated from ordinary politics while corruption, inequality, weak accountability, and social exclusion persist elsewhere. The country’s stability is real, but it is not the same as democratic depth; its growth is impressive, but not the same as broadly legitimate development.
"The Long Game: The Opposition Wins in Honduras," Will Freeman & Lucas Perelló, April 2022
Freeman and Perelló provide a valuable account of how Libre defeated Honduras’s competitive-authoritarian National Party regime, but their “long game” framework risks conflating electoral effectiveness with democratic commitment. Libre’s patient party-building, territorial organization, electoral participation, and tactical alliance with Nasralla were real achievements, but they did not necessarily demonstrate a commitment to liberal-democratic governance. The party’s origins in the trauma of the 2009 coup, its personalist connection to Manuel Zelaya, its radical currents, and the transactional nature of the PSH alliance all suggested that Libre might be better understood as a disciplined anti-PN vehicle than as a democratic reform coalition. The article’s core question is how the opposition won; the harder question, insufficiently developed, is what kind of regime project that opposition would pursue once it controlled the state. In retrospect, Honduras’s 2021 election looks less like a straightforward democratic breakthrough than an alternation within a degraded political system, in which one machine was displaced by another movement whose democratic commitments were always thinner than its anti-authoritarian rhetoric implied.
"Latin America Erupts: Millennial Authoritarianism in El Salvador," Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez, July 2021
Meléndez-Sánchez’s article was remarkably prescient in identifying Bukele as an authoritarian actor rather than merely an anti-establishment reformer. Its account of populist rhetoric, social-media branding, contempt for checks and balances, and the hidden costs of the ARENA-FMLN pact remains highly persuasive. But the concept of “millennial authoritarianism” may place too much emphasis on style and generational novelty. Bukele’s deeper innovation was not simply that he governed like an autocrat while looking like a modern social-media politician; it was that he transformed anti-party disgust and insecurity into a new authoritarian common sense. Courts, prosecutors, journalists, NGOs, and opposition parties were not merely attacked — they were morally reclassified as obstacles to the people’s security and dignity. In retrospect, the 2021 judicial takeover was not only democratic backsliding. It was the institutional precondition for the later state of exception, which turned authoritarian concentration into mass popular legitimacy.
"How Populism Corrodes Latin American Parties," Kurt Weyland, October 2021
Weyland is right that contemporary Latin American populists corrode party systems by substituting personalistic, charismatic linkages for programmatic organization, and by leaving opposition forces fragmented around tactical, ideological, and legacy disputes. His argument is highly relevant to El Salvador, where Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas operates less as an autonomous party than as a vehicle for presidential power. But for Central America, the causal story needs to be inverted as well as extended. Populism does not simply dissolve parties; it emerges where parties have already lost their representative and moral authority. ARENA, the FMLN, Honduras’s traditional parties, Guatemala’s electoral vehicles, and Panama’s clientelist machines were not healthy mediators before populists attacked them. The Central American danger is that party failure allows personalist leaders to present anti-mediation itself as democratic renewal.
"Latin America Erupts: The Dangers of Democratic Delinquency," Laurence Whitehead, July 2021
Whitehead’s concept of “democratic delinquency” is highly useful for Central America because it captures the way elections can coexist with illicit finance, captured courts, corrupt security forces, criminal networks, lawfare, and impunity. But the concept may be too mild for the region’s most serious cases. In Honduras, delinquency became something close to regime structure under the National Party; in Guatemala, it operates through a criminal-oligarchic legal order; in Nicaragua, it has been absorbed into family dictatorship; and in El Salvador, Bukele has used public disgust with delinquency to justify authoritarian concentration. The region shows that democratic delinquency is not merely a set of termites eating away at democracy. Under certain conditions, it becomes the architecture of rule itself.
"The Decay of The Central American Left," Forrest D. Colburn, July 2019
Colburn is right that Central America’s revolutionary left had become morally exhausted by 2019. The FSLN had degenerated into Ortega-Murillo family rule, the FMLN had squandered its historic legitimacy in El Salvador, and Guatemala’s electoral left had failed to become a durable vehicle for democratic transformation. But the article’s “decay of the left” frame is too narrow. What collapsed was not only socialism or revolutionary politics, but the broader postwar political imagination. The right had no more credible answer than the left to insecurity, corruption, stagnation, youth disillusionment, and migration. Bukele’s rise showed that the vacuum would not necessarily be filled by a renewed progressive project; it could be filled by anti-party personalism, punitive security, and authoritarian claims to embody the people directly. The left’s failure mattered, but mainly because it was part of a wider failure of democratic politics to offer protection, dignity, and a believable future.
"Latin America’s Shifting Politics: The Fading of Costa Rica’s Old Parties," Forrest D. Colburn & Arturo Cruz S., October 2018
Colburn and Cruz accurately capture the decline of Costa Rica’s old PLN-PUSC party system and the resulting problems of fragmentation, weak mandates, fiscal drift, and public distrust. But their analysis treats party decline too much as a problem of governability and not enough as a potential opening for anti-institutional populism. The danger was not only that inexperienced presidents would struggle to pass fiscal reform; it was that outsiders could convert disgust with parties into contempt for democratic mediation itself. Fabricio Alvarado’s rise showed how quickly cultural backlash could be fused with sovereignty rhetoric, while the later Chaves presidency revealed how anti-establishment leadership could turn against the press, the judiciary, and oversight institutions. Costa Rica remains far more institutionally resilient than its neighbors, but the fading of its old parties weakened one of the mechanisms that had historically disciplined political conflict.
"Social Media Disruption: Messaging Mistrust in Latin America,"Noam Lupu, Mariana V. Ramírez Bustamante, Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, July 2020
Lupu, Ramírez Bustamante, and Zechmeister offer a valuable account of social media’s ambivalent democratic effects in Latin America: frequent users are more supportive of democracy in the abstract and more politically tolerant, yet also more dissatisfied with actually existing democracy and less trusting of institutions. But for Central America, the article’s focus on misinformation and mistrust should be pushed further. Social media do not merely expose citizens to falsehoods; they help reorganize politics around anti-mediation. In El Salvador, Bukele used social media not just to campaign without a party, but to build a direct relationship with citizens that made parties, journalists, courts, and civil society appear unnecessary or corrupt. The deeper danger is not simply that people believe fake news. It is that they come to believe that only the leader’s direct voice is real.
"Latin America's New Turbulence: Trouble in the 'Northern Triangle'," Forrest D. Colburn & Arturo Cruz S., April 2016
Colburn and Cruz accurately identify many of the Northern Triangle’s central problems: corruption, weak parties, low taxation, crime, elite resistance to reform, remittance dependence, and the dangers of empowering unreformed security forces. But their 2016 analysis is too cautious in defending existing institutions as bulwarks against fragmentation. In hindsight, the problem was not only that corrupt parties might collapse and leave vacuums; it was that those parties and institutions had already lost much of their democratic legitimacy. ARENA and the FMLN did provide stability, but their failure to govern opened the door to Bukele. Guatemala’s party fragmentation was dangerous, but the anti-corruption rupture also exposed the criminalized structure of power. Honduras’s two-party order was not merely corrupt; it was giving way to narco-authoritarianism. The deeper lesson is that democratic stability without responsiveness can become the prelude to authoritarian renewal.
"El Salvador's Beleaguered Democracy," Forrest D. Colburn & Arturo Cruz S., July 2014
Colburn and Cruz were right to identify the central pressures weakening Salvadoran democracy in 2014: economic stagnation, remittance dependence, fragile middle-class aspirations, violent crime, gang extortion, party polarization, and the limited programmatic imagination of both ARENA and the FMLN. But in hindsight, the article misidentifies the axis along which democracy would collapse. The danger was not primarily that Sánchez Cerén would take El Salvador sharply leftward or that the FMLN would bind the country to Venezuela. The greater danger was that both postwar parties would become so discredited that citizens would welcome an anti-party, security-centered personalist who promised to transcend ideology altogether. Bukele’s rise showed that the deepest weakness of Salvadoran democracy was not polarization between left and right, but the erosion of public belief that liberal-democratic institutions could deliver security, dignity, or national renewal.
"Personalism and Populism in Nicaragua," Forrest D. Colburn & Arturo Cruz S., April 2012
Colburn and Cruz were highly perceptive in identifying personalism as the central logic of Nicaraguan politics and in seeing that Ortega’s Sandinismo had become less a revolutionary project than a personalist machine. But in light of Nicaragua’s current reality, the article’s treatment of personalism as a persistent political style now appears too restrained. Personalism was not merely crowding out liberal democracy; it was becoming the mechanism through which Ortega would capture the state, subordinate institutions, neutralize rivals, convert social policy into dependency, and eventually construct a dynastic dictatorship with Rosario Murillo. The article’s emphasis on weak democratic culture among ordinary Nicaraguans also risks understating elite responsibility: citizens became clients because political elites organized the state around patronage, fear, and personal loyalty. Nicaragua’s tragedy is not simply that personalism survived the revolution and the democratic transition. It is that personalism learned to use revolutionary legitimacy, elections, poverty relief, business accommodation, and law itself to destroy democracy from within.
"Trouble in Central America: Guatemala on the Brink," Anita Isaacs, April 2010
Isaacs’s 2010 essay was remarkably prescient in identifying the central obstacles to Guatemalan democracy: oligarchic power, Indigenous exclusion, military impunity, criminal networks, weak parties, politicized courts, and the hollow implementation of the peace accords. But in light of Guatemala’s current reality, the article’s language of weakness and brinkmanship needs revision. The problem was not simply that the democratic state lacked capacity; it was that key institutions could be captured and repurposed to defend impunity. Guatemala did not collapse into open dictatorship. Instead, it developed a more elusive form of authoritarianism in which courts, prosecutors, electoral procedures, and legality itself became tools for protecting a criminalized oligarchic order. The article saw the fragility of democracy, but the later trajectory shows something even darker: weak institutions can become strong weapons in the hands of antidemocratic actors.
"Trouble in Central America: Crime, Hard Times and Discontent," Mitchell A. Seligson & John A. Booth, April 2010
Seligson and Booth were right to identify crime, economic stress, and weak democratic legitimacy as central threats to Central American democracy, and their warning about Honduras before the 2009 coup was remarkably prescient. But in hindsight, their framework is too centered on democratic breakdown as a permissive climate for coups or military rule. The region’s later trajectory shows that the deeper danger was not only that citizens might tolerate antidemocratic interruption, but that they might actively support antidemocratic reconstruction when packaged as security, order, and anti-elite renewal. El Salvador is the key case: its democracy did not collapse because citizens demanded military rule, but because Bukele transformed fear of gangs and disgust with the postwar party system into mass consent for executive domination. The article identifies the reservoir of dissatisfaction; it was difficult to foresee in 2010 that political entrepreneurs would learn how to turn that reservoir into authoritarian legitimacy.
"Trouble in Central America: Honduras Unravels," J. Mark Ruhl, April 2010
Ruhl’s account remains valuable because it shows that the 2009 Honduran coup was not a simple return to old-style military rule, but a broader institutional breakdown involving Congress, courts, parties, business elites, and the armed forces. Yet the article’s procedural balance risks giving too much constitutional dignity to the anti-Zelaya coalition. Zelaya’s defiance of court rulings and his ambiguous constituent-assembly project were genuinely reckless, but they did not justify military arrest and exile. The coup coalition claimed to defend the constitution while violating its core democratic premise: that elected presidents are removed through lawful civilian procedures, not by soldiers acting at dawn. In retrospect, 2009 was not merely a crisis caused by one president’s overreach; it was an elite veto against democratic uncertainty, and it opened the door to a post-coup order marked by militarized politics, deepening impunity, contested elections, and eventually narco-authoritarian consolidation.
"The Turnover in El Salvador," Forrest D. Colburn, July 2009
Colburn’s 2009 essay rightly recognized the historical importance of the FMLN’s peaceful accession to power, but it drew too much democratic reassurance from alternation itself. The article’s confidence in El Salvador’s “vibrant democracy,” institutionalized parties, rule-bound political culture, and responsible leadership now appears overstated. The postwar system could manage competition between ARENA and the FMLN, but it could not generate durable public loyalty or solve the problems — crime, corruption, economic stagnation, and social humiliation — that most shaped citizens’ judgments of democracy. Mauricio Funes’s outsider candidacy was less a sign of moderation than an early indication that party legitimacy was eroding. In retrospect, 2009 looks less like democratic consolidation than the high-water mark of a postwar order soon to be swept aside by an anti-party personalist who turned the system’s failures into a mandate for authoritarian renewal.
"Curbing Central America's Militaries," J. Mark Ruhl, July 2004
Ruhl’s article was right to argue that Central America’s militaries had lost much of their Cold War political power by 2004, but its civil-military framework is too focused on the old problem of autonomous armies and not enough on the emerging problem of civilian-led militarization. The region’s later trajectory shows that elected presidents did not need militaries to overthrow democracy; they could use obedient soldiers, military police, emergency powers, and domestic-intelligence structures to govern through security. El Salvador is the clearest case: the armed forces did not block Bukele’s authoritarian project, but helped implement a militarized public-security order after checks and balances had been dismantled. Honduras’s 2009 coup and later state-of-exception politics also show that formal subordination did not eliminate military danger. The unresolved issue was not simply whether civilians controlled the military, but whether democratic institutions could prevent civilians from militarizing democracy itself.
"The Struggle Against Noriega," Roberto Eisenmann, Winter 1990
Eisenmann’s essay is a powerful democratic indictment of Noriega’s narco-military regime and an important corrective to the view that Panama’s crisis was merely a confrontation between Washington and a Latin American strongman. He rightly insists on the agency, discipline, and courage of Panama’s nonviolent civic opposition. But the article’s moral clarity also produces analytical simplification. By defining Noriega chiefly as a gangster and the regime as an international police problem, Eisenmann risks narrowing a political crisis into a criminal one. That framing helps explain why negotiation failed, but it gives insufficient attention to the institutional, social, and geopolitical conditions that made narco-military rule possible: the military’s corporate power, the legacy of Torrijismo, elite accommodation, financial secrecy, and years of U.S. support for the dictatorship. Noriega had to go, but removing him was not the same as resolving Panama’s deeper democratic deficits.
