1 - Security: the issues

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Since 1979 there has been a huge outpouring of works on Central America. For an area previously very much neglected by English-speaking researchers, and lacking sufficient surviving indigenous tradition of scholarly research to be able to supply an adequate literature from its own resources, it has been a remarkable event and some of the books produced have been very good. From journalists, too, there has been a mass of articles and reports on the region, its constituent areas and problems, unparalleled in modern times.

This present study differs from most others in three respects. It forms part of a wider programme concerned with assessing the relations between superpowers and the Third World into the 1990s. Though it grows out of the work of a Study Group of the project, it does not simply reproduce papers from that Study Group but, rather, integrates the work of academic experts into an overview of the situation as the Reagan Administration comes to an end and we begin to discern the outlines of possible future policies within and towards the area. Thirdly, it treats the problems of Central America within the larger context of the Caribbean Basin.

There are many meanings attached to the concept of the Caribbean, and some of them totally exclude Central America. Yet the main focus of attention by policymakers in the eighties has been upon the mainland rather than the islands.