Dear all,
Just a question about civil war in Latin America. Did Nicaraguan civil war (1979-1990) and Guatemalan civil war (1960-1996) take place across their whole territory?
Btw, is it correct to call what happened in Nicaragua and Guatemala as civil war but what happened in Colombia (FARC) and Peru (Shining Path) as low-intensity guerrilla war/armed conflicts?
My reasoning is that the relative intensity of the wars in Nicaragua and Guatemala is heavier than those in Colombia and Peru.
but I am not sure if I am right.
Thank you!
I don't know offhand but the Political Instability Task Force (PITF) collects data on exactly that type of issue so you could look it up there for those two conflicts as well as most other civil wars.
I don't think you can say the conflicts in Peru and Colombia were less intense than those in Guatemala and Nicaragua. They all had insurgent forces confronting a state. In terms of impact on the population you might rank Colombia the heaviest not least for its longevity. The state reacted in similar ways and human rights were present in all. You could easily calculate 'impact' by number of casualties in terms of population. But there is a more important qualitative impact you can only get by careful comparative analysis. But no there is definetely not two different categories at play, just gradations on a continuum
Dear Yue: in the Guatemalan case, armed forces used widely state terror and scorched earth tactics against indigenous population in the highlands, and it's widely recognized -even in some judiciary, as a genocide. I do believe that aside the number of killings, refugees and internally displaced people -very high in both absolute and relative terms, it gives the Guatemalan civil war a distinctive degree in the latin American history of infamy. Guatemalan internal conflict is also very old, and the first guerrillas emerged in the fifties. But let me add that as Rolando Munck rightly said, probably its better to put them in a continuum.
Dear Yue,
Re: your first question about the territorial scope of the armed conflicts in Nicaragua and Guatemala, I would say that both conflicts did not encompass the whole national territory. Rather, they were regionally focused, although the regional dynamics changed of course over the course of the wars. In Guatemala, for instance, the 'scorched earth' strategy of the military and military-sponsored governments of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which implied massive human rights violations, was focused on the indigenous highland regions north of Guatemala City. In Nicaragua, most of the fighting between the Ejercito Popular Sandinista and the 'contras' took place in the northern parts of the country, though there was also a violent challenge to the Sandinista regime in the south. I analyse these wars in some depth in my book 'Pacficacion y poder civil en Centroamerica', which is on ResearchGate.
Re: your second question, in my work I conceptualize the wars in Guatemala and Nicaragua as 'anti-regime wars', which I believe is more accurate than the term 'civil war'. The armed conflict in Colombia, by contrast, has been conceptualized by French scholar Daniel Pecaut as a 'war against society' (guerra contra la sociedad). This term speaks to the hybrid nature of the war in Colombia, which evolved from its beginnings in the 1960s to something quite different in the 1980s and 1990s, when the insurgents began making an appearance on the national scene and drugs and drug trafficking (and US-led counter-drug 'efforts') started hitting the country hard, alongside the emergence of the infamous paramilitaries. As is clearly shown in the Basta Ya report of the National Centre for Historical Memory (2013), most of the more than 220,000 fatal victims of the armed conflict in Colombia are civilian (and millions more were displaced and otherwise victimized). They were killed by the paramilitaries, the insurgents, organized crime and the state armed forces. Were the wars in Nicaragua and Guatemala more 'intense' than the one in Colombia? It's difficult to say. In terms of ratio of fatal victims/population, probably yes, especially in Guatemala. But then the wars in the isthmus represented quite different types of wars when compared to the Colombian conflict. I would think that the Colombian conflict was - and is - more 'complex', in terms of the actors and interests involved as well as the historical moment in which it has been playing out - than the (end of Cold War) wars in Central America.
Hope this is helpful.
Markus
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