I am Central America

We are men and women of corn;

Different plants, but a single root.

We are a land that they managed to divide;

But they didn't take away our right to be happy.

Rebeca Lane ft. Zaki

The spread of the coronavirus [COVID-19] in Central America intensified sociopolitical processes within each country, starkly revealing existing inequalities and sociopolitical, cultural, political, and economic divides. This situation allowed religious fundamentalisms and neo-dictatorships to flourish in the region. Fundamentalisms thrive on systems of social inequality. Central America has historical characteristics that underpin this inequality: metropolitan central regions at the expense of rural peripheral areas, and the Pacific region at the expense of the Atlantic region, the latter ironically being an environmental reserve that contains the largest concentration of forests in the isthmus. As a consequence of its cultural diversity, Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations call this area home. The Central American Atlantic-Caribbean is the scene of the greatest inequality and poverty, but also the area of ​​the greatest expansion of the contemporary agricultural/livestock frontier (in some countries violently, such as Nicaragua and Guatemala), as well as the target of infrastructure development projects (hydroelectric or canal), the expansion of monocultures and privatization of environmental reserves.

In addition to the above, the low average levels of education in most countries create fertile ground for false political propositions, which, with their limited analytical skills, the population is unable to adequately discern. It is no coincidence that fundamentalist movements attack educational systems, claiming that they "indoctrinate" students when they promote critical reflection on social reality. Most often, these attacks are reactions to attempts to implement Comprehensive Sexuality Education programs. However, attacks have also extended to the teaching of Human Rights.

Following the 2009 coup in Honduras and the subsequent imposition of a civilian-military dictatorship, fraudulent electoral processes were carried out in an attempt to legitimize illegitimate figures. In Nicaragua, the constitution was amended in 2014, allowing for indefinite reelection, in this case for Daniel Ortega. A political crisis in April 2018 was exploited to consolidate control of the state, establishing a new autocratic dynasty known as the "Ortega-Murillo" regime. In El Salvador, following Nayib Bukele's rise to power in 2019, a process of neo-repression and democratic erosion began, fully manifested in the use of the State of Emergency as public policy in 2022. The global systemic crisis and the collapse of the neoliberal economic model fueled the social and political upheaval in Panama in July 2022, generating a wave of popular mobilizations that halted price increases for fuel and approximately 80 basic goods. Panama is experiencing its worst socioeconomic situation since the 1989 US invasion.

In unequal societies with a marked tendency toward authoritarianism, religious fundamentalisms become institutionalized. This institutionalization occurs through electoral pacts in which religious fundamentalists can offer their "folk" as a captive electorate. A symbiosis is created between authoritarian tendencies and fundamentalisms that protect themselves from within the structures of power. They strategically install themselves in government ministries, making their presence felt in decision-making spaces for education, health, culture, public safety, and in agencies that safeguard the human rights of vulnerable populations. There, they empty the existing demands of these institutions and generate public policies steeped in religious moralism disguised as secular rhetoric. In this context, the attacks on public education, and specifically on public universities in Costa Rica, are a clear example of the erosion of institutional integrity. The democratic backsliding has also been expressed within Guatemalan academia, at the historic University of San Carlos, where spurious methods were used to elect its rector in May 2022, disregarding the scientific objectives of higher education and mobilizing the university community to fight against blatant corruption.

Meanwhile, throughout the isthmus, alliances between local elites and transnational corporations continue to consolidate their power projects, stifling autonomous and sustainable development, ensuring that our recent history remains marked by the extermination of those who dare to dream of more just and balanced societies. In rural areas, Indigenous and peasant communities witness the progressive and systematic plundering of their territories, finding themselves invaded and displaced from their common resources, forests, and waters; the expansion of the extractive development model inaugurated with the atrocities of the colonial regime persists.

Of the five countries in the Americas that have an absolute ban on abortion, three are in Central America: Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. The struggle to achieve women's sexual and reproductive rights is a demand for autonomy over bodies and territories, intertwined with a fight against capitalism, the defense of the environment, and all forms of discrimination.

As a Working Group, over the course of six years, we have conducted various analyses of the interwoven economic and sociocultural logics of the Central American isthmus. This has been achieved by questioning hegemonic historical, sociological, literary, and epistemological narratives about the region. We proposed a three-pronged approach to understanding the isthmus: subjectivities, geopolitics, and narratives. This approach fosters a critical perspective on the isthmus's turbulent history, aiming for a profound and authentic understanding of the phenomena that shape its development and contemporary reality. Our reflections stemmed from the premise that the region's events cannot be fully understood without considering its deep connections to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. Similarly, its unique geostrategic character and physiognomy give Central America particular prominence within the context of the political, economic, and environmental reconfigurations of the global village.

Our commitment to rethinking the geographic, geopolitical, and geoeconomic centers, as well as the theoretical-epistemological, cultural, and symbolic centers of and about Central America, resulted in the construction of an epistemic proposal: "Isthmian Perspective." Based on this proposal, we, as a Working Group, renew our intention to continue analyzing and understanding the Central American isthmus in a critical, articulated, transdisciplinary, and comparative manner. Understanding, problematizing, and contesting Central America is not a purely local concern, but a global commitment. Hence the importance of this work: broad perspectives, local concrete examples, through the articulation and ongoing intersection of trajectories between social movements and disciplines. Through peripheral epistemological perspectives, we question and problematize the uncritical acceptance of perceiving Central America from a naturalized marginality, which omits its complexities and its links with the "outside." and its socio-historical specificities, as well as to investigate its dense theoretical and political consequences for the social sciences and humanities exercised from and on the region

The Working Group "The Central American Isthmus: Peripheral Epistemological Perspectives," as the academic expression of the Central Americanist Articulation (O Istmo), is a reflection-action initiative focused on Central America that seeks to create points of contact between epistemic thought and Central American social struggles. Our work is embedded in the network of research and exchange programs at the Latin American and global levels that foster academic experiences and alternative forms of knowledge. We operate on the premise of promoting horizontal relationships and strategic links between intellectuals from different disciplines and agents of concrete sociopolitical struggles. We adhere to the continuum of resistance, transgression, and new epistemologies in different Central American spaces and temporalities.

Our goal is to contribute to a greater global understanding of Central America and to foster greater exchange, connections, and the strengthening of communication and organizational capacities among sociopolitical and cultural actors in the isthmus. To this end, we promote the production and dissemination of information and the systematization of Central American knowledge. We embrace the challenge of structuring links between networks, fronts, and collectives engaged in Central American sociopolitical and cultural struggles. At the beginning of our Working Group in 2016, we defined three areas of focus: 1) geopolitics, 2) subjectivities, and 3) narratives. These thematic areas have become more complex, acquiring a more defined profile as the group has matured. Today, we maintain our commitment to organizing our inherent heterogeneity and diverse proposals and lines of action into three axes, which we call: 1) Territories and Nation-States; 2) Bodies and Subjectivities; 3) Arts and Cultures. The activities proposed in our Work Plan respond to this way of articulating the multiplicity of themes, disciplines, theoretical approaches, interests and ideological affiliations that keep our Isthmian Articulation alive and dynamic.

In developing our work as the Central Americanist Network over nearly a decade, we found the foundations of our epistemological proposal, which we call the "isthmian perspective." Studying and articulating Central America means questioning a space dominated by the contradiction between diversity and unity, which, combined with its geostrategic location, makes it unique on the planet. What makes these territories in the heart of the Americas a region? What is meant, or intended, by the term "region" for the Central American isthmus? These and other questions are at the heart of the epistemological concerns of the Isthmus Network and our Working Group.

In this sense, the "istmian perspective" that we propose is situated in the tension between the notions of Nation-State, region and territory, questioning the arbitrarily established borders and the Central American political and identity projects during the last 200 years.

“Isthmian perspective” signifies, first and foremost, a conceptual effort to understand territories and territoriality in the Central American isthmus as a whole, beyond the limits imposed and delimited by nation-states. Central America, in our view, is more than the sum of the small countries in the territorial strip between North and South America, and also much more than simply a “homogeneous region.” It is a heterogeneous unit configured through porous cultural, environmental, social, and linguistic boundaries that expand and contract, in a state of perpetual critique and transgression. By embodying the power of the political ambiguity between territory and territoriality at a global systemic level, it is capable of pushing the limits of traditional explanatory frameworks in the social sciences.

The "Isthmian perspective" is a broadening of the deconstructive and undisciplined view of Central America that extends across space and time. It reaches north to southern Mexico and south to northern Colombia, as well as from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, encompassing the isthmian waterways on both coasts. This conceptualization stems from its deep history, not only from contemporary nation-states, which we understand as an arbitrary fragmentation of just 200 years. Our "Isthmian perspective" also conceives of the isthmus in its diasporic, symbolic, and powerful territoriality, which unfolds through migrant networks, the relational circuits of the social fabric of Central Americans, and the memory of a shared origin.

The "isthmian perspective" is, therefore, an epistemic movement that allows us to identify and position "objects of study" and "political subjects" in Central America that provoke questions about Central American societies in their historical and geographical particularity, as well as in their links and incursions into the globalized world.

By "isthmian perspective" we mean a catalyst for questions that arise from examining the very idea of ​​region as a question, rather than from the certainty of a supposed set of nation-states. These answers and solutions are found, and must be sought, in the peoples in movement and in the organized and organizing marginalized sectors of the isthmus.

More than a place, the "isthmian perspective" is a path of reflection; more than a statement, it is a question that branches out into diverse intellectual and political positions; rather than a theory, it is an invitation to think collectively, horizontally, and transversally about the meanings of Central America and Central America as a "region."

As a proposal for constructing objects of study and political subjects, it does not start from national limits, but from specific themes of the geographical and sociopolitical reality of the Central American isthmus that constitute relational nuclei contextualized in historical or contemporary dynamics.

The empirical basis we seek consists of nodes of situations (objects of study) that transcend national borders, such as authoritarianism, extractivism as a development model, the reconfigurations of capitalism, violence and racism as societal forms, or Indigenous and Afro-descendant communitarianism outside the state. Likewise, we seek to identify political, cultural, and collective subjectivities (political subjects) that relate, act, or mobilize beyond national borders, such as cross-border communities, coastal areas and their links with the insular Caribbean, migration networks, artistic and intellectual movements, virtual communities, and formal and informal regional organizations.

Thus, articulated, in a collective and committed Central Americanist effort, in the GT "The Central American Isthmus: Peripheral Epistemological Perspectives" - as part of O Istmo - we seek the meanings of Central American regional identity that allows us to open a channel for reflections and praxis in this complex sociopolitical space where, as Miguel Huezo-Mixco has poetically expressed, "stupidity and fear, intelligence and passion, wonder and astonishment converge, which is neither North nor South, which seems to rot and yet survives."