7 - Transition, Peace, and Postwar Power in Central America

Summary

Chapter 7 lays the foundations for the second half of the book, which focuses on the question of institutional persistence within and beyond conflict. It chronicles the road to political transition and peace in both Guatemala and Nicaragua. The chapter then examines a key difference between the two settings: the coalitional configurations that emerged from war. It provides an in-depth examination of how these dynamics played out within the three institution-level cases examined in the previous chapters. Specifically, it illustrates how the Moreno Network and Detective Corps in Guatemala laid the foundations of institutional survival by broadening the distributional coalition—the web of interest groups with a stake in the fraudulent customs arrangements and extrajudicial killing, respectively. Meanwhile, the FSLN’s transformation into the political opposition in Nicaragua following its 1990 electoral defeat resulted in persistent coalitional volatility, which bred chronic instability within postwar institutions.