The main idea we seek to examine in this report is quite simple. It is that the three countries of Central America’s ‘Northern Triangle’ – El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras – have flawed democracies and a uniquely challenging set of socio-economic problems: we argue that building stronger, more inclusive democratic systems will be a necessary, although potentially not a sufficient condition for beginning to solve those problems. We do not see democracy as a magic potion that causes all problems to disappear: there are too many examples in Latin America and elsewhere of democracies that have evaded, postponed, or simply failed to fix deep socio-economic problems; there are also examples in various parts of the world of non-democratic, single-party regimes that have certainly fixed at least some of the problems, some of the time (to take one example, the government of the Peoples’ Republic of China has a very impressive economic growth record over the last 30 years).End of preview - This article contains approximately 424 words.
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