Peacemaking and Democratization in the Western Hemisphere.

• Author: Sotomayor, Arturo

Edited by Tommie Sue Montgomery

Coral Gables: North South Center Press of the University of Miami, 2000, 334 pages

Since the end of the Cold War, UN peacekeeping missions have expanded, involving not only military but also political and humanitarian operations. While traditional literature on peacekeeping devoted enormous attention to the study of peacekeeping among states, the maintenance of peace within countries has generally been neglected. Peacemaking and Democratization in the Western Hemisphere provides a comprehensive study of the peacemaking and peacebuilding missions in Central America and the Caribbean, where internal wars were, until recently, common features of the regional sub-system. This book goes far beyond the analysis of peacekeeping operations as it attempts to show an explicit relationship between peacemaking operations and the emergence of democracy in the region. Although the collection of essays examines particular cases without explicit theoretical frameworks in mind, the contributions do focus on the institutional and normative components of peacekeeping. Thus, one can identify the theoretical roots of this project in neoliberal institutional and democratic peace perspectives.

The volume addresses three types of mission: political, electoral and military. The first section of the book analyzes peacemaking operations in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti and Guatemala. These cases offer empirical evidence from which important lessons for future missions can be derived. Unlike the more traditional peacekeeping missions in the Middle East and South Asia, peacemaking in Central America was a new endeavor for the United Nations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Traditional UN-sponsored peacekeeping missions involved unarmed or lightly armed blue helmets patrolling demilitarized zones in regions where, following a peace agreement among all sides, there was a genuine peace to be kept. However, as the authors of this collection of essays emphasize, peacemaking in Central America involved an ambitious multinational operation, with thousands of blue helmets who ultimately assisted in verifying and enforcing ceasefire agreements. The United Nations took an active position in disarming factions in civil wars, policing strife-torn countries and organizing and supervising elections for new governments.

The Salvadoran case, analyzed by David Holiday and William Stanley, provides a detailed examination of the UN Mission to El Salvador (ONUSAL). The authors argue that the United Nations tended to take sides and attempted to tilt the local balance of power by intervening in the verification of ceasefire agreements. As the authors maintain, "Because the Salvadoran government had more responsibilities than the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberacion Nacional), the UN found itself criticizing the government more than the guerrillas, endangering its appearance of neutrality." Holiday and Stanley consider that ONUSAL's partiality in verifying the agreement eroded the legitimacy of the mission. In their view, by denouncing actions against the Salvadoran government, the United Nations risked forfeiting the government's cooperation, on which the success of the whole enterprise depended.

Holiday and Stanley's discussion of ONUSAL addresses an important...