{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023732904263877714, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009654062751407884, 'mean_word_length': 5.870165745856354, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Introduction: Social Struggle in Neoliberal Central America

This issue explores examples of changes in the formations and strategies of Central American social movements in a context that is very different from the one faced by their much-studied counterparts four decades ago. Since the late 1970s, neoliberal models of development and structural reforms have promoted privatization, free-market economics, deregulation, and government austerity in Latin America and around the world. This transformation began in Central America in the 1980s with structural adjustment programs, free-trade zones, and related policies inseparable from U.S.funded wars, death squads, and other technologies of repression aimed at squelching a variety of resistance movements. Ongoing histories of struggle and repression, with their very different outcomes at national and local levels, shape the context of Central American neoliberalisms and social struggles today. Nicaraguan neoliberalism, for example, followed the end of the Contra War but exists in tension with a lexicon and popular ideology rooted in Sandinismo; in Honduras, targeted death-squad repression in the 1980s left the country without an organized base capable of resisting the ravages of the 2009 neoliberal coup, though Hondurans enthusiastically and valiantly fought it. In Guatemala and El Salvador, highly publicized projects of restorative justice and historical memory are deeply intertwined with current struggles against ongoing violence. Throughout the region, the 1990s “peace” saw the heightened implementation of World Bank– and International Monetary Fund (IMF)–driven restructuring. With the passage of the Dominican Republic–Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) in 2005, corporate power reached new levels of control over national economies and policy, threatening sovereignty on numerous fronts. Neoliberal policies have dramatically affected national economies, prompted massive rural-to-urban and international migration, increased resource extraction, weakened labor and environmental protections, caused major shifts in agriculture, reconfigured (and in some cases reentrenched) hierarchies of gender and sexuality, and increased wealth disparities. Yet the shape of neoliberalism in any given context is determined by dialectical processes of struggle, and, as several of the papers in this issue show, even local community action can have a profound impact on national and international policies.