Word: centralizes
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...while it's been 20 years since Central America's last major civil-war battle, the isthmus is actually more dangerous today. Thanks in large part to exploding gang violence and useless justice systems, Central America has seen 79,000 murders in the past six years, more than the 75,000 people killed in El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war or the 50,000 killed in Nicaragua's 1980-1990 contra war. (See pictures of El Salvador's gangs...
...sure, Central America has shed some of its banana-republic baggage. Democratic elections have replaced right-wing death squads and Marxist guerrillas. This year, Salvadorans for the first time elected a President, Mauricio Funes, from the party of El Salvador's erstwhile leftist rebels. But life after elections remains as dysfunctional as the ubiquitous tangles of pirated electrical lines that hang above Tegucigalpa's streets. "The region has a greater understanding of the rule of law today," says Mark Rosenberg, president of Florida International University in Miami and an expert on Honduras and Central America. "But it's very incomplete...
...analysts, continue to exert incredible influence on the government. Little will change, says Rosenberg, unless those local élites "step up and assume a greater sense of [social] responsibility." Former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Emilio Alvarez agrees, but says Honduras' coup is only likely to encourage more meddling. Central America, he says, "is like a small village where the same group of families controls everything...
...seems a bit late, if not disingenuous, for a Central American politician to experience that epiphany in 2009. The real problem, says Lobo, is "our utter lack of vision about who we are and how to order ourselves." Ever since its Maya glory ended a millennium ago, Central America has been little more than a vulnerable land bridge whose political tragedies are matched only by its natural disasters: earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes such as Mitch, whose floods almost wiped Honduras off the map in 1998. Honduras has yet to really recover from that calamity - and a presidential election held under...
...India's long neglect of its cities was never more painfully obvious than during the Nov. 26, 2008, attacks. The civil administration in Mumbai was utterly unable to manage the crisis and all but abdicated that responsibility to the Army. The central government eventually ended the siege of Mumbai, but its failures - to heed early warnings or secure the city's borders - were just as galling. So perhaps it was with a villager's stubborn pride that I thought Mumbai, a high-octane, rough-and-tumble metropolis, would become a kinder, gentler and altogether better place to live and work...