Word: isthmus
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That's as important to Central America as it is to Costa Rica, which has long given the isthmus a model to emulate - something it still urgently needs. Central America may no longer be fighting the civil wars that ravaged it in the 1980s, but its problems are nonetheless mountainous and pose policy headaches for Washington in areas like the drug war, free trade and illegal immigration. The region's homicide rates, for example, are among the world's highest, as are its illiteracy and malnutrition indexes. Rule of law, as the Honduras debacle demonstrated, remains largely dysfunctional...
...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...
...help its millions of residents prepare. A recently published study by the Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSA), a research group based in Singapore, ranked metropolitan Manila as one of the provinces in Southeast Asia most vulnerable to flooding. The capital region is perched on a marshy isthmus that is crisscrossed with streams and rivers. An ever-growing population - Manila is now a sprawling mega-city of some 12 million people, larger still when factoring in the day-worker population - and the lack of infrastructure to accommodate it left swaths of the city exposed. "What we are seeing...
...still stands as one of the 20th Century's greatest feats of engineering: over a decade, vast battalions of workers braved illness and misadventure to carve a 50-mile long channel through the Panamanian isthmus to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But for University of Maryland history professor Julie Greene, the project was about more than miles dug or dirt shifted. "We have long perceived the canal as involving conquest over nature, and there's some truth in that. But it also involved conquest over the tens of thousands of men and women in the Canal Zone...
...treaty handing over the canal to Panama, which it did six years ago. Now Torrijos, 43, who was democratically elected President of Panama in 2004, is stumping to persuade his countrymen to undertake a more than $5 billion expansion of the 50-mile-long waterway that bisects the isthmus...