3. The contemporary system of regional integration
3.1. The first regional institution: the Central American Parliament
Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Central America came to international
attention, as civil wars in Salvador and Nicaragua and external intervention put the
region in the centre of the East-West conflict. Amid concerns that the military
escalation might lead to a generalised regional war, regional integration came again to
the forefront as a way out to the crisis. After all external efforts to reduce tension
(mainly those undertaken by the Contadora Group4
) failed to produce results and with a
military stalemate, newly-elected Presidents Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica and
Vinicio Cerezo of Guatemala proposed a peace plan based on confidence-building,
internal democratisation and the holding of free elections (Bernales and Vasquez 1990:
134-143); the Esquipulas-I plan, adopted in the Guatemalan city of Esquipulas in July
1986 during the first meeting of all Central American Presidents for a generation,
included the call for the creation of a directly-elected regional parliament, the Central
American Parliament (henceforth, the Parlacen from its Spanish acronym) as a focal
point for the reconciliation and peace in the region.
A remarkable feature of this new wave of regional integration in Central America is
that it did not start, as it had done in the past in the region (and as it happens in other
parts of the world), by the establishment of a comprehensive regional organisation