There was a time in the early to mid-2010s when a common question at Latin American think tank conferences was, “Why is Nicaragua so safe?” At the time, Nicaragua’s neighbors—the so-called Northern Triangle states of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador—were among the most violent in the world. There were years when surges of gang violence and organized crime in Honduras and El Salvador led to homicide rates above 100 people per 100,000 population, levels of mortality that are often not reached even in times of war and international conflict. Yet, Nicaragua’s homicide rate was below 15 per 100,000 for this entire period and continued declining from 2009 until 2015, even as Honduras and El Salvador generally remained above 40 per 100,000.
At a surface level, this disparity between Nicaragua and the Northern Triangle states seemed to defy reason. The country was poorer than its northern neighbors, and its history of conflict and civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, while distinct, was just as traumatic. In terms of large regional trends, it faced the same south-to-north flow of drugs and north-to-south flow of weapons as its neighbors, while its demographics in terms of both youth and unemployment were also similar. And by 2013, its democracy was in bad shape and set to decline under the leadership of President Daniel Ortega.
For all those reasons, it was tough to explain why Nicaragua’s security situation at the time looked more like Costa Rica—a solid democracy with a strong social safety net and a middle-income economy—than Guatemala or Honduras.
