Correlates of Terrorist Attacks in Latin America, Comparative Results from El Salvador and Colombia.

Background: El Salvador and Colombia have long histories of social conflict and accordant policy attention from the United States government. Data and Measures: This analysis evaluates several known correlates of terrorist activity in Latin America; including small arms importation, governance type, ethnic fractionalization, drug exports, terrorist ideology, government legitimacy measures, and urbanization using 7,013 attacks committed by named terrorist organizations in these two countries between 1975 - 1992 and 1994 - 1997 from the combined Global Terrorism and World Homicide Data. Results: For both countries, preliminary results imply that democracy, local political party legitimacy, percent urban and ethnic tensions are all positively related to terrorist attack frequency. On the other hand, government autocracy seems to reduce the number of terror strikes. Finally, the percentage of groups with a communist ideology appears inconsistently related to the number of terrorist attacks. Discussion and Conclusion: The statistical results are limited by constrained variance and non-random data selection methods. A discussion of how each country's specific socio-historical circumstances contribute to terrorism is included. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]