Americans, like ancient Athenians, are a proud people who believe their form of government worthy of universal emulation. "We are the school of Hellas," boasted Pericles in his famous oration; and today the United States would like to think itself a school for the Americas.

Teaching U. S. style democracy to Central Americans has been a high priority for both the Carter and Reagan Administrations. President Carter sought to school Latin America in the individual's right to due process. The Reagan Administration began its tenure calling that human rights policy "utopian," because "it measured all countries by the same standards—disregarding differences in history, political traditions and social conditions." However, the president soon appointed a "school board," The National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, made up primarily of amateurs in the region's cultural inheritance, language, and politics, to gauge the possibilities for implementing his own 1776 vision of freedom and democracy. Successively, each administration had set out with diplomacy and appropriations to fulfill its particular version of United States' "higher law."

Superimposing interpretations of the American creed upon Central America's discredited "democratic" past and intolerable present, Carter and Reagan policies coincide in their insistance that nationalistic movements attempt the impossible—that they be legitimate within the framework of our own political tradition.