Central America

Central America, in the UN's definition, is the land bridge between the two American continents plus Mexico — eight countries in all: Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. The inclusion of Mexico surprises almost everyone, and it is a purely statistical decision, made so that Northern America can be the rich, anglophone half of the continent. Mexicans do not call their country Central American. On the UN's terms, though, the region holds about 184 million people, of whom roughly 131 million are Mexican, and it narrows from a broad plateau to a strip of land 50 kilometers wide at Panama.

A chain of volcanoes runs the length of the isthmus, thrown up where the Cocos Plate grinds beneath the Caribbean Plate, and it makes the region beautiful, fertile, and dangerous — earthquakes level cities here with grim regularity. Mexico's highest peak, Pico de Orizaba, is one of them, at 5,636 meters. The Sierra Madre ranges frame Mexico's high central plateau; south of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec the land breaks into cordilleras, cloud forest, and the flat limestone shelf of Yucatán. The Caribbean coast is wet and forested, the Pacific side drier and more populated. The Panama Canal, cut in 1914, severs the isthmus and carries a large slice of world trade.

The Maya built cities here that were abandoned to the jungle centuries before the Spanish arrived; the Aztec empire fell to Cortés in 1521, and three hundred years of colonial rule left Spanish, Catholicism, and a hierarchy that still shapes politics. The banana republics of the twentieth century, the civil wars of the 1980s, and the drug corridors of today all trace back to a geography of narrow states with weak institutions and a very large neighbor. Costa Rica, which abolished its army in 1948, has taken a different path and become a model for conservation. Migration north through this corridor is one of the defining human movements of the era.

• Belize
  A jungle-and-reef nation where Maya ruins meet the Caribbean country in region
• Costa Rica
  A green republic of volcanoes, cloud forest, and two coasts country in region
• Guatemala
  The Maya heartland of highland volcanoes and rainforest country in region
• Mexico
  Where ancient civilizations and a modern powerhouse meet country in region
• Panama
  The narrow isthmus where a canal joins two oceans country in region
• Mesoamerican Barrier Reef
  The largest reef in the Americas, arcing along four Caribbean nations defining feature
• Popocatepetl
  Mexico's smoking mountain, a restless giant beside Mexico City defining feature
• North America
  The third-largest continent, from the Arctic to the tropics located in