Programa de Cooperación en Seguridad Regional Central America has been the principal focus of U.S. military cooperation efforts, with considerable success at the bilateral level, including Nicaragua, and frustrating failure at the sub-regional level. Multilateral Central America security agreements remain essentially paper declarations, with little real cooperation to show for the Pentagon's efforts. The major difficulty confronting the Pentagon as the advance arm of U.S. policy in Central America is the structural asy­mmetry between U.S. armed forces and the civilian governments, with their civilian institutions of police and judiciary. The security issues confronting the sub-region are mainly crime and violence, often but not always associated with international drug trafficking, and the need to organize effective preparations for the certain but unpredictable natural disasters that recur so frequently. Here, the resources belong to the Pentagon and they are trained to share those resources with their counter­part armed forces. However, the problems are social and civil and require building effective state responses by countries whose civilian institutions are still relatively weak and unprofessional. The U.S. government is sensitive to this asymmetry; but in the absence of multilateral coopera­tion in dealing with gangs, drug trafficking and natural disasters, the default option leaves the initiative in the hands of the Pentagon. When the leadership of Southern Command is confronted with this dilemma, its response tends to be that they have no other effective interlocutors. Until or unless the Obama administration is able to muster sufficient resources and political will to deal effectively with the problems confronting Central America, efforts by the Pentagon will continue to have the unwan­ted consequence of stunting the develop­ment of civilian, democratic institutional responses to crime and violence. For their part, none of the governments in Central America has come up with a coherent or effective policy to deal with the asymmetry between military action and civic capacity. For example, after hurricane Mitch, the United States attempted to have the nations of Central America create a regio­nal version of the Federal Emergency Management Agency(FEMA), a civilian agency that responds to natural disasters in the U.S. Several of the countries(Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras) created national agencies with similar characteris­tics; but there is no regional civilian unit. Therefore, SouthCom, which has the resources available for such tasks, works with its military counterparts in the absence of civilian interlocutors. By the same token, the security arm of the Central American Integration System, CFAC, is inert. The Pentagon cannot understand why the nations of the subregion cannot work together, with SouthCom, on matters of mutual interest. By default, SouthCom continues to collaborate as best it can with each nation on a bilateral basis. Dealing with Latin America in strategic terms, the Pentagon is faced with a region at peace and with no clearly articulated collective regional posture on international security issues. Collective policy would strengthen the hand of civilian governments and make it easier for the U.S. to formulate policies that strengthened civilian institutions in the battle against organized crime and illegal traffic in drugs. July 2010, Page 4