Central America's supposed bad performance

I am currently working with Juliana Martínez and Salvador Martí on a project for CEPAL on social policy in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. I just calculated growth rates for the last 25 years and was surprised once again by one fact: Central America has not performed any worse than the rest of Latin America. Of course, this is still disappointing as this means that two of the countries have not been able to catch up with the regional average. Nevertheless, I think the idea (which I have also written about) that the last few years were much better for commodity exporters than for the rest may not be totally warranted. Just a thought based on this table: Annual average rate of growth. GDP per capita (dollars 2005), 1990-2014