How the U.S destroyed Central America
As with a notably large chunk of people my age in North America, I am on Instagram quite a bit. An increasingly common topic of posts on the platform regard the situation of Central American Migrants to the United States, and the legality of their presence (or lack thereof, given that the Trump Administration is ramping up deportations) in the U.S has come into question. Such a controversial topic, coupled with a network with which anyone can share their thoughts have led to the unveiling of many opinions on the matter. Asides from all the racist rhetoric directed at the migrants and absence of sympathy to their situation, there is an omnipresent idea espoused by users that really grinds my gears.
The point of view at hand goes along the lines of “They should stay in their country and fix it instead of coming here and begging for our benefits.” It should be apparent that it takes more than one or a few individuals to do away with a decades-old cycle of violence and corruption that has turned entire nations into breeding grounds for murder, abundantly speckled with extreme poverty. It is an assessment that was expressed in regards to Middle Eastern refugees looking for safety in Europe, and to be frank, is one that lacks the contribution of human logic. Yet it must be stated that most of these users come from the country affected by migration, the United States. It is painfully evident to see that they are oblivious to the fact that Uncle Sam is by and large the cause for the turmoil in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the severe situation that causes massive groups of families to trek the vast Mexican Desert to the U.S border in search of asylum.
The U.S intervention in the Central American region dates back to the turn of the twentieth century, and its effects have built up in a despicably perfect harmony to create an unliveable situation throughout much of this area. You may have heard of the term “Banana Republic”. It is a country operated like your run of the mill commercial enterprise with an unfathomable gap between a very small land-owning wealthy elite that oppresses a peasant dollar-a-day majority. The term has its origins within this region and the interests of the United States. Many Central American nations illustrate my point well. Guatemala for example, was under the yoke of American fruit companies. For a considerable part of the early 20th century, corporations sponsored dictators that suppressed the peasant class to make sure they remained under a serf like system that served the fruit companies that had business there. After decades of the nation’s land being owned by the rich elite and foreign corporations rather than those who lived on it, the mold was broken. Juan Jose Arevalo was elected president in 1945. He began to initiate agrarian reform and educated the persecuted working classes. In the six years between the beginning and end of his presidency, he was subject to 25 coup attempts. His successor, Jacobo Arbenz continued and enhanced the cycle set forth by Arevalo. On top of allowing for political parties, public debate and legitimizing labour unions, his Decree 900 was a major attempt in closing the social gap between Guatemala’s small aristocracy and the rest of its population. It distributed land to 100,000 families, approximately 1/6th of the population. Money was now going into the pockets of the people, and bolstered the Guatemalan economy. Production of Corn, Coffee and Bananas increased when the law as in place, and as a U.S Embassy analysis put it “A preliminary analysis of the President’s report left little doubt, as long as coffee prices are at their present high level, that the Guatemalan economy was basically prosperous.” In addition to this, he reworked land control to local committees called CALs. They were a fabric of local people and labour unions. All of this reform angered the foreign company that had strangled the economic growth of Guatemala, United Fruit. They lobbied the American Government to overthrow the democratically elected Arbenz. Enter Colonel Carlo Castillo Armas. An ardent capitalist, he went to the C.I.A to request assistance in an attempt to depose Arbenz. In June 1954, he marched into Guatemala with 480 C.I.A trained soldiers and took over the government. During his tenure, he killed and tortured thousands and undid all of the previous land reform, fundamentally prostituting his country’s labour and resources to the U.S’s Banana market once more. Said changes (or the undoing of such) built up the unbreakable barrier between the two sections of Guatemalan society even higher.
In Nicaragua, the dictatorship was not just backed up by U.S monetary, logistical and verbal support, but even had boots on the ground. Upset with the effective colonization of his homeland, one Augusto Sandino had started a guerrilla war against the U.S Marines, who were truly there to ensure that bananas were good enough for buyers back in New York and Los Angeles. The famous rebellion started in 1927 and ended in 1933 when the Great Depression forced the U.S to end their occupation (just one of dozens in the developing world to come in the next century). A liberal president was democratically elected, yet Uncle Sam had to make sure his presence was felt from afar. Before their long awaited departure, the U.S pressured the new president, Juan Bautista Sacasa, to appoint Anastasio Somoza as leader of the national guard. Sandino and the government had reached a deal that allowed for land to his followers, which meant his assassination at the hands of Somoza in 1934 further agitated the tensions between Nicaragua’s plantation owning nobility and those who worked on the plantations. When 1936 rolled around Somoza deposed Sacasa in a coup and instated a U.S backed dictatorship that killed an estimated tens of thousands during its rule. Anastasio and his son of the same name that succeeded him hogged what they didn’t give to America for themselves; most Nicaraguans were forced to live frugally.
In the two aforementioned nations, as well as the majorly class-divided El Salvador, tensions conglomerated and produced bloody civil wars. These conflicts had a pattern of the two sides being composed of leftist groups against U.S backed governments, the justification for their funding being the “Red Scare”. Furthermore, the bulk of the manpower for the governments were made up of “Death Squads”. As the name implies, they irrigated Central America’s fertile soil with the blood of its people. Take the Salvadoran Civil War into consideration. The Salvadoran military fought leftist guerrillas with death squads on their side. The armed forces that were supposed to protect El Salvador were, in a word, sadistic. This description was demonstrated with events such as the Sumpul River massacre. Refugees fleeing from El Salvador north into Honduras were told by the Salvadoran army to turn back. Given that that same military was most likely their cause for fleeing, they refused. This was despite the fact the soldiers had threatened to toss babies in the river, should they choose to go ahead with their plans. They hesitantly continued their journey, and were met with “fistfuls of bullets”, as well as bludgeoned with rifles, gored with machetes and cut up with military knives. Rather than keep their promise of throwing them in the water, members of ORDEN (El Salvador’s most notorious death squad) chose to hurl infants in the air instead, slashing them apart with cleavers. After a few days had passed, a priest came to visit the site of the atrocity. He could not get near it, as the notorious soldiers turned him away. However; from a distance he observed that “there were so many vultures picking at the bodies in the water that it looked like a black carpet.”
I shed light to this massacre and the many others that occurred in El Salvador during the war (look up “El Mozote massacre”, for instance) due to the fact that they were all able to be carried out due to U.S support. $1–2 million was sent from D.C to San Salvador a day, and the army and their ruthless groups of thugs received an enormous chunk of America’s resources. The Atacatl Battalion that committed many of the largest indiscriminate killings in Latin America’s recent times were trained at the U.S founded, funded and staffed “School of the Americas”. From 1983 up until the end of one of the deadliest conflicts in the Western Hemisphere’s history, U.S officers held key positions in El Salvador, and made executive decisions regarding the war. It is worth bringing up that 85% of deaths in the Salvadoran Civil War were committed by the pro-regime terrorists. If we use the lowest estimate of 70,000 deaths in El Salvador to calculate how many deaths the U.S is responsible we get a horrendous amount of 59,500. The U.S considering El Salvador’s malicious assembly of torturers, slaughterers and masochists as a “friendly regime” makes it and the successive administrations that oversaw such a status as complicit in the deaths of innocent civilians. In Guatemala, “there is substantial evidence of the direct role of U.S. military advisers in the formation of death squads: U.S. Embassy personnel were allegedly involved in writing an August 1966 memorandum outlining the creation of paramilitary groups, and the U.S. military attaché during this period publicly claimed credit for instigating their formation as part of “counterterror” operations.” (As per Susanne Jonas’ The Battle for Guatemala). The U.S had particularly increased funding for Efrain Rios Montt, a Guatemalan military general who took power in a coup in 1982. Whilst in charge , he butchered civilians in an industrial manner. According to a Guardian article that compiled various sources, “in 1982, an Amnesty International report estimated that over 10,000 indigenous Guatemalans and peasant farmers were killed from March to July of that year, and that 100,000 rural villagers were forced to flee their homes. According to more recent estimates, tens of thousands of non-combatants were killed by the regime’s death squads in the subsequent eighteen months. At the height of the bloodshed under Ríos Montt, reports put the number of disappearances and killings at more than 3,000 per month.” Moreover, I do not need to go to any great length to explain the U.S funding more of the same in Nicaragua; countless works of media and literature are dedicated to shedding light on it.
The facts and figures above are worth mentioning because as with the Irish in the 19th century and the Palestinians in the early-mid 20th, people move around when faced with life-threatening adversity. What the civil wars in Central America created was an influx of people from those nations into the U.S. Despite the peril they faced in their homeland, they were not seen as worthy of asylum, and were forced to live under undocumented status. Does this ring a bell to any current event? As a result, Central American immigrants had no protection from the racial prejudice and gang violence in the poor Los Angeles neighbourhoods in which they had to settle. In reaction to this circumstance, groups of Central American teens formed the Mara Salvatrucha (more commonly known as MS 13) and 18th street gangs. MS 13’s case is interesting because what once started as a group formed through the dire need to defend children of a civil war mutated into a traditional criminal organization under the leadership of Ernesto Deras, a U.S trained soldier who expanded the gang’s capabilities. This rendered MS 13 a threat, and the U.S deported more than three quarters of the gang to their countries of origin. One should consider that the civil war had been going on in these countries for more than a decade, so many grew up and were even born in Los Angeles, and did not truly know the place where they were to be shipped off to. Let us draw a comparison between Los Angeles, a city with an advanced police force, and that of, let us say, El Salvador, a poor country with no police force that has just gotten finished with one of the most gruesome conflicts of the last half century? This factor, and the nearly infinite number of weapons laying around from the war allowed MS 13 and 18th street to dominate the country with an iron fist that is enamoured with blood. MS 13’s and 18th street’s activity still paled in comparison to the more infamous Bloods and Crips. It could be easily managed by the LAPD, but the United States government chose the alternative of adding another nail in the coffin that is Central America. Central American countries have crime statistics that prove numbers can be difficult to look at. This is not helped by the United States withholding hundreds of millions of dollars of aid meant for Central American states in response to the migrant crisis. When one puts two and two together he realizes that poverty will increase, as will gang activity with less money going to police. Thus, the Trump admin. is really just accelerating the migration that he detests so much. Is it a foreign policy blunder or a deliberate attempt to keep his favourite scapegoat convenient to use?
- A huge thank you to my relatives, who consistently support the work I put out.
Sources that helped my research :
Gleijeses, The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz” (1989), pp. 476–477.
Gleijeses, The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz” (1989), p. 470. “What an anthropologist wrote of Guatemala in the early 1930s still held true in the fifties: ‘The land is for the Indian the symbol of his right to live, the connecting link between the material life with the divine existence.’ For the first time since the Spanish conquest, the government returned land to the Indians. For the first time, also, the rural workers and small peasants participated in trade union activities, even though their role was confined to the local level.”
Gordon, “Case History of U. S. Subversion” (1971), p. 138. “The most striking feature of the Arévalo-Arbenz period was the organization and activity of the working class and peasantry, resulting in the development of new and powerful political groups — political parties, peasants’ associations, agrarian committees for land allotment, labor unions, women’s organizations.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ms-13-was-born-in-the-usa
