Central America's Forgotten History

This is the first book in my unofficial series I'm calling “Understanding US Immigration”.

This book talks about the seven countries of Central America: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. It briefly talks about the rise of Spanish colonialism, and the creation of a caste system between “Ladinos” (people of Spanish ancestry) and Indigenous peoples or “Indians”. Sound familiar? “As in the United States, racism against Central America's Indigenous populations existed on multiple levels and was expressed in policies ranging from genocide, erasure, coerced assimilation, legal exclusion, forced labor, and myths about ‘disappearing Indians.” Most exploitation was of the natives, compared to the US, which mostly imported slaves instead of forcing the natives to labor. Both used the lie of “civilizing the savage” to justify subordination and even extermination.

The US also has had an extremely large impact on the history of all Central American countries. This includes, but is not limited to:
• Refusing to accept election results if it didn't go the way they wanted (Guatemala 1952, Nicaragua 1984)
• Literally annexing and creating the country for the interests of corporations (Panama)
• Invasion (Guatemala 1954, Nicaragua 1912-1933 & 1981-1990, Panama 1989)
• US-backed coups (Guatemala 1954, Honduras 1963 & 2009)
• Slavery/corporate colonialism (google: Banana Wars)
Etc.

What this book really shows is that the USA does not care about democracy or self-determination for nations within its political influence (i.e. any country) if that country's actions results in negatively impacts the bottom line of US-based international corporations. That is the modus operandi of US foreign policy.

Specifically for Central America, the corporations of interest are the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) as well as coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations. The story is always the same:
• Country elects political leaders who want to make life easier for peasants who work on plantations owned by multinational corporations.
• They enact a welfare state and the dreaded LAND REFORM
• Corpos run to the US government
• The US lies and claims the country is being influenced by the USSR (no longer necessary these days)
• the US invades or funds rebels to instigate a coup or both so they can install a new puppet dictator to brutalize the people and appease corporate interests
• Neoliberal Chicago Boy economist ghouls come in to do “structural adjustment,” AKA: write laws to dismantle and privatize all government industry and services, gutting social safety nets. Then, replace them with “free trade zones,” signing away the nation's wealth to foreign investors. This resulted in plummeting median wealth and health for the people.

“‘By the end of the Cold War,' writes Greg Grandin, ‘Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror—hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile—from which the region has yet to recover.'”

A tail as old as time. It's not just Central America, but essentially any country that crosses the US.

But I've told this story over and over again. what did I learn that's different here compared to similar books?

1: The US government was (is?) absolutely involved in the international drug trade.

“US-built airstrips and US-funded private airlines [...] became key nodes in the transport of cocaine and marijuana from Colombia into the United States, and the secretive bases in Honduras proved an irresistible transit point. The US Drug Enforcement Agency briefly opened an office in Honduras in 1981. When the office began documenting the extensive Honduran military involvement in the drug trade, the office was abruptly closed in 1983.”

2: This gave me a better understanding of colonialism and racism.

“Where populations were small and virtually impossible to control, as in North America, the British developed a kind of colonial enterprise called settler colonialism. Rather than ruling over the people they colonized—like the Spanish in Mexico and Peru, or the British themselves in India—settler colonial projects were based on eliminating the people who were there and replacing them with a white, European population.”

“Traditional colonialism and settler colonialism shared an ideology of European superiority that continues to infuse the world today, now commonly termed racism. What we today call people of color are formerly colonized peoples. Simply acknowledging the colonial roots of race and racism helps us to understand how profoundly the past has shaped the present.”

“It's also worth noting that most of the wealth and power in today's world is concentrated in the former colonial powers (the United States and Europe), while most of the poverty is concentrated in their former colonies (Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia). This division too has its roots in a long history of colonialism.”

3: How US-backed Neoliberal hyperindividualism resulted in rising Central American immigration to the US

The US government destabilized Central America through a century of neocolonialism, repression, coups, puppet dictators, counterinsurgencies, and “structural adjustments”. The dogmatism spread by the US and its ilk since the 1980's has been “hyperindividualism — Look out for yourself, don't expect anyone to help you!”

These two facts resulted in something obvious. The people who want to make a better life for themselves in their families do what makes the most sense for themselves as individuals: emigrate. And where do they go? Why the largest economy they can reach, of course! The good ole US of A.

The book went more into the the complexities of the US immigration system and its history. That's a topic I hope to talk about further along in my quest.

4: The AFL-CIO has historically stood with the US government against pro-labor nationalist governments in Latin America (and likely in other places).

“Although the AFL-CIO campaigned against Reagan in 1980 and opposed many of his domestic policies, the federation wholeheartedly adopted his framing of Central American revolutions as communist threats to the security of the United States. [...] The organization offered money and resources to unions that agreed to follow its political orientation. It intervened in unions' internal politics, promoting candidates and positions that eschewed radicalism. It worked closely with the US Embassy, US multinationals operating in Latin America, and the CIA, earning the federation the nickname ‘AFL-CIA' among many critical Latin Americans.”

One of the many reasons why I'm not a big fam of the AFL-CIO. More specifically the first half of that acronym. See: “A History of America in Ten Strikes” by Erik Loomis for more on that.


That's about it.
Read the book if you're into this sorta stuff.