Like a terrible hotel guest who trashes the room and leaves the clean up to the hotel domestics to clean up after they walk away, the United States trashed Central America for political and corporate reasons, creating civil war and instability, and quietly walked away from the damage leaving the people caught between warring factions and drug cartels that were created by our alleged “war on drugs” to deal with it and not hold us responsible to any degree.
Under President Eisenhower the CIA chose Carlos Castillo Armas to lead a violent coup in Guatemala and funded the training of his rebels. In 1954, the president, who had been democratically elected, was overthrown by a U.S.-funded takeover, and the U.S granted foreign aid. The overthrow of the president resulted in four decade civil war. Thousands of Guatemalans fled from cities and towns to the mountains to form guerilla groups to oppose the Castillo dictatorship. The U.S. government and U.S. Special Forces backed the dictator.
This was because the duly elected president had expropriated all land larger than 600 acres that was not being cultivated, and redistributed it to people who owned no land. Although the former owners were compensated, this threatened the potential profits of United States fruit companies. The corporate greed along with their paranoia over the spread of communism created instability and warring factions that are still at it.
In the 1950s and 1960s large landholders began seizing land in Honduras from the agrarian people to extend their plantations and industry. The Honduran government began to benefit when the U.S. began relying on that country as a base of operations for anti-communist operations in Central America, giving it hundreds of millions of dollars towards the military. The power this gave the government tempted it to become more repressive, and it succumbed to the temptation.
The opposition gave rise to the Contras which began to surpass the Honduran military in numbers and military weaponry. The U.S. did not have much use for Honduras except for the military, so it just walked away from what it had helped create leaving the poor of Honduras in the middle of the two opposing sides.
When the U.S decided to build the canal in Panama and not Nicaragua the country realized it was on its own and turned to uniting the Central American countries to promote their own economic interests. American businesses began facing export taxes on the American banana companies so the United States became involved in the internal affairs of the country which resulted in military coups and infighting between liberal and conservative forces within the country. The U.S. kept sending in troops to make sure it did not lose control over trade.
Over time opposition to the U.S. muscle flexing produced Augusto C. Sandino who helped the guerilla movement successfully ward off the increasing U.S. military presence. His Sandinistas were successful until the U.S. began supporting the Nicaragua National Guard which crushed them, and backed Anastasio Somoza Garcia who began four decades of a gruesome dictatorship that finally ended in 1979 with a popular revolt led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The Sandinista government advocated a social democracy and a mixed economy.
The American right-wing's agenda of stomping out revolutions and struggles around the world in order to stop the spread of communism, intensified the U.S. involvement, but there was no attempt to establish communism in Nicaragua. But there was money to be made by American corporations that the Sandinista government was thwarting in favor of the people.
By 1981 The United States began to support Contra activities against the Sandinista government with the CIA leading the operations. The Contras received planning and operational direction and assistance, weapons, food, and training.
The Contras did not succeed, and the Sandinista government prevailed. But, in the 1990 elections, they were replaced by the UNO party after the White House announced that the economic embargo against Nicaragua would continue unless they won. The vote was obviously influenced by the people’s fearing a continuation of the contra war and economic deprivation
In the 1960s and 1970s, El Salvador experienced political turbulence and instability due to coffee plantation owners seizing much of the land that the farmers lived on. Many Salvadorans emigrated to Honduras, Mexico, and the United States. Right-wing military juntas and death squads dealt with those who stayed. The right-wing death squads in El Salvador were the most bloody and repressive of all the Central American countries, and that included the Organizacion Democrstica Nacionalista, founded by General Jose Antonio Medrano who was on the CIA payroll, which assassinated many trade union and other political leaders along with thousands of workers who went on strike and students that were protesting.
Among the victim as Archbishop Oscar Romero who was assassinated while giving mass in 1980, and who was recently elevated to sainthood by Pope Francis.
Fearing a repeat of Nicaragua, President Ronald Reagan said in March 1981 that in order "to halt the infiltration into the Americas, by terrorists and by outside interference, and those who aren't just aiming at El Salvador but, I think, are aiming at the whole of Central and possibly later South America and, I'm sure, eventually North America,” the U.S. government would give the reactionary Salvadoran government at least six billion dollars in aid, 70% of which was specifically for "weapons and war assistance."
From 1979 to 1990, the United States provided financial, logistical, and military support to the Contras in Nicaragua, who committed 1300 terrorist attacks in their opposition to the Nicaraguan government. They continued to receive support in spite of their obvious human rights violations.
The mess the United States made of Central America forced many to flee their native lands due to the war and poverty that had overtaken their countries. The U.S. is responsible for the wars that have left places like, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua in such hazardous conditions.
The 1980's was when the big influx of Central American immigrants began. The 1980 Refugee Act declared “anyone eligible for political asylum who had suffered persecution or who had a 'well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion “ could seek asylum from the mess of our creation. And it is for this reason people are still fleeing many of the Central American countries which are still in very bad shape.
People have been leaving El Salvador and Guatemala to escape the strife of the U.S.-funded death squads and warlords that are ruling those countries.
While we are told bout caravans that are allegedly made up of criminals, Middle Eastern terrorists, and rapists in order to create a fictitious threat from which only the creators of the fiction can protect us. We are being distracted so we hopefully forget that the misguided, failed foreign and economic U.S. policies cause the caravans from Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans fleeing the generals and oligarchs supported by billions of U.S. tax dollars wasted over decades.
The U.S. supported regimes in Guatemala and Honduras fuel the violence and instability that makes life unbearable for ordinary citizens. The U.S. pours hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars into training corrupt police and security forces in Honduras and Guatemala. .
President Nixon launched The U.S. drug war in 1971 that pushed cartels from Colombia into Central America while Latin American leaders implored the U.S. to take a different approach to drug consumption in this country. If drug laws were more realistic there would be less money to be made in producing and selling drugs, and there would be less inter-cartel warfare with civilian collateral damage.
Maras, the international criminal organizations that terrorize Central American communities, better known as MS 13, is a creation of the United States as it came about when Los Angeles street gangs were exported and then grew in the chaotic wake of the civil wars the U.S. government stoked in the countries to which the gang members were sent.
When it comes to M 13, our creation is coming home, and they are not the refugees who are the vast majority of those in the caravans.
The majority are those whose countries and whose lives we destroyed.
The U.S. government has consistently supported dictators over democratically elected officials and has intervened in favor of U.S. business interests and not Central American civil society.
It is our mess that we have yet to clean up, and until we do, it is our moral obligation to accept those fleeing the messes we made.