“So President Biden talks about the roots of mass migration being poverty and violence and corruption. What Biden forgets to ask is what the roots of poverty and violence and corruption are—there’s a whole history going back to the 1800s, but then the neoliberal reform of the 1990s is especially relevant.”
“But the problem is accountability—the reality is that the US is invulnerable to any effort to achieve accountability.”
“It’s much more useful to focus on what the US is doing right now—the US is destroying Central Americans’ lives right now through climate policy and trade policy and immigration policy, so we need to stop the current actions that are destroying Central Americans’ lives.”
“I tend to tell people to look at what’s happening locally in their own communities—those local organizations are usually the easiest way to get involved. So people should get involved in what’s happening in their own communities.”
Aviva Chomsky is a teacher, historian, author, and activist—her 2021 book Central America’s Forgotten History received the following praise from Publishers Weekly:
A searing examination of how colonial oppression, Indigenous resistance, and political and economic turmoil have fueled migration from Central America to the U.S.
And the following praise from Roberto Lovato:
Aviva Chomsky does the work of helping us unforget the pillage, plunder, and violence rained on Central America by the United States. In-depth research and good storytelling do much to resurrect the devastating stories and history beneath the immigration headlines dominating our news cycle. A necessary and timely contribution.
Americans definitely know all about “the immigration headlines dominating” the US media—immigration is right at the heart of US politics. But what do Americans think causes migrants to flee Central America?
Chomsky’s 2021 book is divided into the following chapters:
(1) “Invisibility and Forgetting”
(2) “Making the United States, Making Central America”
(3) “The Cold War, Ten Years of Spring, and the Cuban Revolution”
(4) “Guatemala”
(5) “Nicaragua”
(6) “El Salvador”
(7) “Honduras”
(8) “Central America Solidarity in the United States”
(9) “Peace Treaties and Neoliberalism”
(10) “Migration”
(11) “Trump’s Border War”
I wonder how many people in the West actually know about the things that Chomsky writes about in the 2021 book—it certainly seems like nobody in the US knows about the Reagan administration’s war in Central America, since Ronald Reagan seems to be quite popular.
Interestingly, there are some powerful songs about the Reagan administration’s war—here are some lyrics from U2’s 1987 song “Bullet the Blue Sky”, which is about the horrors that Bono witnessed in El Salvador and in Nicaragua:
Across the field you see the sky ripped open
See the rain through a gaping wound
Pounding on the women and children
Who run
Into the arms
Of America
And here are some lyrics from Bruce Cockburn’s 1984 song “If I Had a Rocket Launcher”, which is about Cockburn’s visit to a refugee camp—in Mexico—where Cockburn spoke to Guatemalan refugees:
On the Rio Lacantún one hundred thousand wait
To fall down from starvation—or some less humane fate
Cry for Guatemala with a corpse in every gate
But Chomsky’s 2021 book is about much more than the Reagan administration’s war—Chomsky explains to me in the below interview that many important things happened before and after the war and that we should focus on the things that we’re doing right this instant.
Here’s a basic map of Central America:
I was honored and thrilled to interview Chomsky—see below my interview with her that I edited for flow and added hyperlinks to.
1) What are the basic facts about what the US did in Central America in the 1980s?
The US has—since the middle of the 1800s—intervened in Central America militarily and politically and economically in order to promote US investment in Central America and US profits in Central America. And to promote a certain form of trade that’s beneficial for US corporations but not for the Central American people.
So there’s been an economic model based on promoting an export economy whose profits and products go to the United States.
US corporations have been deeply involved. And the US military and the US government have—through dollar diplomacy and long occupations and repeated interventions—been deeply involved in making sure that the Central American countries were protecting US corporate interests.
All of this has impoverished and dispossessed the majority—who were primarily poor, rural peasants until the end of the 20th century—and forced them into exploitative low-wage labor.
But we start to see—throughout the 20th century—a series of reformist and revolutionary movements in Central America that seek to overthrow the repressive pro-corporate military governments that the US was supporting.
One movement tried to overthrow Anastasio Somoza, who was the US-backed and US-installed dictator in Nicaragua; another movement tried to create a democracy in Guatemala through implementing elections and through electing reformist leaders; and yet another movement tried to overthrow military rule in El Salvador and implement some form of democratic system.
The US was very firmly opposed to all of these democratic changes in Central America. For example, the US intervened in Guatemala in 1954—and imposed military rule—when a moderate “revolutionary” government challenged US corporate interests through support for labor rights and land reform. So the United Fruit Company and the US government collaborated in a military overthrow of that government—the result was decades of military rule and of peasant resistance.
The Sandinista revolutionary movement had succeeded—by 1979—in overthrowing Somoza, who was the US-backed and US-installed dictator. And there were movements seeking to do the same thing in Guatemala and El Salvador.
All of this history provides context for the revolutionary movements of the 1980s. As of 1979, the revolution had been triumphant in Nicaragua and the revolutionary movements were ongoing in El Salvador and Guatemala—the US vowed to overthrow the Nicaraguan Revolution and prevent the revolutions from taking power in Guatemala and El Salvador.
There was a huge increase in US military aid to the repressive right-wing governments. And the US created and trained and armed a proxy army to invade Nicaragua—where the left was in power—and overthrow the revolutionary government.
Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. He promoted his plan for Central America in purely Cold War terms, but there was of course zero Soviet involvement—the real threat was that the revolutionary movements would harm US corporate interests.
These revolutionary movements enjoyed a significant degree of public support—in all three countries, the repression was aimed at the civilian populations and was therefore extraordinarily and horrifically bloody.
There was violence against the leaders of social movements and against activists. And there was violence against the Catholic Church, since the Catholic Church played an important role in mobilizing resistance to repression and to military rule.
There was the famous assassination of Archbishop Romero, but most of the victims were peasants whose names will never hit the international news.
Regarding Nicaragua, the idea was to undermine the economy and destroy the revolution’s ability to make people’s lives better—the goal was to turn people against the revolution in this manner. So there were a lot of attacks against things like schools and health centers and coffee farms—the US wanted to destroy anything that might improve people’s lives and might make people support the revolutionary government.
Guatemala has the largest Indigenous population in Central America—Guatemala’s Indigenous population formed a significant part of the unarmed popular movement and the armed revolutionary movement, so the Indigenous population as a whole became a target in Guatemala.
Congress was a little bit reluctant about supporting the Reagan administration’s plan—for example, Congress was a little bit reluctant about supporting the genocide in Guatemala. So Congress repeatedly tried to rein the Reagan administration in.
The Reagan administration was able to get around Congress—the administration engaged in the activity that led to the Iran–Contra affair and also armed the genocidal Guatemalan regime through Israel in order to avoid directly arming that regime.
The administration repeatedly lied to Congress and to the American people—about the murders, about the massacres, and about other human rights violations—in an effort to justify the policies.
Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Mayan peasants were killed in Guatemala. Some of them were killed for being organizers and activists—very, very few of them were killed for actually belonging to the very tiny armed revolutionary movement in Guatemala. The majority of them were killed simply for being poor peasants who were living in the wrong place—for example, maybe they were living in a village where other people were activists who belonged to a church group that was involved in popular education.
There were massacres in all three countries.
Hundreds of villages were destroyed in Guatemala—these villages were literally wiped off the map and their residents were all killed. The United Nations deemed it a genocide in the aftermath.
Regarding the genocide, the US at the very least tacitly supported it.
Tens of thousands of people were killed in El Salvador and Nicaragua. And hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Guatemala. And the killings in all three countries mostly happened with US arms, US training, and US support.
And I guess that that’s how I would define US activities in Central America in the 1980s.
2) What numbers might help people to understand the scale of what the US did in Central America in the 1980s? See the following numbers:
[T]he years from 1979 to 1991 turned out to be the bloodiest, most violent, and most destructive era in Central America’s post-1820 history. The number of dead and “disappeared” varies according to different sources. The minimum is 200,000 (40,000 in Nicaragua, 75,000 in El Salvador, 75,000 in Guatemala, 10,000 in Honduras and the frontier fighting in Costa Rica), but this is only an estimate. Millions have been displaced or made refugees.
These numbers really make you think about the scale of what happened.
For Guatemala, the most standard estimate is between 100,000 and 200,000. So I would say that 75,000 is a severe underestimate for Guatemala.
But those are the standard figures for Nicaragua and El Salvador.
There is—as you said—the issue of internally displaced people and the issue of people who had to flee their country.
There were also death squads in Honduras and peasant movements in Honduras and people killed in Honduras. But Honduras was a different situation, since there was no real armed revolutionary movement in Honduras—Honduras was basically turned into a US base of operations for the military actions against the other three countries.
3) What are the best things for people to read in order to learn about what the US did in Central America in the 1980s? To start off the list, I’ll suggest the following material:
Turning the Tide (1985)
The Culture of Terrorism (1988)
Necessary Illusions (1989)
this indispensable resource that Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel created—do CTRL+F in the resource and you’ll get 71 hits for “Guatemala”, 59 hits for “El Salvador”, and 160 hits for “Nicaragua”
So there’s some excellent material on this.
I would really recommend Walter LaFeber’s 1983 book Inevitable Revolutions.
I wrote my 2021 book in part because I noticed that a lot of the literature synthesizing things for a general audience—as distinct from in-depth and detailed scholarly work—was quite old.
4) What’s your reaction to Allan Francovich’s 1987 documentary series The Houses Are Full of Smoke? People can actually watch the three parts online:
Look at the series synopsis:
A chilling documentary on U.S. policy in Central America, this three volume series, which took six years to make, was researched and filmed by Allan Francovich, best known for his award winning film about the CIA, On Company Business.
An astonishing range of characters tell their stories, from soon-to-be-assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero to Salvadoran right wing leader Robert D’Aubuisson; from three then-Presidents of the three republics to Guatemala’s impoverished indigenous peoples; from ousted American Ambassador Robert White, CIA operatives, and National Security officials to the founder of El Salvador’s secret police, who speaks directly of the rape and murder of four American missionary women there, from the top death squad officials to remorseful triggermen whose gruesome accounts of kidnapping, torture and killing lend compelling moral urgency to the case against right-wing dogma.
So it’s a disturbing and interesting documentary.
I haven’t seen that particular documentary since the 1980s, so I can’t comment.
But I would recommend the 2017 documentary Finding Oscar—it looks at the 1982 Dos Erres massacre in Guatemala and traces the story of two people who survived the massacre at a very young age. I think that it’s a really, really moving and wonderful piece of historical documentary.
And I would recommend the 1991 documentary Pictures From a Revolution. It follows Susan Meiselas—who took a lot of the really iconic photographs during the Nicaraguan Revolution in the 1970s and who co-directed this documentary—as she tries to track down some of the people from her photographs in order to see what ended up happening to them. So that’s another really powerful documentary.
Both of these documentaries give a sense of the long-term impact of US involvement.
5) To what extent was what the US did in Central America in the 1980s illegal under international law?
Under international law, it’s completely illegal to engage in an unprovoked military attack against a sovereign country—the problem is that there’s no way for anyone to enforce international law against the US.
And Nicaragua actually sued the United States before the World Court—the World Court ruled against the US, but the US ignored the ruling and said “The World Court has no jurisdiction over us because we’re the boss of the world”.
6) And what about the US activities in the other two countries? Anything illegal?
Everything illegal—not only illegal under international law, but also illegal under US law, since Congress was forbidding US aid to the military regimes there.
But the Reagan administration went ahead and did it anyway.
7) To put a human face on things, what are the most striking and harrowing stories that you know of regarding what we did in Central America in the 1980s? For example, see the following account:
When the National Guard came to [the] village in U.S.-supplied helicopters, they chopped all the children to bits and threw them to the village pigs. “The soldiers laughed all the while,” Luisa told me. “What were they trying to kill?” she asked, still able to cry two years later.…
Like [her], all of the women still had tears to cry as they told stories of sons, brothers and husbands gathered into a circle and set on fire after their legs had been broken; or of trees heavy with women hanging from their wrists, all with breasts cut off and facial skin peeled back, all slowly bleeding to death. A frenzy went with each telling, as though women had yet to find a place inside themselves to contain it. Now, to my right one of the women was rocking another. Everyone was trembling.
And for another example, see the following account:
They started cutting off their fingers. This part of the finger here—the whole thing.
The soles of the feet were torn off with knives and then they made them stand in salt.
They cut off more and more of the fingers until they had cut off the whole hand—naturally when that happens cutting off a hand here makes a person lose buckets of blood.
They start by cutting off people’s genitals or their tongues or piercing their eyes with ice picks.
Then they cut them here so that they die—they slit their throats and throw them in the garbage.
So you can find some striking and harrowing accounts.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin on that one—I guess that I could point people to the following three reports.
Regarding Guatemala, the Historical Clarification Commission presented the following report in 1999:
Regarding Guatemala again, the Interdiocese Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory presented in 1998 the following report, which you can read in English in print:
And regarding El Salvador, the Truth Commission for El Salvador presented the following report in 1993:
Those three reports are based on harrowing testimony from interviews with hundreds of people.
Some stories are known in the international sphere, but the stories are just countless.
The US had bolstered an anticommunist ideology that was rampant among the reactionary forces in all three countries, but you see in some of the Guatemalan testimonies how that anticommunist ideology combined with deep-seated anti-Indigenous racism—there was a sense that the Indigenous people were all subversive and were all communist and were all a threat to the country.
And the Guatemalan stories are—in some ways—the most horrifying. You can read stories about pregnant women’s bellies being cut open, or about infants being bayoneted, or about heads being hung from trees—I mean, it just goes on and on.
8) Have there been any truth commissions for Nicaragua?
There’s been no official truth commission on Contra atrocities—that’s a completely different political context from the other two countries where there were truth commissions.
But there’s been a lot of reporting on Contra atrocities, including Reed Brody’s report that was based on interviews in Nicaragua in 1984 and 1985.
9) How do most scholars explain why we did what we did in Central America in the 1980s, and what’s wrong with that explanation?
I already mentioned the rationalization—about the Cold War—from the Reagan administration.
But there’s no evidence of any Soviet involvement—there never was any evidence of that.
No serious scholar would ever say that there was any Soviet involvement. And no serious scholar would ever say that Central America was a threat to the United States.
I’m sure that some people might try to justify the atrocities. But I don’t think that any historians would.
10) To what extent does the situation at the Mexico–United States border trace back to what the US did in Central America in the 1980s?
I argue in my 2021 book that migration flows follow ties—you see this phenomenon everywhere in the modern world. And ties have been created throughout the history of America’s military and political and economic intervention in Central America.
But you only started to see significant migration from Central America in the 1980s when refugees were fleeing the violence. The US government didn’t want to acknowledge that there was anything to flee from in El Salvador and Guatemala, since those US-supported governments were supposed to be great governments—the refusal to acknowledge the reality meant that it was almost impossible for people from El Salvador and Guatemala to obtain asylum in the US or obtain refugee status in the US, so therefore many of these migrants were undocumented.
That migration in the 1980s formed the ties that migrants are now following during the current mass migration.
But regarding the cause of today’s mass migration, I think that you can especially trace it back to the neoliberal reform of the 1990s.
The revolutionary movements opposed Washington’s policy prescriptions—these movements instead supported redistribution and social welfare.
The floodgates were opened to neoliberal reform after the peace treaties in El Salvador and Guatemala and after the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat in Nicaragua—you could even say that one of the purposes of the Reagan administration’s war was to open the doors to neoliberal reform.
The neoliberal policies included:
large-scale privatization
cutbacks in social services
cutbacks in social protections
openness to foreign investment
giving foreign investors certain privileges
giving foreign investors land for industrial agriculture
giving foreign investors land for resource extraction
reducing land rights
reducing labor rights
opening markets to cheap US manufactures
opening markets to cheap US agricultural goods
fostering a maquiladora sector
fostering export processing zones to which the US can export labor-intensive aspects of the production process—these zones allow the US to take advantage of cheap labor, low taxes, and no environmental regulation
Each country should have a sovereign right to make its own economic decisions—you usurp that right when you implement “free trade agreements” or when you implement structural adjustment.
This neoliberal reform essentially meant regression back to the prerevolutionary period except that things were—in terms of land loss and in terms of horrific working conditions and in terms of the state providing no social support whatsoever—even worse now for workers and peasants.
So President Biden talks about the roots of mass migration being poverty and violence and corruption. What Biden forgets to ask is what the roots of poverty and violence and corruption are—there’s a whole history going back to the 1800s, but then the neoliberal reform of the 1990s is especially relevant.
11) Let me tell you about my vision—for each country X that was involved in the Reagan administration’s atrocities in Central America in the 1980s, I’d like to see X do the following:
(A) conduct an investigation that shines the spotlight on what actually happened—and on the present-day consequences of what actually happened—and then release a detailed report based on that investigation
(B) pay reparations to the victims
(C) make a detailed and sincere and self-reflective apology so that the victims can hear those apologies; and so that X’s citizens can think about those apologies; and so that moral consciousness can increase worldwide as the whole world thinks about those apologies
What do you think about my vision?
Regarding (A), plenty of information is readily available, although investigations are still ongoing.
But the problem is accountability—the reality is that the US is invulnerable to any effort to achieve accountability.
Regarding (B), I would argue that it’s a mistake to focus solely on the atrocities of the 1980s when we talk about reparations. I think that we should focus on what the US is doing right now in 2022—we should focus on that, try to reform that, and seek reparations for that.
It’s much more useful to focus on what the US is doing right now—the US is destroying Central Americans’ lives right now through climate policy and trade policy and immigration policy, so we need to stop the current actions that are destroying Central Americans’ lives.
Regarding (C), I think that structural changes are more important than apologies.
12) What activist organizations can people join in order to help Central Americans?
There are national networks of activism, but there are also local organizations.
I tend to tell people to look at what’s happening locally in their own communities—those local organizations are usually the easiest way to get involved. So people should get involved in what’s happening in their own communities.