What Did We Do in Central America?
It's not easy to stomach, but we should shine the light on unpleasant things.
Everyone should watch Allan Francovich’s harrowing, fascinating, and important documentary The Houses Are Full of Smoke—here’s a summary:
Allan Francovich, The Houses Are Full of Smoke/ En el humo de esta epoca USA, 1987, 16mm, 176 min
Allan Francovich’s epic three part documentary The Houses Are Full of Smoke 1987 exposes the history of clandestine operations and U.S interventions in Central America since the 1950s. The film explores the social and political situation in the region in three sections on Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Built on extensive research conducted over six years, the film combines interviews with people from across the political spectrum—Sandinista leaders, Guatemalan campesinos, CIA operatives, Contras and US government apologists—to trace the political injustices and brutalities inflicted by both local and international governments.
The Houses Are Full of Smoke is viewable on YouTube, which is great:
the first part (Guatemala)
the second part (El Salvador)
the third part (Nicaragua)
YouTube user Santarchy uploaded the third part with this description:
Series Synopsis (from VHS box):
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.
“The issue is really whether the U.S. government instigated, trained and has direct knowledge regarding a whole series of murders—including American citizens plus hundreds of thousands of local people—and has covered it up. What people know about the world is controlled. These issues are crucial to democracy: without information you can’t expect the population to make decisions knowingly.” —Allan Francovich
“An eye-opening documentary about the Central American wars…the film’s most frightening sequences are bloodless interviews with right-wing vigilantes—self-possessed men of power who suavely deny their responsibility for crimes attributed to them by human rights organizations…a formidable work of investigative cinema.” —San Francisco Examiner
“Not to be destined a favorite in the White House screening room.” —The Washington Post
The Los Angeles Times said this in 1987:
The three-hour film is divided into three parts, devoted to Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, respectively, but “The Houses Are Full of Smoke” plays like one long, seamless account of an eternal cycle of ignorance, cruelty, greed and paranoia—the people at the bottom of society finally rebel, only to be branded as Communists and be put down savagely by the rich and powerful, who he contends are backed by the United States.
In the second part (El Salvador), masked interviewees describe shockingly heinous acts—I’ll transcribe from this timestamp:
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.
I asked Noam Chomsky how we can know that these heinous acts actually took place as described:
There are no algorithms. Matters of judgment.
These particular reports are highly credible; they are a bare sample.
How we know that the US was involved in these heinous acts:
US involvement is not in question. The US provided the military support and the training, and of course knew what was going on.
What functional purpose torture serves:
Sometimes it may be sadism, but there are good functional reasons: it terrorizes people into submission. Better not raise your head, or else.
Why this terror couldn’t have been achieved without sadism (one can spread stories about torture without actually torturing anybody, and one can mutilate bodies after the victims have died painlessly):
Why resort to such complex measures?
Chomsky has written a lot about Central America’s suffering, including these books:
(1985) Turning the Tide: U.S. intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace. Boston: South End Press. ISBN978-0-89608-266-3
(1988) The Culture of Terrorism. Boston: South End Press. ISBN978-0-89608-334-9
(1989) Necessary Illusions. Boston: South End Press. ISBN978-0-89608-366-0
For a vast amount of information about Central America’s suffering, see this indispensable resource that Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel created—if you use CTRL+F in the resource then you’ll get 71 hits for “Guatemala”, 59 hits for “El Salvador”, and 160 hits for “Nicaragua”. Here’s one quote from the resource:
[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.
Aviva Chomsky’s upcoming book will bring the history up to the present:
At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in the United States. In Central America’s Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question “How did we get here?” Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories of US expansion and Indigenous and Central American struggles against inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial development policies that promote cultures of violence and forgetting without any accountability or restorative reparations.
Focusing on the valiant struggles for social and economic justice Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, Chomsky restores these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. Tracing the roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish conquest and bringing us to the present day, she concludes that the more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras lie in the wars and in the US interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s that set the stage for neoliberalism in Central America.
Chomsky also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and the impact of losing historical memory. Only by erasing history can we claim that Central American countries created their own poverty and violence, while the United States’ enjoyment and profit from their bananas, coffee, mining, clothing, and export of arms are simply unrelated curiosities.
People should see The Houses Are Full of Smoke—people should know about this history, since this history is extremely important.
Ronald Reagan was a hideous figure who was never held accountable for his crimes against humanity in Central America—recognition of Reagan’s atrocities never stained Reagan’s image in public consciousness, so discussion about Reagan’s legacy often treats Reagan like a respectable figure and not like a hideous figure.
At one point, the documentary shows a coffin being lowered into a hole and then cuts to Ronald Reagan saying: “We believe that democracy deserves as much support in Nicaragua as it has received in El Salvador.”
And as the documentary’s final credits roll, Reagan is shown smiling and holding up a red T-shirt with “STOP COMMUNISM CENTRAL AMERICA” written on it.
It’s important to shine a piercing light on actions that the US government would rather that American citizens not know about. And we might ask why people are in the dark about such actions when the information is so easy to find.