9 Thinking in Historical Perspective about Central America Today

INTRODUCTION

Central America is a small region, but it has a global impact for multiple reasons. It is strategically located between North America and South America. Anyone wishing to travel to the Pacific from the Caribbean or Atlantic Ocean can do it much more quickly using the Panama Canal or traveling overland across Central America. For centuries, Central America has been involved in vigorous regional trade and international trade as well providing inputs for the global textile industry and supplying agro-exports such as sugar, coffee, bananas, and palm oil around the world. Central America bears the imprint of centuries of colonization and neocolonial efforts. European colonial powers from the sixteenth century on, and territorial and neocolonial policies of the U.S. from the nineteenth century on, have affected the region’s economies, politics, and social affairs, and often not for the best—if by best we mean, generating wealth and enfranchisement for the majority of the population. Being a connector region joining North and South America, Central America also suffers from the problems of neighboring regions. Drugs from South America destined to be sold and consumed in North America often get moved through Central America. Central America is often caught in the middle as more powerful neighboring countries or interests exert pressure or apply demands. These are just some of the reasons why it’s important to know more about the history of Central America because this history is also connected to other histories, particularly the economic and political developments of Europe and countries along the Americas, including the United States. If you want to understand the history of U.S. foreign policy better, study the history of Central America. If you want to understand the effects of colonization of European powers, study Central America.

The purpose of this conclusion is to highlight four intertwined historical themes with present-day manifestations that connect Central America to the world, and vice versa. The following sections, each of which open with quotes from Central American scholars analyzing today’s current situation, examine the present-day legacies of historical events, movements, and trends. We begin with the leadership imprint of Central American caudillo or strong-arm leaders. Second, we examine the centuries-long relationship between the United States and Central America, with an eye toward the long-term effects of U.S. interventionism from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Third, the effervescence of Central American social movements shows how much Central Americans challenge elite exploitation and foreign intervention, confirming the powerful potential of leadership from the margins to effect change today. And finally, we explore Central American migration; in addition to outbound migration in which Central Americans leave the region for other parts of the world, often the United States, this section will also examine migration within the region. The goal of this conclusion is to summarize key themes and open a discussion for continued thought and reflection past the actual pages of this book.

LOCAL CAUDILLISTA MODELS OF LEADERSHIP AND THE AUTHORITARIAN TURN

Power in Central America manifested itself as two forces: political monopoly and bureaucratic arbitrariness.^[1]

Many historians claim that the Spanish model of colonization took advantage of autochthonous or local models of leadership in place before the arrival of colonial representatives, in which Spanish conquistadores respected local leaders if they paid tribute and provided labor. This practice led to a mestizo model of strong-arm leadership after independence informed by self- and class-interests, which, in turn, contributed to tensions between fiercely independent local leaders and the authoritarian treatment of much of the population or anyone who challenged the status quo. Whether during the short-lived attempt to unify Central America under the federal republic or during the early state-building efforts of the individual countries, plans to establish institutions that served the interests of the majority of inhabitants were stymied by caudillo leaders. As described in the introduction to this book, caudillo means a strong-arm leader who has amassed enough wealth to hire mercenaries to protect his interests. Throughout early state building, caudillo-type leaders often had a sphere of influence located in particular cities or areas, which they would defend with local armies. This pattern greatly impeded state development throughout the nineteenth century as manifested by the fighting between Conservatives and Liberals and followed by multiple examples of strong-arm leadership throughout the twentieth century and in some cases into the twenty-first century.

Examples from the early twentieth century include strong-arm leaders such as Anastasio Somoza García a Nicaraguan who created a forty-three-year dynasty in which power passed between family members for a couple of generations, and in El Salvador, members of the Meléndez family dynasty held executive power from 1913–27. “In Guatemala, Rafael Carrera rose to power beginning in 1837, toppled Morazán in 1840, and dominated Guatemala until his death in 1865. Other caudillos followed, most notably Justo Rufino Barrios from 1871 to 1885, Manuel Estrada Cabrera from 1898 to 1920, and Jorge Ubico from 1931 to 1944.”^[2] There was General Tiburcio Carías Andino who ruled Honduras from 1932–49. In these cases, the leaders created armed forces they used to quell dissent and protect their interests and the interests of their cronies. But they also used paramilitary groups to carry out repression and keep order. This strategy included the Camisas Azules (Blue Shirts) in Somoza’s Nicaragua who were apparently modeled on Hitler’s Brown Shirts, or the death squads of repressive governments of the late twentieth century such as that of El Salvador during the civil war (1980–92) in which the Salvadoran Armed forces along with other security forces and the death squads were assigned responsibility for 95 percent of the seventy thousand deaths during the conflict with the guerrilla forces of the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front or FMLN.^[3]

A present-day example of this authoritarian leadership model and the use of threats and repression are typified by former revolutionary Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Ortega has held power in Nicaragua since 2007 and uses the Sandinista Youth and other young and disenfranchised paramilitary groups to supplement the police in silencing the opposition. Another example includes Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele who uses populist, strong-arm techniques to maintain power. For example, he sent the police into the National Assembly (Congress) to force them to approve his hard-on-crime plan in February 2020.^[4] The Economist refers to these examples as “democratic regression” and also describes examples from Guatemala and Honduras. Honduras and Guatemala each have histories of state violence and face grave challenges to democracy as well. Guatemala, on the one hand, continues to face governance and transparency challenges exemplified by the government’s 2019 decision to disband CICIG, the United Nations sponsored-anti-corruption unit. “‘Over the past two years military men, corrupt officials and criminals have only become more powerful,’ says Carmen Rosa de León, who heads the Institute for Sustainable Development, a Guatemalan think-tank.… Drug money has started to seep into the state, too. Ms. de León’s organisation has connected 38 lawmakers to drug-traffickers.”^[5] In Honduras, one of the principal problems is the criminality of the state. Government leaders are connected to the drug trade as well as complicit with private investors and official security forces and paramilitary groups in the intimidation, disappearance, and assassination of activists seeking to bring attention to the potential impacts of mega-development projects or the expansion of infrastructure development for tourism.

IMPACT OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, U.S. CAPITAL, AND TERRITORIAL EXPANSIONISM

Under these new geopolitical coordinates [militarization, securitization, etc.], any alternative social project needs to consider the widening of geographical boundaries. Even though Central America has promise and possibility for many, this won’t happen without keeping in mind that the region is circumscribed by a growing space of control, surveillance, and repression.^[6]

Many of the strong-arm leaders of Central America from the twentieth century benefited from protections and support from the United States. From the expansion of the United States “from sea to shining sea,” the Monroe Doctrine instituted a framework that justified the imposition of U.S. foreign policy and varied U.S. economic interests over political and economic agendas throughout Central America. This combination of paternalism and self-interest led U.S. presidents and private business interests to involve themselves in the running of countries as well as to make major economic investments serving foreign stockholders. These actions were implemented via development and aid packages, diplomacy, military intervention, military assistance, meddling, and economic investment. From William Walker in the mid-nineteenth century to military intervention in the early twentieth century to the structural adjustment policies imposed on the region in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, local elites saw that if they profit-shared with these interests, they would have the capital and military might to quell pushback.

From the Cold War through the end of the twentieth century, U.S. foreign policy was particularly disastrous for the majority of Central Americans as it had a double-pronged economic and political impact on the region. There a re multiple examples of the United States toppling democratically elected leaders, such as Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, and supporting authoritarian strong-arm leaders with U.S. troops and military aid, such as Anastasio Somoza García and his descendants in Nicaragua. Then there were decades of safeguarding U .S. economic interests by using force and diplomacy to overturn agrarian reform laws or repress movements for worker rights across the region. The United Fruit Company received support from the U.S. government to protect their interests across the region, and by “1915, the company owned over a million acres of land in the Caribbean and Central America, including 252,000 acres in Costa Rica, 141,000 acres in Guatemala, 62,000 acres in Honduras, and 193,000 acres in Nicaragua.”^[7] The United States systematically contributed to dependence and weak state institutions across the region.

Today, the United States continues to undermine regional security and integration and more inclusive forms of economic development through foreign policies against drugs and terrorism—which in turn have further militarized the region—as well as through pressures to adopt free-trade agreements, which have contributed to increased poverty, outbound migration, and regional disintegration. This long history of foreign policies, up to the present day, that preference U.S. interests over Central American interests have contributed to the challenges that the region faces. Tensions between Central American countries have been exacerbated by migration flows, often fomented by U.S. foreign policy and military aid. Regional tensions mean that the Central American Court of Justice is unable to resolve border conflicts, many of which have existed between countries back to the nineteenth century, and the challenges to regional economic development which have been hampered by CAFTA, the Central America Free Trade Agreement, which has displaced efforts to generate trade within the region and favored the interests of the United States.^[8] Diplomacy and aid could be deployed very differently, and the United States could play a very different role. “A positive first in U.S. foreign policy toward the region would be to hold deeply corrupt governments truly accountable for their actions. Likewise, a just response to the situation at the border can start by understanding that corruption, inequality, and human rights violations abroad are not accidents but the result of deliberate choices by those in power and the tacit support of their allies.… Lastly, assistance should focus on those most vulnerable to abuse by those in power, including women, unemployed youth, and Indigenous populations.”^[9]

Economic development in the region has seldom had the long-term interests of inclusive local economies in mind; rather it has contributed to an extractive, agro-export model that involved extensive foreign ownership of land and production. This enclave model shaped economic development in Costa Rica, the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast, Honduras, and Guatemala. From the nineteenth century onward, this model was replicated over the next hundred and fifty years with long-term impacts for the region and individual countries. Today, these practices have morphed into extraction-based companies that gain mining concessions from Central American governments to extract minerals and other metals. “The presence of extractive companies from Canada and the United States are a constant in the region, but companies from Europe and China, more and more, are appearing.”^[10]

These policies and investments have created repercussions across the region, particularly in the development of social movements that contested the status quo as well as in international solidarity efforts protesting U.S. interventionism and supporting local popular and revolutionary movements. As early as the 1920s, there were organized anti-imperial and anti-interventionist activists leading protests across the United States demanding the withdrawal of the U.S. Marines from Nicaragua; the Marines supported strong-arm leader Anastasio Somoza García and the Nicaragua National Guard in their fight against General Augusto César Sandino and his guerrilla army.

CENTRAL AMERICAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Emergent movements are radical in a new way because their struggles have the objective of transforming the quotidian realities of people here and today and not necessarily in some distant future.… Emancipation starts today or never.^[11]

From the earliest years of colonization to today, Central America has been the home of a polyphony of movements by disenfranchised and marginalized groups throughout its history. Every epoch has had multiple examples of resistance against colonization, inequality and poverty, and exclusions such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. There are many examples of Indigenous resistance against Spanish and British colonization exemplified by frequent uprisings. During early state-building efforts, there were multiple examples of resistance to elite rule. There was also a lot of what can be called persistence in which Indigenous groups simply moved to remoter and remoter areas to escape mestizo leaders. Throughout the twentieth century there were liberation theologians and Christian-base communities, union organizing efforts, communists and socialists, and feminists, who challenged repression and elite rule, and organized groups in their respective countries to demand change. There were also popular movements and armed guerrilla efforts to overthrow authoritarian governments which, in turn, created new opportunities for protest and social change.

The new revolutionary man or “hombre nuevo revolucionario” was part of the organizing of the 1970s and 1980s, which mobilized workers and farmers along fairly patriarchal and heteronormative lines.^[12] “Born in the crucible of the armed struggle against the forces of oppression, the New Man was a heroic, class-conscious revolutionary willing to sacrifice himself for the liberation of the poor and exploited, whose interests he presumably represented. Given Latin America’s historical subordination to the United States, the New Man was also, inevitably, an unbending anti-imperialist and (inter)nationalist.”^[13] The New Man became less compelling in the twenty-first century for those who asked themselves “what is the point of a revolutionary party if the revolution isn’t possible.”^[14] After the civil wars of the late twentieth century, many former revolutionaries chose jobs in the public sector or civil society organizations. This professional focus on carrying out palliative efforts, however, led to turning away from creating alternative models.^[15] Many young activists became disillusioned with the top-down collective action of the 1970s and 1980s and sought new approaches. This has led to new social movements in the postwar years of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries across the region. Today movements aren’t just concerned with economic and class interests but a variety of social and cultural issues connected to quality of life, subjective life experiences, and quotidian manifestations of power in public and private spheres. “The emphasis today can be found in the actions of civil resistance, generally non-violent and less disruptive.”^[16] Movements today include community organizing efforts, environmental movements, Indigenous and Afro-descendant struggles for ancestral lands and natural resources, and movements for the rights of women, people with nonbinary identities, and gay rights, to mention a few. “These new movements have become places of identity production that resist normalization and challenge totalitarian power and universalizing narratives. This has created a politicization of other areas of life that didn’t used to be considered part of political action.”^[17]

Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant groups have also been active in the twenty-first century demanding inclusion and respect for ancestral lands. After the civil wars, there were a number of international landmark cases that granted Indigenous communities in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua rights to ancestral land. These achievements were the combination of sustained activism by Indigenous communities and interestingly also benefited from conditionalities on neo-liberal international aid packages in which Central American states were required to recognize the land demands of Indigenous groups. Hale raises the questions “will the subjugated knowledge and practices be articulated with the dominant, and neutralised? Or will they occupy the space opened from above while resisting its built-in logic, connect with others, toward ‘transformative’ cultural-political alternatives that still cannot even be fully imagined?” in his analysis of the effects of this type of multiculturalism for the Indigenous Maya of Guatemala.^[18] Today, many of these same Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities in Guatemala and across Central America are challenging extractivist efforts to open mines and build mega-development projects without satisfactory environmental feasibility studies or mitigation plans. In Honduras, the Afro-Indigenous group, the Garifuna, are challenging the land development schemes of national elites and foreign investors. Sadly, though, these activists are subject to repressive measures when protests come up against national interests. Central America remains one of the most dangerous places to be an environmental defender.

OUTBOUND MIGRATION

Central Americans are punished for wanting to work where they weren’t born.^[19]

Histories of colonial and neocolonial interventions, twentieth century internal conflict and civil wars, and twenty-first-century violences contribute to high levels of outbound emigration for some Central American countries. “More violence, more migration” is the tenet that sociologist José Luis Rocha uses to explain how emigration has grown over the past twenty years “spurred by economic reasons, by the political instability that in Honduras deepened after the coup d’état of 2009 and by the multiple violences that took place in [the Northern Triangle]: among others, those led by the powerful transnational gangs called ‘maras,’ the persecution of indigenous and environmental activists, and the hitmen at the service of drug traffickers and those profiting from land grabs for tourism, mining, hydroelectric projects, real estate projects, and [other] speculative [projects].”^[20] Also, immigration policies in receptor countries can create additional problems for Central Americans who may be fleeing political threats or gang violence. For example, U.S. immigration policies informed by cold-war rhetoric made it easier for Nicaraguans fleeing the Sandinista government of the 1980s than political refugees fleeing U.S. supported authoritarian regimes such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.^[21] These cold-war policies have present-day impacts as exemplified by how Hondurans are more likely to be deported and have less access to residency.

Interestingly, not all Central Americans who face deprivation, threat of violence, and poverty in their own countries want to leave for the United States. Nicaragua is an interesting case: emigration is on the rise but not at the levels of the three countries to its north. Recent political violence has increased outbound migration northwards, but the real increase has been from Nicaragua to Costa Rica, taking advantage of the long tradition of south-south, seasonal migration to Costa Rica for participation in agro-export harvests and service work such as domestic service and other jobs in the service sector. “In Nicaragua, for example, many are choosing to go to Costa Rica where the government has a more welcoming policy than the United States practices towards its Central American neighbors. Nicaraguan migration to Costa Rica is a major case of South-to-South migration in Latin America. It takes place in Central America, a region where migration—both intraregional and extraregional—is a structural dimension of everyday life.”^[22] As of 2021, 86 percent of asylum seekers in Costa Rica are Nicaraguan compared to only a tiny share in previous years.^[23] The COVID-19 pandemic has also affected the region, particularly Central Americans and others moving through the region to other countries. Though migration statistics dropped significantly in 2020 due to border closures and public health policies, Central American migration has increased drastically since then.

Central American migration is a complex issue, but political leaders and policy makers in Central America and other countries, especially the United States, must stop shying away from examining the root causes such as “state-sponsored violence, the persecution of human rights defenders and activists, U.S. intervention, the negative effects of neoliberalism and megaprojects, and historical land inequality.”^[24] There are no easy solutions to these interconnected issues that exacerbate the effects of poverty, exclusion, climate change, food insecurity, crime, and corruption in Central America, but a good place to start might be with a close reading of history and critical reflection about how participation, equity, and inclusion can be supported across the region. “The United States does not need harsh immigration laws that criminalize Indigenous peoples, migrants, and asylum seekers. Rather, there needs to be serious attention to local and community-led initiatives that seek to tackle the historical and structural inequalities . . . [that] have caused centuries of territorial dispossession.”^[25]