1 Imagining Central America

INTRODUCTION

The Central American isthmus—the land bridge that connects North America to South America—is comprised of seven countries: Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Mountain ranges run north-south along the spine of the isthmus, dividing the region into narrow Pacific plains along the western coast, the highland interior, and wider Caribbean coastal plains to the east, all of which have informed the locations and movements of cultures, population centers, infrastructure, and sites for economic development and political strongholds throughout centuries. The geography of the region has played a significant role in how the region as a whole and each country have evolved through time, particularly how the physical and economic isolation of parts of the region contributed to difficulty unifying the region as a federation in the early nineteenth century.^[2] The barriers to traveling from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean coast, for example, meant that often there was little communication between the coasts, which, in turn, influenced the settlements and political expansion of Indigenous peoples in pre-Columbian times, the Spanish colonization of the Pacific coastal areas and highlands, British extractivism on the Caribbean coast, the strategic position of the region for European and United States interests regarding agro-exports and transcontinental canal plans in the late nineteenth century, and the eventual construction of a canal across Panama in the early twentieth century.

Early in the colonial period, Central America was integrated into the world economy and enjoyed “a certain amount of free commerce and intercolonial trade.”^[3] For example, woven textiles and thread made in the western highlands of Guatemala were sold around the world.^[4] Early Spanish colonization focused on extraction of silver and gold as well as establishing the encomienda system in which Indigenous farmers provided goods and money—often referred to as tribute—and forced labor for export crops such as indigo, cacao, cotton, cattle raising, and sheep farming for wool. During the colonial period, Indigenous labor was supplemented by bringing in African labor in the form of enslaved and free people. Early British colonialists on the Caribbean coast also brought in enslaved Africans where the focus was on extraction, such as logging. This history of extraction has present-day manifestations along with active environmental movements in all countries. Today “the principal themes of the political ecology of the region are . . . extraction of minerals; hydroelectric energy; forestry plantations and extraction of biomass; infrastructure; transnational companies; cross-border disputes; anti-Indigenous racism . . . [and] the many assassinations of activists.”^[5] Though rich in natural resources, many parts of Central America, including the Caribbean coast, have suffered the environmental impacts of extractivism and mega-development projects. Again, Central America, in general, and the Caribbean coast, in particular, have always been vulnerable to destructive hurricanes from the east, and more and more, the effects of climate change are creating harmful effects and magnifying the impact of natural disasters. Climate change has exacerbated pressures on Indigenous groups as well: for example, the Kuna in Panama have had to leave their ancestral lands due to climate change.^[6]

The entire region is volcanic with many active volcanoes today. Frequent seismic events have also affected the region’s infrastructure and politics. For example, the 1773 earthquake in present-day Antigua, Guatemala, the original capital of the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala’s audiencia or high court, forced authorities to abandon the city and build New Guatemala City in the present-day location of the capital twenty-five miles to the east. The 1972 earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua, and the 1986 earthquake in San Salvador, El Salvador, revealed so much government corruption and so exacerbated existing inequalities that social movements and revolutionary groups were emboldened. These natural disasters from the 1970s and 1980s “occurred within a brief period and precipitated social disasters by aggravating the suffering of the poorer sectors.”^[7] (See Appendix 1: History of Natural Disasters in Central America.)

For many—including eminent historians and other commentators—Central America is often depicted without Belize and Panama. Proponents of this narrative say that because Panama was originally part of the Republic of Gran Colombia in South America when the United Provinces of Central American declared independence from Spain (and then Mexico) in the early 1800s, it should not be considered part of Central America. Yet, Panama has played a vitalizing role in the Central American economy for over a hundred years and shares many geographical, cultural, and political traits with the rest of the region. On the other hand, Belize is a country that has been simultaneously identified with the Caribbean and claimed by Guatemala. Belize was colonized primarily by the British, and today, the official language is still English. Yet, like all the other Central American countries, the population of Belize includes mestizos and Indigenous people, though Belize is 32 percent Afro-descendant.

Readers may also have heard about the troubled “northern triangle,” a subregion of Central America that includes Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Excluding Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, the northern triangle narrative of Central America focuses on the rise of violence, drug trafficking, and weak governance in these three countries. Limiting the imaginary of Central America to three countries is problematic because it reifies a version of the region as full of problems for which there are deep historical explanations, including international meddling going back centuries. Again, these challenges are not unique to these three countries, and there are many local civil society, private sector, and public sector efforts to address these challenges. There’s another version of Central America that includes Chiapas, the southernmost state of present-day Mexico, and does not include Panama; this is often the Central America that historians of the early colonial period use because this was the area that comprised the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala.^[8] Though variations regarding forms of governance, language, cultural diversity, and natural resources exist between and across the seven countries, this region shares geographies, borders, histories, peoples, and trade relations. It is also important to keep in mind how the long history of foreign policies of colonial and neocolonial powers—from Spain and Great Britain to the United States—have had profound impacts on each of the seven countries. Indeed, the politics and economies of all the Central American countries are very much affected by global forces both in historical and present-day perspective.

In this short history, we propose a narrative or “imaginary” of the isthmus as a region that differentiates the seven countries from each other as well as pointing to the unifying features of Central America as a whole. Instead of a blurry region often appended to Mexico in the minds of uninformed politicians and media pundits, our goal is to help readers more clearly envision a region comprised of different countries: from Guatemala and Belize—who share a border with Mexico to the north—to El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica to the south, and Panama, which shares a border with Colombia. Given the global interconnections between the region and other countries as well as the interstate connections between the region’s countries, we feel that a short, synthetic book will help students, educators, policymakers, journalists, and global citizens alike to develop a more nuanced mental map of the region, including an understanding of its major historical periods, peoples, and institutions. Through reading about the opportunities and challenges that confront the region and the reasons why Central America appears in the global news so often, readers will learn about a vital region of the world, and thus, be more informed and better able to advocate for diplomatic and development policies that support participation, inclusion, democracy building, good governance, and economic development across the region. In recounting the history of the United States and Central America, the historian Aviva Chomsky warns that “If we erase important parts of our own and Central American countries’ histories, we can believe that they are simply, inherently, ‘shit-hole countries’ as President Trump suggested in early 2018.”^[9] Given the charged political histories of the region as well as colonial and neocolonial interventions with present-day impacts, this book provides a succinct analysis for readers with limited time or country-specific interests. This book is purposely short. Abundant academic scholarship exists about the region that provides extensive analysis for the historical epochs of the region and the countries that comprise it. For this reason, each chapter includes compelling quotes from many of these scholars and a list of recommended readings so that the interested reader can easily identify additional materials that they might like to peruse.

In this introductory chapter, we endeavor to build a regional context so that readers can familiarize themselves with the key themes, trends, and concepts used to analyze the region. We also summarize important regional events and movements in historical perspective, such as peoples and population movements; political elites and the contestation of social movements; and the impacts of foreign powers on the region so that readers can better understand how these factors manifest in the individual countries. In this first chapter, we’ll discuss the original peoples of the region, and key events such as the conquest and European colonization of the region, the nineteenth century decolonization movement, the emergence of tensions between early political leaders, early modern statehood, the political and social movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the effects of colonial and neocolonial powers on the region past and present. Central America’s history is both deeply grounded in models of strong local leadership and yet greatly influenced by North American and European countries.

RACE AND ETHNICITY AND A HISTORY OF COLONIZATION

Prior to the arrival of Columbus, Central America had a large Indigenous population comprised of multiple Indigenous cultures, including Mesoamerican groups and circum-Caribbean groups. These original peoples included the Mayas, Aztecs, Pipils, and Lencas, among others—and thriving economies, including regional trade. Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean coast of Honduras and then travelled southward to Nicaragua and Costa Rica in the early sixteenth century.^[10] At that moment, it is estimated that there was a population of 5.6 million people spread from what is present-day Chiapas in southern Mexico to Panama.^[11] “The Mayas had been living in the region for millennia and had been producing a substantial surplus to maintain an elite. After the conquest, Spaniards became the new elite, but the colonists were not so unintelligent as to wreck the tribute-producing society that had been and continued to be the basis of civilization in America.”^[12] The Spanish conquest of Central America “proceeded most briskly in highland areas and along the Pacific littoral.… Conversely, conquest was protracted in lowland areas and Atlantic watershed zones, where people lived less sedentary . . . lives.”^[13] The logic of Spanish colonization was initially informed by goals of extracting precious metals and claiming land for the Spanish crown with the expectation that local inhabitants would pay tribute and provide labor. This meant that Spain did recognize some of the lands held by Indigenous communities; these lands, “communal in character, were ceded to the indigenous peoples by Spanish conquerors in recognition of the ancient laws in place before the Conquest.”^[14] This is an aspect of Spanish colonization that is different than other forms of European colonization and is something that stayed in place until liberal reforms in the early nineteenth century. This was not benevolence on the part of Spaniards, rather the way they could extract tribute—or taxes—and compulsory labor from local people. Conversion to Catholicism also played a significant role in the subjugation of Indigenous peoples to colonial power.^[15] As Santos Zetino, a Salvadoran Indigenous activist, recounts, “Supposedly, we were saved when we were baptized and our sins were pardoned, but now we know that this was a lie. Christianity was the sword that the Spaniards used to subdue us.”^[16] The original peoples of Central America were subject to forced conversion to Christianity, dispossession, and enslavement, but the most lethal effect of the Spanish conquest was illness. “The decline of Native American populations was rapid and severe, probably the greatest demographic disaster ever. Old World diseases were the primary killer.”^[17] It is calculated that in most of the Americas, including Central America, Indigenous populations had declined by 89 percent by 1650, a mere 150 years later.^[18] In Central America, “the indigenous population shrank from almost 6 million in 1500 to less than 300,000 in 1680.”^[19] Indeed, Indigenous populations across Latin America did not recover from the conquest: “. . . by the beginning of the nineteenth century Indians [sic] accounted for only 37 percent of Latin America’s total population of 21 million.”^[20]

In present times, however, there remain many Indigenous communities across the region, demonstrating persistence and resistance after centuries of ill treatment. These communities have often been successful in gaining legal recognition of their ancestral lands. Their activism has manifested in broader environmental and human rights demands as well. Indigenous Maya communities in Guatemala, for example, played an important role in the civil war (1960–1996) and movements for greater Indigenous rights in Guatemala coincided with global movements for inclusion as well. “By 1980, the guerrilla groups in Guatemala amounted to more than 8,000 men and women and were supported by a noncombatant civilian base of some 250,000 in the indigenous, overpopulated areas of the central and northwest Highlands. The indigenous mobilization constituted the most significant event of the crisis because it represented both ethnic and national demands and it embodied the greatest indigenous revolt since the Conquest.”^[21] Indeed, 40 percent of Guatemala is Indigenous Maya, comprised of 22 different groups with their respective languages. In most countries of Central America, there are numerous Indigenous groups, many of whom have achieved some level of autonomy and control over (some) of their ancestral lands. Along the Caribbean coast of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna number over two hundred thousand, most of them in Honduras.

Though there is debate among historians about the precise numbers of the Indigenous population of Central America in 1502, the Spanish trafficked large numbers of Africans to increase the local workforce as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Subsequently, the African diaspora in Central America has left a significant imprint on the region. Throughout the seventeenth century in the capital of Guatemala and every major city of Nicaragua, for example, free and enslaved people from Africa and of African descent outnumbered other groups, including Spaniards and Indigenous people.^[23] “Yet unlike in many other regions of the African diaspora, these histories were not simply whitewashed, but so often were displaced or denied” in Central America.^[24] This phenomenon of exclusion and erasure has multiple causes. First, modern assimilationist narratives of mestizaje^[25] lauded the mixing of European people with other inhabitants of the region into one people, thereby promoting mestizo identity and rendering invisible people of African descent and Indigenous peoples across the region. Second, anti-Black racism as manifest in different epochs and accompanying discriminatory laws and frameworks pushed African descendant communities to the margins. “Central America reveals the importance of place in conceptualizing blackness and diaspora” given that by the late nineteenth century, many Afro-descendant communities on the Caribbean coast of Central America lived in semi-autonomous zones or in U.S. or British enclaves and were treated as if they didn’t exist by political leaders in the actual countries where they lived.^[26]

When nation states began to “incorporate” these communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nationalist narratives were used to impose and subsume all ethnic groups into one mestizo identity. Given the distant locations many of these communities occupied vis-à-vis Central American capitals, they remained outside dominant narratives of belonging and citizenship. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British West Indian migrants from Caribbean countries were encouraged to come and work in the region on major construction projects, such as the Panama Canal and railroad construction across the isthmus, and to work for logging and fruit export companies. Even though these laborers had been invited, there were many times when anti-Black discrimination manifested in racist, exclusionary laws across the region. Over the years, many mixed-race people of African descent were incorporated into mestizo or Indigenous identities, which, in turn, corroborates why a more nuanced version of “mixedness” and the Blackness of Central America isn’t as well-known as it should be given both the historical record and the contributions of Afro-descendant communities today.^[27]

European migration also had an impact on the region, though less is known about the actual numbers of Europeans immigrating to the region during the conquest and early colonial period. One way that the Spanish crown compensated conquistadors for their efforts and enticed them to stay “was the encomienda, a grant of Indians who were required to provide tribute to the Spaniard in the form of labor and goods.”^[28] Newson explains that “during the sixteenth century, between 250,000 and 300,000 Spaniards migrated to Spanish America, maybe half of them illegally” but there are few studies that track immigration numbers from Europe to individual Latin American countries, including Central America.^[29] The historical record does indicate that most of this early migration was male; rape and forced unions with Indigenous and Afro-descendant women occurred across the region.^[30] The Spaniards were not the only colonizers and immigrants. The British colonized much of what is present-day Belize and the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. The British model of colonization was less focused on tribute and more focused on settler colonialism: “. . . rather than ruling over the people they colonized—like the Spanish in Mexico or Peru . . . settler colonial projects were based on eliminating the people who were there and replacing them with a white, European population.”^[31] Also, throughout much of the nineteenth century, there were sustained immigration flows from German-speaking Central Europe to Guatemala^[32] as well as German capital which benefited from the 1896 overproduction crisis.^[33] In 1888, there were “6,856 foreigners [in Costa Rica], the majority of whom were Europeans tied to coffee’s trade and production,” whereas “the importance of foreign hacendados was less in El Salvador and Nicaragua.”^[34] In Central American countries, governments often offered benefits to Europeans as an incentive to come to the region, propagated by the racist idea that “ingenuity and hard work would come from Europe.”^[35]

The effects of the Spanish conquest and colonial expansion led to the emergence of a Christian mixed race or mestizo^[36] population, the descendants of unions between Europeans, Indigenous people, and Afro-descendant people. This mixing or mestizaje became a nationalistic discourse used throughout the region to encourage the assimilation of all groups into one and make invisible Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. “And it has been effectively used to promote national amnesia about or to salve the national conscience in what concerns the dismal past and still colonized condition of most indigenous peoples of Latin America.”^[37] Mestizaje also has gender and class overtones. To justify the subjugation of Indigenous people, for example, mestizo leaders would describe them as timid and give them feminine traits while simultaneously discussing the type of mothers that Indigenous women should be, which, in turn, supported patriarchal control of Indigenous fathers over daughters.^[38] Some members of this hybrid mestizo group with close ties to Europeans came to hold power, and upon independence in the early 1800s, an emergent European-descendant/mestizo elite was poised to claim power over poor mestizos, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendant communities. Called different names in different countries—“the fourteen families” in El Salvador or los Criollos in Guatemala—elite families, often with direct connections to Europe, occupied the leadership positions and claimed the wealth of the European colonizers in the United Provinces of Central America beginning with the creation of the federation in the early 1800s. “Power in Central America manifested itself as two forces: political monopoly and bureaucratic arbitrariness. First, elite rule was powerfully rooted in the ownership of land, in agricultural production, and in foreign commitments. The second force, linked to the first . . . [was how] the elite radically separated political ideals and concrete practice, bifurcating the legal formality of the liberal legal code and its concrete contents and daily application.”^[39] These local elites were not gentle leaders, rather they claimed their wealth to the exclusion of other groups, often using local paramilitary violence to sustain their wealth. “The history of Latin America [including Central America] is endowed abundantly with great men—caudillos—who have led their nations to greater achievement or ruin, or simply thrived on . . . charisma and bold leadership to build powerful political machines.”^[40] This pattern of caudillo or “strong-arm” leadership created conflict and protest across the centuries. “Conflict between a privileged elite on the one hand and an oppressed peasantry on the other dates from the Spanish Conquest. Calculated terror has been an established method of control of the rural population for five centuries. Resentful peasants have often responded violently individually, and sometimes touched off widespread revolution and civil war.”^[41]

ELITE POLITICS: CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS

Definitively, the first Central American Liberals came up against colonial structures which they tried to change in their attempts to produce good governments and soon they saw that the future they imagined depended not just on good wishes but on creating States based on extreme inequality. Conservative groups saw bad government in the liberal ideas and therefore dreamed and insisted on a return to the colonial order, managing to convince the popular masses to support their efforts.^[42]

Historian Víctor Acuña Ortega argues that early independence leaders were more compelled by self-interest, kinship, and personal loyalties rather than political ideals.^[43] As a result, there was no abrupt change with the advent of independence; what took place was a confirmation of the former regime and the belief that the people—popular masses—were not mature enough to govern^[44] or to participate democratically, and that Indigenous and Afro-descendant people were only fit to serve as exploitable labor.^[45]

In 1821, Central America declared independence from Spain, first forming part of an independent Mexico until 1823, at which time Chiapas stayed with Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica formed the United Provinces of Central America. Belize remained a contested territory, simultaneously claimed by the British and Guatemala. Costa Rica, under Spanish colonialism, was the furthest way from the colonial capital in Guatemala, making it “the poorest province,” which contributed to its homogenous social structure and space to make different decisions about the role and type of government.^[46] At this time, Panama formed part of Colombia to the south.

The loose federation of the United Provinces of Central America split apart in 1840. From the beginning, efforts to organize political life were frustrated, leading to civil war and anarchy.^[47] Challenges emerged immediately when it came to building a national identity for the region that would bring together these different cities and sub-regions: how “to reconcile or choose between municipal and national sovereignty?”^[48] First, “strong provincial loyalties” and mestizo, caudillo leadership across the region did not easily lend themselves to compromise and collaboration, both of which would have been needed to sustain the federation.^[49] Secondly, “independence . . . began with political parties which had long-standing economic differences struggling for control”^[50] as exemplified by “cleavages and tensions”^[51] between elites. “Conservative” political tendencies celebrated local elite Spanish interests, the connection with Spain, and the role of the Catholic Church; mestizo “liberal” goals focused on modernizing the economy and limiting Church power. “The strongholds of partisan Liberalism of the time—El Salvador and Nicaragua (more accurately San Salvador and Leon)—were able to resist Guatemalan centralism from the days of the federation forward.”^[52] Though both sides extolled political ideals about conservative traditions or liberal enlightenment ideas, respectively, neither side particularly sought the participation of the poor mestizo or Indigenous masses; rather this was about tensions between the European-descendant aristocracy and an emergent business class.

Though the short-lived federation split into separate countries in 1840, national elites—organized into the two main political parties mentioned above called the Conservatives and the Liberals—continued to perpetuate economic policies and political formations whose primary objective was to protect elite mestizo interests at the expense of the majorities. Though these parties were mainly comprised of elites, they had different approaches to governance and planning. The ideologies of each party informed national politics across the region from early statehood well into the twentieth century. We will unpack their differences here to facilitate understanding regional and country-by-country politics. “These parties—Conservative and Liberal—were factions of a landholding and bureaucratic elite, but they reflected fundamentally different perceptions on how best to develop their country” with a Conservative commitment to maintaining the colonial status quo of the Catholic landed aristocracy and Liberals acting as advocates for modernization and new forms of economic development.^[53] “The Conservatives pleaded for moderation, order, and the stability of traditional, familiar institutions,” such as respect for the Catholic Church hierarchy, a celebration of Spanish culture, and a status quo that respected small Indigenous land holdings, interestingly, because of the need for their continued tribute and labor to help farm the big estates.^[54] The Liberals, on the other hand, “sought to make Central America a modern, progressive state, casting off the burden of Iberian heritage, and to absorb republican innovations from France, England, and the United States.”^[55] Whereas the Conservatives tended to promote the interests of the landed aristocracy and their agricultural production, the Liberals wanted to restrict the power of the Catholic Church, abolish slavery, promote economic development by lowering taxes on the private sector, modernize the public sector, expand the legal system, offer free education, and commit the government to building infrastructure. Though Conservatives were aligned with protecting the interests of landed elites, the Liberals were not as radical as they tried to appear when considered in historical perspective. “Not only did the Liberals seek political power without radical social or economic change . . . but also they did so from a profoundly illiberal and implicitly racist position.”^[56]

Even after the dissolution of the United Provinces of Central America, the tensions between Liberals and Conservatives continued until the early twentieth century. Though there had been clear ideological divisions between the two groups in the early 1800s—informed by tensions between Spanish-descendant Conservative leaders who yearned for the colonial status quo and new emergent Liberal leaders familiar with Enlightenment philosophies from Europe—these differences tended to blur as time went by, creating polarized models of strong-arm leadership with ever-changing ideological positions:

Beyond the thorny questions of ideology Liberals faced other equally serious problems. Leaders switched sides with a facility explainable only on the basis of crass calculations of personal advantage. Worse yet, the Conservatives were not immune to the Liberal arguments in favor of export promotion and private ownership of land. Thus, the same Conservatives who defeated the Liberals in the 1840s, after more than a decade of severe economic difficulties, stood to benefit directly when conditions improved after midcentury. Indeed, they remained in power much longer than they might have had they been, in fact, opposed to the Liberals’ most basic economic policies.^[57]

Into the twentieth century, “the norm was for elites to fight each other viciously but to close ranks in suppressing any and all lower-class movements that threatened to overturn this predominantly intra class or intraoligarchic political contest of Liberals versus Conservatives.”^[58] In historical perspective, it is easy to see that the policies of these two parties were informed greatly by the economic interests of their proponents, which often meant the continued subjugation of people on the margins. And the legacy for present-day Central America is the persistence of what Acuña Ortega calls “a political culture based on despotism, militarism, alienation, and deference.”^[59]

Then and today, most Central American countries have very high levels of income inequality and poverty due to these early political priorities. Costa Rica and Panama present different paths taken: Costa Rica disbanded its army in 1949 and chose to invest heavily in social services such as potable water, education, and healthcare, and today enjoys a much higher standard of living than its neighbors to the north. Panama also has a high standard of living due to multiple factors: income from the Panama Canal as well as the decision to develop a strong banking system and international financial services sector.

NEOCOLONIALISM AND TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Export crops cultivated under colonialism, such as indigo and cochineal which served the European textile industry, morphed into agro-exports, such as coffee and bananas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that sustained elites—tying them to foreign interests as well—and committing the region to a model of economic development that did not spread wealth or social welfare benefits around. In fact, this economic model often meant times of boom and bust when unstable commodity prices plummeted, or other countries moved into production. “Central American coffee production reached its maximum output in the 1880s, producing almost 14 percent of the world coffee yield.”^[60] But, by the 1920s, the coffee elites “had depleted the possibilities of coffee’s development without apparent worry about or knowledge of such limitations.”^[61] The banana sector didn’t fare well either and during times of economic crisis, foreign firms began to buy up huge extensions of land from national growers, leading Central American historian, Edelberto Torres-Rivas, to claim that by the end of the nineteenth century, “foreign interests controlled the Honduran economy.”^[62]

The region has been subject to the economic pressures and policies of outside powers during pre-Columbian times, throughout colonization, and since independence. A history of incursions of Indigenous peoples from Mexico into Guatemala and further south was leveraged by the Spaniards who used Mexican Indigenous groups to help quell resistance in early colonization efforts. As decolonization moved across Latin America in the early nineteenth century, the role of the United States began to increase given its own emergent territorial interests. Since the 1800s, the role of the United States has had strong reverberations for the region and individual countries. Neocolonialism describes how countries—often in the global north, such as the United States—impose their political agendas, economic interests, and territorial plans of expansion on other countries near and far. Neocolonialism can include the burden of disadvantageous trade agreements; it also encompasses the imposition of foreign economic interests, aid conditionalities and policies, and military aid on countries. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, William Walker, a U.S. mercenary, declared himself president of Nicaragua and then tried to take power in Honduras and Costa Rica. Ultimately, he was captured, tried, found guilty, and executed in Honduras. But U.S. foreign policy—as well as Great Britain, but to a lesser extent—has informed much of Central American economics and politics in one form or another throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into the twenty-first century. Many examples exist of the deleterious effects of these policies for different Central American countries, and these are explored in greater detail in the country chapters. U.S. foreign policy has been justified through official narratives of social progress, economic development, the cold war fight against communism, and often codified in laws and legal frameworks, such as the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary, and other strategies such as Dollar Diplomacy under President Taft and the Alliance for Progress under President Kennedy. “At the time Monroe announced the doctrine, the United States occupied only the eastern seaboard of North America. His [1823] statement made it clear that the new country claimed sole rights to colonize the rest of the continent. And the new country immediately set about doing so.”^[63]

The United States has directly occupied countries with armed troops at many different points; Nicaragua is one such example. The United States propped up elite rulers in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the Cold War, the United States ousted leaders perceived as being soft on communism, as in the U.S.-led and financed coup d’état against President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954—which created the conditions for over 30 years of civil war—or the 1989 invasion of Panama to oust President Noriega because he was not aligned with U.S. interests. The United States also armed and trained repressive government security forces (armies, police, paramilitaries, etc.) across the region throughout the twentieth century. The United States used international aid, military aid, and diplomacy to influence Central American politics towards U.S. anticommunist political goals, and the United States and international financial intermediaries have also imposed economic policies, such as neoliberal structural adjustment and stabilization policies in the late twentieth century onward, which included devaluing local currencies, reducing basic food subsidies, and the deregulation of national economies.^[64] To be eligible for bilateral loans and aid, these neoliberal policies require Central American states to meet such conditionalities as the privatization of state-owned businesses, lowering social spending, and cutting social welfare programming. These policies, in turn, have increased poverty and inequality across the region from the 1980s onwards. Explored in greater detail in each country chapter, many scholars agree that U.S. foreign policy has had a powerful impact on Central America, which, in turn, has fomented Central American outbound emigration. Indeed, it is not infrequent to hear that “U.S. foreign policy appears to have been more effective in generating refugees than U.S. immigration and refugee policies have been in preventing their entry.”^[65]

Remarkably, even with foreign involvement and powerful, local elites, Central America has a long history of activism and social movements, including generally non-violent civil society movements as well as armed, revolutionary groups, which have organized (and fought) for change as exemplified by socialist and communist organizing in the early twentieth century, popular organizing for inclusion and democratic political processes in the mid-twentieth century, and armed revolutions throughout the twentieth century. Often the most extractivist agro-exports created opposition within their own industries, such as banana workers in Honduras and Nicaragua in the early twentieth century seeking to institute a ten-hour workday instead of a fourteen-hour workday and other basic rights. El Salvador’s campesino rebellion in the 1930s also had reverberations through the region as the Salvadoran government carried out a massacre of thirty thousand farmers, Indigenous people, and workers to put down a popular uprising.^[66] Many of the leaders and activists in these movements have come from marginalized groups such as Indigenous peoples, peasant communities, Afro-descendant groups, women, union organizers, and other disenfranchised or excluded groups. Their platforms have included basic worker rights, protests against authoritarianism, and demands for the inclusion of women, Afro-descendant communities, Indigenous groups, and more recently on behalf of gender and sexual minorities. Environmental groups, often in conjunction with campesino and Indigenous groups, have protested the land grabs and extractivist practices of foreign companies and local elites such as large-scale monocropping (e.g., sugar, coffee, and African palm) and mining (e.g., gold, silver, and other minerals), past to present.^[67]

Tied to protest and the status quo, religion has also played a regional role in culture, politics, and economics. During the colonial period, people were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism as part of the colonial order, but over the centuries this has evolved in interesting ways. During the revolutionary period of the late twentieth century, for example, many Roman Catholic priests, nuns, and lay people, following the tenets of the Second Vatican Council that called for increased solidarity with the poor and disenfranchised, embraced the values and praxis of liberation theology. Liberation theology is a movement within Christianity that posits that the Kingdom of God should be built on earth and not treated as something to be put off until the afterlife. This translated into prioritizing and addressing the social conditions and political exclusions of the poor in Central America. Many Catholic Church leaders, including church leaders, priests, nuns, and lay leaders, began to organize and demand social welfare initiatives, political participation, and inclusive economic policies with and on behalf of the poor majorities. This led repressive governments and paramilitary death squads to respond harshly, including the 1979 assassination of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, the 1998 assassination of Bishop Gerardi in Guatemala, and present-day government persecution of the Catholic Church for demanding a return to democracy and rule of law in Nicaragua, for example. Other religions have also proliferated in Central America. In fact, today, almost 20 percent of Latin America—with much higher percentages in Central America—self-identify with Protestantism, following Evangelical and Pentecostal faiths.^[68]

CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRATION

In response to poverty, conflict, and the deadly synergy of climate change and natural disasters, there have been Central American population flows within individual countries (rural to urban shifts), within Central America itself (seeking refuge or economic opportunities in neighboring countries), northwards toward Mexico and the United States, and even to Europe during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.^[69] In the early twentieth century, there was significant migration within Central American countries (and from the West Indies in the Caribbean to Central America) as workers migrated to banana enclaves throughout Central America as well as to Panama for the construction of the canal.^[70] Another example is the flow of service sector workers from Nicaragua to Costa Rica over the past couple of decades. Central American migration to the United States began to grow in the 1980s in response to armed conflicts in the region, which the U.S. government fomented with military assistance to governments and armed groups, often supporting those with bad human rights records. “By the end of the 1980s, around 3 million Central Americans had fled from their countries of origin.”^[71] During the civil wars from the 1970s into the 1990s, a steady flow of Guatemalans and Salvadorans to the United States grew into a mass exodus, but for Honduras, the growth in emigration has been more gradual.^[72] According to the Migration Policy Institute, “Immigrants from the Northern Triangle [Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras] comprised 86 percent of the Central Americans in the United States. In 2017, Central American immigrants represented 8 percent of the United States’ 44.5 million immigrants.”^[73] According to sociologist José Luis Rocha, whose extensive scholarship about Central American migrations traces the complex drivers of migration, “The latest data available in the U. S. Census Bureau [2019] indicate that the United States is home to 257,343 people born in Nicaragua, 745,838 born in Honduras, 1,111,495 born in Guatemala and 1,412,101 born in El Salvador. To this population must be added their descendents, second and third generation migrants, to total 429,501 Nicaraguans, 1,083,540 Hondurans, 1,683,093 Guatemalans and 2,311,574 Salvadorans by origin. This migration has been fed by new generations of increasing size, the balance of which is reflected in these figures.”^[74] Today, most Central Americans in the United States—85 percent of whom have come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras^[75]—live in Los Angeles, with substantial numbers in San Francisco; Texas (especially Houston); Washington, D.C.; New York City; Chicago; New Orleans; and Miami.^[76]

Recently, there has been an increase in the number of unaccompanied children and young people traveling from Central America northwards, due to increasing gang violence, especially in the countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. In a nominal attempt to do something about this, President Obama initiated the Central American Minors Refugee Parole Program “allowing a small number of youth to apply for asylum within their own countries.”^[79] However, under President Trump and his “Border War,” the situation only grew more dire as children were separated from their families and sent alone to Office of the Refugee Resettlement camps.^[80] The New York Times broke the story about this in April 2018.

CENTRAL AMERICA TODAY

The combination of a strategic geographic location in the Western hemisphere, the politically conservative and repressive nature of local elites, and the resistance of oppressed and marginalized groups greatly inform the history of the region. The activism and vibrancy of these social movements has had multiple ramifications, including pressure to end repression, to adopt policies and laws promoting greater inclusion, and to institute environmental safeguards. In his analysis about development and rule of law, Kevin Casas-Zamora writes, “Central America has done many important things, none more so than ending the civil wars. That, however, was the easy part. Ending the civil wars required the will and the courage to sit down and negotiate a settlement. Building more equitable societies, solid democratic institutions, and dynamic economies requires the same attributes over a very long time span. The end of the wars and the democratic transitions in Central America threw a lifeline to the region, but today that lifeline is at risk of being submerged.”^[81] Presently, Central America faces a complex and interrelated set of opportunities and challenges. The opportunities include increased access to education for most of the region, sustained slow but steady economic growth, and a vibrant civil society, comprised of non-governmental organizations, citizen and community groups, and other special interest groups. Yet sometimes these achievements are not enough to galvanize action given the postconflict challenges that many countries face.^[82] The challenges include high levels of poverty, exclusion, and violence due to the civil war era of the late twentieth century; the gang and drug violence of the early twenty-first century; a steady exodus of people from the region seeking better living conditions (see Tables 1.2 and 1.3); and corruption and weak rule of law in some of the countries (see Tables 1.4–1.6).

CONCLUSION

This book started as a conversation between the Seattle International Foundation and Seattle University’s Central America Initiative. Bill Clapp, one of the founders of the Seattle International Foundation, approached Serena with the idea of a research project that would summarize key events in Central American history to share with policymakers in Washington, D.C. Serena and Isabeau piloted the project with a short history of Nicaragua, which in turn led to this book project. The purpose of this set of histories is to provide our readers with a short and accessible history of a region that often appears in the news; it is our hope that this book and its open access versions will help students, educators, policymakers, and global citizens better understand this important yet frequently misunderstood region. In the chapters that follow, we explore the paths taken by each Central American country in a systematic fashion moving from pre-Columbian times to the twenty-first century. Each country chapter is divided into parts: opening with a map and historical timeline, systematically touching on each historical period, and concluding with a list of recommended readings. All references cited can be found in the bibliography at the end of the book. Chapter Nine, the final chapter, explores present-day manifestations of historical themes and topics that are transversal to the region, connecting people and groups across borders, to help the reader better imagine a region and not just a collection of individual countries. This final chapter engages the following cross-cutting themes: caudillo leadership models, impacts of U.S. foreign policy, activism and social movements, and migration.

We authors each have deep roots—personal and professional—in the region; however, to be clear, we are not historians. Rather, we are engaged scholars committed to raising the level of general knowledge about Central America and promoting increased understanding across difference, respectful and responsive diplomacy, international aid that targets Central American priorities, and more inclusive economic development. When we first drafted this manuscript, we were professor and research assistant, now we’re friends and collaborators. Throughout the research and book writing process, we have remained committed to a horizontal collaboration as we moved key documents back and forth for analysis and co-authored the chapters. Serena Cosgrove (she/her) is a scholar of Central America from the United States who moved to the region in the mid-1980s and lived there until 1993, monitoring human rights during the conflicts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. She has returned multiple times a year since then for research, advocacy, applied work, and kinship connections. Isabeau J. Belisle Dempsey (they/them) is half-Belizean and was raised in the United States. As an undergraduate at Seattle University where Serena teaches, Isabeau studied International Studies and Spanish and traveled to Central America. Intergenerational and interdisciplinary, our approach for this book has leveraged our academic interest and experience in Central America, and our personal and kin connections to the region. We have consulted a wide range of academic and primary sources in English and Spanish by a global set of Central Americanist researchers as well as Central American scholars themselves; we read many historical documents and records and analyzed statistics to present as nuanced an interpretation as possible of the region. We dedicate this book to the persistence of Central Americans committed to increased autonomy and inclusion across the region.