The dark legacy of US intervention in Guatemala

[Judi Lynn]

FILE – In this June 16, 2004 file photo, a couple walks by a mural in downtown Guatemala City, on the 50th anniversary of a CIA-backed military intervention in 1954 that ousted leftist President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Four years later, a military insurrection gave way to what later became a guerrilla movement that for 36 years tried to overthrow the military regimes that ruled Guatemala until well into the 80’s. (AP photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)
By SUZANNE SINGER |

PUBLISHED: February 15, 2020 at 8:33 p.m. | UPDATED: February 15, 2020 at 8:33 p.m.

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I was in Guatemala learning about the Guatemalan civil war and the “Silent Holocaust,” the killing and disappearance of 200,000 Guatemalans, mostly Mayan civilians, the displacement of 1.5 million and the destruction of over 600 indigenous villages. These were the result of the Guatemalan military’s scorched-earth policy during 36 years of civil war. And although a peace treaty was signed in 1996, justice has still not been served, as nearly all those guilty of these crimes against humanity have gone unpunished.

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Aside from feeling compassion for the suffering of any human being, why should anyone in the Inland Empire care about this faraway land? Don’t we have enough problems here in the U.S.? The answer is simple: We are deeply implicated in the Guatemalan situation. In the 1950s, that country’s president, Jacobo Arbenz, tried to create a fairer society by giving indigenous Guatemalans access to their ancestors’ lands. The United Fruit Company, whose land was at stake, enlisted the State Department and the CIA to back a coup that overthrew Arbenz, installing the first in a series of brutal military dictatorships. The bloody year civil war ensued.

Guatemala still endures the after-effects of U.S. intervention: 5% of the population owns 80% of the land. Mayans make up over half the population, yet they have almost no representation in the government and are subject to intense discrimination. And foreign companies and members of the ruling elite continue to displace the rural population to make way for mining sites, dams and agricultural estates.

More:
https://www.ocregister.com/2020/02/15/the-dark-legacy-of-us-intervention-in-guatemala/

[Judi Lynn]

1. A Century of U.S. Intervention Created the Immigration Crisis

A Century of U.S. Intervention Created the Immigration Crisis
Those seeking asylum today inherited a series of crises that drove them to the border

Mark Tseng-Putterman
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Jun 20, 2018 · 10 min read

A national spotlight now shines on the border between the United States and Mexico, where heartbreaking images of Central American children being separated from their parents and held in cages demonstrate the consequences of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy” on unauthorized entry into the country, announced in May 2018. Under intense international scrutiny, Trump has now signed an executive order that will keep families detained at the border together, though it is unclear when the more than 2,300 children already separated from their guardians will be returned.

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At the margins of the mainstream discursive stalemate over immigration lies over a century of historical U.S. intervention that politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle seem determined to silence. Since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 declared the U.S.’s right to exercise an “international police power” in Latin America, the U.S. has cut deep wounds throughout the region, leaving scars that will last for generations to come. This history of intervention is inextricable from the contemporary Central American crisis of internal and international displacement and migration.

The liberal rhetoric of inclusion and common humanity is insufficient: we must also acknowledge the role that a century of U.S.-backed military coups, corporate plundering, and neoliberal sapping of resources has played in the poverty, instability, and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States. For decades, U.S. policies of military intervention and economic neoliberalism have undermined democracy and stability in the region, creating vacuums of power in which drug cartels and paramilitary alliances have risen. In the past fifteen years alone, CAFTA-DR — a free trade agreement between the U.S. and five Central American countries as well as the Dominican Republic — has restructured the region’s economy and guaranteed economic dependence on the United States through massive trade imbalances and the influx of American agricultural and industrial goods that weaken domestic industries. Yet there are few connections being drawn between the weakening of Central American rural agricultural economies at the hands of CAFTA and the rise in migration from the region in the years since. In general, the U.S. takes no responsibility for the conditions that drive Central American migrants to the border.

U.S. empire thrives on amnesia. The Trump administration cannot remember what it said last week, let alone the actions of presidential administrations long gone that sowed the seeds of today’s immigration crisis. There can be no common-sense immigration “debate” that conveniently ignores the history of U.S. intervention in Central America. Insisting on American values of inclusion and integration only bolsters the very myth of American exceptionalism, a narrative that has erased this nation’s imperial pursuits for over a century.

More:
https://medium.com/s/story/timeline-us-intervention-central-america-a9bea9ebc148