Finally, an appropriate NPR show, a story about the Dos Erres massacre in Guatemala.
I know almost nothing about US “anti-communist” involvement in Latin America during the Cold War, mostly because I find it too depressing and shameful to think about. One thing that I don’t understand is why the right-wing governments the US backed — Pinochet, Efraín Ríos Montt, for example — were so often so much more monstrous than the left-wing governments (which I don’t claim were perfect) it opposed — Castro, the Sandinistas, for example.
Where is a good place to read about this? Are there any accounts that won’t make me want to shoot myself?
Update. A good, lengthy comment from commenter Kent.
Corner Stone
Only slightly OT – Damn. Now I can’t even go to the bakery anymore?
U.S. Drone Attack Kills 4 in Pakistan
“The officials said the victims were buying goods from a bakery when the missiles hit. Residents were still removing the debris, officials said.”
calipygian
Shut up, that’s why. Capitalism rulez!
Valdivia
Raises hand vigorously–I would begin by reading the book by the two Colliers on Latin American Bureaucratic Authoritarianism. Excellent and though academic done without too much jargon. There is also another book I think it’s called Fear at the Edge which explains the relationship between the military, the aristocratic class and the rise of the working class in the 60s after the success of Import Substitution Industrialization. I would say the Sothern American cases are vastly different than the Central American ones though equally horrific.
And: TAL really rocks.
MikeJake
Why were the right wing governments so bad? Because they were run by right wingers.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Valdivia:
What makes the South American ones different from the Central American ones?
gocart mozart
Because to a conservative,”redistributing wealth” is a worse evil than Hitler.
That sounds like a smartass answer but, I don’t see any evidence against that statement being literally true.
Peter
Well, Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a pretty good account of the generational effect the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic had on a (fictional, but a lot of it was drawing on the author’s experience) family, even on the members of it born in New Jersey.
Suffern ACE
Latin America, sure you can make the claim that the left governments were more humane than the right, and Guatemala almost makes that too easy. But elsewhere? I don’t think congratulations are in order for the left.
wenchacha
Well, we know the right-wing authoritarians in power aided and abetted all sorts of horrific violence against the poor and those who cared for them. Con mucho gusto.
Corner Stone
Simple economics. Backing a right wing government meant a larger pool of dissidents (aka la gente). Backing a left wing government meant going against a smaller, but infinitely wealthier pool, of consumers.
The right wing government could always find an uprising or rebellion they needed to suppress, and hence would buy arms from the US MIC, hire mercs/trainers from the US MIC, or make favorable resource exploitation deals with US MNC to fund their anti-rebellion activities.
Corrupt left wing governments offered less profit opportunity.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Suffern ACE:
This is why liberals suck, I make a point about Latin America and you say “who cares, it’s not true for the whole world”?
And can I just say this: what happened to SE Cupp is worse than the Dos Erres massacre. Only a liberal partisan would refuse to admit this. And what about Hillary Rosen? And what they did to Robert Bork?
I’m out.
valdemar
Perhaps because the rightist movements in Latin America were essentially about preserving the old, very unjust order of things i.e. a class-based system, kept intact by a corrupt military whose officer corps was dominated by landowners and such? Leftist rebels were, to some extent, friends of the workers and peasants by default.
This was not necessarily the case with communist/socialist movements elsewhere. And of course even in Latin America the peasants were sometimes small landowners themselves and deeply hostile to all collectivist thinking.
Then you can throw in religion – there’s a near-perfect fit between Catholic majority countries and fascistic regimes. If freedom of conscience is in theory at the heart of Protestantism, then absolute obedience to authority – however corrupt, brutal or dishonest – is a key tenet for Third World Catholics.
Culture of Truth
Expanding on that, when you’re less popular, you have to be more vicious.
Corner Stone
@DougJ, Head of Infidelity: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Step over to the fainting couch and gently slip those crankypants off.
“this is why liberals suck” ? For realz dog?
Mnemosyne
It still amazes me how many people have completely forgotten why so many people illegally immigrated here from Central America and why the Sanctuary movement sprang up. When the mass immigration started in the 1980s started, it wasn’t because of unemployment.
ETA: I mean, there were even highly acclaimed films about it, but it’s all gone down the memory hole.
Kathleen
I recommend Cry of the People http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2686043-cry-of-the-people
The author details horrific persecution of the nuns, priests and lay people who fought for social and economic injustice.
I read it years ago (it was recommended to me by a priest, who has since left the priesthood) .
Amir Khalid
@Corner Stone:
Come on, man. Does this sound like for realz to you?
JoyfulA
I saw this on Twitter this morning and haven’t read it yet. (I’m supposedly working.) https://www.propublica.org/article/finding-oscar-massacre-memory-and-justice-in-guatemala
Of course, ProPublica’s stuff is always good.
clayton
@Corner Stone: You’re one to talk about cranky pants.
Corner Stone
@Amir Khalid: I’m just trying to pull him back in, just when he thought he was out.
Mr Stagger Lee
Before the infamous Charles Johnson of Liberia, Efron Rios-Montt of Guatemala was Pat Robertson’s love toy because not only was the General a right-winger, but an Evangelical Christian. Nevermind he was involved in commiting genocide on the Mayans, and incredibly he still walks free, he was featured in Daniel Goldhagen’s documentary Worse than War.
Steeplejack
@Corner Stone:
No, he was (somewhat) justified. Suffern ACE’s comment rubbed me the wrong way too. DougJ made a specific point about one region, and Suffern ACE immediately zoomed right past that, adding zero to the discussion. WTF.
Hillary Rettig
@Mnemosyne:
Exactly. A lot of undocumented immigrants were victims of the U.S.’s own policies.
Hillary Rettig
“Are there any accounts that won’t make me want to shoot myself?”
Probably not:
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Danner/1993/truthelmoz01.html
“In a remote corner of El Salvador, investigators uncovered the remains of a horrible crime — a crime that Washington had long denied. The villagers of El Mozote had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of the Salvadoran Army’s anti-Communist crusade. The story of the massacre at El Mozote — how it came about, and why it had to be denied — stands as a central parable of the Cold War.”
Cluttered Mind
I am pretty familiar with the Cold War “anti-communist” CIA activities in Latin America and unfortunately all I can say is no, there is no way to educate yourself about what happened that will not leave you wanting to shoot yourself. We don’t live in a very nice country, you may have noticed.
HE Pennypacker, Wealthy Industrialist
All sorts of bonus points for quoting a Clash song!
clayton
@Mr Stagger Lee: I think you mean Charles Taylor.
Valdivia
@DougJ, Head of Infidelity:
sorry late in replying (my dad is making such a rockus they let him leave the hospital only 2 days after having brain surgery–so obstinate!) anyway: one major difference is ethnic make up and the other is the economic structure of society. The cause of rebellion in the South was urban industrial workers and rural-urban migration and in Central American mostly rural issue such as land reform and exploitation. It created very different alliances and different types of conflicts.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Valdivia:
What is the difference in ethnic make up? Is it the greater proportion of native peoples in Central America?
gocart mozart
@clayton:
Chuck Taylor! The sneaker guy???
Anoniminous
@Hillary Rettig:
And US economic policies. Everybody knows about the Banana Republics – courtesy of the US Marines, US Navy, and the United Fruit Co. Few know about the subsidies for American MidWest corn creating a massive surplus that was dumped on the world market driving down prices for the marginal producers in Latin and South America worsening rural poverty, driving people into slums, etc.
Ron
I’m in the middle of reading Drift and just finished a chapter mostly about the whole Iran-Contra affair. It’s depressing.
PIGL
There are no such accounts. The slaughter of the people of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, were grotesque crimes against humanity, for which no American has ever been held to account.
srv
Che was a monster, and the Bolivian Generals were angels.
AlladinsLamp
Suggested Reading:
Blood on the Border : A Memoir of the Contra War
HE Pennypacker, Wealthy Industrialist
I think it’s worth reading up on, but that the correct response isn’t depression but anger. Anger at the war crimes we actively supported, anger at the subversion of our democracy in Iran-Contra, anger that a turd like Ollie North could not only escape justice but profit from the whole affair…
Valdivia
@DougJ, Head of Infidelity:
yes. Guatemala is mainly indigenous. El Salvador too, except for the 14 families that control the economy. Nicaragua is more mixed ethnically but after 40+ years of Somoza the lower rural classes unified with the middle class and intellectual elites against them.
Cjile, Urguguay And Argentina have a smaller indigenous population and the issues were more economic than ethnic. Though one can’t generalize completely.
Tommybones
The definitive source for our adventures in the Latin American countries is “Killing Hope” by William Blum, which you can order on his website, here:
http://killinghope.org/#order
HIGHLY recommended.
Kevin
I love the Clash. Sadly, you could critique American foreign policy for the past century using only song titles and lyrics from the Sandinista! album. But these days, how many would know what you were doing??
S. cerevisiae
DougJ, why do you hate America? Seriously though, I have met people who absolutely refuse to believe we were responsible for horrible massacres in Central America. They just will not accept the fact that our country did horrible things.
Oliver North should be rotting in a Nicaraguan jail.
Corner Stone
I think one of the better places to start would be here:
Above the Law
It expounds on US foreign relations from a different perspective, and lays out the links the USG and CIA have to torturers in Latin America.
Corner Store Operator
Just want to say keep up the NPR 24/7 diaries. Maybe on twitter if Cole doesn’t want the front page too cluttered?
srv
The Dictator Next Door, about the Trujillo regime fro Hoover to Eisenhower. Pretty wonkish, but a good grounding that can be extroplated to the rest of SA/LA
Reagan’s policies mostly, a book called Empires Workshop.
I’ve heard good things about The Dictators Handbook, but generic, not just SA/LA
http://www.amazon.com/The-Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Politics/dp/161039044X/ref=pd_sim_b_27
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Corner Store Operator:
That’s a good idea.
Suffern ACE
@DougJ, Head of Infidelity: Im not even in the top ten of why liberals suck and you know it. If you want to know an answer to your question it’s probably not a good idea to compare regimes bases on their stated politics. So Read Charles Tilly on collective violence.
Rafer Janders
@DougJ, Head of Infidelity:
Partly ethnic and socio-cultural differences, which always tends to magnify the savagery of conflicts. In South America, particularly in Argentina and Chile, the left consisted largely of an alliance of urban workers and students against the right, but both the right and the left were part of the same ethnic-class groups and lived in the same places, roughly speaking.
In Central America, however, there is still a far larger ethnically Indian population living in the countryside, and so it was far easier for the rightists to incite their soldiers into atrocities against poor Indian peasants living in remote villages, far away from the reach of any cameras or reporters.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Suffern ACE:
Again, would make sense if I’d mentioned anything about stated politics. My comparison was between Latin American governments the US supported and those it opposed.
Kent
I spent the latter half of the 80s working in Guatemala with the Peace Corps and my wife is Chilean so I’m pretty in tune with what happened both in Guatemala in the 80s and Chile in the 70s.
Basically we had a perfect storm of events in Guatemala that lead to the civil war that peaked in the late 70s and early 80s. In no particular order these are some of root causes.
1. Foreign policy is no different than any other policy in that the influential who have the ear of the policy makers have the influence. Works the same whether you are talking about farm policy or banking policy in the US or foreign policy towards Central America. The big American corporate interests in Guatemala had the ear of the government and benefited from a brutal regime that kept down labor costs and eliminated any whiff of dissent. In 1987 I was invited along with several other volunteers to have thanksgiving dinner at the embassy with the Ambassador and his wife (all the embassy staff would invite volunteers to their homes on Thanksgiving. The hot ticket for the female volunteers was to get invited to the Marine compound where the embassy guards lived so you could spend the day hanging around the pool and partying with the hot young marines!). Anyway, that Thanksgiving dinner there were also corporate executives from United Fruit (Chiquita) around the dinner table who were just totally and completely cozy with the ambassador who was some Reagan campaign contributor from Texas…don’t remember his name. It was completely obvious how a one-sided corporate viewpoint was getting filtered up the chain and influencing policy.
2. The Catholic Church aided and abetted the violence in Central America. This is one of the biggest stains on Pope John Paul’s legacy. Remember that Pope John Paul rose up though the church in communist and Russian-occupied Poland during the height of the cold war after WW-II. Due to his life experiences with Stalin and his puppets in Poland he developed an understandable suspicion of all things linked to the soviets…which the Central American revolutionaries most certainly were, at least via Cuba. Understand also that the church hierarchy in Latin America comes from the oligarchy for the most part. It is dominated by old conservative men from wealthy families, or old conservative men who have spent their lives sucking up to wealthy families. The conflict between the church hierarchy in Central America and the village priests (many of them foreign) who were preaching liberation theology is sort of like the current conflict we see in the US between the conservative bishops and liberal nuns. The catholic hierarchy in Central America with few exceptions was archly conservative and adamantly opposed to any liberal social teachings that even hinted at being left of center. When the army started going after priests the catholic hierarchy didn’t lift a finger and the message that got back to Rome was that these liberation theologists had gone way off the reservation. Things began to eventually change in the church by the late 1980s but not fast enough.
3. Although there was a civil war going on between the army and a few communist rebel groups in the 1980s, it really wasn’t in the interest of the army or oligarchy to bring it to an end. As long as there are a few hundred beaten down guerrillas hiding out in the mountains that come down to raid villages every so often the Guatemalan army had carte blanche to go to Washington every year begging for more military aid. And they had a ready excuse to run the country and especially the rural areas with martial law. The army controlled many of the institutions of the country from the phone company to the ports (from which they profited). And there was even a Banco de Ejercito (Bank of the Army). Yes, there was genocide. And in the areas where it happened high ranking army officers ended up with massive estates, especially after land records conveniently went up in smoke and villagers were driven out to refugee camps on the Mexican border. To some extent history repeats itself and in many ways the early 1980s were a repeat of the original wars of conquest of the 1520s.
4. The cold war. From the point of view of the conservatives running the state department and pentagon in the 1980s, Guatemala and El Salvador were just part of the long list of proxy cold war battles that had been going on since WW-II. Korea, Iran, Vietnam, Prague, Indonesia, Cuba, Mozambique, Chile, Egypt. All basically the same thing. Just like in Vietnam US policy makers mistook an indigenous civil war for communist expansionism.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Kent:
Thanks for this.
Peregrinus
@Kent:
This, pretty much. I especially would hit the point about there always being some rebels left alive to occasionally cause trouble, so that the regime could continue to justify putting them down and running the entire country under martial law.
@S. cerevisiae:
Also this. I’m (half-)Cuban, and with the exception of my grandfather, most of my family excuses the shit done by Fulgencio Batista and the right-wingers in Cuba on the basis that they were trying to protect Cuba from someone like Fidel Castro. My grandfather wasn’t a fan of either guy, and from what I understand they had to leave because my grandfather helped defend a guy at his trial.
Cuba, I think is unique here. You could argue that over (and partly due to) the time the Castro brothers have been in power, they’ve been worse than the right-wing regimes that preceded them. Left-wing regimes typically don’t last long before they’re put down, cf. Salvador Allende.
And lastly, @DougJ, Head of Infidelity:
I think I told you this once, but I studied at the same university where you teach (until January, actually) and I still remember a guy sitting next to me going “I love Pinochet.” If he hadn’t been way more ripped than me, the desire to punch him in the fucking face would’ve overwhelming.
Kent
Continuing from my previous post. We also flooded the zone with weapons just like we are doing in Mexico today. With some strange results.
In the late 1970s when Carter cut off overt military aid to Guatemala, Israel stepped in to pick up the slack and started supplying the Guatemalan army with Galil infantry rifles, Uzis, and a lot of other standard-issue military gear. By the early 1980s Israel had built a munitions factory in northern Guatemla to build ammunition, parts, and eventually rifles. For most the 1980s the Guatemalan army was almost completely outfitted with Israelis weapons. Israel has always had an especially close relationship with Guatemala because Guatemala was instrumental in lobbying for and casting the tiebreaking UN vote to partition Palestine and create the state of Israel.
At the same time that Israel was outfitting the Guatemalan army, the Guatemalan rebel armies were getting US weapons from the Nicaraguan Contras which were operating out of Honduras. Reagan was pouring money and weapons into his rebel Contra Army based in Honduras which shares borders with both Guatemala and Nicaragua. The contras were not much more than a bunch of corrupt Nicaraguan expats and former military. So American-made M-16 rifles being shipped to the Contras were winding up in the hands of leftist rebels in Guatemala.
What this meant was that if one encountered a band of soldiers wearing green cammo fatigues in rural Guatemala in the 1980s one could instantly tell if they were army or rebels by their weapons. If they were carrying the Israeli Galil rifles with the distinctive metal folding stocks they were army. If they were carrying M-16s with the distinctive hollow sights and plastic stocks they were rebels.
David Fud
@Kent: You should write a book, dude. (assuming there isn’t one already)
Kent
Oh, and how could I forget to mention Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict). In the 1980s he ran the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which led the conservative opposition to the liberal liberation theology movements that were emerging throughout Latin America in the 70s and 80s. As Pope John Paul’s right hand during this time he certainly has bloody hands and played a big part in the church hierarchy’s willingness to overlook right wing violence in the interest of stamping out leftist catholic movements.
Jay C
@Kent:
What you said…
I (self-admitted liberal) hate to have to bring this up, but the main (IMHO) “problem” with discussing political movements (of any sort) in the Spanish-speaking world (i.e., the Western Hemisphere south of the Rio Grande) – is that virtually the entire sociopolitical heritage (from, like, 1800 on) of this area has been founded on a “template” of Spanish-colonial structure, i.e., feudal, Roman-Catholic, monarchic, and oligarchic: and where the Liberation movements of the 1820s’ sole innovation was to remove the “monarchic” from the formula. While leaving the rest intact.
Peregrinus
@Jay C:
Exactly. Though I would say it’s more than just the Spanish-speaking world where that seems to be the case. For the most part, anti-colonialism is encouraged by the native oligarchy that sees the colonial power as the only problem, and only obstacle to their domination.
Kent
@David Fud:
Oh, there’s been PLENTY of books written. I have three shelves of them gathering dust in my library. This was a sexy area of academia in the 80s. Here’s just a sampling I pulled off my shelf. I have dozens more:
http://www.amazon.com/Unfinished-Conquest-The-Guatemalan-Tragedy/dp/0520203496
http://www.amazon.com/Soldier-without-Fortune-Firsthand-Free-Lance/dp/0440181240
http://www.amazon.com/The-Battle-For-Guatemala-Perspectives/dp/0813306140
http://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Violence-Indians-Guatemalan-Crisis/dp/0806124598
http://www.amazon.com/Cry-People-Penny-Lernoux/dp/0140153853
http://www.amazon.com/Riding-tiger-Ramiro-Carpios-Guatemala/dp/0964842602
http://www.amazon.com/Rigoberta-Menchu-Indian-Guatemala-Edition/dp/1844674185
Jay C
@Peregrinus:
Well, yes: you are right: it’s just that in Latin America, the co-opting of political power by local oligarchies is the most widespread and obvious. And the functional template for political society.
Kent
@Jay C:
Jay…what you say is true. But it’s deeper than that. Look at any Spanish colonial town anywhere in the Western Hemisphere from Santa Fe NM to southern Chile. You have a central town plaza with a catholic church on one side, municipalidad (mayors office and courts) on one side, and the armory on a third. Perhaps a bank on the 4th side but not necessarily. Church, state, and military all wrapped up as a package at the center of every single town in Latin America. The power structure always came first and the town grew up around it.
Contrast that to the typical historic American town from New England to the old west. You typically have a main street devoted to commerce. Banks, shops, restaurants. It represents a power structure too, but one centered on business rather than the church and military.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Peregrinus:
It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
Svensker
@Kent:
This is why I’m a Quaker. It’s all madness. Madness!
Zagloba
To add to Kent’s reading list:
I believe “The Last Colonial Massacre” (Greg Grandin) is specifically about Dos Erres, but it’s also a nearly perfect book more generally if you’re looking at the earlier (pre WWII) history of US involvement in Guatemala.
For a less methodologically rigorous look at the height of the Guatemalan Civil War, up through the presidency of Rios Montt, “Through a Glass Darkly” by Tom Melville is a great read.
Both were key sources for my undergrad thesis, and I’ve reread each since.
Leah
Mark Danner has done incredible work on our path in Central America. He maintains a .com website under his name. He wrote the book on what happened at El Mozote, mentioned by a commentator above. The Massacre At El Mozote
The perfidy of the Reagan administration in all this was unspeakable. For instance, when rumors started that something quite horrible had happened in a village in El Salvador, Elliot Abrams, then in the State Depart not only denied all rumors but attacked any journalist or NGO who insisted there was a story there, calling them lefty American haters.
Eventually we were to find out that the American consulate had sent to Abrams written indication that the rumors appeared to be true, information Abrams took upon himself to suppress.
And just in case you think that the lying ever stops, take a gander at this NYTimes column from David Brooks, written in 2004 apropos of the Iraq war and the upcoming election there. The story he tells of the 1982 election in El Salvador which made Duarte president as a front man for the Arena party, which was pretty much the party of the death squads, so that in the end we engineered the democratic election of an utterly violent and lawless government. Of course that is not the tale Brooks tells. For a point by point rebuttal of Brooks’ fantasy history, you can checkout this by Marc Cooper; it’s an excellent review of that phony “democratic” election.
AA+ Bonds
If his name is not a swear word to you then Noam Chomsky wrote a bunch specifically on how the American press from “left” to right largely failed to investigate or criticize our support for murderous right-wingers in our hemisphere, including in Guatemala
I would start with Deterring Democracy and then Necessary Illusions
Even if you disagree with Chomsky’s conclusions, these books will give you all the Lexis cites you need to figure out how the government got away with this shit domestically
Bill Murray
I liked Daniel Wilkinson’s “Silence on the Mountain” for Guatemala http://www.amazon.com/Silence-Mountain-Forgetting-Encounters-Interactions/dp/0822333686/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1338068480&sr=8-3
and Eduardo Galeano’s “Open Veins of Latin America” http://www.amazon.com/Open-Veins-Latin-America-Centuries/dp/0853459916/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b
AA+ Bonds
and I will back up Kent above (section 2 of comment #48, and all of #52) that the Church hierarchy used Red hunting in Latin America – El Salvador is what I know – as a convenient way to wipe out all the suspected Marxists in their local dioceses or at least try to silence them
Again, I know El Salvador and not Guatemala (mainly because of a whitewashing anti-Red movie I was shown in CCD that I decided to fact check way back when)
but check out the life history of Father Jon Sobrino, who has managed to keep working in Latin America through a lifetime of dodging death squads and tacit Vatican approval for actions against him
And I mean recent approval, too – the Wiki article is very sparse on his activities during the time we’re discussing but has plenty on the 2007 Notification against him after the Jesuits dropped a dime on his books (more a formal procedure than anything else given his relationship with Rome)
AA+ Bonds
A productive conversation with liberation theology would have made the Church hierarchy relevant again
But frankly that would have been next to impossible given their pre-capitalist universalized philosophy
The best step is the removal of diocese resources into the hands of the parishioners – something I know that at least some liberals in Connecticut attempted a few years back, as part of a hard-fought movement worldwide
Ejoiner
Don’t know if it’s been mentioned yet – and I’m too lazy to read through 60+ posts – but “Red Heat” by Alex von Tunzelmann is a great/depressing read about our Cold War adventures in the Caribbean. Used it with my seniors this year and they enjoyed it as well.
Kathleen
@Kent: Kent – OT, but have you read In Banks We Trust, written by the author of Cry of the People? Both of her books provide perspective on what we are experiencing today. Regarding America’s role in Central America (United Fruit, et al) I would also recommend any biographies you can find about Smedley Butler, decorated Marine general who wrote War Is A Racket.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. Those old towns were also likely to have at least a church or two on main street, and there’s more than a smattering of towns that are named “Fort Something”, so you can’t discount the influence of church and military in the US. If there are big differences, they’re that:
1) Those churches were likely to be from denominations with little central control, so that they were more representative of the people than an outside hierarchy. And if there was more than one, they were likely to be different denominations that likely as not disagreed with each other.
2) Our military concentrated on taking the natives’ land for white use rather than enslaving them. That led to towns that were basically white colonies, in contrast to Spanish ones that were mostly native but with a white aristocracy.
ETA: Hmm, that reads more negatively than I intended. I don’t want to dispute the basic point that there are real differences, but more to suggest that the same basic forces were at work in the US. It’s just a different one took the lead here.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
I can give a few books worth looking at. My onw interest is in Honduras, which got off fairly easily in the 70’s and 80’s as far as war goes. There were civil wars going on in all three bordering countries (Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala), but for a lot of reasons that I won’t go into here unless somebody wants me to, that never happened in Honduras.
I lived in Tela, Honduras from 1994 to 1996, and try to go back every year for at least a few weeks. Anyway, back in 1995, I was rooting through the upstairs closet in the “teacher house” we lived in for something to read–we called the closet the “library”, as all it had in it were books–and came across Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo, by Elvia Alvarado. This, more than anything else I had heard or read or seen before, helped me to understand why Honduras was so poor, and why poverty is such an abusive, violent thing.
It doesn’t say much specifically about wars or American backing for corrupt or vicious governments, but I think it’s important to read anyway, as it lays out the conditions in Honduras narrowly, and Central America more broadly, that have helped give rise to the conditions where civil wars can arise.
Also worth reading for a broader understanding of Central America and its history over the last 100 or 120 years is The Banana Men, by Lester Langley and Thomas Schoonover. It tells of how the banana companies took over Nicaragua and Honduras and ran them (Honduras in particular) as economic colonies. I lived in Tela, which was the Honduran headquarters for the Tela Railroad Company–which was essentially the United Fruit Company in Honduras; it was some kind of a shell thing that I don’t understand–and it was like one of those small capital cities on Caribbean islands the British ran that you see in movies set before 1965 or so, with clapboard buildings everywhere, and big fancy buildings for the governor general or whatever, and nice looking clubs for the people who ran things. In British colonies, they were, of course, white guys from London appointed by the government; in Tela, they were white guys from the U.S. appointed by the fruit company.
I lived in a walled-in compound filled with wooden bungalows and some bigger wooden houses. By the time I was there, the fruit company had long gone, and some rich Hondurans had taken over the compound and ran it as a hotel; instead of checking into a room, you’d check into a cottage or house or bungalow. Our Teacher House was one of the bigger houses, and the school where I worked had some kind of a grandfather clause worked out that let us stay there really cheaply. We paid the school about $10 a month, and, I guess, they paid the hotel that much, and we lived there. The fruit company had started the school where I was working 70 or 80 years before for the children of the American bosses, and as I understand, the teachers had lived in that same house all through those years; after the fruit company left, the school had them work out some deal with the incoming hotel investors.
Sorry. Anyway, we had a two-floor house with 4 bedrooms upstairs (mine was the room with screens along the whole length of the two outer walls, which was heaven on earth), and–and this was really sweet–a hot water heater, so we could take hot showers. In the compound there was the clubhouse, a restaurant, a long stretch of beach, a thatched-roofed gazebo on the beach where you could eat or drink or dance, a swimming pool, all kinds of nice shit. On the other side of the railroad yard just south of the compound, there’s a private golf course for the administrators that had by the time I was there become a country club for the richer Teleños (since we lived in the compound, we teachers could play there, too).
Anyway. This is the kind of place Tela was: a colonial capital. The Banana Men tells a lot of the history of those years when the United Fruit Company owned Honduras, and it isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that they did.
Another good book is Revolutionary Movements in Latin America, by Cynthia McClintock, who was one of my teachers in graduate school. It’s about the rebels, not the dictators, but you need to understand the other side, too, if you want to understand the right-wing governments.
Lastly, I’d tell you to read Bitter Fruit, which tells all about the 1954 golpe in Guatemala that really set the whole 36-year long civil war going.
These are by no means the only books worth reading, but these are 4 I’d put near the top of the list, as they’re all 4 about Central America, which is my broad interest, and two of them are about my own personal hobby horse, which is Honduras…
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Thanks!
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
De nada. I don’t know how easy it’ll be to find any of those in your nearest library. Some libraries will let you do inter-library loans, though, so maybe you might track some or all of them down.
Kent
@AA+ Bonds:
AA+ Bonds…In El Salvador you had Archbishop Romero. Guatemala had Cardinal Casariego, his opposite. Cardinal Casariego was part of the arisocracy and drove around Guatemala like a head of state in a limo with a military escort. During the height of the war famously blessed army tanks with holy water. When confronted with the evidence that at least 10 of his village priests and missionaries had been executed by death squads he was reported to dismiss it by saying “if you mix in politics you get what you deserve”. It wasn’t until his death in 1983 that the catholic church in Guatemala actually began to work towards peace and reconciliation leading up to the Escuipulas Peace Accords in 1987 (for which Costa Rican President Oscar Arias won the Nobel Peace Prize).
Chris
So, I’ve been following this thread on my smartphone all day, which isn’t the thing most conducive to posting, but I just want to say for the record this was a fantastic thread and a true delight to read, despite the depressing ugliness of the topic. Thanks to Kent, especially.
Roy G
Great thread. My enlightenment came during college in the 80s, when I learned about what came to be Iran Contra, and spent some time studying in Mexico. My two thoughts to add:
Iran Contra paved the way for the US military excesses of the last decade, when everybody got off scot free and even welcomed as heroes by the Right, that was a license to Ill.
NAFTA and CAFTA were neoliberal economic equivalents of war, and their effects combined with the junta backing described in this post have fueled the Beast known as the Drug War.