Recent Central American History

David Smith

There have been two phases of United States intervention in Latin America since 1970. The older, first phase is the Cold War in which the United States funded Latin military governments and their wars against communist insurgencies. The second phase is the War on Drugs through which the United States has pressured Latin American states into prohibitionist politics, helping to organize and fund anti-drug efforts across the Western Hemisphere. These two contexts are related to each other, they overlap and interact with each other in complex ways, but the justifications for why the United States has stayed so intimately involved in the domestic affairs of Latin America have changed over time, and it is important to understand the magnitude of impact the US has had on its neighbors to the South.

Cold War interventions in Central America date back to the CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala in 1954. After what was regarded by the CIA as a massive success, they tried a similar approach with Cuba in 1961 with the Bay of Pigs invasion, this time with disastrous results. The Cuban situation was massively embarrassing, and it became necessary for the US to increase their commitment to fighting communism across the region. In the 1970s, the United States was very involved in aiding Central American militaries in their fight against communism. The United States supplied Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua with direct military aid to help in their dirty wars. The friendly regimes in Honduras and Panama were used as bases of operations to carry out U.S. assistance to these places. The regimes to which the U.S. supplied weapons, training, and financial aid were known to be abusers of human rights, but Cold War hawks in the United States regarded this as a necessary evil in the international war on communism. The Carter administration tried to change course by denying aid to gross human rights violators, but the successful Sandinista Revolution in 1979 and the subsequent election of Ronald Reagan changed this approach.

The Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua was a watershed event, arguably as or more important to modern Central American history as was the Cuban Revolution. The communist insurgencies that existed in Guatemala and El Salvador turned into brutal Civil Wars, and the Reagan administration responded by providing billions in dollars of aid to the governments and paramilitaries fighting these communists. Though the Cold War ended in 1989, the legacy of the wars the United States fought in the name of anti-communism have had far-reaching impacts into today.

In the 1970’s, the United States had begun to get serious about the War on Drugs. In particular, the United States was targeting Mexico and the Sinaloa region that was supplying the marijuana that had fueled the counter-culture revolution. However, as the US targeted Mexico, production shifted to Colombia. The United States then became involved in fighting wars against the newly formed Colombian cartels and continued implementing crop eradication programs that disproportionately harmed poorer indigenous people. In Colombia, we see an acute intersection between the Cold War and the War on drugs. As the United States and the Colombian government fought the communist FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), they also fought the drug cartels who were pumping tons and tons of drugs into the United States. When the United States and Colombia finally defeated Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, the FARC took over coca-growing operations and made alliances with Mexican cartels, namely the Sinaloa cartel, who now controlled the trade.

The United States has continued to fight the War on Drugs at home and abroad. From discouraging coca production in the Andes to prosecuting corruption in Central America to helping the Mexican government fight a vicious war against the cartels to criminalizing the consumption and distribution of drugs here at home, the United States has remained invested in an expensive and ineffective multi-front war. The War on Drugs is not the only modern example of United States intervention. In 2009, the US was involved in the Honduran coup in which the Honduran military, who has enjoyed a close relationship with Washington over the years, ousted a democratically elected president. Most recently, US Ambassador John Bolton has been considering intervening militarily in Venezuela. The examples that have been discussed have largely been instances where the United States has directly intervened with military and financial aid, but it is also worth considering that the United States has used a variety of political and financial organizations to influence domestic and foreign policies of Latin American governments. A third phase, in addition to the Cold War and the War on Drugs, could be understood as a neo-liberal phase in which the United States ensured loans to governments who would pass more US-friendly laws. Suffice it to say that though the United States does does not completely dominate the hemisphere as they have at different points in history, the US remains embedded in Latin American economies and politics.

Sources:

Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012

Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. policy towards Latin America, Harvard University Press, 2003.

Further Reading:

1. For a brief history and timeline of US intervention in Latin America, see https://www.apnews.com/2ded14659982426c9b2552827734be83
2. For more information on the CIA-sponsored coup and the subsequent Civil War on Guatemala, see https://blog.uvm.edu/sosten-centralamerica/2019/03/23/guatemala-recent-history-present/
3. For more information about the evolution of the drug trade and the war on drugs in Latin America, see https://blog.uvm.edu/sosten-centralamerica/2019/04/11/overview-of-the-drug-trade-1970s-present/
4. To read more about the United States’ role in the 2009 Honduran coup and subsequent militarization and repression, see https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/honduras-coup-us-defense-departmetnt-center-hemispheric-defense-studies-chds/
5. To read briefly about John Bolton’s policy towards Venezuela, see https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/01/28/john-bolton-notepad-troops-colombia-venezuela-military-intervention/2705957002/