by Suketu Mehta
The history of Central American countries from their beginnings as states is a history of the United States intervening whenever it chooses to replace political leaders who do not bend to American will or serve American corporate interests. In the twentieth century, the United States supported bloodthirsty dictators such as Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt and Nicaragua’s Somoza with guns, troops, and money. These interventions left the countries bankrupt, bereft of both social services and thriving businesses. Many attempts to grow native industries or to bring about social welfare schemes that spread the wealth from the U.S.-supported elite to the indigenous populations were vetoed in Washington; the leaders supporting those changes were accused of being communists, and replaced at gunpoint by more malleable ones.
In 1952, Harry Truman took a dislike to Jacobo Árbenz, the president of Guatemala, who passed a land reform bill that benefited one-sixth of the population. Unfortunately, the bill cut into the profits of the United Fruit Corporation, which was based in New Orleans and owned 42 percent of all the land in Guatemala, all the country’s banana production, all the country’s telephone and telegraph network, and all its railroads. As a United Fruit executive explained, “Guatemala was chosen as the site for the company’s earliest development activities, because at the time we entered Central America, Guatemala’s government was the region’s weakest, most corrupt and most pliable.”
United Fruit complained to Truman about the reform bill. Truman authorized the CIA to launch Operation PBFORTUNE to topple Árbenz. The United Fruit Company actually lent one of its freighters to the CIA to transport its mercenaries. Details leaked and the plan was aborted. Truman’s successor, Eisenhower, decided to try again with Operation PBSUCCESS. The plan was hatched by the Dulles brothers, John Foster, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and Allen, the CIA director, who sat on United Fruit’s board. The CIA raised a private army to invade the country and force Árbenz to resign. The land reforms were rolled back. Essentially, the United States government illegally overthrew the democratically elected president of a country to benefit one of its (politically well-connected) corporations.
A series of coups and counter-coups followed—a revolving door of American-backed dictators going in and out of the presidential palace—with every American president implicated, a situation of permanent political instability that lasts to this day. More than 200,000 Guatemalans died over the next four decades in civil strife. The history of American involvement with Guatemala parallels the history of British involvement with India. But unlike India, Guatemala became an economic basket case. So Guatemalans decided to do what anybody who is owed a debt does: they went to have a talk with the debtor. The biggest source of Guatemalan foreign income now is remittances from the 1.5 million Guatemalans in the United States.
In the 1980s, neighboring El Salvador was in the grip of a civil war that eventually took 75,000 lives—most of them poor peasants shot by the army or death squads marshalled by the local oligarchs. And who provided money, arms, and training to these death squads? That champion of liberty, the United States. This is where Ronald Reagan decided he would draw a line in the sand against communism. He flooded the small country with military and economic aid to prop up its generals, more so than any other except Israel and Egypt.
“Many Americans would prefer to forget that chapter in American history,” writes Raymond Bonner, who covered El Salvador for The New York Times in that period.
Salvadorans haven’t forgotten, however. In El Mozote and the surrounding villages of subsistence peasants, forensic experts are still digging up bodies—of women, children, and old men who were murdered by the Salvadoran army during an operation in December 1981. It was one of the worst massacres in Latin American history … Some 1,200 men, women and children were killed during the operation. Old men were tortured. Then executed. Mothers were separated from their children. Raped. Executed. Crying, frightened children were forced into the convent. Soldiers fired through the windows. More than a hundred children died; their average age was six.
The massacre was carried out by the Atlacatl Battalion, which had been created in the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas and which had just completed a three-month counterinsurgency training course in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In El Mozote, the unit’s first operation after completing the course, they applied the lessons they had learned. “The United States was complicit” in the massacre, Todd Greentree, who was then a political officer in the U.S. embassy, told Bonner recently.
Young men fleeing the massacres ended up in the United States and formed gangs for self-protection. Thus was MS-13 born; not in the barrios of San Salvador, but in the badlands of Los Angeles and in the prisons of California. When they were deported back to El Salvador, they formed a parallel government there, grew rich and better-armed with guns sold by Americans, and then made their way back into the United States, a homicidal ping-pong game of the dispossessed.
In much of Latin America, the United States functioned, and still does, as a colonial power. As late as 2007, Chiquita Brands (which United Fruit had shape-shifted into) pleaded guilty to supporting a paramilitary and drug trafficking group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, to which it gave $1.7 million and three thousand AK-47s to fight union organizers and extort farmers into selling only to Chiquita. The United Self-Defense Forces used the money to systematically murder thousands of peasants and union organizers. The U.S. Justice Department refused to extradite the company’s executives from Ohio to Colombia, even though the company had officially acknowledged propping up an entity that had been labeled a “terrorist organization” by the American government.
Officer Tanaomi is, like most of his fellow Border Patrol agents, fairly right-wing. But after listening to Sanchez, Tanaomi says, “Wow. I never heard of these things before. I mean, I studied history in high school and all that, but I never heard of these things.”
* * *
Why are Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans desperate to move north, to come to U.S. cities to work as dishwashers and cleaning ladies? Partly, it’s because of their history with Spanish and then Yankee colonialism; partly, it’s because of race and class conflict and systematic corruption; and these days, it’s because of the drug war, whose casualty figures are, proportionally, higher than those in Syria.
The sociologist Rafael Alarcon sketched out the role of drug trafficking in Mexican-U.S. migration for me. In the early 1980s, there was an implicit agreement between the narcos and the Mexican government: “‘Okay, you have to take all the drugs to the United States. You don’t sell the drugs in Mexico.’ Creating a market in Mexico would have been devastating.”
Most of the killings over drugs now happen because of the wars between the cartels inside Mexico. “The thing that always amazes me is that there is no violence in the U.S.,” Alarcon says. The cartels distribute the drugs in the United States, but do not fight each other, and the police don’t kill the narcos as they do in Mexico. The violence stops at the border, even though most of the product has been shipped across it. “The violence in Mexico is a powerful reason for people to leave.”
And it’s not just that people are afraid of getting killed. It’s also because they can’t work, because the narcos control production. In Michoacán, the lime trade is controlled by the cartels, and the lime farmers have to pay a derecho de piso, a fee to the narcos, in order to work. “They don’t have to kill these people, they just threaten them,” he says.
It is a cost-benefit analysis that each migrant makes: the cost of staying versus the risk of getting deported or having your children taken from you if you cross and are caught. “Well, now the risk of crossing is probably less important than the risk of staying if they live in a violent area,” notes Alarcon.
All around the world, civil upheaval causes people to flee, and many conflicts have been ongoing for years or decades. There are the wars that everybody knows about, such as in Afghanistan and Syria; then there are the little-kno
wn ones, such as the Moro Muslim conflict in the Philippines, which has cost a cumulative 120,000 lives, and the Ituri conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has taken more than 60,000. Many of these conflicts have their origin in colonialism or botched colonial population transfer or mapmaking.
The Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, for instance, has its origins in British recruitment of ethnic Muslim migrant labor from India to cultivate the rice paddies of Burma. Under these policies, the Muslim population tripled, from 1871 to 1911. During World War II, the British promised the Rohingya a separate “Muslim National Area” if they supported the empire. After independence, many of the Buddhist Burmese saw the Rohingya as outsiders or colonial stooges, and these tensions boiled over in recent times—exacerbated by rumors spread through Facebook—and leading to mass killings of the Rohingya, along with rapes and expulsions. Almost a million of them have fled over the border to Bangladesh.
A friend of mine was working with an international NGO in a refugee camp in Bangladesh in 2017 when she noticed something odd: there were children older than five and younger than two, but very few two- to five-year-olds. It was, she discovered, because when the Rohingya fled from the army and the militias, children of that generation couldn’t run as fast as the older ones and were too heavy to be held by their parents. They fell behind, and the soldiers advanced on them with machetes.
* * *
Unlike the situation in Europe, the biggest reason refugees come to America’s borders isn’t the big wars in the Middle East; it’s the small wars in our backyard. The spread of small arms, propelled by the vigorous resistance of the National Rifle Association (NRA) to any controls on their worldwide dispersal, is a factor in numberless small wars around the planet. We buy their drugs and sell them the guns to terrorize their youth, who look to the first freight train north to escape their situation.
In 2014, Mexican authorities seized 15,397 firearms, ranging from machine guns to pistols, and submitted them to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. The agency found that 11,061 of them—71 percent—originated in the United States. In the Caribbean, 64 percent of the guns coming in are American; in the Bahamas, 98 percent of the guns come from its giant continental neighbor.
All this came out in the open in 2011 when Congress discovered that the ATF had been “letting guns walk” over the border, in what it called Operation Fast and Furious. The idea was that two thousand AK-47s and other weapons of war would be provided by the ATF to straw purchasers, who would lead them to drug cartels. Fourteen hundred of the guns disappeared without a trace.
I began understanding the passion for guns in America when I learned about their history: he who held the gun was the law. The foundational principle of America wasn’t religious liberty; it was the rule of the gun, which allowed the white settlers to dominate and massacre the natives. This country could not have been settled by the force of oxbows.
Half of all the civilian guns in the world are in American hands. Guns are our national insanity. But it is an insanity that we don’t keep within our borders; we export it. Every day, around a thousand migrants are intercepted crossing the border from Mexico to the United States. Every day, some seven hundred guns travel unhindered over the border the other way. Their value increases threefold the moment they cross over.
At the Casa del Migrante in Tijuana, I met a middle-aged man who had a hardened face and body. Ronaldo is from Amatlán, in Guatemala, and was in the United States for twenty-five years before he was deported. Back home, he lost his grandmother, whom he was closer to than his mother, and the sadness turned him into an alcoholic and a drug addict. He started doing stints in U.S. jails.
In L.A., Ronaldo found Christianity, at a church on Sunset Boulevard. He would go with the other church members to talk to young Latino men on the street, to bring the gospel to them. “We went to the Mara Salvatrucha [MS-13] where they began. You know where Western and Santa Monica is? There is no gang there today. But that’s the place where they began,” he says. Ronaldo can point out exactly where in Los Angeles the different Central American gangs got their start, because he knew them then. “The 18s, they began in MacArthur Park,” at a MoneyGram on the corner of Seventieth Street.
What happened next, he went on, is that “the United States started deporting people because they didn’t accept them, but they didn’t know their background. They just didn’t want them. They say, ‘Nah, these people are bad, they cannot be here.’ They deported hundreds of them.” Between 2000 and 2004 alone, the United States dumped twenty thousand criminals into Latin America, into a system with no capacity to control or rehabilitate them.
Ronaldo tells me what happened after they were deported: “They started to get together over there and started to do the same thing in our countries. And our countries, they weren’t like that. The United States sent them over there. The gangs are bad people that have been deported from the United States.”
I asked Ronaldo where the maras get their guns.
“They purchase the guns in the United States.”
“How much can you buy a gun in Guatemala for?”
“One thousand quetzales. A hundred dollars.”
“It’s easy to get a gun?”
“Very easy. Anybody that wants one can get one. If you want ten of them, they give you ten of them.”
* * *
In December 2006, the UN General Assembly voted on establishing a panel of experts who would study the feasibility of a small arms treaty that would stanch this murderous flow. The vote was 153 countries in favor, and 1—guess which?—against.
“The United States has frequently been on the opposite side of its hemispheric neighbors by opposing international controls on the small-arms trade,” a 2008 report from the Center for Defense Information states.
The United States was the lone dissenter on establishing a treaty to control the arms trade, has consistently stalled and weakened efforts to develop other international measures, and has been ineffective in stopping the cross-border trade with Mexico. U.S. arms policies, including loopholes in existing laws and opposition to creating strong international agreements, clash with U.S. programmatic initiatives and have allowed U.S. arms to flow to Latin America with continued devastating consequences.
Americans sell their neighbors the weapons of mass destruction and buy the main crop their farmers have left to sell, their coca leaves and marijuana plants. Both the selling of the guns and the buying of their drugs render these countries ungovernable. And so, if you’re a parent in a barrio in one of these countries, it makes logical sense to urge your children to save their lives while they can and go north, not just to earn a dollar, but to stay alive. Because the only other choice, if they are to stay alive, is to work for the narcos.
One out of ten people born in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala is already living in the United States—more than 3 million people, most of whom have been here for over a decade. Now their relatives are coming to join them. The annual flow of migrants from the Northern Triangle countries, which was 115,000 in 2014, has been increasing at twice the average rate of overall immigration.
Trump’s wish list in 2019 called for $26 billion for immigration enforcement and detention, and another $18 billion for his wall. As Roberto Suro, the founder of the Pew Hispanic Center, points out, “That’s almost the combined gross domestic product of El Salvador and Honduras [$48 billion]. A fraction of the enforcement budget well spent on economic development would reduce migration pressure. It would be a better use of taxpayer dollars than trying to intercept people in flight at a militarized border and then criminalizing them. Aside from the utility, it is the right thing to do. American interventions, political, military and economic, helped create the conditions prompting many migrations, including this one.”
In 2016, the Obama administration got Congress to fund a $750 million aid package for Central America. It was meant to improve governance: fight corruption, im
prove policing, and create opportunities at home so their citizens wouldn’t have to move. The next year, the murder rate in Honduras, one of the countries the aid package helped, fell by 25 percent. Then Trump came in and slashed aid to those countries by over 35 percent.
Just as the sale of small arms fuels domestic strife and spurs migration, the sale of heavy weapons is instrumental in creating conflict between nations. To date, 130 countries have signed the 2014 United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, the only serious effort to stem the trade in conventional arms around the world. Of those countries, 99 ratified the treaty in their national parliaments, while 31 countries, including the biggest arms exporter—the USA—have signed the treaty but not ratified it. The treaty has come under unrelenting opposition from the NRA, which mounted a full-throated campaign of slander, saying it constituted an end run around the Second Amendment (which the fact-checking site Snopes unequivocally branded as false). But under Trump, there isn’t a chance in hell that Congress will ratify it.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, sales by the world’s one hundred leading arms-producing and military services providers rose by 38 percent from 2002 to 2016. The majority—58 percent—of these companies were American. The U.K. has sent £4.7 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia for its brutal campaign against Yemen, which it seeks to bomb into submission. But that was chump change compared with what the handshake between Trump and King Salman purportedly meant in May 2017: a $110 billion arms deal—with an option to buy $250 billion more over the next decade. Notwithstanding Trump’s characteristic hyperbole, if the full deal is executed, it would be the biggest weapons deal in history.
