Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America

This chapter focuses on three Central American countries—Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala—and how citizens of these countries were murdered by their own soldiers, often with weapons provided by the United States government. Refugees from Nicaragua were often welcomed in the United States but not refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala. The difference is that refugees from Nicaragua were fleeing from a communist regime, and the Reagan and Bush administrations were invested in stopping communism no matter what.

The Somoza family ruled Nicaragua with absolute control from roughly 1936-1979. After an earthquake in 1972, the Somozas stole millions of dollars in aid relief to the country, and this was the final straw for many of the citizens. A new generation of revolutionaries called the “Sandinista Liberation Front” toppled the Somoza family’s hold on power. This uprising led to the Sandinistas taking power.

The US feared the communist leanings of this government and worked to topple the new Sandinista government. The CIA trained former Somoza soldiers in the new “Contra” army, and for the rest of the 1980s, the CIA, led by Lieutenant Oliver North, oversaw the Contra war against the Nicaraguan government. This led to Nicaraguans fleeing as the conflict intensified.

El Salvador followed a similar pattern. It too was ruled with an iron fist by a dictator, General Hernández, who was responsible for the massacre of 30,000 Pipil, an Indigenous people. His rule lasted from 1932–1944 and was backed by the US. He was finally ousted by “members of the tiny Salvadoran oligarchy, known as the fourteen families, [who] alternated control of the government with the generals, while intermittent coups between factions of the elite became a way of life” (133).

To retain control over the landless peasants protesting against the government, the oligarchy used the army and right-wing death squads to massacre protesters. The fighting between the government and protesters eventually erupted into civil war in 1979:

Over the next two years, with right-wing death squads hunting down dissidents, more than eight thousand trade union leaders were murdered, wounded, abducted, or disappeared. The ferocious repression prompted many young Salvadorans to respond in kind (134).

The opposition groups formed FMLN (Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front) to resist government-fueled bloodshed.

The Catholic Church also became strongly involved in helping the poor. The murders of high-profile members of the church brought the world’s attention to El Salvador. In 1980, Archbishop Romero, a fierce critic of the Salvadoran elite, was assassinated; following this, three nuns and one layperson were raped and murdered. The Reagan administration knew it had to respond to events that were raging out of control. However, instead of punishing the killers, the US rewarded the government because Reagan and Bush felt it represented the most reliable way to prevent any sort of communist takeover:

Washington quickly turned El Salvador into the biggest recipient of American military aid in Latin America. Seventy percent of the record $3.7 billion the United States pumped into El Salvador from 1981-1989 went for weapons and war assistance. As the number of weapons in the country escalated, so did the numbers of Salvadorans fleeing the devastation those weapons caused (135).

The two biggest industries in Guatemala were the United Fruit Company and the International Railways of Central America, which, combined, employed over 20,000 people. Both industries were zealously protected by Guatemalan President Jorge Ubico, whose policy of compelling the huge population of landless Mayans to work on government projects led to a popular uprising that forced him to resign.

The first democratic election in Guatemala led to the election of President Juan José Arévalo. This was followed by the election of President Jacopo Arbenz Guzmán, who continued to work toward a peaceful revolution. President Guzman issued Decree 900, which took uncultivated land from the rich and gave that acreage to the landless for farming. Under Decree 900, the rich would be compensated for the land. However, the United Fruit Company protested that they were not being paid enough. Two brothers, Secretary of State Dulles and CIA Director Dulles, worked to overthrow Arbenz’s rule. This coup resulted in terror, killings, sham elections, and more coups, eventually giving rise to strongman Carlos Arana Osorio becoming head of state. Osorio became known as the “‘Butcher of Zacapa’ for all the massacres that took place while he directed the counterinsurgency campaign in the late 1960s” (138).

All three countries—Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala—became engulfed in war and massacres that the United States was directly or indirectly responsible for. In 1999, “President Clinton publicly apologized to the Guatemalan people for past US support of repressive governments in the region” (147).

The Panama Canal is widely viewed as one of the great engineering marvels of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that the bulk of the canal workers were Black immigrants from the West Indies. The canal, which opened in 1914, created a much faster route from the Atlantic to the Pacific for businesses to deliver their products. Yet this benefit in trade had tremendous costs for the people of Panama. Not only was the canal created, but so was a canal zone, a roughly six-mile border on either side of the canal. This area was controlled by United States administrators, who were mainly former Southern farmers and created an entirely separate area within Panama that was rigidly divided by race. The white workers were on a “gold roll” and the Black workers were on a “silver roll,” which meant they got paid less and received far fewer benefits.

The landmark Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 ended segregation in US schools. However, this did not happen in the American-controlled canal zone of Panama. Rather than integrate their schools, the zone administrators changed the language in the West Indian schools to Spanish so that West Indians, who spoke English, would be forced to move out of the zone. This placed the responsibility for educating and housing the displaced West Indians on the Panamanian government.

By the 1970s, the US government was worried there could be a revolution similar to the one in Cuba over US control in the area, so it signed the Carter-Torrijos Treaty of 1977, in which the US agreed to withdraw gradually from the canal zone, giving control of the canal back to Panama.

Colombia was prosperous and peaceful until 1948 when a political assassination set off 10 years of civil war between the Liberals and the Conservatives. This conflict was known as La Violencia. Even after the violence ended in 1957, the country was permanently changed: “Violence […] emerged as an accepted Colombian way of settling disputes, not just in the countryside where the civil war had raged but in the cities and shantytowns created by the war’s refugees” (157).

Guerrilla groups grew powerful. During the late 1970s, the two main drug lords from Cali and Medellin began recruiting to dominate the world’s cocaine market. “A second low-intensity civil war broke out” that lasted for the next 35 years (158), which made Colombia’s murder rate skyrocket. The assassination of a political candidate in August 1989, which was ordered by infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar, made the government crackdown on the drug market. Many drug dealers fled to New York and assimilated among the immigrant communities there.

Gonzalez profiles two brothers, Héctor and Pedro Méndez. In 1953, they fled to Cali to escape La Violencia. In 1964, they immigrated to the United States and became prosperous. They set up classes to help other Colombian immigrants also succeed. However, a new kind of immigrant began infiltrating the community: criminals who were trying to escape the government crackdown on drugs. After Pedro Méndez accused one of these immigrants of being a criminal, he was shot. His death, along with the killing of a high-profile Colombian journalist, resulted in a police crackdown and the arrest of at least one of the killers.