Their 9-11's

By Nadrat Siddique

The majority of those in immigration detention are from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. What those in power—from the Trump administration to the liberal Left—fail to discuss or recognize is that starting from the 1980s (many would argue much earlier), the U.S. played a highly pernicious role in subverting the governments and economies of these countries. Their countries rendered effectively unlivable, it should come as no surprise that Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans make the dangerous and risky journey north, seeking asylum in the U.S. and other places. Far from incarcerating these indigents, the U.S. should be paying them reparations.

In Guatemala, the democratically-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown by a CIA coup in 1954, and the country was plunged into turmoil. That turmoil resulted in a string of U.S.-supported military dictators, the most prominent of whom were Efrain Rios Montt and Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores.

The U.S. actively supported Efrain Rios Montt, who came to power through a 1982 military coup. He learned counterinsurgency techniques from his U.S. handlers at Fort Gulick (Panama Canal Zone) and Fort Bragg (North Carolina). Under Rios Montt, the Guatemalan army with U.S. support, went on a rampage to wipe out rural support for left wing guerrillas. Rios Montt is widely believed to be responsible for the brutal murders up to 70,000 indigenous Mayans in what was known as a “scorched earth policy,” and was eventually put on trial in Guatemala and Spain.

In 2013, Rios Montt received an 80-year sentence for crimes which included massacres in fifteen Ixil Maya villages in which 1,771 unarmed men, women, and children were killed. However, the conviction was overturned.

Rios Montt’s successor, Brigadier General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, came to power in 1983, and was also supported by the United States, He continued Rios Montt’s policies. In 2011, Mejia Victores was put to trial in Guatemala on war crimes charges stemming from the killings of thousands of indigenous Guatemalans. But—he was declared unfit to stand trial as the result of a stroke.

All told, 200,000 Guatemalans, the majority of them Mayan Indians, were killed between 1960-1996. According to exhaustive investigations by the U.N. and the Catholic Church—most of the dead were civilians who were killed by the Guatemalan Army. Of these, 132,000 died between 1978-1983, a period of undeniable U.S. involvement in Guatemala. The U.S. role in the destruction of Guatemalan society was never brought to bear.

In Honduras, a literal banana republic existed for decades. Starting in the late 19^th century, Cuyamel Fruit Company (an American company, despite the name), United Fruit, and Standard Fruit (which later become Dole) effectively ran the country. They were granted land and exemptions from tax liability and other legal obligations by the Honduran government. During this period, the U.S. repeatedly sent troops to Honduras, presumably to protect the interests of U.S. fruit corporations. U.S. troops landed in the banana republic in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925.

Following two decades of military rule, a populist physician named José Ramón Adolfo Villeda Morales came to power. He ruled from 1957 – 1963, and instrumented agrarian reform which included the transfer of land to poor peasants. He modernized Honduras, and established the country’s public education, public health, and social security systems. Villeda Morales announced plans to expropriate lands from United Fruit. But before he could do this, he was deposed in a 1963 military coup which returned the country to military rule. That military rule lasted for another two decades.

Honduras has long been used as a launch pad by the U.S. for military incursions and interventions in the region. For instance, the deposing of the democratically-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 was conducted from Honduran soil. The Nicaraguan Contras (counterrevolutionaries fighting the democratically-elected Nicaraguan government) received support from the U.S. military headquartered in Honduras. The Contras launched a campaign of terror in the Nicaraguan countryside, subjecting Nicaraguan peasants to arson, rape, murder, and other horrific crimes meant to deflate their support for the Nicaraguan government. In the course of the Contra war—a war fueled and funded by the U.S.—30,000 Nicaraguans were killed. The economies of both Nicaragua and Honduras were severely damaged as a result of the U.S. intervention.

Similarly, Honduras was used to send U.S. support to the Salvadoran military dictatorship in the 1980s.

The U.S. built the Soto Cano Air Base in the Honduran town of Palmerola in the early 1980s to facilitate these operations and others. Approximately 500 – 600 U.S. troops are housed there. Additionally, the U.S. military's Joint Task Force Bravo is headquartered at Soto Cano.

In El Salvador, the U.S. supported a repressive right-wing regime which was being challenged by leftist guerrillas. Under Reagan, the U.S. sent hundreds of millions of dollars of military and economic aid to El Salvador—more than to any other country except Israel and Egypt. At the time, the Salvadoran government frequently used death squads and paramilitaries to carry out their repression.

These death squads killed a popular Archbishop, Oscar Romero. They raped, then murdered four American nuns who were in El Salvador. In the tiny mountain town of El Mozote, a U.S.-trained Salvadoran army unit, called the Atlacatl Battalion, conducted a massacre of Salvadoran peasants, murdering around 1,200 men, women, and children.

The U.S. not only continued to fund the Salvadoran regime, but actively assisted in the cover-up of these atrocities. By the time the civil war ended in 1992, 75,000 Salvadorans, mostly civilians, had been killed with the help of U.S. tax dollars.

And yet, the U.S. has the gall to incarcerate and prosecute the people fleeing from the fallout of these dirty wars. And to take their children from them when they seek asylum here. If that is not hubris, I don't know what is.

© 2018 Nadrat Siddique