Central America's Forgotten History
Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Restores the region’s fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness and connects the United States’ interventions and influence to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today.
At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in the United States. In Central America’s Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question “How did we get here?” Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories of US expansion and Indigenous and Central American struggles against inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial development policies that promote cultures of violence and forgetting without any accountability or restorative reparations.
Focusing on the valiant struggles for social and economic justice in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, Chomsky restores these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. Tracing the roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish conquest and bringing us to the present day, she concludes that the more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras lie in the wars and in the US interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s that set the stage for neoliberalism in Central America.
Chomsky also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and the impact of losing historical memory. Only by erasing history can we claim that Central American countries created their own poverty and violence, while the United States’ enjoyment and profit from their bananas, coffee, mining, clothing, and export of arms are simply unrelated curiosities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Chomsky (Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal) delivers a searing examination of how colonial oppression, Indigenous resistance, and political and economic turmoil have fueled migration from Central America to the U.S. She begins by sketching the Spanish conquests and colonial structures of the 17th and 18th centuries, then details how Central America's "long and tortured relationship" with the U.S. has been characterized by repeated interventions, including the CIA-backed overthrow of Guatemala's democratically elected president and institution of a military dictatorship in the 1950s. Chomsky also documents how the Reagan administration sought to suppress leftist uprisings in El Salvador and Guatemala and waged a "covert war" against Nicaragua's Sandinista government in the '80s, and examines how neoliberal economic policies lowered wages, weakened workplace and environmental regulations, and contributed to the rise of the drug trade and gang violence the'90s and 2000s. Delving into each country's specific experiences, Chomsky places recent migrant caravans from Central America in their historical context, and discusses how the act of remembering can reframe the immigration debate in the U.S. Though lay readers may find the deep dives into regional politics overwhelming, this is a persuasive and well-conceived reminder that the seeds of Central America's crises were sown by foreign powers.
