Holocaust Remembrance Conference Genocide in Central America
March 27, 2006Harry Targ , Coordinator, Committee on Peace Studies, Purdue University
At least 2/3 of the population occupying what is now called Central America and Mexico died at the hands of blood thirsty Spanish soldiers or through the epidemic diseases they brought. As Susanne Jonas describes the impacts of colonial conquest on Central America: “The conquest itself represented the violent clash of two socioeconomic systems and two cultures: the forcible ‘integration’ of the Indians into “Western civilization” was an unmitigated calamity for them of genocidal proportions.”
Central America , usually defined as including Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala consists of 170,000 square miles of mountains, farm land and forests and some 33 million people overwhelmingly poor. The region’s history can be analytically divided into a stage of Pre-Colombian Mayan civilization followed by a long and brutal reign of conquest and occupation by Spain from 1521 to 1821. Then, with independence, economic penetration and military meddling by Great Britain in the 19th century was followed in the 20th century by U.S. economic penetration and military domination. From time to time military interventions and occupation involved extended periods. Along with military domination, the colonial heritage and its aftermath included the establishment of single crop economies; sugar, coffee, bananas, or other agricultural commodities for export. The basic structure today of Central American societies: tiny economic elites and masses of impoverished peasants was established in the 16th century..
During the latter years of Spanish colonialism a local economic and political elite of Spanish heritage but born in Central America arose to challenge Spanish hegemony. After Spain was forced to relinquish its control over the region, the elite began to establish its control over key institutions: church, state, and most importantly landholdings. They authorized the construction of military forces to defend themselves from peasant rebellion. Military dictatorships defending economic elite rule became the pattern throughout the region, even with the façade of elections and parliamentary democracy.
By the dawn of the twentieth century this economic elite, often in collaboration with military officers, began to collaborate with U.S. government and business interests. Usually they served as junior partners to foreign capital, but occasionally indigenous capitalists sought to build Central American economies independently from the U.S. As popular resistance to foreign intervention rose from time to time or when economic elites challenged foreign economic hegemony, the U.S. sent troops to put compliant elites back in power. United States troops intervened in Central American and Caribbean countries about 30 times between 1900 and 1930. Sometimes these troops would stay for years. In the Cold War period, independent and nationalist leaders were labeled as “communist” justifying interventions or covert operations to overthrow the offenders. In 1954, for example President Jacob Arbenz was overthrown in a U.S. organized military operation that ended the only 10 years of Guatemalan democracy that country ever had. After the Arbenz overthrow, civil war ensued in the country for almost 40 years.
Human rights in Central America were most dramatically violated when the Spanish first arrived and during the period of military dictatorship from the 1930s to the 1990s. During the first 100 years of Spanish rule indigenous peoples were nearly exterminated. Of the five countries, their descendents only survive in great numbers in Guatemala yet they remain discriminated against all across the isthmus.
While democracies and respect for human rights were never honored in Central American history, brutal military dictatorships which committed mass murder of local populations were a particular feature of the historical landscape between the 1930s and the 1990s and new forms of violence continue. During the days of the death squads and military dictatorships, governmental and landowning elites would order the killing of dissidents with impunity; such as the case of the 33,000 peasants massacred in El Salvador in 1933, 150,000 peasants who were slaughtered during the Guatemalan civil war between 1954 and 1996, the 70,000 killed by the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1970s, the 50,000 Nicaraguans who lost their lives in the US supported Contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, or the 75,000 Salvadorans killed in the 1980s.
At various times this direct violence against people in Latin America assumed genocidal proportions. The bloodshed was more visible than the structural violence that pervaded four of the five Central American societies. Structural violence refers to the institutionalization of gross economic inequalities in wealth, income, and political power, with those at the base living lives of poverty, joblessness, malnutrition, illiteracy, ill health. In four of the five Central American countries (Costa Rica is the exception) ¾ of the population have lived in poverty. Tiny percentages of the population own most of the land and only small numbers of peasant farmers still engage in lucrative coffee, sugar, and other agricultural production. With the rise of light assembly plants in free trade zones, some workers earn wages, but much lower than U.S. workers. For example, in Honduras workers earn 90 cents an hour. Unemployment rates range from 40 to 75 percent as peasants are forced off the land because they cannot produce crops that are profitable in the face of competition from subsidized products from the United States or Europe.
An economic report at the dawn of the new century summarized the dilemma for Guatemalans: “… just 2% of the population owns 80% of the land. …three-quarters of Guatemalans live in poverty, with nearly 60% of the population unable to meet minimal nutritional needs. Eighty-five percent of children under age five experience malnourishment to so some degree, and stunted growth affects up to 95% of non-Spanish speaking children in some regions of the country.”
Compare this report about the late 1990s with Susanne Jonas’ comments about pre-Columbian Guatemalan civilization: “At no time before the conquest did the Indians suffer systematic material deprivation that has characterized Guatemala since 1524. Malnutrition was not a chronic condition of the Indian population, as it is today. Prior to 1524, Guatemala was a primarily agricultural society in which land was cultivated both individually and communally to produce food and other necessities. Guatemalan society was not integrated on a subordinate basis into a world market that determined its production priorities and systematically channeled its surplus into the pockets of foreign ruling classes. In this sense, underdevelopment as we know it today did not exist in Guatemala prior to 1524, but is the direct outcome of the conquest and the integration of Guatemala into an expanding world capitalist system.”
In sum, Central America, and Guatemala is a paradigmatic case, has been victimized for 400 years by direct violence: extermination by colonial armies, attack and death at the hands of U.S. armies, brutalization by military governments supplemented by private armies or death squads, and in addition in the years since the end of civil wars by growing gang violence and violence against women. Also, Central America has experienced 400 years of structural violence: grotesque economic inequality, malnutrition, joblessness, homelessness, illiteracy, and disease.
The antidote to this 400 year history for us should be greater solidarity with human rights and anti-globalization activists from within the region who defy all odds to build a more humane society than their history has dictated.