carldavidson – Page 3 – Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

‘This Is Much Bigger Than Us, Than Our Union, Even Than Our City’

Teachers, parents, and students picket outside City Hall in Los Angeles on Friday, January 18, 2019. (AP Photo / Damian Dovarganes)

How LA’s teachers joined forces with the community and won a landmark labor contract.

By Sarah Jaffe
The Nation

Jan 23, 2019 – On the morning of Friday January 18, the fifth and last full day of the United Teachers Los Angeles strike, some 2,000 parents and students stood hand in hand along Colfax Avenue, creating a chain that stretched nearly a mile, from North Hollywood High to Colfax Elementary to Walter Reed Middle School. They wore red, as they had all week, in solidarity with the educators, and they were jubilant—finally, after a week of very un-LA-like rainy weather, the sun was out. The mood was electric, more so even than when the strike had begun. Partly, it was due to the sunshine, but also to a sense that they were winning.

The parents had organized the action themselves on a Facebook group. Outside Colfax Elementary a parent was cooking—“Eggs for Egducators and Nurishment for Nurses”—on a grill beside a parked pickup truck. A small child darted up and snatched a piece of bacon from the griddle, to everyone’s laughter. Crystal Cruz, a parent with a fifth grader at Colfax and an eighth grader at Walter Reed, told me, “Not everyone can be a teacher. It takes a great deal of patience and fortitude. It takes love for someone else’s children. It takes a lot of resources and talent and time. It is a lot of energy to teach any number of kids in a class, but if you have got 25, that is one thing. If you have got 35, it is a whole other animal.”

Cruz had come out for the teachers, she said, because, “They deserve every respect. They also deserve the financial support. They deserve everything that they are asking for.”

On January 22nd, Cruz’s wishes for the teachers came true. After morning pickets that were joined by Los Angeles firefighters and still more community members, the UTLA held a press conference with Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) board superintendent, Austin Beutner, to announce that a tentative agreement had been reached to end the strike. The deal included a 6 percent raise for educators; a reduction in class sizes; a nurse in every school; more funding for librarians, counselors, and wraparound services; a 50 percent reduction in the amount of standardized testing; and more. The union also managed to beat back a two-tier health-care system, while the Board of Education agreed to pursue a cap on charter schools and additional state funding. And the mayor promised to endorse the Schools and Communities First statewide ballot initiative for 2020, which would reform California’s infamous Proposition 13, raising property taxes on corporations to raise money for schools and more.

The look on UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl’s face as he announced the contents of the agreement was that of a man who knows his side has won, though he was careful to note that no agreement was final until members got a chance to vote on it. “We are a democratic union,” he told the gathered reporters, explaining that the members would return to their school sites to read the contract and to vote on it using the same structures that had been built to get immediate feedback from the picket lines to union headquarters every day.

In the end, a supermajority of UTLA members voted to approve the agreement that Caputo-Pearl called “Not a narrow labor agreement, but a broad compact.” And indeed, the final deal touched not only on the narrow wages and benefits issues that are so often assumed to be the basis of labor struggles but also on the kinds of far-ranging social and racial justice concerns that have turned teachers’ unions into a full-fledged political movement.

UTLA won its demands after years of reform within the union and in the wake of unrest among teachers nationwide. But most important, the teachers won because of deep, solid community support, mutual organizing, and a sense of shared fate that brought many more people to the streets than there were teachers in the union—60,000 on the Friday before the marathon bargaining weekend that produced the contract. Crystal Cruz was one of these people, as was Amy Schur of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, or ACCE, one of many organizations that had worked side by side with the teachers in their struggle. “The greatest victory is the power we’ve built through labor and community uniting around a long-term economic, racial and social justice agenda and plan,” said Schur.

Cheyenne McLaren, a student at King/Drew Medical Magnet High and a member of Students Deserve, was another of these fired-up allies. She joined actions last week that ventured beyond the picket line, into the hills, and out to Santa Monica to visit the homes of school-board president Mónica García and superintendent Beutner. “We have a whole plan to get [García] to agree to our demands and see that we are not backing down,” McLaren said at the time. “A lot of people out here are angry.”

McLaren’s organization is part of an even larger group, the Reclaim Our Schools LA coalition, which brings together Students Deserve, ACCE and other community organizations, UTLA, and others to demand funding and support for the schools that serve their neighborhoods. It was Reclaim Our Schools that coordinated the vans and cars to bring over 100 members to the doorsteps of decision-makers like García and Beutner with letters of demands; when the two of them refused to answer their doors, the group held speak-outs on their doorsteps. Outside of Beutner’s gate in Pacific Palisades, the crowd sang “The community is calling” while holding electric candles, as if for a vigil, though the tone was more angry than sad.

“I found out that we had our nurse one day a week and I went to war!” one mother declared. “I have one biological child at that school and 588 adopted children at that school.”

It was that sense—shared by community members and teachers alike—that the children of LA’s public schools are all of their children that animated this strike and made it successful. As Peg Cagle, a math teacher at Reseda High School, said of the weeklong swirl of protest: “After decades of feeling invisible, the fact that you really feel like you are being heard, that your voice is rising above the fold, if you will—you have got a possibility that somehow, somebody, might be listening and somebody might actually pay attention.”

Solidarity doesn’t happen overnight. Despite the elegant—and seemingly effortless—choreography between educators, students, parents, community groups, and even local businesses, the display of community-labor force that rocked LA for more than a week was years in the making, and remarkable in both its breadth and depth. To Amy Schur, who has spent years working in “community-labor” partnerships, this fight “was an incredible example of a union going beyond the rhetoric of working with the community, and actually joining in coalition with parent and community groups as true partners in a long-term fight to save public education.” Because of that real partnership, she said, the victories at the bargaining table were shared by community as well as teachers.

I met Rosa Jimenez in the pouring rain on the fourth morning of the strike, outside of Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Koreatown, where she teaches history. She told me—as teachers danced on the picket line to “Proud Mary” and chanted, “We’re soaking wet and really cold! LA schools will not be sold!”—that “everyone is clear about why we’re here.” The organizing and preparation the union had engaged in for months had paid off in an understanding, she said, that, “This is much bigger than us, than our union, even our city. Those of us who work with low-income students of color, we see every day that our students need much more than what they get.”

Jimenez works closely with Reclaim Our Schools LA and with Students Deserve; she was with the students who spoke outside of Beutner’s home, and she was with allies from UNITE HERE when they organized a march from her school to a nearby hotel where the hotel workers were battling for a contract. The students in particular, she said, were inspired by Black Lives Matter’s divest/invest framework, which calls for resources to be taken from policing and prisons and put into schools and community services, and their demands were brought into the union’s bargaining and were won at the table: The union won funding from the district for an immigrant-defense fund, with a dedicated hotline and attorney, and a new program to end random searches in schools.

Those victories “seem little in the scope of things,” Jimenez said, but the district had claimed not long ago that the union could not bargain these issues at all and had even tried to get an injunction against them. “Then we ended up winning on these things. I think it shows the power we had behind us, the parent and student support.”

Jimenez teaches at a school that is seen as a model for the kind of community schools that UTLA and its allies have fought for. What that means, she said, is “teaching curriculum that is culturally relevant, student-centered, and that it is democratically run.” Parents, she said, are involved with decision-making, and students are active participants. The school is also bilingual. “We really have created a place where parents come in and they are with kids in the space until they have to go to class. A lot of parents volunteer.”

Being a community school includes being multicultural and anti-racist, she added. In the age of Trump, that, in turn, has meant considering what it would mean to be a sanctuary school, one that is free of police and ICE so students feel safe—many students, Jimenez said, join the school after leaving immigration detention—as well as a school that could be a hub for organizing in the community. The new contract provides for 30 more community schools like RFK, which Jimenez said was a key demand of Reclaim Our Schools and Students Deserve, and an alternative to the privately-run charters.

“I think it’s huge and it’s really going to change the conversation about what is possible in contract negotiations,” Jimenez said. “It is possible to take on these privatizing forces and it is possible to win and possible to change the narrative. More people are talking about what is at the root of the problems we have in the schools.”

Still, it would be an illusion to suggest that any of this was easy. The community alliances, the solidarity between teachers and students, the support of parents and families, and, of course, the victory—all of this took years of dedicated, patient organizing. And it required real sacrifice, above all by teachers who gave up their pay and risked their jobs to strike—and ultimately won the contract.

“I had this moment this week where I realized, ‘I am also doing this for myself as a worker, as a working-class person, as a single mom,’” Jimenez said, tears in her eyes. “This is actually not that easy for me. I am not getting paid. I am actually also sacrificing. It is okay to say, ‘This is also for me, too.’”

Sarah Jaffe is a fellow at Type Media Center and the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (Nation Books).

CHALLENGING U.S. IMPERIALISM IN LATIN AMERICA

Statement by the Peace and Solidarity Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism – December 2018

The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism condemns the November 27^th vote in the U.S. Senate to impose economic sanctions on Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act (NICA) mandates that the U.S. vote against loans and aid to Nicaragua from international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. The NICA Act was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2017, and after passage by unanimous consent in the Senate, it now awaits the signature of President Donald Trump. The NICA will impose significant cuts to infrastructure and social programs compounding the crisis caused by widespread destruction by U.S. funded oppositionists this spring and fall.

CCDS stands with organizations, faith leaders, solidarity groups and individuals who have denounced the U.S. government’s economic warfare. As with Venezuela and Cuba, the intent is to create a humanitarian crisis to undermine, destabilize and overthrow the democratically elected, socialist governments of Latin America in pursuit of an imperialist agenda – the so-called policy of “regime change.”Once again we see the U.S. government pursuing policies throughout the hemisphere and in the U.S. of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described 50 years ago – the “three pillars of evil” – white supremacy, militarism, and exploitation.

Troika of Tyranny

Trump administration National Security Advisor John Bolton boldly announced U.S. aims in a speech in Miami November 1^st:

“This Troika of Tyranny, this triangle of terror stretching from Havana to Caracas to Managua, is the cause of immense human suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere. The United States looks forward to watching each corner of the triangle fall…the Troika will crumble.” (11/1/18)

What is driving this “regime change” policy? The countries targeted have pursued policies aimed at the betterment of their citizens – free education and health care, eliminating extreme poverty, creating an inclusive society where women, minority and indigenous populations are equal, protecting the environment, and combatting the violent drug trade that has engulfed other countries of the region.

The people-oriented policies of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba are a direct challenge to the “neo-liberal” world order of free markets for capital, deregulation, austerity budgets, and elimination of worker and environmental protections in the pursuit of maximum profit and plunder of natural resources. Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela stand as examples to the world that there is an alternative to policies dictated by Wall Street and free market capitalism.

In Nicaragua, the violence that began in April 2018 was sparked by IMF demands to gut social security pensions in repayment of loans. When the FSLN government countered with a plan to make employers shoulder the burden, the business council refused and walked out of negotiations.

Oppositionist groups funded by the U.S. “aid” organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy seized on the moment of confusion and waged a social media-driven disinformation campaign that accused the government of making workers, not businesses, pay. The ensuing violence resulted in nearly 200 deaths, including several police, kidnappings, torture and destruction of public and private property.

In Venezuela, sanctions have been used against working people and the very poor who are most supportive of the Maduro government. Using the excuse that Venezuelans who have left the country pose a humanitarian crisis, the U.S. openly talks about plans for military intervention. Right wing governments of Colombia and Brazil are being urged to cooperate with the U.S.

The U.S. announced more sanctions on Cuba following an overwhelming UN vote of 189-2 on November 2nd to end the longest running economic embargo of any country in history. Only Israel sided with the U.S. Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called the embargo “a flagrant, massive and systematic violation of the human rights of Cuban men and women.” Estimates are over $1 trillion in lost economic activity since 1962.

The Larger Framework: Aims of U.S. Empire in the Western Hemisphere

With the collapse of Socialist Bloc countries and the dramatic shift from manufacturing to finance at the apex of the capitalist world, we have seen the coming of age of neo-liberal globalization. U.S. global hegemony has been increasingly challenged by China, India, and various formations of the Global South such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). In Latin America there has been a shift from U.S. domination of the region in trade, investments, and economic assistance to greater competition with China, Russia, and European countries.

The new government of Mexico headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) aims to divest itself of the neo-liberal economic model in favor of building its domestic economy, raising wages and living conditions that will end the forced migration of its citizens. In an inaugural address to the nation on December 1^st, the new president announced that “starting from now, we will carry out a peaceful, steady political transformation.” Promising a “change of our political system, he fiercely attacked free market, pro-trade policies have been “a disaster” for Mexico, resulting in low growth, rising income inequality and the migration of citizens out of the country.

Neo-liberal policies are coming under increasing pressure elsewhere in Latin America. Huge mass movements and labor-led strikes have protested IMF-imposed austerity measures in Argentina and Costa Rica. With rising challenges to its regional hegemony, the U.S. has countered its weakening economic position with an expansion of its military presence through dozens of military bases in Colombia and Argentina, and funding rightwing sectors of the capitalist class in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The people of Puerto Rico are challenging the Wall Street imposed regime of austerity and privatization following a debt crisis that led to bankruptcy.

Cuba is still celebrated as a model for progressive economic and political change, and, while suffering setbacks, the spirit of the 21st Century Bolivarian Revolution persists throughout the Western Hemisphere. President Barack Obama recognized the futility of regime change in Cuba and moved toward normalization of relations. Today, President Trump is returning to the use of military threats, supporting violent protests such as in Nicaragua, and imposing crippling economic sanctions to stimulate instability. In the case of Cuba, Trump seeks to reverse the economic and people-to-people ties that have been expanded in recent years. All of these policies constitute desperate efforts to reverse history to overcome the contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism and challenging China’s growing influence in the region. In sum, the Trump Administration is trying to overcome the United States’ loss of regional hegemony.

CCDS stands with people the world over in condemning U.S. government policies of aggression in pursuit of economic and political domination of the hemisphere. We reject interference in the internal affairs of other countries and work to redirect our tax dollars from militarism to living wage jobs for all, a Green New Deal, health care and education.

A Century of U.S. Intervention Created the Immigration Crisis

Those seeking asylum today inherited a series of crises that drove them to the border

Mark Tseng-Putterman

A national spotlight now shines on the border between the United States and Mexico, where heartbreaking images of Central American children being separated from their parents and held in cages demonstrate the consequences of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy” on unauthorized entry into the country, announced in May 2018. Under intense international scrutiny, Trump has now signed an executive order that will keep families detained at the border together, though it is unclear when the more than 2,300 children already separated from their guardians will be returned.

Trump has promised that keeping families together will not prevent his administration from maintaining “strong — very strong — borders,” making it abundantly clear that the crisis of mass detention and deportation at the border and throughout the U.S. is far from over. Meanwhile, Democratic rhetoric of inclusion, integration, and opportunity has failed to fundamentally question the logic of Republican calls for a strong border and the nation’s right to protect its sovereignty.

At the margins of the mainstream discursive stalemate over immigration lies over a century of historical U.S. intervention that politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle seem determined to silence. Since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 declared the U.S.’s right to exercise an “international police power” in Latin America, the U.S. has cut deep wounds throughout the region, leaving scars that will last for generations to come. This history of intervention is inextricable from the contemporary Central American crisis of internal and international displacement and migration.

The liberal rhetoric of inclusion and common humanity is insufficient: we must also acknowledge the role that a century of U.S.-backed military coups, corporate plundering, and neoliberal sapping of resources has played in the poverty, instability, and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States. For decades, U.S. policies of military intervention and economic neoliberalism have undermined democracy and stability in the region, creating vacuums of power in which drug cartels and paramilitary alliances have risen. In the past fifteen years alone, CAFTA-DR — a free trade agreement between the U.S. and five Central American countries as well as the Dominican Republic — has restructured the region’s economy and guaranteed economic dependence on the United States through massive trade imbalances and the influx of American agricultural and industrial goods that weaken domestic industries. Yet there are few connections being drawn between the weakening of Central American rural agricultural economies at the hands of CAFTA and the rise in migration from the region in the years since. In general, the U.S. takes no responsibility for the conditions that drive Central American migrants to the border.

U.S. empire thrives on amnesia. The Trump administration cannot remember what it said last week, let alone the actions of presidential administrations long gone that sowed the seeds of today’s immigration crisis. There can be no common-sense immigration “debate” that conveniently ignores the history of U.S. intervention in Central America. Insisting on American values of inclusion and integration only bolsters the very myth of American exceptionalism, a narrative that has erased this nation’s imperial pursuits for over a century.

As the British immigrant rights refrain goes, “We are here because you were there.” The adage holds no less true here and now. It’s time to insist that accepting Central American refugees is not just a matter of morality or American benevolence. Indeed, it might be better described as a matter of reparations.

El Salvador

1932: A peasant rebellion, led by Communist leader Farabundo Martí, challenges the authority of the government. 10,000 to 40,000 communist rebels, many indigenous, are systematically murdered by the regime of military leader Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the nation’s acting president. The United States and Great Britain, having bankrolled the nation’s economy and owning the majority of its export-oriented coffee plantations and railways, send naval support to quell the rebellion.

1944: Martínez is ousted by a bloodless popular revolution led by students. Within months, his party is reinstalled by a reactionary coup led by his former chief of police, Osmín Aguirre y Salinas, whose regime is legitimized by immediate recognition from the United States.

1960: A military-civilian junta promises free elections. President Eisenhower withholds recognition, fearing a leftist turn. The promise of democracy is broken when a right-wing countercoup seizes power months later. Dr. Fabio Castillo, a former president of the national university, would tell Congress that this coup was openly facilitated by the United States and that the U.S. had opposed the holding of free elections.

1980–1992: A civil war rages between the military-led government and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The Reagan administration, under its Cold War containment policy, offers significant military assistance to the authoritarian government, essentially running the war by 1983. The U.S. military trains key components of the Salvadoran forces, including the Atlacatl Battalion, the “pride of the United States military team in San Salvador.” The Atlacatl Battalion would go on to commit a civilian massacre in the village of El Mozote in 1981, killing at least 733 and as many as 1,000 unarmed civilians, including women and children. An estimated 80,000 are killed during the war, with the U.N. estimating that 85 percent of civilian deaths were committed by the Salvadoran military and death squads.

1984: Despite the raging civil war funded by the Reagan administration, a mere three percent of Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases in the U.S. are approved, as Reagan officials deny allegations of human rights violations in El Salvador and Guatemala and designate asylum seekers as “economic migrants.” A religious sanctuary movement in the United States defies the government by publicly sponsoring and sheltering asylum seekers. Meanwhile, the U.S. funnels $1.4 million to its favored political parties in El Salvador’s 1984 election.

1990: Congress passes legislation designating Salvadorans for Temporary Protected Status. In 2018, President Trump would end TPS status for the 200,000 Salvadorans living in the United States.

2006: El Salvador enters the Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), a neoliberal export-economy model that gives global multinationals increased influence over domestic trade and regulatory protections. Thousands of unionists, farmers, and informal economy workers protest the free trade deal’s implementation.

2014: The U.S. threatens to withhold almost $300 million worth of Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) development aid unless El Salvador ends any preferences for locally sourced corn and bean seeds under its Family Agriculture Plan.

2015: Under the tariff reduction model of CAFTA-DR, all U.S. industrial and commercial goods enter El Salvador duty free, creating impossible conditions for domestic industry to compete. As of 2016, the country had a negative trade balance of $4.18 billion.

Honduran soldiers operate a mortar for members of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division during a joint exercise, March 1988. (Photo: Department of Defense, NARA)

Honduras

1911: American entrepreneur Samuel Zemurray partners with the deposed Honduran President Manuel Bonilla and U.S. General Lee Christmas to launch a coup against President Miguel Dávila. After seizing several northern Honduran ports, Bonilla wins the Honduran 1911 presidential election.

1912: Bonilla rewards his corporate U.S. backers with concessions that grant natural resources and tax incentives to American companies, including Vaccaro Bros. and Co. (now Dole Food Company) and United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International). By 1914, U.S. banana interests would come to own one million acres of the nation’s best land — an ownership frequently insured through the deployment of U.S. military forces.

1975: The United Fruit Company ( rebranded as the United Brands Company) pays $1.25 million to a Honduran official, and is accused of bribing the government to support a reduction in banana export taxes.

1980s: In an attempt to curtail the influence of left-wing movements in Central America, the Reagan administration stations thousands of troops in Honduras to train Contra right-wing rebels in their guerrilla war against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. U.S. military aid reaches $77.5 million in 1984. Meanwhile, trade liberalization policies open Honduras to the interests of global capital and disrupt traditional forms of agriculture.

2005: Honduras becomes the second country to enter CAFTA, the free trade agreement with the U.S., leading to protests from unions and local farmers who fear being outcompeted by large-scale American producers. Rapidly, Honduras goes from being a net agricultural exporter to a net importer, leading to loss of jobs for small-scale farmers and increased rural migration.

2009: Left-leaning and democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, who pursued progressive policies such as raising the minimum wage and subsidizing public transportation, is exiled in a military coup. The coup is staged after Zelaya announces intentions to hold a referendum on the replacement of the 1982 constitution, which had been written during the end of the reign of U.S.-backed military dictator Policarpo Paz García. Honduran General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, a graduate of the U.S. Army training program known as the School of the Americas (nicknamed “School of Assassins”), leads the coup. The United States, under Hillary Clinton’s Department of State, refuses to join international calls for the “immediate and unconditional return” of Zelaya.

2017: Honduras enters an electoral crisis as thousands of protesters contestthe results of the recent presidential election, which many allege was rigged by the ruling party.

Guatemala

1920: President Manuel Estrada Cabrera, an ally to U.S. corporate interests who had granted several concessions to the United Fruit Company, is overthrown in a coup. The United States sends an armed force to ensure the new president remains amenable to U.S. corporate interests.

1947: President Juan José Arévalo’s self-proclaimed “worker’s government” enacts labor codes that give Guatemalan workers the right to unionize and demand pay raises for the first time. The United Fruit Company, as the largest employer and landowner in the country, lobbies the U.S. government for intervention.

1952: Newly-elected President Jacobo Árbenz issues the Agrarian Reform Law, which redistributes land to 500,000 landless — and largely indigenous — peasants.

1954: Fearing the Guatemalan government’s steps toward agrarian reform and under the influence of United Fruit propagandist Edward Bernays, President Eisenhower authorizes the CIA to overthrow democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, ending an unprecedented ten years of democratic rule in the country, colloquially known as the “ten years of spring.” In Árbenz’s place, the U.S. installs Carlos Castillo Armas, whose authoritarian government rolls back land reforms and cracks down on peasant and workers’ movements.

1965: The CIA issues Green Berets and other counterinsurgency advisors to aid the authoritarian government in its repression of left-wing movements recruiting peasants in the name of “struggle against the government and the landowners.” State Department counterinsurgency advisor Charles Maechling Jr. would later describe the U.S.’s “direct complicity” in Guatemalan war crimes, which he compared to the “methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”

1971: Amnesty International finds that 7,000 civilian dissidents have been “disappeared” under the government of U.S.-backed Carlos Arana, nicknamed “the butcher of Zacapa” for his brutality.

1981: The Guatemalan Army launches “Operation Ceniza” in response to a growing Marxist guerrilla movement. In the name of “counterattacks” and “retaliations” against guerrilla activities, entire villages are bombed and looted, and their residents executed, using high-grade military equipment received from the United States. The Reagan administration approves a $2 billion covert CIA program in Guatemala on top of the shipment of $19.5 million worth of military helicopters and $3.2 million worth of military jeeps and trucks to the Guatemalan army. By the mid-1980s, 150,000 civilians are killed in the war, with 250,000 refugees fleeing to Mexico. Military leaders and government officials would later be tried for the genocide of the Maya victims of military massacres.

1982: A second U.S.-backed military coup installs Efraín Ríos Montt as president. Montt is convicted of genocide in 2013 for trying to exterminate the indigenous Maya Ixil.

2006: Ten years after a U.N.-brokered peace deal and the resumption of democratic elections, Guatemala enters the CAFTA-DR free trade deal with the United States. Ninety-five percent of U.S. agricultural exports enterGuatemala duty free.

Author: carldavidson