You don’t have to travel far through the rain forests and under the volcanoes lining the Pan American Highway to see the ashes of U.S. foreign policy in Central America.
Cross into Guatemala and within minutes you’ll be waved over at the first of several checkpoints, where uniformed men with hard faces and machine guns minutely examine your credentials and auto permits.
Climb the hill to San Salvador’s Jesuit University of Central America, where in 1989 U.S.-trained commandos massacred six priests, and listen to human rights activist Benjamin Cuellar. He’ll tell how two thugs invaded his office last October, used a death-squad method to tie his fingers together with shoelaces and fled with his computer after being spooked by campus police.
In the arid desert of western Honduras, a mechanic will talk of blatant intimidation by highway police or army patrols seeking bribes to overlook real or imaginary infractions. In Tegucigalpa, the capital, the talk is about exhumed victims and reports that hundreds of Hondurans were abducted, tortured and killed by authorities supported and trained by the CIA in the 1980s. The U.S. presence was so pervasive that American soldiers dubbed the place “The USS Honduras.”
A decade ago Central America was a linchpin of U.S. foreign policy; today the region lies in the junkyard of Washington’s global priorities. Generous economic and military aid programs that once sustained brutal regimes or friendly rebels have all but dried up.
In the 1980s Central America fairly dominated the front pages of American newspapers and gobbled up chunks of television time, but relatively little on this forgotten area pops up now.
Central America is no longer a national issue. As with Vietnam, public memories of the fighting have become hazy.
But remembered or not, signs of compounding social and economic woes are everywhere.
Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador are threatened by crime, hunger, unemployment and breakdowns of civil order. Homicides, kidnappings and robberies plague Guatemala and El Salvador. Uniformed guards armed with shotguns stand vigil in the aisles of grocery stores and amid the pumps in modern gas stations. Other guards in Guatemala ride shotgun against bandits in Coke and Pepsi delivery trucks.
An estimated 9,000 violent deaths occurred in El Salvador in 1994, and 8,500 were listed in 1995, said Douglass W. Cassel Jr., executive director of DePaul University’s International Human Rights Law Institute. Cassel noted that if the killings continue, the crime war will be even bloodier than the nation’s 12-year civil war.
In Guatemala last year, the army began patrolling the streets of the capital, where tortured and bullet-riddled bodies were turning up with alarming frequency, reminiscent of the bloodiest days in the early 1980s.
Nicaragua remains the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, trailing Haiti. Street crime in Managua, particularly offenses committed by military personnel, has soared this year, and vigilantes are said to have taken over parts of the countryside.
Vast numbers of soldiers and rebels mustered out in peace agreements remain unemployed. Some former soldiers and their old enemies have formed bandit gangs that stalk the Pan American Highway near San Miguel.
Then there’s the public frustration over the military and guerrilla bosses who escaped punishment for human rights abuses.
Ominously, some Americans like Peter Hakim, director of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank, believe the crisis could re-emerge in five or 10 years.
All of this is happening at a time when American aid to the Third World has plunged, a development that has left some Americans bitter over forgotten moral obligations.
Rev. Robert F. Drinan, the former Massachusetts congressman ordered out of politics by the pope, said the U.S. has dropped its obligation to help the region.
“We failed . . . we walked away,” Drinan said. “This was the Reagan (administration) obsession that the communists were taking over El Salvador. That wasn’t true at all. The Reagan people put $3.5 billion with the (El Salvador) fascists, and they killed 73,000 people.”
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it didn’t take advanced calculus to understand why President Ronald Reagan chose to support “friendlies” despite their known brutality.
It was believed that a communist virus gripping Cuba and that the ranks of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas was catching hold in El Salvador and had begun to creep northward toward Mexico and Texas.
Reagan’s men vowed to draw the line in El Salvador against the Evil Empire and within the decade $10 billion had been sent southward to buy loyalties and hone battalions willing to battle “the Reds” as U.S. surrogates.
The idea was to bleed anything Made in Moscow to death, but not with U.S. troops.
The method helped frustrate Moscow’s dream but wreaked havoc on Central American populations and economies. While the U.S. didn’t start the wars, it did enhance their furor by increasing killing efficiency in El Salvador and Guatemala and by backing the deadly contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas from bases in Honduras.
Now millions of people are displaced, and thousands cram orphanages.
In short, the region is a mess, despite signs of economic improvement here and there.
Ask the State Department or United Nations, and they’d tell you a different story. In El Salvador, for instance, both would tell of huge success in the installation of a democratic government through open and free elections. However, get to know some Salvadorans, and they might talk of their belief that the presidential election two years ago was won by the Right through fraud and inefficiency.
Then the World Bank would show its macroeconomics charts painting El Salvador as one of the fastest-growing economies in Latin America.
“But tell that to the average Salvadoran,” Cassel said recently over WBEZ radio’s “World View with Jerome McDonnell.”
“More than 60 percent of Salvadorans are poor. More than 40 percent are unemployed. Yet the government, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, recently increased sales taxes for everyone, and dismissed 15,000 public sector employees. So who benefits from overall economic growth?”
That one’s easy: The Salvadoran rich.
