History for Central American is largely blank. The only way they can go on is to pretend none of it ever happened. Chomsky points out right off the top that to be a Central American today means to suppress both memory and the effects of the oppression.
The movements and their members never coalesced. And all the while, they were heavily taxed for the privilege.īy 1829, Simon Bolivar was already able to claim: “The United States seems destined by Providence to plague (Central) America with miseries in the name of Freedom.”Īll over Central America, small rebel movements took shape, all fighting the same fight, but usually alone. They had no rights, were pushed out of their lands and homes for the benefit of rich whites and mixed race Ladinos, and were slaughtered at will, all with total impunity. They both considered Mayans subhuman, just as Americans viewed their own native populations.
For immense profit, of course.īoth colonizers had a policy of eliminating the natives. With the implementation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, Americans began ousting the Spanish and proceeded to grind the countries of Central America into hellholes of poverty, violence, and chaos. The “discovery” of Central America was not an improvement for any of the natives. It is a story of murder, slaughter, torture and dispossession. It’s a horrifying, if comprehensive run through the descent of a once balanced society into violence, poverty and constant fear. In Aviva Chomsky’s Central America’s Forgotten History, the mistreatment of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua are all different, a cornucopia of tactics that have kept them all violent, vile and oppressive – just the way America wanted it. In the first 150 years, the Spanish oversaw a reduction in population from 5-6 million to just 600,000 by 1800. It began with the Spanish invaders, the reason Columbus Day is a day of mourning throughout the region. The history of Central America is the history of outside interference and destruction. 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, vegetables, clothing, and export of arms are simply unrelated curiosities.Ĭentral America's Forgotten History shows that if we want to create a more just world, we need to acknowledge the many layers of complicity and forgetting that underlie today's inequalities. She traces the roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish conquest and brings us to the present day, where she concludes that the more immediate roots of migration from the three Northern Triangle countries (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.Ĭhomsky also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and the impact of losing historical memory. In Central America's Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question How did we get here? She outlines how we often fail to remember the circumstances and ongoing effects of Central America's historical political strife, which is a direct result of colonial and neocolonial development policies and the cultures of violence and forgetting needed to implement them.Ĭhomsky expertly recounts Central Americans' valiant struggles for social and economic justice to restore these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. 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.Īt the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of asylum in the United States.
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