Central America’s Forgotten History Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration

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.

Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University. The author of several books including Undocumented and "They Take Our Jobs!", Chomsky has been active in the Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights movements for over thirty years. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

PART I: A CRISIS WITH DEEP ROOTS

CHAPTER 1
Invisibility and Forgetting

CHAPTER 2
Making the United States, Making Central America: Bananas, Coffee, Savages, and Bandits

CHAPTER 3
The Cold War, Ten Years of Spring, and the Cuban Revolution

PART II: REVOLUTION IN THE 1970 AND ’80S

CHAPTER 4
Guatemala: Reform, Revolution, and Genocide

CHAPTER 5
Nicaragua: “Luchamos contra el yanqui, enemigo de la humanidad”

CHAPTER 6
El Salvador: Si Nicaragua Venció, ¡El Salvador Vencerá!

CHAPTER 7
Honduras: Staging Ground for War and Reaganomics

CHAPTER 8
Central America Solidarity in the United States

PART III: KILLING HOPE

CHAPTER 9
Peace Treaties and Neoliberalism

CHAPTER 10
Migration

CONCLUSION
Trump’s Border War

Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Index