Starting at the beginning — how did Spanish colonialism, and later the expanding imperial colossus to the north, help local elites establish these extremely unequal, highly oppressive economic and political structures across Central America? These systems, organized around brutally authoritarian forms of labor exploitation and political repression, enriched an extremely tiny oligarchical minority. They prioritized exports above all else — coffee and bananas. How did these orders take shape, both in a cohesive way and also unevenly across Central America?

My sense of the story of Central America really begins with the imposition of Spanish colonialism and, like you said, the extractive economies around gold, silver, indigo, and cacao that utilize the poor and the indigenous peoples of Central America as their labor force.

This creates not only a stratification around who’s exploiting capital and who’s being exploited but also creates a sort of racial caste system that sustains and racializes that inequality. And so this system of colonial development that prioritized the metropole — which, in this case, was Spain and Portugal for Brazil — left Central America with a heavily underdeveloped economy and a reliance on this narrow range of export commodities, of which bananas and coffee become the most lasting cash crop for the region.

After the colonial period, these stratifications remain in place. They’re sedimented and imprinted onto the countries of Central America that will emerge in the early nineteenth century as bona fide nation-states. But throughout the four hundred years following the colonial encounter, [what exists] is a labor regime that leaves out the majorities of Central American populations in order to engorge the appetites of a very narrow elite — people who are Spaniards by descent, with a white complexion.

This reinforced patterns of inequality and exploitation that become very binary throughout the history of Central America — and that get reproduced when nation-states and republics emerge — which cements those inequalities in very strict ways, preventing economic mobility. An oligarchy that descends directly from these huge landowners and intermarriages over generations also comes into formation.

Brazilian theorist and revolutionary Ruy Mauro Marini’s notion of dependency is maybe instructive here. Central American economies were inserted into the world market as agro-exporters well before independence. Marini argues that this kind of export-driven production creates a rupture in the cycle of capital because commodities are being produced to be realized abroad rather than for domestic consumption. This has serious implications for workers’ quality of life and conditions of social reproduction, to say the least.

The resultant inequality, which is highly racialized, also necessitates violent forms of exploitation and authoritarian regimes to sustain itself. Marini’s controversial but ambitious superexploitation thesis basically posits that Latin American capitalists resorted to paying their workers below the value of their labor to compensate for their losses in the global market, where they traded low-productivity raw materials for high-productivity industrial goods. This is one way of thinking about how it’s possible to sustain miserable conditions for vast segments of the population — through the existence of large labor reserves. These brutal conditions of labor exploitation require high amounts of coercion and state violence to be reproduced over time.

The history of US military and economic intervention in the region is long, extensive, and constant. It stretches back to 1894 in Nicaragua, 1895 in Panama, 1903 in Honduras, 1920 in Guatemala, 1921 in Costa Rica, and 1932 in El Salvador. And it goes back even further than that. William Walker was a so-called filibuster, a private US citizen mercenary inspired by Manifest Destiny, who invaded Nicaragua in 1865 to intervene on one side of a civil war but ultimately made himself president until he was ousted by a Costa Rica–led Central American military force.

How did US power shape the regional order in these earliest years, including in terms of these filibuster campaigns — these efforts to expand Anglo-settler-colonial empire to Central America?

Walker is really a starting point for how empire operated in Central America. He laid the ground for what would follow — paving the way for the United Fruit Company, the construction of the Panama Canal to be built, and the idea among US elites, that they can literally invade and transform these political systems to suit the whims of private capital.

Central America has always been, for the United States, a site of probing the US frontier and developing and piloting different imperial projects. I think we can see that to some degree throughout the course of these multiple and myriad invasions that begin very early on. Even before World War II, the US was contesting European imperial power in the region. overtaking the British and the Germans, well after Spain had retreated from these newly independent republics.

In this way, Central America is always, from the beginning, US facing – at least in terms of its independent constitution — in a way that isn’t quite the case for South America. And this is significant for a lot of the ways that the region’s political economy develops.

Walker wasn’t just a precursor to US empire — he was also a model for the kind of private-citizen adventure capitalism that we’ll see later on in Central America. This is something we still see today: private actors treating Central America as a kind of blank slate for their ambitions, forming private armies and militias, brokering deals with local elites.

Walker is an early example of this — especially when we think about the ways that he attempted to institute slavery in Nicaragua, which was sort of unheard of.

To make explicit some of the connections that Jorge is drawing out, Central America is continually the site of these anarcho-capitalist enclaves and just crazy libertarian adventures.

The idea that the US state and Americans generally could imagine Central America as an extension, either directly or indirectly, of Anglo-settler empire is really standard operating procedure already in the nineteenth century. This is happening after the Texas Revolution, which is essentially a filibuster operation itself, and the US seizure of the northern half of Mexico.

At the same time, Nicaragua was hugely important as a transit point for the California gold rush. There’s no defined end point to what the expanding US empire is going to look like either formally or informally.

Exactly. Walker embodies Manifest Destiny in a single person. You talked about the Texas Revolution — one of Walker’s first filibuster missions is in Sonora, Mexico. He’s doing these kinds of things early on, but what was really clear is that part of the project of the Anglo-settler empire is to modernize backward Central America. That’s precisely what these emboldened private citizens and militiamen think that they are bringing about — that they’re “civilizing” Central America.

This unequal dynamic between the United States and Central America, which is still ongoing, starts here but gets replayed over and over with Central American people as collateral damage.

Just as Central America is constitutive of these practices of US empire, it also becomes constitutive of certain kinds of anti-imperialist practice and resistance — and this is true for the rest of the Caribbean for the same reasons — such that popular resistance is very much constituted in this anti-imperialist key and this anti-imperialist language that has really deep roots.

It’s no coincidence that Augusto Sandino cut his teeth fighting the US invasion and occupation of Nicaragua, and the Sandinistas — the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front)  — subsequently took their name from him. Similarly Farabundo Martí, who cut his teeth fighting alongside Sandino in Nicaragua, is to become the namesake of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) in El Salvador in the 1980s.

Jorge, you mentioned this civilizing or modernizing discourse that animates Americans like Walker. It also holds some appeal to Central American elites at that time. Walker is invited into the civil war by liberals. Before we move on, can you both paint a little bit of a picture of what formal politics in the mid- and late nineteenth century looks like? What exactly was this conservative-liberal divide all about?

At this point, conservatives and liberals are both nationalists to some degree, and they weren’t necessarily that different from each other. These were mostly elite feuds — clan rivalries — focused on expanding family business and consolidating power. They’re both tied to the Catholic Church, the conservatives especially.

What is really being played out during the Walker episode — and later during US occupations in places like Nicaragua — is that the conservatives were the faction who were the most fervent about separatism from the United States. They’re the ones who actually believe in a kind of specific national destiny. They’re conservative through the politics of Nicaragua. Whereas the liberals have the sense that they can manage the imperial relationship with the colossus to the north. They see the promise in a relationship with the United States for modernization, for the development of infrastructure, for expanding the plantation economy.

These ideological differences aren’t that different at this point — except for those very peculiar, and what would be very determining, moments of opening doors to people like Walker to accelerate this modernization project. Conservatives preferred a reformist, slower approach.

What did US military intervention in the region look like in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? And how does that all relate to the growing economic importance in Central America of coffee and bananas, operations run by giant corporations like the United Fruit Company?

By 1899, with the founding of United Fruit Company in Boston and the occupation of places like Nicaragua, these two interests began to converge. The US military is involved in stimulating infrastructure projects — there’s a whole debate over whether to build a canal in Nicaragua or a Panama Canal, all geared toward servicing US capital by shortening trade routes.

At the same time, the United Fruit Company was rapidly growing into a sprawling empire, and it relied heavily on the presence of the US military across Central America and the Caribbean. The military effectively acted as United Fruit’s private army, pressuring local governments, collaborating with national militaries, creating the conditions for US capital to move in. It was a straightforward arrangement: we build you this bridge, you sell us this land.

Throughout the first part of the twentieth century, this pattern played out repeatedly. The US military would intervene first and United Fruit would follow, expanding its operations. You see this from the Dominican Republic to Nicaragua to Panama to some parts of Costa Rica to Guatemala and El Salvador. But Honduras was the example par excellence of the banana republic.

Honduras became the model for how the United Fruit Company, side by side with the US military, remakes the state in order to serve capital interests. By this point, many figures in the US political class are both involved with the US government and on the boards of these huge corporations — which will then become a huge part of the economic productivity of these countries, wielding an outsize influence on the politics of those places.

In this period, we can start to see how the region’s uneven development is shaping different political and economic outcomes. In more sparsely populated countries like Honduras, the United States is able to come in and establish a firm grip over the state. This is less true in places like El Salvador or Guatemala, where the local oligarchies are much stronger and more politically and economically coherent. This uneven regional development created a lot of tensions between these newly independent republics.

How did the US simultaneously help break Panama off into an independent country and establish control over the then-still-unfinished Panama canal? And even more dramatically, how did it establish sovereignty over the entire Panama Canal zone, which for the rest of the century would serve as a giant base of US military and economic power across the region?

Panama’s secession from Colombia really highlights the contradictions of the United States’ influence in the region. Panama as an independent country wouldn’t exist without US support for the rebellion against Bogotá. That rebellion was driven by Panamanian elites who wanted to move forward with a canal treaty that Colombia had rejected.

In that sense, Panama as a country was midwived by the United States. Then building the canal in the early twentieth century not only secures US control over that man-made waterway but also left an incredible cultural impact on Panamanian society by establishing the Canal Zone that was essentially run as US territory.

The canal is what enshrines the region’s geopolitical, economic, and logistical importance. Its commercial infrastructure really raises the stakes of political disputes in the region. The canal becomes critical to both the interests of US capital as well as the military on both sides of the continent.

Let’s move on to the early-twentieth-century revolts in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Hilary, you mentioned earlier that the major Nicaraguan and Salvadoran revolutionary movements of the late twentieth century took their names from these uprisings. How did these armed struggles emerge? And how did they shape El Salvador’s oligarchical order and Nicaragua’s Somoza family dictatorship in reaction? What was their revolutionary legacy for the FSLN and FMLN?

It’s hard to overstate how formative these experiences are, but they are also distinct, even though they share really interesting historical overlaps. Sandino’s struggle in Nicaragua is fundamentally a nationalist, anti-imperialist insurgency — he is fighting the US occupations. This fight attracted regional solidarity, including from actors like Farabundo Martí, who traveled to Nicaragua to fight alongside him.

The 1932 insurgency in El Salvador, on the other hand, is more of a response to the conjuncture of massive economic crises in the wake of the 1929 market crash and the Great Depression. Coffee prices drop, and conditions of life for the vast majority of mostly indigenous peasant workers — who are harvesting and planting coffee on these plantations, especially in the west of El Salvador – become entirely untenable.

This conjuncture, along with Communist Party efforts to lead an uprising, is what results in an insurrection, which is especially concentrated in Western El Salvador. The government met it with genocidal violence.

So while we’re talking about different kinds of popular insurrections responding to different conditions, they were both shaped by worsening material realities — dictatorial repression, state violence, and economic realities that made survival impossible for the working majorities.

I think the legacy of the Sandino uprising in Nicaragua is one of enduring national pride, whereas the legacy of La Matanza in El Salvador is quite different. It results in a suppression of indigenous identity expression and official negation of the existence of indigeneity in the country. It installs a deep anti-communist creed, especially among the military and oligarchy, that persists throughout the rest of the century.

It’s worth taking a moment to sit with the scale of the repression with which the uprising in 1932 in El Salvador was met. We’re talking about tens of thousands of people slaughtered. The Communist Party leadership, including Martí, were all executed. And this was in a country with a very small population.

The way La Matanza was enshrined in official memory has a lot of resonances with what happens in the post-civil-war period. The state constructed a paternalistic narrative — on the one hand, demonizing indigeneity, but on the other, portraying indigenous people as these innocent victims manipulated by “evil communists.”

This revisionist history painted the population as caught in a crossfire, not as active participants in their own struggle. That same narrative gets recapitulated in postwar memories in places like Guatemala, but also in the far-right discourse that takes new shape today under Nayib Bukele, for example, in El Salvador.

In 1954, the United States rendered Guatemala a laboratory for a new postwar global phase of empire when the CIA overthrew democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz for daring to nationalize unused land owned by the United Fruit Company. The coup in Guatemala was the third carried out by the United States as it emerged as a global superpower after World War II, following coups in Syria and Iran.

Before we get to the coup, though, what sort of moderate social democratic government were Árbenz and his predecessor, Juan José Arévalo, attempting to build in Guatemala? Árbenz had been part of a movement that overthrew the dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944. I want to focus on this period before we get to the coup — on what these attempts at reform in Guatemala and elsewhere looked like. In the decades that followed, it would become absolutely clear that reform was impossible and that armed revolutionary confrontation was the only answer to these brutal militarist regimes protecting the power of a tiny wealthy elite. So what did this 1944 revolution and its government look like?

It’s important to remember that in the 1940s, the United States was tremendously distracted with World War II, and the Cold War had yet to officially begin. That created an opening for social democratic projects with a lot of Communist Party participation and influence in the region. This wasn’t just in Guatemala but also, very significantly, in Costa Rica.

These are standard social democratic programs in some ways — land reform, social security, public infrastructure, basic labor regulations. But these reforms are devastating to the accumulation regimes that have dominated the region. At the same time, these are also reforms that are understood as necessary to advance national industrialization.

In the wake of the Great Depression, commodity prices didn’t really recover, and these tiny economies are really struggling to find a way to remain economically solvent and viable. Elsewhere in Latin America, countries were turning to industrialization through import substitution. More formal efforts in that direction emerge in the 1950s and ’60s in Central America, but these early social democratic reformist projects are also part of broader national developmentalist projects being advanced in South America through agencies like ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean).

One of the things that was part of this democratic spring in Guatemala was the push for land reform — not just to help subsistence farmers but to redistribute large tracts of unused land owned by corporations and wealthy landowners. Another reform was the legalization of the Communist Party on the ballot line, which had previously been barred from electoral politics. This was all part of an effort to open up the political system in a way that threatened oligarchic interests.

This period, from Ubico’s dictatorship to Arevalo and Árbenz, was brief, but it terrified the Guatemalan oligarchy — so much so that it led to the coup in 1954.

At the same time, from 1910 to 1940, we see nationalization and democratic experiments in Mexico — such as the expansion of infrastructure in Mexico City. Guatemala looked to that model to break the oligarchic deadlock — where a handful of elites controlled the economy and political system. But the breaking point came when these reforms touched the most sacred of landholdings, those tied to the United Fruit Company.

Árbenz himself is kind of a strange character to be considered a transformative agent of Guatemalan society. He rose through Guatemala’s military ranks and wasn’t an obvious revolutionary. Yet he and Arévalo, who once called himself a “spiritual socialist,” were seen as such a threat that the oligarchy and the United States reacted decisively. What they were trying to do was no different than a kind of New Deal approach to remaking Guatemalan society, but it was enough of a challenge to the status quo to provoke a major backlash.

Árbenz’s case reflects a broader regional pattern — the military’s decisive role in shaping national politics. Throughout the twentieth century, the military was mostly a reactive and conservative force but at times, because of its monopoly on violence, it could be an agent of transformation. The military had an incredible impact in the making of modern Central America too.

Certainly the 1954 coup renders Guatemala a laboratory, but it also renders Honduras a laboratory. Honduras became the CIA’s launching pad for regime change, much like it would later become the staging ground for the Contra war in the 1980s. It’s no coincidence that in 1954, Honduras signed a really significant military agreement with the United States that essentially turned the country into a giant US military base.

How much of this coup has to do with the United States having been distracted in World War II? And to what extent is a real substantial policy change underway from FDR’s Good Neighbor policy to Harry Truman’s Cold War?

This is a subject of great debate in Central America, often framed around a comparison: Why was Costa Rica allowed to pursue social democracy while Guatemala was not?

There are a number of structural, contingent, and conjunctural factors at play. One key difference is timing — 1944 and 1954 are two very different moments in US foreign policy. The shift from World War II — when the United States was allied with the Soviet Union — to the Cold War meant the logics of intervention changed.

But there were also economic factors. United Fruit’s holdings in Guatemala were far more significant than in Costa Rica. Guatemala is a much bigger, more densely populated country, so the stakes were higher. Meanwhile José Figueres (“Don Pepe”), in power in Costa Rica at the time, played up his anti-communist bona fides in Washington.

He had better contacts in DC and was better able to convince Washington that he would not take the country on a course that would be contrary to their interests. But it is significant, I think, that you have these two divergent paths — Guatemala is denied the path taken by Costa Rica.

On Costa Rica — just to add a note on Figueres, or Don Pepe — he’s also able to burnish his anti-communist credentials in part because he overthrew a center-left reformist government that had been acting in partnership with the Communist Party of Costa Rica in 1948. Interestingly he continued a lot of their social and economic reform programs, but he nevertheless overthrew the Communist-aligned government and outlawed the Communist Party. He is then able to pitch himself as a model for what “liberal capitalism with a human face” can look like in Central America.

Guatemala is of more strategic importance to the United States because of the United Fruit Company holdings. Costa Rica’s economy — based on cattle ranching and rice production — is insignificant relative to Guatemala, which was a major producer and exporter.

That alone played a huge role.

But there’s another dimension that gets overlooked: Guatemala’s symbolic importance in Central America. Guatemala was the core administrative center of the Spanish Empire in the region. It actually echoes the way that the United States itself comes to operate as a sort of regional hegemon. The US understood that Guatemala’s size, economy, and historical legacy gave it weight and meaning across Central America, where remaking it would have ripple effects across the region.

Costa Rica, meanwhile, was seen as a better negotiator in terms of the way it solicited loans from the United States. It asked the US very kindly for help in a way that seemed aligned with Washington’s national development plans. This is something we’ll see with the International Monetary and the World Bank and regional organizations like the Central American Bank for Economic Integration.

By contrast, Guatemala wasn’t just negotiating — it was trying to actually remake the machinery of the state. Land redistribution, nationalization — these were real structural changes. It was still a development path, but not one that interested the United States.

If we bring Honduras into the picture, the 1950s mark this moment where Honduras is also navigating its own development path. At this point, Honduras wasn’t following the Guatemala model — it was trying to follow Costa Rica’s by playing nice with the United States.

Guatemala thus became an example of what happens when a country takes the “wrong” path — this is what happens when you don’t play by the rules set by the United States.

One country that we haven’t spoken about is Belize, which for the vast majority of its history was British Honduras. Belize, whose territory has long been claimed by Guatemala, only became independent in 1981. How should we think about Belizean history?

Belize is a site of raw materials. For much of the mid-twentieth century, its economy centered around forestry and lumber exports, supplying both the emerging Belizean government and the British crown. There’s no real political activity happening at quite the same scale as its neighbors, because it’s still a colony of the British Empire, and until the 1980s, it remains so.

It’s seen as a hub for shipping materials to the United Kingdom. One of the first proper Belizean political parties, the People’s United Party, for example, didn’t get started until the 1950s. Up to this point, most Belizeans don’t think of themselves as a nation — they think of themselves as subjects of the British crown. This had a lot to do with Belize’s position within both the British Empire and emerging US empire.

In that way, Belize is very much more identified with the Anglophone Caribbean than it is with the rest of Central America.

Another aspect of history that we often forget about Belize, especially in relation to migration from Central America, is that in the 1960s it was hit by a huge hurricane. The hurricane triggered a lot of the migration out of Belize into the US Southwest. This is a very Central American story in the sense that we now talk about climate migration all the time — people escaping food insecurity and poor housing. People from Belize experienced this first hand.

In the 1970s and the ’80s, Belize was a site for exiles and refugees from neighboring Central American countries experiencing political turmoil resulting from US intervention — from civil conflicts and massacres. I think many Belizeans think of this period as the “Central Americanization” of Belize — a phenomenon that’s quite interesting but understudied primarily because the culture of Belize is more Caribbean-facing and because much of its population is a product of the importation of slaves.

It’s probably worth mentioning that Belize is also an important destination for labor migration from countries like El Salvador — especially the country’s service economy.

If we want to continue into the more recent history of Belize, from the 1990s onward, we see a rise in gang activity, which is part of a larger migration story. Many Belizeans migrated to places like Los Angeles and became involved with gangs like the Bloods and Crips. They were then fed back into Belize because of US deportation policy.

Let’s turn to the wave of revolutionary movements that sweep the region in the second half of the twentieth century.In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas overthrew dictator Anastasia Somoza in 1979 and then faced a brutal US-backed Contra war. In El Salvador, the FMLN united five left-wing political-military organizations to wage an armed struggle against the US-backed death squad government, supported by highly organized civil society mass movements. In Guatemala, a long armed struggle took on a US-backed military regime that committed a horrific genocide against indigenous campesinos.

How did the conditions in each country — Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala — converge to create a moment when reform was deemed clearly impossible? What did these revolutionary organizations look like? How did they unite and organize these broad coalitions in the way that they did? And how did they learn from earlier Latin American models — like the Foco theory that emerged from the Cuban Revolution? And lastly, what role did the liberation theology that was sweeping the region’s Catholic churches play in making these new revolutionary coalitions possible?

I think the Guatemalan case is instructive in that democratic movements for reform are violently suppressed, leading reformers to take up arms and adopt insurgent methods to try and overthrow a state that they have been categorically excluded from participating in.

We see this in different ways across the region: the continual closure of democratic spaces while the uneven processes of regional integration and industrialization are creating incipient middle classes and raising expectations. These processes of industrialization and integration are diversifying exports and expanding the agricultural frontier — and further displacing masses of people across the region. Land concentration really explodes in this period, leaving more and more people landless. There’s a general heightening of all these social contradictions — of authoritarianism on the one hand and this uneven, fraught, and US-subordinate mode of industrialization on the other.

As for how these insurgencies take shape, their forms vary over time, influenced by different global conjunctures. In the same way that the Mexican and Russian revolutions inspired insurgencies of the 1930s, by the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution had become the model and inspiration for the region. That means that alongside more traditional Marxist-Leninist strategies and Communist Party orthodoxies — that look to align themselves with this elusive nationalist bourgeoisie — you have these much more heterodox, often urban, New Left formations, as well as Maoist organizations developing across the region.

These groups are increasingly in constant dialogue with radicalizing peasant movements that are fundamentally inspired by liberation theology. And not just in the countryside — Catholic Action groups in urban middle-class circles are also really fundamental for mobilizing people into the insurgencies. But in the countryside, where the most powerful insurgent armies drew the vast majority of their forces, it is liberation theology’s radical Christian doctrine — the preferential option for the poor — that provides a bridge for dialogue with these other more Marxist traditions.

The region was a pressure cooker. I like to call it superexploitation with national characteristics. Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador all shared a landed elite-military-command model, defending the privileges and the economic needs of an oligarchy. They were militaristic by design, protecting elite privilege and serving economic interests tied to foreign capital.

But the outcomes in each country were very different. Nicaragua saw a successful revolution, El Salvador reached a brutal stalemate, and Guatemala endured the longest civil war in the Americas, culminating in genocide. And yet the structural conditions were the same: massive inequality, structural racism, and widespread economic exclusion. These conditions reached a boiling point almost simultaneously.

But what we have to also remember is, as Hilary mentioned, the incredible examples of the Cuban Revolution and the coup against Árbenz — Che Guevara himself cites the coup as a major influence. Watching Árbenz’s reformist experiment crushed by US intervention, Guevara concluded that reform would never be permitted in Latin America. That realization pushed many toward armed struggle against the ruling class and the powers that be as the only viable path to change.

It’s this double whammy of 1954 — the coup — and 1959 — the Cuban Revolution — that shaped how revolutionary movements developed in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and even Honduras. From this point, armed struggle became the dominant strategy in attempting to overturn these incredibly unequal systems.

By 1979, Nicaragua had succeeded, but El Salvador’s struggle led to a very complex and troubled peace process. And Honduras became the staging ground for US counterinsurgency efforts aiming to extinguish peasant movements and disarticulate political movements across the region. This is why liberation theology became so important —  it provided a different grammar with which to explain and politicize inequality, reaching people in ways that traditional Marxist-Leninist and Maoist rhetoric sometimes couldn’t. Liberation theology became a vehicle to understand inequality and misery in a way that activated people to join social movements.

This is the moment when the conditions set in motion in the 1930s — cemented by authoritarianism and the deep entrenchment of oligarchic power — reach another crisis point, mobilizing people against them.

But the paths that each country takes from this crisis are dramatically different. In Guatemala, it leads to a military dictatorship that unleashes violence against organized communities, the majority of whom are indigenous. In Nicaragua in the 1970s and ’80s, the Contra war produces one of the major exoduses of Nicaraguans into the United States. In the case of El Salvador, which much of my family lived through, the war became a moment of incredible consciousness-raising — but also left deep discontent that was never fully resolved. There was no safety valve to release this pressure, so that unresolved discontent mutated in these perverted ways after the war.

In spite of the similar mid-century origins of these conflicts, their outcomes are so different that they almost seem like entirely different stories. But in many ways, they were all shaped by the Cold War playing out in different contexts and across different countries.

In terms of how these movements take shape, Guatemala faced unique challenges. Guatemalan revolutionary forces were smaller, more fragmented, and operating across a much more vast geographic and demographic terrain. This was a constant obstacle to achieving the kind of unity and military advances seen elsewhere.

In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were able to recover from early military setbacks and develop a really sophisticated diplomatic strategy. This was critical. The Sandinista revolutionary government positioned itself effectively on the world stage, forging links with Eurocommunists, social democrats, and other friendly states — a diplomatic landscape that was open at the time but would shrink as the Cold War went on.

The FMLN in El Salvador tried to replicate this model. Early on, it had success, particularly through the formation of the FDR (Democratic Revolutionary Front) — its civilian political wing, which in 1981 successfully brokered the Franco-Mexican Declaration. This was a major diplomatic win: France and Mexico formally recognized the FMLN as a legitimate force in the civil war. That gave it international recognition and allowed it to advocate for itself on the world stage.

At the same time, diplomatic efforts and political action were backed by armed struggle and mass mobilization. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, El Salvador saw popular mass mobilizations of peasant organizations, labor unions, and student groups. Many of these had direct or indirect links to clandestine military structures. This was a real popular revolutionary movement, unmatched in scale anywhere else in the region.

But timing mattered. The triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution — while inspiring for the Salvadoran struggle — also made victory impossible. The sheer scale of the US response made a similar outcome in El Salvador far more difficult.

Let’s get into the US response — the brutal death squads and military violence that in all three countries were actively sponsored by the United States. What sort of repression did these regimes orchestrate with support from the US? How did the ruling regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala compare to one another in terms of their programs of repression? How did they organize various elite constituencies behind these military states? And how did both of those regimes take on new forms as this process of repression and resistance intensified over the 1980s?

The US program of counterinsurgency, which enjoyed support from other countries as well, included a whole host of practices of state terror and social control. In El Salvador, you have the implementation of paramilitary rural organizations. In Guatemala, similar groups are mobilized that enlist the population to surveil, repress, and inform on each other — which created an atmosphere of fear and mistrust among neighbors.

There are selective targeted assassinations of political dissidents and organizers. There is widespread use of forced disappearance, torture, and selective and spectacular displays of violence — mutilated corpses left in public places as warnings. There’s also, most spectacularly in Guatemala, but I think no less horrifically in El Salvador, the use of scorched-earth tactics in the countryside to exterminate entire communities that are perceived as social bases of support.

These US-funded, -armed, and -trained practices will combine to effectively hobble these revolutionary movements. Especially in the early 1980s, mass uprisings — where hundreds of thousands took to the streets — were brutally suppressed.

The effect of this, in the Salvadoran case, is to shift strategies. Instead of trying to take state power through a national, coordinated military offensive, they switched to a prolonged popular war, to borrow Vietnamese language, to take and hold territory in the countryside, settling in for a long military conflict. Guatemala is similarly forced to settle into a much longer military conflict but with much less military capability than in the Salvadoran case. The Guatemalan insurgency never really comes close to overthrowing the state, but they are certainly able to pose enough of a consistent threat to governance to provoke a response.

The United States trained, armed, and offered much of the playbook for these special forces — setting up the infrastructure for forced disappearances, massacres, targeted violence, and clandestine imprisonment. By this time, much of Guatemala and El Salvador’s military leadership had been trained at the School of the Americas, a US military program that specialized in “counterinsurgency warfare.” Honduras also became a key training hub — a place where many Salvadoran and Guatemala military personnel went for training under US guidance.

This is where you see the emergence of elite special forces. In Guatemala, the Kaibiles, a rapid response battalion formed in the 1970s, became infamous for extrajudicial killings. They would go on to commit some of the grossest human rights violations in the Guatemalan Civil War.

In the Salvadoran case, the Atlácatl Battalion, founded in 1981 with US training, was responsible for one of the biggest massacres of the war — the El Mozote Massacre.

It wasn’t just about military tactics — the United States provided millions of dollars to these countries in order to engage in these kinds of activities. Much of the political leadership of later years will also be imprinted by their experience of US war-making in Central America.

What sort of regimes existed in Guatemala and El Salvador? How did they represent different elite constituencies and manage the various conflicts and contradictions that emerge among those elites?

We mentioned that, in the mid-century, the region went through this sort of frustrated industrialization and regional integration project that ended up being entirely subordinated to the demands of US capital and devolved into conflict between the unevenly developed states in the region. But these efforts also created new bourgeois classes, even as they reflected broader global shifts in political economy.

By the 1980s, neoliberalism is in full swing throughout much of the world. The coup against Salvador Allende in Chile happened in 1973. Ronald Reagan is in power in the States, Margaret Thatcher is in power in Britain, and the agro-export model that has managed to stay predominant in the region is really under a lot of pressure. The rural insurgencies that are wreaking absolute havoc on these massive plantations are accelerating the crisis in a different way.

Within the elites, there is conflict between the traditional landed oligarchs and many of their younger, US-educated, business-school-graduate children. This younger generation, increasingly investing in commercial interests and finance, are increasingly tied to transnational assets and ventures and are pushing for a way to reintegrate the region into this newly neoliberalized, globalized economy.

At the same time, conflicts within the military also intensified. There were factions that adhered to nationalist developmentalism, while others embodied the most bloodthirsty, reactionary anti-communism imaginable. The United States maneuvered between these factions, shifting its support over time as these conflicts became more protracted and evolved.

Initially the US and these local elites were pushing for military victories in El Salvador and Guatemala. But as the Cold War came to a close, and as global and geopolitical conditions changed, the balance shifted. The faction favoring winding down the violence — so that Central America could be reintegrated into neoliberal economic structures — gained the upper hand. The United States ended up favoring these factions.

What differentiates these two countries is how power struggles played out within their militaries. In Guatemala, different wings of the military vied for control. In the Salvadoran case, there were attempts at reform to bring an end to the protracted armed struggle.

But we can’t lose sight of the fact of the United States’ incredible anti-communist zealotry, which refuses to cede any ground and which really emboldens the most reactionary wings of these national militaries. That led directly to the evangelical Christian General Efraín Ríos Montt’s rule in Guatemala — a period that saw some of the bloodiest massacres of the Guatemalan Civil War. The majority of deaths and disappearances took place at this time.

Here begins the Cold War “domino theory” in Central America: if Nicaragua has fallen, El Salvador might be next, and so Guatemala must hold. We also can’t discount the role of US empire and its ideological shift as it begins to support the most reactionary elements of these military apparatuses. This was what led to the deepening social crisis in these countries and the loss of so much life — with impacts that are impossible to fully measure.

But for the United States, this is the tail end of the Cold War, and victory must be achieved. Central America becomes such a key battleground for this fight. The conflict reshapes the political culture of many of these countries in ways that will have lasting effects in the postwar era. During this period, Reaganism became the dominant way of viewing any kind of political dissidence. You see that in both countries, but we shouldn’t lose sight of how the United States is calling many of the shots regarding national military activity.

And it wasn’t just about military strategy — it was also about when and on what terms negotiations could happen. Throughout the wars, there were different openings for possible dialogue that the United States refuses to engage with. It isn’t until the US was willing to back negotiations — not starting until the late 1980s — that a diplomatic path to a negotiated transition emerged.

How did those counterrevolutionary regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala compare then to the dirty war that the US was sponsoring in Nicaragua?

A lot of the tactics and practices that we’re discussing are replicated in Nicaragua. The loss of life is massive, with maybe 30,000 people killed — and the use of terror, assassination, and sexual violence is just as widespread as it is elsewhere. It’s no coincidence these people are all being trained in the same camps, in the same places, by the same people.

But the strategy in Nicaragua was different. Instead of suppressing insurgent popular movements, the strategy quickly becomes one of attrition. It wasn’t about trying to overthrow the regime, Bay of Pigs–style.

The Contras opt to wear them down, to foster dissent, to sow doubts about the government’s capacity to rule — and, most critically, to make it impossible to govern. The infrastructure sabotage and the economic damage that the war costs takes a massive toll on the Sandinistas. It forces them to divert resources that could otherwise have been used for development and reform — it puts them in a defensive position that eventually results in their losing power in an election. That election basically held a gun to the head of the Nicaraguan people saying: Do you want this war to end or not?

The Contra war was fundamentally an ideological war — a war to discredit the Sandinista government. The Sandinistas held state power, had the military on their side, and enjoyed popular support. A different kind of war was waged — one that was as much cultural as it was military.

There was an attempt to “Americanize” Nicaragua in order to demonstrate that the revolutionary government of the Sandinistas could not properly modernize the country. The United States funded the Contra war in an attempt to expose the fault lines within the Sandinista government itself.

There were military skirmishes in rural Nicaragua, with Contra forces coming in from Honduras, but that’s only part of the story. The real impact was that the Contras were largely made up of Nicaraguans themselves — those who were dissatisfied with the FSLN project.

They were able to leverage internal dissatisfaction by virtue of having a Nicaraguan-led Contra army. This worked to motivate people to join the Contras and to create the illusion of an internal uprising. The goal was to undermine the FSLN project — an attempt to erase the real achievements of the revolution.

At this point, these achievements were quite visible in terms of literacy levels, people’s access to water and food, higher levels of education, and so on. The Nicaragua project garnered so much international attention precisely because of its incredible successes. And that model — this idea that a revolutionary guerrilla army that takes power by force could remake a society for the better — was an image that was too threatening to the United States.

The Contra war was a deliberate attempt to tarnish that image. In El Salvador and Guatemala, radio and television shows were used to demonize the armed left, but in Nicaragua, that kind of ideological attack was the whole strategy. The United States had to undermine the entire idea of Sandinismo in order to create enough dissatisfaction to bring about its downfall.

By the time of the 1990 election, that strategy had worked. The Sandinistas — committed to democratic governance — respected the election results. But the war and the relentless ideological pressure had already ensured their defeat. It wasn’t a military victory; it was a US-engineered political collapse — one that led to Violeta Chamorro’s government taking power.

The other distinction that is worth mentioning is that the Contra war was ostensibly covert. The Iran-Contra affair is this insanely elaborate, vertiginously complex conspiracy that involves so many different actors and funding streams. That’s different from what happened in El Salvador and Guatemala, where US support was in the open. Congress was actively voting on aid, even as there were debates and restrictions — which were constantly subverted. It was happening for the world to see — whereas what happened in Nicaragua was a lot more sinister.

Where does the US military intervention in Central America fit into this larger and longer US imperial project? Should we see these dirty wars as fundamentally a right-wing, Reaganite, extremist anti-communist project? Or more an extreme manifestation of a more ordinary bipartisan American imperialism?

In some ways, it’s both. The counterinsurgency project precedes Reagan significantly. The Alliance for Progress in the region had a very different public face, but it helped set the foundation for the paramilitary surveillance and counterinsurgent project that would escalate to extreme levels in the 1980s. In that way, I think both the Democrats and the Republicans certainly have a lot of blood on their hands.

Óscar Romero famously wrote an appeal to President Jimmy Carter begging him to stop funding the military dictatorship. Just months later, he was gunned down while giving mass in San Salvador — and Carter never responded to his appeal.

Greg Grandin’s thesis is very compelling — he argues that Central America became the stage for Reagan’s remoralization of US foreign policy in the wake of defeat in Vietnam. I think that there’s a lot of truth to that: it could be framed as a crusade in which the United States can once again be the good guys. Obviously the reality was the opposite, but that’s how these interventions were pitched to the coalition of neocons and evangelicals that formed Reaganism’s base.

Like you said, it’s a little bit of both. The Reagan approach was perhaps the most flamboyant, in terms of the way that it is remembered for being an anti-communist crusade — for attempting to avenge the defeats of Vietnam.

But in a way, this is a part of the American imagination. Reagan’s approach was defining, but it wasn’t exclusively Republican — it was something bipartisan. Carter also played a role, though with a new language around human rights that wasn’t in the Reagan lexicon.

With Carter, you have the brokering of the Panama Canal, which marked a transition — from open military violence to a more policy-driven approach to maintaining US domination in the region. There is no way to separate the two — this was always a bipartisan effort.