Jorge Cuéllar is assistant professor of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean studies at Dartmouth College. He is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching focus on the history, politics, and daily life of modern Central America.
The end of the bloody, US-backed civil wars across Central America led to a brutal neoliberal economic restructuring near the turn of the century — which then helped produce the 21st-century authoritarianism of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele.
There is a direct line in Central America stretching back more than a century from US-backed military intervention, to support of reactionary oligarchies, to devastating neoliberal restructuring, to the migration crisis now exploited in US politics.