Recent Immigration from Central & South America

A Timeline of Latin American History and Immigration to the United States from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala

1823-1841: The Federal Republic of Central America (also called the United Provinces of Central America) is formed.

1841-1931:

Guatemala

The Federal Republic of Central America (also called the United Provinces of Central America) dissolves in 1841.

Guatemala’s history as an independent country began in 1841 when it broke away from the Central American Federation, which in turn had broken away from Mexico. Guatemala has one of the highest percentages of Indigenous people, but it has historically been ruled entirely by a white/mestizo elite.

From 1841-1944, Guatemala’s presidents decreased the power of the Catholic church, protected international corporations, and eroded the land rights of the Indigenous Maya people as coffee plantations rapidly expanded. Coffee plantations and the United Fruit Company (UFCo) relied primarily on labor from the Indigenous Maya people who lived in the highlands.

Because bananas are a lowland crop, Maya laborers would migrate to the lowlands during growing season and then go back to their villages in the offseason. Those working in coffee labored closer to home, but also saw their economic wellbeing and communities threatened. The conditions on banana and coffee plantations were dismal and have described as “slave-like.”

In 1902, Guatemala courted the United Fruit Company (today known as Chiquita Banana) by giving them preferential treatment, and they in turn made Guatemala a “banana republic”. People use the term “banana republic” as a way of describing Latin American nations that were superficially republics, but were economically and politically dominated by U.S. capital, especially companies like United Fruit, with the support of the U.S. government.

El Salvador

El Salvador was another one of the countries that came into existence with the dissolution of the Federal Republic of Central America. El Salvador is home to several Maya groups, the Lenca, and Pipil peoples, who held a stiff resistance against the Spanish for many years. Today, El Salvador has a population of over 6 million, roughly 86 percent of which are mixed Indigenous and Spanish (mestizo), 13 percent are white, and 1 percent are Indigenous. Like Guatemala, El Salvador was ruled throughout most of its history by an oligarchic, white elite. El Salvador was ruled by what were known as the "14 families” for the 19th and early 20th centuries until it began to modernize its coffee industry. Although Salvadoran peasants did not fare as badly as those in Guatemala, much of El Salvador remained poor, exploited, and increasingly landless. While in other countries, the Catholic church is sometimes a conservative actor, Catholic organizations centered around peasants followed liberation theology, which called for liberation from oppression.

1931-1951:

Guatemala

Jorge Ubico, who ruled Guatemala as a dictator with close relations to the U.S., continued giving the UFCo preferential treatment during his term (beginning in 1931) before he was overthrown in a popular coup in the October Revolution of 1944. In December, President Arévalo, a professor, was elected. He helped draft a new constitution and passed fairly moderate labor reforms which created protections mostly for urban laborers, but also those working for the United Fruit Company because of its size. The moderate and well-intentioned reforms that Arévalo passed were seen as a threat by the UFCo. Therefore, the company sought to have Arévalo removed from office, insisting to the Truman administration that Arévalo was a communist even though he was not. All Arévalo had done was usher in democracy and a moderate labor reform.

1951-1954:

Guatemala

The United States' favored replacement, Jacobo Guzman Arbenz, won election in 1951, and was the first Guatemalan president to take office without violence. The United States liked Arbenz because he had a military background, which the United States saw as a sign that he would be conservative. But Arbenz had actually grown quite sympathetic to the plight of the Mayan peasantry and was troubled by what he viewed as the feudalism that plagued Guatemala and the power of the UFCo, which at this point owned 42% of Guatemala’s arable land. Arévalo increasingly worked with Guatemala’s communist party (the PGT) to issue a land reform law, known as Decree 900, to distribute land to the landless Mayan peasantry and to bring about more modern capitalist development by expanding infrastructure with competing capital from the United States. The PGT had no contact with the USSR and the goal of Arbenz and PGT at this time was to move away from a feudalistic economy to a capitalist one and reduce foreign economic power over the country. However, the United Fruit Company believed the land reform law threatened its interests even though the reform only targeted unused land, landowners were compensated, and UFCo only used 15% of the land it owned despite owning 42% of arable land in a country with major land distribution problems. Through Decree 900, about 1⁄6 of the population, mostly Indigenous Maya peasants, received land. Land reform was the final straw for the United States.

1954-1996:

Guatemala

In 1954, the United States launched Operation PB Success, which overthrew Arbenz through CIA-coordinated psychological warfare and a CIA-sponsored Guatemalan invading proxy force. The U.S.-led overthrow of Arbenz represented the end of Guatemala’s 10-year democratic experiment. Following the takeover, President Castillo Armas took power and all of the peasants who got land due to Decree 900 were stripped of their land and subject to retaliatory violence by the landholding elite. Around 4,000 supporters of Arbenz were killed within the first few months, but this was small compared to the genocide to come In response to the Armas regime and the subsequent military dictatorships that ruled the country, some people became guerrilla fighters in the Guatemalan highlands. This resistance movement was small, but it was used as an excuse for Guatemala’s rulers and armed forces to murder roughly 150,000 people 1960-1996, roughly 85% of whom were Maya. The high point of this genocide against the Maya occurred at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s. In addition to the devastation and razing of hundreds of Maya villages, military officers used torture techniques on citizens indiscriminately. The United States helped train soldiers and provided military aid to the Guatemalan government during this era of dictatorship, civil war, and genocide. Although the United States was aware of the genocide, it considered it an acceptable sacrifice to prevent communism.

El Salvador

During this time frame in El Salvador, El Salvador's agricultural sector relies primarily on the volcanic soil that allows cultivation of coffee and other crops. However, because El Salvador is still a small, mountainous country, many migrant laborers went to neighboring Honduras to work during part of the year. So many Salvadorans went that one eighth of Honduras was at one time migrant Salvadoran laborers. Xenophobia and a soccer match ignited the brief "100 Hour War" between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969. 

The United States opposed any radical movements that could be construed as communism, both because the Soviet Union was the United States' geopolitical enemy during the Cold War and because US financial interests could be threatened. Because of this, the United States worked to institute reforms in El Salvador to prevent revolution like in Guatemala. However, it also worked to strengthen the military and paramilitary groups, should the moderate reforms fail. Moreover, the Salvadoran military and oligarchy remained powerful forces opposed to democratic and socioeconomic reform. 

In much of Latin America, traditional communist parties have been a relatively conservative force. These parties did not think Latin America was ready for communism, so they encouraged Latin Americans to work through reform. This did not stop communist ideas from influencing more radical movements and organizations, like the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, whose success in turn helped inspire the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador (these movements were also nationalist and not Soviet proxies). The Salvadoran Civil War started in 1971 when an oligarch was assassinated by students who would one day form the FMLN. Although reform looked possible in 1972 when the Christian Democrat Duarte was about to win the presidency, his right-wing opponent, Colonel Arturo Molina, was given the victory. Junior officers revolted but were put down by a combination of the right-wing militaries (formed by the United States) of Guatemala and Nicaragua and the United States. The mass repression that followed sparked more resistance, birthing three more radical, militant, socialist groups. 

Heavy repression was briefly halted in 1979 when a bloodless coup led by junior officers called a ceasefire. A middle path was proposed, but the military retook power by 1980, beginning another period of repression, mass murder and torture by the government, and armed resistance by the left. The military brought Duarte back into the country on March 3rd of 1980, after torturing and exiling him in 1972, to lead agrarian reforms, but the repression continued through the agrarian reforms, and the guerilla movements continued to have a strong presence in the countryside. On March 24th, 1980 the Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, was assassinated by the military. Romero had been a relatively conservative Archbishop but had spoken out against the killing of innocents by the military, leading the most right-wing party in the military, ARENA, to assassinate him during mass. His death sparked more protests, and in turn more repression and murder by the military, which was in turn funded by the United States. 

Full scale war raged, and the FMLN moved to the mountains, taking over almost a quarter of all of El Salvador. Government violence was indiscriminate, with whole villages, even those not in FMLN territory or with any FMLN members (like the town of El Mozote), were destroyed with all of the villagers killed. Between 1981 and 1983, the military killed upwards of 40,000 people, many of whom were civilians. US support for El Salvador's military sometimes wavered, but it never fully disappeared. The guerillas began calling for peace talks in 1981, but because the military thought it had largely destroyed the guerrilla movements, they did not negotiate until 1989. In 1989, the FMLN launched a final assault on San Salvador, which went much like the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War: while the FMLN failed militarily, it made the military reconsider how close they were to victory, leading to a peace deal in 1992.

Honduras

Unlike its neighbors, Honduras is relatively poor in natural resources, with many indigenous people being sent to Peru for labor during the colonial era. Honduras is home to Lenca, Miskito, Pech, and other indigenous tribes as well as a large number of Garifuna people. Garifuna people are a mixed black and indigenous ethnic group composed primarily of Taino people native to the Caribbean who were sent to Central America to open up land for European powers and black people descended from enslaved people from the Caribbean. Honduras is 90% mixed indigenous and white, 7% indigenous, and 2% black.

In the 1950s, Honduras became the newest banana republic, with the United Fruit Company importing black workers from the Caribbean and migrants from El Salvador to supplement the small population. Honduras would begin to modernize economically, but unlike its neighbors, kept up with some peasant demands. In the 1970s, the military helped institute a land reform which redistributed land to peasant cooperatives and away from Garifuna people and large landholders. Because of the poor soil, more land was needed for peasants to live off of subsistence farming. In the 1980s, the U.S. encouraged Honduras to keep its laws friendly for US companies wanting cheap labor. Although the government listened to peasants more than other Central American countries, its reforms were small and only just enough to keep the populace from turning against the government. The 1990s saw the rolling back of even these small reforms, causing a leftist president to be elected in 2006. Honduras experienced the same repression, disappearances, murder, and torture by the government during the second half of the 20th century, but it was on a much smaller scale, with hundreds instead of thousands being murdered and disappeared. Honduras was, however, a training ground for the militaries that carried out some of the most inhumane massacres in Central America, including the militaries of Guatemala and El Salvador and the Contras of Nicaragua. The CIA used Honduras to train right-wing military and paramilitary forces who would graduate to terrorize civilians throughout Latin America. These organizations also facilitated the beginning of an international drug trade that has decimated Honduras.

1996-Present Day

Guatemala

In 1996, with help from the United Nations, the violence in Guatemala came to an end. Although a commission was set up in Guatemala to investigate the atrocities, the crimes of the Guatemalan government went largely unpunished and the United States has not had to account for its role in ending democracy and fueling the subsequent civil war in Guatemala. This disruption has set Guatemala’s development back decades and led a large number of Guatemalans, including Indigenous Maya people, to migrate north to the United States, where their economic opportunities and physical safety are greater. The Maya people are not one ethnicity, but instead a multitude of different ethnic groups, each with their own language. In Europe, for example, Italian, French, and Spanish people all speak Latin languages, but they have their own separate cultures and mutually-unintelligible languages. Maya is an umbrella term to refer to the linguistic family, not a single ethnicity. The Mam and K’iche Mayan ethnicities are particularly common in Saint James, where increasing numbers have moved to work in the meat industry. Many of the Mayan immigrants arriving in Saint James do not speak Spanish or English, and if they do speak Spanish, it is often a second language for them. Reports about Saint James’s good economic opportunities from Guatemalans living here have incentivized more Guatemalan migrants to make the trek north. By 2019, 1.1 million Guatemalan immigrants lived in the United States.

El Salvador

The Salvadoran Civil War left millions of people displaced, including one fourth of the population who fled the country (about one million people). Salvadorans fled everywhere they could, and some even ended up in Saint James. By 2019, 1.4 million Salvadoran immigrants resided in the U.S.. There's a story one of the community members wrote about her experience. This may be a good place to reference it.

Honduras

In 2006, President Zelaya was elected in Honduras, and with him came the promises of a minimum wage, a halt to further privatizations, and more rights for small landholders. The 20th century saw many Latin American nations, conservative and liberal, rewrite their constitutions, but when Zelaya called for a referendum on whether or not the Honduran constitution should be rewritten, he was thrown out in a coup by the military and exiled. While the UN, EU, and many other international organizations denounced the coup, the United States accepted it and refused to acknowledge the coup. Many of the coup-plotters were trained in the United States, but it is not clear if the United States was directly involved in the initial coup. Regardless, the United States worked hard to keep Zelaya out of the country, and Honduras privatized, militarized, and repressed. Workers rights took many hits, and by 2015, 66 percent of the country was in poverty, and 14 percent was unemployed. The United States. Blatantly fraudulent elections were taken as a sign of true democratization by the United States, and international aid and loans from the IMF returned to Honduras despite ongoing violence enacted by the government. 

Honduras today has gotten marginally better, with the rates of homicide falling and even poverty falling slightly, but its citizens still live under a corrupt government and have to fear violence from the international drug traffickers. Many Hondurans have understandably fled Honduras for the United States, some of whom now call Saint James their home. By 2019, 746,000 Honduran immigrants lived in the United States.