This is part two of a three-part series on the history and present of Central America with Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar. The interview picks up where we left off in part one amid the revolutionary armed struggles against military oligarchic regimes, struggles that took off in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Those regimes responded with brutal violence against the people aided and abetted by the United States.

It was a counterrevolutionary foreign policy that took off with particular enthusiasm under the zealously anti-communist and evangelical Ronald Reagan administration. Peace accords and pmlnostwar transitions brought an end to the armed conflicts and established basic civil rights in the region. The postwar settlement, however, failed to address the underlying conditions that led to armed struggle in the first place. Worse yet, it was all accompanied by the imposition of brutal neoliberal economic restructuring that further deteriorated economic conditions.

This new economic order, in turn, accelerated the mass migration from the region initially unleashed by the civil wars. Ultimately, members of gangs formed in the United States were deported back into the region, leading to the explosion of gang violence that wreaked further havoc on countries that had never recovered from US-sponsored armed conflicts in the first place.

You can listen to this episode of the Dig in full here. You can listen to the first episode in the three-part conversation here or read a transcript of that episode here, and you can listen to the third part here. The conversation’s transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

The Distinct Paths of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador

Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama

The Sanctuary Movements

The Making of Central American Gangs

The Rise of Nayib Bukele

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Contributors

Hilary Goodfriend is a postdoctoral researcher with the Geography Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. She is a member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) editorial committee, an editor at the journal Latin American Perspectives, and a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.

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.

Daniel Denvir is the author of All-American Nativism and the host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio.

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