Stanford University Press Blog

From U.S. Politics to Cuban Food

How sanctions have impacted Cubans' plates.

HANNA GARTH

February 15, 2020, Las Vegas- Senator Bernie Sanders  at the the Clark County Democratic Party's 2020 Kick Off to Caucus Gala.

Photo by Gage Skidmore. Via Flickr. No changes were made. CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders recently made comments on Cuba that have stirred some criticism and controversy. Although Sanders condemned authoritarianism, he said that “it's unfair to simply say everything is bad” with respect to Cuba, as Sanders pointed to Fidel Castro’s massive literacy program put in place just after the 1959 socialist revolution. Between this literacy campaign and free education at all levels, Cuba continues to have a 99% literacy rate. However, what Sanders did not mention is that while Cuba has historically accomplished these things in spite of the U.S. Embargo, the impact of U.S. sanctions can be felt through other metrics and is only getting worse.

Trump’s tightening of U.S. sanctions has had a devastating effect on the already precarious Cuban food system.

Long before these comments Cubans on the island had been keeping a close eye on the 2020 US Presidential election; this year’s election is particularly important because of the recent crushing sanctions against Cuba that the Trump administration has put in place. Trump’s sanctions have happened in tandem with many political changes on the island. In 2019 Cubans approved a new Constitution that formally recognizes the operation of the market and legalizes forms of private property and business. These shifts continue to be within the single-party system and formalize an ongoing process of economic liberalization toward a mixed economy, which has been termed “market socialism.” Cuba’s new President Miguel Diaz-Canel assumed office on Oct 10, 2019, having served as the President of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers since 18 April 2018. Just before Diaz-Canel began, Trump activated a rarely used part of the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which allows U.S. citizens to file claims against Cuba’s trading and investment partners for properties nationalized following the revolution 60 years ago. This is an effort to tighten the U.S. Embargo by forcing other countries to stop trading and investing in Cuba.

Trump’s tightening of U.S. sanctions has had a devastating effect on the already precarious Cuban food system. I have written about this extensively in my new book, Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal», which is based on research I conducted in Santiago de Cuba between 2008 and 2019. Cuba imports 60 to 80% of food consumed on the island. Not only are direct food imports an issue, but reductions in imported agriculture inputs, including fuel to operate farm machinery also have severe impacts on domestic food production. For instance, in March 2019, Cuba produced 900,000 fewer eggs than the 5.7 million needed daily to satisfy national demand. As a measure to ensure basic food access, in May 2019 the government tightened the food rations, food items that had recently been more abundantly available in non-subsidized markets were now only available through the food ration. This included chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic products that are only available in limited quantities. At hard currency stores there is also a limit on powdered milk to four packets per person, sausages to four packs per person and peas to five packets per person. Adjacent to actual food shortages, in early January 2020 the Cuban government announced that tanks of petroleum gas, the main cooking source for most Cubans, would be scarce. This scarcity is directly tied to a contract that was cancelled due to Trump’s sanctions.

The Dreamers’ Fight

A syllabus for understanding the challenges facing undocumented youth.

Los Angeles March for Immigrant Rights, September 2017. Photo by Molly Adams. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which granted provisional work permits and protection from deportation to undocumented youth, has been at the center of a maelstrom of political debate. Signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012 and rescinded by President Donald Trump in 2017, the DACA program and those who are protected under it have been sent into a tailspin of uncertainty as Congress remains gridlocked on long-term immigration reform. This stalemate triggered a government shutdown in January, and though President Trump gave Congress a March 5th deadline to hammer out a new policy, no progress on a legislative solution has yet to be made.

In the meantime, challenges from federal courts in New York and California have issued injunctions against terminating the program, allowing those young immigrants who already have DACA permits to continue applying for renewals. This stay, however, is only temporary. If no long-term solution is reached, hundreds of thousands of young immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as children could find themselves unable to legally work and eligible for deportation.

For a more detailed look at the recent political and cultural history that brought us to this moment, we’ve gathered below a short syllabus of books that explore the rhetoric, policies, and activism around the present US immigration debate.

Smuggling in the Borderlands

Smuggling is a form of livelihood on the Mexico-Guatemala border, where economic opportunities are scarce.

by REBECCA BERKE GALEMBA

Photo by Rebecca Berke Galemba.

Tito was born on the Mexican side of an unmonitored road crossing the Mexico-Guatemala border to a poor family with little farmland. He grew up crossing the border to visit family and exchange goods. Now, Tito has two houses: an old cement block one and a new, two-story house with pillars, tiled porches and floors, and an indoor bathroom with a hot-water shower. Tito sees himself first as a farmer and second as a businessman.

At the Mexico-Guatemala border, Tito makes a living by transporting goods like corn and coffee across the border. In this region, smuggling basic goods has flourished as a form of legitimate livelihood as alternative economic options have evaporated. The border’s recent integration into a hemispheric security and trade agenda has disrupted and displaced the traditional means of livelihood for many border residents. That agenda, which emerged in the 1990s and 2000s in coordination with the United States, focuses on curtailing unauthorized flows of goods, capital, and people. As the security and trade nexus between North and Central America, policies governing the border were increasingly positioned in line with geopolitical security interests emanating from the United States. In effect, Mexico has been a partner in the extension of the U.S. southern border to the Mexico-Guatemala border.

Those living near the boundary have felt the consequences, as residents there have historically traded, married, and migrated across the Mexico-Guatemala border. Even in the face of tightening controls, residents remain savvy in using border knowledge and networks to navigate politics, social dynamics, and currency and trade differentials to make a living where there are few opportunities.

“Free trade is just for the academics and the corporations. The people will become poorer.”

Immigration, Families, and Solidarity

In transnational families, grandmothers become caregivers to support their loved ones.

by KRISTIN E. YARRIS

Angela, Laleska, and Laleska’s coresident cousin Alexa pictured above. Photo by Kristin E. Yarris.

In a working class barrio of Managua, Nicaragua’s capital city, lives Angela, a mother to four adult children—two who live with their spouses and families in Managua, and two who have immigrated to the United States. One of Angela’s migrant children, Karla, emigrated in an attempt to rejoin her father, who had left for the United States about a decade prior. Upon Karla’s departure, she left behind her then one-year-old daughter, Laleska, for whom Angela assumed care, thus becoming responsible for her granddaughter’s physical and emotional wellbeing for more than a decade.

The story of Angela’s family is shared by many transnational families. Their experience illustrates the trials of transnational life.

While Angela, who is now in her 50s, finds a sense of purpose in caregiving, it has also been hard work: caring for her granddaughter has proven to be both physically demanding and emotionally trying. For Laleska, separation from her mother over more than a decade was not easy either, though Angela’s carework sustained the tie between Laleska and her mother, a tie made tenuous by absence, distance, and the uncertainty of family reunification, all of which are exacerbated by U.S. immigration policies.

During my time in Nicaragua conducting fieldwork with families like that of Angela and Laleska’s, I also volunteered with Servicio Jesuita para Migrantes (SJM, or Jesuit Migration Service), an NGO spearheading a nationwide campaign to protect and defend the rights of migrants. As part of the campaign, SJM produced a weekly radio program called La Mochila Viajera (The Traveling Backpack), which was designed to raise public awareness about immigration. La Mochila Viajera aired short public service vignettes, designed to raise awareness about the challenges facing Nicaraguan migrants and their families at home and abroad.

I reached out to families, like Angela’s, who were participating in my research study and invited them to share their stories on La Mochila Viajera if they were inclined to do so. Laleska decided this was something she wanted to do, and I escorted her to the radio studio one muggy Monday morning to record her vignette. Laleska was visibly nervous, but also committed to telling her story, as she told me, in order to let other children of migrant parents know they were not alone in the challenges they faced.

 

TRANSLATION: "Hi, I’m Laleska. I am twelve years old. I’ve lived with my grandmother since I was one year old because my mom left, for economic reasons, to the United States. Since then, I only see her in December. But for three years, I haven’t been able to see her. We just communicate by phone. Truthfully, I don’t like talking with her because I feel bad about not having her near."

 

Making a Home for the Disappeared

As the Peruvian state uncovers mass graves, relatives find ways to honor their missing loved ones.

by ISAIAS ROJAS-PEREZ

Photo taken by the author at the Museo de la Memoria, Para que no se Repita, established in Ayacucho by ANFASEP (Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados, Detenidos, y Desaparecidos del Perú).

An enlarged identity card photo of a boy wearing his school uniform alongside one of his class notebooks are among some of the most moving artifacts displayed at the Museo de la Memoria—the small museum that the Quechua-speaking mothers of the disappeared built in memory of their missing relatives in Ayacucho, Peru. The notebook displays what could be the work of any Quechua-speaking boy in a Spanish-speaking state institution such as the school: the unsteady lettering, the misspellings and grammatical errors, the playful drawings. It is the work of a joyful boy preparing to enter into adult society and the political community by mastering the state’s writing and reading practices. But at midnight on June 24, 1984, a military squad burst into his house and kidnapped him. He was never seen again. Only his class notebook and the enlarged identity card photo remain.

Pablo Gerardo Albites Pariona is one of the thousands of people “disappeared” by the Peruvian state during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru’s central southern Andes. In August 2003, at the end of its mandate, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación, or CVR) compiled a preliminary list of four thousand “disappeared” people. In 2011, another state-sponsored institution, the Central Register of Victims, registered 8,661 cases. Yet, as the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances observed as recently as July 2016, the real figure may be much higher. Citing such institutions as the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team, the UN Working Group considers that figure “to lie between thirteen thousand and sixteen thousand victims of enforced disappearance.” According to Peruvian human rights organizations, the actual figure may be as high as eighteen thousand disappeared.

Abstract figures tallying the number of lives lost cannot convey the visceral quality of the horror that families like Pablo Gerardo’s experienced.

Transformative Activism

In Argentina activism is an ongoing process of working on the self and acting on the world.

by SIAN LAZAR

A demonstration in Argentina organized by the Argentine Central Trade Union (Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina), 2012. Photo by Sian Lazar.

In my home country, the UK, we have just come out of a general election. Many of us—including the prime minister who called it—thought that this election would consolidate Conservative power by creating an unassailable majority in the House of Commons. But, although the Tories won the most votes, they actually lost seats, resulting in a hung parliament. This impasse raises plenty of problems and is hardly the most strong and stable outcome, but we have, at least for now, collectively warded off the specter of a one-party state. And it looks as though that achievement in large part came down to the Labour party running an extremely effective campaign: people taking to the streets and knocking on doors to talk to voters, organizing rallies, meetings, discussions, hustings, social media campaigns, and so on. In other words, good old-fashioned activism. Meanwhile, in the US, people are organizing and attending town hall meetings with their representatives; they are protesting at airports and outside courtrooms; they are taking to the streets in enormous numbers to object to President Trump and his policies. Again, good old-fashioned activism. At the same time, in both countries hundreds of everyday campaigns are taking place: for fair wages, fair policing, environmental protection, reproductive rights, clean water, and the list goes on.

What is it that impels people to take up the role of activist?

But what is it that impels people to take up the role of activist, to spend time seeking to persuade others of their cause and to collectively resist the attacks on social life and reproduction wrought by corporate capital and its allies in government? This question is at the heart of my research. I ask it of labor union activists in Argentina, a group of people who have been highly organized since the turn of the 20th century. Over generations, labor unionism has persisted as a vibrant and powerful movement at the heart of Argentine politics, despite being attacked and threatened, at times with lethal force. That persistence is based on many individuals choosing to become activists and to continue organizing in the face of public stigma and state repression. These days the latter tends to take the form of rubber bullets rather than disappearances and such confrontations occur with less frequency than they used to, but activists’ perseverance remains impressive all the same.

Militarization and Multicultural Rights

U.S. intervention in Nicaragua has had lasting consequences for Afrodescendants.

by JENNIFER GOETT

United States-supported anti-government "Contra" rebels in Southeast Nicaragua, 1987. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

Nicaragua and the United States are approaching the 30-year anniversaries of two periods of national reckoning that took place in the waning years of the Contra War. The conflict erupted in 1981 just two years after the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the Somoza regime, a brutal family dictatorship that had ruled Nicaragua for more than forty years. Once in office, Ronald Reagan, a devout anti-communist crusader, authorized the training and funding of counter-revolutionary forces or contras as part of a campaign to destabilize the Sandinista state. Armed resistance spread to the Atlantic coast region where dissatisfaction with the revolution grew in indigenous and Afrodescendant communities with the imposition of a new ruling order from Managua. By the end of the 1980s, the United States would extend over $400 million USD in aid to the contras, while the war and destabilization campaign would result in more than 30,000 deaths and billions of dollars in losses for Nicaragua.

What has U.S. militarization meant for the people who live in militarized places around the world?

The Contra War continued until 1990 when the Nicaraguan people removed the Sandinistas from power by popular vote. But indigenous and Afrodescendant resistance began to subside in the mid-1980s as the Sandinista state sought to reconcile the revolutionary project with these communities by recognizing their rights to land and regional autonomy. In November 1986, the state enshrined these rights in law with the adoption of a new constitution followed by the passage of an autonomy statute for the Atlantic coast region in 1987. The reforms established the framework for some of the most expansive multicultural citizenship rights in Latin America. It still took more than two decades for the Nicaraguan state to title indigenous and Afrodescendant territories. And even with formal recognition, conditions remain precarious in these territories where deforestation, land dispossession, capitalist intensification, and drug war militarization threaten community life.

Zika and the Common Good

Who precisely is the “common good” that the public health sector purports to serve?

by KATHERINE A. MASON

The Zika-carrying Aedes Aegypti mosquito. Photo by James Gathany of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public domain.

It has been barely a year since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa released its grip on the frightened imaginations of the Global North, and already global health officials are in the midst of another viral panic. After spreading across the Pacific to Brazil and Puerto Rico, the mosquito-born Zika virus this summer is expected to continue its march to the mainland United States, where it will make landfall on the Gulf Coast. The message from global and American health authorities is the same as it was in 2003 with the appearance of SARS, in 2006 with H5N1 avian flu, and in 2014 with Ebola: Be very afraid.

“This could be a catastrophe to rival Hurricane Katrina or other recent miseries that disproportionately affect the poor,” writes Peter J. Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in a recent New York Times Op-Ed. “If I were a pregnant woman … in an impoverished neighborhood in a city like Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Biloxi, Miss., or Mobile, Ala., I would be nervous right now.” Of course, Hotez is none of the above. So are those women nervous? Will controlling Zika end up helping them? And would Hotez listen if the affected women thought it wouldn’t? As we enter another round of emergency epidemic control, these questions are critical to ask.

Public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this threat carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?

What I have found from my own research is that even when a global disease response appears to be effective, unintended consequences can emerge that threaten to undermine, rather than support, the long-term health and well-being of vulnerable communities most affected by the disease in question. In the urban Chinese settings I studied during and after the SARS outbreak, China’s enormous population of rural-to-urban migrant workers was seen as a public health menace capable of spreading the same dangerous diseases that threatened it. In the wake of the 2003 outbreak, Chinese public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this menace carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?

Justice in Latin America

The question of what is just is not an ahistorical one—it is answered daily in the spaces of lived experience.

by SANDRA BRUNNEGGER and KAREN ANN FAULK

"Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo." May 31 2007. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr. 

Latin America is as culturally diverse as it is geographically vast. Yet, the nations of Latin America share important historical and institutional characteristics. Perhaps most significantly, countries across the region continue to grapple with the legacies of colonialism—from the classical era of Iberian colonialization to the neocolonial domination enacted through economic penetration in the early twentieth century.

At the approach of the twenty-first century, Latin Americans found themselves constrained by the demands of international lending agencies and awash in the flood of cultural and material products made ever more readily available by multinationals striving to captivate and capitalize on the “emerging markets” opened by neoliberal reform. The continent has also had to contend with the legacies of state violence and dictatorial regimes that sought to strip society of its vibrant forms of popular organizations, preemptively crushing opposition and laying the foundation for the economic restructuring that was to come.

In all of these cases, the protagonists are seeking one thing: justice.

These shared processes of emergence paved the way for a diversity of forms of resistance. In the Chilean Atacama Desert, residents have undertaken a prolonged struggle for their right to groundwater. Family members of bombing victims in Buenos Aires brought a case against the state of Argentina before an international human rights body and are still working through a slow process of attempted resolution. In Colombia, some victims of political violence are turning increasingly to the courts for resolution in the wake of devastating personal tragedy, while others reject the state’s ability to fairly adjudicate their grievances and construct instead a nonstate tribunal to consider the damages they have suffered to both persons and property.

Galaxies of Memory in the Americas

What mysterious deaths and memory struggles in Chile can teach the U.S.

by ADAM ROSENBLATT

Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, recording his poetry for the Library of Congress in 1966 (public domain). New evidence may indicate that the poet did not die of natural causes.

The week after I took my children trick-or-treating on the streets of our Philadelphia suburb turned out to be a time of ghosts in another place where I once lived: Chile. On November 5, Chile’s Interior Ministry released a public statement calling it “highly probable” that Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, died of poisoning soon after the coup that ushered in Augusto Pinochet’s 27-year dictatorship, and not from the natural progression of the prostate cancer for which he was being treated at the time. If true, this would confirm years of suspicion that Neruda, like the singer Victor Jara and thousands of other Chileans, was a victim of Pinochet’s violent efforts to suppress political dissent.

Chile’s Interior Ministry released a public statement calling it “highly probable” that Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, died of poisoning.

The retelling of Neruda’s death began when the poet’s former driver stepped forward in 2011 to allege that after treatment in Santiago’s Santa María clinic for his cancer, and only hours before his death, Neruda confided that he had been given a strange injection in his stomach. The path to an official investigation—which would result in the exhumation of Neruda’s corpse from his seaside grave and posthumous travel to four different forensic laboratories in as many countries—has been contentious.

Despite the Chilean government’s bold declaration, the tests thus far don’t offer conclusive evidence. The Staphylococcus aureus bacteria found in his body has no relation to cancer, but this does not conclusively prove that Neruda died from poisoning. Further tests are still needed to clarify the origins of such a potentially lethal microorganism (healthy individuals can be perfectly asymptomatic carriers of the bug), and even then we may never know for certain. For those inclined to think Neruda died of cancer—possibly accelerated by grief at seeing his country fall into the hands of a brutal dictator—and those who believe he must have been poisoned, there is no reason yet to significantly alter their version of history.

Dismantling the Racial Paradise

How migration to and from the U.S. is transforming notions of race in Brazil.

by TIFFANY JOSEPH

Governador Valadares, Brazil is the largest immigrant-sending city to the U.S. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikipedia.

I still remember my first trip to Brazil—I was amazed by the diversity of physical features I saw among the population, a continuous range of skin tones between what Americans think of as “white” and “black.” Everyone seemed to get along well; residential segregation levels were low and interracial couples, families and friend groups appeared to be the norm. It would have been easy to believe that Brazil was a racial paradise compared to the United States. However, as I learned Portuguese and spent more time in the country, I came to realize that Brazil was a country of racial contradictions.

Despite having seemingly more “cordial” interpersonal relations, Brazil has struggled with rampant social inequality, especially between lighter and darker Brazilians. While Brazilians espoused the beauty of its multiracial population, I was perplexed every time I passed stands full of Brazilian magazines and saw a sea of fair-skinned faces with blonde hair and blue eyes upheld as the ideal image of beauty. As a black American, I began to notice commonalities between the pervasiveness of structural racism in Brazil and the U.S. while being keenly aware of the different racial ideologies that characterized each nation’s history.

An Improbable Comeback

How Chile weathered one of the greatest natural disasters in recent history.

Collapsed building in Concepción. Photo by Claudio Nuñez. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikipedia.

In 2010 an 8.8 magnitude earthquake wracked Chile—the sixth-largest quake in the world since 1900. NASA estimates that the event moved Chile’s capital, Santiago, eleven inches to the West, and even tilted the Earth’s axis by three inches. On the ground, the shocks killed hundreds, displaced millions, and devastated nationwide infrastructure—schools, hospitals, roads, homes, and businesses—across a vast swath of the country’s midsection, paralyzing the country for weeks. Occurring at the twilight of Michelle Bachelet’s presidency, just days before the inauguration of Sebastián Piñera, Chile found itself in the grip of national catastrophe just as the nation’s top political leadership was in a period of transition. 

Circumstances were dire, the outlook was bleak, and the barriers to recovery seemed staggering—yet, within six weeks, all of Chile’s schoolchildren had returned to classes; by the end of the year—despite sustaining economic damages equivalent to one-fifth of the country’s total GDP—Chile’s economy was back on track, delivering a strong 6 percent annual growth rate at a time when the world economy was still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis. Chile’s restoration proved so swift and robust that it garnered accolades from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) who later that same year extended an invitation to Chile to become a full member of its trade forum.

The Stage Is Set

Envisioning a prosperous and progressive future for Latin America.

by ALEJANDRO TOLEDO

 

In the past two decades, Latin America has gone through a major transformation. You could even call it a renaissance. This renaissance could continue for many decades, transforming most Latin American countries into highly developed, socially more equal and deeply democratic societies. In these societies, today’s poor and lower middle classes would be full participants in vibrant, socially progressive, diverse national cultures, both part of and very influential in shaping the global knowledge economy. Yet, there is no assurance that the renaissance will continue; Latin America is at a crucial moment. Hard work, planning, and serendipity have led us to a time and place where we have a historic opportunity to make a giant leap forward.

Hard work, planning, and serendipity have led us to a time and place where we have a historic opportunity to make a giant leap forward.

Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Latin American countries implemented national development strategies based on economic reform and democratic governance. In the 2000s, these reforms helped the region attain sustained economic growth of almost 4.5 percent per year since 2003. With hardly a ripple, Latin American economies just kept expanding through the economic crisis of 2008–2009. Two of the big economies, Argentina and Peru, have had much higher annual growth rates of about 7 to 7.5 percent.

Achieving these levels of economic expansion has opened up tremendous opportunities for changing Latin Americans’ lives and for further strengthening democracy in the region. The sustained nature of this growth has had a major impact on poverty reduction, at least in terms of how many people earn less than $2 per day, which is the way international agencies measure poverty, or $1 per day, which is the way these agencies measure extreme poverty. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), based on these measures, the percentage of people living under the poverty line decreased from 42 to 29 percent in 2000–2011, and those in extreme poverty decreased from 18 to 12 percent.

A Book Jacket on Steroids

Executive Editor, Eric Brandt, on publishing former Peruvian President, Alejandro Toledo.

by ERIC BRANDT

Alejandro Toledo was Peru's 48th president, holding office from 2001-2006.

On December 11, I finally received the email response I had been hoping for. It was from the Clinton Foundation and included an endorsement of Alejandro Toledo’s forthcoming book, The Shared Society:

As President of Peru, Alejandro Toledo confronted some of Latin America’s biggest challenges. Today, he shares his vision for the region’s future and offers a roadmap for promoting growth and creating the inclusive, prosperous society that is well within reach.

—President Bill Clinton

In my long career as an editor, I’ve never obtained a book endorsement from a former US president. In the following weeks, I would also receive endorsements from world-famous economist Francis Fukuyama and the former president of Brazil, Fernando Cardoso. As Toledo’s literary agent said, “This is going to be a book jacket on steroids!”

Intervention and Displacement

How U.S. involvement in Central America pushes children and families to migrate.

by LEISY ABREGO

There is no doubt that violence and extreme insecurity are significant and immediate driving factors in the migration of children and families from Central America today. Since the early 1990s, when the United States began deporting gang members to the region, gangs have proliferated in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—the three countries with the highest numbers of child migrants in recent months. But gangs are not the root cause of migration; they are merely a symptom of a long and continued history of U.S. intervention.

Any time Central American leaders sought to reduce poverty, redistribute unused lands, or tax foreign companies, the CIA removed those officials.

For over a century, the United States has looked to the Central American region, with its arable land and geopolitical significance, as its backyard and a source for cheap labor. In a January 1927 Memorandum, Undersecretary of State, Robert Olds declared that the United States controls “the destinies of Central America and we do so for the reason that the [U.S.] national interest absolutely dictates such a course… Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those which we do not recognize and support fall.”

Indeed, U.S. intervention has been evident throughout the region: From orchestrating Panama’s independence from Colombia to building the Panama Canal for shorter transoceanic trade routes, to ousting presidents whose policies threatened U.S. companies’ local profits. Any time Central American leaders sought to reduce poverty, redistribute unused lands, or tax foreign companies, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and sometimes also its military, removed those officials and installed new U.S.-amenable presidents. This happened as early as 1909 to remove José Santos Zelaya in Nicaragua and again in 1954 to remove Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. As recently as 2009, the United States tacitly supported the coup against democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. In each of these cases, the region was politically, socially, and economically destabilized with dire consequences for vulnerable populations.