The people resisted by forming economic cooperatives and latched on to Liberation Theology amidst their Catholic tradition and offered an alternative society. While multinational companies profited, these changes caused mass malnutrition for Guatemalans and economic servitude “by the early 1980s, all five Central American companies held debts significantly larger than their annual earnings” (pp. Then came the “beef boom,” which created few jobs but absorbed massive amounts of land-all while the population exploded in growth. “First came the cotton boom…For peasant farmers, cotton meant eviction…forced recruitment through debt and low wages…child labor,” etc. “For US businesses …the coup brought magnificent windfalls” (p. Investors wrote the economic laws American oil companies wrote laws for drilling, the Bank of America revised the bank code and opened branches in the country and government loans were granted to buy products from General Motors. When the country elected a reformist (who proposed to outlaw forced labor, redistribute land, and grant rights to peasants), the America CIA orchestrated a violent overthrow of the government in 1953-54, and purged the land of “communists” (anyone who resisted, unionized, or refused to work for private capital). By the 1950s, most of the country’s exports went to the U.S. The military dictator Jorge Ubico “subjected Indians to forced labor,” “provided tax exemption for the United Fruit Company and the United States to establish its first military base in the country” (p. Furthermore, with the rise of Soviet communism, “Cold War counterrevolution targeted not only communism but virtually any movement for social change” (p. “Too much democracy had allowed workers, peasants, and the government to challenge” US corporations “United Fruit discovered that it was much more profit to do business with a dictator than with a democratic president” (p. The last section looks at what happened in Central America the last forty years in light of American foreign policy, from the neoliberal program of Ronald Reagan’s administration to the immigration restrictions of Donald Trump’s.Ĭhomsky highlights the “Good Neighbor Policy” in Guatemala during the 1930s and its connections with the New Deal. Chapter 8 looks at Central American solidarity in the United States. The second section looks at each place and episode of crisis and economic imperialism (from roughly the late 1800s to 1990s): Guatemala (ch. The first section discusses how memory suppression favors certain economic and political goals, and outlines the major markets (coffee, bananas, etc.) and the central role of anti-communist Cold War rhetoric in these American interventions. Importantly, it restores and re-centers the memories of witnesses of these events. The book basically explains why so many people have been and are immigrating to North America from Central America and how American economic interests led to the invasion, occupation, conquering, and violent suppression of peoples and societies in Central America. It explores the true human costs of interventions that are often justified in the name of “economic development.” Historian Aviva Chomsky’s Central America’s Forgotten History is one of these books. There are, however, new works of social, political, and economic history that don’t make the repeated errors of eurocentrism and instead use primary sources that give voice to the unheard and suppressed. (I recently described some of these problems in my review of The Economic History of Colonialism see Capital & Class 46:1). It is often disturbing how uncritically economic history tends to treat imperialism and colonialism. Reviewed by Jamin Andreas Hübner, LCC International University and University of the People. Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration. Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration Author(s):Īviva Chomsky.
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