Thirty Years Later: Remembering the U.S. Churchwomen in El Salvador and the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 119-144
Author(s):  
Theresa Keeley
1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-16
Author(s):  
David Rymph ◽  
Linda Little

Washington, D.C., like many major cities in the U.S., has experienced a large influx of illegal immigrants in the past decade. Hundreds of thousands of Hispanics have entered the United States, many of them fleeing from the political violence in Guatemala and El Salvador. The Washington metropolitan area may have as many as 80,000 refugees from El Salvador alone.


2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline L. Hazelton

Debates over how governments can defeat insurgencies ebb and flow with international events, becoming particularly contentious when the United States encounters problems in its efforts to support a counterinsurgent government. Often the United States confronts these problems as a zero-sum game in which the government and the insurgents compete for popular support and cooperation. The U.S. prescription for success has had two main elements: to support liberalizing, democratizing reforms to reduce popular grievances; and to pursue a military strategy that carefully targets insurgents while avoiding harming civilians. An analysis of contemporaneous documents and interviews with participants in three cases held up as models of the governance approach—Malaya, Dhofar, and El Salvador—shows that counterinsurgency success is the result of a violent process of state building in which elites contest for power, popular interests matter little, and the government benefits from uses of force against civilians.


Author(s):  
Matthew James Hone

The United States, amongst other motives, utilized their intervention into El Salvador as a laboratory for strategic, tactical and technological military techniques. The extent of the experimentation has not been fully divulged due to the continued classification of documentation and the secretive nature of U.S. special operations. However, there is sufficient evidence available to reveal that the U.S. participation in El Salvador initiated or expanded on a number of practices that would be incorporated well after the conflict


2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter C. Ladwig

After a decade and a half of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. policymakers want to change their approach to COIN by providing aid and advice to local governments rather than directly intervening with U.S. forces. Both this strategy and U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine in general, however, do not acknowledge the difficulty of convincing clients to follow U.S. COIN prescriptions. The historical record suggests that, despite a shared aim of defeating an insurgency, the United States and its local partners have had significantly different goals, priorities, and interests with respect to the conduct of their counterinsurgency campaigns. Consequently, a key focus of attention in any future counterinsurgency assistance effort should be on shaping the client state's strategy and behavior. Although it is tempting to think that providing significant amounts of aid will generate the leverage necessary to affect a client's behavior and policies, the U.S. experience in assisting the government of El Salvador in that country's twelve-year civil war demonstrates that influence is more likely to flow from tight conditions on aid than from boundless generosity.


Author(s):  
Matt Eisenbrandt

As the chapter describes the legal team’s continuing search for Alvaro Saravia, it provides the background on Saravia’s criminal past in El Salvador that led him to come to the United States. Salvadoran authorities finally launched a serious investigation into the Romero assassination leading to the testimony of the getaway driver, Amado Garay, and the arrest of Saravia in Miami. Roberto D’Aubuisson and others infuriated the U.S. government by undermining a case to have Saravia extradited to stand trial in El Salvador. With Saravia still facing immigration problems, a U.S. embassy official took advantage of Saravia’s predicament to get information from him about Romero’s murder. Those details largely matched the findings of a Truth Commission report issued a few years later, after the end of El Salvador’s civil war.


Author(s):  
Roberto Suro

This chapter examines the circumstances that produced repeated migration surges from the Northern Triangle of Central America—El Salvador, Honduras to Guatemala—to the United States. Dominated by women and children fleeing poverty and violence, since 2014 the surges have challenged the U.S. asylum system, prompted crisis responses at the border and provoked ongoing political controversies. This chapter argues these surges are an outgrowth, really a kind of mutation, of long-standing migrations that have been dominated by labor and family reunification flows in recent years. Moreover, the surges were facilitated by migrations channels, including criminal smuggling networks, that had developed to transport what was once a far larger Mexican flow. The surges serve as a warning that seemingly stable labor migrations can transform into sudden, large scale movements of humanitarian migrants due to changing circumstances in sending communities.


Author(s):  
Matthew James Hone

The United States, amongst other motives, utilized their intervention into El Salvador as a laboratory for strategic, tactical and technological military techniques. The extent of the experimentation has not been fully divulged due to the continued classification of documentation and the secretive nature of U.S. special operations. However, there is sufficient evidence available to reveal that the U.S. participation in El Salvador initiated or expanded on a number of practices that would be incorporated well after the conflict


2021 ◽  
pp. 0094582X2110618
Author(s):  
David Stoll

Exporting labor to the United States has become the principal industry of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Central Americans have been moving to the United States in large numbers since the 1980s, but how they gain entry has shifted thanks to the interplay between the migration industry and border enforcement. Many Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans are paying smugglers to deliver them to U.S. border agents so they can apply for asylum. The Trump administration’s harsh reactions have energized asylum advocates, who argue that applicants are fleeing dislocation by neoliberal capitalism. Migrant households in the Ixil Maya municipio of Nebaj, Guatemala, express an optimistic interpretation of this situation that they call their American Dream. Their wish for high wages in the United States can be seen as the latest in a series of “hope machines” that interpret disadvantageous relations of exchange as the path to a better future. Such hopes are based on the irrefutable buying power of the dollar, but migrant remittances to their families conceal the extraction of rents. U.S. asylum advocates understandably stress that the most important challenge facing irregular immigrants is their legal status. However, with or without legal status, the underlying issue for migrants will continue to be their position in the U.S. job market, because this generates household indebtedness that increases vulnerability to human trafficking. La exportación de mano de obra a los Estados Unidos se ha convertido en la principal industria de Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras. Los centroamericanos se han estado mudando a los Estados Unidos en grandes cantidades desde la década de 1980, pero la forma en la que obtienen la entrada ha cambiado gracias a la interacción entre la industria de la migración y la industria de la deportación. Muchos guatemaltecos, hondureños y salvadoreños pagan a coyotes para que los entreguen a agentes fronterizos de Estados Unidos, pudiendo así puedan solicitar asilo. Las duras reacciones de la administración Trump han energizado a los defensores del asilo, quienes argumentan que los solicitantes están huyendo de la dislocación causada por el capitalismo neoliberal. Los migrantes en el municipio ixil maya de Nebaj, Guatemala, tienen una interpretación optimista de esta situación, la cual llaman su Sueño americano. Su deseo de salarios altos en Los Estados Unidos puede ser visto como la última en una serie de “máquinas de esperanza” que interpretan las desventajosas relaciones de intercambio como el camino hacia un futuro mejor. Dichas esperanzas se basan en el irrefutable poder adquisitivo del dólar, pero las remesas de los migrantes a sus familias ocultan la extracción de rentas. Los defensores del asilo en Estados Unidos enfatizan, comprensiblemente, que el desafío más importante que enfrentan los inmigrantes irregulares es su estatus legal. Sin embargo, con o sin estatus legal, el problema subyacente para los migrantes seguirá siendo su posición en el mercado laboral estadunidense, ya que esto genera el endeudamiento de los hogares e incrementa su vulnerabilidad a la trata de personas.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 462-471
Author(s):  
Wassim Daghrir

Should the United States’ global mission be to make the world “safe for democracy”, as Woodrow Wilson said, or, in the words of John Quincy Adams, should the US be “the well-wisher of freedom and independence of all” but the “champion and vindicator only of our own”? The debate between Idealists and Realists in US foreign policy has been going on forever. Idealists hold that the US should make its internal political philosophy, namely Democracy, the goal of its foreign policy. Realists, on the other hand, esteem that the US foreign policy should be mainly oriented towards the protection and enhancement of “the National Interest”. My line of reasoning is that the balance has always shifted towards Realism and, occasionally, aggressive Realism. U.S. interventions in Latin America offer telling case studies. They have taken the shape of a mixture of overt and covert interventions in conjunction with the significant political, economic and military pressures. Washington’s efforts to check hostile developments in the Americas necessitated the investment of considerable tax-dollars, political capital, and even American lives. To accomplish its political, strategic, and economic objectives in the area, the U.S. has devoted extensive human and material resources. The strategy to follow might differ depending on each country’s specificity or on the reactions of the U.S. Congress and public opinion. The big lines, however, remain unaffected, as we will try to find out through our study of the U.S. interventions in El Salvador.


Author(s):  
Rosina Lozano

An American Language is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States. The nation has always been multilingual and the Spanish language in particular has remained as an important political issue into the present. After the U.S.-Mexican War, the Spanish language became a language of politics as Spanish speakers in the U.S. Southwest used it to build territorial and state governments. In the twentieth century, Spanish became a political language where speakers and those opposed to its use clashed over what Spanish's presence in the United States meant. This book recovers this story by using evidence that includes Spanish language newspapers, letters, state and territorial session laws, and federal archives to profile the struggle and resilience of Spanish speakers who advocated for their language rights as U.S. citizens. Comparing Spanish as a language of politics and as a political language across the Southwest and noncontiguous territories provides an opportunity to measure shifts in allegiance to the nation and exposes differing forms of nationalism. Language concessions and continued use of Spanish is a measure of power. Official language recognition by federal or state officials validates Spanish speakers' claims to US citizenship. The long history of policies relating to language in the United States provides a way to measure how U.S. visions of itself have shifted due to continuous migration from Latin America. Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are crucial arbiters of Spanish language politics and their successes have broader implications on national policy and our understanding of Americans.


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