Historical Context

As Chinchilla and Hamilton describe, Central American migration to the US began to grow as a result of US economic and strategic involvement in the early 20th century. Expansion of trade and commercial ties through banana plantations in Honduras and coffee growers in El Salvador lead to the initial immigration of middle to upper class Central Americans to the US (Chinchilla and Hamilton 190). In fact, these agricultural plantations were the first of many initiatives through which the United States exploited the Central American economy. Nevertheless, Eddie’s parents primarily immigrated to the US due to the external factors that destabilized the Central American and specifically Honduran quality of life in the mid to late 20th century.

 

Beginning in the 1960s till the present day, Central American workers began immigrating to the US in search of job opportunities in US factories. During the 1960s, 101,330 Central Americans were legally admitted to the US, and, by 1970, 174,640 legally immigrated (Chinchilla and Hamilton 190). However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, many Central Americans had begun entering the US illegally as well. For the most part, many of these Central Americans were able to immigrate without legal documentation through the support networks established in the US during the 1970s. A “pioneer” was an immigrant who, after obtaining a job and housing, secures work for family and friends from Central America (Chinchilla and Hamilton 193). In fact, Eddie’s parents were able to confidently immigrate to the US without documentation due to this support network at protections guaranteed by their Temporary Protection Status.

“Juan Xuc, a young Maya from San Pedro, Totonicapán, in Guatemala, came to Houston in 1978, where he found a job at a supermarket. Subsequently he was able to obtain jobs for relatives and friends from San Pedro, and eventually neighboring villages, in the same supermarket chain.”

Since the 1980s, the United States administration has experienced a surge in immigration from Central America, specifically the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). As the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) writes in its article “Central America’s Violent Northern Triangle,” tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans, many of them unaccompanied minors, have arrived in the US in recent years seeking asylum from the region’s skyrocketing violence, which has directly lead to the economic and political instability in the region as well as a lack of opportunity.

“The government, the street gangs, and the public all disagreed with one another in terms of policy and direction for the country. Although the civil wars had ended, the region was still the murder capital of the world.” – Eddie

The reasons for the systemic violence found in the Northern Triangle can be traced to the decades of war in the region, according to the same CFR report. In El Salvador, fighting between military-led government and leftist guerrilla groups (1979-1992) left over 75,000 civilians dead, and Guatemala’s Civil War (1960-1996) killed almost 200,000 civilians (Labrador and Renwick CFR). In the case of Eddie’s home country, Honduras did not have its own civil war,  but instead acted as the staging ground for the US-backed right-wing Contras, a rebel group fighting Nicaragua’s democratically-elected Sandinista government in the 1980s (Chinchilla and Hamilton 194). As violence increased in the Northern Triangle in the late 1980s, established refugee communities in the United States relied on expensive smugglers, or coyotes, to escort refugees across the difficult and dangerous US-Mexico border to safe houses in the US, resembling an “underground railroad” (Chinchilla and Hamilton 194).

Naturally, the US played a major role in initiating and exacerbating these civil wars, indirectly destabilizing the regions’ economies and politics. In 1954, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated the Guatemalan coup d’état that deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacabo Árbenz and installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, the first of a series of US-backed, right-wing authoritarian rulers in Guatemala (CFR). Although the US’s main goal was to take a harder line against communism, American policy on intervention in Central America systemically created political instability and violence that prevented these countries from focusing on economic and financial development.

Fearing that El Salvador could fall to Communism through left-wing opposition groups, the US provided exorbitant amounts of military aid to the country’s government and military throughout the early 1980s in order to suppress the civil war. Human rights atrocities were explicitly ignored by the United States; although the US contributed to the top ranks of the Salvadoran army, on March 15, 1981, the Salvadoran Army’s Scorched Earth Offense on the Cabañas Department in northern El Salvador led to the slaughter of hundreds of civilians by both the US-backed Salvadoran and Honduran armies (UN Truth Commission for El Salvador, 1993). Not only were civilians’ lives uprooted by the conflict, but also the agricultural land and other infrastructure were completely decimated by the conflict, setting the region back economically and financially as well. At the end of these civil wars, a large portion of demobilized former soldiers utilized their easy-access to weaponry to establish the roots of the present-day Central American crime organizations.

By the 1990s, the violence as well as the political and economic instability in Central America, specifically the Northern Triangle, pushed many to immigrate to the United States in search of better opportunities and a higher quality of life, including Eddie’s mother and father. The economic situation in Central America also pushed Central Americans to immigrate, as “at least half of all Central American households [had been] characterized by poverty or extreme poverty” (Chinchilla and Hamilton 197). The sheer poverty and lack of opportunity ultimately pushed Eddie’s parents to immigrate to the United States.