Honduran secret police, tortured, and thrown alive
from helicopters. John Negroponte, the ambassa-
dor to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, was alleged by
some in Congress to have ignored Honduran hu-
man rights violations in order to promote the Con-
tra war against Nicaragua.
In Guatemala, Reagan supported an oppressive
government that had fought a civil war against Ma-
yan rebels for almost thirty years and that killed
200,000 people before the war ended in 1985. A hu-
man rights watch group reported that 93 percent of
these killings were conducted by the Guatemalan
army, with the direct and indirect support of the gov-
ernment of the United States. The commission used
the word “genocide” to describe 626 massacres of
entire Mayan villages during the 1980’s. President
Reagan dismissed reports of the attacks on villages
and called the Guatemalan dictator, General Efraín
Ríos Montt, “totally dedicated to democracy.”
In addition to helping preserve murderous gov-
ernments, the United States employed such men as
Manuel Noriega to provide it with anticommunist
intelligence. Noriega, who was on the payroll of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as early as the
1970’s, was the military dictator of Panama, as well as
a major international drug dealer. Finally deciding
that he was more of a liability than an asset, the
United States invaded Panama in 1989, arrested
Noriega, and took him to Miami to stand trial. In the
only other Latin American military action of the de-
cade, the Americans also invaded the island nation
of Grenada in 1983 out of fears that Cuba had infil-
trated Grenada’s revolutionary government.
South America Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile
were controlled by repressive military regimes until
elections brought changes. The governments of all
these countries used death squads, secret police,
and torture to maintain power. In Argentina, the
Dirty War ended with elections in 1983, after the
country’s defeat by the United Kingdom in the
Falkland Islands War. In Chile, General Augusto
Pinochet Ugarte agreed to elections in 1988 and was
defeated.
Bolivia’s history during the 1980’s was another ex-
ample of the heavy-handed use of American power.
Both the Carter and Reagan administrations sought
to pressure the Bolivian government to eradicate its
coca crop, but coca (used for making cocaine) had
been cultivated by the indigenous population for
centuries. Eradication policies and the presence of
U.S. troops created fierce anger; a bomb was deto-
nated during the visit of Secretary of State George P.
Shultz in 1988.
Colombia’s relations with the United States were
complicated by the growing drug trade and the
presence of two Marxist-oriented, violent guerrilla
groups: the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
Colombia—Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army, or
FARC-EP) and the Movimiento 19 de Abril (Nine-
teenth of April Movement, or M-19). M-19 attacked
the Dominican embassy in 1980 and kept a number
of ambassadors hostage until given safe passage to
Cuba; the FARC-EP financed its operations with kid-
napping, extortion, and drug sales. Although Bolivia
and Colombia received some of the largest South
American grants of U.S. military aid during the
1980’s, little progress could be shown in control of
either the drug trade or the Colombian rebels.
Impact The United States consistently stood in its
own eyes and in its rhetoric as a champion of free-
dom in the 1980’s. However, the government be-
lieved the opposite of freedom to be communism,
and it was willing to support any regime, no matter
how brutal, that would oppose communism. By the
same token, the U.S. government opposed populist
and democratic movements that were anticapitalist.
This rigidly anti-Marxist policy of the Western Hemi-
sphere’s only superpower left Latin America increas-
ingly poor and vulnerable to unrest, while the drug
trade continued to grow. These dubious achieve-
ments cost hundreds of millions of dollars in mili-
tary aid, scores of American dead (in the Panama
and Grenada invasions), and hundreds of thousands
of Latin American dead in the various “dirty wars”
the United States fought by proxy during the de-
cade.
Further Reading
Didion, Joan.Salvador.New York: Simon & Schuster,- Eyewitness account of the terror campaign
during El Salvador’s Dirty War.
Middlebrook, Kevin J., and Carlos Rico, eds.The
United States and Latin America in the 1980’s: Con-
tending Perspectives on a Decade of Crisis.Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986. Twenty-four
papers offer a variety of academic perspectives on
U.S. relations with Latin America.
Musicant, Ivan.The Banana Wars: A Histor y of United
574 Latin America The Eighties in America