Every few years, Washington rediscovers the southern border as an emergency, as if the people arriving there had appeared out of nowhere.
They did not.
Much of the migration from Central America echoes decisions Washington made over seven decades, funded by taxpayers and defended in the name of fighting communism. A call to arms we are hearing repeated today.
While Mark Twain is often miscredited with this quote, that does not diminish its effectiveness.
“History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.”
The pattern began in 1954. When Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, expropriated uncultivated United Fruit Company land under a modest agrarian reform, the CIA organized his overthrow.
Democracy did not follow. Terror did.
A succession of military governments followed, along with a civil war that lasted until 1996. Guatemala’s UN-backed Historical Clarification Commission concluded that state forces and allied paramilitaries committed roughly 93 percent of documented human rights violations, and more than 200,000 people died or disappeared, most of them Maya.
In 1999, President Clinton told Guatemalans in their capital city that US support for military forces engaged in widespread repression had been wrong.
The 1980s repeated the pattern on a larger scale. In El Salvador, Washington poured billions of dollars into a government whose security forces and death squads, according to the UN Truth Commission, committed the great majority of the war’s atrocities.
The US-trained Atlacatl Battalion carried out the 1981 El Mozote massacre.
In Guatemala, Reagan defended General Efraín Ríos Montt, later convicted of genocide in his own country, as a man getting a “bum rap.”
In Nicaragua, we funded the Contras, and in 1986 the International Court of Justice found the United States had violated international law. Jeane Kirkpatrick’s influential 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” supplied the intellectual cover: friendly autocrats were tolerable, and reformers were suspect.
The reformers were the real casualties. Washington treated land reform, labor organizing, literacy campaigns, and popular parties as Soviet beachheads. In Chile, the Church Committee documented American efforts to undermine Allende before the 1973 coup installed Pinochet.
Across the region, jailers, exiles, and death squads removed the people who might have built functioning, accountable states. What remained were militarized institutions, concentrated land ownership, and impunity.
Those conditions drive people north.
Then came the second-order effects. Salvadoran refugees fleeing the war landed in Los Angeles, where some youths formed MS-13 and Barrio 18 in response to the gangs around them.
After Congress expanded deportation grounds in 1996, the United States shipped gang members back to countries with shattered institutions and no capacity to absorb them. Scholars such as Ana Arana have traced the region’s gang violence to this collision.
Today’s asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle often flee the descendants of policies we exported.
But a system quietly dependent on workers it officially refuses to recognize is not a border policy. It is a subsidy for a few.
Joe Broadmeadow
Economic policy compounded the damage. NAFTA exposed Mexican corn farmers to subsidized American imports, and studies from the Carnegie Endowment and others tie the disruption to rural displacement and northward migration.
Meanwhile, American employers in agriculture, meatpacking, construction, and hospitality have long depended on a workforce that is both cheap and willing and, because of its legal status, easy to discipline.
The Bracero program formalized the arrangement from 1942 to 1964, and its informal successor never ended. The gains flowed disproportionately to employers. Stagnant wages, strained services, and political backlash landed on everyone else.
Immigrants’ economic contribution is real. The National Academies found immigration to be a net positive for long-run growth, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that undocumented workers paid roughly $97 billion in taxes in 2022.
But a system quietly dependent on workers it officially refuses to recognize is not a border policy. It is a subsidy for a few.
And we paid for all of it. American taxpayers funded military aid, training at the School of the Americas, covert operations, and proxy wars, and nobody asked whether they wanted to underwrite the destabilization of their neighbors.
Now the same taxpayers pay for walls, detention, and enforcement to manage the consequences.
None of this means every migrant is a refugee of Washington’s making, or that open borders follow. It means an honest border policy starts with an honest ledger. If we want fewer people at the border, we should stop treating it as the beginning of the story. We should support the institutions, land reform, rule of law, and economic development in Central America that we spent decades dismantling.
Sources
- CIA, CIA’s Role in the Overthrow of Arbenz (declassified history); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (Harvard University Press, 1982)
- Commission for Historical Clarification, Guatemala: Memory of Silence (1999)
- UN Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, From Madness to Hope (1993)
- International Court of Justice, Nicaragua v. United States (1986)
- US Senate Church Committee, Covert Action in Chile, 1963–1973 (1975)
- Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Commentary (November 1979)
- Ana Arana, “How the Street Gangs Took Central America,” Foreign Affairs (2005)
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, NAFTA’s Promise and Reality (2003)
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration (2016)
- Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Undocumented Immigrants’ State and Local Tax Contributions (2024)
Joe Broadmeadow retired as a captain from the East Providence Police Department after twenty years of service, having commanded the Investigative Services Division and served on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force with the FBI and DEA. Since founding JEBWizard Creative Media in 2019, he has written across crime fiction, the Josh Williams and Hawk Bennett series, along with co-authored true crime, YA fantasy, and literary fiction, bringing an investigator’s evidentiary eye to both his novels and his opinion writing. A 2014 Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, a grandfather, and a Cumberland High School graduate with deep roots in the town, he lives in Rhode Island, or wherever his travels take him.
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