The Dragons' Teeth of War
CHAPTER 2 The Dragons' Teeth of War Perhaps it was inevitable that Americans would have to finish the debate over Vietnam in Latin America, where the United States had long been the predominant power. Vietnam was 12,000 miles away, but Latin America was our own backyard. El Salvador was closer to Miami than Miami was to Washington, D.C., as Ronald Reagan regularly reminded us. Harlingen, Texas, was just a few days drive from Managua, Nicaragua.1 If Washington's commit- ment in Vietnam was a mistake because it was too far away, because the culture was too alien for Americans to understand, or because the interests at stake did not justify the sacrifice, none of these reasons applied in Central America. The isthmus of Central America stretches from Mexico's southern border to Panama, encompassing five former Spanish colonies—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Nicaragua, the largest, is about the size of Michigan; El Salvador, the smallest, is the size of Massachusetts. Only about 23 million people live in the entire region, whose average gross national prod- uct per capita in the 19805 was well below $1,000. Central America has always been among the most underdeveloped regions in Latin America. Even during the colonial period, it was a sparsely settled backwater. Unlike the colonial centers in Mexico and Peru, Central America had few precious minerals to attract the Spanish and, except in Guatemala, 1O there were too few indigenous people to work the mines or the large landed estates. Central America's subsistence economies were not fully integrated into the world market until the late nineteenth century, when the coffee and banana booms spurred a rapid expansion of export agriculture.2 Contemporary Central American society was built on coffee and bananas.
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