Central American Solidarity, Then and Now: An Interview With Jenny Atlee By Michael Fox

n the 1980s, as the U.S. government under Presi- How do you see things in Central America ­currently? dent Ronald Reagan supported repressive govern- I ments and covert wars across Central America, U.S. The region as a whole is awash in violence. Some of it is citizens responded, refusing to allow their tax dollars to drug related, some of it is related to organized crime, some fund violence and U.S. intervention. Churches played an of it is related to human trafficking, some of it is related integral role as a new solidarity movement to gang violence, and it’s a violence that is very chaotic. grew. Groups like Witness for Peace were born, bringing It’s violence that terrifies people, that really traumatizes over 10,000 people to during the 1980s. people. In some cases structures that were created and put By 1987, 100,000 U.S. citizens pledged to resist U.S. in place during the counterinsurgency wars in the 1980s intervention in the region. The same year, the Central are engaged in that violence. But there is a different set of American movement helped to pass an amendment in actors and dynamics. Congress that denied aid to the . It’s more complex in some ways than it was in the The Central American wars were eventually resolved, but 1980s, when it was more straightforward in terms of a two decades later, the region is again covered in violence. very clear popular movement, struggles for justice and Among the most disturbing cases is , which in equality that were being repressed by military dictator- June 2009 suffered Central America’s first coup d’état of the ships or governments backed by the with 21st century and now has the highest homicide rate in the funding and equipment. Now there’s this much more cha- world. Since the coup, thousands of human rights violations otic situation, with many facets to the violence, but at the have been documented, and according to human rights de- same time there’s a very familiar level of targeted political fenders it is only getting worse. Although the United States violence that is growing. And it’s very complicated to track briefly suspended military assistance to the coup govern- it all and to sort out where and whom it’s coming from. ment, it has since increased support. Defense Department For example, in the 1980s it was really explicitly clear in spending in Honduras has more than doubled since 2007. Guatemala and El Salvador what the structures were and who Jenny Atlee worked for Witness for Peace in the 1980s, the government actors were designing the policies and carry- leading delegations and documenting the impact of the ing out the repression. It was very clear that the United States U.S.-backed war in Nicaragua. She has lived and done sol- was funding the Contras and that they were waging the war idarity work in Central America ever since. With the 2009 against people working for social change in Nicaragua. coup, Atlee and other solidarity activists began to lead del- Now in Honduras it’s much more complicated because egations to Honduras to learn, as they had in Nicaragua, the structures that are actually carrying out the sort of tar- from the realities on the ground and to address U.S. policy geted political violence are hidden within the government. in the region. She currently works for the Nicaragua-U.S. They’re not acting openly, so you have to research and dig Friendship Office, coordinating the Honduras Accompa- and find out who they are and how they’re operating. Mean- niment Project (friendshipamericas.org). Since the coup, while, the government will both deny any involvement in her organization has led 12 delegations to the country. repression and justify it by saying the victims are involved This interview took place on January 17, 2012. in drug trafficking or organized crime or have arms. There’s just many more layers of violence that things can be attrib- Michael Fox is the editor of NACLA Report on the Americas. uted to in order to deflect attention from the actual actors. More of his work can be found at his website, blendingthelines.org. Thirty years later, the patterns and policies and struc- This interview was transcribed for NACLA by Jesenia Dolmus. tures that create economic injustice and concentrate

62 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS VOL. 45, NO. 1 wealth and power are still in place. They continue to gen- evaluate as we went along to see how things resolved, erate dynamics of extreme poverty and human suffering, thinking it would be a short-term effort. Far from being and people organize and try to find solutions and try to resolved, the situation has become much more extreme resist and create a better reality, and the response is repres- and the needs and requests for international and human sion and an attempt to criminalize those efforts. rights accompaniment are growing and are long term. We have a team there that works with Honduran A lot of the focus of your work today is on Honduras. human rights defenders and social movement leaders Can you talk about what you’re working on there? who are at risk. So that’s one of our major focuses and much of our ability to provide that kind of accompani- Honduras is very similar to the rest of the countries in the ment in Honduras is because of our experiences in the region, except that in the 1980s the United States had a 1980s working in the war zones of Nicaragua where the real stronghold in Honduras in terms of physical ­presence Contra war was having an extreme impact on the civil- and military bases. It was a real intelligence hub and the ian population. Churches in Nicaragua put out a call to place from which it launched its counterinsurgency op- people in the United States to come and be present and erations into the other countries. This really marked the to document and witness what U.S. policy was doing on resistance movement in Honduras, because the concen- the ground in Nicaragua, and so for many years in the tration of wealth and power generated unrest. The resis- 1980s Witness for Peace had a steady flow of delegations tance movement organized and tried to press for social in and out of this country into the war zones. Out of that change, but it never reached a point where it posed a re- experience, we learned a tremendous amount and were ally serious challenge to the powers that be as the popular able to quickly respond and move in with lessons learned movements did in the other countries in the region. to accompany the people in Honduras in a context that is After the wars, what we saw was this whole roll-out of very, very complex and in some ways much more danger- neoliberal economic policies, and Honduras was a real at- ous than even the war zones during the 1980s. So that’s tractive sight for the maquila sector. It moved in with full one of our major focuses in Honduras. force, and that generated another wave of social unrest The other piece is to again educate people in the United because the conditions were so extreme in the maqui- States and try to break the media blockade about what’s las. Organizing and consciousness raising began to push happening in Honduras. Unfortunately, far from learning for government reforms and for policies that could cre- from the tragic policies of past decades in Central Amer- ate living conditions that were more manageable and that ica that are very clearly documented now through truth ended up triggering the coup d’état in June 2009. commissions and years of advocacy work, we see the What happened in response was something nobody United States repeating the same patterns and policies, saw coming: a spontaneous outpouring of people into the justifying repression of legitimate expressions of dissent. streets demanding respect for the democratic process and a restoration of the president. And that huge outpour- How is it that in some areas of Honduras, things are ing of people into the streets didn’t go away. They stayed even more deadly than they were in war zones in there and they kept demanding that the coup be undone. the 1980s? The military began suspending civil rights, declaring a state of siege, declaring curfews, rounding up people and It’s very chaotic. In the war zones the crossfire was some- putting them in stadiums, illegal and arbitrary deten- what more navigable. It was pretty clear who was doing tions, massive repression. The social movements were what to whom and where it was coming from. In Hondu- very concerned about where this was going. They began ras today there’s this whole sort of hidden apparatus car- to see similar actors put in high-level positions in govern- rying out a dirty war targeting people for political assas- ment who had been involved in the counterinsurgency sination, and it’s not clear where it’s coming from. So that in the 1980s, which sent a real clear message to people makes it very dangerous. In addition there’s this overlay working for social change in Honduras. of drug trafficking and organized crime, which changes People called for help and they called on the interna- all the rules of the game. tional community to be present and to be concerned, to In the 1980s, the United States’ massive amounts of come into the country to try to document and break the military aid to the counterinsurgency wars created a po- media blackout and tell what was happening and provide litical space for a group like Witness for Peace to work accompaniment. We responded first by trying to take del- in the region. In Nicaragua, while it was acceptable for egations on a regular basis with the idea that we would Nicaraguan casualties to mount, it was not OK for U.S.

SPRING 2012 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 63 citizens to be harmed. We saw this in the tragic case of What other kinds of parallels do you see between Ben Linder, who was the first U.S. citizen to be killed in Central America now and the past in regards to U.S. Nicaragua during the Contra war. He was a water engi- ­foreign policy? neer working on a project up in the mountains to create hydroelectric energy and he was killed by the Contras. Unfortunately, U.S. policy continues to pursue practices The fallout from that killing was huge in the United and patterns that concentrate wealth and power and gen- States, because there was a huge solidarity movement erate poverty and inequality. That dynamic ­inevitably gen- and the government heard from that movement loud and erates dissent, and the U.S. responds to that dissent with clear that this was yet another impact of U.S. policy. Af- military solutions—to crack down, to criminalize, and to terward the United States was very cautious about mak- demonize. That hasn’t changed from the 1980s. In some ing sure there were no U.S. casualties; it was too politi- ways it’s become more extreme now, because in addition cally costly in the United States. Right now in Honduras to supporting military responses, it’s also all couched in with all of these other layers of violence, some of those this war on terrorism. So countries are required to pass dynamics are not as clear. anti-terrorist laws, and legitimate expression of dissent is The other thing that’s very different today is that sec- considered terrorist activity. That’s a new dynamic, and tors of the resistance movements in the 1980s in Central it’s a very dangerous one in terms of eroding the efforts America, after many years of exhausting all efforts and to create democracy in the region and to strengthen civil mechanisms for change, had adopted armed struggle as rights and liberties in this post-war period. a way of social change. The armed sector provided­ some Also the policies in the 1980s left this enormous legacy counterbalance­ to the violence of the military. In this cur- of human casualties and suffering, and there’s this huge rent context, the popular movements and the resistance level of collective trauma that has never had the opportu- in general in the region, and particularly in Honduras, is nity to be appropriately healed. When, for example, there’s choosing nonviolence as a method of social change, so a coup in Honduras and people like Billy Joya—who was they are totally vulnerable and unprotected. a death-squad leader famous for disappearing the children of social movement leaders­—is put into a very high level How has U.S. solidarity with Central America changed of government, which the United States immediately steps since the 1980s until now? up to recognize, that sends a chilling message to people throughout the country that reactivates the trauma from In the 1980s what stands out for me is the sheer vol- the 1980s. There’s a real explicit intent to use terror to try ume of people who were coming in and out of the region to subdue people by retraumatizing them. year after year. I remember being with Witness for Peace The one other thing that the United States learned in in the early 1980s. We had a large team, and we would the 1980s was to distance itself from the violence by using have several delegations in the country at a time and they proxy forces like the Contra. They were still being funded would be back to back. One large delegation would come by the United States, so there was complicity and respon- in, you’d drop them off at the airport, and the next one sibility. Today it’s more complicated because military op- would be arriving. We don’t see that kind of large volume erations have been privatized through military contractors anymore, and particularly not in Honduras; it’s very hard or security companies that are local, distancing the link- to get delegations in general to go there. While there are ages. This reduces accountability, and we have to work large numbers of delegations coming into the region, of- much more harder to follow the money and track the ten they’re more focused on development efforts or in military aid and where it goes and how it ends up, than general education—sort of first exposure to the region we did during the 1980s, when it was going directly into rather than a delegation that’s really coming in to focus the government or directly into the military. and grapple with U.S. policy in a very strategic way. The other difference is the churches, which in the 1980s Do you think that this was a conscious shift on the were central to the movement. They had a really strong part of the U.S. government to intentionally reduce prophetic voice, providing sanctuary for refugees. They ­accountability? played a really prominent role both in the region and back in the United States. That role is not as prominent today, I think so. I think it was one of the lessons learned from and we hope that changes. I think we’re all working hard the 1980s. To lessen their accountability to make it harder­ to reengage­ the churches and the major denominations. to trace it back to them.

64 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS VOL. 45, NO. 1 U.S. citizens join a weekly protest in front of the U.S. embassy in Managua in 1985. paul dix / witness for peace Are there any positive lessons to be learned from the legacy of the 1980s? population, were dismantled and eliminated. That didn’t take place in any of the other countries, and it created a One thing that really stands out is that there’s a real pal- whole other legacy here, it created a space that is much pable difference in Nicaragua in terms of levels of vi- more healthy and safe and secure. People here trust the olence and security than anywhere else in the region. police. They are not afraid of the military. There was If you look at what’s called the Northern Triangle—El just a poll in Nicaragua in which the head of the police, Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras—and then up into Aminta Granera, came out as the most respected person Mexico, there’s a similar dynamic where those countries in the country. I think it’s a real testimony to the need for are awash in this chaotic mix of organized crime, drug real structural change and one of the lasting legacies of violence, trafficking, and then this whole other layer of that huge struggle on the part of the ­Nicaraguan people. targeted political persecution. You also see, in the three Central American countries, actors that were involved What can people in the United States do to help? in massive human rights abuses and counterinsurgency during the 1980s still active today. I think it’s essential that people look for alternative me- In Nicaragua, it’s dramatically different. Nicaragua dia sources, to read and educate and find out what’s hap- has the highest indexes for citizen security and for drug pening in the region, to come to the region, to come on interdiction in the region, and it is one of the poorest delegations, to join accompaniment efforts, to be present countries, with the lowest-paid police force. Yet they’ve here, like we did in the 1980s. To see and hear and know been able to keep crime rates down, keep a good level what’s happening and come back and share with their of security in the country, and keep drug traffickers at communities, with their churches. I think it’s essential bay. Nicaragua is the only country where the abusive for church leaders to come here and see what’s happen- structures, created, trained, and financed by the United ing and be grappling with these issues. There’s also policy States to prop up the U.S.-backed military dictators, makers who have been around since the 1980s and have were totally dismantled with the Revolution. The Na- that historic memory, and they get it immediately and see tional Guard was dismantled, the very feared and repres- the connections. But we need to be there in their offices, sive EEBI [special operations] forces, which terrified the we need to be talking to them, and they will respond.

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