As professors of Latin American & Latino Studies, we train students to recognize the deeply linked histories and realities of this hemisphere. “The hemisphere is a lens, not just a place” is a phrase that we often bring up in faculty meetings. In other words – centering the interconnectedness of moving beings, things, and ideas in this hemisphere is at the core of how we understand the politics, economies, cultures, and environments of the Americas.
As it turns out, this perspective is helpful when it comes to disentangling the murky, rapidly-expanding definitions of “terrorism” that the Trump administration is actively leveraging at home and abroad. Furthermore, it allows us to see how today’s shifting goalposts of “terrorism” are the product of a process set in motion decades ago. Our students were born and came of age during the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) – they’re no stranger to the term. Yet they often don’t have a sense that “terrorism” as an idea, rhetoric, justification for the atrocities of ‘counterinsurgency’ – is so deeply rooted in a history of inter-American relations.
Terrorism & Intervention in Central America
“Terrorism” as a justification for U.S. intervention and regime change in Latin America expanded in the mid-1980s. Some of its first appearances in the discourse of U.S. politicians were in references made to Central American people. For example, at that time, the Reagan administration (1981-1989) sought to depose Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, and bring an end to a socialist revolutionary project that it cast as unfolding in the U.S.’s “backyard.” This was a moment when the U.S. was becoming ever more involved in the Middle East, as Reagan moved combat forces into the region and, among other objectives, sought to secure U.S. access to oil. In labeling the Sandinistas as “terrorists” (not just “communists”, as had been more standard until then) conveniently tied U.S. actions in Latin America into its broader geopolitical agenda.
During this era, the U.S. government developed strategies to deal with a set of political and economic conditions that politicians such as Henry Kissinger had taken to referring to as the “Central American crisis.” Tactics hinged on overt and covert intervention operations designed to destabilize governments and movements who, like the Sandinistas, the U.S. cast as a threat to democracy and (importantly!) capitalist enterprise. Over the course of the 1980s, thousands of officers sent from Latin American military dictatorships trained in “counterinsurgency” (read: torture-forward curriculum) programs sponsored by the US Government at the School of the Americas military training center in Georgia. As the Cold War entered its last decade, Latin America became a testing ground for the strategies and rhetoric deployed in escalating US involvement in the Middle East in the years that followed.