The author reports on the origins and recent US sponsorship of terrorist organizations in Central America, particularly in Honduras and Guatemala. She focuses much more on their role to terrorize citizens to accept right-wing governments, and is rather weak on their more immediate purpose: to promote the interests of US and Canadian resource corporations.
I get almost daily reports from human rights organizations of atrocities committed by these terrorist armies and paramilitaries who often function to drive indigenous populations off their lands which the above corporations, particularly mining corporations, want access to. These organizations always urge their readers to write to their corporate-sponsored Congress representatives about such actions--as if that will change anything. Of course, these incidents are never covered in US mainstream media and therefore US citizens have no idea what is going on down there.
“The pretext now is drug trafficking,” .... “The drug war has been the frame within which the United States government has legitimated support for repression by state security forces in Honduras and increased funding for them.”
And while the U.S. goal of maintaining a regional base of power amidst the threat of emerging or consolidating leftist alternatives remains much the same, the political context in the region has significantly changed.
“The larger context is the many democratically elected center and center-left governments all over Latin America that the United States is threatened by because they aren’t going to pay obeisance to United States power,” ....
“The United States wanted to lock down its power in Honduras so that it can maintain what has long been the most captive nation in Latin America.”
In the process, the U.S. also promotes the interests of transnational corporations that are making a killing from state-sponsored death squads that suppress resistance and pave the way for capitalist exploitation of land, labor, and indigenous and campesino resources.