This is part two of a three-part series on the history and present of Central America with Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar. The interview picks up where we left off in part one amid the revolutionary armed struggles against military oligarchic regimes, struggles that took off in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Those regimes responded with brutal violence against the people aided and abetted by the United States.

It was a counterrevolutionary foreign policy that took off with particular enthusiasm under the zealously anti-communist and evangelical Ronald Reagan administration. Peace accords and pmlnostwar transitions brought an end to the armed conflicts and established basic civil rights in the region. The postwar settlement, however, failed to address the underlying conditions that led to armed struggle in the first place. Worse yet, it was all accompanied by the imposition of brutal neoliberal economic restructuring that further deteriorated economic conditions.

This new economic order, in turn, accelerated the mass migration from the region initially unleashed by the civil wars. Ultimately, members of gangs formed in the United States were deported back into the region, leading to the explosion of gang violence that wreaked further havoc on countries that had never recovered from US-sponsored armed conflicts in the first place.

You can listen to this episode of the Dig in full here. You can listen to the first episode in the three-part conversation here or read a transcript of that episode here, and you can listen to the third part here. The conversation’s transcript has been edited for length and clarity.