It was not the first or the last time that US imperialism intervened in Central America. From the beginning of the 20th century, on dozens of occasions, Washington sent the Marines to impose their will on the region. The heroic deeds of Augusto César Sandino and his “little crazy army” against the Yankee military intervention of the first quarter of the 20th century in Nicaragua is well known. Decades later, that country and the government of the Sandinista Liberation Front would suffer a relentless and bloody aggression from the government of Ronald Reagan. A counterrevolutionary army organized and armed illegally by the United States was supplied by air from Honduras in a massive CIA operation. Planes came loaded with weapons from the United States and returned with drugs (Iran-Contra). At the same time, the CIA established death squads that, at the expense of egregious human rights violations, kept Honduran revolutionaries at bay. In 1989, George Bush Sr. ordered the invasion of Panama, which cost the lives of 3000 people.

In 2009, the Military Base of Soto Cano in Honduras, where Task Force Bravo of the Southern Command of the United States is located, initiated the coup against President Manuel Zelaya. That action is related to events that led to the mass migration of Central Americans. Zelaya entered ALBA and established a fluid cooperative relationship with Chavista Venezuela. He managed to get the OAS to lift the exclusion of Cuba in a general assembly of the organization held in his country and tried to organize a constituent assembly to transfer to the Honduran people the control of its national sovereignty and its natural resources. None of this was tolerable for Washington, which not only ordered the coup, but did everything within its power to consolidate it. Since then, all elections in Honduras have been fraudulent, including the one that augured the current president Juan Orlando Hernández.  Zelaya, allied to the Nicaragua of Daniel Ortega, would have been an obstacle to the plans of looting and territorial expansion through mining transnationals and the so-called Special Economic Zones.

The genesis of the current and irrepressible migratory flow was the application of the neoliberal policies designed by the so-called Washington Consensus to Central America, which have become increasingly bloody and unsustainable. The peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are being subjected to a second reconquest and recolonization, through transnational companies and militarization promoted by the United States, which includes the presence of military bases in our countries. Satellite governments of imperialism provide all facilities to the transnationals in their expansionist plans of accelerated depredation of natural resources and super-exploitation of the labor force. All this through the dispossession of the  lands and waters of indigenous, Afro-descendent and peasant communities, who are repressed when they rebel by state security forces allied with organized crime. Coupled with this, the rupture of productive chains has led to deindustrialization and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

This neoliberal aggression against the previous forms of capitalist productive organization, with the consequent unemployment and breakdown of the social fabric, is the major cause of the growing displacement and forced exodus of millions of people to the United States. But it is considerably aggravated by the unstoppable rise of criminal organizations and the brutal violence they exert against peoples and communities, whose action map overlaps that of the megaprojects of neoliberalism 3.0.