NACLA editorial committee members Jorge Cuéllar and Hilary Goodfriend recently wrapped a marathon, three-episode podcast series on Central America with The Dig, a podcast hosted by Daniel Denvir through Jacobin Radio. This sweeping conversation on the region’s history, political economy, and present conjuncture is intended to serve as an accessible yet comprehensive tool for scholars and activists, beginning with Central American state formation and the imperialist interventions of the late 19th century and concluding with reflections on the far-right demonization of migration in the United States today. 

Episode I, “Oligarchy, Empire, and Revolution,” traces the region’s uneven development and dependent insertion into the globalizing world market beginning in the 19th century, identifying common patterns of military-oligarchic rule and agro-export accumulation while exploring the historical contingencies and structural factors that account for national particularities and distinctions across the isthmus. This discussion includes the U.S.-backed excision of Panama from Colombia, the United States’s tolerance of social reform in mid-century Costa Rica while backing the 1954 coup against Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, and the onset of the wars for national liberation and U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary campaigns that wracked Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador in the second half of the 20th century. 

Episode II, “Neoliberalism, Violence, and Migration” follows the region from civil war into the neoliberal postwar period, exploring the coterminous installation of liberal democratic infrastructure and free-market restructuring that augured devastating processes of displacement, dispossession, and social alienation. This segment covers the role of mass migration in the region’s subordinate insertion in the new international division of labor, the rise of transnational criminal gangs, and the subsequent exhaustion of the postwar political economy, as embodied by the rise of authoritarian president Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.

Episode III, “Crypto Dystopia or Popular Democracy,” offers an analysis of the conflicting pressures of authoritarianism and extractivism against social movements and democratic reformers, as well as the tensions between liberal agendas and radical programs for refoundation and plurinationality in the region. The conversation returns to the Bukele regime’s sinister project of personal gain and global branding, pivots to the sensitive subject of Daniel Ortega’s retreat from Sandinismo’s revolutionary commitments in Nicaragua, then explores the promise and contradictions of progressive governance under Presidents Xiomara Castro and Bernardo Arévalo in Honduras and Guatemala, respectively. The discussion then moves south to the discontents of extractivism and mass migration in Panama, finally closing with considerations regarding the spectre of migration in U.S. political discourse. 

Listen at The Dig Radio or your preferred podcast streaming application, and please share widely! Stay tuned for a forthcoming Dig newsletter with reading and viewing recommendations from Cuéllar and Goodfriend on Central America’s past and present. 

AROUND THE REGION