Central America 
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SOURCE: Washington Post
5/20/2023
Discovery: Vast Network of Connected Mayan Cities in Guatemala
The discovery, using LIDAR technology, of more than 400 settlements connected by more than 100 miles of highways suggests that the Mayan civilization was even more developed than previously believed. The discovery also raises major issues of preservation and public access to the site.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
1/10/2023
Was Present-Day Panama the Site of the First Slave Revolt in the Americas?
Papers in the General Archive of the Indies in Sevilla, Spain, helped Robert Schwaller to challenge the established timeline and expand the geography of slave rebellion in the Americas.
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SOURCE: Responsible Statecraft
3/1/2022
Honduran President Was Washington's Man, Until He Wasn't
Propped up in large part as a bulwark against a leftist political insurgency, Juan Orlando Hernandez's usefulness to American interests has apparently diminished sufficiently for his indictment on drug trafficking charges to proceed.
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SOURCE: Public Books
8/3/2021
The Migration Crisis is a Gendered Violence Crisis
by Laura Briggs and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo
Central American women are frequently pushed to migrate by the threat of sexual violence. American policy inflicts further gendered harm through family separation and border militarization.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/12/2021
The U.S. Role in the El Mozote Massacre Echoes in Today’s Immigration
by Nelson Rauda and John Washington
Renewed efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of the 1981 El Mozote massacre of Salvadoran civilians during the civil war will further demonstrate American involvement in the perpetuation of inequality and violence in Central America and, the authors argue, the hypocrisy of US immigration policy.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
4/29/2020
‘I’ve Lost Everything to the Beast’: Reviewing 4 Books on MS-13
by Rachel Nolan
While the specter of the MS-13 gang has been central to political panics about immigration, the group's origins are American. A Latin American historian reviews four new books.
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SOURCE: New York Times
4/11/2021
How Should the US Treat Migrants when American Policy Affected the Countries They Fled?
The Temporary Protected Status designation, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States, originated because of the massive human rights abuses of the US-supported dictatorship in El Salvador.
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SOURCE: The Nation
4/1/2021
Biden’s Plan for Central America Is a Smokescreen
by Aviva Chomsky
The Biden plan for Central America revives the Cold War formula of business-friendly economic development and militarized security in the name of stopping migration toward the US. This, the author argues, amounts to doubling down on failed policies that have driven migration for decades.
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SOURCE: Skipped History
3/24/2021
The 1954 US-Backed Coup in Guatemala
by Ben Tumin
Ben Tumin's "Skipped History" video series returns with a discussion of the 1954 Guatemala Coup, drawing on the work of Greg Grandin, Stephen Kinzer and Steven Schleshinger, and Vincent Bevins.
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SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson
3/13/2021
Letters From an American, March 13, 2021
by Heather Cox Richardson
What are the historical underpinnings of the immigration system, and what do politicians really mean by invoking a "border crisis"?
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SOURCE: The New Republic
3/5/2021
The Manifest Destiny Marauders Who Gave the “Filibuster” Its Name
by John Pat Leary
The original "filibusters" were mercenaries who invaded multiple Latin American nations in the interest of subverting their governments and establishing slaveholding colonies. Today the name is tied to procedural efforts to subvert democracy and impose minority rule.
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SOURCE: Not Even Past
11/13/2020
Out of the Rubble: Doctors Strikes and State Repression in Guatemala’s Cold War
by Ilan Palacios Avineri
An earthquake in Guatemala, and subsequent demands for their labor, shook many medical professionals out of complacency and cooperation with the country's right-wing government at the height of the nation's civil war.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
10/25/2020
Sanctuary Unmasked: The First Time Los Angeles (Sort of) Became a City of Refuge
by Paul A. Kramer
Los Angeles’s first sanctuary law grew out of the refugee wave that had brought Alicia Rivera to the city. By 1982, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 refugees from El Salvador — a country with fewer than 5,000,000 people — and tens of thousands of Guatemalans had fled to the United States to escape murder, poverty, and starvation.
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SOURCE: National Security Archive
9/11/2020
"GUILTY": Justice for the Jesuits in El Salvador
Applying the doctrine of Universal Jurisdiction for human rights abuses, a Spanish Court found former El Salvador Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano guilty in the assassination of six Jesuit priests and two Salvadoran women in 1989. The National Security Archive supplied hundreds of declassified documents as evidence.
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SOURCE: Haymarket Books
9/2/2020
Book Launch: Roberto Lovato's Unforgetting: Family, Migration, Gangs, Borders, and Revolution
Roberto Lovato discusses his new book "Unforgetting" with Mike Davis.
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SOURCE: New York Times
9/1/2020
A Salvadoran-American Assembles the Fragments of a Violent Cultural History (Review)
Carolyn Forché reviews Roberto Lovato's book "Unforgetting" on the transnational history of the Salvadoran people.
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SOURCE: New York Times
4/7/2020
How Coffee Ruined a Country
by Lizabeth Cohen
Lizabeth Cohen reviews Augustine Sedgewick's book, which argues that coffee monoculture was disastrous to El Salvador.
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SOURCE: USA Today
7/15/19
Marshall Plan for Central America would restore hope, end migrant border crisis
by William Lambers
The Marshall Plan was key to restoring stability to Europe after WWII. Now, a similar approach must be taken in Central America.
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SOURCE: AP
5-20-13
The Maya meet the Internet
Researchers began decoding the glyphic language of the ancient Maya long ago, but the Internet is helping them finish the job and write the history of this enigmatic Mesoamerican civilization.For centuries, scholars understood little about Maya script beyond its elegant astronomical calculations and calendar. The Maya had dominated much of Central America and southern Mexico for 1,000 years before their civilization collapsed about 600 years before the Spaniards reached the New World....