Grabbing Power Summary

Imagine living in a country where you know you could die at any moment but don’t know how much longer till it happens. That was how much of the population of El Salvador used to feel when the government could not control the big coffee corporations. These out of control corporations, highly feared that the people would want to revolt against them so they hired murderers to kill innocent people to spread fear in the minds of the people of El Salvador. Fear, hate, and sorrow were the common feelings felt by the poor and innocent major population of El Salvador caused by the evil wrongdoings of the government during October 1979 – 16 January 1992. This is how the main character, Jose Luis, of the novel “Mother Tongue” by Demetria Martinez, felt before escaping his beautiful yet over constantly dangerous country, which depended on its cash crop, coffee beans to sell on a foreign market as the country’s main income. However, following the stock-market crash of 1929, a drop in coffee prices became apparent and affected everyone in El Salvador, but the poor especially. Making things worse, the glorious United States was funding the men whom were doing all the innocent killings with more weapons and money to increase their military power. So for Jose Luis the safe haven that he had escaped to was also blatantly funding the war that was killing so many innocent people he knew and had forced him to escape for his own safety. With nowhere else to go in order to find safety the United

This report provides information on Honduras which includes the geography, its society, and government conditions. It offers facts about Honduras’ natural resources and ethnic groups. In addition, the article examines its military and transnational issues including, international conflicts, refugees and drug trafficking. The article provides insight to what controls the economy of Honduras. This article will be useful for my final project because it offers background facts on the level of development.

Olsson, Tore C. Sharecroppers and Campesinos: The American South, Mexico, and the Transnational Politics of Land Reform in the Radical 1930s. The Journal of Southern History Volume LXXXI, No. 3, August 2015.

The poor neighborhoods of Honduras can be just as corrupt as their government. Many neighborhoods in Honduras, including the neighborhood that Lourdes and Enrique grew

It is now obvious that countries in Central America have been plagued by civil war, economic crisis, election fraud to finally transition into a political system granting the population the freedom to elect their leaders. El Salvador is no different than Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras. One might notice that such issues arise due to political unrest in the region (Central America), thus creating a pattern of social, political and economic instability.

Through this Article, the author is showing the importance of greed. The Cherokee an Indian tribe owned Georgia as their territory, but in 1829 the gold rush resulted in Georgia. Mines in Georgia produced “300 ounces of gold a day” (Pauls). The greed of the white people seeing gold come in daily “demanded that the U.S. Congress devolve to the states the control of all real property owned by tribes and their members” (Pauls). This was approved by president Andrew Jackson with no authority the Indians were forced out of their land. Another act of greed happened when Indians in the southeast owned valuable farming land this “coveted by outsiders because they were located in prime agricultural areas and were very well developed” (Pauls). The greed

Today’s violence in El Salvador consists of ruthless gang members. According to CRS (Congressional Research Service) about 30,000 kids have joined the maras and it will continue to increase. Due to the gang violence, children are fleeing the country to prevent from becoming victims or recruited, furthermore families are streaming into the U.S to seek asylum. Alike today, El Salvador experienced the same immigration crisis back in 1980 when the civil war was the cause for Salvadorans to immigrate to the United Sates. Repression and violation of human rights was the root cause, now gang violence is the root cause striking a similar pattern of the effects of violence. In 1980, El Salvador’s right-wing government had death squads to kill citizens for suspicion of supporting a social reform. Military soldiers attacked many villages, including El Mozote in which men, women, and children were tortured and subjected to sexual violence.

In the book The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, author Greg Grandin traces Guatemala’s evolutionary period from the late 19th century to the early 1980s. What he dubs as ‘the last colonial massacre,’ the Panzós Massacre of 1978 was the mass murder by the Guatamalan army of 35 Q’echi-Mayan men, women and children who had gathered in the town square demanding democractic representation, land reform and higher wages. Outrage over this massacre led many Guatemalan peasants to join the communist Guerilla Army of the Poor (EGP) which prompted violence and repression by the US backed right-wing government. Grandin’s thesis is that Cold War terror unleashed or excused by the United States, weakened the advancement of democracy

The social condition in El Salvador concerning the people was divided from wealthy people to poor campesinos. Discriminated against the campesinos because the people with the power in the community want to control what they do and don’t want them to do nothing for them. Poor housing because there houses are not build in the proper way for a person to live

For my first book review I chose to read Barefoot Conquistador Cabeza De Vaca and The Struggle for Native American Rights by Diana Childress. The book explains the many struggles that the Spanish conquistadors had to go through and the suffering of the Native Americans.

Twentieth century El Salvador is made up of violence, suffering, and hardships. After the independence of El Salvador, the elite took control of this country which produced discontent amongst the lower classes. During the 1920’s this discontent grew because of political abuse and increased poverty. According to John Chasteen in Born In Blood and Fire, Salvadoran indigenous people were pushed into volcanic land by the

Throughout 1939-1971, El Salvador was run by a military-style dictatorship, causing those who had land and wealth to be stripped from them just because they could. According to Encyclopedia Britannica the persistence of this dictatorship can be partly credited to Augustin Farabundo Marti, who forced the Salvadorian Communist Party (2017). Proving to be a catalyst for conflicts for years to come.

The book I picked is “A long way gone”. It relates the experience of a child soldier from Sierra Leone, which is a country located in Southern Africa, between Guinea and Liberia, next to the North Atlantic Ocean. This former British colony has currently six million inhabitants, and gained independence in 1961. The official language of Sierra Leone is English, but only 30% of its citizens are educated. Besides that the average life expectancy is 40 years and AIDS / HIV affects 7% of the population; and the economic and social infrastructure of Sierra Leone are not well developed. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the population survives on subsistence agriculture, although the extraction of alluvial diamonds represents almost half the country's exports and the most important source of foreign exchange earnings. The first diamonds from Sierra Leone were discovered in 1930. In addition to diamonds, the country has many natural resources of titanium ore, bauxite, iron ore, gold and iron chromite. Today, Sierra Leone is in peace, and exports approximately $142 million worth of diamonds annually.

In Fentiman article, talks about an ethnographer who is studying a village in Oloma. She points out some of the resources that they are lacking that is causing uproar within this village. Oil is a commodity and when it was discovered in this village it changed everything. The community was experiencing an environmental and cultural degradation. The oil industry has impacted they’re livelihood. They were able to fish because the oil had flowed into the rivers. Their land was being destroyed and they were unhappy. Between the two readings from Fentiman and Perlezan and Johnson, it’s an example of how resources have an affected on people’s lives in terms of having that need and want of something to the point where you don’t care how it affects

Start of the twentieth century it seemed like El Salvador finally establishes a viable government and began building an economy (Background, 2012). Then, the economic crisis of the 1930s occurs and the international markets plummeted and so did El Salvador. Externally, El Salvador was not a huge contender in global markets, but internally the social, political and economic environment in El Salvador was becoming tense and in 1932 the peasant workers in the rural countryside raised up against the land elites (Benavides, 2008). The