“Destroying the Seeds”: The cruel origins of violence toward children in the United States and Central America

Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of violence.

My mom and I in Honduras.

I was born in an aldea in rural Olancho, in the interior of Honduras, in 1995. In the early 2000s, my family and I embarked on the long journey to the United States via land through Guatemala and Mexico, like many other Central American migrants. My name is Cristian Padilla Romero and I am undocumented. I lived with my working-class parents in Georgia up until I graduated high school when I was awarded a scholarship to attend a liberal arts school as a DACA recipient. In college, I was first exposed to scholarship on the historical forces that have caused so much instability and dispossession in Latin America, and this resonated deeply with my family’s lived experience of poverty in Honduras. The lack of history about my own country produced by directly affected people within the US academy propelled me to pursue a PhD in History at Yale University, where I now specialize in Central America, with a focus on Honduras.

“Algunos niños descansan en la carretera mientras viajan con la caravana de miles de migrantes de América Central en ruta a Estados Unidos.” Photo by Ueslei Marcelino for Reuters published in France 24.

My story and the story of my family are closely connected to the stories of thousands of other Central Americans who have been and are currently arriving at the US-Mexico border, the majority seeking asylum. The more I study the history of where I come from in both academic and organizing contexts, the angrier I become at the inhumane treatment my fellow Central Americans are being subjected to, all of this with the support of the US government.

In October of last year, for instance, NBC News reported that lawyers in charge of reuniting previously separated migrant families could not account for the parents of 545 children. Of these, sixty are under the age of five and two-thirds had their parents deported without them. 

A report published by the Office of the Inspector General reveals that the US government began separating migrant families in an undisclosed program in November 2017, well before the 2018 Trump administration “zero tolerance” policy, which separated parents from their children as a way to “deter” migrants from crossing the border. However, while many rightfully decry the Trump administration for its xenophobic remarks and policies, it is equally important to highlight that the Obama-Biden administration deported more people than any other administration, laid the infrastructure (i.e. cages) for detaining migrant children and adults, and contributed to the militarization of Central America through foreign policy like the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). In other words, the two parties hold responsibility for upholding a system that separates not only families, but entire communities. 

The pain of being separated from their child is not uncommon for many Central American parents. The New York Times, for example, reported that children often failed to recognize their parents when reunited. One mother, Mirce Alba López, remembers the excitement she felt at being reunited with her three-year-old daughter and how that “joy turned temporarily to sadness” upon realizing that her own child did not recognize her. The reports do not stop there. In October of last year, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents detained and separated a Honduran woman from her newborn who was delivered shortly before their detention and; back in May 2019, a two-year-old Guatemalan toddler died in CBP custody in El Paso, making him the fourth Central American minor to die in CBP custody since 2018. There are no limits, it seems, to the negligence and malfeasance performed by US agencies against migrant children and their families.

Pupils at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania (c. 1900)

The violence that the United States has inflicted on Central American children is not new. Various forms of violence against children have been employed throughout US history, beginning with the genocide and forced indoctrination of Indigenous children and their communities during the formation of a settler colonial state. All of this violence has been exported to other parts of the world through US foreign policy, particularly in the Global South, where the United States government provides funding as well as police and military training in order to preserve their economic and political interests. 

A child looks at a graffiti reading "Ríos Montt, killer" during the burial of victims of Guatemala's 1982 civil war massacre, in Nebaj, Quiché departament, some 260 km northwest of Guatemala City on July 30, 2014.  (Johan Ordóñez/AFP)

To begin, there is an established pattern of US support for regimes that either facilitate or otherwise produce the violence in Central America through cruel tactics far worse than the ones we witness today. Much is known about the so-called Central American conflicts that climaxed in the 1980s and which oversaw the murder of over 200,000 Guatemalans and over 75,000 Salvadorans, the majority poor ladino (mestizos) and Indigenous campesinos (peasants). Lesser is known, however, about the particular ways in which minors and children, as a social group, were targeted and fell victim to the cruel nature of these US-supported dictatorships, including that of Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala and José Napoleón Duarte in El Salvador. In fact, “destroying the seeds,” was a euphemism employed by the dictatorships to refer to the deliberate targeting of children for murder as a way of terrorizing communities and ensuring their compliance with US-supported state forces.

Consider, for example, some of the events recorded by a US congressional delegation to El Salvador in 1981, a time period when military juntas were in power and the United States was pouring billions of dollars into the small country. The delegation’s report includes graphic descriptions by refugees detailing how the Salvadoran security forces mutilated and decapitated civilians. Furthermore, the report reads, “Children around the age of 8 [were] being raped, and then [the soldiers] would take their bayonets and make mincemeat of them.” It continues, “The army would cut people up and put soap and coffee in their stomachs as a mocking. They would slit the stomach of a pregnant woman and take the child out, as if they were taking eggs out of an iguana.”

Skeleton remains after a massacre in Chalatenango, El Salvador in 1984. Credit: Scott Wallace. Photo published in The New York Times. 

I cannot overstate how much of a common practice this violence was in El Salvador in the 1980s. Human rights journalist Elizabeth Hanly, reporting from a Honduran refugee camp in 1983, described how one Salvadoran campesina witnessed how her three children were chopped to pieces and fed to the pigs by the Salvadoran National Guard. “The soldiers laughed all the way,” the woman recalls.  

Guatemala was equally, if not more, inflicted with this sort of violence under the dictatorship of Efraín Ríos Montt, a Guatemalan general trained at the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in Columbus, Georgia. The Official Report of the Human Rights Office, Archdiocese of Guatemala, documented the testimonies of Guatemalan refugees during this time. One individual in San Cristóbal, Alta Verapaz, 1982, remembers witnessing soldiers tying up his mother, sister, brother-in-law, and their three children and locking them in a house that was subsequently lit on fire, burning and killing everyone inside.

In fact, half of the documented massacres in Guatemala included the collective murder of children by incineration, machete wounds, and blunt head trauma. The Archdiocese's report shares that one man in Buena Vista, Huehuetenango, 1981, remembers thinking that he preferred to die rather than see his children be killed:

“I did beg God that, if they were going to kill me, that they kill me first. I didn’t want to see what they were going to do to my children, because they always did it like that. First, they kill the children. It was a way of torturing the people, the parents. And I thought about all of that but thank God it didn’t happen. And so, someone was still able to escape. They took the baby out of the woman. She was alive and they took out the child she was expecting, in front of her husband and her children. And the woman died and her children died too. They killed the others; the only one who remained was the one who escaped.”

"I know that President Rios Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment." – Ronald Reagan, December 4, 1982

Despite the fact that even mainstream newspapers denounced the human rights abuses under the Ríos Montt regime, then-president Ronald Reagan described Ríos Montt as a “man of great personal integrity” who faced false accusations and was “totally dedicated to democracy in Guatemala.” In his seventeen-month-reign between 1981 and 1982, Ríos Montt oversaw the death of over 100,00 people, accruing about 19 massacres each month. Ríos Montt evaded legal prosecution for his war crimes until 2013 when a Guatemalan Court finally charged and convicted him and another officer for the massacre of over 1,700 Ixil men, women, and children in the 1980s. Ten days later, however, the sentence was conspicuously overturned based on some technicalities.

Even though the armed conflicts in Central America formally ended in the mid-1990s, the conditions that led to the war have not. As a matter of fact, the conditions that the urban and rural poor fought for—an end to poverty alongside a right to land and other political freedoms—have only worsened since then.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama and Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández during a meeting at the White House, 2014. (EFE)

Today, the governments of the countries in the Northern Triangle (Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador) receive billions in aid from the US government, mostly to fund the military infrastructure which has been widely recognized as a force of political repression against dissidents and environmental defenders. Though this aid is portrayed as altruistic, the US government is actually preserving and advancing its own business interests in the region. In 2009, the United States under the Obama administration supported and bolstered a coup regime in Honduras that overthrew democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya and has consistently supported the regime of Juan Orlando Hernández since he assumed the presidency in 2014. US support has continued despite a fraudulent election in 2017 and even after family  connections to the top drug cartels—as the conviction of the president’s brother, Tony Hernández, in a New York court—becomes more evident. It is no surprise, then, that over two-thirds of Central Americans who have recently arrived in the United States have experienced overt violence, including the murder, dissappearance, and/or kidnapping of a relative in their country of origin.

Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernandez and U.S. President Donald Trump during a meeting in New York City, 2019. (REUTERS)

What we are witnessing today is a continuation from the 1980s: the US government plays a role in causing and/or exacerbating the violence in our home countries while denying entry to migrants and refugees escaping these conditions. Most people in the United States feel disbelief at the fact that their government, which portrays itself as a “nation of values,”   repeatedly inflicts harm on children, both domestically and abroad. Yet, inflicting pain on families is one of the most historically consistent characteristics of US relations with many communities, including those in Central America.

To this day, the United States engages in regime change efforts, as the coups in Haiti (2004), Honduras (2009), and Bolivia (2019) demonstrate. Nowadays, the United States government provides economic and military aid to its allies under the excuse of fighting the drug war (such as in Colombia and Honduras) and imposes inhumane, illegal, unilateral sanctions on countries that do not adhere to its will. 

Me (center) and my siblings, oldest sister (center) twins (left and right).

My family and I did  not simply “choose” to migrate, we did so out of necessity. The uneven nature of the global capitalist economy increases forced migration, disrupting familial and social relationships in countless ways, not only at the US-Mexico border, but also when family members are pushed to leave their communities and are unable to take their children with them. I am determined to continue working on addressing the root causes that created the conditions we were forced to flee, such as US interventionism in Central America and in many other regions around the world.