By Amy Argenal
In March 2018, I visited the community of Guapinol, Honduras, for the first time. Guapinol is a farming community in the Bajo Aguan region of Northern Honduras that has been waging a battle against a mining company. Contamination directly ran from the mining operations into the Guapinol and San Pedro rivers that serve two large communities. We were a group of faith leaders, human rights scholars, and activists, there to learn about the struggle and to walk in solidarity with the community to preserve their land and their fight to remain in their communities and thrive. On this visit, we met with local political leaders and heads of various public institutions at the community’s request. In one of our meetings with the mayor and the police chief, we noticed flags of Israel flying behind them. One of the members of our group asked why there was a flag of Israel, and the mayor answered that Israel is their biggest supporter, sending lots of aid to the police and local forces. As a group, we took this information back with us, but it wasn’t until the inspiration of the People’s University that I had the opportunity to fully understand what this meant for the people of Central America and the people of Palestine.
In May of 2024, the Encampment for Gaza began on the UC Santa Cruz campus, where I am a teaching professor. The People’s University quickly launched, and there was a call for community members to offer teach-ins. I have always taught Palestine in my human rights courses, pulling case studies from various human rights movements in the region and discussing the right of return in my courses on migration. But much to my regret, I had not spent much time making connections to my work in Central America and the struggles faced by Palestinians at the hands of Israel until this call. I offered two teach-ins, one in the beginning of May, on border walls, given my recent trip to the U.S./Mexico border, and the second teach-in focused on investigating and digging deeper into the long legacy of Israeli funding in Central America, funding that has been used time and time again against communities in struggle. Framing the teach-ins as a framework of global struggles against imperialism and colonialism opened up new spaces for connections, including 1) the importance of movements across geographic boundaries showing up for each other, as demonstrated by the Sandinista freedom fighters from Nicaragua and their solidarity with Palestine, and 2) the continuation of that legacy of solidarity with the recent international legal cases being brought to the International Court of Justice by South Africa and Nicaragua.
Funding Militarism Globally
Israel has long been intertwined with military regimes in Central America, even prior to its creation as a nation-state. This has manifested in several ways, including selling weapons and technology, building relationships in exchange for support of Israel on the international stage, and oftentimes supporting the U.S. imperial agenda in the region when the U.S. Congress puts human rights restrictions on aid.
According to Gutierrez and Jamail (1986), the Somoza dictatorship of Nicaragua “provided agents of the forerunner of the Israeli army, the Haganah, with diplomatic cover necessary for purchasing arms in Europe”. The Somoza regime in Nicaragua lasted three generations and was a brutal dictatorship. Israel heavily funded the Somoza regime, and in the 1970s, one report stated that Israel accounted for 98% of the arms imports. The Sandinista Revolution ended the long dictatorship in 1979 (Gonzalez, 2000), but that didn’t stop the funding Israel sent to thwart social change in the country. After the Sandinista victory in 1979, which brought social programming like the creation of health clinics and literacy campaigns throughout the country, the United States, in collaboration with exiled supporters of Somoza, known as the contras, led a counter-revolution from U.S. military bases in Honduras in which they continued to attack Sandinista projects, including health clinics and schools (Chomsky, 2021). Israel has openly denied funding the contras. Many reports, however, show that Israel offered them aid and support and collaborated closely with the United States to provide them weapons, especially when opposition to this policy in the United States gained momentum (Gutierrez and Jamail,1986).
This history of supporting military regimes also occurred in El Salvador. Israeli support, including in the forms of training and sharing equipment and technology, was directly implicated in many of the massacres that took place in El Salvador during the Civil War from the late seventies until the peace accords in 1992. From 1975 to 1979, 83% of military imports in the country came from Israel. This similar history rings true in Guatemala, where Bishara Bahbah (1986) cited Israeli military funding as a “special case.” Taylor (2024), meanwhile, draws on archival research to show how Israel-trained military forces in Guatemala led to scorched earth campaigns and the destruction of indigenous villages that very much paralleled what took place in the Nakba.
This history only continues, as the visit to Guapinol demonstrated above. Israel shares military technologies with local police and military forces in Honduras, and in 2019, Israel became Honduras’ largest supplier of arms. While the elections in 2021 of Xiomara Castro brought great hope to the country, much of the same infrastructure exists at the local levels, in which local police and military forces are weaponized against their very own citizens when communities resist large-scale development projects and other land grabs (Phillips, 2022).
It is not only the wounds from tear gas, bullets, and surveillance that communities in Central America share with Palestinians but also the weaponization of antisemitism thrown against leftist movements in Central America. The Regan administration charged the Sandinistas with attacks on Jewish communities. No evidence, however, was found of that, with reports instead finding a population critical of Israel’s policies (Gutierrez and Jamail,1986). This is similar to the institutional attacks against the encampments today. Calls of anti-semitism are leveled against students whose protests are critical of apartheid, occupation, and genocide.
Global Solidarities
While making connections to global power structures and recognizing the similar boots on the necks of Central Americans and Palestinians was key for the teach-in, it was also just as important to highlight the ways that communities historically worked together to fight against it and how solidarity played out as communities from across the world came out to struggle together. It was important to insert this, as solidarity was so beautifully modeled by the students’ own praxis in the creation of the encampment.
In Nicaragua, this global solidarity has a long legacy. Sandinista soldiers went and trained with the PLO in the mid-1970s and even fought alongside PLO guerrillas against Israeli troops (Kinzer, 1991). Kinzer goes on in his book to talk about the importance of training with the PLO for the Sandinistas’ own struggle and agenda. This solidarity has continued over the years. Recently, for example, Nicaragua took Germany to the International Court of Justice for supplying weapons to Israel that are being used in the “furthering genocide.”
In a recent interview with former Honduran president Mel Zelaya, journalist Jose Olivares discussed the role of solidarity with the people of Gaza and noted the level of support for Palestine by many in the ruling party of Honduras. I felt this same energy in the streets of Guatemala City at the recent inauguration of Guatemalan president Bernardo Arevalo, where Palestinian flags flew throughout the streets and in the central plaza.
The People’s University
It took the People’s University to spark this investigation for myself. It was only then that I remembered the Israeli flags flying behind the mayor and police chief in Tocoa. The students and their questioning inspired the talk, as they made these connections daily. The way their own teach-ins uncovered the funding of various investments of the UC system and the connections they drew to housing, unfair wages, and investments in weapons that are killing Palestinians all led to the teach-in.
The teach-in on Central America took place on the very last day of the encampment. Of course, we had no idea that the police would be raiding the encampment and arresting 106 people, including three faculty in what would be a standoff that lasted an entire night. That day is fresh in my mind. We were sitting in a grassy field, students and some faculty and community members circled around, and the majority of the teach-in was students making their own connections. They asked about the role of evangelical missionaries in the region, which has also sparked an affinity with Israel as a state. They shared their own family stories and complex, sometimes contradictory relationships within the region, such as the deep support for the state of Israel learned through evangelical missionaries, while at the same time, having to flee their homes due to war and militarism. I realized that this was one of my favorite experiences as an educator! I was in a space in which I was problem-posing as a facilitator and in an intense learning moment as well, as all of us as a community were making the connections together. The teach-in went in the directions where we needed and desired to go, students felt comfortable to be vulnerable in front of their classmates and faculty, and we were touched by the sun and an occasional breeze of a lovely Spring morning.
The encampments across the country have been labeled violent spaces, but they were far from that. They were generative spaces of learning and community building that centered on love and care for all. They have been models to us all of the world that could be, of the classroom that could be. Imagine if all of our learning could look and feel like this, in which students have ownership over their studies, can be vulnerable, make connections, and move in directions that we need to move in to end the occupation, colonization, and genocide. This is the liberatory education I strive to create in more formal classrooms. It has taken a moment of global solidarity to make it possible, a moment of holding space and demanding a different future from our institutions, not only around how we fund and participate in genocide but also how we learn together, care for each other and create an education that serves justice and liberation.
AUTHOR BIO
Amy Argenal is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Sociology Department. She completed her doctorate in International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco, where she also received her Master’s in the same area of study. She received her second Masters in Human Rights from Mahidol University in Thailand. Her current research focuses on the root causes of migration from Central America and explores methodologies that bring the narratives of migrant communities to the forefront.
References
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