Historical Context:
The Cold War
What was the Cold War?
The Cold War developed as World War II came to an end and tensions grew between two superpowers and former allies: the Soviet Union and the United States. At the center of the conflict was economic ideology with the U.S. fearing the spread of the Soviet Union’s communist influence into other parts of the world, while the Soviet Union feared what it saw as U.S. expansionist tendencies and efforts to undermine its status in the world. The Cold War resulted in proxy wars, such as Vietnam and Korea, where the U.S. and the Soviet Union did not directly fight each other, but supported opposing countries in their fights.
In some ways, U.S. involvement in Central America was more proxy fighting by these two superpowers.
It was against this Cold War backdrop that the United States orchestrated events and became involved in civil wars in Central America. The Cold War also influenced how refugees from war torn southern neighbors were received when they arrived in the United States. The Reagan administration saw the Central American civil wars as “theaters in the Cold War”and its policy toward the refugees reflected that by labeling them “economic migrants” to avoid implication U.S.-supported regimes had committed human rights violations that might qualify refugees for asylum. “As a result, approval rates for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases were under three percent in 1984. In the same year, the approval rate for Iranians was 60 percent, 40 percent for Afghans feeling the Soviet invasion, and 32 percent for Poles.”1
The Refugee Act of 1980. Click here to see the U.S. National Archives' images of all 18 pages of the act. U.S. National Archives/Flickr
Refugee Act
President Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980 into law shortly after the Senate unanimously approved it. The 1980 law raised the number of refugees entering the U.S. each year from the 17,400 previously allocated to 50,000. It also created a process for adjusting the number in case of emergencies.2 According to the Migration Policy Institute, previous U.S. law “recognized only refugees from Communism,” but the Refugee Act changed the definition to any person with a “well-founded fear of persecution.” This change was made to align U.S. law with 1951 UN Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.3
“The coincidence of the Central American exodus with the passage of the Refugee Act set the stage for a decade-long controversy that ultimately involved thousands of Americans. The protagonists in the controversy included, on one side, immigrants' rights lawyers, liberal members of Congress, religious activists, and the refugees themselves. On the other side were President Reagan and his administration, the State Department, the Department of Justice (including the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)), and conservative members of Congress. The first group invoked international human rights and humanitarian and religious principles, while the Reagan administration's arguments centered on national security and the global fight against Communism.”4
Guatemala
Read more about U.S. involvement in Guatemala here.
The United States saw President Jacobo Arbenz as a communist threat because he legalized the communist party in Guatemala and he was moving to nationalize United Fruit Company (UFCO). The U.S. UFCO had been operating in Guatemala for at least half a century when Arbenz became president, and at the same time was one of Guatemala’s largest land owners. “The country’s soil was immensely fertile, but only 2 percent of the landowners owned 72 percent of the arable land, and only a tiny part of their holdings was under cultivation,” according to Juan Gonzalez in Harvest of Empire. The Guatemalan Congress passed Decree 900 that ordered uncultivated land be taken from those who owned more than 600 acres and redistributed. The owners whose land was confiscated would be compensated.5
A 1975 CIA memo titled “CIA’s Role in the Overthrow of Arbenz” outlines the Cold War connections through which the U.S. saw Guatemala. Read the full memo here. The memo describes Arbenz as “anti-U.S.” and states that all key positions in his government “below the cabinet level” are “thoroughly controlled by a Communist-dominated bureaucracy.”6
Despite the Cold War reasoning of the United States, there is no evidence that the Soviet Union was involved in Guatemala with the exception of a shipment of weapons to Arbenz’s government before the U.S. backed overthrow. 7
"Killed in El Salvador: An American Story" is a 2014 New York Times report on the 1980 murder of four American churchwomen in El Salvador by the Salvadoran National Guard.
El Salvador
Read more about U.S. involvement in El Salvador here.
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, against which the U.S.-backed Salvadoran Army fought, had some of its origins in the Communist Party of El Salvador, and received support from the Soviet Union. Despite the Salvadoran Intelligence Agency’s death squads that murdered anyone suspected of political dissent and the known human rights violations of the Salvadoran Army, fear of a communist government saw the United States support the military dictatorships. When four American churchwomen (three nuns and a laywoman) were raped and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard in 1980, public outcry against U.S. support saw a suspension of aid for six weeks. The Reagan administration increased aid in 1981 “hoping to counteract Soviet and Cuban aid to FMLN.”8
Nicaragua
Read more about U.S. involvement in Nicaragua here.
Reagan’s administration saw the Sandinista government of Nicaragua as a Soviet Union pawn. On November 17, 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed secret National Security Decision Directive 17, giving the CIA power to recruit and support the Contras to fight the Sandinistas, and a $19 million budget.9
Addressing the nation five years later, as he asked Congress to pass an aid package of $100 million for the Contras, Reagan called Nicaragua a “Soviet ally on the American mainland only two hours’ flying time from our borders. With over a billion dollars in Soviet-bloc aid, the Communist government of Nicaragua has launched a campaign to subvert and topple its democratic neighbors.” Calling Nicaragua “our own southern frontier,” Reagan called the Contras “freedom fighters struggling to bring democracy to their country and eliminate this Communist menace at its source.”10
Iran-Contra Affair
The Reagan Doctrine said U.S. policy was to support “anti-Communist insurgents wherever they might be.” In his 1985 State of the Union address, Reagan said, “ … we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-sponsored aggression and secure rights which have been ours since birth.” The Reagan administration’s sponsorship of Contras in Nicaragua was one application of the Reagan Doctrine.11
However, a Democratic Congress passed the Boland Amendment in November 1982. The Boland Amendment restricted U.S. involvement in Nicaragua. In 1985, despite an embargo against selling weapons to Iran, Reagan's administration made an arms-for-hostage deal that resulted in more than 1,500 missiles being shipped to Iran before the scheme was exposed in 1986. While investigating the arms-for-hostage deal, Attorney General Edwin Meese discovered $28 million in Iranian weapons payments unaccounted. “Then-unknown Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council explained the discrepancy: he had been diverting funds from the arms sales to the Contras, with the full knowledge of national Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter and the unspoken blessing, he assumed, of President Reagan.”12
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President Ronald Reagan discusses his remarks on the Iran-Contra Affair with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese, and Don Reagan in the Oval Office on November 25, 1986.
Collection: White House Photographic Collection, 1/20/1981 - 1/20/1989, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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1. Susan Gzesh, “Central Americans and Asylum Policy in the Reagan Era,” Migration Information Source, The Online Journal of the Immigration Policy Institute, April 1, 2006, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-americans-and-asylum-policy-reagan-era.
2. “Refugee Act of 1980,” National Archives Foundation, https://archivesfoundation.org/documents/refugee-act-1980/.
3. Susan Gzesh.
4. Susan Gzesh.
5. Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 135-137.
6. “Memorandum Prepared in the Central Intelligence Agency: Subject-CIA’s Role in the Overthrow of Arbenz,” May 12, 1975, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54Guat/d287.
7. Michelle Denise Getchell, “Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United National, and the ‘Hemispheric Solidarity,” Journal of Cold War Studies 17, no. 2 (2015), 73, accessed April 19, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1162/JCWS_a_00549.
8. “Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992), “‘Burning with a Deadly Heat’: NewsHour Coverage of the Hot Wars of the Cold War,” American Archive of Public Broadcasting, Accessed April 19, 2025, https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/newshour-cold-war/el-salvador.
9. “President Reagan gives CIA authority to establish Contras,” History.com, January 31, 2025, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/november-17/reagan-gives-cia-authority-to-establish-the-contras.
10. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on the Situation in Nicaragua,” March 16, 1986, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-nation-situation-nicaragua.
11. “Reagan Doctrine, 1985,” U.S. Department of State archive, https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/rd/17741.htm.
12. “The Iran-Contra Affair,” American Experience, Public Broadcasting Service, Accessed April 19, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/reagan-iran/.