Central America and Zionist Counterinsurgency
When reading about Israel's involvement in Central America, particularly in Nicaragua, one case in point (that’s often cited) stands out to show the connections between Zionist settler colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and counterinsurgency. After the Sandinistas overthrew Nicaragua’s dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, Israel sent thousands of AK47 assault riffles to the counterrevolutionaries1 (Contras) who were primarily made up of “former national guardsmen under Somoza” (Jamail & Gutierrez, 1986, p. 31). Israel captured these weapons from the Palestinian Liberation Organization when it invaded Lebanon and killed thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, known as the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. At the request of the Reagan administration, Israel sent these captured assault rifles, which would later be used to terrorize villages sympathetic to the Sandinistas.
This arms shipment is significant primarily because it demonstrates with raw clarity the intimate relationship between Palestinian liberation and liberation movements in Latin America, as well as the counterinsurgency and counterrevolutionary measures jointly taken by the US and Israel in the region. Focusing on these connections, however, requires a deeper historical dive to understand the reciprocal ways Latin American countries aligned with US interests, Nicaragua in particular, played a role in the zionist settler colonial project prior to its formation.
In It's not a Secret, Milton Jamail and Margo Gutierrez offer insights into the Somoza's support of zionists in the 1930s and 1940s, before the violent founding of Israel in 1948 that initiated the ongoing Nakba. After the Great Palestinian Rebellion of 1936-1939, Somoza provided diplomatic assistance to buy arms to the zionist settler militia (McGrath, 2025), Haganah, which would later form the core of the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948. In 1947, Somoza Garcia “accepted $200,000 and a large diamond to issue passports needed by Haganah purchasing agents for arms-buying in Europe” (Israeli Arms Sales to Central America). Important to note that 1947 marks the beginning of the Nakba, where Haganah ethnically cleansed Palestine.
Israel would return the Somoza regime the favor by “selling automatics weapons, tanks and military aircraft” as early as the 1950s (Israel’s Bloodstained Legacy in Latin America). Between 1970 and 1974, Israel supplied 98%2 of the Somoza regime’s arms (Jamail & Gutierrez, 1986). In 1978, the Carter administration suspend military aid to Nicaragua, which truly wasn’t a problem as Israel would continue to meet the demands. It is estimated that the Somoza regime killed 50,000 people between 1978 and 1979.
After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979, Israel supplied military training, counterinsurgent techniques, surveillance technology, weapons, and counterintelligence to the Contras. Israel sent the Contras Galil assault rifle, Uzi submachine guns, and “torture workshops” that would “train interrogators in the most efficient methods, computer technology to help compile ‘death-lists’ of subversives, and training in Israel itself for the creme-de-la-creme of the military elites” (Israeli Assistance to Dictatorial Regimes).
I offer this case to illustrate the entangled history of counterinsurgency. The settler colonial state of Israel has certainly transformed Palestine into a laboratory to test weapons, surveillance, and techniques for dispossession, genocide, and population control, all of which serve US imperialism, for these weapons, technologies, and techniques reinforce the ones jointly developed with the US. These technologies of colonial violence are then exported to geopolitically and militarily strategic regions linked to the US’s “national interests”, more aptly understood here as its imperial futurity. One could also argue that Israel also used Central America as a laboratory of sorts, a testing ground for its counterinsurgent techniques to prove the applicability and transferability of counterinsurgency in distinct contexts, which, in turn, offered Israel the necessary data or information to make adjustments to its counterinsurgent practices and technologies in Palestine.
Some scholars draw on Cesaire’s work to conceptualize these global connections as an imperial boomerang, but this would not accurately address the way the US developed its counterinsurgent practices in slave plantations and in the settler colonial frontier during its westward expansion justified through manifest destiny. Instead, this would conceive of the imperial boomerang in unidirectional terms and thus elide the colonial and genocidal foundations of the United States. Conversely, Laleh Khalili makes evident in her article The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgencies, “the two-way traffic of colonial knowledge” challenges “the received wisdom that inventions in techniques of rule traveled only from Europe to the colonies. She argues
“that officials and foot soldiers, technologies of control, and resources travel not only between colonies and metropoles but also between different colonies of the same colonial power and between different colonial metropoles, whereby bureaucrats and military elites actively study and borrow each other’s techniques and advise one another on effective ruling practices. Throughout the last century, Palestine has been a crucial node for such transmission, owing to its geostrategic significance, the ongoing struggle of Palestinians against colonization, and the position of Palestine’s colonizers in global hierarchies of power. Palestine’s centrality stems from the fact that with the Mandate, Palestinians were subjugated by perhaps the most powerful empire of its time, and today they are subjects of domination by Israel, the most important ally and client of the United States, the international hyperpower of our time.” (p. 413-414).
What this all means is that in order for one to apprehend counterinsurgency with more clarity, one has to consider the always already entangled relationship across distinct geographies dominated by Euro-American powers. As Burton writes, counterinsurgency strategies are “developed in global laboratories of empire” (p. 13). Palestine has been the central theater of colonial and genocidal war for Israel, and it is not surprising that, because of decades of anticolonial resistance, Israel has sought to not only perfect its counterinsurgent methods but also profit off of its “combat tested” technologies of population control, surveillance, death, and destruction.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements (Contras) shaped Central America’s sociopolitical, economic, and cultural landscape. Honduras, for example, served as a military headquarters for the US. It became the training ground for “low intensity” counterinsurgent operations in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Bordering these countries, Honduras was geographically and militarily strategic in the 1980s, especially with the free range use of the Palmerola military base to train counterinsurgents, paramilitary groups, death squads (Battalion 3-16), and traditional military personnel. I mention this since the geopolitical game the US played in Central America impacted the border region where my campesino village was (and is) located. In fact, Contras entered Nicaragua to fight the Sandinistas by crossing the mountains and rivers near my village. It is this history that led many Central Americans to immigrate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My family chose to immigrate to the country responsible for all the death and destruction in our region. We lived in southern California undocumented, without healthcare or financial aid for higher education, with constant encounters with police violence, incarceration, and threats of ICE raids and deportation. This not-so-distant history has become the lens through which I see and interpret the world, particularly in relation to Palestine and counterinsurgency. The friction between what is seemingly abstract (global) to the very concrete decisions people make at the local level is illustrated through violent displacement and migration. Leaving my village in 1992, after five centuries of (neo)colonial domination, is merely coincidental yet symbolically important in terms of shaping my thinking about the ongoing dispossession, domination, and exploitation of colonized peoples, such as the Palestinian people, whose fate has been historically overdetermined by multiple colonial powers. Living in Southern California, experiencing state-sanctioned violence and being incarcerated when I was fifteen years old has shaped how I think about the world. These experiences have helped me make connections to the experience of Palestinian men, women, and children under Israeli occupation, Palestinians who are all too often kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned. I include these biographical connections to illustrate how these lived experiences (this positionality, if you will) create the condition of possibility to understand the social totality of counterinsurgency. But experience does not guarantee an insurgent epistemological or materialist position. There are no guarantees when we consider the counterinsurgent archive and the role intellectuals of all shades play in reproducing colonial-racial domination and capitalist exploitation. The entanglement between biography, geopolitics, and history (Mills) undoubtedly shaped my anti-imperial, anticolonial, and decolonial position both in theoretical and practical terms. One’s biography, history, and geography, however, are insufficient to understand the deeper connections these have with other regions with a shared history of colonial domination. One must therefore seriously study, in the most radical sense of the word, how particular social, political, economic, and counterinsurgent formations are tied to one another. It is only until relatively recent, for instance, that I learned about the deeply entangled relationship between Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine and the global repression of liberation movements, including the genocidal campaigns in Central America in the 20th century. Thanks to militant Palestinian scholars and activists, I’ve learned about a history rife with counterinsurgency in which my campesino community, located in the mountainous region of southern Honduras thousands of miles away from Palestine, found itself embroiled in a counterrevolutionary war led, trained, funded, and armed by the US and Israel.
Important to keep in mind is that when anti-war movements in the past became too strong or when the international pressure was too high, US congress passed weapons embargoes on certain regimes that the US in fact supported. When the US was unable to overtly support a regime, Israel stepped in to defend the geopolitical and imperial interests of the US by exporting technologies of violence the US and Israel manufactured in collaboration with one another and with the assistance of universities. The transnational flow of technologies has therefore greatly impacted the struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean. Let me give a few concrete examples. In the Dominican Republic, Israel began selling small arms to the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo as far back as the 1950s, during his oppressive 31-year rule over the Dominican people. In Haiti, under Jean-Claude Duvalier, Uzi machine guns and armored vehicles were imported to repress dissidents. In exchange, Haiti supported Israel’s occupation of 1967 in the United Nations. In Guatemala, we know that Israel exported military personnel and weapons to the government. Counterinsurgency against Indigenous and campesino communities involved a genocidal campaign similar to the one against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed and more than a million people were displaced. The period that saw the most death and destruction was precisely when Israel stepped in, a time when the Guatemalan government systematically razed hundreds of villages. It is estimated that Guatemalan soldiers raped about 100,000 women. In El Salvador, Israeli military personnel trained death squads for counterinsurgency measures. The estimates indicate that 83% of military imports came from Israel, and that 75,000 people were killed during the civil war.