They were generally opposed to socialist/Communist movements, which is why the the US government (especially after the Cold War began) was so cozy with them. They were horrible, rights-suppressing, peasant-torturing, nun-raping, priest-killing dictators, but they were OUR horrible, rights-suppressing, peasant-torturing, nun-raping, priest-killing dictators.
As for the second question, the original Revolutionary Junta had both left- and right-wing elements. There were several changes as various groups joined or left the junta and Napoleon Duarte (a right-winger) ended up the top man. This led a coalition of leftist groups to join together into the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The fact that the oppositional group were socialist/Communist made US support for Duarte almost required, given the times. Even the Carter administration pretty much just unquestioningly sent arms and supplies and money to El Salvador.
Not that the leftists were really BETTER people. Both sides were pretty terrible as far as brutality and violence went. There really weren’t a lot of obvious good guys in Central America in the 70s and 80s. Archbishop Romero counts as such, but he was never actually a member of any organized opposition groups, AFAIK. Just a vocal critic of the Junta and Duarte.
They supported the established power hierarchies. They fought to ensure that the landowning elites continued their hold on all the power and privilege to be had in these countries, and stopped at nothing. They tried to crush labor organizers, peasants’ groups, feminists, progressive religious groups like that which gave rise to Romero, LGBTQ folks, student activists, and anybody trying to help their societies leave their feudal state of affairs.
The FMLN was a fairly diverse organization that, while very left-wing, called the USSR “imperialist.” In Nicaragua, the FSLN was certainly Marxist, but had a difficult ideological relationship with Moscow. Besides, US General Paul Gorman freely admitted to reporters in 1986 that, even if the worst were true and Nicaragua did become a Soviet outpost (which was not happening), it could be destroyed very quickly.
There’s a reason you never hear about illegal immigrants from Costa Rica, Belize, or even Panama. These countries were never utterly demolished by the US in the way that El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras were (and the struggles and reaction continue today). People are going to flee their destroyed countries. They can’t help it, and to continue to punish them for doing so stems from either ignorance or cruelty, and it’s shameful either way.
In the 1950s, one of the first things Chiang Kai-Shek did in Taiwan was institute land reform. There are similar stories in all the Asian Tigers (South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau), among other places. In the same decade, when Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz attempted to enact land reform, reactionaries started screaming about “Communism”, the CIA overthrew the government, and Guatemala became a killing field for decades.
So why did some lucky people manage to get away with pursuing some very socialist policies as part of their successful development strategy, while others incurred the wrath of Washington? “Only Nixon could go to China”; in other words, nobody could Red-bait Chiang Kai-Shek and company. There was just no plausible excuse to use against them (or Israel, or Yugoslavia until the 1980s), plus there were strategic considerations involved.
Actually, these Central American conflicts (and those in the rest of the hemisphere, from the Rio Grande to Patagonia) are rather unusual in that the human rights abuses were very disproportionately committed by the right-wing elements. The Sandinistas in power began to lose friends as they became more repressive, but they were never as bad as the regime they replaced, or the Contras who battled them. This is even true for Cuba, as the Castro regime never had any death squads, or anything else approaching the brutality of the regimes the US supported and supports.
The US has lost a great deal of leverage over Latin America, and we’ve seen some really positive results, with only Venezuela going partway off the rails (and who knows how long that will last). Lula was able to wage war against poverty and inequality in Brazil. That’s the kind of behavior that got his predecessor Joao Goulart overthrown in 1964 and replaced by a military dictatorship that carved out chasms between the rich and everyone else. Now, Dilma Rouseff has to deal with a large and aspirational middle class!
The problem is that the reactionaries are still around, and still kill hope, with plenty of help from the big shots in the US. See Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, and plenty of attempts throughout the hemisphere in the past 15 years or so.
The truth commission that came from the peace accord that ended the civil war pointed that about 85% of the killings came from the military and associated death squads, so while I do agree that there were no good guys, the reality was that Romero could see who had the preference for killing priests, nuns, teachers, students, worker leaders, etc.
When Romero demanded that the repression should end he was not talking about the rebels, he was talking about the authorities who were complicit with the ongoing killings and impunity he had seen. Everyone understood that Romero was risking his life, and everyone understood that the one that could and eventually did kill him were indeed the US supported military and government thugs.
I can not support everything of what it took place with the revolutionary groups, but if I had been aware of the full picture then I would had seen that defending yourself and not be just sitting ducks was a logical thing to do then.
The other option was to flee, and that is what my family (that had some connections to Romero) did.
Yes I would agree with that, but I think the main reason for the invasion of Panama was about ownership/control of the canal. For example, news story of the time.