Having been exposed to the broader context of US involvement in Central America as part of her graduate studies, Castillo could prime Cowan and the others. The US was propping up a war machine in El Salvador, she told them; it had long treated the region as a geopolitical laboratory. The CIA had overthrown the Guatemalan government in 1954 at the behest of an American corporation that, among other things, wanted bigger tax breaks abroad. Honduras had come to be known in the region as the USS Honduras, a de facto American military installation. For years, the US’s man in Nicaragua was a
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