I picked up The Miami Herald newspaper today and read a front page article about how many Latin American countries with governments that are left of center are threatening to kick out the U.S. Agency for International Development – known as U.S. AID. For most people, the agency is just another government bureaucracy, an acronym that doesn’t mean much more than alphabet soup. But for someone like me who has been traveling to Latin America for thirty years, it is another one of those instances that drives home just how radically the political world has evolved over here in the Western Hemisphere in the past five decades. It also makes me wonder what the CIA agents I brushed elbows with, especially in Central America in the 1980s, some of whom worked under the cover of U.S. AID, are thinking today. Given all the years they put in working to shape Latin America to U.S. will, how do they feel they did?

U.S. AID has provided assistance over the years to help the poor, but it has also never made a secret of the fact that it is also in the business of supporting U.S. foreign policy, backing political leaders the U.S. considers its allies in Latin America, and, consequently, working against those it doesn’t care for.  One example cited by The Herald was $95.7 million that U.S. AID earmarked for Venezuela between 2002 and 2010, specifically for its “Office of Transition Initiatives,” which announces as its goal “targeting key political transition and stabilization needs.” Some critics of that office have told the U.S. that Venezuela has an elected government and that any transition should be left to the Venezuelan people. One of those critics was Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a vocal opponent of U.S. administrations in general, who in 2010 made it illegal for  Venezuelan organizations involved in political activities to take foreign funding. Of course, it’s also true that Venezuela donates lots of oil to the Cuban government –basically propping up the Castro brothers’ political organization—but we’re talking here about U.S. AID.

In Bolivia, U.S. AID has funneled money to political parties that oppose left of center President Evo Morales. Morales has also accused the agency of funding peasant protests against him and, according to press reports that cited correspondence between the two governments, Morales is threatening the agency with expulsion.

In Ecudaor, another leftist president, Rafael Correa, has also accused the agency of working against him and has said he is in the process of writing new rules that will govern what U.S. AID can and can’t do in Ecuador. “If they don’t want to follow them, then so long,” Correa was quoted as saying by The Herald.

Now, leaders of Latin countries didn’t very often act or talk this way to the U.S. back there before the Cuban insurrection and revolution fifty plus years ago. Of course, back then the U.S. was pouring its money into fighting leftist movements that threatened conservative leaders in Latin America –some of them dictators. Those old leaders were just fine with U.S. AID and if some of its employees were really CIA, so much the better.

The subsequent leftist guerrilla movements in many countries, modeled on the Cubans and aided by the Cubans, eventually forced the U.S. to make real its support for free elections all over the region. (Ironically, today only Cuba doesn’t have them.) Funding dictatorships became politically embarrassing. And what that has led to, in time, has been the election of left of center governments in many Latin countries.

In 1982-83 I was posted in Honduras for United Press International. We all knew that the CIA had built a big presence there to fight the Sandinista government and its comandantes, the first born sons of Fidel Castro. At one point it was reported that the CIA had more agents there than in any country except the Soviet Union. And at the time Honduras was home to only four million people or so.

I knew some U.S. officials were CIA and there were others that I wondered about. I crossed paths with them at receptions. Of course, in Nicaragua they were successful in supporting a right wing guerrilla war against the Sandinistas, who eventually lost the election of 1990 and left power. Today, the Sandinistas –and President Daniel Ortega — are back in power via the ballot box.

I picture the faces of some of those CIA agents and suspected CIA agents, probably retired now, and wonder what they think of what has happened in Latin America in the past thirty years. Elections are held almost everywhere, and that is a stated American value. But many countries in the region are much more to the left than they were all those years ago, and their leaders can get mouthy, and I figure that probably isn’t the way the old agents would want it. Then again, apart from Cuba, there are no communist governments and stopping communism was their principle goal.

Do they feel they won? Do they feel they lost? I wonder.

Two former Argentine military dictators were convicted this week of stealing newly-born babies from women who were enemies of their military government, murdering the mothers and then giving the children away to people who sided with the regime. The crimes occurred between 1976 and 1982 and it took all these years to bring to trial the people who ran  successive military juntas that engineered those crimes. In order to get the military to leave power, civilians at first had to agree to an amnesty absolving all members of the armed forces of any crimes committed during the years of the dictatorship. But in the mid 1990s the Argentine Supreme Court abrogated the amnesty for crimes against children and trials have gone on for some years now. This week former generals Jorge Rafael Videla,86, and Reynaldo Bignone,84, were finally convicted. Videla, received a 50 year sentence; Bignone, 15 years. Both were already serving time in prison for other crimes.

Armed guerrillas did fight against the military government, but the generals didn’t target just them. They tracked down students, academics, journalists, labor leaders, social workers, anyone they considered ideological enemies of the regime, whether they were armed or not. The official estimate of people executed by the generals was 13,000, although some Argentines put it higher. Other Latin American military governments waged campaigns to eliminate political enemies during that era, but it was the case of the “children of the disappeared” that set Argentina apart. The new-born children were taken from the mothers, who were assumed to have leftist sympathies, and given to persons with right-wing sympathies to be raised in accord with a more conservative ideology. This was an instance of social engineering that the Nazis might have embraced. The mothers, by the way, were killed soon after the babies were removed from them. Many of them were dropped from military planes into the ocean off Buenos Aires so the sharks could eat them and dispose of the evidence.

I was a journalist in Latin America in the 1980s and have made many trips back for reporting over the years. As civil wars spread through the region, I covered many tragic, dramatic and disturbing stories. But I’ve always thought the “children of the disappeared” was the most gripping of all. I wrote a novel, “The Lady from Buenos Aires,” about the issue. It was published by Arte Publico Press in 2007.

It is not known how many children were removed from their mothers in the way I’ve described above. To date, relatives of the disappeared women have used DNA evidence to track down 106 of them. Advocates believe there may be hundreds more, but where they are is the question. After the amnesty for crimes against children was lifted in the mid-1990s some persons who had the children left Argentina, afraid of being tracked down. In at least two cases I’ve heard of they were tracked down in other Latin countries, but advocates believe some might also be in the U.S. Many Argentines emigrated to the U.S. during the past dozen years or so, due to economic turbulence in Argentina. If some of those ‘children of the disappeared” are here in the U.S., where I live, they probably don’t know who they really are.

During his trial, General Videla denied any knowledge of an organized effort to take newborns away from their mothers. At one point he said that the pregnant women used their unborn children as “human shields” in their attempts to escape government pursuit. Think about that. The woman has the child in her stomach; a member of the military catches up with her; she turns to face him and that is what the former general calls using a human shield. That alone will explain  how thousands of innocent people ended up dead.

To live in the capital of an exile population is a strange experience. The people who belong to that population are here, but a part of each of them is not here. Each has a separate existence in a version of their homeland that exists in their memories, their imaginations, their longings. They are people with two existences, and the world that exists only in their minds and hearts is often much more real to them than the place they happen to live in at the moment. That gives exile capitals an extra layer of life, as if a land of the imagination floats above or next to a real place and there are certain beings who commute between the two.

Miami and its surrounding towns and cities are certainly the capital of the Cuban exile world. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have shown up here in the 63 years since Fidel Castro and his band took over in Cuba. Some flew from the island –with permission or without. Others left on ramshackle rafts and were swept to Florida by the Gulfstream current, while others have been smuggled to Mexico or Central America and then made their way to the U.S. border. Under a law written especially for Cuban exiles, they are legally in the U.S. and allowed to stay the moment they step on U.S. soil. Life changes radically with one stride.

They come but they don’t leave Cuba behind. The older Cubans who have been here for all those decades will still talk about the old Cuba, before Castro. It is as if they are speaking about the mythical island continent of Atlantis, which sank into the ocean and took with it a wondrous civilization that had never been seen before and has not existed since. Atlantis was run by magicians, but still has nothing on the old Cuba, which, according to those Miami accounts, was a rapturous place full of magical musicians, gorgeous dancing girls, sexy casino life, a landscape and beaches right out of heaven, the sweetest of sea breezes, and food and drink that tasted better than anywhere else in the universe, including heaven.

The loss of that paradise has created a sadness and anger that is major element in the air we breathe here in Miami. There is, of course, plenty of Cuban music, and  the delicious aroma of Cuban coffee and of Cuban food. We hear outbursts of super-fast, excited, guttural Cuban Spanish  and, of course, our share of  wicked Cuban laughter.

But we go through moments where the two worlds –real and longed for –collide and that anger and/or sadness is thicker than usual. The most famous such passage was the 2000 controversy surrounding a six-year old boy named Elian Gonzalez. He, his mother and about a dozen other people had tried to reach Florida from Cuba in a small boat. The boat sank, his mother and most the others drowned and the boy was found at sea floating in an inner tube, a bit like the baby Moses floating down the river in the reed basket. In the case of this Cuban boy, he had a father back in Cuba who wanted him and many non-exiles supported the claims of the father. But distant relatives in Miami, backed by many highly emotional members of the Cuban exile community, said his mother had given her life to reach exile and that made her child one of them. Since exile is a whole other state of being, he was like a boy with dual natures and both sides fought for him.  Anger and outrage exploded all around you in Miami in those days and at all hours. The two distinct species of Miamians who live here – those who are exiles and everyone else—were speaking two totally different emotional languages and couldn’t understand each other at all. A few months later the boy was returned to his father by the U.S. government, but even today, twelve years later, people can still get into bitter arguments over that outcome and they still speak two different languages.

I thought of that time recently because I saw a picture of Elian, now 18 or so, and still living and going to school in Cuba. Just a kid, he has become a symbol of the dual nature of Miami and of the Cuban people. He always had an elfin quality to him and he still has it now, a light in his amused eyes as if he really is comfortable with both natures, with belonging to both worlds, and is immune to and amused by the controversy.

Seeing him made me think about the fact that the exiles who actually lived in Cuba before coming here will eventually die off. Then the hands-on experience of it will be gone and all that will remain are legends of a magical, imaginary place – just like Atlantis. I wonder if all, or at least most, of that sadness and anger of exile will dissipate too.

I have a friend who I believe to be a very talented person who has never written a book and I believe it is for one major reason: She has managed to become intimidated by the works of authors she has grown to love. It’s as if Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, etc. are standing in her house with nasty expressions on their faces.

“Don’t try it, sister.You can’t do what we did.”

Anyone who has written novels eventually gets asked, “How do you do that?” How do you figure out what to write?”   And anyone who has written novels used to look at other people’s novels, books  they admired, and asked the same questions: “How did these writers do this? How can I do it?” “Where do I start?” It seemed unfathomable.

The answer that has gotten the most ink is: Write what you know. On the surface, that doesn’t give you much guidance because we all know a lot of things. When people used to say that to me, I would think: “Thanks for nothin’, buddy.” But hidden in that throwaway line  is a hint.

What I tell my friend is you want to bring something to the novel that no one else has brought. Now, that sounds grandiose and daunting to her, but I explain to her that it really isn’t at all.In fact, it’s the opposite. Wherever it is you are, life is bit different today than it was yesterday. So the contemporary Russian novelist may never be as good at Dostoyevsky, but doesn’t mean he can’t bring something fresh to the novel about his country. As good as Dostoyevsky was, he can’t give you the details about modern day Russia. He’s long gone. No matter who you love -  Austen, Twain, Flaubert, Dickens, Welty, Ross MacDonald, Hammett, Chandler, Christie—they can’t write about what you know because they ain’t here no more. Even if your idols are contemporary –Atwood, Amis, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, Desai—they aren’t exactly where you are. Novel writing begins –in most cases –with the details about a certain place at a certain time. Anything more universal or timeless you may stumble on  –I may not stumble on that stuff but some people do—springs from observation about the world around you. Start there and don’t start at the emotions, connections and thoughts your favorite novel provoked in you, I tell my friend. Those details were  where  the classic authors started and, since they aren’t around anymore, you are seeing stuff they didn’t see and you know things they didn’t know..

Even when you are surrounded by other novelists –as I am here in Miami—there is plenty you know that they don’t. Edna Buchanan lives down the street from me. Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, Les Standiford, Jim Grippando, Vickie Hendricks, Jim Born all live not quite within rifle shot distance, but nearby. So did my friend Barbara Parker until she died a few years back. We were all writing what can be grouped as crime novels, but they were all  distinct. We were all driven by different issues, different characters, different ideas about what the crime novel is about. Our novels are as different as our DNA.

We all write about the same general area –South Florida—but we plug into the place in very different ways. In my second to last novel, “The Lady from Buenos Aires,” I wrote about the Little Buenos Aires section of Miami Beach. That came into being with the influx of Argentines into the Miami area in the past dozen years or so. In other words, Charles Willeford, the classic Miami crime writer, author of “Miami Blues,” couldn’t have written about it. He was dead by the time the Argentines arrived. My novel was set in tango clubs, Argentine restaurants and other locales that didn’t exist when Willeford was here doing his good work.

My last novel, “On Hallowed Ground” was set on Key Biscayne. Now Key Biscayne has been here a long time, sitting a few miles off the coast, but it wasn’t always a refuge for wealthy Colombian families looking for a place to hide out from kidnapping gangs. The great Willeford couldn’t have written about that. That Colombian enclave didn’t exist when he was here. So it was up to me to write about it.

In other words, there is always something for a would-be novelist to write that his or her heroes can’t do. Since crime novels are so tied to place, this is especially true for crime novelists.

That said, one of my favorite anecdotes is about a writer who said  he couldn’t ever match an author who had been there before him and moved out of town. Cormac McCarthy, the author of “Blood Meridian,” “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Road,” and other novels, spent early years in the area of Knoxville, Tennessee. James Agee had written a classic American novel, “A Death in the Family,” about that area. McCarthy has said he didn’t think he could do better than Agee, so he moved – to the borderlands where Texas meets Mexico, and he has set most his work there.

Personally, I don’t think McCarthy really felt there wasn’t new, great work that could be set in Tennessee. I think maybe he preferred the flatlands to those Tennessee hills and wanted to be around those horses. If he had stayed in Knoxville, he would have found plenty to write about that Agee wasn’t around to see.And my friend can find lots to write about in Miami that’s still out there for the pickin’.

It is April and small mangoes have appeared on the large tree in my front yard. They are green and hard, most of them no bigger than an inch or two in diameter. But by very late June or early July many of them –I hope—will be plump. They will also be colored  a combination of luscious red and pale orange, which will spell “ripe.”

Of course, the squirrels will get some of them. My mango tree is a major perk for the squirrels living in my neighborhood. The house is about a quarter mile from the sea on Miami Beach, but the squirrels aren’t beach goers. On the other hand, they are big time mango eaters. Lines connecting telephone poles run right up to the outer branches and the squirrels often do extremely nimble circus-like tightrope walks, leaping to the tree to reach the fruit. Unfortunately, they are not very efficient eaters. They nibble on the fruit when it is still on the stem and they often knock the mangoes to the ground. Instead of climbing down the tree and finishing off the mango it started, the squirrel will often just move on to an adjacent piece of fruit. So I often find mangoes on my front lawn with small sections removed. When I first moved to this house I used to throw those mangoes away, afraid of sharing a meal with a squirrel. But I grew tired of discarding that otherwise fine fruit and a few years ago I began cutting away a section around the squirrel bites and consuming the rest. I have not begun to foam at the mouth.

I don’t begrudge the squirrels the few mangoes they do get because my tree is miraculously fertile –at least most years. Occasionally, cold snaps in winter make the tree flower late and then the mangoes are stunted and puckered. This winter was warm so I have high hopes. When they begin to ripen I will hit my front yard and the edge of my roof with my trusty mango picker. It features  a wire basket on the end and a long handle which I can extend a good fifteen feet. If I don’t act aggressively, the squirrels will take over. But even my long mango picker can’t reach the mangoes at the top of the tree, which is about fifty feet tall. Eventually those mangoes grow heavy on the vine and fall on their own. I sometimes hear them thump on the lawn just as I’m falling asleep at night. When I wake up on a morning in early July I will often find several of them nestled in the grass like big orange condor eggs. Occasionally, one will land on the stone walkway and then its splat city, but most land safely. At least safely for the mango. One morning a couple of years ago I went out to retrieve newly fallen fruit and was bent over picking one up when I heard a momentary rustling of leaves and caught an even fresher mango right on the back of the neck. For readers looking for plot devices, I’m offering you death by mango. I’m not going to use it.

I do have to get out there early. If not there are local denizens who will beat me to them. One older Cuban gentleman, who walks his dog in my neighborhood, would tiptoe into my yard many mornings to secure his breakfast –and then some. I met him there one day and we made a deal. I would save a few particularly nice ones for him if he didn’t trespass.

I’ve never counted my crop. I’ve trimmed the tree back and thinned it out from time to time to allow enough sunlight to reach my lawn. But I’d say last year I “harvested” about 150-200 really nice specimens. This crop makes me popular with my friends, acquaintances and neighbors. When I worked in an office I used to bring some there. The members of my poker game, which meets at my house, always leave with mangoes during the season. Maybe not with their money, but at least they take home fruit. A friend down the block makes mango chutney and gives me my cut. I have used my mangoes as an inducement to more than one would-be girlfriend. Basically , “If we make it til July, there are mangoes in it for you.” Mango daiquiris –made with Nicaraguan white rum–flow like the Gulfstream.

In recent years, I have begun scooping out mango pulp and freezing it in baggies. This provides a supply of mango daiquiris year round, as well the plain, cold mango pulp, which is absolutely delicious on its own. Last year I filled the freezer side of the refrigerator with bright orange plastic bags. In fact, I am only this week  finishing last year’s supply. Just in time for the new harvest.  My mango picker is still propped  just inside my front door, where I left it last year. I’m ready.

I moved to Miami Beach in 1992, but I had been dreaming of living here for many years. In 1956, when I was seven years old, I had traveled by car with my parents from New Jersey all the way south to Key West. My father, who was born in Cuba and emigrated by himself to the U.S. when he was twenty, had not been home in many, many years. He decided to take my mother and me home to meet the family.

At that time, three years or so before Fidel Castro and his cohorts too power, you could put  your car on a ferry in Key West and be in Cuba later the same day. But we arrived in Key West just after the ferry had departed and my parents rented a motel room near the ocean to await the next day’s departure. Meanwhile, they took me to the beach.

New Jersey has beaches of its own, quite nice beaches, but the water there was a dark blue and never got what you could call warm. This water off Key West was a very different affair. To begin, it was much closer to body temperature. Bath water, really, and I didn’t mind that at all. But the most memorable difference was the color. I had never in my life seen water the color of the sea off Key West. It was the color of the Caribbean Sea, a  crystal clear aquamarine color, and with my swim mask on and my head under the water it seemed like I was swimming through some gorgeous, translucent jewel.

I stayed in as long as I could that day and I never forgot that sensation of swimming in and through  a precious gem.

Years later I worked as a journalist in Central America for seven years. When I came  to and from the States on vacation, I would travel through Miami. A friend of mine had an apartment right on Ocean Drive on Miami Beach with a wall windows looking out over the sea and he invited me to stay there when I passed through town. The water off that beach was the same color as the water in Key West, a captivating aquamarine color when the sun was shining, giving way to an elegant  jade green when a cloud cover rolled in. Again, I was bewitched by it. I’ve come to think of it as genetic trait. My father grew up in Matanzas, on the north shore of Cuba. My mother was raised mostly in Ponce, on the south coast of Puerto Rico. They both grew up within walking distance of the Caribbean. They both had those  gorgeous colors in their memories, in their DNA. I inherited from them a love for –and need for–the colors of the Caribbean.

In 1992, I came to Miami to live and eventually bought a house, walking distance from the ocean and from those same beautiful colors –just like my parents.The ocean off Miami is the South Atlantic but the colors are much like that of the Caribbean, I still live there, see the ocean almost every day and am still beguiled by it. If I didn’t know I would say my blood is crystal clear and aquamarine in color.

In my Miami novels, my characters occasionally stop to appreciate the  beautiful  colors of the water –both the ocean and Biscayne Bay. It’s only fitting. If I hadn’t been seduced by those colors, those specific characters  would probably never have existed. They say all life comes from the sea. In my case, that couldn’t be truer.

About 20 years ago I was living in Los Angeles, working on a suspense novel and once per week doing volunteer work. Every Saturday morning I reported to a small, rundown office building in a far from fashionable section of the metropolitan area and entered a dingy office crammed with filing cabinets. There, for half the day, I would collect, edit and file reports of human  rights violations being reported to me and to other volunteers in that office by  Salvadoran refugees who had flooded California, fleeing from the civil war in their country. Those refugees recounted to us tales of family members, friends and acquaintances disappeared or murdered outright by the Salvadoran military.

At that time I was dating a woman who grew irritated with the fact that I would disappear for half of every Saturday. She had only a vague sense of the wars that had raged in Central America in recent years. She knew I had spent time there as a journalist all through the 1980s, but I wasn’t there anymore and I wasn’t being paid for what I was doing, so she couldn’t comprehend why I would sacrifice a part of every Saturday. “You’re not from there. Why would you care about all that?”

As I’ve written in other blog entries, and chronicled in all the seven novels I’ve published, the ghosts of contemporary Latin American history never stop nagging, especially the ghosts of those who were slaughtered during those 20^th century civil wars. They nag me as a novelist to the point that sometimes I feel like the Latino Stephen King of suspense writers.

They always clamor for justice and sometimes people in the real world hear them too. Just recently a few more of them were finally heard.

On Feb. 24,a federal immigration  judge based in Orlando Florida ruled that a former Salvadoran defense minister, who has been living comfortably in  Florida for many years, can be deported from the U.S. because of his role in human rights violations committed by the military during the 1980s in El Salvador. The judge found that former general Eugenio Vides Casanova can be deported for the torture of specific Salvadoran citizens, the 1980 rape and killings of four American Catholic churchwomen –three nuns and a lay worker,  and the killings of several other specific victims, including two Americans.

The rape and killing of the four churchwomen was a seminal moment in the U.S. involvement in El Salvador and probably did more to create opposition to that involvement than any other single incident.  Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel, who were in the country to work in poor communities,  were detained at a military checkpoint after leaving the national airport on the night of December 2, 1980. They were found by peasants the next day, raped and shot to death, in a desolate area off a nearby road.  The van they had been driving turned up twenty miles away, burned.

The U.S. had chosen to support and fund the Salvadoran military’s war against leftist guerrillas and that battle was just beginning. Over the next decade the Congress would have to approve  billions of dollars in spending, and now many Americans, outraged over the killings of the churchwomen, were saying it would be better to get out of El Salvador and have nothing to do with such a murderous regime. In short order, five Salvadoran national guard soldiers of low rank were identified as the guilty parties, confessed and were eventually sentenced to 30 years in prison. The assertion  was that they had acted on their own, with robbery as a motive. Vides Casanova, who was then head of the National Guard, and the defense minister at the time, General Jose Guillermo Garcia, denied that either they or any officer had ordered the killings or had any knowledge that they would happen. But no one with any knowledge  of El Salvador and its military believed for a moment that five lower ranking soldiers would have killed American citizens without orders from above.

In 1993, a United Nations Truth Commission report concluded that  Vides Casanova and Garcia had organized an official cover-up of the killings. Nevertheless, both men were granted residence in the United States and have lived in Florida for many years.

Then in 1998,  four of the soldiers convicted of the killings told American lawyers investigating the killings that they had received orders from a superior to kill the women. They said they were told that the orders had come from even higher up the chain of command, although they were never told exactly from whom. They had been pressured to lie about those orders, but after so many years they were still in prison so they had decided it was time to tell the truth.

Robert White, who was U.S. ambassador in El Salvador at the time of the killings and who was fired just months later by the Reagan administration after criticizing the Salvadoran military,  later told journalists that he had always suspected that Vides Casanova was involved. Not only was he commander of the national guard at the time but his  first cousin was the local military commander in the zone where the murders were committed. And White believed Garcia, as defense minister, had been involved as well.

”It is totally outrageous for the U.S. Government to have singled out four guys who were following orders and to insist they get punished at the same time it is practically conniving to get the people who were the intellectual authors of this terrible incident off scot free,” White said. ”That they have been let off not only with their reputations intact, but with the right of residence in the United States, does not serve the ends of justice.”

Today, Vides Casanova is facing removal from the U.S. and Garcia is also facing deportation  in a separate case.

The ghosts of those four Catholic churchwomen are still rattling their chains and they are being heard.

I went to Central America as a freelance journalist in August 1982. One of the moments that triggered that decision was reading a Washington Post article in which a reporter recounted crossing the Mexican border on foot, entering a nearby Guatemalan village and finding dozens and dozens of dead Mayan Indians –men, women and children. They had been slaughtered by members of the Guatemalan Army who at the time were trying to eradicate a twenty-year old guerrilla insurgency. Before the Guatemalan civil war was over some 200,000 people would be killed. A United Nations study later calculated that 93 percent of those people were killed by government forces, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

By the time I arrived in Central America the man who had taken over the country and that slaughter was dictator General Efrain Rios Montt. Rios Montt had very publically declared that his government would follow a “scorched earth” policy against guerrillas. The insurgency had based itself in the Mayan highlands and the earth that ended up being scorched was Mayan villages. Many were wiped off the map. In effect, Rios Montt followed the same strategy employed by the Salvadoran Army next door in El Salvador. There they employed a different description of the strategy. The Salvador military referred to guerrillas as “fish” and said in order to kill the fish you had to dry up the ocean those fish swam in. In other words, you killed the civilian population that might help conceal and nourish the fighters. The notorious massacre at the Salvadoran village of Mozote in December of 1981, where hundreds of men, women and children died, was an example of the Salvadoran military in action.

But back to Guatemala. I remember going there in the mid-1980s. I had been reporting for three years from Central America at that point, first from Honduras and then Nicaragua, with assignments in El Salvador as well. I hadn’t been asked to report from Guatemala, but I wanted to see it. Despite the mayhem there, my reporter friends would often talk about just how beautiful the Guatemalan mountains were. They said it was the most beautiful of the Central American nations. I went with my girlfriend and we spent several days, visiting those mountains, at least the parts where the war was not currently being fought. And, yes, the landscape was gorgeous –deep, deep green with higher peaks and deeper valleys than I had seen in Nicaragua or Honduras. It was especially beautiful when you saw a group of Guatemalan women dressed in their traditional woven huipil blouses – often in bright reds with matching skirts—passing down a trail with those mountains as a backdrop. Those ladies looked like flocks of gorgeous tropical birds –macaws, quetzales–against the majestic mountain backdrop. The fact that so many of them were dying at the hands of the Army was a crime against nature, beauty and humanity.

At the very time I was in Guatemala, a young Guatemalan indigenous woman named Rigoberta Menchu had recently published an autobiography and was starting to become known as a fighter for the rights of indigenous people in her country. She eventually won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and did as much as anyone to divulge the crimes against her people.

But from that visit to Guatemala I also remember vividly a moment far from nature, far from indigenous women in the gift shop of an upscale hotel in Guatemala City. I and my girlfriend, who was a photographer, entered into conversation with the owner, a woman descended from Spaniards, light skinned, a member of the Guatemalan elite. When she heard that we were visiting journalists she decided she had to set us straight on what was happening in her country. She told us that accounts of massacres were all fiction and that the guerrilla insurgency had it all wrong. That the Mayan Indians didn’t want schools, didn’t want health clinics, didn’t want a higher standard of living. Yes, there was dire poverty and disease, but “They don’t want anything different. That’s the way they are.” The whole history of the Mayans having been forced into the most remote, inhospitable regions of the country by the Spanish Conquest had been lost on her. The fact that this educated woman could say that to us demonstrated just what Guatemalans of a certain class were saying to each other and how they could accept and justify the slaughter being perpetrated by their government.

I bring this all up now because Rios Montt has finally been brought before Guatemalan courts on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. He is formally charged with 266 separate incidents of official mayhem that resulted in 1,771 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans. That is a drop in the bucket when compared to the crimes committed, but enough to bring him to justice and give a sense of the scope of the tragedy. It is ironic and contradictory that this is happening at the same time that Guatemala just recently elected a new president, a former military officer, Otto Perez Molina, who served under Rios Montt.  The fact that Guatemala has of late been besieged by big time drug cartels made his military background attractive. Along the way, Perez Molina has denied any massacres or genocide occurred in the civil war. In that regard, he is a throwback to that lady who owned the gift shop.

But Rios Montt, 85, is still in the dock. The judge in the case is a woman, Judge Carol Patricia Flores Blanco, and she has been very aggressive in insisting that he stand trial for genocide. I don’t know her ethnic background, but she appears to be Guatemalan woman more in the spirit of Rigoberta Menchu than the gift shop owner. In that sense, the people of Guatemala still seem to be wrestling over who writes their history, still wrestling over the country’s soul.

You can’t pick up a newspaper or click on a news website these days without reading about the wave of violent crime that has inundated Mexico and Central America. It isn’t unusual to read of a dozen, two dozen or more people being found dead at one time in some desert locale in northern Mexico, on a back street in Acapulco, or even on a major thoroughfare in the city of Veracruz. Over the past five years more than 40,000 people have died in Mexico in what is generally described as drug violence. Much of this bloodletting is between cartels, some of it results from battles between the Mexican Army and the drug interests, and some is just the gratuitous killing of innocents in order to sew terror. At the top of heap when it comes to bloodletting are the  dreaded  Zetas, former Mexican Army special forces commandos who decided the drug business was much more lucrative than the military, rented themselves out to the Gulf Cartel for a time, and finally went into the drug business forming their own cartel. Late last year a commando team of Zetas walked into a Monterrey casino with automatic weapons, opened fire and then set the place ablaze, killing more than 50 people. Why? Apparently they were just flexing their muscles, sewing horror. One mass grave in the northern hinterlands attributed to the Zetas reportedly contained 193 bodies. By all accounts they were innocent people who had been dragged off buses passing through that region and murdered. Their crime? Being in the wrong place at a time when the Zetas needed to throw a scare into the country.   In order to coordinate all that mayhem, the cartel, until recently, had its own radio network that spanned much of Mexico–including towers, antennas, repeaters—so they could avoid eavesdropping by the authorities. It was discovered and at least partially destroyed by government agents last year.

The Zetas have also moved into Guatemala where they have recruited into their ranks special forces troops trained by the U.S. to fight leftist guerrillas there two decades ago. Those commandos were known as Los Kabiles and were notorious for their vicious killing of Mayan Indians suspected of being leftist sympathizers back in the 1980s. Put them together with the Zetas and you have a very violent marriage of interests. It has made them almost impossible to control. Drug cartels are so entrenched in some parts of the country that they have their own Public Works Department, so to speak, building not only rural airstrips, but roads and bridges to help move their product. Cocaine processing labs have also relocated there, after being forced out of Colombia by the Colombian military. Those locals who try to resist the new industry in town don’t resist for long. Twenty-seven people were found dead on one remote cattle ranch in Guatemala last year.

The Zetas are not the only Mexican drug interest to have spread its tentacles south. The Sinaloa Cartel, thought to be the richest in Mexico, has also expanded. Those drug interests also control regions of Honduras and are entrenched in  El Salvador as well. Salvadoran police, not long ago, found $9 million in cash buried in a barrel on a ranch there.

In all the countries –Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America—cartels have found eager recruits among local gang members.  In many cases, those gangs were formed by members of U.S. gangs who had been deported back to their native countries. The MS-13 and 18^th Street gangs –both founded in California—are now powerful in Central America. The

cartels find the gangsters willing recruits and ready  to employ the violence the job calls for.  It’s ironic that to some extent it is U.S. trained former soldiers and former U.S. gang members who are destabilizing both Mexico and Central America and causing headaches for the U.S., especially for the Drug Enforcement Agency.

I lived in southern Mexico for more than four years in the 1970s. I ran a camping business in the mountains of the state of Oaxaca, taking hikers through the Pacific slope of the Sierra Madre.and getting to know locals.  In the 1980s, as a journalist, I lived in Honduras and Nicaragua for seven years, and worked  in El Salvador and Guatemala at times. I saw lots of poverty in all those places. In some cases, it was desperate poverty. I also saw a lot of indifference toward that poverty on the part of the more well-to-do citizens of those countries and no small measure of arrogance. In the case of Guatemala, I heard undisguised racism expressed by the elite toward the dark-skinned Mayans. When I first started to read about the spread of wholesale killing in those countries, I thought back to my experiences there. The Central American countries, in particular, had already gone through enough violence during the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. I had lost friends there. But I also understood where this new wave of violence was coming from in those countries.  The inequities I had seen made me angry, so I could only imagine how they made those young, poor Mexicans and Central Americans themselves feel. There was pent up rage. The frustrations and abuses of those societies has made it very easy for the cartels to find young men willing to spill blood and risk their lives –throw away their lives—in exchange for  drugs and some cash. What we’re seeing there isn’t a problem created by drug cartels. It is a situation exploited by drug cartels, but it is rooted in the same poverty, frustration and indifference that I witnessed.

Miami has been transformed –and spiced — over the years by waves of immigrants from Latin America and Caribbean. First you read about turmoil in one country or the other –economic, political, or both — and after a fairly short interval you begin to see an increase in that population in Miami.There is an easy way to measure where the newest wave is coming from and I’ll get to that below.

Of course, the biggest influx has been the Cubans. They have come, basically, in three waves: the hundreds of thousands who fled the island in the first decade after Fidel Castro and his cohort took charge in 1959; those who fled in 1980, during what came to be known as the Mariel boatlift –about 125,000 in a matter of a few months; and many more thousands who have come after winning visas in lotteries for Cuban citizens staged by the U.S. government. In the first 35-40 years or so after Castro took power, many people also took to rafts and tried to ride the Gulfstream current from the north Cuba coast to Florida. Back then, if the U.S. Coast Guard encountered rafters at sea, those refugees were taken aboard, brought to the U.S. and in short order were granted legal residence. It was part of the U.S.’s absolute position against the Castro government. But during the administration of President Bill Clinton —1993-2001—that policy changed. In order to keep Cubans from risking their lives at sea, the U.S. instituted a policy known as “wet foot, dry foot,” which is still enforced today. That means that if Cuban rafters – balseros— are encountered at sea, the Coast Guard returns them to Cuba. If they make it to shore and step on dry U.S. soil –or sand– they have the right to stay. This has been strictly enforced by U.S officials. Rafters wading ashore and just yards from the beach have been detained and sent back to Cuba. This drives some Cuban exiles crazy. The policy has also led the local head of our American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a leading human rights watchdog, to joke that Miami is the only place where the U.S. Constitution is interpreted differently depending on whether it’s low tide or high tide.

The various waves of Cubans arriving in Miami have been augmented by a smaller but steady stream of Haitians over the years because there has always been terrible poverty –the worst in Western Hemisphere—and also political violence in Haiti. In addition, Nicaraguans who considered themselves enemies of the left wing Sandinista Front arrived in Miami in considerable numbers after the Sandinistas took power in 1979. It’s interesting to note that El Salvador was in the midst of a left wing guerrilla insurgency in the 1980s, which was answered by violent and sometimes savage repression by the Salvadoran Army and its death squads. Miami does have a small Salvadoran population, but the great majority of refugees from El Salvador from that time did not come to Miami –which was considered a place full of conservative Latinos. Those Salvadoran refugees went primarily to California, which was seen as a haven for people of left of center sympathies. The Salvadorans were following in the footsteps of thousands of Chileans, who in 1973, when the military government of General Augusto Pinochet came to power, fled to California rather than to Miami. Why? Well, because many anti-Castro Cuban exiles openly spoke of their great admiration for Pinochet, despite his death squads and the killing of many unarmed civilians. He was a staunch anti-communist who had condemned Castro and that was all that mattered.

A good number of Guatemalans –mainly Mayan Indians– who were fleeing the violence caused by that country’s long civil war ended up on both coasts. The Guatemalan military, if it thought a village was sympathetic to the leftist guerrillas, was capable of killing off entire villages, especially in the Mayan highlands. A report completed after the end of the civil war by the Catholic Church in Guatemala concluded that some 200,000 people were killed during more than 30 years of conflict –more than 90 percent by the Guatemalan military and about 5 percent by the guerrillas. The Mayans who fled to Florida didn’t fit in Miami for political reasons. They ended up 70-100 miles north in the area of Palm Beach County, where there are fewer Cubans and Nicaraguans.

Over the past two decades, Miami has received waves of Argentines, who have fled economic turbulence in that country; waves of Colombians fleeing drug cartel violence and kidnappers; and Venezuelans who oppose the leftist government of President Hugo Chavez. Like the Nicaraguans and Cubans they have established their enclaves –their barrios. Those differing diasporas and their neighborhoods are the milieus I write about: my first two books set in “Player’s Vendetta” and “The Ultimate Havana,” were set among the Cubans; the next, “The Lady from Buenos Aires,” involves the Argentines; and the newest, “On Hallowed Ground,” the Colombians.

Back in the 1980s, I was living in San Francisco when Salvadoran refugees started to arrive. I remember a friend telling me how more and more of the security guards working in the city were Salvadorans. It was a low-wage, entry level position that often required little or no English. Over the years, here in Miami, I’ve tried to gauge the influx of different nationalities. I live in Miami Beach and given the large hotel, resort and nightclub industry in my neighborhood, I have found a good way to figure out who the new arrivals are: I question the parking valets. The Cuban and Nicaraguan parking valets of years past have given way over the years first to the Argentines, then the Colombians and the Venezuelans. We’ll see who’s next.