Central American Cold War conflicts killed over 360,000 civilians with U.S. arms

Evidence

Elsewhere the toll was higher: 50,000 dead in Nicaragua, 75,000 dead in El Salvador, and 240,000 dead or disappeared in Guatemala in what is widely considered a genocide. The majority of the victims were poor civilians. They died, as foreign service officer Greentree writes, in “large and indiscriminate numbers, families, clans, entire villages, the victims of torture, of bombardment, of massacre, of crossfire.” Hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded to neighboring countries and to the United States, whose government had provided the bullets that forced many to flee in the first place. Entire nations were left traumatized in ways that reverberate to this day. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 293

Categorization

• SEED: The line that refugees fled to a U.S. whose bullets had forced them out is an angle for an essay on how U.S. aid creates the very refugee flows it then resists.
• ADDENDUM: Complements the sacrifice/corpses piece theme by showing U.S. arms production causing mass civilian death abroad.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 293