I was standing in a friend’s kitchen eating pupusas when Noah Bullock of Cristosal began talking about the moment Central America is living through now. Most of the world, and most of the media, are focused on the conflicts in Iran and Lebanon. But Bullock was looking back across a much longer arc of power, repression and resistance in the region, and he offered a reminder that sounded less like analysis than a vow: no matter how dark the road gets, we keep on walking. We know the sun will rise again.

That message landed in a place where history has never really stayed buried. Cristosal is one of the region’s key human rights groups, working through legal advocacy, forensic investigation and the voices of people who are resisting repression in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Its work is rooted in a Central America that has spent generations living with the consequences of outside intervention, from the early U.S. occupation of Nicaragua in the last century to the dynastic dictatorship Washington helped entrench there by the 1920s, a system that lasted until 1979 and enriched U.S. companies along the way through gold, lumber and palm oil.

The pattern is familiar across the region. In 1954, the CIA overthrew Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala and installed Carlos Castillo Armas as president. In the 1950s and 1960s, Washington used the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union as a pretext for meddling across Latin America, and in 1973 a CIA-backed coup toppled Salvador Allende in Chile. During those same Cold War decades, the United States backed right-wing, repressive governments in El Salvador, Honduras and Uruguay, helping shape a political landscape defined by fear long after the headlines moved on.

Then the map shifted again. Starting with the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, most of those countries began to rid themselves of their repressive rulers in the final two decades of the 20th century. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States turned its attention elsewhere, pushing Latin America down the list of urgent crises. That retreat did not erase the history Bullock was describing. It simply made room for newer forms of struggle to take hold in the places that had lived through the old ones.

That is why the scene in a kitchen matters today. While the immediate world news cycle is dominated by other wars, Cristosal and groups like it are still working in the political aftershocks of an earlier era, documenting abuse, building cases and amplifying people who refuse to accept repression as normal. Bullock’s words fit that reality. He was not describing victory, only endurance. And in a region where power has repeatedly arrived from outside and lingered at terrible cost, endurance has often been the first form of justice.