Crisis at the Border
by John Lawrence, July 8, 2019
The temporary solution is simple: they arrive in busloads. It's intolerable that they are kept here in the US under horrible conditions. So... bus them back as fast as they arrive. Humanitarian crisis solved! They are being brought here by human traffickers. They are not arriving due to spontaneous decisions to walk to America. They are coming basically to escape poverty. The US asylum laws were never meant to deal with a situation like this. They are being flaunted by people who arrive on US soil and ask for asylum. Then according to law they have to be given a court date months or years away. In the meantime they melt into US society and never show up for their court date. They are relying on the dysfunctionality of the US government to do anything coherent. The immigration situation could have been resolved years ago, but US government is totally incapable of doing anything rational.
Having said all that, here's the more comprehensive solution. The US should work with Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to rid those countries of the gangs which are threatening the people and giving them a plausible excuse to become migrants. The US needs to allocate a large amount of financial resources to those countries, and even have a physical military presence on the ground. Think about it. The military never does anything constructive like rooting out M-13 and other gangs that are involved in the drug traffic with the US and with committing violence towards indigenous people. The US has been involved in various coups in Central and South America at the behest of the oil and exploitive industries, American corporations and right wing dictators, but never on the side of the people to improve conditions in their lives. It's only the lefties who have tried to improve conditions of the hoi polloi. US forces have only served right wing regimes and American corporations seeking to exploit resources.
Medium reports:
At the margins of the mainstream discursive stalemate over immigration lies over a century of historical U.S. intervention that politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle seem determined to silence. Since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 declared the U.S.’s right to exercise an “international police power” in Latin America, the U.S. has cut deep wounds throughout the region, leaving scars that will last for generations to come. This history of intervention is inextricable from the contemporary Central American crisis of internal and international displacement and migration.
The liberal rhetoric of inclusion and common humanity is insufficient: we must also acknowledge the role that a century of U.S.-backed military coups, corporate plundering, and neoliberal sapping of resources has played in the poverty, instability, and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States. For decades, U.S. policies of military intervention and economic neoliberalism have undermined democracy and stability in the region, creating vacuums of power in which drug cartels and paramilitary alliances have risen. In the past fifteen years alone, CAFTA-DR — a free trade agreement between the U.S. and five Central American countries as well as the Dominican Republic — has restructured the region’s economy and guaranteed economic dependence on the United States through massive trade imbalances and the influx of American agricultural and industrial goods that weaken domestic industries. Yet there are few connections being drawn between the weakening of Central American rural agricultural economies at the hands of CAFTA and the rise in migration from the region in the years since. In general, the U.S. takes no responsibility for the conditions that drive Central American migrants to the border.
The interventions of the US on the side of right wing dictators and American corporations in El Salvador are too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say that the dates are 1932, 1944, 1960, 1980-1992, 1990, 2006, 2014, 2015. These included massacres of civilian women and children by right wing dictators with full US support. In Honduras there have been numerous interventions in support of Dole foods and Chiquita bananas, US owned corporations.
1980s: In an attempt to curtail the influence of left-wing movements in Central America, the Reagan administration stations thousands of troops in Honduras to train Contra right-wing rebels in their guerrilla war against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. U.S. military aid reaches $77.5 million in 1984. Meanwhile, trade liberalization policies open Honduras to the interests of global capital and disrupt traditional forms of agriculture.
2009: Left-leaning and democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, who pursued progressive policies such as raising the minimum wage and subsidizing public transportation, is exiled in a military coup. The coup is staged after Zelaya announces intentions to hold a referendum on the replacement of the 1982 constitution, which had been written during the end of the reign of U.S.-backed military dictator Policarpo Paz García. Honduran General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, a graduate of the U.S. Army training program known as the School of the Americas (nicknamed “School of Assassins”), leads the coup. The United States, under Hillary Clinton’s Department of State, refuses to join international calls for the “immediate and unconditional return” of Zelaya.
Guatemala:
1954: Fearing the Guatemalan government’s steps toward agrarian reform and under the influence of United Fruit propagandist Edward Bernays, President Eisenhower authorizes the CIA to overthrow democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, ending an unprecedented ten years of democratic rule in the country, colloquially known as the “ten years of spring.” In Árbenz’s place, the U.S. installs Carlos Castillo Armas, whose authoritarian government rolls back land reforms and cracks down on peasant and workers’ movements.
1965: The CIA issues Green Berets and other counterinsurgency advisors to aid the authoritarian government in its repression of left-wing movements recruiting peasants in the name of “struggle against the government and the landowners.” State Department counterinsurgency advisor Charles Maechling Jr. would later describe the U.S.’s “direct complicity” in Guatemalan war crimes, which he compared to the “methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”
1971: Amnesty International finds that 7,000 civilian dissidents have been “disappeared” under the government of U.S.-backed Carlos Arana, nicknamed “the butcher of Zacapa” for his brutality.
It just goes on and on. Most recently, the good ol American playbook of supporting right wing turnovers of democratically elected regimes didn't turn out so good for US interests in Venezuela where American supported Juan Guaido failed to oust Maduro.
Why aren't American politicians, the American media and the American people studying this history? Oh, I know: they are too busy watching vacuous and inane TV shows and attending sporting events when they are not buying new cars or pleasuring themselves in a multitude of other ways. Or listening to Trump's inane tweets which lead politicians like Joshua Gardner, a career DOJ attorney to utter "I am doing my absolute best to figure out what's going on."
It's just too much to ask that the US government stop supporting right wing murderous dictatorships and start alleviating the conditions which led to the migration crises from these Central American countries. But maybe AOC and the other Congressional members of Latin American descent can finally come to grips with this terrible history perpetrated by the US government and the CIA against the people of Central and South America and lead the way to an America which facilitates retribution and economic development for the people themselves. Or perhaps that will be left up to China with its Belt and Road Initiative. In just a decade, trade between China and Latin America has multiplied more than 20 times as regional partners have signed hundreds of agreements and broken ground on dozens of key energy, transport and infrastructure projects in strategic locations. China better watch out. The US doesn't appreciate them or anyone else doing some good in its own back yard.