Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
It’s The Other Way
Around - Central American Immigrants Aren’t Invading Us. We Invaded Them.
John
Tarleton
July
2, 2018
The
Indypendent
Children locked in
dog kennels, crying by the sides of roads at night, wrapped in glittering Mylar
blankets on the floors of Border Patrol processing centers, stowed away in an
abandoned Walmart, flown thousands of miles from their parents. The sounds of
their wails an “orchestra” to the ears of a border guard, who is heard quipping
in audio captured at a child detention center that all that is “missing is a
conductor.”
But there is a
conductor.
He sits in a
leather chair in the Oval Office, his arms crossed in a gesture not unlike that
of a petulant toddler on time-out. He blames his political opponents for the
nightmare troubling America’s conscience — 2,300 children, including infants,
separated from their parents since April, when he instituted a “zero tolerance”
policy to prosecute parents on criminal charges for attempting to enter the
United States at its southern border.
“God has ordained
the government for his purposes,” says his attorney general, citing Romans 13,
a Bible verse used in the past to justify slavery.
“Womp-womp,” says
the president’s former campaign manager, imitating the “Debbie Downer” sound
effect.
“I don’t care, do
u?” asks the all-capitalized lettering on the jacket cloaking the First Lady.
It turns out
people care a lot. Yet despite the heightened scrutiny the detention of migrant
children has received in recent weeks, little effort has been made to explain
the origins of the crisis.
• • •
The
drama playing out right now is not just about detained families and their fate.
It’s about what kind of society we want to be.
When the media
stops to explain why Central American refugees are pouring over the border, it
notes that Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — where most of the refugees
hail from — are poor, politically unstable and plagued by some of the highest
murder rates in the world. This begs the question, why are things so bad there?
What chain of events has caused parents to flee at great risk to themselves,
only to see their children ripped from them and tossed into cages?
Not that the right
wing wants to hear it. When Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and
Fox News talk about people who flee their homes and travel thousands of miles
to try and enter the United States, they don’t see people in need. They see an
“invasion” by hordes of criminals who will burden the rest of us with their
lawlessness and demands for public services.
This is a smear
against immigrants as an entire group, who studies repeatedly show are less
likely to commit crimes, and who contribute far more in taxes than they receive
back in public services. As for the “invasion,” what if the real invasion began
more than a century ago (if not five centuries ago) and continues to this day?
And what if it has come not from the South to the North but the other way
around — an invasion by a powerful northern neighbor intent on extracting as
much wealth and resources as it can from smaller, weaker nations and ready to
bend their governments to its will?
• • •
Banana republic.
The phrase conjures up images of a languid tropical locale where the government
is corrupt and unstable and the economy functions at the whim of a few powerful
interests. O. Henry first used it in a 1904 novel based on the time he spent on
the Atlantic coast of Honduras, where the United Fruit Company was muscling its
way into the country.
Next door in Guatemala,
United Fruit would become the country’s largest landholder in the first decades
of the 20th century, with much of that land lying idle to keep it out of the
hands of potential competitors. It also controlled the sole railroad in the
country, the sole facilities capable of producing electricity, and the main
port facilities on the country’s Atlantic coast, while ruling its labor force
with an iron fist.
El Salvador also
became a full-fledged banana republic in the late 19th century, though its rugged
terrain made coffee, not bananas, the main export crop for international
markets. Coffee exports increased by more than 1,000 percent between 1880 and
1914. The large profits fueled the rapid concentration of land ownership and
the rise of an oligarchy known as the Fourteen Families. This process was aided
by pro-free market governments that abolished communal landholdings and passed
anti-vagrancy laws that ensured peasants and other rural people would work on
coffee plantations. In 1912, the hated National Guard was established as a
rural police force that suppressed any sign of dissent.
Cycles of revolt
and repression would follow across the region, with the United States
invariably backing monstrous dictators straight out of a Gabriel García Márquez
novel.
A 1932 peasant
revolt in El Salvador was crushed, and 30,000 people were butchered over 10
days, in what became known as La Matanza, The Massacre. In nearby
Nicaragua, rebel leader Augusto Sandino was captured and executed in 1934 after
attending peace talks with the government. His movement was subsequently wiped
out, as U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza seized power.
In 1944,
progressive army officers in Guatemala helped topple a brutal dictator and
usher in a decade of health, education and labor reforms. However, when the
government of Jacobo Arbenz moved to redistribute some of United Fruit’s unused
estates to landless peasants, Arbenz was swept aside in 1954 in a CIA-backed
coup. The usual reign of terror followed for decades.
So what does all
this distant history have to do with today’s immigration battles?
In the late 1970s,
pent-up demands for change in Central America erupted. In Nicaragua, the Somoza
family dictatorship was toppled by the Sandinistas, a leftist rebel group that
took its name and inspiration from the original Sandino. Revolutionary
movements surged in El Salvador and Guatemala as well.
For the United
States, it was a moment of reckoning. Our government could have embraced the
Central American people’s demands for freedom and a better life, something we
all want for ourselves. Instead, the United States doubled down in support of
its regional anti-communist allies and their butchery when President Ronald
Reagan came into office in 1981. He had promised, in as many words, to make
America great again after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam six years earlier.
Reagan staffed his
administration with right-wing ideologues such as U.N. Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Lt. Colonel Oliver North, Elliot Abrams and John Bolton. They saw
their battle against Central America’s revolutionary movements as an
existential struggle between good and evil, capitalist democracy and
totalitarian communism, in which the end justifies any means. The price for
their holy war would be paid with the blood of others.
• • •
In El Salvador,
right-wing death squads ran wild, killing thousands of trade unionists, student
activists and others — dumping their disfigured bodies for anyone to see. As
Joan Didion wrote in Salvador, her 1983 account of the country’s
torment:
“The dead and the
pieces of the dead turn up in El Salvador everywhere, every day, as taken for
granted as in a nightmare, or a horror movie. Vultures of course suggest the
presence of a body. A knot of children on the streets suggests the presence of
a body. Bodies turn up in the brush of vacant lots, in garbage thrown down
ravines in he richest districts, in public rest rooms, in bus stations. Some
are dropped in Lake Ilopango, a few miles to the east of the city, and wash up
near the lakeside cottages and clubs frequented by what remains in San Salvador
of the sporting bourgeoisie.”
As the surviving
activists fled to the mountains to join a burgeoning guerrilla movement, $5
billion in U.S. arms and assistance would flow into El Salvador over the next
decade to prop up the government. More massacres followed. In one of the war’s
most infamous episodes, the U.S.-trained and equipped Atlacatl Battalion
massacred more than 800 peasants in the village of El Mozote and surrounding
hamlets that were thought to harbor rebel sympathizes. As narrated in Mark
Danner’s The Massacre at El Mozote, Salvadoran soldiers first
killed all the adults and then took young women and girls as young as 10 to
nearby hillsides to gang rape before finishing them off. Finally, El Mozote’s
surviving “tender-age” children were led to a church building where they were
killed by gunfire, bayonets, and rifle butts to the head.
The massacre’s
lone survivor, Rufina Amaya, a mother of four, hid nearby in the thorny brush,
unnoticed by soldiers. She heard the children’s cries for help and vowed to
share their story with the world. When word got out, the Reagan administration
treated the massacre as so much fake news. The New York Times demoted
Raymond Bonner, the reporter who broke the story. When investigators were
finally able to enter El Mozote more than a decade later, they found the
remains of 131 children aged 12 or younger.
A similar dynamic
unfolded in Guatemala, where urban protests were suppressed mercilessly and the
Army unleashed a scorched-earth campaign in the highlands, massacring whole
villages of Mayan Indians thought to be in cahoots with leftist rebels. In
Nicaragua, the Reagan administration organized Somoza’s former henchmen into a
mercenary army known as the Contras, who targeted teachers, doctors and others
sent to work in the countryside by the Sandinista government.
Reagan complained
that Guatemala’s military dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, was getting a bum rap
from his critics. He demanded that Congress continue funding the Contras
because the Sandinistas were “just two days driving time from Harlingen, Texas”
on the U.S.-Mexico border — as if a nation of 3 million was going to invade a
nuclear-armed superpower.
The Central
American wars of the 1980s left an estimated 300,000 people dead, the great
majority of whom died at the hands of right-wing forces. Hundreds of thousands
fled to the United States. As the Cold War wrapped up, peace treaties were
signed and the wars wound down, leaving destabilized societies in their wake.
The region, no longer a geopolitical flashpoint, was largely forgotten by
Washington policymakers, whose attentions were increasingly drawn to fighting
bloody new crusades in the Middle East.
Not that the
U.S.-backed bloodletting in Central America was entirely forgotten in elite
circles. Vice President Dick Cheney, asked in a 2004 campaign debate how the
George W. Bush administration would respond to the growing insurgency in Iraq,
suggested the “Salvadoran option” would do the trick. Sure enough, over the
next several years, U.S.-backed Shi’ite militias unleashed a wave of terror and
ethnic cleansing against the country’s Sunni minority, setting the stage for
the later rise of ISIS.
• • •
In El Salvador,
there was a brief moment of hope after peace accords were signed in 1992
between the government and the FMLN, the leftist rebel group. Under the deal,
the FMLN laid down its arms and became a legal political party. The Salvadoran
Army was cut in half, and known human-rights abusers were purged. The National
Guard was disbanded and replaced with a civilian police force that incorporated
some former FMLN combatants.
The FMLN competed
for the first time in elections in the spring of 1994. At that time, I was
staying in a dusty market town as the guest of a local family, and hitchhiked
around the country without incident. Above all, people conveyed to
me a feeling of relief tinged with optimism that a conflict that claimed 75,000
lives over a dozen years was finally over.
The conservative
ARENA party won the election, and the FMLN finished second. It all went down
peacefully. When I returned to visit a year later, the country was seized by
fear of a growing crime wave. A sense of menace lurked in the air. The new
president vowed on national television to go after the criminals with a mano
duro, or heavy hand.
What I didn’t
realize at the time was that the United States had begun deporting thousands of
young Salvadorans with criminal records. The deportees, in many cases, had come
with their refugee parents to Los Angeles in the early 1980s as small children
and later had joined Salvadoran street gangs.
Instead of the
Bloods and the Crips, it was MS-13 and the 18th Street gang. With a weak state,
little in the way of jobs or opportunities for the deportees (the U.S. aid
spigot dried up once the war was over), and an abundance of demobilized
soldiers and ex-guerrilla, El Salvador became a petri dish in which violent
crime exploded. MS-13 and 18th Street would soon expand their reach into
Guatemala and Honduras, with similarly harrowing results. The three nations in
the northern half of Central America became the homicide capital of the world.
• • •
When it was least
expected, good news came to Honduras. The country had been spared the worst of
the 1980s-era conflicts. Still, it was one of the poorest countries in the
Western Hemisphere. In 2006, a timber magnate and cattle rancher named Manuel
“Mel” Zelaya became president with little fanfare. To everyone’s surprise,
Zelaya moved rapidly to the left. During his three and a half years in office,
free education for all children was introduced along with free school meals for
poor children; the minimum wage was boosted by 80 percent; and domestic
employees became covered by the social security system for the first time.
Zelaya also established friendly relations with Cuba and struck an alliance
with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela which helped bankroll his increased social
spending.
For once in its
long, oligarchical history, Honduras had a president that was doing something
for the people. Honduran elites and U.S. hawks found Zelaya intolerable. In
June 2009, he was overthrown in a coup with the tacit support of the Obama
administration, and was spirited into exile in the middle of the night.
Massive protests
followed, but the new regime clung to power. Both common crime and politically motivated
assassinations soared. The presidential elections in 2013 and 2017 were marred
by claims of fraud and saw anti-government protesters killed by police. Amid
the chaos, refugees began streaming north to the U.S. in 2014. After a lull,
the number of asylum-seeking refugees from Central America is growing again.
Barack Obama, the cool and detached deporter-in-chief, oversaw the removal of
three million immigrants during his eight years in office, only to be replaced
by Donald Trump with his naked, unabashed racism.
While the courts
will have their say on questions of law, people around the country are leading
the way with acts of solidarity. Here are a few examples.
Rio Grande Valley
— In this normally sleep corner of Texas, waves of protesters from around
the country have descended on the detention sites where child refugees have
been warehoused.
New York City
— On the night of June 20, hundreds of New Yorkers turned out at
LaGuardia Airport to greet children separated from their parents being flown into
the New York area on commercial airlines.
San Diego — Religious
leaders marched June 23 to the Otay Mesa Detention Center and chanted “No
estás solo” (You are not alone). When the detainees heard them, they
cheered loudly.
Portland — On
June 17, protesters blockaded the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) headquarters and established an occupation outside the building that over
the next 10 days morphed into a mini-city with 90 tents, a hydration station, a
medical tent and a children’s tent. As The Indy goes to press,
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is refusing to dismantle the encampment. Similar
occupations have since popped up outside ICE headquarters in other cities.
The drama playing
out right now is not just about detained families and their fate. It’s about
what kind of society we want to be. Amid wars, so-called failed states and
above all climate change, the 21st century will be a century of unprecedented
human migration. How will we respond?
From the time he
rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy,
Donald Trump has appealed to the racist paranoia of his Make America White
Again followers. Now that the cruelty of his policies has ignited widespread
revulsion, another more inclusive vision of who we can be is being advanced.
Welcoming the
Central American refugees is the smart thing to do. In time they will
contribute much to our society. More important, it’s the right thing to do. It
also gives us a chance to reckon with the history that brought them here and
begin to take responsibility for it. When we embrace the refugee, we embrace
the best in ourselves. Love trumps hate, as the saying goes. But only if we
make it happen.
The Indypendent is
a free, progressive monthly newspaper and online news site. Founded in 2000,
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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