The Violence Central American Migrants Are Fleeing Was Stoked by
the US
We're still dealing with the
aftermath of atrocities committed by US allies in Central America during the
Cold War.
Jun 28 2018, 12:00am
Ronald Reagan in 1986. Photo
by DON RYPKA/AFP/Getty
As courts, law enforcement, and the
Trump administration continue to sort out what to do with
the steady stream of migrants either
crossing the southern border illegally or seeking asylum, the roots of the
current misery are often forgotten. The desperate border-crossers often
come from Central America’s “Northern
Triangle”—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—and are
fleeing high homicide rates and violence
in those countries. But this instability did not arise in a
vacuum. Many historians and policy experts are quick to point out that much of
the troubles in Central America were created or at least helped by the US’s
interference in those countries going back decades. In other words, the foreign
policy of the past has profoundly shaped the present immigration crisis.
“Hundreds of thousands of people were
displaced in the 1980s,” said Elizabeth Oglesby, an associate professor of
Latin American studies at the University of Arizona. “People were fleeing violence
and massacres and political persecution that the United States was either
funding directly or at the very minimum, covering up and excusing.” Violence
today in those countries, she said, is a directly legacy of US involvement.
Oglesby spoke to me from Guatemala,
which even today is still feeling the cumulative effects of US actions from
over 50 years ago. In the 1950s, Guatemala attempted to end exploitative labor
practices and give land to Mayan Indians in the highlands. The move, according
to now-unclassified CIA documents,
threatened US interests like the United Fruit Company, which controlled a good
portion of land in Guatemala. But instead of citing economic factors, many in
the US cried “communism,” saying the labor reforms were a threat to democracy.
Wisconsin Senator Alexander Wiley, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee at
the time, said he believed that a "Communist octopus" had used its
tentacles to control events in Guatemala. In 1954, the CIA helped organize a
military coup to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government, and
continued to train the Guatemalan military well into the 70s.
“The war in Guatemala was really a
genocide,” Oglesby said, adding that an estimated 200,000 were killed in the
subsequent 36-year-long civil war, which stretched from 1960 to 1996. “The
history is important because it went so far beyond anti-communism—the purpose
was to destroy people’s vision of the future. It had a terrible impact on the
country, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.”
In Nicaragua, El Salvador, and
Honduras, there are similar stories. When, in the late 70s, the Nicaraguan
resistance group called the Sandinistas overthrew the country’s dictatorship
that had been in power for over 40 years, the US opposed the revolution, backed
the dictatorship, and later supported the rebel group known as the Contras. In
El Salvador, the US gave billions to the government to fight the socialist
Farabundo Martà National Liberation Front (FMLN), and used Honduras as a base
to hold military exercises.
“Under the umbrella of the Cold War,
the US amplified its presence in the region, especially El Salvador, in order
to defeat the guerrillas of the FMLN,” said Xochitl Sanchez of the Central
American Resource Center (CARECEN) in Los Angeles. “The United States is
complicit in creating the rampant and bloody gang violence, dire poverty,
displacement and migration from El Salvador.” CARECEN was founded in 1983, as
Central Americans were fleeing en masse to the US. “The need was astonishing,”
said Sanchez.
Contras at prayer in 1989. Photo by Scott Wallace/Getty
Adding to the instability from the
various civil wars the US was involved in throughout the region, Richard
Nixon’s so-called “war on drugs,” beginning in 1971, pushed
cartels from Colombia into an increasingly unstable and impoverished Central
America. “The drug trafficking routes began to change, and that coincided with
economic crises in the region and criminal networks that took up the
trafficking that was displaced out of Colombia,” said Oglesby. She was quick to
emphasize that while MS-13 garners most of the headlines today (and whose origins are in Los Angeles, not Central
America), “a much deeper problem for Central America are government-linked
organized crime networks that come directly out of the counterinsurgency
experience of the 1980s.”
At the time, some refugees were
granted asylum in the US, based in part on their perceived politics. “In Cold
War politics, the Reagan administration was only too happy to declare Nicaragua
unsafe,” said Charles Kamasaki, senior cabinet advisor for UNIDOS US, the
nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization. “By contrast, something like
99 percent of Salvadoran applications for asylum were turned down for the
reverse reasons. We were backing the right-wing juntas—we could not say from a
foreign policy perspective that conditions were unsafe, and therefore declined
virtually every political asylum case.”
Tightening of the border has,
according to Oglesby, made coming to the US a significantly more perilous and
expensive journey for Central Americans, but hasn’t slowed down migration. “The
militarization of our border is actually leading to increased migration,” she
said. In the 90s it wasn’t expensive to travel north with a local smuggler.
“Now it costs $10,000 or $12,000 for someone from Central America to
migrate—criminal networks control the routes through Mexico. So once they go,
they stay, because they can no longer come back and forth. The only way for
families to be reunited is for the families to also try to go.”
Following the administration’s recent announcement that
domestic abuse and gang violence are no longer grounds for asylum, Oglesby is
concerned that more people will be crossing through the desert instead of
turning themselves in legally at the border. “Meaning more deaths in the
desert,” she said. “They also will be more inclined to cross using criminal
networks. I feel that criminalizing the asylum process is going to strengthen
the criminal networks that control the routes.”
Immigration and civil rights advocates
told me it’s impossible to look at domestic immigration policy without
examining the foreign policy roots of the current crisis. “The US has a moral
and social responsibility to this population of immigrants as they are
complicit in the creation of the conditions of forced migration from the
country,” said Sanchez.
While UNIDOS US doesn’t take official
positions on foreign policy, Kamasaki told me that in his view, the US does
bear responsibility for its role in the circumstances that cause people to
leave their home countries. “For those who felt strongly that we should
intervene in Central America, whether it was to fight communism, or to maintain
good conditions for business so American consumers could enjoy cheap bananas or
Nicaraguan coffee, I would argue that responsibility’s a two-way street. If we
enjoy benefits, then that brings with it some obligations."
“I get asked all the time, Why
can’t Central Americans just stay in their country and strive for better?”
Oglesby told me. “I want people to understand, Central Americans
have been trying to do that for decades, and the United States put itself on
the wrong side of those struggles, and now we are reaping the consequences.”
Sign up for our newsletter to get the
best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Cole Kazdin is a writer living in Los Angeles.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"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
No comments:
Post a Comment