Washington’s Role in Triggering the Child Migrant Crisis
July 09, 2014
The Flood From the North
Washington’s Role in Triggering the Child Migrant Crisis
by XAVIER BEST
Rare is the occasion that power systems voluntarily expose the true character of their policies. Mountains of disinformation and distortion are critical to keep the prying eyes of the public at bay. President Obama recently broke with this norm on the White House lawn. In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulous he angrily denounced Central American parents for sending their children to the US border. “Don’t send your children to the border … they’ll get sent back,” he inveighed. These words plausibly aroused memories throughout the region of a darker era when the US played a much deadlier role. In her illuminating study They Take Our Jobs: And 20 Other Myths About Immigration historian Aviva Chomsky documents the discrimination Central American migrants faced in the 1980s.
Devastated by Reagan’s terrorist war against the region, thousands of Central Americans traveled north to escape the violence of US-backed death squads. Of the 45,000 Salvadoran refugees that applied for asylum between 1984 and 1990 only 2.6% were approved. Further, of the 9,500 Guatemalan refugees in the same period a mere 1.8% were approved. Striking statistics of this kind, Chomsky observed, reflect the “much more political than humanitarian,” character of US refugee policy. Refugees from “enemy states” like the Soviet Union and Cuba were far more likely to be granted asylum than those migrating from US controlled domains. The hundreds of thousands of corpses generated by these policies serve as gruesome affirmation of this fact. Death toll estimates from the war in El Salvador, where the US backed the murderous Salvadoran military junta, place the number killed at 70,000. Meanwhile, in Guatemala casualties reached a staggering 200,000.
Incidentally, the barriers erected to impede entry of traumatized Guatemalans were significantly relaxed when it came to their torturers. Take the case of Hector Gramajo. As Defense Minister in the Guatemalan army, Gramajo played an integral role in the genocide against the country’s indigenous Mayan population. Not only was he given free entry, but Harvard University granted him a fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Such double standards were central to Reagan’s “war on terror” , which unleashed a plague of state-terrorism with effects that linger to this day. It’s worth contemplating whether Obama had this sordid history in mind when he emulated the crimes of Reagan, principally through what researcher Alexander Main has described as the “US Remilitarization of Central America and Mexico.” Military aid to Central America has sharply increased under the Obama administration. Under the pretext of the “war on drugs”, his administration has poured millions of dollars in US arms into the region. Chief among these militarization programs are the Merida Initiative and the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). In 2012 US arms sales to Guatemala totaled $21.3 million. Moreover, Guatemalan military officers have increasingly replaced the civilian leadership and neighboring Honduras has yet to recover from a US-backed military coup. A wide range of scholars and journalists now concede that the 2009 coup accelerated Honduras’ descent into chaos, triggering the mass migration Washington is working to reverse. Writing in the New York Times, historian Dana Frank harshly condemned the takeover for plunging the country into “a human rights and security abyss,” which was “in good part the State Department’s making.”
Current statistics on unaccompanied youth from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras support Frank’s assessment in more concrete terms. Between October 2008 and September 2009 the total number of child migrants apprehended by US border authorities stood at 19,418. Five years later, this figure skyrocketed to a stunning 46,188. Describing the region as a “corridor of violence”, the International Crisis Group observed “the most dangerous areas in Central America is located along the border of Guatemala with Honduras.” And this imperial assault is not without economic analogues. Converting Latin America into a workshop for US industry has been a long-standing goal of US policy makers. Justifying US ambitions to dominate Cuba, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams described the island’s people as little more than children. Cubans, “forcibly disjoined” from Spanish control, he argued, were “incapable of self-support,” therefore they had to submit to US demands. Contemporary forms of this doctrine can be found in the expanding array of “free trade agreements”, all of which are designed to enrich US-based corporations at the great expense of the poor. Citing a provision in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Obama administration turned to naked coercion by withholding $277 million in economic aid from El Salvador unless they abolished a government-run seed program designed to empower small farmers. Fortunately, Congressional pressure, spurred by a grassroots struggle to overturn the policy, forced the Obama administration to abandon this goal. Nevertheless, the mere attempt is a dramatic indication of where US strategic interests lay.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/09/washingtons-role-in-triggering-the-child-migrant-crisis/
