Struggling With A Monster That America Created

[TexasTowelie]

By Carol Morgan

The President’s critics persist in the myth of lax enforcement of immigration policies as the cause of the flood of refugees from the south. It’s a simplistic answer to a complex problem that serves an extreme diabolical purpose.

As is with any social problem, Americans prefer to point fingers and blame. This crisis is no different. We blame the parents of Central America for sending their children away, we blame the President for not enforcing the law, we blame the porousness of our borders, and we blame employers for hiring illegals.

Believing that any of these alone is the root cause of the problem is a delusion. Detention and deportation is a simplistic solution to a conveniently-ignored cancer that’s been worsening for over sixty years.

It’s a cancer that America helped to create.

The initial seeds of crisis were planted long ago in 1946 with the establishment of the School of the Americas, and the fertilizer was America’s trade and foreign policy of the 1980’s. Both of these resulted in the exodus of people pounding on the doors of our southern borders. We’re like Dr. Frankenstein struggling to manage the out-of-control monster of his own making.

The School of the Americas, whose name was changed to the Western Hemisphere Institute For Security Cooperation in 2001, is located at Fort Benning, Georgia. It provides military training to government personnel in Central and South American countries. Originally, it was designed to short-circuit a growing Communist ideology in those countries to our south, but after end of the Cold War, the Communist label conveniently changed to narcoterrorism, and eventually evolved as label for any group who opposed the status quo.

The status quo consisted of American corporations and the Central American elite who enriched themselves by way of their capitalist covenant.

The training school produced many illustrious and storied graduates: the founders of Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel, Panama’s Manuel Noriega, Guatemalan Maoist revolutionary Marco Antonio Yon Sosa and Guillermo “Bombita” Rodriquez of Ecuador (to mention only a few).

The school has a particularly checkered past with Honduras (the homeland of the majority of the refugees seeking asylum), having produced fifty or so graduates, all of whom are linked to torture, death squads and other human rights abuses in Central America. That's no surprise; torture was a part of the SOA curriculum.

We used all of them for American purposes, until they outgrew their usefulness, but they forgot what we taught them.

There are more interesting details at the SOA Watch webpage.

The influx of refugees from Central America isn’t a recent phenomenon. The wars that America promoted under the Reagan Administration began the initial flight. Two million Salvadorians alone fled to America in the 1980’s; some legally, most of them illegally.

Besides war, America also added to Central America’s economic woes through NAFTA and CAFTA. Businesses in Central America were privatized, small communities upended or displaced because of foreign mining projects, and U.S. corporations dumped their agricultural products in bulk into Central America, bankrupting rural farming families because they could not compete.

We might have seen far fewer Honduran refugees had the U.S. allowed President Manuel Zeylala to enact his reforms of a minimum wage, agricultural subsidies for family farms and free education, but an elite minority of Hondurans who benefitted from the people’s woes overthrew Zeylala in 2009 with our approval.

Day after day, we see politicians mining this crisis for political gold: Rick Perry, John Cornyn and the most nausea-producing media prostitute, Ted Cruz. They all have nefarious selfish reasons for their actions and it has nothing to do with a concern for the refugees or even for our national self-interest. Their solutions are merely personal step-builders on the ladder to their quest for higher office.

The irony of Ted Cruz is that his own father benefitted from this system, but instead of lending a hand to others, he’s pulling the ladder up behind him.

Money and power, power and money. It’s an old story, but a persistent one.

http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/carol-morgan/2014-07-21/struggling-monster-america-created#.U82HArFCz2R

Permission granted to reproduce this blog in its entirety.

[freshwest]

1. K&R!!

[Scuba]

2. I have met the enemy, and he is us.