[...more than four years have passed since the police shot
Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco’s
Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his
remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings... ]
[[link removed]]

WHAT HAPPENS IN EL NORTE DOESN’T STAY IN EL NORTE  
[[link removed]]


 

Rebecca Gordon
August 15, 2019
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ ...more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar
Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco’s Mission
District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were
the sole support for his mother and siblings... _

Protestors hold signs that read " Asylum is a Right" outside of the
San Francisco Federal Courthouse on Wednesday, July 24, 2019 in San
Francisco, Calif. , AP Photo/Haven Daley

 

It’s hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the
police shot
[[link removed]]
Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco’s
Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his
remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in
Guatemala. On February 26, 2015, two undercover police officers shot
him six times in the back, although they would claim he’d been
running toward them with an upraised butcher knife.

For two years, members of my little Episcopal church joined other
neighbors in a weekly evening vigil outside the Mission police
station, demanding that the district attorney bring charges against
the men who killed Amílcar. When the medical examiner’s office
continued to drag its feet on releasing its report, we helped arrange
for a private autopsy, which revealed what witnesses had already
reported -- that he had indeed been running away from those officers
when they shot him. In the end, the San Francisco district attorney
declined to prosecute the police for the killing, although the city
did reach a financial settlement with his family back in Guatemala.

Still, this isn’t really an article about Amílcar, but about why he
-- like so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and
El Salvadorans in similar situations -- was in the United States in
the first place. It’s about what drove 225,570 of them to be
apprehended
[[link removed]]
by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2018 and 132,887 of them to be picked up
[[link removed]]
at or near the border _in a single month_ -- May -- of this year. As
Dara Lind observed at _Vox_, “This isn’t a manufactured crisis, or
a politically engineered one, as some Democrats and progressives have
argued.”

It is indeed a real crisis, not something the Trump administration
simply cooked up to justify building the president's wall. But it is
also absolutely a manufactured crisis, one that should be stamped with
the label “made in the U.S.A.” thanks to decades of Washington’s
interventions in Central American affairs. Its origins go back at
least to 1954 when the CIA overthrew
[[link removed]]
the elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz. In the 1960s,
dictatorships would flourish in that country (and elsewhere in the
region) with U.S. economic and military backing.

When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Central Americans began to rise up in
response, Washington’s support for right-wing military regimes and
death squads, in Honduras and El Salvador in particular, drove
thousands of the inhabitants of those countries to migrate here, where
their children were recruited into the very U.S. gangs now devastating
their countries. In Guatemala, the U.S. supported successive regimes
in genocidal wars
[[link removed]] on its
indigenous Mayan majority. To top it off, climate change, which the
United States has done the most
[[link removed]]
of any nation to cause (and perhaps the least
[[link removed]]
to forestall or mitigate), has made subsistence agriculture
increasingly difficult to sustain in many parts of Central America.

U.S. ACTIONS HAVE CENTRAL AMERICAN CONSEQUENCES

Scholars who study migration speak of two key explanations for why
human beings leave their homes and migrate: “pull” and “push”
factors. Pull factors would include the attractions of a new place,
like economic and educational opportunities, religious and political
liberties, and the presence there of family, friends, or community
members from back home. Push factors driving people from their homes
would include war; the drug trade; political, communal, or sexual
violence; famine and drought; environmental degradation and climate
change; and ordinary, soul-eating poverty.

International law mandates that some, but not all, push factors can
confer “refugee” status on migrants, entitling them to seek asylum
in other countries. This area of humanitarian law dates from the end
of World War II, a time when millions of Europeans were displaced,
forcing the world to adjust to huge flows of humanity. The 1951 Geneva
Convention defines
[[link removed]]
a refugee as anyone who has

“a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race,
religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or
political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is
unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the
protection of that country...”

Almost three-quarters of a century later, that legal definition still
theoretically underlies U.S. policy toward refugees, but this country
has always welcomed some refugees and not others. In the 1980s, for
instance, Salvadorans fleeing U.S.-supported death squads had almost
no hope of getting asylum here. On the other hand, people leaving the
communist island of Cuba had only to put a foot
[[link removed]] on U.S.
territory to receive almost automatic asylum.

Because of its origins in post-war Europe, asylum law has a blind spot
when it comes to a number of forces now pushing people to leave their
homes. It’s unfortunate that international law makes a distinction,
for instance, between people who become refugees because of physical
violence and those who do so because of economic violence. A
well-founded fear of being shot, beaten, or raped may get you asylum.
Actual starvation
[[link removed]]
won’t.

Today, a number of push factors are driving Central Americans from
their homes, especially (once again) in Guatemala, Honduras, and El
Salvador. Key among them are political corruption and repression, the
power of the drug cartels, and climate change -- all factors that, in
significant ways, can be traced back to actions of the United States.

According to World Bank figures
[[link removed]?], in 2016 (the
latest year available), El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the
world, 83 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Honduras took second
place with 57 per 100,000, while tenth place went to Guatemala, with
27. Mexico wasn’t far behind with 19. (By comparison, with 5.3 per
100,000, the United States was far down the list.)

By any measure, the three Central American nations of what’s
sometimes called “the Northern Triangle” are dangerous places to
live. Here’s why.

_Political repression and violent corruption:_ Honduras, for example,
has long been one of Central America’s poorest and economically most
unequal countries. In the 1980s, the United States supported a
military-run government there that routinely “disappeared” and
tortured
[[link removed]]
its opponents, while the CIA used the country as a training ground for
the Contras it backed, who were then fighting the Sandinistas across
the border in Nicaragua (who had recently deposed
[[link removed]]
their own U.S.-backed dictator).

By the turn of this century, however, things were changing in
Honduras. In 2006, José Manuel Zelaya became president. Although
he’d run on a conservative platform, he promptly launched
[[link removed]]
a program of economic and political reforms. These included free
public education, an increased minimum wage, low-interest loans for
small farmers, the inclusion of domestic workers in the social
security system, and a number of important environmental regulations.

In 2009, however, a military coup deposed Zelaya, installing Porfirio
Lobo in his place. Four of the six officers who staged the coup were
graduates
[[link removed]]
of the U.S.’s notorious School of the Americas, where for decades
Latin American military officers and police were trained in the ways
of repression and torture.

Washington may not have initiated the coup, but within days Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton had given it her seal of approval, supporting
that power grab in defiance
[[link removed]]
of the Organization of American States. Since then, murder rates have
skyrocketed
[[link removed]],
while corruption and drug trafficking have flourished as the drug
cartels and local governing bodies as well as the national government
melded into a single countrywide nightmare. In a recent _New York
Times_ report, for instance, Sonia Nazario detailed
[[link removed]]
what this has meant just for public transportation where anyone who
operates a taxi or a bus must pay a daily tax (double on special days
like Christmas) amounting to 30% to 40% of the driver's income. But
this isn’t a government tax. It goes to MS-13, the 18th Street gang
(both of which arose in the United States), or sometimes both. The
alternative, as Nazario reports, is death:

“Since 2010, more than 1,500 Hondurans working in transportation
have been murdered -- shot, strangled, cuffed to the steering wheel
and burned alive while their buses are torched. If anyone on a bus
route stops paying, gangs kill a driver -- any driver -- to send a
message.”

The police, despite having all the facts, do next to no­thing.
Violence and corruption have only become more intense under
Honduras’s current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who returned
to office in what was probably a stolen election in 2017. Although the
Organization of American States called for a redo, the Trump
administration hastily recognized
[[link removed]]
Hernández and life in Honduras continued on its murderous course.

_The drug business:_ Along with coups and Coca-Cola, Mara Salvatrucha,
or MS-13, is another U.S. import to Central America. Although Donald
Trump likes to cast
[[link removed]] most
refugees as dark and dangerous gang members from south of the border,
MS-13 had its roots in Los Angeles, California, among Salvadorans who
had fled the U.S.-backed dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. When
young people who grew up in Los Angeles returned to El Salvador at the
end of that country’s civil war, MS-13 went with them. What had
begun as a neighborhood street gang created to protect Salvadoran
youth from other gangs in that city has now grown into a vast criminal
enterprise of its own -- as has the 18th Street gang, or Calle 18,
which also came out of Los Angeles, following a similar path.

Without a major market for their product, drug cartels would have
vastly less power. And we all know where that market lies: right here
in the United States. Fifty years of this country’s “war on
drugs” turn out to have provided
[[link removed]]
the perfect breeding ground for violent outlaw drug cartels, while
filling [[link removed]] our own
jails and prisons with more inmates than any other country holds. Yet
it has done next to nothing to stanch addiction in this country. These
days, if they remain in their own lands, many young people in the
Northern Triangle face a stark choice between joining a gang and death
[[link removed]].
Not surprisingly, some of them opt to risk the trip to the U.S.
instead. Many could have stayed home if it weren’t for the drug
market in this country.

_Climate Change and Environmental Degradation:_ Even if there were no
corrupt regimes, no government repression, and no drug wars, people
would still be fleeing Central America because climate change has made
their way of life impossible. As what the _New York Times_ calls
[[link removed]]
the biggest carbon polluter in history, the United States bears much
of the responsibility for crop failures there. The Northern Triangle
has long been subject to periods of drought and flooding as part of a
natural alternation of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena in the
Pacific Ocean. But climate change has prolonged and deepened those
periods of drought, forcing many peasants to abandon their subsistence
farms. Some in Guatemala are now facing not just economic hardship but
actual starvation
[[link removed]]
thanks to a heating planet.

All along a drought corridor that runs from Nicaragua through
Guatemala, the problem is a simple lack of water. The _Guardian_’s
Nina Lakhani reports
[[link removed]]
that, in El Salvador, many people now spend their days in search of
enough water to keep their families alive. Even where (unsafe) river
water is available, the price -- in money or sex -- extracted by the
gangs for using it is often too high for most women to pay, so they
are forced to rely on distant municipal taps (if they even exist).
While El Salvadorans live with strict water rationing, the U.S.-based
multinational Coca Cola remains immune to such rules. That company
continues
[[link removed]]
to take all the water it needs to produce and sell its fizzy
concoction locally, while pouring foul-smelling effluvia into nearby
rivers.

In Honduras, on the other hand, the problem is often too much water,
as rising sea levels eat away at both its Atlantic and Pacific coasts,
devouring poor people’s homes and small businesses in the process.
Here, too, a human-fueled problem is exacerbated
[[link removed]]
by greed in the form of shrimp farming, which decimates coastal
mangrove trees that normally help to keep those lands from eroding.
Shrimp, the most popular seafood in the United States, comes mostly
[[link removed]]
from Southeast Asia and -- you guessed it -- Central America. Whether
it’s shrimp or drugs, the point is that U.S. desires continue to
drive devastation in Central America.

As the Trump administration does everything it can
[[link removed]]
to accelerate and deepen the climate crisis, Central Americans are
literally dying from it. Under international law, however, if they
head for the U.S. in an attempt to save their lives and livelihoods,
they don’t qualify as refugees because they are fleeing not physical
but economic violence and so are not eligible for asylum.

NO ASYLUM FOR YOU

These days, even immigrants with a well-founded fear of persecution
who perfectly fit the Geneva Convention’s definition of
“refugee” may no longer get asylum here. The Trump administration
doesn’t even want to offer them a chance to apply for it. The
president has, of course, called
[[link removed]]
such groups of migrants, traveling together for safety and solidarity,
an “invasion” of “very bad people
[[link removed]].”
And his administration continues to take a variety of concrete steps
to prevent non-white refugees of just about any sort from reaching
U.S. territory to make such a claim.

His early efforts to deter asylum seekers involved the infamous
family-separation policy, in which children who arrived at the border
were taken from their parents in an effort to create the sort of
publicity that would keep others from coming. An international outcry
-- and a federal court order
[[link removed]-]
-- brought an official end to that policy in June 2018. At the time,
the government was ordered to return such children to their parents.

As it happened, the Department of Homeland Security proved largely
incapable of doing so, because quite often it hadn’t kept decent
records of the parents’ names or locations. In response to an ACLU
lawsuit listing 2,700 individual children living without their
families in this country, the administration acknowledged
[[link removed]]
that, in addition to named children, thousands more fell into that
category, lost in what can only laughingly be called “the system.”

You might think that, if the goal were to keep people from leaving
their homes in the first place, the Trump administration would do what
it could to improve life in the Northern Triangle. If so, however, you
would be wrong. Far from increasing humanitarian aid to El Salvador,
Honduras, and Guatemala, the administration promptly slashed those
funds
[[link removed]],
ensuring yet more misery and undoubtedly forcing yet more to flee
Central America.

Its most recent ploy: to require
[[link removed]]
refugees to apply for asylum in the first country they come to after
leaving their own. Because Guatemala lies between Mexico and the rest
of the Northern Triangle, that means Salvadorans and Hondurans will
officially have to apply there first. President Trump even used
[[link removed]]
the threat of new tariffs against Guatemalan goods to negotiate such
an agreement with that country’s outgoing president Jimmy Morales to
secretly designate his nation
[[link removed]]
a “safe third country” where migrants could apply for asylum.

There is something more than a little ironic in this, given that the
Guatemalan government can’t even offer its own people anything like
safety. Significant numbers of them have, of course, been fleeing to
Mexico and heading for the U.S. border. Trump’s solution to that
problem has been to use the threat of tariffs
[[link removed]]
to force Mexico to militarize its own border with Guatemala, in the
process frustrating the new administration of president Andres Manuel
López Obrador.

On August 1st, a federal judge in San Francisco issued an injunction
[[link removed]]
against that “safe third country” policy, prohibiting its use for
the time being. For now (at least theoretically), migrants from the
Northern Triangle should still be able to apply for asylum in the U.S.
The administration will certainly fight the injunction in the courts,
while doing everything in its power to stop those immigrants in any
way it can.

Meanwhile, it has come up with yet another way to prevent people from
claiming asylum. Historically, family members of those persecuted in
their own countries have been eligible to apply, too. At the end of
July, Attorney General William Barr announced
[[link removed]]
that “immigrants fearing persecution because of threats against
their family members are no longer eligible for asylum.” This is
particularly cruel because, to extort cooperation from their targets,
drug gangs routinely make -- and carry out -- threats of rape and
murder against family members.

A REAL CRISIS

There is indeed a real crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of
thousands of people like Amílcar are arriving there seeking refuge
from dangers that were, to a significant degree, created by and are
now being intensified by the United States. But Donald Trump would
rather demonize desperate people than deploy the resources needed to
attend to their claims in a timely way -- or in any way at all.

It's time to recognize that the American way of life -- our cars and
comforts, our shrimp and coffee, our ignorance about our
government’s actions in our regional “backyard” -- has created
this crisis. It should be (but in the age of Trump won’t be) our
responsibility to solve it.

_Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]],
teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of
American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for
Post-9/11 War Crimes
[[link removed]].
Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches
in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua._

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter [[link removed]] and
join us on Facebook [[link removed]]. Check out
the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the
second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands
[[link removed]],
Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story
[[link removed]],
and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War
[[link removed]],
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The
Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
[[link removed]]
and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II
[[link removed]].

Copyright 2019 Rebecca Gordon  Reprinted with permission.

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]