Let’s begin with the obvious. For more than 100 years the United States has been making war in Latin America, defending the fat against the hungry. Our troops have trained soldiers that committed genocide in El Mozote, El Salvador. Economists like Milton Friedman helped the Pinochet Regime destroy that economy while he was drugging dissidents and throwing them out of helicopters. Other allies were “disappearing” thousands in Argentina. The contra movement during the Reagan Administration was lobbing hand-grenades into school-rooms full of indigenous children because they called their parents “Communists” for fighting for equitable distribution of land and resources.
Now, the myopic and complacent mouth breathers supporting our train-wreck of a President (who is demolishing the idea of cooperative government by referring to Democrats en masse as “evil”, “power-hungry, the fruits of which will not end with his term of office)” seem disturbed that people are fleeing the cultures we ruined, now ruled by gangs and narco-trafficantes, to find some safe port where all the money wound up, in our Nation.
Could we possibly be more smug, self-satisfied and aphasic? Can we really have no idea that when stories leave the news-cycle their effects do not diminish in real life? That Latin America has been and remains a virtual war-zone for the poor in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Argentina (yes I know they’re all different) but they all been afflicted by the American foot on the back of their neck, forcing austerities on the already poor, while we are buying another muscle car or gas-guzzling truck helping to turn the planet into a cinder. While we build a border to keep the poor out, American guns are being shipped into Mexico en masse. 70% of the 105,000 weapons seized by Mexican police between 2009 and 2014[1] came from the US, and that does not include guns assembled from smuggled parts. Nothing is preventing drugs from Mexico being shipped into America where’s it’s being processed by American banks like Wachovia and HBSC, caught in 2010 and 2012 convicted of criminal money laundering for the Sinaloa Cartels[2]. Not a single bank executive went to jail.. We’re eating food picked by immigrants every day, many of whom work under false papers (wink wink) pay taxes for which they get nothing back, all the while also paying sales taxes, the most regressive form of taxation.
I have difficulty believing the level of self-righteousness and self-indulgence of my own people militarizing the border to punish again, the people we have already impoverished, people who are not responsible for the fact that CONGRESS legalized the exporting of American jobs.
President Trump has never read the Agamemnon, but when his over-armed sycophants, realize the degree to which they’ve been swindled, the degree to which future debt service will kill health care, social-security, and Medicare, how they’ve been tricked and robbed, some of those crazies are going to come looking for him. They can find his address online.
[1] Francisco Cantú,The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border,Penguin Random House, 2018