Here’s one thing you’ll never hear about in Donald Trump’s (or any other Republicans') incendiary speeches about so-called “illegals" seeking asylum: Three decades of misguided American foreign policy, coupled with Americans' insatiable appetite for cocaine, played a huge role in creating the dismal, murderous and inhuman conditions in the countries those people are fleeing.
Instead, if you attended one of Trump’s mini-Nuremberg spectacles filled with his braying, red-capped, flag-waving goons, you’d probably be left with a different reality. You might find yourself believing that these “caravans," comprised of impoverished refugees slowly trudging up through Mexico from Central America, just magically materialized because some sudden, random idea popped into their heads one day. You might think that random idea drove these “aliens” to try to relocate their entire families and all their worldly possessions to the U.S, risking death by thirst, hunger, or exposure in the attempt.
You’d be led to believe they just decided, on a whim, to pick up and leave behind the only homes they’d ever known, as well as their families, jobs, and friends, all their social and economic ties to those countries, just to face the horrors of crossing the barren Mexican desert. Why not deal with little food or water, newborn babies and raggedy-clad toddlers in tow, while paying extortionate sums to abusive “coyotes" and human traffickers, who are likely to abandon them after stealing (or holding hostage) their life’s earnings of a few thousand pitiful pesos? And that’s before they face near-certain rejection (or have their children kidnapped) by thuggish U.S. border patrol agents drunk on power.
It’s mighty inconvenient to point out to Americans that … Americans are pretty much responsible for the travesty that allowed lethal drug gangs to run rampant. So much so that these Central American countries citizens are now forced to flee for their lives. That fact really doesn’t sit well with Republicans trying to demagogue and race-bait the issue back home to their lily-white constituents. Worse, it sure doesn’t sit well with a fascist blowhard trying to get himself re-elected by the same ignorant rubes he bamboozled the first time around (with a friendly nudge from the Russians).
But it happens to be true. What Donald Trump calls a " crisis" (and now, we are told, a “national emergency”) on our Southern border is practically 100% American-made. Those people are at the border, trying against all odds to get in the U.S, and to escape certain death back home, because of US.
The causes fueling these dirt-poor migrants’ flight—from the hellholes we callously created and left for them to suffer in—has been well-documented for years. But just in case anyone forgot, or just doesn’t want to remember, Italian journalist Roberto Saviano has penned a comprehensive indictment of the causes driving the Guatemalan, Honduran and El Salvadoran people who Trump and Fox News impugn with their practiced fear-mongering, now on a near-daily basis. The Migrant Caravan: Made in the U.S.A. appears in the newest edition of the New York Review of Books. It describes, in broad strokes, the march of American folly and disregard spanning the decades since the failed American “War on Drugs” began in earnest, creating the conditions that these poor people are trying to escape.
First, a reality check on the so-called “caravans” is in order.
The migrant caravan that left Honduras and headed north toward the US last October is the largest flight from drug trafficking in history. Though the phenomenon of Central American caravans isn’t new, never before have thousands of people decided to flee from criminal organizations in such numbers. It is, in a sense, the biggest anti-mafia march the world has ever seen.
The “caravans” (which no evidence suggests include any hard-core criminals, gang members, or drug smugglers) form when poor people, unable to afford any other means of transportation, attempt to protect each other from robbery by the sheer force of their numbers. The Oct. 2018 group (who Trump incessantly demonized in his failed attempt to influence last fall’s midterm elections) originated in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, near the Guatemalan border. From 2011—2014, thanks to a cascade of events, all tracing back to American drug consumption and heedless U.S. policies occurring over decades, San Pedro Sula was the most violent city on the planet. Honduras itself ranked just behind El Salvador as the country most dominated by organized crime.
The only thing to do there is escape. The crime syndicates, which have complete control over the region and the power of life and death over its people, have in recent years plunged Honduras into an unofficial state of war. In 2012 the country had the highest murder rate in the world...
The main reason Honduras enjoys this dubious distinction is that it sits directly between the largest cocaine-producing nations—Colombia, Peru and Bolivia—and the largest cocaine-trafficking nation, Mexico. Those countries, in turn, supply the biggest cocaine-consuming nation: the United States of America.
It is effectively impossible for citizens to alter or improve their dismal situation and remain in Honduras. As Saviano points out, those who try, the “activists,” are routinely killed, as are journalists working to expose the dangers. Their murders, for the most part, are ignored and unpunished by any governmental authority, because the government itself is a thoroughly corrupt narco-state. Honduras’ main currency, cocaine, has been feeding the hungry noses of Americans since 1975—when the Cali Cartel used Honduras as a staging area for drug shipments to Florida. When U.S. authorities stepped up their interdiction of those seaborne shipments, a land route through Mexico was created for the distribution of the always-wanted cocaine.
In the meantime, brutal and bloody civil wars—aided in the 1980’s by venal U.S. policymakers like Bush-pardoned criminal Elliot Abrams, who is Trump’s new nominee as envoy to Venezuela, and funded and guided by the CIA and the Reagan state department in its anti-communist crusades—broke out in neighboring Guatemala and El Salvador. These wars were exacerbated by American aid to dictators in the region, provided in the name of fighting communism. Unfortunately, the practical effect was to concentrate wealth among a select few brutal regimes, such as those of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and Oswaldo López in Honduras, who proceeded to turn their resources on their own people in order to maintain control.
To save their children from government death squads and massacres, like the one that occurred in El Mozote, El Salvador and was subsequently covered up by the Reagan administration as “left-wing propaganda,” parents sent their children, especially their boys, to the United States. These boys, most without any meaningful resources or prospects, found themselves in Los Angeles, and immediately formed gangs to protect themselves from already-existing L.A. gangs of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans. This is how gangs such as the infamous MS-13 came to be.
The United States ultimately deported thousands of these young men back to their (by then) wrecked native countries, where they were unable to find any legitimate work. Since drugs were the only game in town, they became the foot soldiers and enforcers of the drug cartels that fed the U.S. market. Honduras, by that time, had become an intermediate hub for Reagan’s arms shipments to the “Contras,” whom Reagan backed in their attack against the legitimate Sandinista government of Nicaragua, with drug lords being tapped as conduits for clandestine shipments by the American government. Engorged with profits from the sale of drugs and arms, these drug lords quickly became the most powerful people in the country, while the U.S. government, in its myopic, “anti-communist” fixation, looked the other way. That, and a military coup in 2009 which forced out the country’s President Zelaya, helped set the stage for making Honduras the narco-state it is today. The son of Zelaya’s post-coup successor in 2009 was convicted of drug trafficking in 2016. And the brother of the current Honduran president was arrested in 2018 in Miami, again for drug trafficking.
But, as Saviano points out, there was another catalyst:
The involvement of the United States goes further. In 2008 the US government signed the Mérida Initiative with Mexico and the Central American countries, a multiyear agreement under which it pledged to cooperate in the fight against drug trafficking by providing those countries (especially Mexico) with economic support, police training, and military resources. This crackdown pushed the Mexican cartels—already under pressure from the war on drugs that Mexican president Felipe Calderón had begun in 2006—to lean increasingly on Central America and its drug gangs.
As a result of the enormously profitable narcotics trade, and not indirectly as a result of American policies in the region over the past thirty years, those drug gangs now effectively control such countries as Honduras and El Salvador. The result is a horror that ordinary citizens of these countries have to face on a daily basis.
Gangs control the territory and protect the trafficking of the big cartels. Businesses are subjected to shakedowns, streets become the scenes of clashes between rival gangs competing for dealing locations, and the jungle is a no-man’s land in which clandestine runways are carved for planes loaded with cocaine. Some urban areas are off-limits to ordinary citizens; a perpetual curfew reigns. The maras recruit boys—younger each year—as drug-trafficking foot soldiers; refusing to join can be fatal.
Because no one protects the populace from the abuses and threats of the gangs, people feel abandoned and in constant danger. This feeling is exacerbated by the extraordinary level of impunity in Honduras. In 2013, Attorney General Luis Alberto Rubí caused an uproar by declaring before the Honduran Congress that law enforcement had the manpower to investigate only about 20 percent of the nation’s murders, and that therefore the remaining 80 percent were certain to go unpunished. In Honduras (as in other Central American countries) being a sicario—a contract killer—is a real profession: in the morning you wake up and wait for a call asking you to commit a murder, for which you’ll be paid more than you could hope to make at any other job.
Thus it’s crucial to understand that what those people in the caravan are trying to “escape” is a life so terrible and fraught with danger that they will risk anything—and use any means-- to get away from it. So when Donald Trump squeals to his followers about “gang members” and criminals,” who he’s talking about are the monsters that the ordinary folks in the “caravans” are desperately trying to escape. He’s speaking of the same monsters that we Americans, with our misguided economic and foreign policies, and our “War on Drugs,” played a large part in creating.
The truth is that we actually owe these people for what we did to them, and what we did to their countries.