Why are so many people fleeing the "Northern Triangle" countries to come here?
America wrecked the place.
People are fleeing a mess America helped make.
That created a political problem for Kamala Harris -- asylum seekers in numbers that overwhelm our ability to process them. It created the opportunity for Trump to progress from denouncing criminal, drug-carrying, rapist Mexicans to inventing stories of cat-eating Haitians.
In 2024, the Biden administration increased penalties for asylum-seekers who arrive illegally, and following the failure of the bipartisan immigration legislation, the president used executive orders to set a cap on the number of asylum petitions the U.S. will consider. Diplomatic negotiations with Mexico sharply curtailed passage at the Mexican border. This has sharply reduced immigration, although not the underlying problems in Northern Triangle countries.
The U.S. Government's Congressional Research Service summarized the reasons for economic and governmental dysfunction in the Northern Triangle:
"El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have long histories of autocratic rule, and their transitions to democracy have been uneven. . . . Land ownership and economic power in the Northern Triangle historically have been concentrated in the hands of a small group of elites, leaving a legacy of extreme inequality and widespread poverty."
Central American Migration: Root Causes and U.S. Policy
Why is democracy so fragile there? Jack Mullen shares a bit of history and context.
Jack Mullen entered the Peace Corps after college and served in Guatemala, where he grew agricultural test plots. Jack thinned pears alongside me in local orchards in our high school years, and later worked with me as field staff for U.S. Representative Jim Weaver. Jack is retired and lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Jennifer Angelo. He wrote me about the blowback to America's meddling in foreign affairs to achieve our economic goals.
Guest Post by Jack Mullen
The latest anti-immigration targets are Haitians. It’s not like there hasn’t been a grim tradition of demonizing Haitians.
Back at the turn of the 19th century, Haitians overthrew their White colonial European rulers, becoming the world’s first Black republic. The American Revolution may have inspired the Haitian Revolution, but our nation’s new wealth depended on slavery, so our country considered intolerable the example of a Black slave revolution. The legacy of the 19th Century U.S. campaign of manipulation and demeaning Haiti and its people -- and supporting France in its century of sucking wealth out of Haiti through its demand for reparation payments -- found its way into the latest presidential debate.
Haiti was an early democratically-elected government to cause disfavor with the U.S. government. It wasn't the last.
IRAN
When officials from British Petroleum, fearful of Iran’s nationalizing its oil production, met with President Harry Truman in 1952, they suggested we overthrow the elected government of President Mohammad Mosaddegh. Truman, a man who knew how to “give them hell”, tossed the BP guys out of the Oval Office. The little guy from Missouri instinctively knew we best not dip our big toe into the Middle East any farther than we had.
But early in 1953, these same BP executives returned to Washington. BP found the new Eisenhower administration receptive to tossing out Mosaddegh. The CIA paid a million dollars to Mohammed Reza to gather a combination of mobsters and students to run ramshackle through the streets of Tehran and foment the overthrow of the government. Four days of street disruptions ended up with Mohammed Reza becoming the Shah of Iran and a strong American ally.
Iranian resentment of America’s meddling ended up in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
GUATEMALA
Petroleum is the reason we stuck our noses in the Mid-East. Bananas is why we felt the need, one year after overthrowing the democratic government of Iran, to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Guatemala.
We Americans love bananas, and in the 1890’s the United Fruit Company started purchasing land in Guatemala to grow and ship bananas. By the 1930s, the United Fruit Company owned 42 percent of the land in Guatemala, land on which United Fruit was exempted from paying taxes.
Guatemala progressed towards democracy with the 1945 election of Juan Arévalo. In 1952, their government began expropriating unused United Fruit land to distribute to landless peasants. Later there was a peaceful transfer of democratic power to another president, Jacobo Árbenz.
United Fruit was well represented in the Eisenhower administration. CIA Director Allen K. Dulles was on United Fruit’s Board of Directors. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was a former member of the New York law firm, Cromwell and Sullivan, which represented United Fruit.
Using the successful model of the CIA-financed coup in Iran, the CIA organized a coup financing covert "freedom fighters," radio propaganda, leaflet drops, and bombing raids using unmarked aircraft. President Árbenz concluded that resistance to the "Giant of the North" was impossible. Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a member of the right-wing National Liberation Movement party, marched into the capital and took power as president of Guatemala in April, 1954. He established an authoritarian government closely allied with the United States
No more land reform in Guatemala, as U.S.-financed military-backed corrupt Guatemalan governments ruled by various oligarchs and generals.
A Guatemalan anti-insurgency civil war broke out and lasted from 1960 to 1996 when over 200,000 Guatemalans were killed and another 200,000 were forcibly "disappeared." Many became refugees in Mexico and the United States. Of these over 400,000 Guatemalans, 83 percent were indigenous Maya, according to a U.N. sponsored commission.
The most egregious era of Guatemala’s killing fields occurred under the 1982-83 reign of an evangelical Christian president, General Effrain Rios Montt. Rios Montt was convicted in 2013 for the war crimes of his “beans and guns” campaign, in which the Guatemalan Army exterminated the entire Ixil Mayan ethnic group.
President Ronald Reagan visited Guatemala for six hours, met with Rios Montt, and told the American press that he felt Rios Montt “had gotten a bad rap.”
A new, but rather untold story, is the effort of the Biden-Harris administration's successful efforts to uphold the legitimate election and January inauguration of an anti-corruption Guatemalan lawyer, Bernardo Arévalo as his country’s president.
Guatemala continues to have among Latin America's highest poverty and inequality rates, and a child malnutrition rate of 47 percent. In its poorest cities, some 90 percent of households have children under age five showing stunted growth. Americans who think Guatemalans should stay home and fix their own place if there are problems there, and in any case should leave the U.S. alone, need to look at the history and ask the same things of ourselves.
We reap what we sow.
6 comments:
I was in that area in 1977 that got wiped out . Why would they get wiped out? Because they were a bit different. The village I was in had their own language and a village 10 miles away had a somewhat different language. My visit with them was very positive with obvious love in the families. Humans can be so cruel to other humans, especially humans in power. I’m ashamed of the US when we are those abusive humans. At times we have been the good guys, but clearly sometimes we are the bad guys.
Whatever we “sowed” in the past, the answer is not to have us “reap“ having half the population of the Northern Triangle move to the United States.
The answer is not to “understand” when the ayatollahs in charge of Iran scream “Death to America.”
The answer is not to abandon love for our amazing country because its past did not perfectly satisfy its ideals.
I remember the Killing Fields of Guatemala as as supported by St. Ronnie Rayguns, as well as I remember his ubdertving support of the Apartheid hours in South Africa, a program he would have loved to instituted in this Country.
Before Trump, perhaps the biggest fraud ever to be one president.
No one is suggesting that half the population of the Northern Triangle move to the US. No one is suggesting that we "understand" the ayatollahs. No one is suggesting that we abandon our love for our country. I honestly don't know how you come up with this stuff.
What is suggested is that we accept our government's responsibility in partnering with American businesses to make money, regardless of how it affects the people in those countries.
My solution to the mass migration of people throughout the world who are fleeing violence and hunger would be to support governmental and non-governmental organizations in those countries who can help people stay where they are, which is much more practical and humane than spending billions of dollars after they are already here to detain them and send them back. Kamala Harris was successful with this approach. And considering that we are partially responsible, I think we owe it to them.
What would your answer be?
As we see even here, there are people who are not only only oblivious to history, but think that to know it shows a lack of love for our country. That's one of the reasons it's taken so long to achieve the nation's ideals, which are what true patriots love about it.
When I think back to the whitewashed "history" I was taught in High School right here in Medford uncomfortably close to 60 years ago, I find it easy to realize why so many people are ignorant of what this Country has done in the past. It has rarely been lollipops and roses that we sent out from our borders.
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