We live in a country where willful blindness and stupidity is part of the “culture.” Before he was a member of Congress, Mike Johnson ignored his father’s pleas to stop the burning of toxic munitions in his own neighborhood. According to Johnson’s stepmother, he wouldn’t even give his own father—who survived a near fatal industrial explosion—five minutes of his time at his legal office. Johnson—a “creationist” and religious fanatic—is someone who doesn’t believe in taking care of the environment “because we have a finite amount of time here and God will take care of you. It’s crazy,” she told The Guardian.
We also live in a country where fantasy morphs into “fact” because personal responsibility is no longer an excuse for making bad decisions or doing things you “regret” in hindsight. An appellate judge in California who is hearing the appeal of a Marilyn Manson accuser’s case--after it was dismissed for being outside the statute of limitations, claiming “suppressed memory"--wondered “is there a limit to our duty to accept things as true, no matter how improbable? I mean, what if the plaintiff alleges, ‘I suppressed it for 10 years because I was abducted by aliens, and the aliens controlled my mind, and therefore I had no ability to remember, and when I finally escaped from the aliens, it all came back to me.’ Do we have to accept something like that as true?”
The judge also wondered if the court should accept as “true” a claimant’s assertion that they had time traveled, suggesting the claimant had walked through a time portal to the past to “re-live” what she was accusing Manson of to "remember" it "better."
And then some people only see the world through their own eyes, and not what someone else—like, say, this woman’s husband—may be seeing instead:
You think he might be regretting marriage too, at least to chronic, self-involved, no-fun complainers like this?
Meanwhile, Ukraine is still fighting for its life and in need of more assistance with the coming of winter. But it seems that since “victory” is not yet in sight, many Americans are getting bored with the whole thing. Republicans are taking advantage of this by demanding that an even more draconian border policy be enacted before they even consider sending more aid to Ukraine. According to the Washington Post,
On Capitol Hill, the dispute has become exceedingly acrimonious. Last week (Ukraine president) Zelensky was scheduled to virtually address a House and Senate briefing on Ukraine, but he canceled that appearance shortly before the gathering devolved into a shouting match over U.S. border policy and several Republicans stormed out.
Alright, so let’s talk about what Republicans want to do about the “border.” Well, it's actually quite simple: they do not want any “brown-skinned” people allowed in this country, at least the one’s with Spanish names. NPR noted that “At the heart of Republican promises are expanding the immigration detention system, strengthening Border Patrol, deputizing local law enforcement, deploying military to the border, and large scale deportations. One of the main concerns they have expressed has been fentanyl coming over the border- although, as NPR reported -virtually no migrants or asylum seekers have been caught smuggling fentanyl, and it mostly comes through legal ports of entry.”
Republicans also want to shutdown asylum claims for anyone attempting to do so at the border, unless they are European or Asian, who will at least get an expedited hearing. All asylum claims by Spanish-speakers—even those from “socialist” countries like Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela—would only “legitimate” if they are made in “third-party” countries that are just as dangerous as the country they are leaving. Otherwise, they are all “fake.”
Donald Trump claims he will only be a “dictator” for a day if he is elected in 2024, which of course is meaningless because if he promulgates the policies of a “dictator” for even one day, it means those policies continue to be in force. If Trump declared the Insurrection Act during his one-day “dictatorship,” he still would be a de facto “dictator.”
Of course his rivals for the presidential nomination are doing their best to “out-do” him. It is beyond hypocrisy that a South Asian like Nikki Haley who ignores the abuses of H1B visas and people overstaying those visas with the aid of their South Asian employers altering their records, is touting a “catch and deport" policy. Of course for her own “people,” she has a “fix” for that: "For those that have been here longer than that, we've got to start seeing, who is it? How long have they been here? Have they been vetted? Have they paid taxes? Have they been working?”
This implication, of course, is that some people here illegally should be treated with more “respect” than others, based on preconceived prejudices. Like her fellow presidential hopefuls, Haley also endorses ending birthright citizenship for children of “illegals.” Haley’s Indian compatriot, Vivek Ramaswamy, also brings his cultural caste and racial bigotries into the fore. He apparently believes that the concept of jus soli only applies to foreign nationals who are here “legally,” if only on “temporary” work visa—or in the case of “birth tourism,” here “legally” on tourist visas.
The 1898 Wong Kim Ark U.S. Supreme Court decision, however, remains the “law” of the land, granting birthright citizenship to all save those children of foreign nationals here on foreign government business with no intent to live here, which is as much policy for those foreign governments as the U.S., so as to keep control of potential “dissidents.”
But all this is sidebar stuff. What we should be talking about is why we have this border “crisis.” I’ve talked about this many times, the latest example here: https://todarethegods.blogspot.com/2023/10/us-immigration-policy-since-1965-can-be.html.
But because Republicans are intent on making the same mistakes even worse because their efforts to shutdown asylum-seeking are about the possibility that the people they disparage as “vermin” might not vote for them in elections, we might as well talk about this again. To be honest, the American media (outside mainly NPR) never talks about why migrants are coming to this country, thus in affect this failure to confront U.S. policies as the principle driver of the “crisis” is never discussed, and people generally remain ignorant of it; I mean, people don’t want to feel “bad” or guilty about what their representatives have done in their name.
This country apparently feels that “asylum” is only for those fleeing countries in wars that we support (say, Ukrainians) or those seeking asylum on “political” grounds (say, China). But the U.S. is intensely hypocritical about this; countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are on the U.S. “socialist” shit list, yet asylum requests even from those countries generally treated with indifference even if they are more likely to be more “conservative” politically.
The overload of hypocrisy is boundless. People are completely oblivious of the “irony” of a country like Nicaragua which has no connection to the U.S., and thus despite its “socialist” reputation, it is a much safer place to live than in other Central American countries and Mexico. Its police forces are decentralized, and officers tend to serve the neighborhoods they live in, so there is an incentive to keep the places they live in safe, and thus discouraging gangs and drug traffickers from getting a foothold.
This is quite different than in the “triangle” countries, where the police are centralized into a single force and have little incentive to risk their lives for people they don’t know. The reality is that these centralized forces, in the past funded and armed by the U.S., were established less to enforce the law, but to suppress people who opposed the regime in power (like the right-wing murder regimes in the 1980s and 90s).
Corruption was of course just part of the game of survival in countries wracked with drug violence, like Mexico. The Alex Cox film Highway Patrolman, which I talked about here https://todarethegods.blogspot.com/2021/07/alex-coxs-comeback-film-highway.html looks at the reality of policing in Mexico.
So the American media isn’t talking about this, but the UK’s The Guardian has been for years, as if anyone is this country is listening—and even if anyone is, they probably don’t care and wave it off as “liberal” bullshit:
Ramaswamy went so far as to call the refugee problem "fake". In October, he posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, "TRUTH: we need to admit that the U.S. has a self-created fake refugee problem that is *systemic.* You can't cure a cancer until you acknowledge its existence." Ramaswamy then promised to "implement an asylum & refugee moratorium until our borders are fully secured and our asylum laws are updated - period." Ramaswamy has also indicated he would end Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which offers temporary protection from deportation to certain designated groups fleeing unsafe conditions.
Why do our asylum laws need “updating”? The ones we have are not even being implemented fairly now. Here are few facts that The Guardian has provided us in recent years about the people that current asylum laws are "helping":
Jakelin Caal Maquín, the seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who died this month in US custody, is the latest victim of a long, dysfunctional relationship between the US and its southern neighbours that has cost countless lives over the past half-century. The forces driving ordinary people to leave their homes and put their lives at risk crossing deserts with smugglers to get to the US border are deeply rooted in Central America’s history of inequality and violence, in which the US has long played a defining role…Experts on the region argue, however, that when politicians or activists have come forward on behalf of its dispossessed, the US has consistently intervened on the side of the powerful and wealthy to help crush them, or looked the other way when they have been slaughtered. The families in the migrant caravans trudging towards the US border are trying to escape a hell that the US has helped to create.
More often US intervention in the affairs of these small and weak states has been deliberate, motivated by profit or ideology or both. “The destabilisation in the 1980s – which was very much part of the US cold war effort – was incredibly important in creating the kind of political and economic conditions that exist in those countries today,” said Christy Thornton, a sociologist focused on Latin America at Johns Hopkins University.
In the Guatemala highlands, small-scale farmers are being driven off their land to make way for agro-industry producing sugar and biofuels. It is an example of why it is often hard to distinguish between security and economic reasons for migration. The men behind the land grabs are often active or retired military officers, who are deeply involved in organised crime. “When communities fight back against land-grabbing, their leaders can be killed. We’ve seen just in the past year almost two dozen community leaders assassinated,” (Elizabeth) Oglesby said. “There is a legacy of impunity.”
Guatemala’s long civil war can in turn be traced back to a 1954 coup against a democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, which was backed by the US. Washington backed the Guatemalan military, which was responsible for genocide against the native population. An estimated 200,000 people were killed between 1960 and 1996. “The point was to root out anything that looked like communist subversion, but it was really a scorched earth policy against the indigenous people,” Thornton said.
The issue of impunity for violence remains central to Guatemala’s chronic problems. Jimmy Morales, a former comedian and the country’s president since 2016, has announced he is going to close down the UN-backed International Committee against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig). Cicig has investigated corruption cases against Morales, his family and his political patrons, and links between organised crime and politicians like himself. In September Cicig headquarters were surrounded by US-donated military jeeps, but there was no complaint from the Trump White House. On Tuesday, the government announced it was withdrawing diplomatic immunity from 11 Cicig workers.
El Salvador is also trapped in a cycle of violence that can be traced back to a civil conflict in which the US was a protagonist, training and funding rightwing death squads in the name of fighting communism.“The civil war really destroyed the economic base of the country and any sense of a functioning democracy,” said Thornton. “It left a massively militarised society.”
Gangs have filled much of the space occupied by civil society in healthier societies, but they too are largely a US import. The MS-13 gang, frequently referred to by Donald Trump in justification of his hardline immigration policies, was formed in Los Angeles, and introduced into El Salvador when its members were deported – often to a country they barely knew: another instance of unintended consequences which have rubbed salt in the Central America’s wounds.
When Manuel Zelaya, Honduras’s reformist president, was seized by the country’s military in 2009, and flown out of the country to Costa Rica, still in his pyjamas, the Obama administration refused to call it a coup. Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state at the time, argued that to do so would have meant cutting aid at the expense of the Honduran poor. In the first edition of her memoir, Hard Choices, she admitted working with other Latin American governments to ensure Zelaya would not return to power. The references to her role were removed in later editions.
Zelaya had been trying to resolve conflicts over land, that pitted local campesinos against agro-industry. After the coup, that conflict was militarised and more than a hundred campesinos were murdered. Organised crime spread through the country’s institutions and the murder rate soared. Within a year, Honduras was the most violent country in the world not actually at war.
The current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, has further militarised the police force. When he looked in danger of losing his re-election bid last year, he unleashed a wave of violence against the opposition and extinguished the challenge. The Trump administration congratulated him on his victory.
“These societies were poor and violent irrespective of when the United States became involved in a major way,” Cynthia Arnson, the director of the Latin American Programme at the Wilson Centre thinktank, said. But she added: “The US since the very early stages of the cold war has played a defining role in the evolution of state violence.”
In Mexico, The Guardian reports, simple people trying to survive...
...have found they have to fend for themselves against the cartels and their hired killers; even when the military intervenes, the cartel gangs merely hide out in the hills until the soldiers declare “victory” and leave.
Those who knew the town of El Limoncito remember a welcoming and industrious community of lime farmers who poured their sweat into the soils of Mexico’s sun-baked backlands in search of a better life. Then the drug conflict exploded and everything changed. The village’s primary school found itself on the frontline of a six-hour Monday morning gunfight that sparked a ferocious two-year struggle for control of the area.
As gunmen from two rival cartels – armed with .50-calibre sniper rifles and improvised tanks – fought pitched battles for El Limoncito’s dusty streets, locals fled, leaving behind everything they had. “It was all-out war,” remembered one former resident, who asked not to be named for fear of being killed.
El Limoncito’s deserted schoolhouse became a base for fighters from one of the warring factions – then a blood-spattered graveyard after their enemies stormed its classrooms in an attempt to retake the village. Family homes became makeshift forts used to spray invaders with gunfire. The pale yellow chapel was peppered with bullets and robbed of its flock.
“It’s appalling – we’re in the middle of a war we never asked for,” said Father Gilberto Vergara, a Catholic priest from Aguililla, the surrounding municipality in the western state of Michoacán Vergara said it was impossible to know how many were killed in the battle for El Limoncito since the gunmen carried their fallen comrades back into the hills. But the carnage left crystal clear the intensity of the conflict raging in Mexico’s hinterlands after decades of state abandonment and cartel control. “The toll goes far beyond the bullets you see on the ground,” Vergara reflected. “You look around and see the abandoned crops. The people gone. Areas where people lived happily have become regions of fear.”
El Limoncito, three and a half hours south-west of Morelia, has been turned into a ghost town by the two-year turf war between a coalition of crime groups called the Carteles Unidos and the fast-growing Jalisco New Generation cartel (CJNG) whose leader, El Mencho, was born nearby. Every single one of the bungalows on the village’s rocky main drag is vacant, each empty room filled with reminders of heartache and horror.
Mexican soldiers who had occupied the area the previous week urged reporters not to venture into the fields beyond the village’s last home, where a machete lay beneath orange and purple graffiti exalting the Jalisco cartel. Three days earlier an elderly farmer had died in the next village after stepping on an improvised landmine. The region’s untended groves were rumoured to be strewn with such devices.
Cartel triggermen had abandoned their roadblocks and retreated into the mountains to avoid a confrontation. Humvees mounted with Minimi machine guns patrolled the highway that is used to move vast quantities of drugs through Mexico and on to the US. Anxious locals fretted that the expulsion of one cartel might simply clear the way for another to seize power, noting how security forces had served such a purpose in the past.
In some Michoacán farming communities such as Pareo, just north of the hot land, locals have long since abandoned hope of government protection and again created their own heavily armed militias to keep out the cartels. “Here we love life … Out there it’s fucked up,” said a vigilante commander as he showed off one of more than 80 pillbox-style fortlets his troops use to defend Mexico’s avocado-growing heartlands from the narcos. Amlo has celebrated the army’s hot land occupation and said displaced families are starting to return home – but locals dispute official claims the army is now completely in charge.
“They’ve made themselves present – but taking control will require much more work,” said Vergara. “Are the organized crime groups no longer here? No – it’s just that we can’t see them. They haven’t just suddenly evaporated. They are people – and they are somewhere.” The priest was right. Three weeks later, the cartel killers reappeared, shooting Aguililla’s mayor dead in broad daylight near its occupied main square.
And what for? It’s a “competition” to feed off the U.S.’ insatiable appetite for illegal drugs, in a country where impoverishment is a way of life and the drug trade provides a way for "easy" money, and lots of it. It didn’t have to be this way, but the “war” on the Colombian cartels drove the center of the drug business to Mexico, and “ironically” free trade agreements have deliberate codicils that benefit American farmers while driving Mexican small farmers off their lands.
And all that “vermin” on the border. It is up to a foreign source like The Guardian to tells us that
The mass of humanity living in a makeshift encampment at the US border with Mexico is driven by historical forces of which many Americans are only dimly aware. Demonized by Donald Trump as an “invasion” of miscreants who should be housed in concentration camp-like tent cities, the migrants, many of whom are in fact planning on applying for asylum, persist under the weight of a US history in their home countries as heavy as any burden they carry with them. In Honduras, where the caravan originated, the past decade has seen the terrorizing effects of street violence by criminal gangs exacerbated by an increased presence of Mexican cartels, police abuses and the murder of human rights and environmental activists, most notoriously that of Berta Cáceres in 2016.
After the overthrow of Zelaya;
Honduras was run by a series of rightwing leaders. When the most recent of them, Juan Orlando Hernández, looked likely to lose his re-election last year to the former journalist Salvador Nasralla, his government responded with a repression that Amnesty International characterized as having “violated international norms and the right to personal integrity, liberty and fair trial guarantees” At least 31 people, the vast majority civilians, died in the violence, but Orlando Hernández continued in office, with Trump’s state department congratulating him on his victory while stressing “the need for a robust national dialogue”.
“Old News” is worth repeating to the hard of head, even if they are a tough nutcase to crack:
Honduras is hardly the only country whose society has been undermined by US political decisions both recent and historic. In neighboring Guatemala, the US provided extensive aid to the Guatemalan military during the country’s 1960 to 1996 civil war, which killed an estimated 200,000 people. The war itself was to a large extent an outgrowth of a US-backed coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz, in 1954.
And what about El Salvador, a country of horrors in the 1980s that Oliver Stone made a movie about, Salvador?
But perhaps no country’s history attests to the US role in helping to create the conditions for this latter-day exodus than El Salvador. After an October 1979 coup resulted in a military-civilian junta, the US government, first under Jimmy Carter and then under Ronald Reagan, supported the junta even as its civilian members resigned and it grew more violent.
As political polarization accelerated, a bubbling multi-front guerrilla insurgency united under the umbrella of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In turn, the FMLN was met with increasing death-squad activity by the right. Much of this violence was orchestrated by US-trained Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a former intelligence official.
The United States worked furiously to
prevent a D’Aubuisson victory in 1984 elections that saw center-right José
Napoleón Duarte come to power. Despite its role in preventing D’Aubuisson’s
election, the US government for years poured money into Salvadoran military
bodies such as the Atlacatl Battalion, whose chief military maneuver appears to
have been the massacre, a tendency which it carried out in mass killings in
hamlets such as El Mozote and El Calabozo and even in the capital, where it
murdered six Jesuit priests and two lay workers in 1989.
During El Salvador’s civil war, which lasted until 1992 and killed an estimated
75,000 Salvadorans, hundreds of thousands fled to the United States, especially
to southern California. There, young Salvadoran boys found themselves
endangered by local gangs and coalesced into their own groups, including Mara
Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
When some of these young gang members, not US citizens though culturally
American, were deported back to El Salvador, they took California’s gang
culture with them. The gangs have since proliferated throughout Central
America. Though MS-13 remains the bete noire of Trump and his acolytes, the
American origins of the gang go almost unreported.
All this being the case, it is rather irresponsible for the United States to take such an active role in creating the conditions that make people want to flee the countries that make up the Central American isthmus and then profess shock when they do so.
And that’s not all. It is not at all uncommon for asylum seekers who were denied entry to be deported back to their home countries where there subsequently murdered by forces that people who came here for economic reasons never had to face themselves—you know for what a racist Indian like Ramaswamy called “fake” reasons:
Antonio Díaz’s 26-year-old son Oscar was kidnapped, beaten and left for dead by gang members, the Honduran father decided to send Oscar and his three brothers to the United States, fearing that any one of them could be the next victim of the country’s swelling wave of violence. “I sent them away for their safety,” says Díaz, sitting in a comfortable and well-furnished three-bedroom home in a town outside San Pedro Sula, where he owns a fleet of minibuses. “We’re not bad off here, economically, but I couldn’t bear the thought of my sons getting killed,” he says.
A year and a half after Antonio paid the $6,000 coyote fee for each of his sons to make the perilous overland journey to the United States as undocumented migrants, one of the young men – Ángel – was deported back to Honduras. A month later he was dead, gunned down on one of his father’s buses by suspected gang members. “After he was sent back here, I was afraid whenever he left the house,” says Antonio, who asked that his real name not be used for fear of retaliation from the gangs, known here as maras. “And they killed Ángel just as I’d feared,” he says.
Every year hundreds of thousands of Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans flee poverty and violence at home in search of a better life in the United States. And every year tens of thousands of undocumented migrants are sent home. No one keeps an official record of how many returnees have been murdered in Honduras. But a review of news reports of killings in the country compiled by researcher Elizabeth Kennedy at theSan Diego State University shows that at least 35 people who were deported from the United States between January 2014 and July 2015 were murdered within months – or even days – of their arrival in Honduras.
One homicide detective in San Pedro Sula told the Guardian he estimated that deportees accounted for 10 to 15% of the cases he investigates in the city, which for the past three years has been the most violent in the world
These stories go back to the Obama administration days to the present time. Nothing has changed, as has the ignorance and utter lack of responsibility on the part of the U.S. for causing the border “crisis.” Asylum hearings are a process in slow motion; if such hearing were adjudicated in a timely manner, instead of leaving people in limbo, there probably wouldn’t be this “back log” we see crowding the border.
Equally bad is that “regular” legal immigration procedures for people from Latin America is a deliberately impossibly slow process--sometimes decades in the making--while for "favored" groups it is much more streamlined and faster. As a female El Salvadoran asylum seeker said on a John Oliver show on immigration policy, who was let in or not was “racist.”
So thank you, The Guardian, for telling me what I already knew long ago—as if I needed “reminding” after all those multiple car alarms I hear when I pass by, and that assorted fear-freak behavior from the paranoid whose only “knowledge” of who I am is their stereotypes and prejudices spoon-fed to them by politicians, and a media that either supplies the white nationalist rhetoric about the “Reconquista” or the “white replacement” theory (Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson) or the “liberal” media which just feeds you scenes of the “vermin” like this on the border...
...for whom being on the bottom of social order isn't anything new if they are indigenous people, without anyone bothering to ask these human beings what they are escaping from, let alone bothering to go find out themselves.
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